Family Histories and Culture: A Thanksgiving Conversation

Hi Everyone!
      Thanksgiving is upon us. We would like to thank everyone for their contributions to this study so far. This holiday presents us with a very interesting set of circumstances, it is an opportunity to critique what is quite possibly the biggest and least energy efficient meal of the year, but it is also a time when you are with your family, with the people who you grew up eating and cooking with, or maybe learned how to cook from. Because Thanksgiving is such a constant in our lives, it serves as an amazing tool to understand cooking habits over time.
       We would like you to take this chance to ask the people you are eating with about their family's Thanksgiving traditions. Where did the recipes come from? How have the dishes and ways of cooking changed over peoples life times? Are there certain traditions that are steadfast or are there ones that take new forms year to year? What are the different ways they have cooked turkey/stuffing/gravy/potatoes? Why has that changed over time?
      Because Thanksgiving is a social event, you are eating, talking and cooking together, we think it would be a great opportunity for you to think about the discussion we had about the meaning embedded into food when cooking for other people.  Also, are you finding any of the skills and tips from the blog in other people's cooking? If so, that might be a great place to bring up the fact that that method saved a little bit of energy.
      We would love it if you started a conversation with your close ones and got people thinking about energy and how that can relate to their cooking habits. While Thanksgiving might not be the time anyone is willing to alter their views on cooking, there is always the day after - where people feel stuffed and a little guilty for eating all that food. Maybe that is a good opportunity to to open up more conversation.
      Please post your thoughts and reporting in the comments section, along with any reflections you may have had on energy consumption related to cooking a Thanksgiving meal. We would be interested to know if it is something that is now on your conscious when you look at food. Thank you and have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

-Huey

Improving on an old favorite.

Thanks to everyone who posted their list of go to meals. These are meals that we go to because We know we can do them right and they are convenient. This weekend we are asking you to choose one meal from your list and think of a way to save energy when preparing this go to meal using the tools you already have in your kitchen. If you want to do a little experimenting, please do. Don't forget to take some pictures.

Good luck!
Josh

Go To Meals continued!

Happy Friday to everyone!

So thanks to everyone that posted their favorite go-to meals. Today, we’d like to know what it is about these meals that make them “go to.” Some of you listed preparation time and cheapness of ingredients as factors. What are some others?

Do you typically have these meals’ ingredients lying around your kitchen? Do they require little attention/can you make them on autopilot? Are they meals you grew up on? 

 

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Go To Meals!

Hi everyone!

We visited some participants yesterday afternoon during their Potluck event.

Something that came up in our conversations was our Go To Meals. Remember those long tiring days when you just don't want to stress anymore after work/school? Seems like all of us have some meals that we know well and/or doesn't take long to prepare.  One of mine is definitely ramen noodles. Another is garlic shrimp with rice.

Please list those meals (around 5?) in the comment section below.

Thanks and have a great week!
Go Team~

Show us a meal!

A simple request for this weekend: post a photo of one meal you prepared  for yourself or for others this weekend to the gallery on our blog.

To do so, you can either send the photo as an attachment to pollockj-413c@post.me.com or click on the arrow in the upper right corner of the pictures page on our blog (it's on the right column).

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Helpful Resources?

Hi all~
Maybe we're all about to run dry on what other things we can do to lower our energy use beyond the obvious (putting lid on, etc). Below are some pages with information on low energy cooking methods:

Microwave Vs. Toaster Oven
Microwave Vs. Stoves

Different Simple Cooking Methods
"Common Sense" tips
Appliance comparisons

Some crazy ideas?

If you have any other links or useful resources, feel free to share! :D


On another note, a participant has blogged about his experience on his Tumblr page. One of his concerns is whether his favorite food, steak, will taste worse if he were to try saving energy by putting the lid on. What do you guys think? Any steak-cooking pros out there? Or advice through experience?



Nick's blog entry

Hope you guys are doing well with your cooking and moving on to the one-pan/pot experiment! (Look at previous post).

~Go team!~

Welcome to Week 2 - Experimenting with Low Energy Cooking

Hi Everybody!

Lets get started! This week we are asking all of you to try combined cooking, using a single pot or pan to cook multiple parts of the meal. For this exercise I will be making pasta with sausage and vegetables. I will attempt to cook all the items for my meal at once. I will boil sausage with my pasta, and while I cook that part of the meal I will steam broccoli and zucchini over the boiling water. I am looking forward to this, as I usually do not cook my sausage this way and often have vegetables steaming in a different pot next to my pasta. When you cook this week, try to think how it would be possible to maximize the heat you have generated. We want you guys to get creative but also explore the simple stuff as well.

As you may have noticed we have added a Low Energy Tips section to the blog where you will be able to find a list of useful ideas that will help you conserve energy when cooking. If you have not checked this out please do so. We hope that having a running list will not only show you how easy it can be to conserve energy but also how intuitive some of our wasteful habits have become. Recognizing and changing our cooking habits can have enormous effects on how much energy is needed to prepare the meals we eat. Please contribute any ideas you come across or methods you practice.

Good luck trying out your new ways of cooking! Please remember to continue to keep track of your energy consumed while cooking, it will be very interesting to look at when this living lab is finished.

Checking In

How's everybody doing so far? Have you been able to keep notes on a few of your meals this week? I only cooked once in the last week since I'm moving towards a mainly raw diet, but I did make sure to turn the heat down once I got my wok hot, it's a simple way to save gas. I've also been thinking about how much energy my juicer is eating up to make four juice everyday (breakfast and lunch juice for my wife and I.)
If you have already started to evaluate the energy use in your own cooking habits please respond with a comment to this post and let everyone know what you are thinking.

WEEK 1! What are we supposed to do?

Hey everyone! I apologize for the sudden and slow start into your study. I do hope, however, that everyone gets to catch up soon and introduce themselves with each other in the next two days. We will ask you all to check the blog frequently because this will be the place we use to keep in touch and reach our goal of low energy cooking. It is very important as you all are the ones helping and sharing your culture and food with each other through the next three weeks. 

For this week (Week 1), you guys are cooking like you normally would and sharing your backgrounds of cooking with each other. Please start planning when you will be cooking so that you can make time to fill in the quick survey (listed as “Meal Info Survey” in the right column).This week is also the phase where you will research for tips and possible methods to use in order to cook with less energy. 

In addition to your intros, here are some questions that you guys can talk with each other about in the comment section below. 

Where did you learn your cooking methods and tips?

Describe a typical cooking phase. Where do you start? What do you usually do?

How much food do you usually cook/prepare in one round? 
              Enough just for yourself, or enough for leftovers or for another person?

How does your culture influence the way you cook?

What encourages you or discourages you to cook?

The next blog entry will revolve more around simple energy saving tips and will be posted on Wednesday.

We will see you then. 

Happy cooking!

~Carmen

Welcome to Our Blog!!

Hello all! 

We are extremely grateful for your participation in our project and hope this will prove to be a fun and enlightening experience for everyone!


There might be this question lurking in the back of your mind: What do we consider cooking? 

We consider cooking to be any form of meal preparation: making a sandwich, heating up a frozen dinner, baking lasagna. We’re interested in all types of meals that come out of the kitchen. Our only restrictions are take-out and, of course, eating out.

The general protocol of the project is as follows:
Participants will keep track of their cooking routines for four meals a week, noting the times and forms of energy they use to cook their meals. We ask that you record your energy usage for each of these four meals and fill out this information on our survey (the link is listed on the right-hand column of the blog page). Please do not be intimidated – this is not a complicated form.

We also ask that participants reflect on their cooking process on the blog - responding to questions and discussion points we post, as well as other participants’ reflections. We would love for this to be an interactive, communicative process! 

We’d also like everyone to understand that we, the designers of this project, will be participants as well. This will be a learning experience for everyone!

Feel free to start exploring the different pages on this blog. You can share pictures by emailing your pictures to pollockj-413c@post.me.com. They will be posted on this site: http://gallery.me.com/pollockj/100063. (The link is available on the right-hand column.)

Please take a few minutes to introduce yourself and get to know everyone!
Name:
Reason for participating:
Favorite Food to Cook:
When did you first start cooking for yourself?
How many people do you usually cook with?
What would you like to get out of this study?