At the Diner: It's what's inside that counts!

Last night it snowed and the world is covered in white.. The sound of the cars and trucks rolling by, their tires crunching the snow, let you know that it is cold. I love that sound. I am thinking it is a strange thing that I really don't love the cold but I love waking up on a snowy morning.

And the smell of ginger cookies baking makes it all the more wonderful. Finally I have the recipe I am proud of! And it is the same recipe that I made before this one. BUT, with one major

important difference: the ginger. I put ginger from the local store bulk department in the previous one. Ginger is ginger, right? Nope. I then ordered some ginger, I picked the yellow Chinese ginger from Penzey's which came in the mail this week. So now this is what we have in the cookie jar! Spicy, crunchy, chewey, totally delicious ginger molasses cookies that are perfect.

Of course, I am using organic flour, butter, eggs, molasses, and sugar. And a little Real Salt which has all the good minerals left in it. A little teensy bit of baking soda.

We have become a lot more conscious of ingredients lately. I have shopped for organic food for years and years. Grown food organically for years. But in this past year, John decided to give up the prilosec he had been taking for 8 years or so. It was a very delicate process of carefully choosing each bite of food to be friendly to his readjusting stomach. We did the diet together and now, eight months later, he is eating normally, no prilosec and the heart burn and acid reflux are gone! I would be glad to give the details to anyone interested but this is just to say that the food search has become a lot more meticulous, as in reading and learning about

ingredients. And I was shocked to find that MSG use, which I naively though we had pretty much got rid of except in Chinese food, is rampant in prepared food, even the "natural" ones.

Apparently MSG is not the only source of free glutamate. The most interesting ingredient that appears on more food's lists than you might imagine, is "natural flavor". What is an ingredient called "natural flavor"? It is not just a description of the product, it is an ingredient.

Take these Terra chips. Potatoes, salt and pepper, oil and "natural flavor". What is that? More potato-ness? More salt? But that is salt. Pepper is pepper. What is "natural flavor"? I wrote to Terra company, a subsidiary of Hains Celestial Foods, but no reply yet.

The problem is that in doing some research about sneaky glutamate additions, which at best , well, there is no best. But at worst, cause a lot of health problems from the minor to the very severe. Anyway, in doing this research, what I found was that the there are any number of ways to add flavor enhancers without calling it MSG. And call me obsessive, but I would like to eat food that is just what it claims to be and no less or more. Free glutamate addition to foods has been linked to everything from autism to ulcers to a whole host of other problems. So why add it?

Now, I walk through the aisles of the grocery store and wonder at the millions of products that are refined, preserved, enhanced, colored, flavored and packaged and wonder how we ever got to this level of food insanity.

I am cooking more these days. Lots of vegetarian dishes. Yummy baked brussel sprouts au gratin. Sweet curried rice with veggies and nuts. Chili and soups and homemade yogurt.