Why I Cook, and March

There are a boggling number of reasons #whyimarch, but a handful of them can be explained by two shepherds pies.

One I made a week or so back as part of a post-pregnancy meal train for Andy and Caitlin, who recently brought a sweet babychild named Willa into the world. Andy and Caitlin are exceedingly warm and generous humans, who I feel grateful to have gotten to know over the last year or so. They are also young organic dairy farmers in Central Maine, who work tirelessly to provide both exemplary care for the land and animals they steward and truly delicious, nourishing eats that are helping to build our state’s increasingly robust foodscape.

The other pie I made this evening and brought to Meghan, who is currently VERY pregnant with her third kid. I met Meghan very early on my first time around living in Gardiner, when she helped me out considerably as I attempted to cut my teeth on this whole community mobilization thing. A natural organizer and deeply engaged community volunteer, she is also a member of the core group who has spent the last three-ish months coordinating tomorrow’s local Women’s March in Augusta.

Cooking for other people is the primary way I carve out space to socialize these days, especially with all these babies popping up all over the place. As my friends and collaborators build their families and settle into their local worlds, this still somewhat rootless human has a great deal of gratitude to these and all others who, in ways seen and unseen, are likewise engaged in some version of “the work” – some sort of effort to strengthen our communities for the benefit of all. This work is necessarily diverse; it has domestic, personal, civic, and public components, and will discourage and exhaust just as easily as it can invigorate and embolden. I find that preparing a hearty meal for someone else is a reliable means for fending off that discouragement and exhaustion - it's pretty obvious that eating one, too, has a similar effect.

I march, in part, for the same reasons I cook for others – to take time out to be the change, show my thanks, and create time and space for care and connection.

Culinary Integrity - in Retrospect

I've left quite the gap - nearly a year and a half - between this posting and the ones from my first weeks of C school.

My first months at ICC were especially challenging for me culturally, personally and technically. I ended up getting pretty enmeshed in the experience of landing in such unfamiliar territory after FoodCorps service in rural Maine, and found it more difficult to process as I went than I thought when I started to blog about it.

All these many months later, I found a post I drafted sometime toward the end of December (2013). It was titled "Culinary Integrity," and consisted of the following three intentions:

• Integrity in learning: dedicating time to practice, being gentle with myself if I'm not progressing as quickly or seamlessly as I'd like, seeking out help, and the right kind of help, if I need it.

• Integrity in self-care: making sure that I'm leading a whole life, being happy. Spending time with others, making food outside of class, getting out and exploring the city.

• Integrity in ethic: managing my perspective of how what I'm learning can be applied in the future. Avoiding getting wrapped up in the "prestige" culture of professional cooking in NYC.

I wrote these out at the height of some serious self-doubt around my decision to do this culinary school situation. I missed Maine, my FoodCorps crew, the amazing support network I'd developed, powerfully. It was the winter of the polar vortex, we were in school through Christmas, and I wasn't able to be with my family during the holidays. I felt outpaced and minimized in the city, which heightened all other negativities.

I ultimately did a fair job of navigating these challenges as they came along. Mostly, it was thanks to the people who helped me make the most of and find deep value in my time in New York.

Christmas Dinner prepared with my classmate, Jade Neo.

I had, for instance, some really wonderful extracurriculars that introduced me to some highly worthwhile individuals. Working with Carrie Dashow to combat neophobia and pull off some highly creative taste tests in partnership with the New York City Greenmarket and the Umami Food and Art Festival was a major highlight.

Carrie's awesome poster promoting the presentation of our taste test results at the Umami Food and Art Festival.

As were assisting some very playful chefs hosting workshops at the Kids Food Festival in Bryant Park. And developing a friendly acquaintance with an edible wild foods enthusiast who published a beautiful memoir about her relationship to foraging in the city and shared some truly excellent recipes with me. And, of course, the wonderful pals who invited me to cook and host a Food Justice dinner at AMO Studios, and all the attendees who hadn't anticipated that part of the evening would involve making themselves an education "6 plant parts" salad and rose to the occasion.

The Salad Course at AMO Studios.

Early on, I had a really helpful framing conversation with Annemarie, of the superb Saltwater Farm, who gamely talked me through the myriad ways in which sticking out the murky first month of C-school would be worthwhile. One of the greatest moments of closure after my Maine return was finding myself at her restaurant one morning and being able to thank her in person.

Class field trip to the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm.

Jade, my adventurous, cosmopolitan classmate from Singapore, requires a big time shout out for being a total rock throughout. She became a great co-conspirator in the kitchen, and general instigator/enabler in all kinds of food and art-related experiences NYC had to offer that I wouldn't have sought on my own. So pleased this woman will be taking the city by storm again, this time as a Masters candidate in the NYU Food Studies program.

Jade and I on Long Island, right after I met the first oyster I ever loved.

I learned all kinds of lessons, intentional/unintentional, while working under a veritable army of formidably talented chef instructors. That said, one in particular had a profound effect on me: it was Chef Sixto's excellent guidance through our charcuterie unit was surpassed in his generosity and willingness to spend the extra time at the end of class teaching us how to hot smoke the breasts off the wild duck he'd hunted near his home in New Jersey. (I still haven't made his Field and Stream venison sausage recipe yet, but one of these days...)

Sixto Alonso in his element.

I think between his influence and Chef Janet's expert cutting instruction, my future in meat was etched in stone.

Carving the roast beast.

The week I spent at Blue Hill at Stone Barns was also hugely positive and formative. The energy of that place is really beautiful, in the way that only places that can embrace their own brand of chaos will be. Our immersion there was such a thoughtful, special concentration of everything we'd learned up to that point, and felt like such a natural return to considering the farm behind the food in developing a cooking ethic as a culinary student.

The Blue Hill at Stone Barns parsnip altar/dinner interlude.

Really, at this distance I can roundly view and appreciate my formal culinary education. In two weeks I'll be headed back down to New York, after nearly a year; I'll walk the stage at Carnegie Hall and formally acknowledge that I did, in fact, give myself over to the process of becoming a better cook. I sure am glad I did. I'm a better good food advocate and educator for it!

Farm-to-Table C/O June '14 

Culinary School: the First 2+ Weeks

A quick overview of the ups and downs thus far.

Most enjoyable days: 

• stocks - seriously, making stocks is pretty much nirvana-status contentment. 
• food preservation - duck confit, gravlax, preserved lemons, and brandade, the light fluffy salted cod spread descended directly from the heavens.
• fried potatoes - enough said.

Days that required extreme decompression (read - naps) immediately after class: salads (seriously though), soups, sauces. All dishes bearing the reminder that improvement will come, with time. 

It’s pretty much unfathomable to be reminded that I’m halfway through my first level of culinary school. First of all, it feels like I’ve been here 6 months. Which happens to be the actual length of my program. It's partly because of the breadth of material we’ve covered so far: soups and fish and salads and sauces and stocks and potatoes and preserved foods, as well as knife skills, equipment usage, presentation, kitchen hierarchies and organization, product identification, chemistry. That’s right, chemistry. And a whooooole lot of french vocabulary. 

The time warp I’m finding myself in is also a result of the class bonding that’s occurred in the couple of short weeks. Turns out, when you spend 30 hours a week with the same 13 people you get friendly pretty fast. Though most (but not all) of us were drawn by the Farm-to-Table angle in one way or another, it seems to me that our class as a unit is extremely diverse, in a totalizing sense. Finding out what brought my fellow classmates to working with food is utterly fascinating. While our backgrounds and lenses can vary pretty wildly, the one thing that comes to the fore in every conversation I’ve had that's landed in the “why food?” arena is the same visceral undercurrent: “I love to cook.” 

Guiding us along are two highly experienced chef-educators: Chef April, a former “Chopped” contestant, and Chef Veronica, who trained and worked in high-end professional French restaurants for 30 years. The word “passion” gets thrown around a lot in reference to chefs and cooking - there’s an appreciation for process, the history, the tradition, and, with all these as a foundation, the opportunity for innovation that all come to a head in what Chef V refers to as “alchemy” in both the professional and educational kitchen. Both of our chef instructors also have backgrounds in the arts; both fields, arguably, have an alchemic element to them.

It’s extremely clear even this early on that its equally important for us to learn our ingredients backwards and forwards, as well as the reasons for using the techniques we learn, in order to master them. Those techniques, by the way, are highly “classical” in the sense that they are capital-F French and often originated a few hundred years or so ago, thus also involving doing a lot of dirty work by hand. Machinated shortcuts are not much of a “thing” in culinary school, and our chefs, trained in the classical style, are teaching us extremely old-school kitchen skills. 

Between the pared down, history-steeped  nature of classic French culinary education and the farm-to-table addenda, it's easy to locate a kinship with a back-to-the-land ethic that translates really nicely through our in-kitchen and out-of-kitchen experiences. This week, we visited the NYC Greenmarket and chatted with both a local farmer and a chef about the evolution of their relationship to each other via the market. In January we’re visiting Blue Hill Farm to get some exposure to their particular F2T approach as a preamble to our week out there at the end of the program, as well as Mast Brothers to learn about chocolate, which I’m so obscenely excited about I can’t think straight. 

All this is to say that both the community building and information inundation in levels 1 and 2 (of 6) at the ICC is definitely at a maximum. We have written tests - frequently - and biweekly evaluations from our lead instructor, as well as a comprehensive practical at the end of each level. Studying and testing may not be totally unfamiliar territory, but practicing peeling potatoes into tiny footballs (tournage) and cutting carrots into 1 cm cubes (brunoise) for several hours a week outside of class is definitely venturing into unexplored territory. 

To be honest, I haven’t adapted as quickly as I hoped I would. Kitchen etiquette, multitasking, active use of my peripheral vision to monitor the kitchen activity around me, speed and confidence with my equipment, and even just maintaining my knives properly are all practices I’m adjusting to pretty clumsily. But I’m still gripped by the whole thing, and I’ve been assured by my instructors that though not progressing at the inhuman pace of my dreams I’m right where I ought to be. And if there's one thing I've learned so far, its that what chef says, goes.

"Christmas Around the World" family meal last week (ICC Facebook)

Joining the Chef's Table Part 1: One Year Ago

Practically a year ago to the day, I unwittingly stepped into a kitchen that brought me precisely to the spectacular undertaking to which I am fully relinquishing the next six months - life as a culinary student at the International Culinary Center’s Farm-to-Table program. 

That kitchen belonged to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant located on the campus of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY. Blue Hill is widely lauded as one of the most innovative and aspirational farm-to-table establishments pretty much anywhere. The day I found myself there I was attending a rescheduled Whole Animal Butchery workshop, one among a plethora of educational offerings at the National Young Farmers Conference, an opportunity for 200 new and hopeful farmers and agricultural advocates to come together for resource exchange, inspiration and education at Stone Barns each year. The “rescheduled” detail is a significant one; the workshop was one of the conference’s most popular and required pre-registration, but because of the changed time there were conflicts that encouraged some people to opt out last minute. En route to the workshop I took a pit stop to commune with some pigs rooting around for acorns in the soil of a nearby field. On arriving, even though I was late, the smaller crowd allowed me to snag a seat right at the front of the room. 

2012 NYFC Whole Animal Butchery Workshop at Stone Barns. That's me on the right! 

(From NYTimes.com)

It's difficult to explain the effect that watching Jose Morquecha, Blue Hill’s master butcher, carve up a half pig into perfect, precise cuts of raw muscle and fat had on me. I’ve tried to put words to it again and again, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is to say that I had this unprecedented, visceral desire to get my hands in that pig. Adam Kaye, Blue Hill’s Vice President of Culinary Affairs who started out as the restaurant’s meat cook, narrated the process Jose played out, describing how each part that was pulled away from the carcass might be cooked in their kitchen and the kinds of dishes it might be incorporated into. I listened and took painfully meticulous notes, but the proof was in the visual: the realization that I was going to learn to do what I was seeing was basically instantaneous.

My NYFC attendance was subsidized by a scholarship that I qualified for in part because of my status as a FoodCorps Service Member living on a modest Americorps stipend (more about FoodCorps later), and because I had pretty significant travel costs to cover as a result of coming all the way from Maine. The three other scholarship recipients I shared a hotel room with - two other FoodCorps members coming from Mississippi and a FarmCorps member from Colorado - and I had become fast friends over the weekend, and when we all convened for dinner that night in nearby Tarrytown I couldn’t shut up about the porcine miracle I’d witnessed earlier that day. I also distinctly remember ordering pork belly in celebration. 

Informational overload was part and parcel of the conference experience, and among the pamphlets and info sheets I accrued over the course of the weekend was one with details about the ICC’s new Farm-to-Table program. Blue Hill’s Executive Chef, Dan Barber, was a graduate of the Classic French Culinary program when the school existed under a different name, the French Culinary Institute. He designed the farm-to-table component of the program, which included a week in the Blue Hill kitchen and on the farm at Stone Barns. Culinary school wasn’t even on my radar as a conceivable next step at that point. But over the course of the year, in the midst of food-based education projects and a cascade of professional development activities focused around meat, all informed by that singular workshop experience, it became the inevitable next step. 

Now a week and a half into my culinary school adventure (I’m in the midst of preparing for our first test tomorrow), it’s pretty wild to look back to last December and revisit that first glimmer of my present trajectory - advocating healthy community development through cooking great food. I’m hoping to get a decent camera soon (ATTN Santa!) to better record my progress over the next six months as I’m immersed in the “to” of farm-to-table/nose-to-tail/bean-to-brew/cacao-to-chocolate/etc. In the meantime, check out my classmates Amanda and Lauren’s blogs for pictures and more details about the beginning of our collective foray into the educational kitchen. 

As Chef Alain says when he strolls into our class every so often: joyeux cuisine (happy cooking)!

Home:Tree

From Colossal:

"Photographer Marianne Kjølner snapped this pair of photographs of a bizarre tree in Denmark. Of the photo she says:

This old pink house is situated at the old dunes, a few hundred meters from the west coast, a very windy place were there isn’t much that can grow. So the tree can only grow where it has shelter. It has looked this way always.

I can’t help but think the tree might have had some helping human hands, but perhaps nature really is this awesome."

on shaping something enduring and sustaining

perfect songs, sung perfectly

Scholarly pursuits, at least for now, have ended. I'm in the sweet spot: between being an undergraduate student - the last socially mandatory educational rite, as far as most of us are concerned - and reaching the point where it becomes imperative to bring some definition to the terms of a post-collegiate reality. Many people have assured me that this, the initial post-grad limbo, was the most frightening period of their lives, but that they felt better about it once suitably terrified, or annoyed, or bored, or otherwise spurred into some sort of action that seemed to move them definitively out of it. 10 days in - after a deep tissue massage, quality time with meine mutter, and several excellent meals both of the homemade and professionally-prepared variety - I'm holding up just fine.