By Sparks Tribune

On Aug. 31, Kings Beach resident John Merryfield and a group of extreme stand-up paddlers will embark on a stand-up paddle circumnavigating Lake Tahoe to promote the Vegan One Day project, a challenge for everyone to adopt a vegan diet (no meat, dairy or eggs) for at least one day of the year.

To highlight the challenge, a group of extreme stand-up paddlers will complete the entire 72 mile trek in one day, paddling all day and all night powered by a vegan diet and a commitment to create a better world. Merryfield says the intense physical and psychological strain of the 72 mile paddle in one day is nothing compared to the extremely cruel conditions endured by animals on factory farms.

The group will paddle at night along the eastern shore under a full moon, greet sunrise near Emerald Bay and hope to return to Kings Beach by dusk. Merryfield is confident that paddle will inspire others to see that a whole foods diet is a celebration of life.

A community, vegan pot luck is scheduled on the beach in Kings Beach on Aug. 31 at 6pm as the paddlers embark on their journey. To learn more about the Vegan One Day project, go online and take the pledge to go vegan for one day.

By Craig Wilson, USA Today

WASHINGTON – Like a fine wine, which she was known to enjoy, Julia Child is aging well.

Yes, she died two days short of 92 in August 2004, but her spirit lives on. Aug. 15 will mark what would have been her 100th birthday, and she would have liked nothing more than to celebrate with a big slice of cake made with lots and lots of butter.

Or, as she once famously said, “if you’re afraid of butter, use cream.”

Eight years after her death, Child remains a virtually untouchable American icon, even among foodies who are not known for playing well with others. As she did in life, she remains clear of any food fight. Like a good cream, rising to the top.

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By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

The high school or middle school student who can grab a sugar-sweetened soft drink on school grounds during class hours is becoming a rarity, a new study finds. But lots of kids still can buy high-sugar beverages in schools: Fruit juices and sports drinks that are designed for serious athletes engaged in vigorous physical activity remain widely sold in U.S. middle and high schools.

In 2010-11, 25 percent of high school students had access to sugary sodas during school — either at cafeteria concessions or from vending machines. That was down from 54 percent of high school students in 2006-07. Middle school students’ access to sweetened soft drinks also dropped: in 2006-07, 27 percent had access to sodas and sugary soft drinks; by 2010-11, just 13 percent did.

The study was published Monday in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, and was funded by Bridging the Gap, a research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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By Kathryn Reed

When I do eggs they are scrambled. I might add veggies to them, but little else changes.

But I so enjoy when others do something more for breakfast.

This spring we were at the Wild Rose Inn in Genoa where owner Sue Knight concocted a great quiche. Not having a crust surely made it even a bit healthier. It certainly makes it easier to assemble.

I decided to find the recipe she had given me and make it for my mom and sister, Pam, when they were here in late July. We all thoroughly enjoyed it.

Besides being so tasty, it is super easy to put together. Plus, depending on what veggies you have on hand or are in season, the flavor can keep changing. I used mushrooms, green onions and zucchini.

Changing the cheese would also alter the flavor.

No need to use a quiche dish. I put everything into a glass pie plate. Even a square pan would work.

Wild Rose Inn’s Crustless Mushroom Quiche (6 servings)

½ pound mushrooms, sliced

1 bunch green onions, chopped

3 T butter or margarine

3 eggs

½ C, plus 1 T Biscuit mix

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp pepper

½ tsp nutmeg

1½ C milk

1½ C shredded Monterey jack cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Sauté mushrooms and onions in butter or margarine. In a large bowl, beat eggs. Add Biscuit mix, salt, pepper, and nutmeg; beat 1 minute.

Slowly add milk to egg mixture and blend thoroughly.

Place half of the mushrooms and onions in the bottom of a greased 9-inch quiche dish. Top with cheese, followed by remaining mushrooms and onions. Pour egg mixture over top.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until set.

While cooking in your camper or RV, open a window or two for ventilation.

This is important due to the fact that cooking in a confined space can deplete your oxygen supply. Remember, the air we cook with is also the air we breathe.

Another precaution to take while camping is to periodically check your propane appliances, hoses, and fittings for leaks. Statistics show that a leak in one of these areas is a primary cause of fire.

On behalf of the South Lake Tahoe Fire Department, have a safe and fun camping season.

— Sallie Ross-Filgo, South Lake Tahoe Fire Department

By Kathryn Reed

LONDON – Afternoon tea in England started as a pick-me-up, but I found it to be such a relaxing experience I was ready for naptime.

The history of this ritual dates to the early 19th century when Anna, the 7th duchess of Bedford, would have afternoon tea in her bedroom.

“Later friends were invited to join her in her rooms at Woburn Abbey and this summer practice proved so popular that the duchess continued it when she returned to London, sending cards to her friends asking them to join her for ‘tea and walking the fields’,” according to the Cadogan Hotel in London.

Afternoon tea is a ritual in England. Photos/Kathryn Reed

Others followed the duchess’ lead by hosting teas, and thus the ritual spread to all classes.

“Traditionally, the upper classes would serve a ‘low’ or ‘afternoon’ tea around 4 o’clock, just before the fashionable promenade in Hyde Park. The middle and lower classes would have a more substantial ‘high’ tea later in the day, at 5 or 6 o’clock, in place of a late dinner,” the hotel explains in its Afternoon Tea menu.

Walking into the parlor of the stately Cadogan Hotel, which is close to the high-end shopping on Sloan Street, I thought perhaps we should have petticoats and other attire of days gone by. Despite our “tourist” wardrobe, the staff didn’t turn us out onto the street.

Being there during Wimbledon meant the hotel was offering a special for the renowned tennis tournament. A group had already nabbed the table showing the match of the day. But we were still able to enjoy some of the tennis fun with the Apple Cream and Almond Puff Tennis Balls.

A variety of teas from India and China are on the menu. Sue picked the Jing Assam Breakfast – a black tea, while I chose the Jasmine Pearls.

With a strainer over the cup, our server poured the steaming tea into our cups. The strainer prevents leaves from getting into our cups. We each had a pot that later the server added more water to.

The three tiers of food may be called finger food, but it was a meal for the two of us and not just a snack. I have never been a fan of scones, but after eating the apricot creations made by pastry chef Marie Bolland, I could have these every day.

Tiny sandwiches ranging from cucumber and cream cheese to egg salad filled the first tray. Then the scones. An array of desserts, including the tennis balls, topped the ensemble.

At 22.50 pounds it’s a bit pricey, but considering this turned into a meal for us, it was worth it. While it’s not something I would pay for if I lived in London, except maybe for special occasions, I would definitely recommend high tea as something to experience while on vacation. And the Cadogan Hotel made the ritual seem so regal even for commoners.

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By Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times

Endurance athletes, unlike the rest of us, have the unusual problem of having to work hard to keep weight on. “In your super-high-calorie-burning sports, like distance running, cycling or the triathlon, elite athletes can burn 15 or 20 calories a minute,” says Michael Joyner, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who conducts studies of endurance athletes. At the peak of training, these athletes are working out four or five hours a day, he continues.

These workouts can burn 4,000 to 6,000 calories, which “have to be replenished,” he continues, “if you want to train again the next day.” Refueling can resemble an episode of “Man v. Food,” with dinner consisting of things like a pound of pasta drizzled with olive oil (about 800 calories), a dozen eggs (840 calories), an entire cheese pizza (perhaps 2,000 calories) and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s cheesecake-brownie ice cream (1,000 calories). These foods (although not this exact lineup) were described to me by dietitians and officials who work with Olympians as common training-table choices for elite endurance athletes, particularly men. Plus beer (about 150 calories a bottle).

One of the biggest issues, they told me, is that these athletes, in their quest for fuel, often turn to high-calorie but less nutritious processed foods — Snickers bars, store-bought chocolate-chip cookies, Pop-Tarts. Even an athlete who intends to eat healthfully can be defeated by nutritional realities. “You can only eat so much oatmeal and tofu,” Joyner says. A typical bowl of oatmeal contains about 150 calories, a cup of tofu about 175. You do the math.

“Dietary fat provides nine calories per gram, whereas carbs provide about four per gram,” says Kerry Stewart, an exercise physiologist and a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, meaning that fat is “energy dense” and desirable for famished athletes — but less so if you want to shed pounds. And even on a pizza-and-ice-cream diet, some athletes drop weight during peak training periods.

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By Eugenia Bone, Food & Wine

When I told my mother I was going on a long horseback ride and I was nervous, not having ridden since horses were a substitute for boys in my affections, she said, “Well, you need to look each hoss in the face and ask, ‘Do you want to carry me?’”

At the time, that seemed like good advice. A communion of some sort would definitely be to my advantage. But instead, the cowboys at Edwards, Colorado’s Bearcat Stables picked out my horse for the four-day, 55-mile trek from Vail to Aspen, through the magnificent White River National Forest and Holy Cross Wilderness Area. I was assigned a gentle gelding named Socks. Nonetheless, I pocketed an apple at breakfast, figuring that what I couldn’t achieve by horse-whispering, I could achieve with food.

Food was definitely going to be a part of this riding experience, and not just for the horses. Bearcat partner Leeds Butcher, a sommelier, collaborated with his friend Kelly Liken, of Restaurant Kelly Liken in Vail, to prepare wonderful, rustic dinners for us on the trail. Liken—one of the best chefs in the Southwest, a Top Chef finalist and a contestant on “Iron Chef America” — seemed in her element, happily cooking at fire pits in the waning light.

Gavin Selway, a weathered fellow in aging chaps and the other half of Bearcat, led our ride; a hired hand, Todd Brown, followed with a packhorse laden with cowboy necessities (saws, first-aid supplies, bug spray). There were 12 of us, including the cowboys, plus the packhorse: “Twenty-five heartbeats on the trail,” said Todd. When I first saw my fellow riders, young men and women attired in gorgeous western gear, I figured they were real cowboys and cowgirls… until I heard their English accents and found out they were swigging amaretto from their flasks. (They were, it turns out, freshly minted British MDs.)

We traveled in a line, changing places periodically to separate quarreling horses. “It’s like managing a bunch of third-graders,” sighed Selway. We rode through grass pastures knee-high with purple columbines, pink primroses and bluebells; we scared up deer that bounded away on legs like springs. Selway pointed out medicinal plants cowboys use to treat sore muscles and scrapes, and if you were in the back of the line, you heard Brown’s litany of naughty cowboyisms (apparently a “cowboy hand warmer” is a horse turd).

The first day was an eight-hour ride, and by the end I felt sore and tired, but also exhilarated to have accomplished the journey. (Subsequent days were less arduous.) When we entered the Peter Estin Hut, named for a famous skier, and pulled off our boots, I couldn’t get enough of the simple pleasure of wiggling my toes.

The huts—we stayed at two—lay between 9,700 and 11,700 feet above sea level and are part of a series of beautifully maintained backcountry log cabins in the Colorado Rockies known as the 10th Mountain Division Huts (the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army trained in the Rockies during World War II). Our huts had comfortable beds, pegs on the wall for our hats, open kitchens with wood-burning stoves and views of the endless craggy peaks of the Williams Range, the Maroon Bells and the Elks.

On our first night, we were greeted with the profoundly satisfying scent of warm bread. Liken, a brown-eyed 35-year-old with quick, confident hands, was cooking flatbread over a campfire’s embers until the crust was as spotted as a leopard; she then spread it with ricotta and sautéed wild mushrooms. “Pizza,” she told us, smiling, “is inherently shareable food.” Her friend Kevin Furtado, the winemaker at California’s now-shuttered K. Furtado Wines, was there to pour his 2009 rosé of Syrah, as dainty and floral as the jars of wildflowers on the porch tables.

Liken is one of a dozen or so chefs defining Colorado cuisine today. I’ve been to her elegant Vail restaurant, where she prepares unfussy, scrupulously sourced New American dishes, like potato-crusted trout fillets with haricots verts. She cooks outdoors in the same spirit. Indeed, the essential Kelly Liken seems most evident under the big Colorado sky.

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By Laura Hibbard, Huffington Post

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a national vegan and physician group based out of D.C., has filed a petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture asking for milk to be banned from school lunches, according parenting site BabyCenter.

According to the report, PCRM claims that the beverage is “…high in sugar, high in fat and high in animal protein that is harmful to, rather than protective of, bone health.”

Despite the American Heart Association’s recommendation that children between ages 1 and 8 drink around two cups of reduced-fat milk a day, the PCRM asserts in its petition there are better ways for youngsters to get their calcium.

“Children can get the calcium they need from beans, green leafy vegetables (e.g., broccoli, kale, collard greens), tofu products, breads and cereals. Additionally, a wide variety of non-dairy, calcium-fortified beverages is available today including soy milk, rice milk and fruit juice, all of which provide greater health and nutritional benefits compared with dairy milk.”

Anne Goetze, a registered and licensed dietitian at the Oregon Dairy Products Commission, told the Capital Press that while calcium is available in other foods and beverages, it couples many other necessary vitamins as well.

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By Joel Stein, Time

I would not be hired by Chipotle because I’m not happy enough. This information was delivered to me — gently and kindly — by Joe Miranda, the chipper, plump, patient manager at the Los Angeles branch where I had spent the morning grilling pasture-raised steaks, peeling locally grown avocados and dicing antibiotic-free chicken.

The rapidly growing restaurant chain has 13 official characteristics every employee must have, and four of them basically mean happy. But if Miranda thinks I’m not qualified to make burritos because of insufficient cheeriness, then there is no way Steve Ells, the founder and a co-CEO of the company, could get a job at Chipotle either.

Sitting at the unfinished-wood conference table at Chipotle’s small, sparse, exposed-brick offices in New York City, Ells at 46 is skinny, fashionable, passionate, exacting, candid, digression-proof, smile-free and unwilling to suffer even fools who are writing a long profile about him. The reason his employee-incentive program works, Ells explains, is that it makes happy people pleasers behave more like him. Miranda is one of about 300 restaurateurs–promoted from Chipotle’s 1,300-plus managers — who get stock options, a company car and, most important, $10,000 for each employee they develop into a general manager. The program has spiked profits at the restaurateurs’ branches.

“That’s because restaurateurs started firing their low performers,” Ells brags. “And their mediocre performers. What fast-food place ever lets go of mediocre performers?” Seriously, Ells could never land a Chipotle lettuce-dicing gig.

Ells, however, is amazing at inspiring these shiny, happy people he has so little in common with. That’s because he does not believe he is selling burritos, and his employees are eager to believe that too. Instead, they believe they are saving the world. Saving us from food without taste. Saving us from obesity. Saving us from chemicals. Saving us from ecological disaster. Saving us from torture of animals. Saving us from blandness. Saving us from unhappiness.

These are things people are willing to pay for. Chipotle has nearly doubled its number of U.S. restaurants since 2006 and tripled its revenue to $2.3 billion last year. There are now some 1,250 locations serving about 800,000 people a day in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and France. Its revenue grew 23.7 percent in 2011; its stock rose nearly 20 percent in the past year and 800 percent since it went public six years ago. Because the average tab at Chipotle is larger than at a typical fast-food place–$9 in 2011, or nearly double the average tab at McDonald’s–Chipotle’s restaurant-level margins, at about 26 percent, are among the highest in the industry, despite its spending more on food than its competitors do.

Ells has created a new category of restaurants designed to bring elevated food to the masses, a strategy that has been copied by Five Guys burgers and fries, Chop’t salads and Taco Bell’s new, suspiciously Chipotle-like Cantina Bell menu, which is supervised and marketed by Lorena Garcia, a chef who appeared each week alongside Ells last year as a judge on NBC’s America’s Next Great Restaurant.

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