the GoodEater Collaborative

Birds in Hand: Slaughtering Chickens with Pete & Jen

Pete Lowy and Jenn Hashley met at UC Santa Cruz’s Center For Agroecology’s Sustainable Food System’s horticultural apprenticeship program, and soon after moved to Verrill Farms in Concord, where Pete is the assistant farm manager. Today, we help them slaughter their chickens.

NYTimes Biotech and Food Crisis Debate – Unanswered Questions

The New York Times is currently hosting an excellent debate entitled Can Biotech Food Cure Hunger? Contributors include Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, Per Pinstrup-Andersen of Cornell, and Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya. Yet there are serious meta-questions about how we even approach this controversy that remain unanswered.

Crunching the Numbers on a Vegan in a Hummer

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Archives Thin

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Smart Choices Backpedals

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The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs

Nearly every basic cookbook offers conflicting techniques on how it should be done—start the egg in cold water, or gently lower it into boiling water; add vinegar to the water to lower its pH, or add baking soda to the water to raise it; cover the pot, don’t cover the pot; use old eggs, or use new eggs, and on and on—but very few offer evidence as to why any one of these techniques should work any better than your average old wives’ tale. Apparently, boiling is not…ahem…an eggs-act science.

Recipe: Perfect Boiled Eggs

In this week’s Food Lab, we tackle one of the most difficult simple task in the kitchen: boiling eggs. Here are recipes for achieving perfect hard or soft boiled eggs every time. Click here for the science behind the method.

The Food Lab: Animal Fat Mayonnaise

While I was reorganizing my freezer the other day so my wife could easily pull out the frozen dumplings without having to touch alligator legs, goose feet, or any number of other “experiments” going on in there at the moment, I came across a stash of rendered animal fats—beef, duck, and lamb, to be precise.

I thought to myself: “If I can make mayonnaise out of egg yolks and oil, why can’t I make mayonnaise out of egg yolks and rendered animal fat?”

Turns out, it’s not so simple.

Recipe: Animal Fat Mayonnaise

Is it possible to make mayonnaise using rendered animal fats in place of oil? It sure is! Here are the recipes. Read about the science behind these recipes here.

So You Want Your Own Tomatoes?

The Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN), affiliated with the larger-scale American Community Gardening Association, owns 40 community gardens throughout Boston and provides support and advocacy for 150 more, impacting over 10,000 individuals in total.

For a fee ranging from $15 to about $30, you can get your very own plot, ready to sow.

Sounds great, but here’s the rub: A quick internet search for urban gardening will have you believe that all you need to produce a bumper crop of heirloom tomatoes is a garden and a seed catalog, but in fact, the productivity of a garden plot is directly proportional to the gardener’s skills and experience, and let’s face it – you’re no green thumb.