I had a chance this week to watch an urban legend grow first-hand.

I'm a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, and my job (everyone at PSFC has to work) is helping to chair the monthly General Meeting that sets the rules. At January's meeting, a member asked about what Israeli products we sold. Almost in passing, she said she thought we should boycott Israeli products (all four of them). She was politely told that to make such a proposition, she needed to submit it to the agenda committee.

And that was that. We thought.

Then came a story in the Jewish Daily Forward saying the coop was considering a boycott of Israeli products. On New York Magazine's Daily Grub blog, that became "Park Slope Coop Bans Israeli Food." Soon the blogosphere was alight from here to Jerusalem and back. "We are going to protest these leftard dhimmis," said one blogger, adding indignantly - " in Brooklyn of all places. This is inexcusable."

As the February GM approached, the staff was nervous enough to mull police protection. So was the rabbi of the temple that hosts our GMs. It was starting to look like there might be an ugly scene.

It all got so tense that last night, walking to the GM half an hour late, I half expected to hear sirens and see flashing lights. But alas, no such excitement (although I was later told that a police van was circling the block - just in case). All I found was an incredibly crowded meeting that had long since disposed of what was, in fact, a complete non-issue. As anyone who had looked at the February agenda knew, there was no such proposal.

And now I know how urban legends are born. Like a game of telephone.

Labels: food, park slope food coop, urban legend

I do almost all my cooking from English recipes. Partly it's because I really like English food. This astonishes many. And I have to admit English food really earned its bad rep. When I first went to the UK in the 60s, I thought the title of Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything was a joke - until I walked into a cheap cafe in London and saw the menu. Sausage with chips, ham with chips, bacon with chips....spaghetti with chips?

Even in the 80s, the food in your average pub was abysmal. On one long car trip, my husband and I beguiled the hours planning a catering company that would supply good food to pubs.

Now, though, even the pub food is good. And English cooks are at the top of the heap when it comes to a profound appreciation of seasonal ingredients. I regularly clip recipes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian and Rowley Leigh in the Financial Times, and they're always written with an intense awareness of what tastes best right now (Of course, that's right now in England, which can be frustrating. Recently both have raved over purple sprouting broccoli, a vegetable I've never even seen, let alone tasted).

But there's another reason I prefer English recipes: they don't use cup measures. They use weights. And boy, does that make cooking, and shopping, easier.

Yesterday, trolling the web for a recipe to use up a half a pound of really bland cheddar I'd ordered from my raw milk supplier (if you want good cheese, I now know, don't buy it from a dairy farmer, buy it from a cheesemaker), I came upon one for macaroni and cheese with leeks. It called for a pound of sharp cheddar, and I figured if I bought half a pound of the sharpest cheddar I could find, and mixed the two, it would work. And it did.

But it also called for 5 cups of chopped leeks. Well, just how many leeks is that? Two? Three? Four? Five? Small leeks? Big leeks?

I made a wild guess and bought three pounds of large leeks. It turned out to be one too many, but that's OK - I can always use a spare leek. But had the recipe called for 2 1/2 pounds of leeks - or even for 500 grams (roughly a pound) of chopped leeks, figuring out how much to buy would have been a lot easier.

Or take peppers. A few years ago I made a dish that called for a cup of peppers sliced lengthwise. I don't know what kind of measuring cup the writer was using, but mine was a good inch and a half shorter than the pepper slices, and I was left struggling to read the writer's mind. Come on, I kept saying - just tell me how much it weighs.

American chefs' terror of the scale bewilders me. A scale is neither high-tech (mine has two buttons), nor rare (every cooking supply store sells them) nor expensive (Amazon sells the one I've got for $25). And it makes life easier in countless ways. You can set it for ounces or grams. You can re-set it to zero over and over again, making it magically simple to measure multiple ingredients directly into a bowl without using (or having to wash) every measuring cup in the house.

In a pinch, you can even weigh packages with it.

Lee Gomes, writing last summer in the Wall Street Journal, says it's not the cookbook writers' fault - most of them use scales themselves. The problem, he says, is that cookbook publishers think weights in a recipe will scare readers off.

Come on. Do they really think someone who can figure out a TV remote will be scared off by a two-button scale?

Labels: cookbooks, cooking, local food, pubs

Every winter, as I pick my way down the steps to the compost bin (or, more often, dump the stuff in the trash), I swear I'm going to start a worm bin. This year I finally did.

According to the books, and in my imagination, it was simple: drill some holes in a big plastic bin, fill it with damp shredded newspaper, order worms, dump them in, add garbage.

Umm...not quite.

The bin part was simple. So was the newspaper part, and the dumping-in of the worms part. They came curled tightly in a big ball, like trauma victims huddling together - which I suppose, after a few days in the hands of the US Post Office, they were.

It was days before they began to explore their new surroundings. But when they did...uh-oh. About a week after they came, I opened the bin to find what looked like all 1,000 of them wildly trying to get out, clambering the walls and diving over the top the instant I took off the lid.

What I needed at this point was not a book, but a person, and there is one: Bentley Christie (aka The Worm Guy). Bentley, from whom I bought my worms, promises email support, and he delivered.

A few panicky email exchanges later, it turned out the worms were probably unhappy with the dirt I'd put in the bin (for grit). It came from a pot on the deck (with ice covering the stairs, I wasn't about to creep down to try to dig it out of the frozen earth) - and the pot on the deck contained commercial potting soil. Worms, it turns out, want good clean dirt.

I shoulda known.

Bentley suggested we encourage the worms to migrate into a second, potting-soil-free bin. But when I opened the bin to put the new bin on top, about four days after The Great Escape Attempt, the worms - or those that were left, anyhow - had settled down in peace and quiet. We put in more newspaper, to dilute the dirt, and since then they have been happily chomping our coffee grounds (of which - now that I am weighing our garbage - I've realized we produce an alarming amount), wilted lettuce, and other assorted goodies.

(Weighing my garbage? Just you wait. I'm freezing it, too.)

We aren't yet home free. For one thing, I have discovered that we produce considerably more than the half-pound of garbage that 1,000 worms can eat in a day. Just the grounds from our daily pot of coffee weigh almost 5 ounces.

At the moment, I'm freezing what they can't eat, because we'll be going away for 1 1/2 weeks in March, and need to store it up. But I have better uses for my freezer than to store worm food. So when we come back, either they'd better start breeding, so I can give them more garbage, or I'll have a worm bin and still have to throw stuff out!

Of course, if they do start eating more, I'm not sure how I'll figure it out; in the riotous mixture of paper, garbage and worm that fills my bin, I don't know whether I'll be able to tell just what they're doing.

At which point, I guess it will be time to email Bentley again.

Labels: composting, food waste, green living, worm composting