Announcing our Inaugural Snailblazer Award!

Slow Food Columbus is pleased to announce our inaugural Snailblazer Award, in recognition of pioneering contributions to a sustainable food system, and to announce that Warren Taylor of Snowville Creamery will be the award’s first recipient. Warren will be honored in a reception on February 23, from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the Wexner Center; the public is invited to attend. Delicious hors d’oeuvres, courtesy of Slow Food Columbus and created by Slow Food members John and Kimberly Skaggs from Heirloom, will be available, as well as a cash bar.

In addition, and recognition of the passion and drive with which Taylor champions the ideals of Slow Food, we are donating $500 to Snowville’s community-sourced Kickstarter campaign, designed to fund a yogurt-production facility. What’s more, we will donate even more money to Snowville’s yogurt campaign… but only if you will. Taking a cue from November’s Big Give campaign, Slow Food Columbus will designate matching funds to be added to every Kickstarter pledge made between now and February 10. The Big Give utilized $1 million in matching funds to leverage a total of $7.4 million in donations—just over $13 for every $100 donated. The needs of Snowville’s yogurt project are smaller, and our treasury is smaller still (we take “nonprofit” quite seriously), but we believe in this project, and we will give $1 for every additional $100 donated to the Kickstarter campaign after the morning of January 23.

Remember, folks, the deadline is February 10, so please, donate now. And we hope to see you at the reception on February 23!

First Principles

The past few years have brought some changes at Slow Food USA, changes that might leave members wondering about the principles behind the organization and behind their local chapter. It makes sense for us, in advance of our Annual Meeting, to lay out a statement of what those principles have been, and what we hope they will continue to be.

In past years, Slow Food developed a reputation as an elitist organization, largely because of its emphasis on being willing to pay the visible premium associated with good, clean, and fair food. To its credit, the organization took the criticism, in part because it took the long view: the invisible premium on conventional food, measured in terms of environmental degradation and health, would come closer to evening the price than most consumers realized. But elitism is an easy charge to make, a difficult one to evade, and a problematic one for a growing organization. More to the point, there was a growing sense that the emphasis on the best, cleanest, and fairest food excluded many Americans who could not afford it on a regular basis.

Accordingly, there has been a recent shift at Slow Food USA toward an emphasis on lower-cost solutions that nevertheless maintain the standards of food quality. The outcome has been divisive: a recent Chow article, while mentioning the substantial growth in the organization, nevertheless noted prominent defections from the Slow Food fold. According to the article, Slow Food’s shift toward $5 dinners and away from supporting the organic farmers who have been its core constituents is responsible for the disbanding of the New Orleans chapter and for making Alice Waters cry.

We regret that New Orleans is without a chapter, and we hope that Ms. Waters is well. But frankly, we don’t understand the reason for the uproar.

We have always believed that Slow Food should be a movement for everyone. The organization’s shift in emphasis toward younger and less well-off members is welcome, and we seek to continue it and to share it ourselves. But in our chapter, it is not, and should not be, exclusive. We hope that the mix of events that our chapter has sponsored over the past few years speaks to that orientation. We seek, as our homepage has always said,

to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.

The quote never specified which people—and it shouldn’t. Slow Food should be a movement that is accessible to everyone on every rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Period. Some of those people have been, and will remain, the core supporters of organic and sustainable farmers around the country. Others may be soon. Still others desire to find the best, cleanest, and fairest options available to them.

It is incumbent upon our organization, and upon the chefs, farmers, and rank-and-file members who comprise it, to use our creativity and skill to realize that vision for everyone. That is our purpose.

If you share those goals, please consider joining Slow Food or keeping your membership current, and if you are a member, please consider proposing a new event.

Thank you.

Stand Up, Columbus! Beard Award Voting Now Open

You might think, at first blush, that Columbus is a shoo-in for a James Beard award. Julia Child once described James Beard as “the quintessential American cook;” Columbus, a test market for fast-food chains for years, has long been a quintessential American city. At the same time, both are progressive: Columbus was just named the up-and-coming gay city of 2011, and Beard was expelled from Reed College for homosexual activity back in the 1920s. Yet despite these obvious similarities, with the exception of the Dispatch’s own Robin Davis (who won while living in a different city), Columbus, unlike Cleveland (!!), is home to no winners of the prestigious James Beard Award.

We believe the time has come for this travesty to end. And we want your help in putting a stop to it.

The Beard Award nominations are open from now until December 31 (just click here to submit your choices). In past years, Kent Rigsby of Rigsby’s Kitchen and Magdiale Wolmark of Dragonfly Neo-V (soon to be reopened as Till) have been nominated in the Best Chef—Great Lakes Region category, and those worthy chefs probably will be again—with good reason. We would, in addition, urge you to forward two more names to the Beard Foundation this year, names that our Board believes brook no argument whatsoever: Chef Ryuji (“Mike”) Kimura of Kihachi, whose culinary skill wowed Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman on Bourdain’s No Reservations show, and Spencer Budros, the pastry wizard behind Columbus’ star pâtisserie, Pistacia Vera.

If you are reading this blog, you don’t need us to tell you anything more about these people. Please go vote for them now—and with any luck at all, Columbus will be able to celebrate the Beard Award committee’s recognition of their accomplishments in a few months’ time.

Veggie U

On a recent visit to The Chef’s Garden I also had the opportunity to learn about their non-profit Veggie U. Based in Milan Ohio, just down the road from the Chef’s Garden, Veggie U is a 501(c)3, not-for-profit, that was established by the Jones Family in 2003. It shares space with the Culinary Vegetable Institute which offers retreats and educational opportunities for chefs as well as Earth to Table dinners and cooking classes open to the public.

The inspiration for Veggie U came from a belief that diet is a big factor in many of the diseases afflicting our youth in increasing numbers (obesity, diabetes etc). The Jones Family partnered with local chefs, educators, a nutritionist and a physician to design the program. The mission is to promote the well-being of children through a healthy lifestyle.

Veggie U is a curriculum designed to empower children and to teach them that they have choices in the food they eat. The curriculum includes all of the materials needed to teach hands on lessons covering healthy nutrition, sustainable agriculture and state-required plant studies. Veggie U is targeted at fourth grade and can also be used for home school.  The program takes 5 weeks. It is designed to teach proficiencies in science, math, health and nutrition.

Veggie U is ‘dedicated to changing children’s eating habits one classroom at a time’ and the curriculum is currently being taught in 1800 schools around the country.

Farmer Lee Jones explains the classroom kit

A $450 donation can put an Earth to Table™ science program kit in a classroom and a donation of $225 allows the teacher to host the program a subsequent year with a refill kit. The kit comes complete with seeds, soil, flats, root view boxes, grow lights and a worm farm. Equipment that is designed to let the kids see, feel and taste the whole process of planting, growing and harvesting vegetables.

Veggie U’s goal is to expand the program to include all 6,500 fourth grade classrooms in Ohio and the 93,000 fourth grade classrooms nationwide.

A $5 Dinner in 15 Minutes

Most of the people planning Slow Food USA‘s $5 dinners have shown remarkable ingenuity in stretching their $5 far beyond what anyone would have imagined—preparing multiple courses of sustainable food that few would have believed cost less than $5 per serving.

I decided to try something a little different.

I stuck to the $5-dinner rules, but I wanted to address the criticism that many people have of cooking at home—namely, that they don’t have the time to do it. I didn’t seek out ingredients that I could stretch as far as possible; instead, I chose ingredients from the North Market that I could turn into a simple, delicious, sustainable meal, quickly:

• One 4-1/2 lb. Amish chicken $14
• 1 lb pesticide-free Brussels sprouts, Ann’s raspberry farm, $4
• 1/2 lb salad greens, $2

(Prices are approximate; when you factor in the salt, pepper, and olive oil/vinegar that I added later, the result puts us almost exactly at $20, for four meal-sized portions.)

More importantly, I made use of a lot of the time-saving tips I described in the previous blog post. And I tracked the extra time it took to obtain the ingredients, prep them, and cook them on the Slow Food Columbus Twitter stream.  Some sample tweets:

@SlowFoodCMH Rather than documenting cost for today's #5challenge,
I'll document the time it takes. Proving we have time to cook.
bit.ly/q1aHcj

@SlowFoodCMH Entering @NorthMarket

@SlowFoodCMH And done

@SlowFoodCMH Not bad... produce and poultry in 6 minutes. short
lines today

@SlowFoodCMH Sprouts prepped, salad prepped, kitchen cleaned,
trimmings thrown in freezer bag for stock. Clock stops: 21 minutes
this leg #5challenge

@SlowFoodCMH Dinner in 36 minutes. #5challenge lockerz.com/s/139692086

@SlowFoodCMH And a few more nights' worth of dinners, already ready for
the fridge. #5challenge lockerz.com/s/139693172

@SlowFoodCMH All told: 4 servings shopped for, cooked, and cleaned up
in about an hour's time—15 minutes per meal. Now time your next
fast food run.

·

I did relatively little to the ingredients: I removed the extra bits from the chicken, rubbed it with olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary, and threw it in a 400° oven to cook for just over an hour (15 minutes per pound). Then I rinsed, oiled, salted and peppered the sprouts and put them on a tray by the oven, rinsed the lettuce and put it in the refrigerator… and went back to reading. When there were 40 minutes left I slipped the sprouts into the oven. When everything was done I pulled the sprouts and chicken out of the oven, quartered the bird, dressed the salad, put the remaining portions into Pyrex storage containers to cool, snapped a quick photograph… and sat down to enjoy dinner at my leisure.

It was far from the most elaborate meal that was prepared today. But it’s sustainable, it’s healthy, and it clocks in at around $5 per serving. And even making generous allowances for travel and cleanup the time spent obtaining and preparing it doesn’t exceed an hour, or 15 minutes per meal when you take leftovers into account.

You might be able to beat that with a trip to the drive-through window, maybe… as long as you don’t get stuck behind the guy who can’t decide whether he wants fries with that.

Op-Ed: You Say You Don’t Have Time To Cook. You’re Wrong

Slow Food USA’s $5 Dinner campaign is a very good one. The idea that we can “take back the value meal” by showing people just how far their $5 can go is brilliant: why settle for a Big Mac when you can have so much more? Local food blogger and urban homesteader Rachel Tayse Baillieul has already risen to the challenge with style, and more dinners are on the way (you can sign up to make one or attend if you’d like).

The only problem is the objection we hear whenever we urge people to cook at home: in today’s busy world, who has the time to cook?

The answer is simple. You do.

Most beginning home cooks don’t think they have time to cook because—not to put too fine a point on it—they’re doing it wrong. When I started cooking for myself, I’d begin with a clean kitchen, take out the still-uncut or wrapped ingredients for the recipe one at a time, execute the recipe’s steps one at a time in order, stand there and watch the food cook to make sure that nothing went wrong, serve myself a single course, eat it, and then clean up. And yes, I decided pretty quickly that cooking took a long time.

If there are any professional chefs reading this, or even experienced home chefs, they’re probably smiling to themselves right now… because that’s not how you do it. There are all sorts of ways to cheat time and make home cooking far, far more efficient:

• Shift time. If you find a few spare moments an hour or three earlier in the day, go ahead and put the raw ingredients together early. You’ll be amazed at how much time it saves when you go to cook. In some recipes (like bread), you have to do this.
• Never stand still. If your feet aren’t moving, ask yourself whether they could be. While the food is cooking, start cleaning the dishes that you’ve already used. Cleanup goes a whole lot faster when there’s hardly anything to clean up.
• Cook more than one meal. There’s no law that says that you can’t eat leftovers. Cooking lots of servings at one time means zero prep time for subsequent meals—fast food can’t beat that.
• Do things out of order. Think ahead to when things need to be ready; don’t wait until step 3 to do the things that are required in step 3. For example, if you think you’re going to need to boil water for something, start a pot of it boiling right away—don’t wait until you need it.
• Cook low and slow. Lots of meals don’t even require you to be present for most of the cooking. If you can start a recipe cooking in the morning, leave it unattended all day, and return to cook a quick side dish or two right before dinner, it will seem as though cooking takes hardly any time at all.

Nothing will eliminate the time that’s needed to cook, of course: it’s a simple fact that cutting up a chicken takes time. But it simply doesn’t need to take nearly as much time as beginning home cooks think it does.

So here’s my challenge to you, if you are of the “it takes too much time” school: Find three people you know who do cook on a regular basis, and ask them what their favorite tips are for saving time in the kitchen. I bet you’ll be impressed by the answer… and I bet, in the end, you’ll be more inclined to try cooking yourself.

I’m also curious to hear what they say… or what you have to say yourself, if you have more ideas.

Ruhlman’s Twenty and the Art of Cooking

Cleveland chef and author Michael Ruhlman came to town recently to talk about his new book, Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto. Ruhlman (who is called both “Chef” and “Mr.” elsewhere, a fact that may in part explain his Rihannaesque surname-only status) is an unusually thought-provoking author: his slim book Ratio condensed a lot of recipes down into a small set of simple principles—something that’s very hard to do—and Ruhlman’s Twenty does the same for cooking.

I had assumed, therefore, that Ruhlman’s talk at the Best of Fall Home Show would be about those principles, or some of them. But he surprised me.

Ruhlman used some of the techniques in Ruhlman’s Twenty, of course: he cured some salmon and did a basic ceviche, casually demystifying two dishes that most of his audience almost certainly had thought was well beyond its reach. But he actually focused very little on the nuts and bolts of how to do it, a fact that quietly emphasized the simplicity of cooking. Instead, he focused on his main message: “Cook for yourself. It makes life better.”

Obviously, we couldn’t agree more—from the point of view of health, conviviality, family, and pleasure. But what impressed me most was how Ruhlman had once again focused on the forest rather than the trees. It makes little sense to try to teach someone 1,000 recipes when they can learn 20 techniques instead. And by the same token, it makes little sense to talk about the specifics of those techniques when the point of learning them is to cook.

So let’s get out there and cook. It really does make life better.

A Snapshot of Slow Food Columbus

I guess this shows where our priorities lie.  (via Wordle)

 

 

Shake the Hand That Feeds You IV

When people ask what we do at Slow Food Columbus, one of the things I like to mention is our annual Shake the Hand That Feeds You dinner at Dick Jensen’s Flying J organic farm in Johnstown. The meal embodies the Slow Food ideal along many key dimensions:

• Community.  New people often come expecting the sort of sit-down meal they’d get at a restaurant. They soon find themselves picking kale, helping to roast a pig, or making ice cream—and loving it. They cool off with a beer or a glass of wine that’s been provided by a local business here in the community… and may even have a chance to chat with the owners themselves.
• Quality.  Chef Caskey and his team from Skillet Rustic Urban Food orchestrate an amazing meal made up of ingredients that couldn’t be fresher—on the vine in the early afternoon, on the plate by dinnertime, all of it held to strict organic standards. We don’t have menus for the event for one simple reason: the chef decided what to make when he arrived.
• Inclusiveness.  Thanks to the generosity of Skillet, which closed for a busy weekend without asking for a cent, and of our community partners, and of all of the members and friends who chipped in, we were able to offer the dinner at a price that was competitive even with ordinary restaurant dinners—$40 per person for members—let alone with other farm-to-table dinners (we’re looking at you, Outstanding in the Field). Kids came too—the farm’s donkey in particular seemed to love playing with them.

It’s the sort of event that intimately mingles people and food, and in so doing emphatically brings out the best in both.  We are always honored to set it in motion and witness it as it unfolds.  And we’re happy to share it with you here, through the eyes of some of the participants.

Op-Ed: The Raw and the Deep-Fried

I awoke this morning to a lot of buzz about Frank Bruni calling out Anthony Bourdain for Mr. Bourdain’s disparaging comments about Paula Deen (“Unsavory Culinary Elitism,” Op-Ed, New York Times, August 24).  The nub of the argument is that elitism, not a genuine concern about unhealthiness, is driving Bourdain’s disparaging remarks.  ”When Deen fries a chicken,” Bruni writes, “many of us balk. When the Manhattan chefs David Chang or Andrew Carmellini do, we grovel for reservations and swoon over the homey exhilaration of it all.”

What bothers me about this characterization is that it’s easy to make and easy to believe. Bourdain is, after all, a foie-nibbling New Yorker, and Deen makes bacon-egg hamburgers with donuts for buns.  The problem is, it’s probably too easy: accusing Bourdain of elitism is a great way to rile up a lot of people, but the reality is far more complicated.