Civil Eats

An 18-year-old Dolly Freed describes the philosophy of “possum living” as follows: “It’s easier to learn to do without some of the things that money can buy than to earn the money to buy them.” For five years in the late 1970’s, this teenager and her father lived off the land outside of Philadelphia, managing a small budget, eating from their garden and choosing to actively disengage from the commercial world surrounding them. Her 1978 manifesto, Possum Living, reflecting the back-to-the-land movement of that time, is now reissued.  Although she does not make an ideological case for a return to the land as others had proposed, her participation with homestead living nevertheless aligns herself with proponents of a sustainable movement. For this reason, Possum Living has new relevance and deserves a new audience. Read More

For my entire food love life, which is basically the number of years I have been alive, I have been plagued by conflict. Raised by one vegetarian parent, whose meal-making repertoire spanned the Whole Earth Catalogue, I was taught to consider carob chips as a very special treat. My other, carnivorous parent reveled in the rare opportunities to spoil me with “Home-Fried Taco Shell Night” and sly donut stops on the way to the dump. This devil and the angel phenomenon now haunts my kitchen time—one voice whispers to steam veggies and substitute stevia in my whole grain baking projects, while the other yells to go ahead and make that traditional coconut cream pie. I grapple constantly with being “healthy” or using the “real thing,” striving for purity of body or purity of original flavor. But in the end, can’t these two food philosophies converge?

Yes.  I think the solution lies in simply trusting in the nourishment of whole, fresh ingredients.   Read More

Gramercy Tavern is voted the “most popular” restaurant in New York all the time. It’s a restaurant with regulars like most don’t have anymore. People go there to eat in an unfazed New York, where restaurant eating remains a polished, “Now I shall dine,” sort of affair. Popularity is an unfortunate thing to vote on, but in a city that’s brutal whenever it’s not convinced, it seems people like reminding themselves that they like this restaurant.

Like other cities’ favorite restaurants, Gramercy Tavern has a quality that can only be gotten from being liked. It’s warmth a place can’t try for because it’s a side effect of confidence. Whatever the restaurant does well, it knows it owes a good deal to how attached its city is to it: Gramercy exists in two places at once, in a gray, stone building on 20th street, and in its patrons’ memories, in versions each of them owns and tends.

How bound those two Gramercy Taverns are to each other makes changing the restaurant’s buying priorities difficult. Its executive chef, Michael Anthony, who took the kitchen over from Tom Colicchio in 2006, is trying to. He’s committed to a local food economy in the quietest, simplest way a chef ever is. Read More

Thanks to Cathy Erway, I right now have bread dough rising on my kitchen counter. Three years ago I read Mark Bittman’s New York Times article with Jim Lahey’s phenomenally easy bread recipe, but it took sitting down with Erway’s new book, The Art of Eating In, for me to get cracking. Read More

A reader recently asked me if I could expand the post I did last year on “choosing the right milk” to include eggs, another food for which there a lot of confusing buying options. Although there are more details below, the short answer is that you should look for eggs that are “pasture-raised” from a farm near you. Pasture-raised is pretty much what it sounds like — they are eggs laid by hens that are raised with open access to pasture where they can scratch, peck, bask in the sun, eat and run around to their hearts content.

Unfortunately, “organic”, “cage-free”, and “free-range” classifications/certifications do not guarantee that the birds are fed a natural diet or that they live the life of a normal chicken, complete with keeping their beaks (egg-laying hens raised in factory farms routinely have their beaks cut off–a truly horrible practice that is done to prevent them from hurting each other in their extremely close living quarters), having enough room not just to turn around but also to run around in, as well as unlimited access to the real outdoors and all the sunlight, yummy grass, and nutritious bugs they desire. Read More

It was a blessing in disguise, one of many construction zone disasters that actually resulted in triumph.  One recent morning I walked into the only room that remains somewhat set up for day-to-day activities during our total DIY home remodel, sectioned off by hanging canvas tarps, gutted walls, electrical wires, naked bulbs and lots of dust, and on the floor lay splinters of wood and scattered index cards.  It looked like a crime scene from the movies, someone looking for my secret papers, but instead was my old, neglected recipe box that had tumbled off its absent-mindedly placed location on the highest shelf. Read More

Growing up in the era of George Reeves (aka Superman) I confess that my secret fantasy was to fly. For years, I would dream about lifting off and soaring up into the sky. It was so real and logical – of course one day I would find a way. Back to that later.

A grueling year approaches the finish line. There’s one more weekend to go. The party’s are pretty much over. Our President has demonstrated that compromise is a survival tactic we can believe in.

Standard expectations were lowered; budgets reforecasted and adjusted again and again. Staff trimmed, perks deleted and just to make things really interesting, competition became fierce. Victories and defeats so closely mingled it is at times hard to know which is which. Read More

Tomorrow’s the big day to strut your stove and hosting skills, and as people everywhere are now shopping hastily for last minute ingredients — or even starting the cooking of the coming feast — many of the cooks out there are also freaking out about the sheer quantity of food that they’re going to be producing, the timing of it all, and trying to make the dinner memorable and delicious besides. In the New York Times on Sunday, Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything and the NYT’s Minimalist column, implored all of us to just chill out. “When did performance anxiety and guilt become prerequisites for offering family and friends nourishment hospitality?” he asks. He then goes on to say: Read More

My kitchen has been whittled down to about 50 square feet.  Standing room only to say the least is our new cooking protocol, making collaborative meals a thing of the past. The kitchen counter is rapidly shrinking as more and more household items get piled onto the rare space, along with the dirty dishes in our bus tub that have to get washed outside. My elbows tuck in closer when chopping and I have to set the toaster oven on the floor by the power strip that reaches the single outlet in operation. The large vintage Viking range, a mere foot away, makes for a hot and sweaty prep station if cranked up during the dinner hour, so even on these chilly autumn evenings our faces flush with any kitchen task. What has restricted our game, you might wonder? Read More

There’s nothing funny about all those E. coli and salmonella outbreaks that keep popping up and plaguing us like the Undead. But with trick- or-treat season right around the corner, I thought it might be nice to take a brief break from food scares and focus on scary food we can safely sink our teeth into, like Rocky Road-To-Perdition Fudge or I’Scream Cake.

Those are just two of the diabolically delicious recipes I found in Ghoulish Goodies by Sharon Bowers, a clever collection of Halloween-themed concoctions. Some are sweet, others savory, but they all sound eerily tasty. I spotted this book at a friend’s house last weekend and essentially stole it after leafing through its pages and finding such ingenious Halloween snacks as Cheddar Eyeballs, Candy Corn Pizza, and Bandaged Fingers, to name just a few of the more than seventy inventive recipes featured in Ghoulish Goodies. The recipes have simple ingredients, easy-to-follow instructions and plenty of photos to inspire you. Read More

So last summer, my husband and I bought a quarter of a cow. Hung, butchered, wrapped, and frozen, it filled our entire chest freezer. Most of it wound up as ground beef, but a few less-than-choice cuts come with the territory. Thus far, we’ve tackled beef liver and beef tongue.

The liver was, to put it succinctly, a bust. We soaked it in milk for a few days, on the theory that this would dull some of the, well, livery taste. (It’s a good theory, since, as Matthew Amster-Burton explained in his column on milkshakes, the fat in dairy can flatten out sharper flavors.) Then we pan-fried it, ate a few bites, looked at each other, and gave the rest to the cat.

It was just too strong a taste for us. And, heck, we like liver, at least the kind that comes in poultry; we’re happy to pan-fry that stuff and spread it on bread any day. But this? This was overwhelming.

At least, until I unwrapped the beef tongue. Holy cow. Holy cow. Read More

A conservative town San Francisco is not, but even the among the most open-minded veterans of Bay Area culture, a short intake of breath was heard on Saturday night when into the foyer of the SF Museum of Modern Art rolled a bicycle trailer hauling a whole, spit-roasted cow.

The bovine beast was the centerpiece of an evening with OPENrestaurant, a collective of young Bay Area chefs who stage performance installations that revolve around food, farming, and the politics of the two. This time the theme was futurism—specifically, the Futurist Cookbook, written in 1932 by pioneering Italian futurist, F.T. Marinetti. The event was part of SFMOMA’s exhibition honoring the centennial of the futurist movement, entitled Metal + Machine + Manifesto = Futurism’s First 100 Years. OPENrestaurant founders Sam White, Stacie Pierce and Jerome Waag brought together a formidable group of local chefs and designers to recreate the wild mechanical inventions and adapt the even wilder recipes from the famously radical book. Read More

On the menu: : Ragout of Fresh Shell Beans, Cipollinis and Chanterelles with Grilled Flat Iron and Pimenton Butter.

Fresh shell beans, those wild Italian onions, cipollinis, and chanterelles are spontaneously everywhere. The grow together/go together axiom holds mighty tight here. This dish is a no-brainer as far as mutual affinities go.

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A true beacon of creating community through food, the Ceres Community Project in Sebastopol, California, brings teens into the kitchen to learn about healthy foods and cooking skills while providing organic meals to individuals and families battling cancer and other serious illnesses. Named for the Roman goddess, Ceres—who rules the growing and preparing of food as well as the natural cycles of birth, death, and renewal—the nonprofit’s 100-plus volunteers currently cook meals for more than 40 families a week and, since launching in 2007, have provided nearly 45,000 meals to Sonoma County families. Read More

The great stakes and pains of planting our mini farm does not escape one day in our minds. Gigantic effort, sweat, sometimes some tears, all to ensure the bounty we see rolling in like tidal waves at this height of the season. Far from unappreciated, the bags of tomatillos, buckets of pears and plums, and fat bunches of basil bombard our tiny kitchen that has recently been cut in half in the midst of home construction. Every spare minute is now spent canning, pickling, seed sorting, drying, and pretty much always eating, just to make sure nothing goes to waste. The ironic thing about some of the products rolling in and out of our kitchen is that we never lifted a finger in their creation. Amazingly, a large portion of these preserving projects I find myself immersed in has a foraged subject. Mysterious appearances of wild edibles are being recreated into highly enjoyable farm goods and menu items here at the homestead. I will share a few with you. Read More

Nora Ephron’s effervescent Julie & Julia has evidently sparked a mad dash to snap up Child’s epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Butter’s back, and margarine’s been marginalized. Three cheers for real food! After all, as Joan Gussow says, “I trust cows more than chemists.”

Yesterday the White House released a video featuring First Lady Michelle Obama and assistant chef and food initiative coordinator Sam Kass telling the story of the White House garden. The video is around seven minutes long, and features footage of the building of the garden, with Kass giving details about the history of gardening at the White House (there is even some historical footage from “Victory Gardens” a 1944 government film to encourage people to grow at home, which you watch in full here), soil amendments, the seeds from Thomas Jefferson’s Montecello garden, and even a time lapse video as the garden was growing.

This short film also features the Bancroft Elementary students who helped to plant it. “We wanted the focus to be on kids,” the First Lady said, “because you can affect children’s behavior so much more easily than you can adults.” She also said that the garden was largely about setting an example for other families through changing her own family’s diet, specifically through “eliminating processed and sugary foods,” and encouraging eating together around the table. She continued, “the garden is really an important introduction to what I hope will be a new way that our country thinks about food” Read More

Canning is hot and sticky (sometimes salty) work. Your fingers go pruny, you get sugar rushes (if you’re making jam) and salt dehydration (if you’re canning savory). Like everything that’s hot, sticky, exhausting, and a little risky, it’s way more fun with friends. Canning has historically been a community venture, with folks pitching in when the fruit and vegetables are abundant. But times have changed, Americans have been taught to be afraid of their own canned foods, “botulsim”, “contamination”, “microorganisms” are the words that come to mind when you mention home canning to most people instead of evoking the joyous sticky deliciousness of homemade jam. Read More

Even though supermarkets have made canning and preserving unnecessary, there is still something wonderfully fulfilling about preserving food yourself (and the results are MUCH tastier than anything you can buy in a grocery store.)

When my husband’s grandmother, Marcia, a great cook and remarkable woman who I loved, passed away a few years ago, I inherited her preserving cookbook, Putting Food By.

I treasure this worn book, not because the recipes are anything special, but because it is speckled by years of use and it includes her notes. Marcia kept a detailed record of everything she “put by” in its blank end pages. Read More

I’m an American with Midwestern roots raised on French fries, potato chips, and meat and potato dinners. I’ve been known to order mashed potatoes for dessert (I’m not joking), lived on baked potatoes and salsa in college, and generally think scalloped potatoes are manna from heaven (on par with a classic, homemade extra cheesy mac n’ cheese.) However, I didn’t’ truly appreciate the sheer joy of the potato until I had an opportunity to harvest rows and rows of them on a New Zealand family farm. I didn’t know that this ubiquitous part of my existence, this foodstuff I took for granted for so long, was such a treasure. Read More

In recent years, farmers’ markets have flourished as consumers look outside the corporate, industrial food system to feed their families. We have an organic garden on the White House lawn, and in backyards everywhere, small gardens are nearly ready to bear Mother Nature’s summer fruit. The warm weather is finally here, and around the country farmers’ markets are in full swing. Strawberries, corn, pole beans and apricots have arrived in most places, and soon, tomatoes and figs will also find their place on the dinner table. This summer, two different organizations are celebrating the American farmers’ market tradition and raising awareness through summer-long contests. Read More

The second installment of Kitchen Table Talks was held last Tuesday in San Francisco. The evening featured Jessica Prentice, a professional chef, local foods activist and author and a clip of Edible City, a forthcoming documentary which follows the lives of Bay Area residents who are creating a local food system in their neighborhoods and communities.

Slated for distribution in early 2010, Edible City is a project of East Bay Pictures, a film company committed to making motion pictures that inspire reflection, compassion and imagination. The film, which uses character vignettes, showed Joy Moore, a longtime activist and teacher, discussing gardening and nutrition with the students at Berkeley Technology Academy. To help bring this inspiring film about growing local food systems to a larger audience, East Bay Pictures is seeking funds to finish the film. Read More

Bill McCann wrote to me out of the blue. The very first email he sent ran to two pages and started with the words “Way back in the day (1971), I was working as what was then called a cooks’ runner.”

It went on to tell this story: one night, during the younger Bill’s term rushing ingredients around a hotel kitchen for a battalion of short-tempered French, Swiss, and German cooks, the kitchen ran out of veal scallops. (It’s an outmoded cut, but used be central in Continental cooking.) The whole place went ballistic until a thick, German assistant to the chef grabbed Bill by the elbow and wrangled him down to the basement butchery room. There, the assistant lifted a veal hindquarter from its rail, and “deftly boned, seamed, and sliced it into beautiful thin scallops,” which Bill scrambled to platter as neatly as the man had butchered them. Read More

The first time I saw “Pressure Cooker” was at Slow Food Nation last Labor Day. It left me–and as far as I could tell every single other viewer in the theater–in tears. It follows three seniors at a Philadelphia public high school, charting their journey through a culinary arts curriculum under the wing of the hilariously blunt, tough-loving Mrs. Stephenson. The film has been making the film festival circuit for the past 9 months and will now be enjoying a theatrical release in several cities (scroll all the way down for schedule). Here I sat down for an interview with Co-Directors Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman: Read More

As much as New Yorkers love the city, there’s nothing we love more than a getaway. That’s why when I found out that the launch of Huffpost Blogger Cathy Erway and Akiko Moorman’s supper club Hapa Kitchen was going to be a benefit dinner for the Queens County Farm Museum, I could not hold myself back from buying a ticket. And convincing four friends to come with me. Read More

Patricia Mulvey reported on the blog F is for French Fry that a group of fourth-grade students at Nuestro Mundo Elementary School in Madison, WI had planned to protest the unhealthy food served in their cafeteria by staying behind in class during recess and enjoying a home-cooked meal. Their “Real Food Picnic” – you might call it an Eat-In – was cancelled, however, when the school district’s assistant superintendent alerted parents and school administrators and asked them to discourage the event, citing concerns about food allergies, lack of supervision and the presence of news media. Read More

In response to some of the worst economic times since the Great Depression, I’m excited to present my “Grow. Cook. Grub.” series.  With unemployment climbing, diet-related illnesses increasing, and health care costs sky-rocketing, more and more people are looking to feed themselves healthfully, simply, and cheaply.  Using my family and community as an example, I will show readers how easy it is to cook health-promoting, delicious, and inexpensive meals year round using food from my home garden, CSA, and local farmer’s markets. Read More

So the First Family’s pulled up a patch of green turf and rolled out the red carpet for that dynamic dietary duo, fruits and veggies. Finally, fresh produce has a friend in the White House (except for beets, which, sad to say, the President declines to eat.)

But where is the Beltway ballyhoo for the third crucial ally in the Axis of Eat Well? It takes three pillars to form the plant-based diet we’re supposed to adopt if we want to save ourselves and the planet: fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. With all the publicity that the Grow Your Own movement has been getting, it’s high time to shine a light on America’s Grainy Day Woman, Lorna Sass, whose last book, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way won a well-deserved James Beard award. Read More

I was so excited when I received Bryant Terry’s newest cookbook, Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy and Creative African-American Cuisine.  First, because I grew up on southern delights like baked beans, corn bread, grits and coleslaw, but have been hard-pressed to find tasty recipes that don’t call for industrially canned and/or processed ingredients.  Second, the recipes in Terry’s book are vegan — which I see as an added bonus (though I’m not a vegan, I love eating that way), allowing the eater to get back to the core of what makes soul food good: Terry shows us that it’s the fresh, simple ingredients that bring the most flavor. Read More

Last year we built a fortress, created to deter deer, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and wild pigs from our own little slice of edible possibility. Today we are in the middle of planting our spring garden in this enclosure, now just a blank, dark dirt slate of bumpy rows and discarded piles of weeds. Shaping the earth is like frosting a chocolate cake, at least to this baker’s mind, and has inspired my next birthday party creation. Right now, though, it is time to focus on what plants will grow.  Read More