As a little girl, I loved sitting on the kitchen counter while my mom cooked. While I kicked my feet against the cabinets, she taught me how to peel an onion efficiently and how to crack an egg and use my index fingers to get all the white out before tossing the shells into the compost bin. And I still vividly recall the excitement I felt over the beautiful, golden, sesame seed-studded  loaves of braided challah we baked in my second grade class at the Woodstock Children’s Center–they were like some kind of miracle. Childhood is such an important, impressionable time of life when the vast majority of our lifelong habits are formed, or at least pointed in the direction in which they’ll head. That’s why my husband and I want to introduce our son, Will, to growing and cooking food alongside us.

Will, who is just shy of three, watches and “helps” us with our container garden where we grow tomatoes, greens, peas, beans and herbs. At this point, it mostly means he digs in the dirt but he’s learning.

He had the heady experience of drinking cold, clear, slightly sweet maple sap straight from the spile (was this a new vocab word for you, too?) during our first foray into maple sugaring last winter.

And we brought him with us to forage for ramps a few weeks ago (although we confined his enthusiastic excavation efforts to a patch of ground that was not home to this fragile delicacy.) We’ve also gone strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and apple picking as a family–all activities we plan to repeat on a yearly basis.

My husband sometimes plans baking projects in their hours together. At this point, Will’s attention span is still remarkably short so he mostly just enjoys the idea of helping and participates in the “dumping” portion of the experience where he moves pre-measured amounts of flour, sugar, nuts, raisins, etc., into the mixing bowl. Then he gets bored, climbs down from his stool and runs off to do something else.We’ve taken him to local farms and friends’ houses to gather eggs so fresh you have to chase the hens off their nests to pick them up. In addition to teaching him where his food comes from, it’s a great way to kill an hour or so. We have not yet taught him about where the meat we eat comes from, both because we don’t have a great local source and we’re also both a little wimpy about exposing him to something so bloody at a tender age (or to being exposed to it, ourselves, at our not so tender ages…)

It takes about 2-3 times as long to bake something when Will is involved and is inevitably messier and more work but not only are we laying the groundwork for future cooking projects and appreciation of real food, we have also noticed that our notoriously picky eater is MUCH more likely to eat foods he has helped prepare in some way (score!).

Will also enjoys using the salad spinner to dry greens and cutting food (cucumbers and tofu are perfect!) with the adorable toddler knife Rahm got him recently after being inspired by this Slate magazine piece by Nicholas Day on the topic of cooking with pre-schoolers. And he LOVES sitting on the counter smelling and identifying spices (cinnamon is his favorite; cloves and star anise rank second and third.)

I recently made him a child-sized apron to help him feel at home in the kitchen and, hopefully, keep him slightly cleaner, though it’s a bit of a lost cause at this point in his life. I chose the fabric (called “Dig It” by Michael Miller, in case you’re curious) since he is 100 percentobsessed with digging and construction machines and I thought I should go with something he’s already into.

We figure that laying the groundwork now will not only encourage him to appreciate good food, eat more healthfully, and enjoy growing and cooking his own food from scratch someday, but if we’re really strategic about it, in a few years, we might even get him to cook meals for us! If you are shaking your head in disbelief, check out this New York Times piece by Leslie Kaufman, who got her two sons (ages 10 and 14) to each cook dinner for the family one night a week.

One thing I love about Kaufman’s article is that she does not gloss over the challenges inherent in giving up control in the kitchen–she squirms in discomfort when a flame is left on too long for her taste and has to repeatedly battle her impulse to step in–something she unthinkingly does early on in the experiment that backfires. Her son storms off to his room and misses the meal he’d prepared altogether, despite her apology.

As a perfectionist (fine, I’ll just say it, I’m anal) who views cooking as somewhat of a devotional, semi-meditative practice–I like to clean up as I go and put everything in its place so that there’s no mess left at the end–this is HARD for me! I think it’s good to be realistic about the fact that this is not an easy process–it requires a lot of patience, faith in your child, and a willingness to spend more time and do more cleaning up than you would if you just handled it all on your own. But the end result should be worth it.

If this sounds appealing to you, I’ve compiled some resources to help you in this journey.

• Kitchen Tools For Little Hands - beware, you may want to buy everything… it’s all so cute!
• Four Great Kids’ Cookbooks - a few excellent cookbooks to help you get started. Some are great for pre-schoolers (complete with pictorial recipes/instructions they can follow easily) and some will take you into the older years.
• Twenty Top Shelf Kids’ Books About Growing, Cooking and Eating Food - a big round up of all our family’s favorites plus some great recommendations from friends.

Please add your own thoughts and any recommendations you have on approach, books, tools, etc., via comments.

Originally published on The Garden of Eating

When San Francisco voters passed the three phases of the Proposition A facilities upgrade bond in 2003, 2006, and 2011, they approved money to cover the design and construction of green schoolyards for at least 83 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) elementary, middle, and high schools. SFUSD is the first urban school district to embrace outdoor learning opportunities in this fashion. It is also one of the first large districts in the state to implement the Common Core State Standards, a new set of English language arts and mathematics standards focused on real-world college and career readiness.

Seizing on this opportunity, I met with Rosie Branson Gill last fall to discuss how our organizations (San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and 18 Reasons, respectively) could work together to provide more opportunities for San Francisco students to engage both in school gardens and with the craft of cooking. On February 17 of this year, 13 elementary classroom teachers, garden coordinators, and parents gathered for the launch of Cooking the Common Core: Bringing Educational Standards to Life in the School Garden, a new training series designed to do just that.

Cooking the Common Core offers teachers innovative, interdisciplinary lessons to help them teach the new standards. Rosie and I wanted to design a training that promoted cooking as a way to increase students’ access to and opportunities for learning in the outdoor classroom. We wanted teachers to feel empowered introducing students to the craft of cooking, to fresh ingredients, and to the full garden-to-table experience.

To that end, each lesson in Cooking the Common Core combines freshly harvested produce from the school garden, Common Core standards, and basic cooking skills, while leaving ample room for teachers to use the lessons to explore other classroom topics. Social studies, ecology, and respect for other cultures easily integrate into recipes such as fried rice, summer rolls, handmade pasta, or Brassica slaw.

Keeping in mind that public school educators are increasingly asked to do more with less, one of our priorities from the outset was to provide participating schools with outdoor cooking kits, in order to make the lessons as accessible as possible.  These kits include a Burton stove, fuel canisters, cutting boards, paring knives, mixing bowls, peelers, a box grater, tongs, serving utensils, a colander, and a dough scraper.  We have already heard back from participants in our first two trainings that the kits have allowed them to quickly and easily incorporate cooking into their teaching.

Rosie and I dream of writing lessons for every grade level linked to memorable meals from around the world. We are currently seeking sponsorship for the cooking kits so we can continue to offer the courses at a reduced fee for teachers and develop new lessons to meet the growing demand. When summer break rolls around in June, we will have provided cooking kits to and trained educators from 18 SFUSD schools, two nonprofits working with San Francisco youth populations, and one other school district in the East Bay.

Learn more about San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, 18 Reasons, and Cooking the Common Core.

When I was an intern in Santa Fe, New Mexico a thousand years ago, my mother sent me a three-page letter (yes, a letter. It was that long ago).  Worried that her underpaid intern son might be starving in the desert, she wanted to pass along her wisdom on how to cook and eat on the cheap.  It was called “Good Old Mom’s Three Days on One Chicken and Other Depression Folklore.”  It kept me fed that long hot summer and later became a family treasure.

I was reminded of it recently when I had the opportunity to read An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler.  Ms. Adler has certainly made her bones as a cook, having worked in such legendary establishments as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Prune in New York.  It may have been there, under James Beard award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton that she found her voice as a writer.  Hamilton after all is not only among the most talented chefs in New York, but is also the author of the widely acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter–a must-read itself.

An Everlasting Meal is part memoir, part cookbook, and part self-help manual for all who wish to cook better with less; and these days, who is not among that group?  She points out, for example, that “Minestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear, or that number plus one.”

The book is full of that kind of clever phrasing. Adler clearly shares my fondness for MFK Fisher, and can channel her at will, it seems.  Her writing is never pedantic, never preachy, always smart, descriptive, and leisurely.  It is as practical as the recipes she includes.

Her recipe for the classic Italian peasant soup is simple and uses lots of ends and bits, like Parmesan rind and the end of a good piece of hard salami.  These and many other ingredients are simmered “45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone.”

Adler reminds us that “Some vegetables are persistently underrated.”  Here I’d have listed turnips, but she looks toward ones we take for granted, like onions and celery, and finds both comfort food–onion soup–and less common dishes like celery poached with lemon and topped with a handful of breadcrumbs.

There is good food to be had in the barest of pantries, Adler assures us, if we are resourceful enough and know the basics of how to cook.  In a chapter entitled “How to Weather a Storm,” we find recipes for chickpeas with pasta, spicy green beans, and fish cakes made from canned salmon or mackerel.  There’s even one called Salad for a Natural Disaster, made of ingredients she found in a chef’s earthquake kit, presumably while in the Bay Area.

Perhaps most helpful for the frugal but passionate cook is the inclusion of an appendix subtitled “Further Fixes,” where we learn two dozen or so suggestions for what to do when things have gone wrong.  Meat a little dried out?  Make crispy lardons.  Chicken undercooked?  Remove it from the bones, simmer in butter and chicken stock and toss with egg noodles.  Curry too spicy?  Eggplant too salty? Rice or lentils overcooked?  Adler includes fixes for them all.

In a time when we can all appreciate the value of frugality in the kitchen, when each of us can ring a wry smile from the Tuscan proverb she quotes: Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio (“We were better off when things were worse”), it is refreshing to know that with just a little effort, and a lot of love, delicious healthy meals are waiting to be awakened from their slumber in the back of the pantry.

Bi-Rite Market is a well-known San Francisco grocery store located on 18th Street, just down the block from Tartine Bakery and Delfina Restaurant. Across the street, Bi-Rite Creamery is equally famous and if you ever get a craving for salty caramel ice cream, plan on standing in line, a very long line. (Even if it’s foggy and 54 degrees and you’re wearing sweaters and scarves, you will stand in line.)

So what’s a grocery store in San Francisco doing with a cookbook and why should you care? Take a peek at that lovely cake pictured and then read on for my review.

At first glance it may seem like Eat Good Food is for Bay Area shoppers only. After all, its co-author, Sam Mogannam, is a San Francisco native who is a second generation owner of a San Francisco grocery store, as well as a farm in Sonoma County. The book itself is loaded with pictures and profiles of hyper-local Northern California farmers, producers, and suppliers. This makes sense, since the Bi-Rite Family (there is also a second store in the works, as well as an ice cream store and a community center) is solidly built on a commitment to local foods and creating community and connections. But does Eat Good Food have any relevance for people who don’t live in the Bay Area? In my opinion, the answer is yes. Absolutely.

Eat Good Food‘s subtitle, “A Grocer’s Guide to Shopping, Cooking, and Creating Community Through Food,” pretty much sums up what this book is about. Every aspect of the grocery shopping experience is represented here in nine chapters: Community, Grocery, Deli, Produce Department, Butcher Counter, Dairy Case, Cheese Department, Bakery, and Wine and Beer.

Within each chapter the specific foods that can be found in these departments are thoroughly covered, each with a How to Buy, How to Store, and How to Use section. There are even boxes that cut to the chase with “At the Very Least, Look For” and “Ideally, Look For” pointers. This acknowledges that the ideal is not always available in your average grocery store, but still, it’s good to know what it is.

There are also sections that zero in on items such as canned fish, preserves, varieties of apples, etc. My favorite is a page that pictures 18 kinds of citrus; from large pomelo grapefruits to tiny mandarins, it’s great to finally know the names and characteristics of some of the more obscure varieties. The full-color pictures throughout the book illustrate recipes, cuts of meat, farmer’s in their fields, shots of the store and, most memorably, a group shot of the 80 plus employees that help to run Bi-Rite. (Sam says it’s now over 100.)

There are also dozens of recipes such as Curried Coconut Sweet Potato Mash; Brussels Sprouts Salad with Pistachios and Warm Bacon Vinaigrette; Moroccan Lamb Meatloaf; Grilled Pimenton Leg of Lamb with Cucumber Raita; Grilled Peaches with Blue Cheese and Hazelnuts.

So who is this book for? It’s for people who want to know how to navigate their grocery store as informed participants in their food systems; it’s for your nephew or daughter who are just starting out on their own and need some guidance; it’s for people who want to eat better but aren’t sure how; it’s for schools and church groups and community centers that want to teach children about good food; it’s for people who believe that going to the grocery store does not have to be an anonymous, impersonal event, that it can actually can be fun. If you love to eat good food, then this book is for you.

When I lived in San Francisco, I couldn’t always afford to shop at Bi-Rite but I would treat myself to a few meals from there on occasion. I would go when I was hungry but I didn’t quite know what I was hungry for. I knew that the food at Bi-Rite would answer that hunger in a way that was deeply satisfying and nourishing on many levels. From the beautiful display of flowers out front to the helpful and friendly staff, I didn’t have to worry if what I was purchasing was fresh or delicious or raised in a sustainable way. If it came from Bi-Rite, it was going to be good. This book captures that spirit and takes it out into the larger world and, hopefully, it will find its way into your kitchen where it will inform, encourage, and inspire you to Eat Good Food.

Earlier this summer, as I was hauling a bag of farmers market produce home 15 blocks and up four flights of stairs, sweating bullets, cursing my choice to buy a melon (they’re heavy!), I stopped mid-step.

“Does it really have to be this hard?” I asked myself.

My story is particular to me, of course, but all over the country there are people trying to put food on the table and asking themselves “does it really have to be this hard?”

I was living, at the time, in a neighborhood with few supermarkets. The ones within a long walking distance were either very expensive or lacking the seasonal produce I craved. So on weekends I would hike over to the big farmers market. But at the farmers market I always find myself of two minds. In one moment I am buying something and can’t believe how much I get for so little money; the next item I pick up gives me sticker shock. How can both of these things be true?

When people ask me: “Doesn’t the food you eat (some mix of local, sustainable, organic, etc.) cost so much more than “regular” food?” I protest and agree at the same time. When they say “Doesn’t cooking from scratch take a lot of time?” I remember the awesome pasta I cooked the other night that took 7.5 minutes. But also the weekend of foraging I did going from one store to the next.

I live in New York City; I make a living wage; I am not trying to feed a family; I work on these issues for a living. If I find it hard/tiring/expensive sometimes, what must other people feel?

In the spirit of this conundrum, Slow Food USA launched the $5 Challenge last week.

The economy is tanking. We’re all stressed about money and we’re all stressed about time. And yet. Every day there are people all over the country who find a way—despite the challenges of access, affordability, and time–to cook healthy food on a budget. It’s not easy—especially at first—but they’ve developed tips and tricks for stretching their food dollars, and decreasing the amount of time it takes to make a fresh and delicious meal. This campaign seeks to learn from those people, to share their wisdom—and then work together to make eating this way a reality for everyone every day.

So, on September 17, take the challenge: get together with family and friends and cook a “slow food” meal for less than the cost of fast food. Know how? Teach others. Want to learn? This is your chance. You can host a potluck where nothing costs more than $5. You can cook for a crowd and charge $5 at the door. You can cook with your family for less than $5 per person.

Now I recognize that $5 is actually not a small amount of money—but it is the cost of a typical fast food “value meal,” so we figured that was a good starting place for cooking up a meal that reflects your values.

Next week we’ll be rolling out a page where you can share your tips and tricks—and read the ones that other people have submitted. The idea is to embrace this crazy conundrum (the one I call the “It’s easy, it’s hard” conundrum)—to find ways to make eating ”slow” easier, while also acknowledging what makes it hard. Understanding the hard part and how to fix the hard part… is the hard part. And it’s where we’ve all got our work cut out for us.

Let’s start by taking the challenge.

In this era when consumers want to know how many “food miles” their carrots traveled and restaurant menus list the distance from farm to fork, restaurant owners are increasingly putting in their own farms on rooftops, abandoned lots and nearby agricultural plots.

The trend has caught on with high-end, Michelin-starred restaurants in California such as The French Laundry in Napa and Manresa in Los Gatos as well as more casual places, such as Pauline’s Pizzeria in San Francisco and the Fremont Diner in Sonoma.

The growing number of restaurant farms is welcome news to new farmers like Rose Robertson, 28, who, like many new farmers, is trained but without a plot of land to call her own. After interning for a year at a farm in Santa Barbara, Robertson knew she wanted to farm but also knew she did not want to be a cog in a large-scale farming operation. She worried that at a big farm, workers like her would end up, “spending your whole day picking beans,” she said.

She found a job managing the one and a half-acre garden at Ubuntu, a high-end vegetarian restaurant in Napa. The owners and staff of Ubuntu describe the garden as the heart of the restaurant, not just a side project. In the summer months up to 90 percent of the produce served comes from its garden.

“The chef says he’s not the chef,” said Robertson. “That the gardeners are growing the food that dictates the menu.”

Ubuntu’s owner, Sandy Lawrence, set out to create that dynamic, and says the importance of hyper-fresh produce is heightened because the restaurant is vegetarian. With the increasing number of young people flocking to agricultural training programs and farming internships, Lawrence never worried about finding eager farmers to employ.

“The reason we’ve been so confident is we’ve always had loads of young people who want to work,” she said. In addition to Robertson, another full time gardener and two part time workers, the garden has an internship program that attracts a constant stream of willing volunteers.

The trend represents a different kind of job opportunity for young people trying to break into agriculture in regions like the Bay Area, where land prices are prohibitively high. The average plot of cropland in California sold for about $9,000 an acre in 2010, according to USDA data, compared to about $4,000 an acre in Iowa, or $800 an acre in Montana, the cheapest state. Prices can go much higher in the Bay Area, though–a plot currently for sale in Sebastopol, Sonoma County is priced at about $21,000 per acre.

American farmers are getting old–in 2007, the average age of a farmer was 58, compared to 39 in 1945. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of farmers under 45 decreased by 21 percent. Still, in recent years, more young people have shown interest in farming and policy makers are working to recruit and incentivize new farmers. The latest version of the Farm Bill allocated $18 million for training new farmers.

Several Bay Area farms offer apprenticeships and internships for new farmers, mostly based around organic or biodynamic methods. But it is still difficult for many of the young people who complete the programs to get a paid job farming when they finish, which makes restaurant farms an appealing option to some.

Misja Nuyttens, 30, was an intern at Green String Farm in Petaluma and recently took a job starting a farm for the restaurant Central Market, also in Petaluma.

She says the experience of starting a farm from scratch has been invaluable. It’s not uncommon for beginning farmers such as Nuyttens to hold multiple jobs or look for non-traditional ways to use their farming skills. Samantha Langevin runs the internship program at Hidden Villa farm and education center in the Los Altos hills. She says she encourages interns to think about taking a diversified approach to their careers.

“The trend we’re seeing is young farmers, in addition to farmers markets, they might be selling to restaurants, they might be offering a CSA program, they might be working with a local school, whether that’s elementary to university, to offer programming on-site, they might be working with other community organizations that are looking to purchase food,” says Langevin.

Managing a restaurant garden lets farmers try out running a farm without having to take on debt or over-commit. And for restaurants, being ultra-local and having control over access to produce gives the chef flexibility. Robertson, the manager of Ubuntu’s garden, says the chef likes being able to harvest vegetables at any stage of growth. He also sometimes uses parts of the plant which are edible but often aren’t traditionally sold, such as carrot tops and beet stems. And he has Robertson grow plants that are difficult or impossible to find in the marketplace, including an edible ice plant with a lemony taste called ficoide glaciale.

Misja Nuyttens says part of the motivation for the chef and owner at Central Market restaurant to start his own garden was to be able to serve produce at its absolute freshest. Even when he purchased from farms only a few miles away, the produce would often go through a distributer that trucked items all over the Bay Area before getting to his kitchen.

Starting a dedicated garden might not always be profitable for restaurants. Lawrence says Ubuntu’s garden is sustaining itself by providing produce to the restaurant, but it helps that most of the land is on the owner’s property. Similarly, the owners of the Farmhouse Inn in Forestville, Sonoma use their own land for their garden, and have set up a share-cropping arrangement with a farmer to make it affordable. Co-owner Catherine Bartolomei says the garden could probably be more profitable if she wanted it to be, but that the larger goal is to adhere to the business’s eating philosophy.

While more and more restaurants are finding ways to make it work, putting in a garden is not a business move that would make sense for every eatery.

Providing boutique vegetables for high-end diners also might not be the philosophical goal for many of the area’s young farmers, although Nuyttens does find connection to a greater cause in her work with the Central Market garden.

“It is a bridge to increasing awareness about the benefits of food grown this way,” said Nuyttens. Restaurant farms, she says, provide, “a springboard for this movement, allowing a new generation of natural process farmers to get established.”

Above, Oxheart carrots grown in Ubuntu’s garden. Photo: Rose Robertson. Below, Ubuntu restaurant’s chefs standing in the garden. Photo: Karen Mann.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting.

Ann Gentry is the creator and founder of Real Food Daily (RFD), a mecca for organic, vegan cuisine in Los Angeles, where she and her staff serve up delicious, plant-based food to celeb devotees including Alicia Silverstone, Ellen DeGeneres, and Conan O’Brien. The executive chef to Vegetarian Times magazine, and star of her own cooking show, Naturally Delicious, Gentry is also the author of The Real Food Daily Cook Book. Her new cookbook, Vegan Family Meals: Real Food For Everyone, just out this week, offers more than 100 tasty recipes. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Gentry about cooking for families, raising children vegetarian, and why she believes in feeding people whole, natural food.  

What’s a Southern girl like you doing in a vegan joint in Hollywood?

I’m from Tennessee, and like most people, grew up eating the Standard American Diet, only Southern style. People ate a lot of meat, everything was fried, and no one questioned frozen or packaged food. When I moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue an acting career, I worked in a natural foods restaurant and that experience had a big impact on me. I became interested in the cause and effect relationship between my body and the food I ate. But mostly, I just felt really good eating whole food. When I moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, I worked as a personal chef to actor/director Danny DeVito, and later had a home delivery service before I opened the first RFD restaurant in 1993. I base my cooking on macrobiotics (a diet based on whole grains and vegetables), which taught me the connection between diet and health. I’ve been vegetarian and vegan on and off for three decades; these days I eat a small amount of dairy and fish.

What about cooking for families appeals to you?

I thought the RFD cookbook would be my one and only. But, I realized I had another book in me after I had two children (a daughter, Halle, twelve, and a son, Walker, eight) and began feeding my family out of my own home kitchen. I wanted to create a book with very simple and tasty recipes. The central theme of this book is family and who is around your table and it doesn’t have to be kids. Your family is your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even just yourself. I want people to sit down and eat together in a healthy and delicious way. The focus is on texture, color, cooking methods, simplicity of ingredients, accessibility—you can find most of the ingredients in your own pantry. I grew up sitting down to a meal of protein centered in the plate with several side dishes. People are busy and don’t have time to make all of that food now. In this book, you can learn to make a whole meal out of salad, which is my favorite way to eat, and you can be completely nourished and satisfied.

Your family helped you with this book. What is like raising kids vegetarian and/or vegan?

I’m lucky because my husband is as committed, if not more, than I am to eating well. We keep a vegan household, though sometimes we have goat ice cream or yogurt, and the kids eat what we eat. My daughter breastfed and was vegan for first two years of her life and then she became vegetarian, and now she’s exploring food. She is sort of a radical vegan, who understands what it means to kill an animal. Children do. It will be interesting to see if my kids will rebel against it and if they do, I’m not going to stand in their way. I made a conscious decision that I don’t want to be the mother who follows her kids around with “special” food, though I do appreciate families whose children have allergies.

Why is eating less meat important?

I try to never preach and knock people over the head with a vegan message. Veganism is a noble cause, but most people aren’t going to become vegan or vegetarian. That doesn’t mean they don’t seek out and want more grain-based food in their lives. I’m hopeful that the more grains and vegetables people eat, the more they will want to eat this way. And times have changed. People are eating less meat due to the horrible practices involved with industrial animal agriculture and also for their health and the environment. And there are a lot of vegetarians who are living on processed tofu meat-like products. While I do include recipes in the book with tofu, tempeh, and nondairy cheese, I’m not trying to replicate flavors or textures of meat. I’m much more interested in getting people to eat whole, unprocessed food.

You were one of the first restauranteurs to commit to organics. Why is organic important to you?

Choosing fruits and vegetables that are grown organically in pesticide-free soil is the best thing you can do for yourself and your family. My dollars go toward supporting small family farms and keeping chemicals off my plate, out of my body, and out of the environment. Nearly everything we have at RFD is almost 100 percent organic. We bite the bullet and pay the extra cost for organic ingredients because we believe it is better for our customers and the planet. When we first opened, I went to the Santa Monica farmers’ market twice a week, and I have longterm relationships with some incredibly committed organic farmers, including Bill McGrath, Coastal Organics, Burkhart, Maggie’s farm, and Del Cabo—Larry Jacobs is my brother-in-law, and we love using his cherry tomatoes in our guacamole.

What’s your take on MyPlate?

From my perspective, USDA’s MyPlate represents a shift in the right direction from prior recommendations, but that’s not saying much. Let’s face it, the agency has a stated purpose to promote the sale of agribusiness products. Leaving my cynicism behind, I do like that fruits, vegetables, and grains comprise three-fourths of MyPlate. But why did they stop at half? Mostly likely because the cereal manufactures won the day at that negotiation. Madison Avenue has convinced America that whole grains come from a cereal box. The inclusion of “protein” as a “food group” is an obvious win for the meat industry’s lobbyists.   These guys have spent big bucks for generations convincing Americans that protein is the flesh of a dead animal. For the most part, they have succeeded. So now we have  ”official” guidelines with their “code word” taking up one-fourth of the plate.  On the positive side, beans, peas, nuts and seeds make the list of “protein foods.” The fact is, all plants contain plenty of protein for a healthy diet and American’s over consume protein, which many experts say contributes to depletion of calcium.  Eating more calcium will never overcome the problem of bone loss and I’d like to see that cup of dairy on the side of MyPlate fed back to the calves as the mama cow had intended. Obviously, the dairy industry’s lobbyists earned their pay here.

One of Gentry’s favorite recipes from her new book follows. On Tuesday, June 21, she will be cooking up some vegan fare and discussing her new book at 18 Reasons in San Francisco.

Lasagna Rolls with Tofu Ricotta and Everyday Tomato Sauce

This is a fun way to serve lasagna: Instead of the traditional layering, you top the individual noodles with a vegan ricotta cheese and vegetable mixture and roll it up. My tofu ricotta cheese is a blend of tofu, miso, and tahini, which creates a creamy consistency that easily spreads. The tomato sauce takes no more than 10 minutes to make; if there is any left over, use it the next day over rice or noodles. Serves 6 (makes 12 rolls)

2½ tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ¼-inch pieces
2 zucchini, cut into ¼-inch pieces
1 head broccoli, stems removed and florets finely chopped
2 cups Tofu Ricotta Cheese (recipe follows)
12 eggless lasagna noodles
3 cups Everyday Tomato Sauce (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large, heavy frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions, garlic, basil, salt, and pepper. Sauté until the onions are tender, about 10 minutes. Add the carrots, zucchini, and broccoli and sauté until the carrots are crisp-tender, about 12 minutes. Let cool completely. Mix the vegetable mixture into the tofu ricotta cheese.

Cook the noodles in a large pot of boiling salted water, stirring often, until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and rinse the noodles, then toss them with 1 tablespoon of the remaining oil to prevent the noodles from sticking together.

Coat a 13 by 9 by 2-inch baking dish with the remaining 1½ teaspoons oil. Spread 1 cup of the tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish. Using a spatula, spread about ½ cup of the vegetable mixture over each lasagna sheet, leaving about ½ inch of each end uncovered. Roll up each sheet tightly and place it seam-side-down in the baking dish. Pour the remaining 2 cups tomato sauce over the lasagna rolls.

Cover the dish with aluminum foil. Bake until the sauce bubbles, about 55 minutes. Remove the foil and continue baking for 15 minutes.

***

Tofu Ricotta Cheese

When blended, the tofu gives this vegan cheese a creamy consistency that resembles ricotta. This recipe is borrowed from my first book, The Real Food Daily Cookbook—when you have a good recipe, why change it?  Makes about 3 cups

(14-ounce) container waterpacked firm tofu, drained and  cut into quarters
²⁄3 cup yellow miso
²⁄3 cup water
½ cup tahini
¼ cup olive oil
5 large garlic cloves
1½ teaspoons dried basil
1½ teaspoons dried oregano
¾ teaspoon sea salt

Blend all the ingredients in a food processor until smooth. The cheese will keep for 2 days, covered and refrigerated.

***

Everyday Tomato Sauce

This is a perfect, simple tomato sauce. The key is to use canned crushed tomatoes, easily found in a grocery or natural foods store. Eden and Glen Muir are my favorite brands because they are organic.
Makes about 4 cups

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 shallots, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano

Heat the olive oil in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the shallots, garlic, and salt and sauté until fragrant, about 20 seconds. Stir in the tomatoes and the 1 cup water. Bring to a gentle simmer, then decrease the heat to low and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, to allow the flavors to blend. Stir in the basil and oregano. Remove from the heat.

—From Vegan Family Meals by Ann Gentry/Andrews McMeel Publishing

When owners and mountaineering guide-friends Eric Fenster and Ari Derfel developed their business plan ten years ago, they had no formal culinary or business training. It was smart planning, relationship building, and a new way to raise funds that made their vision possible.

Derfel considers himself an “unusual entrepreneur with unusual motivation.” An inspiring public speaker at the recent TEDxPresidio Business 3.0 convergence and a role model in the green movement, Derfel embarked on a year-long project to collect his garbage–mostly food packaging–during 2007 to challenge himself and learn. This gained him media coverage everywhere from the San Francisco Chronicle to CNN and resulted in an art piece at the 2009 Greenfest festival.

Then during a period of 18 months from 2008 and 2009, Derfel explains how he spent countless hours “tirelessly networking” to open Gather in the new David Brower building–a hub for environmental and social action organizations under one roof, built with cutting-edge green design techniques. The goal was to raise $2.5 million, during what he calls “arguably the worst economic climate during our lifetime.” By creating a long term goal to grow their outdoor adventure company, and later their organic catering business Back to Earth, Fenster and Derfel built the credibility to garner investments and open Gather within their ten-year plan. But building the restaurant from scratch  using environmentally-friendly design proved to be very expensive. Though help came from a community bank and a lending institution, relationships with values-driven investors made the difference in the final push.

Over 65 investors and their partners were drawn to the idea of funding the community food system close to home. Derfel describes Gather’s 100+ co-owners as “an incredible mix of people who wanted to build an institution together.” The vast majority live in the vicinity, invested anywhere from $5,000 to $400,000, and will receive 95 percent of the profits until they are paid back. Together Fenster, Derfel, and Chef Sean Baker own 50 percent of the LLC as managing members with decision-making authority, meeting with co-owners once to twice a year.

Today the restaurant serves as one of the first and best examples of the tenets of Slow Money, a new model of investing in small, local food enterprises that connects investors to projects that revive economies and build healthy communities. Based on author Woody Tasch’s book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered, the movement’s principles hinge on shifting investments from fast profit to those that build relationships, accountability, and a better ecosystem over a longer period of time.

“Fast money made sense when corporations were small and the world was big, when resources and places for waste disposal seemed infinite, when mass production was first being tapped to fuel higher standards of living,” writes Tasch. “We must now find new ways to mark our progress.”

Slow Money’s mission is to create billions of funding for restorative environmental projects, beginning with food. Now a non-profit organization with Derfel as its Executive Director, it has helped funnel over $4 million to small food businesses throughout the U.S., including Gather.

Although Derfel and Fenster had received most of the funding when Derfel presented at the first Slow Money conference in 2009, an additional amount from like-minded investors helped open Gather within the ten-year plan. The money came from folks who not only shared the vision for Gather, but also believed in allowing that money to grow in wealth over time.

This group of evangelists is one of the many “intangible gems” that Derfel refers to as a return on investment in the Gather business venture.

“The beautiful thing is that those people are now the best marketing one could ever hope for, because they constantly tell anyone and everyone to come and eat at this restaurant,” he goes on to say.

Since opening, Gather has created 75 new jobs, helped support several local farms, cultivated a tight knit staff, and started a chain reaction of restaurants opening in the area. The restaurant has its own dedicated half acre of produce grown at Lindencroft Farm, which includes heirloom varieties of produce, chiles and herbs. Its menu appeals to both vegetarians and omnivores. Benches covered in sleek, re-purposed leather belts, a mural in the bar made from reclaimed packaging from the restaurant’s construction, and elegant salvaged wood are just some of the features that make it stand out in innovative, environmentally-friendly design.

According to Derfel, “Not only is Slow Money possible, it’s happening. Every one of us is an investor, and we all need to begin investing our money like this.”

And it’s growing these relationships, rather than just the profit, that Derfel says has made Gather worthwhile.

“What we needed was money,” adds Derfel, “what we got was a community.”

The First Slow Money Northern California Regional Showcase takes place this weekend in San Francisco on Sunday, June 12th at Fort Mason. If Civil Eats readers are interested, you can register at 50 percent off of general admission with the code: civileats. The Third National Conference is scheduled for October 12-14, 2011, also happening in San Francisco.

Watch for a taste of the restaurant:

A version of this article was originally published on Shareable Design

One of the how-did-we-get-here narratives of food goes something like this: Starting in the late 1960s, the women’s movement called upon educated women to forge a new path into professional life while an increasingly convenience-driven industrial food complex conspired with demanding weekday schedules to culminate in empty kitchens and the near extinction of home cooking. It’s a tale that oversimplifies the reality. But when Michael Pollan, in his 2009 New York Times essay “Out of the Kitchen Onto the Couch,”  singled out Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as the tome that convinced women that cooking is drudgery, he set off a feminist firestorm. Several angry blog posts and counter-defenses later one thing is clear: If more home cooking is essential to changing the food system, men had better get into the kitchen as well.

It’s happening. In 1965, fathers accounted for only five percent of the time spent cooking for the family; now they’re in the kitchen nearly one-third of the time. John Donohue’s new book Man with a Pan, a collection of essays by fathers about cooking for their families, celebrates this change. Donohue, a New Yorker cartoonist and editor, pulled together thoughts by food writers and culinary professionals like Mario Batali, Michael Ruhlman, and Mark Bittman. But one of my favorite things about the book is the inclusion of the voices of “ordinary” dads who have come to cooking simply because it’s work–pleasurable, of course–that needs to be done for their families every day.

“It was very important for me to include a broad cross section of men who cook for their families in the book,” Donohue says. “I wanted the well crafted essays by professional writers, but I also wanted to hear from other working fathers, ones who might have more demanding jobs than being a successful writer. It’s one thing to make your own hours, it’s another to have to be on the job as a fireman, a bond trader, a carpenter, an economist, and still get food on the table. I wanted the book to be an inspiration to men of all professional stripes.”

Inspiration comes from surprising places, like from horror novelist Stephen King, who urges readers to lower the heat and take a “gentle” approach to cooking. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg contributes an homage to King in the form of a screenplay about a man who becomes fatally obsessed with a barbecue grill while caring for an empty, isolated hotel in the off season. There is the classic “overreacher,” Manny Howard, who writes about how his “stunt foodways” (like roasting a whole pig on the beach) are incompatible with feeding a family.

The more practical firefighter Josh Lomask says cooking is like building a house. “It’s a manual process. But unlike a house, which might take months to build, cooking takes one night, and that gives me a great sense of satisfaction.” He says what Pollan was trying to say in “Out of the Kitchen,” but somehow the sentiment is less incendiary coming out of a firefighter’s mouth. “With both parents working, there’s been a whole generation of neglect in the kitchen. Guys are going to have to learn what fifties housewives must have all known–how to plan a menu and feed a family week by week.”

Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for the Washington Post and author of The Hidden Brain digs most deeply into the topic of gender roles. Through a short exercise he illustrates the subliminal biases that cause many of us to think of professional cooks as male and home cooks as female. For Vedantam, when Dad walks into the kitchen to cook for his family he becomes an activist, “actually engaging in political activity that is every bit as serious as that of the suffragettes who marched to win women the right to vote, or the civil rights protesters who marched to win equal rights for racial minorities. If you’re a man who abhors sexism, take up the spatula.” (Somewhere a adjunct professor is photocopying this chapter long with Gabrielle Hamilton’s chapter on “where are the women chefs” from Blood, Bones and Butter for her food studies course.) If that’s not convincing enough for you, there is also the opening quote by 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin: “What woman wants, God wants.”

Donohue is hoping the diverse voices in Man with a Pan will inspire readers of both genders to cook more–and he’s not leaving those readers empty-handed. Every contributor also lists a couple of his favorite, time-tested recipes along with a list of his favorite cook books. There are several recipes for “The Best!” roast chicken, along with Tofu Bolognese, Ceviche, Chocolate Mousse, Ghanian Peanut Butter Soup, pickles, Pan-National Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Fish Cakes, and Whole Roast Cow. Okay, maybe that last one is not so useful (though the accompanying chimichurri recipe looks good), but the recipes and cookbook recommendations help Man with a Pan multitask as entertainment, polemic, and a tool book.

On his blog, Stay at Stove Dad, Donohue documents his own efforts to feed his family, wife Sarah Schenck, filmmaker and co-founder of video-based family food website Parent Earth, and their two daughters. Planning home-cooked meals for the family is, as Donohue puts it, like a chess game. “You have to think many moves ahead. Will there be something in the fridge to eat that Wednesday night you have to work late?” he asks. “Good question, one that can only be answered Sunday afternoon when you have the time. I make sure there are pasta sauces, pots of cooked rice, containers of black beans, roasted chickens, and the like always on hand.” Donohue does most of the cooking, but Schenck is usually the one to pick up the children and serve them dinner, putting together the sauces and staples Donohue prepares in advance. With his wife on the front lines with two hungry kids the food had better be good–and it looks like it is.

After reading Man with a Pan, I’m starting to catch a new vision of home cooking, one that involves men exchanging recipes and strategies. In the 1983 film Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton’s character is a recently out-of-work auto industry exec who has switched places with his wife. She’s supporting the family now while he does the housework. At a job interview he enthusiastically exchanges cooking advice with another laid-off worker, a scene that plays like a joke. They’re so into it–ha! When do we ever see men get so passionate about home cooking? I’ll tell you when; here and now, in one-third of our kitchens. For a book about men, Man with a Pan has surprisingly little chest thumping and a glorious amount of pleasure, generosity, and joy.

It’s like one of those bar jokes: An ethnobotonist, an agroecologist, and a chef walk into a chile field…but there isn’t a punch line because this book is about climate change.

Thankfully, the writers of the new book Chasing Chiles manage to keep despair at bay as they carry the reader along on a fascinating journey in their van, “The Spice Ship,” visiting pepper fields all over North America to seek out iconic regional peppers and the people who grow them.

The three authors, chef Kurt Michael Friese, agroecologist Kraig Kraft, and ethnobotonist Gary Paul Nabhan, set out in The Spice Ship to learn how climate change is affecting one particular crop (chiles) in a variety of different places (parts of Mexico, the Rio Grand, Avery Island, areas of the south, and the Midwest). They investigated and documented how farmers are adjusting their growing practices to changing conditions in their fields. Each of the three brings his own perspective and unique brand of inquisitiveness to the micro-subject of chiles, providing the reader with a kaleidoscopic lens through which to view the macro subject of climate change.

The writing has a natural immediacy that made me feel as if I were listening in on their conversations with farmers, cooks, and seed savers in Sonora, Mexico, Iowa, and points in between. Some of the scenes were physically upsetting. I literally felt sick to my stomach as the three chile wranglers approached an orchard in the desert of Sonora, Mexico. They’d set out to see how the indigenous chiltepin chiles were faring a month after a severe hurricane swept through the region, and found Oscar González, whose farm had been hit without warning by a deluge that filled his well and irrigation system with sand, ruined his tractor, washed away his farmhand’s house, his chickens, and his dog, and took out more than half of his fruit.

As farmers shared details of the variability in weather patterns they must deal with in deciding when and where to plant and which traits to select for in their heroic attempts to stay one step ahead of climate change, I was struck by their tenacity in fostering diversity in their fields. If readers take one thing away from this book it should be that genetic diversity is key to protecting our food supply in the face of climate change. Variable weather conditions produce more than wholesale destruction of crops; they also produce a variety of new and unpredictable crop-killing pests and diseases. Crop variety must match these threats.

You don’t need to be a science geek to love this book. Even in the face of the dire effects of climate change, the pleasure principal is alive and well throughout the narration. All three writers are enthusiastic eaters and experiencing the chiles through meals shared with farmers and cooks along the way not only left me with tons of respect for farmers, it made me yearn for the complex, chile infused foods they were eating. Luckily the book includes recipes for dishes like Yucatecan pollo pibil, Datil Pepper sauce, pilau and carne machaca con verduras de Sonora sprinkled throughout, courtesy of Friese.

I hope the gastronomic aspects of this book get more people to read it because it’s going to take more than disturbing data about storm severity, droughts, and changing bird migration patterns to get people to make the connection between climate change and their plates. You’ve got to hit them in the gut. Now excuse me while I go try out the recipe on page 98 for a fiery habañero condiment called xnipek.