I’m very familiar with this way of cooking because that’s what I used to do for other people back in the day when I was a personal chef in Maryland. I used to get up in the morning, go grocery shopping for one of my client families, go to their house with my box of equipment and car full of food, and then cook up enough entrees and side dishes that were freezer friendly for a week’s worth of meals. Then, I’d freeze the meals in containers, clean the kitchen get paid and go home.

It’s not a bad way to do things, but for people who work and are loathe to give up a weekend afternoon–and frankly, I don’t blame you one bit for wanting a weekend afternoon that is NOT spent in the kitchen–it just sounds like too much work. And that’s because it IS work.

I just wanted to let you know that there’s an easier way to go about this, and while it works more gradually, it still works. This “slacker method” of cooking ahead has saved me on many a night when I was either too damned tired to cook anything or too damned busy to remember that I had to cook dinner until it was, oh, a half an hour before dinner time.

All you have to do is this: on a night when you are cooking something that goes nicely in the freezer, cook at least twice the amount you need. Then, when the food is done, you put it in a container or wrap it up and put it in the freezer.

Most foods that go well in a freezer don’t really take any longer if you double or even triple the recipe. Mind you, when I first started using my “slacker method,” I didn’t even do it on purpose: (that’s how you can tell its the “slacker method–” I came upon it by accident!) I wasn’t doubling or tripling my recipes–I was having trouble transitioning from cooking in quantity as a chef at work to cooking for two adults and one toddler at home. So, I accidentally cooked too much and had a buttload of leftovers that I had to do something with.

Rather than eat the leftovers for a week, I started packaging them up and putting them in the freezer to be used the next time I came home from work in time to cook dinner but without an ounce of will or gumption to stand in front of a stove again. On those nights, I could open up my freezer door, find a container marked, “taco filling,” defrost it in the microwave, heat up some taco shells and shred some cheese and cut up lettuce and cilantro, and BOOM! Like magic, a home cooked, nutritious meal seemingly out of thin air, put on the table faster than you can say, Rachael Ray. (With nary an utterance of EVOO in sight or hearing range.)

I’ve since refined my slacker method of cooking ahead. I actually keep freezer bags, reusable plastic (BPA-free, of course) containers, and a Sharpie marker in my kitchen so I don’t have to go hunting around frantically when it’s time to package stuff. (In my early days of cooking this way, I neglected to label some containers thinking, “Oh, I can tell chili from taco filling!” only to find that when I’m tired, headachy and hungry, no, I can’t.) I also buy extra ingredients on purpose and everything.

Dishes that are good for this method include chili, beans, lentils, stews, curries, mashed potatoes, nearly any kind of pasta sauces including marinara, puttanesca, pesto, and bolognaise, meatloaf, soups, rice dishes like jambalaya and pilaf, and casseroles like lasagne, squash (or any vegetable, now that I think on it) gratin, and arroz gratinado.

Lasagne is a great example of the slacker principle at work. It’s already a pain the butt to make and it takes a while. I have found over years of extensive experimentation (that’s a fancy way of saying, trial and error) that it takes no longer to layer noodles, fillings, sauces and cheeses into three casserole pans as it does for one. The prep is also not much more onerous for three pans as it is for one–the prep time doesn’t triple, or even double, but rather takes half again as much time as it would normally. (And for lasagne, I have found that shortcuts like using pre-shredded cheeses–which is not going to kill you–really cut the prep time down considerably.)

That’s a lot of different types of dishes. And truly, most of these dishes, if you double or even triple your recipe, you aren’t doubling or tripling your cooking or even your prep time. In my experience, it doesn’t take twice as long to make a six servings of puttanesca as it does to make three. Nine servings takes maybe five minutes of prep time longer for the same recipe. Pesto–if you make it in your food processor, only takes more time to pick off more leaves from your basil, but really–how long does it take to pick leaves off of basil in the first place?

Yeah. Not that long.

The beauty of this slacker method of cooking ahead is that if you cook five times a week normally, and you double the amounts you are cooking, you have put away meals for five days in the same time as it takes to cook dinner for those five nights anyway, with maybe 15 extra minutes added on.

And personally, I think it’s a heck of a lot less intimidating to spend an extra fifteen minutes five times a week for a total of one hour and fifteen minutes of extra labor, than it is to spend a whole a afternoon–two to four hours say–cooking all day on a weekend when you could be spending time with your friends and family doing something fun. The end result is the same–you fill your freezer over the course of five days with five more days worth of dinners. Do that a couple of weeks in a row and you have built up a stock of really varied, healthy, home-cooked meals for you and your family to enjoy on evenings when time is of the essence, or when everyone is just too damned hot/tired/cranky/or otherwise poopy to even think of cooking from scratch.

Yes, I’m ignoring the fact that for some of us, spending two to four hours cooking on a weekend afternoon is fun, because I’m not writing for us–I’m writing for everyone else. Or rather, I’m writing for the folks who do think its fun, but have other things to do on the weekends than cook all afternoon. And, I’m writing for the folks who are really intimidated by cooking five or six different dishes and packing them up for the freezer in the span of an afternoon. Let’s face it, that’s lots of prep, cooking and clean-up, and if you aren’t a professional, like me, or someone who just cooks a lot habitually, that kind of cooking marathon can seem like endless, purgatorial and just plain old no damned fun.

In conclusion, I want you to try my slacker method. It’s perfect remedy for busy folks who want good, nutritious, home cooked food, but who just have days when they can’t pick up the knife and saute pan.

As for recipes that work really well for cooking ahead–try these from my archives–I’ve used them for slacker freezer stockpiling exercises for years, and they never fail to taste good.

Taco Filling
Mangalore Chicken Curry
Mixed Greens and Mushroom Dal
Chana Bhatura (you can freeze the bhatura dough before cooking it, then thaw it out and fry it)
Shepherd’s Pie
Jamaican Beans and Rice
Arroz Gratinado
Braised Rabbit With Marsala Wine and Wild Mushrooms

There are plenty more applicable recipes here at Tigers & Strawberries–I just gave you a few to start out with.

Have fun cooking and filling your freezer like a slacker all week, and then enjoy doing nothing this weekend! It’s a good thing.

Slacker Notes:So, uh, when I wrote this post, I was such a slacker, I didn’t really give as much specific information as perhaps I could or should have, so some readers asked a few great questions down in the comments section. I decided that the information was so pertinent, that I should just put it up here in an addendum to the original post just so folks who aren’t in the habit of reading the comments to a blog post get the benefits of it, too.

Casserole Specifics

Okay, for lasagne or other casseroles–a reader asked if I cook it first and then freeze it, or I assemble it and then freeze it uncooked.

The answer is: I’ve done both and they both work pretty well.

And there are several ways to go about it. You can just make your regular one big pan of lasagne, (one that normally serves six people, say, and its only you and a significant other eating) and bake it as normal and then after dinner, cut the remaining lasagne into one or two portion bits and pack them up in containers, and then you can either thaw them in the fridge or microwave them from frozen. Works just fine. I’ve done it with lasagne, arroz gratinado, macaroni and cheese and shepherd’s pie, and none of them have suffered a bit for it.

Or, you can assemble one or two extra whole casseroles in freezer to oven dishes, and freeze then uncooked. To cook them, preheat your oven to about 25 degrees lower than your usual cooking temperature for that particular casserole, and bake it for about 50 percent longer than you usually would. In order to brown the top of your previously frozen casserole, in the last fifteen minutes of baking, turn the heat up on the oven to the regular temperature and that should give you a nice crusty brown, bubbly top.

I’ve frozen moussaka, pastitsio and lasagne this way and baked them both thawed and frozen and they all come out of the oven smelling and tasting divine.

Now, this isn’t very slackeriffic, because it involves prior planning, but if you just know that tomorrow is going to suck big-time at work and you are going to come home hungry, cranky and just plain not in a mood for cooking, you can take one of these uncooked casseroles out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge until you get home from work the next evening. Then, you preheat your oven all the way to its usual temperature and bake it as usual, just adding an extra five to ten minutes to the time it spends in the oven.

See–isn’t that simple?

Thawing Out And Reheating Liquids

I didn’t even think about telling everyone how I thaw out liquidy dishes like soups, stews, curries and sauces that freeze into a coherent block of ice until Kim, down below, asked me how to go about it. She’s right–beans and rice or taco filling or jambalaya–stuff that is relatively dry is simple to heat up from frozen in the microwave. But those troublesome liquidy dishes are a pain in the butt, and while yes, you CAN put them in the fridge to thaw overnight and during the day while you’re at work, planning ahead just isn’t a slacker-approved activity.

So, how do you get say, marinara sauce and meatballs that has frozen into a scarlet cube of tomato sorbet to thaw and heat up quickly?

This is going to sound bass akwards, but the way I do it is I use the defrost function on my microwave to get the frozen liquid to mostly return to a fluid state, and then I plop it all into a saucepan and finish heating it up to a boil on the stove.

My microwave has a defrost function that sets the time and temperature for thawing a frozen item based on its weight. A true slacker like me guestimates the weight, but if you have a baker’s scale you can tell your microwave the exact (or rounded up) weight of the marinara and meatballs. (In fact, if you are only partially a slacker, and are thus somewhat organized, you could write the weight of the item on the label when you pack it up for the freezer in the first place, so you don’t have to play guessing games or find your scale after work.)

Anyway, use the defrost function on your microwave and when you’ve got your stuff mostly thawed out, with maybe a little bit of ice in the center of the container, just sploosh the contents of said container into a saucepan, turn the heat on high and stir like mad, chipping away at that ice until it breaks apart and melts into the rapidly boiling liquid that surrounds it. Then, you just stir and cook until everything is heated through to serving temperature.

And then, dinner is served!

Tips from Readers:

So, as is usual, I got some nice ideas from readers. Just for the folks who don’t read comments, here’s some ideas that didn’t come from my slacker self, but instead are from the myriad of good, clever cooks who read this blog:

From Jenny V: One thing that can work if you’re cooking an entire extra casserole or lasagne is to line the baking pan with foil before filling it with the food. Then, after it is frozen solid, you can remove the pan from the freezer, leaving the foil-wrapped food behind in the cold, and add it back to your cabinets to use for other meals in the meantime. When you want to eat the leftovers, just pop the pre-formed foil container into the baking dish again and bake.

Dan here, as if Barbara has any luck at all, she’s asleep by now.

Sorry about the delay.  I’ll let Barbara fill you in on the details as she sees fit tomorrow, but just to let you know where we went for a few days there…

We got hacked.

Someone had inserted some nasty code into the site and was using our server space and our bandwidth for a phishing scam.

Barbara and I became aware of this on June 9th, and shortly thereafterward, Dreamhost took our domain offline.

We’re back up and running now, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the bugs out of the system, (though I am going to be a little more vigilant over the next few days.)

I am pleased to say that I know WHEN the compromise took place, and the time between the phishing scam going live and being shut down was only a matter of hours.  

Other commitments prevented me from fixing the problem and bringing us back online until today. I apologise for the inconvenience.

I am forwarding the material I have collected to the security firm that informed us of the breech so they can track down the culprits.

We return you now to your regularly scheduled Culinary Goddess, who had a post that she was all excited to share before this mess occured.

I’m going to bed….

You know, I’m not really technophobic. I mean, I use a Macbook to write my blog, and I’ve been using a digital camera for nearly a decade and I can even get this complicated television set-up we have here to do what I want it to do, and on top of it all, I do carry my cellphone with me all the time and even have it on so people can call me. (I used to carry it and not have it on, because I DIDN’T want people to call me–it was only for me to call an ambulance, the cops, DIAL-A-PRAYER or what have you in the case of an emergency. I’m over that now, but still precious few people have my cellphone number….)

But I do rather have a somewhat neo-luddite reputation among friends and family because I don’t go all ga-ga over every latest invention in the world and am more apt to know about the latest development in drip irrigation systems or chef’s knives than I am about the newest networking devices. In fact, I don’t really know what a Blackberry is and why President Obama had to give his up. I mean, I kind of know, but not really–to me a blackberry is a tasty fruit, not something you use to read email. And, texting–I don’t know from that. I don’t do it. Why type with your thumbs? I mean, really? Just call your friend up, and for God’s sake don’t do that in traffic!

And Twitter. I don’t get it. I can see why it’s useful in some cases–like creating a flash mob during a political protest against an oppressive regime–but since I’m not into that at this moment, I don’t really see the point.

Before everyone thinks I’m hopeless, I am on Facebook. But I only friend people I actually know, so yeah, I’m kinda backwards.

Which is why it’s kind of weird that I have an iPad. AND–the truth is, I didn’t ask for one or really want one, until Zak found the subject of this post (you were beginning to wonder if there was a topic at hand here, or if I had just taken off on a tear about technology just for the flying fun of it) which is an iPad app called The Recipe Box.

Until he found that app and bought it for a mere $3.99, I just couldn’t see much of a reason for me to have an iPad. Sure, it made sense for Zak–he sketches on his and since he has an MA in Digital Art–a virtual sketchpad makes a LOT of sense. And we use his to help navigate on long car rides, and to find hotels and book rooms on trips–so yeah, they’re useful, but I saw no reason for ME to have one.

Except, you know, it really sucks to have to borrow your husband’s iPad to cart off to the kitchen when he’s trying to draw. It’s just not cool. So while I watched in fascination when he showed me how The Recipe Box worked, I didn’t mess with it much until yesterday, when Zak’s old iPad magically fell into my lap as a surprise gift. (Yeah, Zak got the newer, faster iPad which is easier for him to draw on, and I got the hand me down. But, its still cool!)

So, since yesterday, I’ve been putting The Recipe Box through its paces, inputting recipes from Tigers & Strawberries as an attempt to create my own virtual cookbook which will keep me from having to cart the laptop into the kitchen every time I need to look up one of my own recipes from the blog.

How well does it work?

It’s simple to use. There are FAQ’s and tutorials, but I haven’t needed them. I can cut and paste a recipe from my blog into the app, including photos, in less than three minutes. Really. It’s amazing. And the app sorts your recipes and makes them searchable by keyword, or you can look them up by their categories. But wait, you don’t like their categories? Well, you can add your own, as well as delete the ones they have.

The recipes that are included in the program–you can delete them. You can delete your own. It’s perfectly simple. Just a click here and a touch there–and boom–all gone.

You can make shopping lists with the app. You push a button on the touchscreen and it will put your ingredient list on the shopping list which comes up as a pop-up. You can cross off what you already have before you go to the store, and then cross off each item as you put it into your shopping cart.

But the best thing, as far as I’m concerned, is that it’s a lot easier to have an iPad in the kitchen than a laptop. Perching the iPad at eye level on one of my shelves keeps it in easy view, but out of harm’s way–no worries about splattering it with droplets from whisking eggs or clouds of sifted flour. My laptop is too big for that–it has to sit on the counter where it not only takes up a huge amount of valuable kitchen real-estate, but it’s also in the eye of the storm once a good cooking frenzy starts. And if I put it way across the room or in the dining room to keep it safe, I have to dash back and forth and while the exercise is good, it’s a little emotional stressful to run around like a chicken with my head cut off, just because I can’t remember the exact number of eggs that go in my cheesecake recipe.

I used to print my recipes out on paper and carry that into the kitchen, but it’s so wasteful. I hated doing it. Why do that if I have it online?

The format used by The Recipe Box is very readable, useable, and sensibly laid out. Check it out in the first picture–you can see one of my “oldie, but goodie” recipes up there–Gateau de Mumtaz Mahal. See–there’s the pretty picture from my blog in the corner. And then, as you read the steps, you can touch the screen and the next step comes up. Or you can go back to check out two steps before. It’s intuitive and simple–and it means I don’t have to scroll past my blog entries to get to the recipe at the end! (You don’t know how many times I’ve growled at myself while looking up a cookie recipe, “Damn, girl, why you got to write so much?”)

It also makes it much easier for me to email recipes to people., since you just click a button, fill in an address and then go. No cutting and pasting on the fly, or sending a link to the whole post when all that I need to send is the recipe.

Now, before you begin to believe that I’ve been paid off by the developer (Corpus Collusion–love the name) to say all this nice stuff, there is one flaw that really works my nerves, but which is usually amusing enough to make me laugh aloud when it get’s its freak on and starts messing with what I’m trying to type. The auto-correct function will take my “Murgh Methi” and turn it into “Burgh Methi.” Or, and this is even more funny, it will take “Rogan Gosht” and turn it into “Organ Gosht.” The app will get uppity when I go back to correct it, essentially forcing me to correct it twice before it accedes reluctantly that I might actually know what I mean to type better than it does. (I can only imagine what it would do if I tried to type a recipe title in Lolcatsese.)

But really, that’s not much of a complaint. The good seriously outweighs the bad in this app. Seriously.

Overall–this is a great app for an iPad user who also cooks and who gets their recipes online. It keeps the computers out of the kitchen and away from the sink, deep frying oil and sloshing wine. It keeps us from wasting paper and it keeps our recipes organized for us.

And it gives us cooking geeks a reason to have an iPad, which is especially nice when one just falls into your lap like it did in mine.

Now, I’ve got to go and input more of my recipes. I’ve got 88 down and hundreds to go.

Sometimes, I am just all late and wrong.

Last night is the first time my girls and I (my daughter Morganna, the 19 year old line cook, and her best friend Brittney, the 18 year old line cook) could get together and get away to see Nora Ephron’s film, Julie & Julia. Which means, since it opened on August 7th, that I am sure that everyone else in the country, especially food bloggers, have already seen it. (OK, not everyone else has seen it. My dear Aunt Judy hasn’t seen it yet, either–she is going later this week.)

Late and wrong as I am, I still want to write some of my thoughts on the film, because I think that one of the best things that films do is they bring people together to talk about them. (Yeah, I have a minor in film, along with one in history, one in biology and one in women’s studies. Yes, I am a super-geek who would go to college the rest of her life if she could get away with it.)

Unsurprisingly, I really liked the movie, and I love the way that the script was structured, flipping back and forth between Julie Powell’s life as sourced from her blog and later her book, Julie & Julia, and Julia Child’s as remembered in her memoir, My Life In France.

Viewed as a purely structural device, bouncing back and forth between the two women’s lives and marking parallels between them brings a beautiful symmetry to the narrative, and builds a sense of anticipation as the stories unfold. The actors were all superb, and each of them brought an authentic sense of their characters’ humanity and reality to the screen. Even the supporting actors, particularly Linda Edmond who portrayed Simone Beck, were spot-on, their performances sparkling, fresh and genuine. They all brought a strong humanity to the characters which made them very appealing to the viewer, even when the characters’ personalities were not ones which would normally appeal to the viewer.

Here is where I tread in dangerous waters as a food blogger. It seems that any criticism of Julie Powell as a writer or as a person portrayed in this film or in her memoir, especially when written or uttered by a food blogger, is viewed as a sign of jealousy or personal attacks by herself and her fans. This is a shame, because the fact is, Julie Powell put herself out there in public view–she wrote her blog and wrote her book in a way which she can easily be viewed as narcissistic and shallow by readers–so if there are some who look at her work and declare their honest opinion of it, it doesn’t mean that they are attacking her personally. It means that they read her words and her own portrayal of herself and had an opinion about them–an opinion which may not be positive.

And that is okay. As a food blogger and a chef, I have taken plenty of flak for things I have written, and have gotten personal attacks which may or may not have been warranted. It comes with the territory of writing for the public. If you write strong opinions on issues, you are going to step on some toes, and you are going to hear about it from readers. And yeah, some of them are going to get personal, because frankly, some people take what you write personally, (even if it isn’t personal) and respond in kind.

It is just something that you should expect.

And really, if you write about yourself, as in a blog or memoir, you as the author are the one who is making it personal. And the fact is–not everyone who reads about someone is going to like them as a person. It is just how it is. Not everyone is equally loved by the rest of the world, because different people get along with different personalities, period. End of sentence, paragraph and story.

So, knowing this, I am just going to say the bad thing that food bloggers have to be very politic and not say: I did not care for either Julie Powell’s blog, nor especially, her book.

There. I said it.

And if readers want to see it as sour grapes or jealousy, so be it, but the truth is, I found Julie’s writing to be very shallow and her story to not be all that compelling. Her idea of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a stroke of genius, and as a blog subject it was perfect. It still stands as one of the best thematic hooks in the history of food blogging. I bow to Powell when it comes to the narrow focus and time limitation on her blog, especially since I have never been able to narrow down what I want to write about in my own blog. (I am just too damned interested in too damned many topics to impose limitations on Tigers & Strawberries.)

It is just the execution that I found lacking–I just didn’t like her writing style.

And that is fine. I don’t have to. Lots of people love the way she writes and what she writes about and I am happy for them and for Powell.

Now that I have said the dangerous thing, I can get on with what I wanted to say about the film. Amy Adams’ portrayal and the script make Julie Powell a much more interesting and sympathetic character than Powell does herself in her own writings, and that is a good thing. However, her story is just not as compelling or interesting as the story of Julia Child in postwar Paris, and that is the film’s greatest flaw. The two tales, while superficially similar, are not that analogous, and while presenting them equally in the structure of the film provides a sense of symmetry, the overall effect is not symmetrical.

Even though I liked Amy Adam’s portrayal, I found myself growing impatient during the segments that showed Powell’s struggles to complete her self-appointed mission. I wanted to go back to France, or Germany or Norway–wherever Julia and Paul had been stationed, and see what was happening there, because it was just more interesting to me. Like many reviewers, I feel that it was a shame that My Life in France wasn’t given its own film treatment, because it is just that more fascinating to the viewer.

(Let me add that one of the most interesting sociological contrasts between 2002 Queens and 1950′s Paris was the amount of cigarette smoking that was going on in the 50′s. Everyone smoked. Everywhere. In restaurants, in restrooms, at home–everywhere. And, while I am at it, I must applaud Nora Ephron’s eye for detail–the costumes, hairstyles, make-up, props, sets and street shots of Paris were period-perfect and really drew the viewer into that world.)

But, flawed as it was, in truth Julie & Julia has had one great effect on me: it made me want to crack open my ages old copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, get in my kitchen and whip up some Boeuf Bourguignon, a dish I haven’t made since culinary school.

And it seems that I am not the only one who wants to revisit the classic tome: The New York Times reports that for the first time since it first came out, Mastering is once more at the top of the best-seller list, as it rides on the coattails of the movie that it partially inspired. Nearly fifty years after its publication, it is once again flying off of the shelves (along with everything else in print by Julia Child, including her memoir, as well as Julie Powell’s book) and hopefully into kitchens across the country.

Many readers, however, seem to be stunned by the amount of fat involved in these recipes, and many are adapting them to lower the fat content, while hopefully retaining the flavor. One reader quoted in the Times article who made what she called “beef fauxguignon”–great name, by the way–admitted to using a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of burgundy wine and a can of cream of French onion soup seems to have missed the point in lowering the calories–cream of mushroom soup is anything but low-calorie. When she said, “Yes, Julia Child rolled over in her grave when I opened the cream of mushroom soup, I’m pretty sure of that. But you know what? That’s our world.” I had to laugh. The truth is, the opening a can of this and a can of that and popping some wine in the pot isn’t just our world–it was the world of 1950′s American cooking that Julia Child set out to change in the 1960′s too.

The irony is delicious.

But, when all is said and done, I think that we cannot dismiss the fact of Julia Child’s lasting impact on the eating habits and cooking abilities of Americans, nor can we downplay the effect that this film will have upon a new generation of American cooks.

By getting people who were only tangentially aware of Julia Child as a pop-culture icon out of the theatre and into the bookstore and then, hopefully, their kitchens, we also cannot dismiss the fact that by writing her blog, and then her book, and by selling the film rights to that book, Julie Powell helped remind America of why we loved Julia Child in the first place.

What would they say?

In the article, “Going Up, Part 4,” Grist started the ball rolling by asking Michael Pollan, author of the well-received essay, The Farmer in Chief, and then moved on to a plethora of passionate authors, activists, farmers and educators, all of whom had great ideas to pitch to the incoming President.

Of course, this got me to thinking–what would I say?

I think that I might mention that while most Americans live an urban lifestyle that is far removed from the toil and work of producing food, our historical roots are sunk deep into the soil–at one time, most of us were farmers, and not that very long ago–as recent as World War II, many Americans grew some portion of our own food.

In this failing economy, with jobless rates rising higher than in previous decades, with the banking system on shaky footing and fuel prices fluctuating up and down, we may need to return to our agricultural roots, not just because it is good for the environment, but because we will need to in order to survive.

I would suggest that federal support for urban community gardens and farms could help the urban poor produce some of their own fresh food, and perhaps a program of tax credits for suburban and small town families who turn some or all of their yards to food production would encourage the middle class to not only produce some of their own food as well. Educational programs to help non-gardeners learn the skills needed to grow food, such as the current County Extension Agencies could be expanded so that there was more community outreach and involvement, as well as tying the Extension offices to public school Edible Schoolyard programs across the country.

Americans really want to roll up our sleeves and do something to help make our country great again, and these sorts of self-help programs will get people moving in a positive direction again, as well as providing good, fresh food to people who may otherwise have no access to it at all.

Now, for the record, if John McCain had won the election, I would say the same things to him–my thoughts on this issue are not partisan–I’d think like this no matter what.

So now I want to know–what would YOU say?