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Announcement, Cookies, Make Your Own Darn Good Cookies

Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie Squares – EXPERIMENT

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What’s green and brown and all mixed up?

Some of my recipes I imagine and then create – with others I get the flavour idea from some other recipe, glean what I need from it in the way of flavouring and proportions, and then create my own cookie.  Early this month I came across a recipe for Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies – and they looked TASTY!  I instantly thought about this flavour being a cookie square…

Spread out in my forming pan and ready to go…

Around the middle of the month I got the opportunity to give it a go – take a look at the results below – it seems this is one of the times I nailed the recipe in the first go.  Here are two other bits of good news…

Yeah, I know, they’re a little toasted on top & don’t quite look minty green. I’ll see the inside results when I cut these apart after they’ve cooled over night.

…In simple terms, the way this recipe worked out, I learned more about my base Cookie Square recipe, enabling me to more easily make other flavours I imagine.

…I’ve already included this recipe in my soon-to-be-published baking book – not only do you get to see them here, but you will have the opportunity to make them yourself!

And how’s the book going?  There’s still a good chunk of work to do but I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I’m working with an editor — Linda AKA CheckChick.com, who is FANTASTIC — and the writing is better than ever!  My *HOPE* is that the book will be published late-December or early-January.  Keep your eyes here and on the WIBC Facebook page…..

YEP – these cookies are GREEN! Trust me, I know – I live in a state where 1/2 of everything is green ….. not minty though.
Film, Hunger

Food Stamped (2010)

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Did you see my post about A Place At The Table?  Did you watch the film?  Watch it, and then immediately watch Food Stamped.

If you’ve followed along, the issues of quality food and hunger are close to my heart – and it is my hope that this is a topic is one that other people look at.

In “Food Stamped” Shira & Yoav Potash take ‘The Food Stamp Challenge’ (which seems to match the name of what a number of folks on Capitol Hill experimented with).  For one week they shop & eat on the average amount of money that someone receiving food stamps has to use – which is about $1 per meal for an individual.  They took this further by making a few ground rules that the food must be nutritious:

  • Every meal must include protein, whole grains & fruits/veggies
  • To buy as many organic items as they could afford
  • To eat as little processed foods as possible
  • At the end of the week submit their diet record to a registered dietitian for a nutritional evaluation

Through their film they interview food justice activists, nutrition experts, politicians, and ordinary people living on food stamps – all to look closely at the challenges that low-income Americans face daily trying to put three-square meals on the table.

Shira is a certified nutrition educator with a Masters of Science in Community Health Education.  She teaches nutrition-based cooking classes to elementary school students in low-income neighborhoods, most of who are from families that qualify for food stamps.

Yoav is a graduate of UC Berkeley and has taught film courses at the Bay Area Video Coalition and Academy of Art University.  He is a documentary film maker who has produced documentaries & videos for many companies and nonprofits.

FoodStamped.com

FoodStamped.com the film

Food Stamped Film Trailer

Food Stamped at IMDB

Film, Real Food

Fed Up

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PS to “Ingredients – Who’s Your Farmer?” on 21February2016

I might – scratch that, WOULD – also add “Fed Up” to this list.  Something about the style of delivery in this documentary strikes me as ‘commercial’, regardless I still found thought provoking.

Fed Up at IMDB

Fed Up – movie home page

Fed Up at Wikipedia.org

(NOTE – This started as a small PS and grew as I found more & more important things to share.)

The more I watch this documentary the more I come to believe it is important.  As I watch, I find myself additionally reflecting on what I (too) have done with my WIBC products.  A big part of this video focuses on sugar and processed foods.  Let’s be very clear about a few things with respects to my company & products:

  • WIBC is (presently) licensed as a Food Processing Plant (emphasis added).  I understand this as a general purpose title given by the Washington State Department of Agriculture.  When the name of this license is put beside the term “processed foods” it may give the suggestion that what WIBC makes is ‘processed’.  I didn’t choose the title of the license, and this assumption or confusion should not be made.
  • I consider WIBC to be a part of the Local Food or Real Food movement.   I did not set out to do this, it is merely that how I make food falls within this idea.  I make baked goods like a person would at home, just on a commercial scale.  In frank terms, if you look at a food product ingredient label and read ingredients you have at home (eggs, butter, sugar, flour, etc) then you are essentially holding real food; if the ingredients read like a cross between Greek, Pig Latin, and Medical Terminology in unpronounceable syllables, then you’re dealing with a processed food (substance of some sort).
  • WIBC products do include various sugars.  I have never denied this, I have never hidden it in any way – in fact, my ingredients have been a part of my company’s transparency and I have very gladly talked about the ingredients used in my products.  To this end, the sugars used in my products comprise of white and brown sugar; other sugars come from fruit juice, molasses, white and chocolate chips, and M&Ms (unless there are any other ingredients I am not thinking of off the top of my head).  When you read the ingredients of a product that include these, (I suggest that) the only one that may not read so straight-forward is one that includes M&Ms.  The not-so-pronounceable ingredients to these are preservatives in the M&M food colouring.  Further …
  • What WIBC (AKA I) does not add to its products are stand-alone ingredients you cannot pronounce, strange flavour enhancers, or dubious preservatives.  As said, I make baked goods like a person would at home.  As a result my baked goods have a short shelf life & are meant to be consumed soon after preparation, and should be considered ‘Real Food’.
  • Maybe if you can’t pronounce something on a food ingredient label, don’t eat it.  If you ask a company that produces & markets food items, and they won’t talk with you or all they give you is prepared spin, maybe don’t eat what they’re offering.  If you do ask a food company about their products and their ingredients and they’re happy to talk with you about them and speak in straight-forward terms, and you understand and believe in their ingredients, that’s probably a better bet.  If you go to a grocery store or a farmers market and you know that a vegetable is a vegetable, an egg is an egg, and a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread (etc), then it’s probably a much better bet.

Well, it seems this is a pretty important PS for me.

Fed Up – movie home page

Film, Real Food

Ingredients – Who’s Your Farmer?

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This film is all about the development of the local food movement.  The food we eat is no better than the quality of the ingredients that go into them.  More and more farmers are growing real food.  More and more restaurants and food companies (as I did with WIBC) are moving to work with no less than real ingredients.  The local food movement takes root.  Find farm-to-restaurant venues & patronize them.  Cooking is a joy, not drudgery – go to your farmers markets and buy local.

You’re a real person – eat real food!
Enjoy, Don

Ingredients at IMDB

CargoFilm-Releasing.com – Ingredients – Whos Your Farmer

Ingredients – Who’s Your Farmer

Film, Hunger, Review

A Place At The Table

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This film was produced by the same folks who made Food, Inc.  It points out and questions the following:

  • The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world – we also produce more food than we consume.
  • How is it and why is it that the U.S. has a substantial number of people who cannot afford to buy food and are starving &/or cannot afford to purchase quality sustenance?

Apparently we had this problem in the 1970s, and we beat it.  Now it’s back, and it’s not a simple issue, but an extremely important one.  One of the things that I wanted to do with WIBC while a production food company was to join this fight.  When I finished watching this film I started writing a letter to Jeff Bridges (the actor), but I was so fired up that I couldn’t tie my many thoughts and sentences together.  Why Jeff Bridges?  Watch the film.

A Place At The Table at IMDB

TakePart.com – A Place At The Table