Civil Eats

Vegetable expert and bestselling cookbook author Mollie Katzen’s handwritten and illustrated cookbook, The Moosewood Cookbook, (not to mention The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and her cookbooks for children, Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels) introduced many to the love of cooking. She was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2007 and her most recent book, Get Cooking, was recently nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals Award. Beloved by many, new to some, Katzen continues her clarion call for taking back our food system one delicious meal at a time. I recently spoke to Mollie about vegetables, the new Good Food Movement, and the radical necessity of cooking. Read More

Kyle Cornforth was up for a challenge. So when the founder of a cooking school in the outskirts of Chiang Mai asked Kyle, who was working at the Edible Schoolyard at the time, if she’d like to come on board as director of The Prem Organic Cooking Academy and Farm, she leapt at the chance. She wanted to share what she’d learned about local, sustainable, organic cooking at a public school in north Berkeley with students and staff at an international school in northern Thailand. 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

It took a teenager from Wyomissing, PA who had never heard of Alice Waters to figure out what was missing on the culinary scene in Berkeley. 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

Happy New Year and welcome back for more Kitchen Table Talks, the monthly conversation series about the American food system. Many thanks to all of you who participated in our discussions in 2009 and we look forward to a fruitful and inspiring year of exchanging knowledge and ideas and building community with you. We’re excited to kick off 2010 with a conversation on Urban Homesteading on Tuesday, January 19 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at our new location in San Francisco’s Mission district at Viracocha, 998 Valencia St. at 21st St.

As the good food movement grows and urban farming heroes like Growing Power’s Will Allen and Oakland’s own Novella Carpenter pave the way, we will explore the surge towards City self-sufficiency, including growing and preserving your own food; raising chickens and goats; keeping bees and worms; composting, installing greywater and rainwater catchment systems; and a whole host of other DIY activities. 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

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 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

Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan just sent out a really exciting memo [pdf]: “Harnessing USDA rural development programs to support local and regional food systems,” which goes far beyond fantasies of how a new food system might look, and straight into how this gets both funded and created. Merrigan’s new memo details how to use USDA funding for the kind of projects that are being developed by First Lady Michelle Obama and her food policy team, such as school lunch infrastructure, farmers markets, farm to school programs, cooking classes. Read More

With my recent introduction of the term “Pro Food” and a definition of its core principles, several readers have questioned how Pro Food differs from Slow Food. Rather than try to answer this question on my own, as I am only somewhat familiar with Slow Food, I am opening it up to others to help decide.

Pro Food is primarily focused on driving entrepreneurial interest in solving the complex food system challenges we face. By attracting such talent and energy to sustainable food, from farming through retail to home cooking, it is my belief that the money will follow to support their efforts (new post coming on this subject). Read More

As a U.S. historian, I can provide examples of the many ways – both positive and negative – that patriotism has been expressed at different times in our nation’s history.  There are many ways that individuals and communities can express their patriotism today. Eating local foods can be one of them.

Local foods are patriotic, whether you’re buying them directly from producers in your area or growing your own. They’re good for our local farmers, our economies, our health, and the health of our planet.  Local foods give us pause to (re)consider our connection with the land and those who produce our food.  And they taste great because they’re fresh from the soil.  (Who says that what is good for you can’t taste good, too?)

This Fourth of July, please consider celebrating your independence by including locally sourced foods in your menu.  Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International – who earlier this year petitioned the Obama administration to plant a Victory Garden on the White House lawn – recently launched Food Independence Day to encourage local eating on the Fourth.  Part of this effort was to gain the commitment of individuals to include local foods in their menu.  Another goal?  To petition our nation’s 50 governors to consume local foods and publish their menus for the day. 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

Every year, Americans find a new diet or pill to help them lose weight. Popular examples abound. There’s the low-fat diet, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the list continues. Fast food and quick service restaurants rush around to change their menus to offer low-fat dishes, more bread, less bread, 24 oz. burgers loaded with bacon, piles of cheese. And after a few months or years, the “it” diet fades from people’s minds until another one comes long and sweeps the country. These fad diets rarely lead to reducing obesity or making Americans healthier. Rather most lead to the over consumption of factory-farmed meat, cheese and “low-fat” or “low sugar” processed foods filled with high fructose corn syrup, fake sweeteners and partially hydrogenated oils. Well, I think its time we try another kind of diet: the low carbon diet. Except rather than getting you into that teeny, tiny yellow polka dot bikini, this diet helps reduce carbon emissions, fatten the slim wallet of small farmers and cut inches from big agriculture.  Read More

Part 1 of my interview with conservationist Gary Nabhan, we talked about impacts of modern farming, the implications of biological complexity, and the current direction of the sustainable food movement.  In this second installment of our conversation, Nabhan talks about his childhood on the shores of Lake Michigan, about how his Arab-American heritage has influenced the direction his career has gone, and about how a modern chef is like a jazz musician. 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

I’ve always possessed a secret desire to be placed in a situation where I would have to rely merely upon my wits, resourcefulness and surroundings to survive. So sometimes I pretend that Armageddon has come along, just to prepare for the unexpected. It’s not uncommon for friends to tell me I would be one of their top picks if faced with the infamous “who would you want if you were trapped on a deserted island” question, primarily due to my foraging skills. Although flattered, I have to admit that it’s really not as hard as one might imagine to fend or oneself in an urban landscape, even a desert urban landscape! Read More

Last week I spent $200 on food. I was traveling in Washington D.C., and the money was spent on two meals, just for me. The meals were great, but shelling out that kind of money, when I am committed to reducing the amount I spend, was a little shocking. It gave me a real sense of gratitude for the $130 I spent the week before for a week’s worth of groceries for my family of four.

In these interesting economic times, everybody is looking at ways to save money, and with rising health care costs we are also looking at ways to stay healthy. The answer seems to be in forgoing restaurants—both the big ticket and the fast food kinds, to spend more time in the kitchen and in the garden. Read More

I recently found a bottle of dressing I had made, hidden away in my pantry. Labeled “Blood Orange & Asparagus,” it instantly transported me back a year ago when the bounties of winter and spring collided and became transformed by an afternoon of labor into what I was now holding. Read More

The fact that the cabinet door to my “pantry” is suddenly busted has made ignoring its contents difficult. For example: two cans of tuna packed in oil, and I cannot remember the last time I ate canned tuna. My concerns about seafood (un)sustainability have made me shy away from eating fish lately. When did I even buy those cans, and why? Read More

“I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you… meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro’ many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.”

-Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Webb, 1784

These are normally the times when I cook, when days start to lengthen just enough to give one hope. I have noticed some things about how it is I always can, even when money is tight, and I don’t skip joyfully to the market daily. I think cooking well and simply without worrying about costs relies on the same hard-to-swallow concept as the most trusting kind of charity: you must pay it forward. Read More

Seventeen years ago, I left a great job teaching at a prestigious northeast culinary school to move back to Iowa and be an executive chef at a Holiday Inn. It was difficult to find people, in Vermont or Iowa, who did not think I was certifiably insane. Those who thought they knew Iowa claimed, “There’s no there, there!” And those who did not asked, “Iowa? Isn’t that where they grow potatoes?” Read More

Veteran cookbook author and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman knows his food — and what he dishes out is smart, contemporary and consistently delicious. For years, his books – including “How to Cook Everything” and “The Best Recipes in the World” (his “Chile Shrimp” is one of my husband’s all-time favorite dishes) have been permanent fixtures on my book shelves, and his kitchen savvy has informed my own style of cooking. Read More

I had been feeling a certain sense of resentment that I had become a utilitarian cook. After 30 years of  preparing meals for my family almost every day, I was feeling a bit like a short order meal machine. Read More

Chef Jamie Oliver was on The Leonard Lopate Show today to talk about his new book and Food Network show called Jamie at Home.  The premise of the book is to encourage home gardening, and interspersed within the tantalizing recipes are tips anyone can follow for growing tomatoes, zucchini, rhubarb, strawberries, potatoes and more.  The recipes follow the seasons, and focus on the specific ingredients you learn to grow in the pages. Read More

I spoke with Dan Barber last week about his restaurant Blue Hill, located at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, an 80 acre four-season and pastured livestock farm in Tarrytown, New York that provides most of the food for the restaurant and conducts educational programs open to the public.  I wrote about my experience at Stone Barns and the restaurant here. Read More

Recently, the American public was issued a challenge by the folks at KFC (formerly “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” but “fried” just didn’t sound healthy). The fast-food joint argues in its latest commercial that you cannot “create a family meal for less than $10.” Their example is the “seven-piece meal deal,” which includes seven pieces of fried chicken, four biscuits, and a side dish — in this case, mashed potatoes with gravy. This is meant to serve a family of four. Read More