kabobs

After a trip to the Farmers' Market and quite a collection of fresh fruits and vegetables later my mom and I were preparing shish-kabobs! We had beautiful sweet corn, picked freshly that very morning, to eat on the cob and veggies to slice and skewer for kabobs. We made lovely arrangements of green pepper, mushroom, tomato, zucchini, and summer squash - onion would have been great on it too, but we didn't have any at the time. (It's a good thing we have so many more skewers left over so we can do it again with onions next time!) We cooked our kabobs on the little tiny grill we have, seasoned slightly with garlic pepper, and they turned out wonderfully! Another thing to try with kabobs in marinating them - really all it takes is dipping them in sauce - and it adds great flavor. You can also cut up chicken to put on the kabobs with the veggies! It sure was a tasty treat with fresh veggies from the market.

It was very interesting, after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, to eat corn since the first part of the book reveals a lot of dirty secrets about where corn really goes and how much corn we really eat on a daily basis. Next time you pick up a packaged food, read the ingredients label and you'll be surprised how much corn is in everything. Of course, they don't just come out and call it corn - it comes under many disguises. Food labels really are quite a different genre of reading. But the corn we ate on the cob was sweet and delicious and very different than the corn grown in mass quantities on industrial farms - I can't wait to have some more!

snobbery

A few days ago I went into a high-end specialty food store, where my family has frequented since I was quite young. They happen to be having a sale and I love their chocolate selection. I went in and happened upon a sample table where a lovely young lady, who was quite cheery and eager to talk, was putting together whoopie pies ... from a box mix. For those uneducated few - a whoopie pie is a delicious dessert from New England and Amish country. It consists of two small round, moist, smooth (usually) chocolate cakes separated by a sweet fluffy white filling. They are deadly. I observed what this young woman was making and noticed that her "cakes" were flat, too pale in chocolatey color, looked to be a bit on the crisp side and the filling was far too runny to be real whoopie pies. So I tasted one to see if my observations were true - the "cakes" were better than expected, but too crisp on the edges and did not melt in my mouth the way a real whoopie pie would, and the filling was, indeed, sub-par in its fluffiness and taste. However, I must give the company some small kudos for attempting to produce boxed whoopie pie mix. As for me, I think I'll stick with the homemade, from scratch whoopie pies. And, yes, I am aware that I am a whoopie pie snob.