Let’s Stop Food Waste

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Last week, I tweeted a disturbing statistic: "If food waste were a country, it would be the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind the U.S. and China."

When we buy food, there’s the cost of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing and getting it to our tables. So if we buy it, then trash it, we’ve expended energy and resources—for nothing! And to compound the problem, the resulting waste in the landfill further degrades our environment.

Ten or so years ago, I remember interviewing the celebrated chef and cooking teacher, Jacques Pépin, for the Associated Press. At the time, despite the ubiquity of takeout meals, he surmised people were still cooking because supermarkets continued to stock ingredients like fresh fruits and vegetables. If consumers weren’t buying them, does a dump truck go to the supermarket at the end of the day to toss the produce out? That would make no economic sense, he maintained.

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Strawberries Thrive, Despite the Drought

Congratulations to JF W. who won our #DaveinAsia sweepstakes! Hopefully he'll enjoy the food as much as Dave enjoyed his trip.

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

By now, everyone knows that California, America’s agricultural market basket, is facing one of the most severe droughts on record. In San Francisco, our family is doing its part to conserve water—mindfully taking shorter showers, irrigating our plants sparingly and filling the dishwasher to the max before running it.

Since California produces half of all the fresh produce grown in this country, consumers are concerned about the potential of skyrocketing prices. So far, so good.

According to an article by Russ Parsons, food editor of the Los Angeles Times, while some fruit and vegetable prices have increased significantly, produce prices in the aggregate remain stable and USDA is forecasting a nominal increase of 2 or 3 percent.

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Now and Then: My History with Food on the Internet

Sandy circa 1995

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Remember this year’s Super Bowl commercial with Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, where a young Katie asks, “Alison, can you explain what Internet is?”

That would be the year, as Director of the Ketchum Food Center, I initiated the development of a recipe and cooking website for Ketchum, a global PR agency, with the help of Ketchum Advertising’s interactive team. Not only were most educated people clueless about the Internet, marketing pros were still debating whether the Internet was a trend or fad.

In the summer of 1995, we launched recipe.com. It was so groundbreaking in its time, that when I went to New York City to demonstrate the site to food editors of the biggest national magazines, it was the first time most of them had experienced the “information superhighway,” as we called the Internet then.

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Mad for Matcha

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Last fall, on a vacation to Japan, Steve and I visited Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms, learning how Japanese tea is produced, and getting educated on how to brew the leaves for optimum flavor. Of course, no travel is complete without souvenirs, so we purchased a few packages of sencha for drinking and some cooking grade matcha to experiment with at home.

If you're like me, you've acquired a taste for bitter matcha, a flavor that’s a hot global food trend right now. I remember how I disliked it as a child, when it was whisked up to teach us about the rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony at our Japanese language school in Hawaii.

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How to Cook Fast

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Recently, I was a guest on a Kansas City radio food show, LIVE! From Jasper’s Kitchen, hosted by Chef Jasper Mirabile and Kimberly Stern. Invited to talk about the story of Special Fork, ten minutes flew by and there was hardly time to get to some practical cooking tips.

Having put some thought to it for the show, I’m sharing some of our best quick cooking tips with you, as an extension of the radio interview. I’d love to hear your best tips, too!

Top Ten 30-Minute Recipes

I culled through many hundreds of recipes in our recipe database to come up with my top ten quick favorites. While all Special Fork recipes take no more than 30 minutes to prep, cooking time may be extra. These ten I’ve identified can each be made, start to finish, in about a half hour total.

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