Saturday, December 16, 2006

Christmas tea.. I'm trying to get the gang together for tea and cookies, at the least, this month, since It's Christmas. But we have yet to get our schedules to align.

So December's slow food night, might have to happen spontaneously. If anyone gets hungry this month, just call and we'll throw something together.

Love
Jen

Saturday, November 18, 2006

The vices of eating alone

Why a dinner group? Thing is, I don't like eating alone. I think it's criminal. I love to share food. I was one of those kids who wanted to make cookies for all the kids in my elementary school. I wanted to feed the school. I practically did because I have 5 siblings. As a kid I was excited to come home from school and take over the kitchen with my creative and choatic cooking. I think part of feeding others is this: to cook is to create-- and to share what you've cooked is like making others happy with what you've created. It's pretty simple.

I also like the process of cooperating to create things. You know, put the onions and butter in a pan, add fresh tomatoes, garlic, basil, taste. . . add sugar, salt, think of what else you need. Then in walks a friend with some oregano and fresh olives from the market. She's also got an idea of what it needs, and sure enough, she was right.



Why

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Every month since July, we've been putting on the food- for a Slow Food Night. Follow ours on this Blog, or start your own.
If you join us, we require only three things:

1. Bring a dish you make from scratch, or that you know where it comes from (local food, farm food, organic whole food.)
2. Be able to tell a story about your food, where the ingredients come from or how you learned to cook it like that (it can be a way of sharing your family's treasured recipes with each other.)
3. Attach a link of your Slow Food Night Blog to our Slow Food Waltz Blog.

More about SLOW FOOD and the slow food movement- http://www.slowfood.com/. "Created to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food."

Every month we will share our food stories along with photos on this Blog- stories that connect us with our food and with each other.

FOR ALL WHO:

*Can taste the difference between tomatoes from the garden vs. supermarket

*Enjoy gardening- pulling or digging bunches of green leafy things from the soil

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race. -Wendell Berry

*View a forest of ripe berries as one of the Wonders of the World (you love to take home buckets but wind-up cramming most of it in your mouth while on the spot)

*Feel slighted when you cook from a package
*Don't like to eat alone (unless you are a parent and need a break from your kids)
*Love to cook, or would like to learn to cook from scratch
*Have inherited a dozen or more recipes that your Mom, Dad, grandparents or great-grandparents used to cook and have handed down

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.- Calvin Trillin.

*Love to hear stories and tell stories about the food you are eating
*Like to know where your food comes from
*Care about farmers who care about the land
*Possess a distain for dieting and commercial "diet" food

American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it. -Dave Barry

*Aren’t afraid of indulging in delicious food

Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, "No, thank you," to dessert that night. And for what! -Erma Bombeck
School lunch with the 9th grader-

So today I ate lunch at a public school cafeteria: a blob of big fat greasy spaghetti noodles with a little meat and lots of sauce on a rectangular styrofoam plate. It came with a roll and anything I wanted in the "self-serve" salad bar (which I opted out of, knowing the personal hygiene of junior high students going through the line ahead of me.) It tasted like that canned Chef Boyardee stuff. I felt kind of sick after I ate it. I wanted to ask the students, "how can you eat this stuff everyday?" it's a little wierd that during the time that they are growing the fastest, some, or most of these kids are eating the most discusting food imaginable. School lunch is probably good compared with the junk food they down.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Toward the end of our slow food night, we started to get a little silly, maybe it was those beet greens kicking in, but here's what it looked like.



"Toni, cucumber over and visit?"



"I'd love to, but I have a date with my garden- my carrots need some extra attention,"





Here is Toni and Jenie singing that James Taylor song:......"Shower the people you love with veges, show them the way that you feel...."
Slow Food Night #3

Thanks ya'll for coming. Thanks Paul for letting our beets bleed purple all over your cutting board, for allowing the random acts of green grape tossing and for letting us pile all those swedish meatball and greasy potatoe pancake plates into your clean sink. ( we did help you clean up- Toni mostly). Also, for letting us put the ice-cream maker in your bathtub (wouldn't want it to leak on your hardwood floors.)

Millie and Andrew, Toni's friends from Ghana brought a dish made with plantains- Toni needs to tell you about it, Millie told a great story. Another couple from Ghana came as well, Joseph and his wife...

Paul made a type of ghoulash thing- red beans and rice with ham hocks and sausage, thyme, parika, cayenne, celery seed and lots of love. I think Paul also read William Carlos Williams poetry to his ghoulash as it was cooking. "so much depends on a pot of red beans, glazed with paprika beside the red ham hocks." Something like that.

Stacy brought her grandpa's recipe of potato pancakes.

Chris brought his appetite and news of himself breaking a land record (ask him about it.)

I (Jenie) tried to duplicate my meticulous gourmet cooking grandmother's swedish meatballs. In the end, I made them the way my family makes them (except I did sneak in some nutmeg, that's for you Gram.) I added a creme sauce at the end.

Andrea brought rolls and butter.

Toni made homemade icecream. A family recipe. Very tasty.

More stories to come!!

Saturday, September 09, 2006




Next food nite, bring soul food or food that's a family favorite or family recipe...

Friday, September 08, 2006



This is Toni, I and Stacy at the first slow food night...
Paul- He can Slow Food Waltz with the best of 'em. He's our resident poet and maker of Grandma Rawlins applesause and chocolate chip cookies-- He wrote the following story "Gift of Soup" which was recently featured on Radio West. Tune in.....

Thursday, September 07, 2006

A Gift of Soup
It’s your grandmother who explains it, hands still wet from the dishwater, twisitng a gold ring onto a wide-mouthed jar: how quart bottles work as well as anything, the same jar, maybe, that held the corn or tomatoes, if the lid isn’t too puckered. If you pop the lids off with the ring, that doesn’t happen the way it does with an opener, and they’re still a good fit, not leak proof, but tight. Or you can cap the bottle with plastic wrap and a rubber band, or tinfoil if you’re going to be careful. A bowl with a snug lid, that’s fine of course, but most times people aren’t so worried about getting bottles back. Canning jars trade around like a cold: a quart of cherries or bottled pears goes out to a daughter or a neighbor, peaches or tomato juice come back from home.
Put the soup in warm, and it will stay that way awhile. Wrap the bottle in something, a dishtowel or some newspaper, and it will still be right to eat when whoever you’ve given it gets home or where they’re going. Riding next to someone on a seat, the warmth itself will bring on appetite like the smell of cooking. When she did this for your father (or your mother), traveling off to school or back to the city after a holiday, she’d send a plastic spoon, so later they could eat straight from the jar, the soup still lukewarm, while a friend drove. They’d have that one good meal to get them started, and for as long as it took for the taste to fade, the lid to be screwed tight and the bottle put away, they’d miss where they had been, and that’s good for children who’ve begun to leave home.
Something hearty’s best—don’t send out a jar of something thin and fine, French onion or bouillon. The exception being a quart of stock as starter, which is like a cutting off a plant or the old loaning of an ember from a hearth to kindle a new fire. Better, though, to send rough-cut vegetable, rich with stew beef or big crumbs of hamburger. Chicken with good thick noodles—like her own, simmering on the range top and giving off the scent of celery and mild onion. Potato. A chowder. Stew. Something meant to make a meal, or even two. Tomato if it’s homemade, turkey with carrots and rice, beans with ham, split pea (if you like it), minestrone, goulash, the family chili, meaty gumbo.
There are rules to know. She looks at you sharply here because she believes propriety, the binding weave of social order, is lost to your generation. When it’s you on the receiving end, take care, on occasion, to rinse the jar and return it with a spray of bachelor buttons, the ones that grow along your porch; snapdragons from beside the fence; the columbine that winds around the backyard tap. Fill it full of M&Ms or butter mints, licorice, jelly beans, bridge mix or sour balls. Drop a note inside, or you can send a little card. This is not done in exchange; it’s a separate gift. And it’s not done every time—you don’t barter with affection. (If she only knew!) Don’t return soup for soup, just as you would never give back a pie plate with another pie: it feels like competition.
When you’re the giver, tell the son or daughter—brother, neighbor, stranger, bachelor, guest, friend—that the soup will be better on the second day. There’s a richness that comes with time and the close association of ingredients. Tell them to add a little salt if they need to. Tell them it’s good with bread and butter, cheese if they have it, a dish of fruit.
When they say thank you, just say you’re welcome. Don’t make apologies for your cooking.
She explains how she’ll sit and think of them the next day at noon, at the table where you sit down with her now, watching rain run down the window, steam twist up from an old pink bowl. She sends them a good thought, or a prayer, she says; then, unsure anymore of how you believe, she falters and settles on: just some good wish. You smile, butter bread for both of you. You pass plates and salt, eat while your cups are full.

Saturday, September 02, 2006


This is a sego lily, when we were kids, we ate the roots sometimes on walks. Mom said the Indians used to eat them and that they showed the Mormon pioneers how to pop them out of the ground to eat.
The brunch was very tasty. We scooped fresh blueberries blackberries and applesauce onto german pancakes and topped it with fresh whipped creme. Paul told a story about whipping creme in South Africa when he was a missionary there. A group of boys were standing around and one woman insisted Paul whip the creme because he was being a smart aleck. I scrambled the chicken eggs with green onions and topped it with feta cheese bought from Drake's family goat farm. Paul made fried potatoes he said his family liked to eat with fresh garden tomatoes. Jen brought some apricots she'd picked from her backyard tree and frozen. She made smoothies-- a family favorite. She said her family liked to make shakes and smoothies in the morning for breakfast.

When Toni made the pancackes, she told a story about her mother, how she wasn't a particularly avid cook, but sometimes she'd make something special to surprise the kids. Once day she wowed her kids with the bubbly tasty german pancakes like the ones she served us that day. Toni is very close to her mother.

Stacy our resident Arizonian brought fresh-made salsa from chilies, cilantro, onions and tomotoes she picked. Stacy said her mom had a garden when she was growing up and she'd go pick tomatoes, chilies and fresh limes and make salsa. Knowing how to make salsa seems like a requirement to living in the Southwest. Stacy taught Toni how to make her brand of salsa last week after the brunch. Toni had a batch of it in her fridge yesterday. The salsa was great.


Duane brought elk meat that we were going to make into omelettes. But it seemed too labor-intensive when we got down to it, so people added it to the potatoes or eggs. Almost everyone tried some elk meat. Duane bagged the elk in the mountains around Carbon Canyon and hauled it out on the back of a horse. (SEE NEXT TWO ENTRIES ABOUT ELK MEAT, HUNTING...)
MEMORIES OF DAD-

Eating the elk meat Duane brought reminded me of my Dad.

I grew up eating the stuff. Every year my dad went out into the woods to bring home our dinner for the next year. There are 7 children in our family and my dad worked as a carpenter, spending his days raising pine two-by-fours along the edges of the Rocky Mountains. He didn't make much money as a carpenter in a small Idaho town. To make up for the slim paycheck, he had to bag an elk every year- getting that elk was a nine-mouthed necessity- (there are nine in my fam.) He also caught and brought home fish from the Snake River.

Eating the elk meat reminded me of how Dad always provided for us, was hard working and how connected he was to the land. I remember him hauling home the elk and hanging it by its legs from the back shed. It was really gross. But it didn't seem to matter when it came time to eat it. Maybe I didn't make the connection between that dead elk and the process of quartering it, taking it to the meatcutter and bringing it back wrapped in nice little packages marked: "cubed steak" "elk roast" "elk burger" "sirloin tip," and "elk round" etc.

I just knew all those white irregular-shaped packages in the freezer were what we would be eating for the rest of the year along with our huckleberries, morrell mushrooms the peppermint tea we found by the banks of the creek and the pink and white flesh of rainbow trout and brook trout.
INTERVIEW WITH A HUNTER
I asked Duane some questions about hunting.

Q: Do you think elk meat is healthier than store-bought beef?

I've heard that grass-fed beef is healthier has more of the beneficial Omega fatty acids. Elk would have the same, it's leaner and lower cholesterol. The grain that they feed to fatten them up before they slaughter them is not as good for you. The elk feed mostly on grass and they eat flowering plants like daisies and shrubs, etc.

Q:Where did you get the elk:

I was nine-mile canyon in Carbon Canyon, up by Mount Bartles in the Book Cliffs. It was one clean shot, no thrashing around or anything, it was a clean kill, we'd been up, we took care of it, the next day we rode up and got it. It was the 6th day of hunting.

Q: I've heard that some hunters like to take the liver out first and eat it while they are still camping out.

They say that fresh liver is really good. You shoot it and take the liver right out that day and they say it's really good. But what I've tasted isn't very good.

Q: What do you like about eating wild game verses store-bought meat?

I don't want to eat corporation meat. On the one hand, I don't like to kill stuff, but I'd rather have wild meat than corporation meat. There's not many corporations that control the meat we consume, it seems like. It's a more satisfying feeling when you are involved in the process of getting it. Plus you don't have any farm land that you have to plow up to feed the animals.

Q: Explain that a little more:

In order to feed beef, you need so many acres to grow alfalaf and grain, it's better to have farmland rather than development-- everything comes at a cost. But beef takes up a lot resources. But I guess if they didn't have farms, they'd just build houses on it. With hunting, at least you know the meat is coming from land that's wild land and wild habitat.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006



Toni's delicious German pancakes.

Chris was the only one tough enough to take on this Green River watermelon. After he carved the melon patiently and with great care, he posed for this picture.

Chris even coined a phrase to describe how good the melon was. "Melonicious!"

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Check out this vegan twinkie recipe

http://shmooedfood.blogspot.com

Friday, August 18, 2006



Loveable goat at Drake Family Farm

Last night I watched my Uncle Craig herding his chickens around his backyard and getting the little rascals to jump up to take a grape out of his hand. I hunted for eggs in the hen house and learned that brown chickens lay brown eggs and white chickens lay white eggs. . and that if you talk sweet to a chicken, you might get it to eat out of your hand.

This morning I woke at 6 a.m. to drive down a dirt road off Redwood in West Jordan to videotape Farmer Drake milking his goats at the Drake family farm.

Toni suggested we join the Epic Summmer amatuer film fest sponsored by a guy she knows. Our videoing skills are pathetic, but we'll try it to chronicle a few Slow Food nights-- the dinners we make, the places we go to find the food and the interesting people (and animals) we meet along the way.

Of note this morn was Essence the goat, a hornless female with a real "goatee" beard standing contentedly in the milking station while farmer Ron Drake milked she and her lactating sisters. Her utters were attached to rubber piping and her face was towards Drake and us and she had fun wildly licking Toni's hand all the way up to her elbow. (This is a trailer to our film.)

We bought some fresh milk, yogurt and cheese.


More stories to come... hope to see you at the brunch tomorrow.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006



My great Aunt Louise, gives her blessings to our Slow Food group. She's been cooking slow food for at least 60 years (in those days, all food was SLOW food, good and slow, and "fast food" hadn't been invented.) Louise left me with instructions on making applesauce from the apples I picked down the lane by her home in Hailey, Idaho.


August 15-- BREAKFAST IS COMING

COME ALL to our next slow food get-together, a brunch at 11:00 a.m. Sat 19th. E-mail me and I'll give you directions to Toni's house.

Bring your favorite breakfast food- something you can tell a story about.

On the Menu- breakfast foods, scrambled eggs from Uncle Craig's capitol hill chickens and Toni's German pancakes topped with applesauce made by fresh apples - a recipe from my great auntie Louise. Yesterday I picked the apples from a tree next to the home of a famous poet, Ezra Pound. My auntie lives by place where Ezra was born. He's dead of course, but those apples in the tree beside his yard are still living and we're going to eat them on Saturday. . . that is if I can get the hang of saucing them.


Oh and I can't forget, for those herbal tea drinkers, this tea is the best, mint, rooibus with a hint of cocoa bean.

Tastes like mint, chocolate, spices.

Fell in love with the tea when I had a cup of it at this cool coffee shop/art gallery build in an old church in Eagle, Idaho. Yum, yum, you'll love it.


Check out some of Ezra's poems in the prior post.

I'll add more details about who is bringing what when I get them.

What do you want to bring???

Jen
Poems by Ezra Pound:

About walking with a friend:

The Garret

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness
the hour of waking together.

Ezra Pound


Salutation


O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

Ezra Pound



About War (sorry this one is a little serious for a food blog, but it's Ezra Pound at his best!)

And I liked this next poem especially because it reminded me of the war in Iraq, of our soldiers who have suffered, my brother being one of them, the soldiers who are still in that place and the ones who have come back and still suffer.

These Fought in Any Case


These fought in any case,
and some believing
pro domo, in any case .....

Died some, pro patria,
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

Ezra Pound

Friday, August 04, 2006

July 21, 2006- Slow Food Night #1
On the Menu
SALAD, by Jen--Ingredients: Lettuce and green onions from my sister's garden, organic tomatoes, carmelized walnuts (Paul showed me how to carmelize them) and a sprinkle of huckleberries.


(This photo is my niece pulling up an onion.)

For the salad dressing, I used raw maple syrup mixed with Mayo. I forgot the vinegar, but Toni suggested a squeeze of fresh lemon would add some zest to the sweetness of the syrup.

The Huckleberries came from Libery Heights Fresh- http://www.libertyheightsfresh.com/
If only it had been Huckleberry season, I would have picked them fresh. Whenever I taste huckleberries, it reminds me of my childhood in Idaho. We usually went out every year with old Schwann man icecream buckets into the woods and plucked the sweet purple berries from the bushes. We were like the bears, loved to pick and eat, pick and eat, filling us with purple and leaving our hands and lips purple. My sister usually came back with the fullest bucket. I came home with only half a bucket- the other half being in my belly. We would freeze the berries and my Dad would make homemade huckleberry icecream.

I stopped at a local Italian shop, Tony Caputos,http://www.caputosdeli.com/ for some fresh pasta and visited my Aunt Marilyn's down the road to pick some herbs from her obliging garden. Toni was going to make the spaghetti sauce and I thought adding some fresh olives would be a nice touch. So I sampled about 10 different olives at Caputos and decided on a sweet variety that grows in Southern Italy- "around the tip of the heel," said the guy at the counter.



Toni was in charge of the spaghetti, but we all ended up helping cook. It had fresh herbs, garden tomatoes, Walla Walla sweet onions, sugar, olive oil, butter, garlic and organic beef. (See Toni's post for more details) And it was delicious.



I also made carrot apple juice.


A friend from Montana, Heidi Burnett, made fresh carrot apple juice for me while I was a student at Utah State. I remember how surprisingly sweet it was. I used fresh ginger and a variety of apple, fuji, Red D, Golden D. (See picture)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

FOR ALL WHO:

*Can taste the difference between tomatoes from the garden vs. supermarket

*Enjoy gardening- pulling or digging bunches of green leafy things from the soil

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race. -Wendell Berry

*View a forest of ripe berries as one of the Wonders of the World (you love to take home buckets but wind-up cramming most of it in your mouth while on the spot)

*Feel slighted when you cook from a package
*Don't like to eat alone (unless you are a parent and need a break from your kids)
*Love to cook, or would like to learn to cook from scratch
*Have inherited a dozen or more recipes that your Mom, Dad, grandparents or great-grandparents used to cook and have handed down

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.- Calvin Trillin.

*Love to hear stories and tell stories about the food you are eating
*Like to know where your food comes from
*Care about farmers who care about the land
*Possess a distain for dieting and commercial "diet" food

American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it. -Dave Barry

*Aren’t afraid of indulging in delicious food

Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, "No, thank you," to dessert that night. And for what! -Erma Bombeck


Every month we will hold a Slow Food Night. Follow ours on this Blog, or start your own.
If you join us, we require only three things:

1. Bring a dish you make from scratch, or that you know where it comes from (local food, farm food, organic whole food.)
2. Be able to tell a story about your food, where the ingredients come from or how you learned to cook it like that (it can be a way of sharing your family's treasured recipes with each other.)
3. Attach a link of your Slow Food Night Blog to our Slow Food Waltz Blog.

More about SLOW FOOD and the slow food movement- http://www.slowfood.com/. "Created to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food."

Every month we will share our food stories along with photos on this Blog- stories that connect us with our food and with each other.