Archive for January, 2009

How to Eat Well on a Roadtrip

By Susie, 5 January, 2009,

Have you ever been on a long road trip only to wonder if you’re living in fast food nation? You might think of making a TripTik with AAA. But what you really should think about is The Eat Well Guide where you can make a local food centric trip plan that will make your journey so much more pleasurable.

You pick the types of establishments you’re interested in – farms, restaurants, stores etc. Then can generate a printable guide.

Recently embarking on a roadtrip, I remembered to generate a list of great eateries from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

How did the Eat Well Guide fare?

Pretty sweet, although it needs help to suggest more local food places.

If you have several Interstate highway systems to choose from, you may need to game the system by choosing start and finish cities on the particular highway you’ll be driving (in my case highway 101) vs. the guide showing you the shortest route (highway 5).

PS – One of my favorite recent discoveries on I5 in California is the family farm fruit stand at the Westley exit. In peach season be sure to stop there.

And if you’re on highway 80 through Iowa, screech off at Newton to go to Maytag Blue Cheese!

You’ll find this all soon in the Eat Well Guide as I happily start to get involved!

Start a Food Business Based on a Tradition?

By Susie, 3 January, 2009,

Pigs pigs everywhere! For the first time ever, my Christmas season was marked with candy pigs, yet of completely different traditions. This got me thinking that there are surely other symbols and goods that have potential to become time-honored traditions, much like these:

Marzipan pigs – I’ve eaten plenty of German sweets but somehow I was surprised when my friend handed me a traditional Christmas marzipan pig from Niederegger, a two-centuries old marzipan manufacturer that makes other “lucky charm” candies in various shapes.
Now searching Amazon I see marzipan pigs everywhere – in art, books (The Marzipan Pig by Russell Hoban!), and all sorts of pig-shaped candies.
The Peppermint Pig – “You don’t know about the peppermint pig?” my party hostess asked, handing me a ham-colored, shrinkwrapped hard candy pig from a felt bag along with a little silver hammer.The tradition is to smash it, pass around the plate, and eat a piece for good luck.This pig hails from a Victorian tradition.Saratoga.com tells how “in the 1880’s, Jim Menges produced the first Peppermint Pig….Over time the pig was lost, but the memories of it were not forgotten. It was not until 1986 that the pig reemerged and the seasonal ritual began again.” Saratoga Sweets tells how the pig was reborn: “Using borrowed candy molds and the original recipe, about 100 Peppermint Pigs™ were made just in time for sale that Christmas Eve Day. We were greeted that snowy morning by a crowd of Saratogians of all ages gleefully waiting to get their first Peppermint Pig™ in over 50 years.”Now packaged with a little metal hammer to smash the pig, the candy is much more than a sweet but a symbolic tradition…of which they sell 120,000 each year.