seed for seeds

Photo by the lovely Liz Stanley.

UPDATE (4/2/12): We are only $2000 away from hitting the goal! Please let me know if you can help in any way.

Blogosphere,

I need your help! I know money is tight all around right now, but this program means so much to my community and any help will be appreciated. I have sought funds for the program through many traditional and non-traditional methods, and here is the next non-traditional one!

One of the groups I work with in Maine is called the Heirloom Seed Project. Based at Medomak Valley High School, it is the oldest high school seed-saving program in the United States and its 850 heirloom varieties comprise the sixth largest heirloom seed bank in the United States. Spearheaded and run for 21 years by Neil Lash, a 70-year-old educator with unmatched brilliance and whimsy, the program has sustained tough economic times. The school sells seeds through the Seed Savers’ Exchange Network and is internationally known.

This summer, I hope to initiate a Teen Agricultural Crew program at the school, where two teens will be hired to:

• Work three mornings each week for the summer, and after school in spring and fall.
• Raise heirloom crop varieties for donation, seed-saving, and processing.
• Understand the importance of biodiversity.
• Study genetics, horticulture, and the unique histories of each seed variety.
• Grow leadership skills through volunteer management.
• Develop entrepreneurial skills through learning how to run a seed-saving program for sale through community distribution and through Seed Savers’ Exchange.
• Plan and market community events.
• Learn teamwork and problem-solving skills.

The program, including funding for two student stipends, one teacher stipend, and reimbursement for field trip travel, will cost $4250. I have raised $1050 the from the Waldoboro community and $750 (so far) from my extended network of generous friends, family, and colleagues. And now, I am looking to you for the remaining $2450 $2000! If you are interested in donating (even $1!), comment or e-mail me (genna dot cherichello at gmail dot com) with the amount you are willing to donate. As soon as we hit the mark, I will e-mail all donors to send your checks to the program!

And of course, there are prizes! For donations up to:

• $25: Thank You note & 2 packs of heirloom seeds.
• $50: Thank You note & 4 packs of heirloom seeds.
• $75: Thank You note & 6 packs of heirloom seeds.
• $100: thematic hand-drawn poster, Thank You note & 8 packs of heirloom seeds.
• $250: tour of the Heirloom Seed Project facility, thematic hand-drawn poster, Thank You note & 10 packs of heirloom seeds.
• $500: homemade, gourmet, four-course meal cooked with selection of products grown at the Heirloom Seed Project, tour of Heirloom Seed Project facility, thematic hand-drawn poster, Thank You note & 12 packs of heirloom seeds.

If you are not local to Waldoboro (or don’t plan to visit) but still wish to donate $250 or more, please contact me to work out your compensation.

Thank you in advance, and do not hesitate to spread far and wide!

mommom’s measurements

For the past two Saturdays, I prepared the lunch for an “Italian for Travelers” class at a language learning school in Rockland. It continues to intrigue me how much more connected I have grown to the food and culture of my Italian heritage since moving to Maine, where I am away from the family, bakeries, and cities that have always been there to sate my cravings for specialty desserts and cured meats. My critical palate for Italian food has led to me to focus on learning how to make my favorite foods from scratch, and the projects have been as rewarding for me as for my office mates upon whom I bestow the leftovers.

I used this Italian lunch as an opportunity to call my grandmother and finally pen down her recipe for pizza dolce, pronounced (by my Southern Italian family) “pizza dulch.” Traditionally made around Easter, this sweet pie is an Italian cheesecake made with ricotta. The  grainy-smooth ricotta cheese results in a very  light cheesecake, and the vanilla extract, orange blossom water, and cinnamon combine elegantly on the tongue. My mom and her sisters have the recipe, but I opted to go straight to the source: Mommom.

She rattled off the ingredients list with no hesitation and no recipe. For the crust, she recommended mixing the dry ingredients and adding water “until it-a form-a the dough.” For the filling, she instructed to add “half a box” of this to “a small glass” of that, among other equally vague steps. Her delivery left me stranded in a territory where many feel uncomfortable: baking without an exact recipe.

I barely use recipes to cook, but when I bake, I am still pretty reliant on them. The old world cook embodied in my grandmother doesn’t sweat the small stuff because she doesn’t need to. She knows how her food should come out and has perfected recipes by look and feel. She knows how each ingredient will alter the outcome, and I can only hope to gain some of this intuition with the mainstays of my family’s culinary history. If this pizza dolce project says anything, it whispers, “You’re on the right track.”

when food isn’t food

Thanks to Reddit, I stumbled upon the filmmaker PES who creates stop-motion films with everyday objects as stand-ins for other everyday objects. My favorites are the food-related ones, obviously, but he has a beautiful new video called “The Deep” that features old metal objects as sea creatures. He also has one called “Roof Sex,” featuring furniture having sex on a roof, but that is for a different blog. Check them out, though. Hopefully they will whet your creative appetite.

And in food news, I am hosting a Producers & Buyers “Meet and Greet” tomorrow to enable growers to mingle with interested markets for the 2012 season. There have to be snacks at this sort of thing, naturally, so I have spent the past hours in the kitchen making:

• Caramelized onion focaccia
• Sweet lavender olive oil crackers (I described these as “romantic” earlier, and I stand by my statement)
• Popcorn with nutritional yeast
• Roasted beet salad with lemon vinaigrette and capers

Maybe some of the buyers will want to help me start a brand! A girl can dream.

eggs, history, and sweets

In An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, Tamar Adler weaves together methods about “How to Teach an Egg to Fly” and her opinion mirrors my philosophy: “meals still qualify as meals if they are eggless. But an egg can turn anything into a meal and is never so pleased as when it is allowed to.” A fried or poached egg is the perfect punctuation mark to leftovers or odds & ends that need to be eaten. I love eggs, and this love will never grow old or tired. If I ever open a restaurant, I will hire a person to walk around and ask people if they would like a fried egg with that instead of a grind or two of pepper. They are that important.

The food historian in me has always wondered how eggs have become so integral to our diet. Egg-based pasta and noodles, egg drop soup, frittatas, potato latkes, lamb and egg tagines, omelettes — the savory applications are countless and wholesome. But what really gets me is the foundation eggs provide for the world of baking and pastry. Mastering the potential of an egg–its yolks and whites, separately or together–seems to be a precursor to mastering true desserts.

My 100 word preview of the Encyclopedia Britannia article on the use of eggs in baking elucidated only the how, not the when or who. I learned that yolks are 50 percent solid (60 percent of which is strongly emulsified fat), and they effect the color, flavor, and texture of baked goods. Whites, on the other hand, are mostly protein with no fat, and are most important for texture. They also hold air well. (NB: My use of the word “learned” above is very generous.) I was pleased when a slightly more aggressive set of Internet search terms led to The Food Timeline and an FAQ about eggs. It offered the following quotation from The History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Sama:

In the Roman period pastry cooks made much use of eggs for desserts as well as cakes. Apicius (25 BC) invented baked custard: milk, honey and eggs beaten and cooked in an earthenware dish on gentle heat. Eggs really made their way into the kitchen with Apicius, who mentioned them frequently in the Ars Magirica.

Lynne Olver, the author of The Food Timeline, elaborates that once eggs were recognized as binders and thickeners, their culinary applications proliferated. But when asked about when this began, she notes: “The food historians do not venture into this territory.” When one reaches this wall, one must accept defeat. And I did just that, by diving into my egg carton, separating a few eggs, and utilizing centuries of culinary wisdom with no known origin. I made Meyer lemon curd (below) and almond meringues (in progress above), and reinforced that while I can eat lemon curd all day, I’m not big into meringue cookies.

This particular curd & meringue night was before Christmas, and I put the jar of lemon curd in my Mom’s stocking. I hear she stirred it into whipped cream as topping for angel food cake, another egg white-heavy treat. She allowed the yolk and white to meet and mingle on the dessert plate, and it sounded divine.

Tonight, I answered cries from my sweet tooth by revisiting this treatment of eggs: separating them and letting the parts grow independently bigger than the whole, creating cranberry curd and chocolate cookies. I utilized Alton Brown’s lemon curd recipe but replaced the lemon juice with unsweetened cranberry juice  and the lemon zest with orange blossom water. The result was ethereal, complete with tart, sweet, and perfume-y notes.

To care for my egg whites, I made François Payard’s Flourless Chocolate-Walnut Cookies. These are perfect for anyone who lusts after chewy brownies, so everyone. They taste like crunchy walnut Nutella. Unlike meringues, which are made from whites whipped into stiff peaks, these cookies utilize whites in their original form as the only liquid ingredient besides a bit of vanilla extract. They came out looking exactly like those pictured above and are now added to my list of future party favorites. Make them for your gluten-free friends, your Jewish friends (or self) during Passover (as recommended by the NYMag article), or if you would like the smell of chocolate and toasted walnuts to permeate your home.

Thank you, eggs, for making possible so many culinary wonders.

learning with ted

When I found out about TEDxManhattan “Changing the Way We Eat,” I knew that I needed to attend. TED is a global non-profit that organizes conferences around “ideas worth spreading,” and they offer support for TEDx conferences that are otherwise independently organized. From the moment I submitted my plea to attend TEDxManhattan, I was ready to settle into my seat in the New York Times Building, chic place that it is, and absorb. Luckily, I blinked and the beginning of October was the end of January, and I was on a plane to Newark with little more than business cards and a blazer in tow.

The day was divided into three themes: “Issues,” “Impact,” and “Innovation.” While I learned something from each presenter, my two favorite speakers both fell under “Impact”: Stephen Ritz of the Green Bronx Machine and Mitchell Davis of the James Beard Foundation.

Ritz’s speech has been uploaded to YouTube, and I recommend anyone reading this to watch it, if for no other reason than to see me in the front row, awestruck, nine minutes in and again a bit later. But really, Stephen Ritz is the kind of person that every community needs. He is a bottomless well of positive energy who is working with his students to bring food justice to the people of the South Bronx. His edible walls are being built in his classroom, around his neighborhood, in buildings around New York, and beyond. The projects he develops with his students are quintessential examples of successful service-learning: students work on solving community problems and, in the process, grow connected to the classroom.

My AmeriCorps*VISTA position is focused on developing these kinds of opportunities for Maine youth related to school gardening and nutrition education, and immediately after Ritz’s speech (which was immediately before another food- and networking-filled break), I jetted toward him, shook his hand, and got his contact information. I want this man and his students to come to Maine and shake us up a bit!

While Ritz’s speech inspired me the most, Mitchell Davis’s talk whet my academic appetite. Davis is the Executive Vice President of the James Beard Foundation, and his talk addressed the role of taste in the larger conversation of food issues. I could have listened to him speak all day, and told him during the reception that when his talk ended, I felt like he was just getting started. Just a few of the other speeches addressed the act of eating, instead focusing on the larger theoretical considerations that inform the act, and only Davis’s treated taste as its own issue.

He identified taste as a social construct, as much about power and class as what the tongue senses. Posing the question “What does a better food system taste like?”, Davis walked the audience through a duo of experiences in Italy: one at a small farm and another at Castella di Verrezzano, a fancy winery and tourist destination. At each place, he had nearly identical meals of freshly made pasta, homemade olive oil and red wine vinegar, house cured meat, and vegetables borne from the most local soil. In Italy, where taste is part of the culture’s value system, you eat high quality, good tasting food regardless of economic status. You have the skills to make this food (and if you don’t, a neighbor does), and the food system is set up to make that food available to you without question.

But when the American food system is mandated and reinforced by large corporations that strangle food producers in contracts and debt even when they comply with impossible orders, and that tell us to drink “corn sugar” (the recently-coined euphemism for high fructose corn syrup) and eat burgers made from animals raised in conditions worse than slave ships, what national food values exist here? None.

Yes, we should focus on ensuring that the 14.5% of government-classified hungry people in the United States are fed at all, but beyond that, we must ensure that everyone in this country is fed well. Davis noted that the best foods for us are not only the healthiest but also the most nourishing for our soul and appetites. No one can deny the comfort of warm soup and hot tea when you have a cold, because it addresses our ails and reminds us of home. Every meal should do these things, and if so, we will eventually get rid of most our ails and our foodshed will be one with our home. Indeed, changing the way we eat in this country will change the way we live.

And for an example of being fed well, enjoy this peek into one of the snack spreads from TEDx: cheese, Orwasher’s Ultimate Wheat Bread, the Cleaver Group’s apple brown butter cupcakes with goat cheese frosting, and apples from Breezy Hill Orchard in the Hudson Valley.

Thank you to anyone who read this, and I hope you feel compelled to start a discussion in the comments.

And if this wasn’t proof enough that I was actually there, here I am, courtesy of the TEDxPapparazzi, with Joshua Stokes of Grill-a-Chef in the midst of chatting about An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler and inquiring about where the adult beverages were being served.

aliens of earth and sea

I was in New York City last weekend for TEDxManhattan “Changing the Way We Eat.” Embarrasingly, one of the most satisfying part of that trip was finding Romanesco broccoli for sale at Eataly. For $6.50 a head, I hesitated for a second because $6.50 is a lot for aesthetically pleasing cauliflower, but I have been on the prowl since I was 15 and seven years is long enough. Finally, this martian vegetable was mine!

I roasted the Romanesco broccoli, also known as fractal broccoli, with salt and pepper. When I took it out of the oven to cool down a bit, I shuffled all of the florets into the same corner of the pan and sprinkled it with rice vinegar to absorb as it cooled. I love how otherworldly it looks, and it is simply delicious. I hope that I’ll be able to grow it someday.

This meal had significantly more black in it than most meals I eat. The stuff on the right side is Lalibela Farm Organic Black Bean Tempeh from Dresden, Maine, roasted with soy sauce and sesame oil until the outsides crisped up. Tempeh is traditionally fermented soybeans and usually sold in stores vacuum packed to submission, petrifying in its wrapper in the vegan section of the produce aisle. This tempeh, however, is made with organic black turtle beans and it is unbelievably creamy and  fresh-tasting. It is the only tempeh I have been able to enjoy plain, but roasting it was over the top.

The other black stuff in the foreground is kombu from Ironbound Island Seaweed in Winter Harbor, Maine. The long pieces of dried seaweed were broken up and cooked in the pot with brown rice, salt, and a dried chile. I learned this technique from Justin at Mano Farm and it perfectly reconstitutes the kombu.

Topped with a sprinkle of red dulse flakes from the Maine Coastline, a fried egg from my colleague’s son, and a drizzle of sesame oil from nowhere near me, this meal was nothing short of perfect.

biography of a simple dinner

My cooking style these days often strays far from recipes and sticks close to the desires of my eyes, stomach, and mind. My ingredients also speak to me: that cabbage is finally getting old, I have way too many eggs (is there such a thing?), the hidden apple butter was suddenly noticed after months of unintentional neglect, or I take a whiff of Chinese five spice and all neurons fire “YES.” Since the messages from my mind’s eye and kitchen’s pantry change every day, I rarely replicate meals exactly.

But two nights ago, I had a simple, rustic meal for dinner that I repeated tonight and will repeat whenever the I have all of the ingredients at once:  a heaping pile of warm greens over country bread and ricotta, a celestial combination of some of my favorite Maine eats so far.

I caramelized leeks in a trifecta of butter, rendered bacon fat, and olive oil. Then, I threw in several handfuls of chopped kale that I had previously de-stemmed. This helps prevent kale from wilting, similar to how removing carrot tops keeps the root firm. (Important: I threw the stems into a jar  with garlic, fenugreek, and a dried chile and covered them with a boiling mixture of water, apple cider vinegar and maple syrup for an impromptu refrigerator pickle.)

While the kale was wilting, I toasted a thick slice of country bread from Scratch Baking Co. in South Portland. This bread is baked in huge 18-inch rounds at least 6 inches high, so the folks at Scratch sell more manageable quarter- and half-loaves as well. On my way back from visiting a friend in Portland for the weekend, I picked up a quarter loaf in addition to a dozen  perfect bagels, this establishment’s claim to fame and key to my heart.

After the bread was toasted, I rubbed both sides with raw garlic, a move that elevates toast from plebian to glorious, and smeared a generous portion of Lakin’s Gorges Cheese Basket-Molded Ricotta, a Rockport-based artisanal cheese made using organic Maine milk. I saw owner Allison Lakin speak at the Camden Library about her transition from museum jobs and an anthropology degree to owning her own cheese-making business, and I have been wanting to support this soul-sister financially ever since. Her ricotta is different, as it is left to drain to the point where it is sliceable. I opted to smear it (heavily) on the garlic-rubbed toast and never look back.

I poured the kale and leeks over the ricotta-smeared toast, and topped the whole thing off with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and a pinch of salt. Voilà: a dinner that managed, with each bite, to evolve through light, sweet, smokey, spicy, creamy, crunchy, salty, and chewy. And everything except the olives in the foreground and the olive oil was produced in Maine, within about 30 miles of my house. I’m real into it.