Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 8,000 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Meanwhile, the stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how my blog did in 2010, and here’s a high-level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 8,800 times in 2010. That’s about 21 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 38 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 231 posts.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, freshgreens.typepad.com, mail.yahoo.com, bulgarbugle.com, and harvestymebread.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for chicken fat, heart, oklavore, and census of agriculture 2009.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Rendering Chicken Fat April 2009
11 comments

Census of Agriculture February 2009
3 comments

About Tricia October 2008
2 comments

Garden Update May 2009
6 comments

I had never worked with meringue before and I’m not a fan of fluffy meringue pies; however, this concept of crunchy meringue intrigued me.

The cap of meringue sealed in the applesauce, so I had to tap, tap, tap to break through. It sort of felt like ice fishing—not that I have ever ice fished.

The recipe worked beautifully and I can’t wait to apply this crunchy meringue cap to other desserts, namely a semi-sweet dark chocolate pudding.

Of course, if you want to try the recipe with applesauce, Oklahoma apples are in season right now.

I’ve come to enjoy meal planning. This is how I do it:

My meal planning routine comes down to lists: 1) frozen food; 2) food I want to make; 3) shopping lists to fill the gap between what I have and what I need.

1) frozen food list
I keep a list of the contents of the freezer. This was initially a way to save energy by reducing the amount of peeking in the freezer. But it has also turned out to be a helpful way to plan meals and make shopping lists.

Frozen meats

Frozen food

2) list of meals/dishes
My meal planning routine includes time for flipping through cookbook indexes looking for ways to use ingredients I already have on hand (for example, now I would look for recipes using a lot of potatoes or cucumbers) or I anticipate getting from the food co-op or farmers’ market (like eggplant). Or I look through saved websites or blog posts for recipes that sounded promising or exciting. I bookmark the cookbooks and write down the recipe names on a piece of scrap paper, sometimes noting the recipe source so I can easily find it later. I usually try to include a meal or two that uses non-perishable or frozen food like pasta or meat from the freezer. There might be a lack of fresh food, but I know we have the makings of a meal, even when the refrigerator or pantry look bleak. For example, meatloaf is always an option since eggs, tomato paste, frozen ground meat, and breadcrumbs are staples.
These meals aren’t planned for certain days, but there is usually a balance between quick-and-easy and more elaborate recipes. Once the planning and shopping are done, I usually decide what to cook a day or two in advance, depending on my schedule and the status of my fresh ingredients.

What's cookin'?

As I make the list of meals, I reference the frozen food list and refrigerator contents, while making note of any items I need to buy. Which leads us to the third list:

3) shopping list
I try to group items on the shopping list by source: farmers’ market, Buy For Less, ethnic grocers.

Read about Chelsey’s similar system. Also, Bob Waldrop has two recent blog entries on meal planning.

Do you have a meal-planning system? Please share. What are your go-to meals or staple ingredients? What delicious meals have you prepared when, at first glance, it seemed there was no food in the kitchen?

It takes a community to sustain a small farm
“I used to think there were four distinct pieces to a local food system: production, processing, distribution, and retail. Now I realize there is a fifth: community. Without an involved community of customers who believe in what the local farmer, miller, distributor, and grocer is doing, none of them will last very long.”

It’s getting tougher to bring home the bacon
“The government is concerned that bacteria from a smuggled piece of meat will spread through the ecosystem, infecting livestock and hurting agricultural production…”

Why you should go see Fantastic Mr. Fox
I had no idea.

Cultivating Failure
A ferocious critique of edible schoolyards.
“It’s the state’s Department of Education that is to blame for allowing these gardens to hijack the curricula of so many schools. But although garden-based curricula are advanced as a means of redressing a wide spectrum of poverty’s ills, the animating spirit behind them is impossible to separate from the haute-bourgeois predilections of the Alice Waters fan club…”

And a delightful, smart, animated response to “Cultivating Failure.”

The industry blogs are even more fun, where bloggers like Yvonne Vizzier Thaxton of Poultry Perspectives argue semantics: in her view factory farms and family-owned farms are mutually exclusive. And the mere existence of factory farms is questionable. Oh, and this gem: “Poultry farmers are farmers and by nature these people love the environment otherwise, they could have a career in an office doing much less physically exhausting work.” (from “The message we need to shout,” 9/1/09; I’d link to it, but articles and blogs require a sign-in.)

Yesterday’s Meatingplace headlines were peculiar in that two stories were inconveniently interwoven.

The referenced author is Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new book is titled Eating Animals. He has an erroneously titled opinion piece here. I guess an honest, thorough title wouldn’t be as provocative. Do you think Foer’s critique of animal agriculture will be taken seriously? Is there room for another voice in this discussion?

Red Meat and Mortality
Excerpt: “Eating lots of red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely of cancer and heart disease.”

Not All Meat is Created Equal
Excerpt: “The results of the study point out that heavy consumption of ‘processed meats’ is most likely to cause disease, but they do not take the logical next step, which is to consider all meat raised on artificial diets under industrial production standards to be processed. This is not just a semantic problem.”

Calves in Germany are dying from “blood sweating.”

Another “pasture to plate” article, this time with grass-fed cattle (see Pollan’s article on feedlot cattle).
The article addresses regulatory hurdles/barriers when it’s time to slaughter and process. Here’s an entrepreneurial solution. (Thanks, Vines & Cattle.)

Original content coming soon. I made ice cream!

We used a recipe from Sugarlaws. Take note of the nice, consistent marshmallow squares in her photo. Baffling. Our marshmallows refused to be molded. “Don’t box me in!” they said. Rather, they are quite reminiscent of ceiling acoustics, aka “popcorn.” Or cauliflower. What do you think? Not really appealing, but they taste good. And they are especially delicious in hot cocoa. Mmmm…they melt quickly and form a creamy layer that sits on top of the cocoa. But, because they melt so quickly, they don’t work too well for roasting.