Tag Archives: Food

How To Cook Seasonly with Parsnips

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In the recent issue of World Ark, there is a special section called, ‘Tips for Better Living.” Since the how-to series often discusses eating sustainable and seasonally, I thought sharing the recipe for Curried Parsnip Soup would be good addition.

Curried Parsnip Soup:

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 pound parsnips, peels and cubed
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 teaspoons curry powder
3 1/4 cup boiling vegetable broth
1/2 cup milk
salt and pepper to taste
red pepper flakes or paprika for garnish

Instructions:

Saute the onion in a large pan over medium heat until soft, about five minutes. Add the parsnips, garlic and curry powder to the pan, and saute for a couple of minutes. Pour the vegetable broth into the pan, stir, and simmer for 15 minutes, until the parsnips are soft. Remove from heat and blend with a hand mixer, immersion blender or regular blender for 30 seconds to one minute. Pour back into the arge pan, then stir in milk and heat through. Season with salt and pepper, and garnish with paprika or pepper flakes.

If you enjoy parsnips – let us know how you cook with them in our comments section.

WalMart Cutting Cost for Fresh Fruits and Veggies

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Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, announced Tuesday that it is launching an effort to get healthier foods into homes by cutting the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, lowering the sodium and sugar content in their “Great Value” brand, and by adding a “Great For You” label to foods high in nutritional value.


And they have a powerful ally in First Lady Michelle Obama.


“The largest corporation in America is launching a new initiative that has the potential to transform the marketplace and help American families put healthier food on their tables,” Obama said at the announcement.


And while this move may help improve WalMart’s bottom line, at Heifer we know all too well that too many people in the United States have a limited or uncertain availability to nutritionally adequate foods.


Since we also just launched the Seeds of Change project, which aims to do the same thing in a different way—by creating sustainable food systems in Arkansas and Appalachia with smallholder farmers—to see such a powerful player like WalMart step in and help make better foods affordable to more people is a positive step.


Definition: Sustainability

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Here at Heifer, we have a set of fundamental principles to guide our work, called the 12 Cornerstones for Just and Sustainable Development. One of these Cornerstones is Sustainability and Self-Reliance, and for our project participants, the focus is two-fold: one is for families to continue to thrive after direct support from Heifer has ended; the other is to use their resources in a way that will not deplete or permanently damage those resources, so they and their successors can continue to benefit.

But what does sustainability really mean? As a writer, reader and skimmer of various texts, I know how easy it is to get caught up on certain words.

To say the least, sustainability is a hot-topic, jargoney word (in fact, it was on Advertising Age’s top list of “Jargoniest Jargon” Words of 2010. Here on Heifer Blog, we’ve even got two categories dedicated to it: sustainability and sustainable agriculture.

In an effort to help make sustainability a more digestible–and livable–concept, Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard Gayeton embarked on a three-year journey across the United States to dissect and define the myriad of terms that shape what sustainability means, resulting in the Lexicon of Sustainability.

From the website:

The Lexicon project is based on a simple premise: people can’t be expected to live more sustainable lives if they don’t even know the most basic terms and principles that define sustainability.

It’s a pretty impressive project. Watch the above video to learn more about it, and check out this page to get their full, artful glossary of terms, which includes several we like to use here at Heifer (biodiversity, CSA, food security, to name a few). Their blog includes terms that aren’t included yet in the gallery, like food sovereignty, another Heifer favorite.