Published on December 11th, 2008
As the hurried frenzy of the holidays descends upon us, even the most mindful diners can get caught up in the seasonal time crunch, losing touch with our dining experiences. Take a break and linger over the stories and messages behind a new cookbook by Iowa chef Kurt Michael Friese for a hearty serving of appreciation for our food sources: A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland.
As a Wisconsin farmer myself, it tickles me to see the spotlight on the Midwest’s rich culinary scene once again. Too often we get stereotyped by dominating images of corn and other tasteless monocrops. Sadly, this burgeoning, vibrant local, sustainable food scene goes unnoticed.
But as Friese so aptly summarizes of his passion for our nation’s heartland, historically many great centers of the world’s diverse culinary heritage have centered on the core of a nation’s grain belt, such as France, German, India or China. This inspired Friese to deeply explore thirteen Midwest states – from Ohio to Oklahoma to North Dakota - to discover some of the most innovative, sustainable and creative culinary practices around today. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on November 26th, 2008
A Year of Mornings began as a daily photo conversation, in blog form, between two friends that live 3191 miles apart:
Maria Alexandra Vettese (left images) is an artist living in Portland, Maine. She has two cats and her “perfect day includes an early rising-time and bedtime. In her dreams she sits at a table in a sparse but warm room and writes letters by hand all day.”
Stephanie Congdon Barnes (right images) is from Portland, Oregon. She has two kids, loves the woods as well as making little things out of wool and linen. “The first thing she does in the morning is put water on to boil for coffee.”
It lasted the entire calendar year as an artful blog and the project has now been transformed into a book.
Visit the new photo blog, A Year of Evenings, which highlights the ambiance that arises in the evening somewhere around dinnertime.
Another couple fun visual sites I adore are Simply Breakfast, and Read the rest of this entry »
Published on November 19th, 2008
Granted, food lovers tend to migrate toward cookbooks as their foodie literature of choice. But, particularly amidst today’s economic gloom, it’s good to keep a well-balanced diet and chew on some advice about navigating the turbulent times that lie ahead.
New York homesteader and writer Sharon Astyk delivers such inspirational, nutritional nuggets in her new book, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (New Society Publishers). The subtitle describes her true calling: One Woman’s Solutions to Finding Abundance for your Family while Coming to Terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times.
Astyk draws on her academic background and ideas developed on her prolific, widely-read blog to offer a reality check on the tough times to come: It will get worse before it gets better and she had the numbers and analysis to prove it. This book takes local, seasonal and organic eating a step further into the future – what happens when peak oil hits, everyone is homebound and farmers markets and retail in general dry up while we weather the crisis? Read the rest of this entry »
Published on October 3rd, 2008
It’s late in the year; harvest season is upon us. If this year in local food has had a “theme” it would be the victory garden. Growing your own has a new appeal. If you haven’t started your garden yet, maybe it’s a bit late, but it’s not too early to think about sharing the garden experience with your youngest family members next year.
DK Publishing’s resident children’s cooking expert, Jill Bloomfield, just published her own children’s guide to gardening. Grow It, Cook It is a great step-by-step visual guide to how to grow a plant on the first spread of pages, then shows step-by-step how to cook the ingredient on the next. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on September 25th, 2008
Guest contributor Pamela Price is the founder of Red, White & Grew, a blog devoted to “Promoting the Victory Garden Revival and other simple, earth-friendly endeavors as bipartisan, patriotic acts in an age of uncertainty.”
A couple of weeks ago, I contemplated the role personality might play in how one approaches the creation and cultivation of a contemporary Victory Garden.
Because one reader expressed interest in a simple guide to creating a garden, I wanted to follow up with a couple of recommendations.
Keeping in mind the over-simplified contrast of messy vs. tidy (a contrast that I first started to contemplate by looking at these two books side-by-side!), allow me to suggest two very fine books for the newbie gardener’s shelf. Together with Heather Flores’ outstanding Food Not Lawns, they are my favorite go-to resources.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published on September 11th, 2008
This is another one of those wonderful books that will get tattered and worn because it is so oft referenced. Food Not Lawns, by Heather C. Flores appeals to food and community activist that is sometimes buried underneath the suited business exterior that I don more days than I would like.
Her approach is very accessible and not aggressive, the writing style is friendly and inspiring, and the hand-spun illustrations are not only descriptive, but fun.
As I read through this book, I started applying sticky notes to areas I want to not only reference for myself, but share with my fiancee who is starting to become somewhat obsessed with our compost experiment in the back yard. There are like 50 sticky notes already . . .
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Published on August 15th, 2008
If I had to sum up Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35) in one sentence it would be, “Everything old is new again.”
Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD maybe America’s premiere Locavore. He spent years helping to compile lists of America’s endangered food products. He asks, “Do we put pretty pictures of these edibles in a museum so we can look at them?” His answer, No! We preserve foods, tastes, cultures by what Slow Food calls “eater-based conservation”. Mr. Nabhan has said that isn’t just about the genetics, “If we save a vegetable but we don’t save the recipes and the farmers don’t benefit because no one eats it, then we haven’t done our work.”
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Published on July 31st, 2008
If buying local is the way to lower your carbon footprint and enjoy foods at their peak, then you likely can’t get any more local than chef and artist Jim Denevan’s “farm-to-table” dinners. You see, for Denevan’s events, the table is usually just a few feet from the very crops that are being served.
Denevan’s unique concept, dubbed Ouststanding in the Field, began with a few such on the farm dinners and has expanded over the last nine years into a country-wide tour of dinners. Denevan and his team travel in a 1953 bus dubbed “Outstanding.” They follow the harvest season, hosting dinners at farms, and even in sea caves, anywhere that the best of ingredients can be sourced — just feet away from the table. The dinners feature the farmers, fisherman or local food artisans whose harvest comprises the menu, alongside the efforts of local chefs.
The dinners themselves are set up like works of art, arching tables, candles in the earth, each diner’s plate brought from home to give him or her a way to add a personal touch to the event. The events, held for one night only, then whisked away to being anew in another locale have a fleeting beauty to them, not unlike Denevan’s own sand sculptures, some of which stretch for miles, and last only hours. Read the rest of this entry »
