Confetti Bean Salad can feed a crowd

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Confetti Bean Salad can feed a crowd

As I used a wooden spoon to mix up a big bowl full of bright-colored ingredients for bean salad, I thought of what my mom would say if she was with me. “This is the cat’s meow.” She would say that when something impressed her with its ease and convenience.

When I attended a meeting hosted by my friend, Pat, a couple of weeks ago, she served a bean salad which was inspired by something similar she’d eaten at The Village Fish Market in Punta Gorda, Fla.

She emailed a list of the ingredients she had tossed together. No measurements were included. That’s part of the appeal of Confetti Bean Salad. You can do your own thing, adding more or less of any of the beans or vegetables.

If you haven’t tried edamame (eh-dah-MAH-may) yet, you will enjoy the buttery, nutty flavor and crisp texture of this soy bean that looks like a little lima bean. Edamame contains all of the amino acids essential for human health, making it a complete protein and a good meat alternative. Most grocery stores carry shelled edamame in their freezer cases. Purchasing edamame in the pod will add a lot of prep time to this bean salad. Edamame must always be cooked for a few minutes before it can be eaten.

The beans and vegetables can be mixed up a few days before you plan to serve the salad and stored in the refrigerator. Early in the day you plan to eat Confetti Bean Salad, toss it all up with some Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette and put it back in the refrigerator so the salad ingredients can soak up the Asian flavors. Pat uses a purchased bottle of sesame soy ginger dressing. It takes just minutes to mix up your own Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette. You’ll know exactly what’s in it and if you have any left over, it makes a tasty marinade for chicken, pork or tofu.

Grape tomatoes and dried cranberries get mixed into the salad just before serving.

If my dad was around to see the huge bowl of Confetti Bean Salad, I know what he would say. “Whoa, that’s enough to feed an army.” He said that often. My mom’s motto in the kitchen was “Better to make too much than not enough.”

The healthful salad won’t feed an army, but it will feed a crowd at summer picnics, family reunions and wedding showers.

Pull out the biggest bowl you can find and make space in your refrigerator. Pour yourself a glass of iced tea or lemonade and sip as you chop vegetables and drain a few cans of beans and corn. Shake up a jar of homemade Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette. You’ll wind up with a meal of protein, fiber, antioxidants and lots of vitamins with plenty to share. Easy.

Confetti Bean Salad really is the cat’s meow.

Confetti Bean Salad
1 (12-ounce) bag frozen, shelled edamame
1 (15-ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 (15-ounce) can cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
1 (15-ounce) can whole kernel corn, rinsed and drained
1/2 of a red bell pepper, chopped
1/2 of a yellow bell pepper, chopped
1/2 of an orange bell pepper, chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, minced
1 bunch green onions, chopped
1 rib of celery, chopped
1 cup chopped jicama
1 cup chopped zucchini
1 cup chopped sugar snap peas
1 cup chopped seedless (English) cucumber
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 pint grape tomatoes, quartered
Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette (recipe below)

Cook shelled edamame according to directions on package. Place in large mixing bowl. Add remaining ingredients, except for dried cranberries, tomatoes and Vinaigrette. Cover bowl and refrigerate. Four to eight hours before serving, add enough Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette to lightly coat salad ingredients, tossing gently. Return covered salad to refrigerator. Just before serving, add tomatoes and dried cranberries. Taste and season with salt and pepper, if necessary. Makes enough to feed a crowd.

Recipe adapted from Pat Sanford’s original concoction.

Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger root
1/2 cup canola oil
1/4 cup toasted sesame oil
1/3 cup unseasoned rice vinegar
5 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons honey

Put all ingredients into a large jar and shake until honey dissolves and ingredients are well blended. Store in refrigerator. Shake before using. Makes about 1 cup.

Tips from the cook

–If you don’t have room for a large mixing bowl in your refrigerator, the undressed salad can be stored in a 1 gallon zip-top plastic bag.

–You decide whether or not to include the jalapeno seeds in the salad. I taste a bit of jalapeno to see how much heat it has and then decide whether or not to use the seeds.

–The original ingredient list included chopped apple. I used sweet, juicy and crunchy chopped jicama instead.


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Is the food revolution just a great big fat lie?

Is the food revolution just a great big fat lie?

In the second half of the 20th century, western consumers were treated to an unprecedented array of high-quality, low-cost food. Monochrome national cuisines were spiced up by immigration, globalisation and holidays abroad. Increased disposable income turned a restaurant pilgrimage into an everyday jaunt. You could have pain au chocolat for breakfast, a Mexican tortilla wrap for lunch and a Thai green curry for dinner. Farmers’ markets popularised heritage tomatoes. Celebrity chefs took up residence in gastropubs.



  1. Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions

  2. by

    Eliane Glaser


  3. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Now, I think it’s great that in recent years we’ve woken up to the wonders of fresh, local, home-cooked food. But this new food culture is not quite as it seems. The spectacle of Jamie Oliver, a cheeky lad from Essex, tearing basil leaves on to spaghetti was in some ways a step forward for equality, but in other ways it was a sneaky step back – because it made it that much harder to notice the dodgy doublespeak that has come to dominate the way we talk about food.

A lot of celebrity chefs claim to be just like you and me. “I lead a normal life,” Nigella Lawson writes in the introduction to Nigella Express, “the sort we all share.” So that means living in a £12m house in Chelsea and sharing an estimated fortune of more than £100m with her husband, the art collector Charles Saatchi? Or there’s this, from Jamie At Home: “Like most people these days, with a busy family life and a hectic working schedule, I began to struggle with finding a balance between the two. I seem to have evened things up a bit now, and it’s all thanks to my veg garden.” That would be the veg garden that enjoys the attentions of a personal gardener.

Reality, normality, hard-working families: this is the mantra of the multimillionaire celebrity chef. But the recipes have trouble sticking to it because, despite the homely trappings, they are essentially restaurant food. Take Nigella Express, the book of the TV show promising “fabulous fast food and incredible short cuts”. The recipes are quick to make, it’s true, but look at the ingredients: mirin, poussin, pomegranate juice, quail, harissa, sake, garlic oil. It would take an afternoon to track them down. I have for many years wrestled with the matter of fresh herbs. They improve simple dishes no end: most of Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals rely on them. But I always find myself rummaging impatiently through a supermarket’s highly selective herb selection to find the one I need.

Every time I’ve tried to grow them on my balcony, they’ve lasted about three weeks. My shrivelled, dried-up herbs seem to me to encapsulate a broader problem, because they are the very baseline minimum of the grow-your-own business, the entry-level stage. And even that doesn’t seem to work. The glossy new food revolution that’s advertised on our TV screens and in our beautiful recipe books purports to be democratic, accessible, available to everyone, but it’s not. I’m fine with Heston Blumenthal‘s baroque creations, his frog’s leg blancmange and exploding cakes. He is not for a minute suggesting that we should try those at home. But if the others really wanted to come up with a quick and easy cookbook for “hard-working families”, they’d write one that used only the kind of ingredients I can buy at my local Costcutter: potatoes, tomatoes, onions and carrots.

Yet there’s an obsessive emphasis on teachability, on getting your hands dirty, on This Will Change Your Life. I remember recipe programmes on TV in the 80s that paused, politely, while you grabbed a pen to note down the ingredients list. Now, supposedly real-time cookalongs are a frantic marathon, and full ingredients lists are to be found only in the accompanying book, priced at £19.99. And to me it’s extraordinary that celebrity cookbooks rarely announce their gastronomical allegiance. A lot of celebrity cheffery blends into a modern European, pan-Asian melange. It’s beyond fusion. It’s category meltdown. I find it odd that, for all today’s flag-waving about the wonder of different cuisines, our modern chefs are so coy about their culinary brand. And for all the apparent kitchen-sink empowerment, I also find it somewhat patronising. These are often connoisseurs who’ve been trained to distinguish Spanish from Catalan tapas, or trace the genealogy of haute cuisine; but don’t you worry your little heads about such finer points, they seem to say. It’s the food equivalent of the modern post-ideological politician who gives speeches saying right and left are over, but back at Oxford made damned sure he mastered the taxonomy of political theory. Today’s TV chefs claim to be making food accessible, but they don’t give ordinary people the vocabulary, the building blocks, to get a handle on food. Just as art schools today don’t teach much drawing, there’s no going back to food-type basics, techniques or the elements of different cuisines: no culinary periodic table.

Now, you might be thinking, what’s wrong with a little recreational food porn? I’m not averse to a bit of Nigella myself. But while these fantasies may be fun, they are not harmless. We lap them up, but they ultimately leave us still more famished. The more time we spend watching cookery programmes and reading restaurant reviews, the less we spend actually cooking. According to the Food Standards Agency, in 1980 the average meal took an hour to prepare. By 1999, it took 20 minutes. And a 2002 Mintel report found that only one in five viewers tries a recipe after watching a chef on TV and only one in seven buys new ingredients. A large proportion of apparently handmade gastropub meals are actually trucked in by catering giants such as Brakes or 3663, which provide microwaveable or boil-in-the bag versions of old-fashioned rustic classics such as venison and pork sausages “infused with sloe gin and served in a rich and sweet bramble berry and red wine sauce”, or, for dessert, an “apricot, apple and stem ginger crumble… heaped with hand-placed golden oaty all-butter crumble”. The “authenticity” of these dishes is a fib impossible to spot. We may be aware there’s been a huge rise in sales of ready meals, but now they’re being disguised as home cooking.

My problem is our refusal to admit that reality is obscured by illusory ideals. It’s not only that Jamie employs around 5,000 staff and is reportedly worth £65m, it’s that he foregrounds his lovely-jubbly persona and rapport with dinner ladies. TV executives try to get around these contradictions with the help of that weasel word “aspirational”. But it just doesn’t wash. This is not just food. This is 100% mock-authentic, mock-egalitarian class hierarchy. Supermarket labels such as “organic”, “finest” and “taste the difference”, or “economy”, “basics” and “everyday”, are euphemisms for food apartheid. I am addicted to the genius TV series Come Dine With Me, but the butt of the jokes are the wannabe foodies in Luton who serve starters of “microsalads”, main courses in “towers” on large square plates and desserts that always come as a trio. Jamie’s Ministry Of Food claimed to bring home cooking to the ordinary British family, but the series was riddled with undeclared class dynamics. Those mothers who passed chips through the fence at Rawmarsh school in South Yorkshire after it started serving Jamie’s healthy school dinners were protesting against paternalism. As one of them explained, “This isn’t about us against healthy food, like they’ve been saying… It’s about how people change the rules.” I believe Jamie’s gastronomical good intentions, but his outrage at seeing mothers bottle-feeding Coke to their babies has a class dimension that is never explicitly addressed. Because he himself doesn’t sound posh, there’s a sense that if he’s made it good, so can they. Jamie raises the stakes for middle-class fans by presenting expensive, cheffy food as barrow-boy basics (“Tear up yer tarragon, drizzle yer top-quality olive oil”). And he raises the stakes for working-class mums by implying that there’s no excuse for not pulling themselves up by their culinary bootstraps.

It’s not only class inequality that lurks beneath the new food culture, it’s gender inequality, too. When Jamie debuted on British TV as The Naked Chef in 1999, he was credited with encouraging the most male-chauvinistic of oafs to try their hand at a fairy cake. And indeed, this has come to pass in some households. But very often it’s the men who are flambéeing the bananas at the Saturday night dinner party, while the women are plotting how to stretch the Sunday roast leftovers into day three. Female TV chefs are filmed in a cosy kitchen, male chefs in some kind of rustic outhouse or on a beach with an improvised barbecue. In 2010, Waitrose spent £10m on an advertising campaign featuring two people: “Britain’s best chef” and “Our best-loved cook”. No prizes for guessing which was Heston Blumenthal and which was Delia Smith.

It’s a new backlash sexism, I believe, that accounts for the fact that so many famous chefs’ wives are prominent foodies themselves. Their role is to absorb the feminine connotations of their husbands’ cookery. “The trick to Christmas,” says Tesco Magazine Celebrity Mum of the Year Tana Ramsay, being interviewed for said magazine, “is making things in advance as much as you can, such as chopping the vegetables on Christmas Eve.” After the Ramsays have opened their stockings, the article continues, “Gordon and son Jack, eight, whizz off to Claridge’s to wish his restaurant staff a merry Christmas. At home, under Tana’s watchful guidance, daughters Megan, 10, Holly, eight, and Matilda, six, help their mum keep an eye on the turkey.”

The end result is that celebrity chefs and their wives – Tana’n'Gordon, Jamie’n'Jools – end up modelling in the media traditional gender stereotypes that undercut the right-on rhetoric. Take Jools Oliver’s Minus Nine To One: The Diary Of An Honest Mum, which contains children’s recipes: “A few months before our wedding,” she confides in the book, “Jamie asked if I wanted to become his PA. I agreed, as it meant that I would get to see him every day and I thought it would be fun, plus I was never really a career girl anyway. (Who was I kidding? I wanted the babies, the baking and the roses round the door.)” For all the metrosexual class-busting bluster, it’s this message we are left with.

My local Waitrose offers a choice of four different kinds of salmon fillet: standard fillets; “Wild Alaskan Sockeye” fillets, “caught in Alaska’s well managed, sustainable fishery, certified to Marine Stewardship Council standard”; “Select Farm” fillets from “dedicated farms in locations carefully chosen for their highly oxygenated, fast-flowing tidal waters”; and “Duchy from Waitrose Organic” fillets, “organically farmed to Soil Association standards on Shetland and Orkney”. It’s a classic example of totally uninformative information. If I were a salmon, I think I’d appreciate highly oxygenated, fast-flowing tidal waters; so how come Duchy from Waitrose organic salmon don’t get to swim in them? And how come wild Alaskan salmon are caught in a fishery? That shelf of salmon fillets appeared to offer a diverse range of tasty, affordable, environmentally-friendly fish. But the reality of which kind of fillet would be best for me, best for the fishermen and best for our oceans is simply impossible to make out.

The same goes for seasonal fruit and veg. Seasonality is a virtue heavily promoted by Jamie and the rest. It has the advantage of being an enjoyable virtue, too: I love summery, flavoursome tomatoes and sweet blackberries. But if I go to the supermarket or the local grocer, it’s just not that easy to work out what’s on nature’s menu.

Then there’s organic food. The tech spec of organic food – the fact that nothing synthetic is used in its production – suggests flavour, nutritional value and agricultural ethics. But it has become a devalued, mass-market symbolic indicator. Organics are promoted as both available to all and a luxury treat, but often they’re more expensive and they taste the same. And they’re not even necessarily good for the environment, either. Increasing demand has led to organic meat being raised on vast industrial feed lots, and the scarcity of organic ingredients means they are flown around the world. Research sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs showed that the production of a litre of organic milk requires 80% more land than conventional milk. And that organically reared cows burp and fart twice as much methane as conventionally reared cattle, which would be amusing if it weren’t for the fact that methane is 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Overall, the research on environmental impact is contradictory, which only makes it harder for consumers to work out what to do. The marketing of organic food taps into our innermost drives and ambitions: to be good, to be good to ourselves, to be worth the extra cost. But the only people for whom it definitively seems to be good are managers of multinationals. Ben Jerry’s is owned by Unilever. Coca-Cola has a majority stake in Innocent smoothies. Back To Nature is owned by Kraft. Supermarkets may display their organic food in rustic-looking baskets, and Starbucks may camouflage its corporate brand under local “community personality”, but farmers in the developing world suffer from diminishing profits, and our soil, sea and atmosphere are ever more degraded.

The food industry successfully hides its influence behind persuasive talk of the power of the individual. The industry and government alike argue that it is consumer choice and consumer demand that really drive change. Yet a Royal Society report published in 2010 revealed that, although consumers consulted 10 years earlier about whether they wanted GM food had responded with a resounding “no”, GM has nevertheless thoroughly penetrated the food supply in the form of soya animal feed and cooking oil. The notion that consumers are in control of the food industry is a myth, as is the notion that they are at liberty to make well-informed decisions about the food they buy. One of the Cornish pasty company Ginsters‘ favourite slogans is “Keeping it local”. But its pasties are taken on a 250-mile round trip by lorry before being delivered to the Tesco next door to its Cornwall plant (they insist it’s more efficient that way). A slice of Cranks seeded farmhouse bread has twice the amount of salt as a packet of Walkers ready-salted crisps. McVitie’s light digestive biscuits have less fat than McVitie’s original digestives, but more sugar, so the difference between the biscuits is just four calories. But then a 2009 article in the New Scientist pointed out that even calorie labelling is unhelpful, because the body digests different foods at different rates. “Consumers aren’t stupid” is the stock industry response when challenged on their campaigns of misdirection. Yet in her 2010 book Green Gone Wrong, the environmental writer Heather Rogers quotes the director of an organic conglomerate noting that “most consumers are simple minds [who] look at the label and nothing else”. But with labels that are this misleading, intelligence is a red herring.

The industry insists that in selling the sugary, fatty, salty foods that are contributing so much to rates of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, it is simply giving people what they want. In reality, of course, the industry doesn’t just respond to desires: it shapes them. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein talk a lot about food choices in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth And Happiness. Their proposals, which include placing fruit at eye level in school canteens, are an acknowledgment that people aren’t very good at choosing healthy food. They’re an acknowledgment, in other words, of the fallacy of the much-trumpeted notion of the rational consumer, although the governments that are in thrall to the politics of nudge seem untroubled by this contradiction. For all their good intentions, Thaler and Sunstein underestimate just how energetically the food industry is working to prevent healthy choices. Often what is needed is some basic information, some rudimentary transparency, rather than a nudge. A traffic light system for labelling healthy and unhealthy food would be a start – research shows it’s the most helpful one for consumers – but that would mean giving consumers real power to choose.

One of Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley‘s first moves in office was to promise that “government and FSA promotion of traffic light labelling will stop” as part of a big shake-up of public health. Out went regulation, legislation and “top-down lectures”; in came voluntary corporate action and individual responsibility. Lansley set up a series of “responsibility deal networks” designed to get public health officials to “work with business”. The idea of McDonald’s, KFC and Pepsi designing public health policy outdoes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And one of the networks, in charge of “public health behaviour change”, was to work with the government’s newly set up “nudge unit”. There it is again, the real payoff of nudge policy: to nudge us into buying from big corporations.

There’s a huge denial of inequality here: between consumers and corporations, and also between different kinds of consumers. In reality, there is one group of shoppers that can afford to be ethical and another that can’t. The fact is, people on low incomes are more likely to buy food that is bad for them and bad for the environment. But corporations and governments take advantage of the taboos of false consciousness and inequality in order to protest that they are simply letting consumers choose what they want. We are labouring under the delusion not only of freely available, low-cost, great-quality, nutritional food, but also of a level playing field of money, power and information.

The fact that we tolerate this delusional state of affairs does not speak well of us. It makes us seem passive, blinkered and bovine. The cheapness of food has provided us with a false sense of security, allowing us to believe we’re getting the best of both worlds. But food prices are rising. In some ways that will make food choices more conscious, and more consciously political. But there’s also a danger that we’ll focus more attention on price alone. It’s not really our fault. It’s hard to make good choices when the marketing of products is so opaque and befuddling. It’s hard to detect the silent promotion of inequality by mainstream food culture when the headlines are all about democratisation and demographic change. But we are like orally fixated toddlers, transfixed by Nigella’s cupcakey bosom, Starbucks’ vanilla frappuccinos and Michelin-starred creamy, frothy sauces. We need to wise up to the rhetoric of food and start tasting reality.

This is an edited extract from Get Real: How To Tell It Like It Is In A World of Illusions, by Eliane Glaser, published by Fourth Estate at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, including mainland UK pp, visit the Guardian Bookshop.

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students reclaim wasted food to feed the needy

Kent State students reclaim wasted food to feed the needy

KENT: In a freezer in the kitchen of Beall Hall at Kent State University, dozens of deep-dish cheesecakes are stacked up, waiting to be thawed and served as dessert.

They were prepared by students taking a baking course as part of the university’s hospitality management major. What makes these cakes so special is that until very recently, they would have been thrown in the trash, not saved in the freezer.

That was until a fateful spring break trip in 2010, which sent staff and students home with the kernel of an idea: Reclaiming food from across the campus, saving it from being wasted and putting it to good use.

The Campus Kitchens Project at Kent State will soon mark its first anniversary. In just one year, student volunteers have saved nearly 14,000 pounds of fresh, edible food from the trash and have repurposed it into nearly 10,000 meals to feed the needy in Portage County.

The spring break trip in 2010 wasn’t your typical Daytona Beach run, with students working on their tans and another case of beer. This group of students headed to Washington, D.C., where they toured the D.C. Central Kitchen and met its founder, Robert Eggers. The nonprofit organization turns leftover food into meals for the needy and offers job training to once homeless and hungry individuals.

The Campus Kitchens Project is a national program spawned from the D.C. Central Kitchen, which encourages campus-based operations. So far, 31 universities have opened Campus Kitchens, but Kent’s is the only one in Ohio.

Anna Gosky, senior special assistant for quality initiatives and curriculum at KSU, was on that spring break trip and was so impressed with what she saw, she came home determined to start a Campus Kitchen at the university. It took a year of planning, but by February 2011, the Campus Kitchen found its home, staffed with eager student volunteers and blessed with the kitchen space from a dining hall no longer in use. Gosky and chef Ed Hoegler of KSU’s Hospital Management Program supervise the project.

Over the past year, student volunteers have become expert scavengers, culling leftover food from campus food service, sporting events and the hospitality management program, in which students routinely produce a wide variety of baked goods and other food in class. Until the kitchen started claiming the food, much of it had gone to waste.

Kitchen manager Lisa Hofer, a senior hospitality management major from Pittsburgh, said when students take baking classes, professors always give them the chance to take home their projects. Some students do, most don’t. Food that wasn’t taken home was tossed in the trash. No longer.

Hofer and other volunteers are happy to claim them, stocking the freezer with cakes, pies, bread and other items.

Food comes from a variety of other sources, including local restaurants, farms, farmers markets, and the public. Farms have allowed students to go into their fields in the summer to pick crops for use in the kitchen, and a prize-winning hog from the county fair was donated, resulting in a freezer filled with pork chops and loin roasts.

After less than a year in operation, the kitchen already is gathering accolades. It received an Excellence in Operations Award at the National Campus Kitchens Project’s annual conference last fall, one of just three schools to receive the recognition.

The Campus Kitchen project has given students a place to volunteer their time, and has helped extend the resources of Family & Community Services Inc. of Kent, which operates hot meal programs at Kent Social Services and the Center of Hope in Ravenna. Each week, students use the food they have reclaimed to prepare the hot meals served every Thursday at the two locations.

Ann Marie Mann, director of community outreach services for Family & Community Services, can’t say enough about what the Campus Kitchen means to the Kent-Ravenna community, where the need for hot meals has increased 20 percent in the last year.

“They have been a fabulous partner,” she said. “More and more working-class families are coming in.”

Because of the extra resources provided by the student kitchen, the hot meal sites were actually able to be open to serve Christmas Eve dinners this year, Mann said.

Each week, the student volunteers gather in the kitchen of Beall Hall to wash, chop, cook and package enough meals to feed about 200 needy Portage County residents.

Hofer, who holds one of just two paid positions at the Campus Kitchen, is responsible for keeping track of what food is in the kitchen’s pantry and freezer, and deciding from week to week how the resources will be used to create the next meal.

The job, Hofer explained, is not much different from what everyone does when making dinner at home. She looks in the cupboards, the refrigerator and the freezer, considers what she has and decides how to best put it together for a well-balanced meal. However, it is made easier by the use of Google Docs, which allows her to check on inventory from her computer any time of day or night.

Sometimes volunteers will present an idea for a meal that they want to supervise, and Hofer is happy for the help, noting that her strengths are in operations management, not recipe creation.

One recent Wednesday, students were putting together tuna-zucchini patties, pasta with Alfredo sauce, tuna and peas and tossed salad, the recipes for which had been developed by hospitality management student Jessica Kalar.

Kalar, a Mentor native, said the recipes were based on what was available — plenty of tuna — and what she thought would be tasty. Her tuna patties with grated zucchini were a riff on crab cakes. The meal also would include potato rice soup and sweet potato pies made in culinary classes.

Beyond making meals, Gosky said students are involved at the centers where the food is served, offering cooking classes and nutrition advice on how to prepare healthful meals at home, and how-to videos on using kitchen equipment and the importance of good sanitation.

Kalar said her work in the campus kitchen has helped her to realize that she likes running a kitchen best, and hopes someday to find a job as a sous chef in a restaurant, not an executive chef, so that she can use her skills in a more hands-on way. She also appreciates how the volunteer work the students do is “empowering the less fortunate” to be able to cook and better care for themselves.

Hofer said the kitchen is a good opportunity for hospitality management students to use and improve their skills, so they do their best to make meals that are restaurant-worthy, and presented with the same kind of garnish, flair and creativity. Soup is never served right from the can, but rather is used as a basis for sauces or other dishes that require a better stretching of the volunteers’ culinary skills. Some recent meals included stuffed pork chops and salmon with lemon caper sauce.

Mann said the extra effort is appreciated. “Our clients wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to try such a variety of foods that we receive,” she said.
Donated canned goods that can’t be used to create dinners are given to Family & Community Services for the grocery bags they give away, or are used for food backpacks given to needy schoolchildren on Fridays to ensure they will have something to eat over the weekend.

The kitchen volunteers come from majors beyond hospitality management— nursing, accounting and nutrition and dietetics. In its first year, more than 420 students have volunteered. Gosky said many professors try to incorporate volunteer service into their curriculums and will make students aware of the kitchen as an opportunity.

There are benefits to the students too, Gosky noted. Many of them have never picked up a knife before, so they learn valuable life skills about how to cook, she said.

Gosky said the kitchen is willing to accept food from many sources, including grocery stores, restaurants, banquet halls, farmers markets, farms, and other food retailers. All donations are covered by the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects donors from legal liability when donating food to charity.

If more food is donated, students eventually may be able to cook an additional day each week for the centers.

The students also appreciate donations of large, disposable aluminum pans, which they use to pack the cooked meals and transport them to the meal sites.
Anyone who wishes to donate can contact Gosky at 330-672-8004
Lisa Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or at labraham@thebeaconjournal.com.

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Food - Fresh fruits, veggies out of reach for many East Central Indiana residents

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Food – Fresh fruits, veggies out of reach for many East Central Indiana residents

MUNCIE — Eleven percent of Hoosiers in U.S. Rep. Mike Pence’s congressional district believe they don’t have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, according to Feeding Indiana’s Hungry, a nonprofit agency based in Indianapolis.

That number represents the highest percentage in the state, and increases to 11.5 percent when addressing families with children in the district.

“This is a problem because when families don’t have access to fresh produce — or if they believe they don’t — that affects their nutrition, their overall health and that of their children as well,” said Tameka Williams, a public health educator from Purdue Extension’s Delaware County office. “Their bodies can’t fight against illness without the nutrients from fresh food and produce and what they eat instead can lead to other health problems, such as obesity. This is certainly a problem.”

Based on information from the Food Research and Action Center’s report, “A half empty plate: Fruit and vegetable affordability and access challenges in America,” Indiana’s numbers are above the national average of 8.2 percent and East Central Indiana’s are significantly higher.

The report identified areas based on congressional districts as a way to compare across the nation, not as an indication of whether members of Congress work on feeding the hungry in their districts.

But the reason for the higher statistic in Indiana’s Sixth Congressional District is unknown to local food suppliers.

“I would guess the economy has something to do with it and the fact that all of us are seeing more people, and newer people, than ever before,” said Lois Rockhill, executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana, which distributes fresh food during its monthly tailgates. “I do know that this confirms the commitment we’ve made to supplying more fresh items to our pantries and the community. We’ll also see what more we can do.”

Finances are also an expected variable for local families.

Amber Scorch, a Muncie mother, is a member of one of the many families in Muncie with problems accessing fresh foods because of the cost.

When she shops for her family, fresh foods are often the first to go because she can purchase cheaper canned foods at grocery stores.

“My dollar goes a lot further when it’s canned or frozen
compared to fresh food,” she said. “I have to choose with the dollar if I want to feed my children all the food they need.”

Emily Bryant, executive director of Feeding Indiana’s Hungry, believes the study provides social service agencies with more data to prove what they may anecdotally know: People in the area are struggling.

What they do with that information is up to them.

“We’re working with state organizations to find better and more efficient ways to feed people in our state. We’re willing to work with anyone interested in doing the same,” Bryant said. “This is a problem we can fix in America. It’s about getting the food to the people who need it.”

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Food - Tiny desserts, bacon backlash shape 2011

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Food – Tiny desserts, bacon backlash shape 2011

(AP)  2011: The year I officially became the last American to still eat gluten.

Or did it just feel that way? Because though only a tiny fraction of Americans suffer sensitivities to this wheat protein, the multibillion dollar industry of foods, cookbooks and magazines touting their gluten-free cred this year would suggest an epidemic.

Didn’t notice? Perhaps you were too busy chugging raw milk, herding your backyard flock of chickens and hunting down nearby sources for heirloom vegetables, all popular pastimes buoyed by growing demand for so-called “local” foods — a market the government predicted this year would generate some $7 billion in sales.

And so went the year in food, a period marked by some unusual dietary dichotomies.

At the same time sharply rising food prices made it ever harder for American families to get dinner on the table, our nation was seized by an almost obsessive need to know just how many courses would be served at Prince William’s wedding. And how does one make that kooky chocolate biscuit groomsman cake?

At least our government was mindful of its food dollars, right? Accusations that the Justice Department spent $16 per muffin at a breakfast conference turned out to be false. They spent $16.80 for a continental breakfast of pastries, fruit, coffee, tea, juice and, of course, muffins. Wait a minute… Isn’t that what I get for free when I stay at a hotel?

Meanwhile, Congress apparently wants to send plenty of cash to the potato and pizza industries. For this was the year our politicians blocked efforts to limit french fries in school cafeterias and declared the tomato sauce on slabs of pizza the equivalent of a vegetable. Add a ketchup chaser and it’s practically a salad.

Maybe kids can get some healthy eating tips from Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam. This fall, the government gave cartoon characters a hall pass when it comes to pushing sugary cereals and similar foods, caving to food industry pressure while crafting guidelines aimed at toning down the marketing of junk food to kids.

But childhood obesity remained on Michelle Obama’s radar. The first lady spent 2011 forging alliances with restaurants to offer healthier foods, and even enticed Wal-Mart and other retailers to get more fresh and healthy items into regions where such foods are scarce.

Just don’t ask people where those ingredients fall on the food pyramid. Government health officials decided pyramids were too perplexing and scrapped them in favor of a new healthy eating icon, “My Plate” — a circle divided into different sections for fruits, vegetables, protein and grains.

Food safety also was a hot topic. Despite new regulations signed into law in January, the nation suffered its deadliest known outbreak of food-borne illness in more than 25 years when listeria-contaminated cantaloupes sickened 146 people in 28 states, killing 30 of them.

Worrisome obesity rates and food safety concerns didn’t slow America’s fetishizing of food. We continued to swoon over food trucks, the more esoteric the better, even using Twitter to track the movements of our favorite mobile eateries. Don’t have a truck cruising your ‘hood yet? Don’t worry, the moment has nearly passed.

Meanwhile, foodies struggled to crown a new “it” food. Bacon and cupcakes have had their moment. Ditto for offal and ramps. Macaroons are trying, but fussy French cookies are an unlikely contender in this country. Nutella wants it bad, but probably won’t quite get there. Meatballs are yummy, but it’s hard to get excited about a ball of meat.

Tiny desserts also don’t stand a chance, even — if not especially — with retailers pushing waffle iron-like countertop baking appliances for churning out small cupcakes, whoopee pies and cake pops. These devices were the chocolate fountains and turkey fryers of 2011. There will be lots of them under trees this year, all destined to be used once and never again.

Speaking of foods it’s hard to get excited about, what is up with kale? People were tripping over themselves to buy or bake kale chips this year. And now fast food chain Chick-fil-A is suing a Vermont man for selling T-shirts with the logo “eat more kale.” The company claims he is ripping off their ad slogan, “Eat Mor Chikin.”

However that is settled, I doubt even a wet T-shirt could get most Americans to embrace kale. Which means 2012 may well be a year in which foodies don’t have a star ingredient.

Oh, wait. We’re not supposed to call them foodies. They-who-gush-over-pretentious-foods this year decided they are too hip for that down market term. Some have started favoring culinarian. Really? My eyes hurt from rolling. And I pledge to continue using “foodie” with abandon.

And that wasn’t the only offensive term slung in 2011. Inspired by Alec Baldwin’s “Saturday Night Live” skit about a baker named Pete Schweddy, ice cream maker Ben Jerry’s released a new flavor called Schweddy Balls — vanilla ice cream studded with fudge-covered rum balls. Not everyone was amused and some grocers refused to stock it.

The food publishing world continued to bustle. Bon Appetit magazine got a new editor-in-chief, Adam Rapoport, as well as some heat for his decision to put a person — Gwyneth Paltrow — on the 55-year-old magazine’s cover for the first time in decades. Which puts Gwyneth in the same class as culinary icon James Beard. Plenty of foodies objected to that.

In books, Ferran Adria of Spain’s famed — and, as of July, closed — elBulli restaurant released “The Family Meal,” dedicated to the meals he fed his staff at his notoriously hard to get into eatery. And Nathan Myhrvold wooed the media — but few consumers — with his brainy 2,438-page, six-volume, 46-pound, $625 “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.”

Home cooks clearly had other priorities — starting the day off right. For the first time in a long time, the year’s No. 1 recipe search on Yahoo wasn’t chicken, but “breakfast.” Coming in at No. 5 was pancakes and French toast landed at No. 7. None of them had even made the top 10 in recent years.

And maybe that is telling.

Perhaps that is where we should look for our 2012 trendy “it” food. Breakfast. We could even have tiny gluten-free pancakes made in countertop cookers. Perhaps topped with kale.


Food Allergy with Bill & Sheila

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Cooking tips for Christmas

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Cooking tips for Christmas

This year serve a festive feast without fear of failure, writes Zoe Skewes.

Last year I spent more time in the kitchen than with my family. What can I do to make the day more enjoyable?

  • If you’re the lucky person hosting a large family for Christmas Day, taste‘s own Matt Preston says that the most important thing to remember is not to attempt anything you’ve never tried cooking before. “I’d much rather have a good roast chook on Christmas Day than an overcooked turkey or goose,” he says.
    “Christmas is more about the people you’re sharing the meal with than it is about sticking to tradition or having the best of everything.”
  • Think like a restaurant chef: practise mise en place, the art of doing as much prep as you can in advance. Wash, trim and peel the vegetables and chop herbs; mix up dressings and seafood sauces; measure out quantities for custard; and whip cream. Stackable takeaway containers are ideal for fridge and bench storage.
  • Wine and beer should be stored in eskies to maximise fridge space.
  • Setting the table is the obvious job to do in advance, but also make sure you gather your platters and serving utensils too. Use Post-it notes to label each platter with the dish to be served on it.

A whole ham is expensive. What can I do to ensure I prepare well and wow my guests?

  • If you’re buying your ham from a butcher, double check they source their hams from female pigs, which tend to have a thicker, sweeter fat, giving more flavour to the meat when it’s cooked. For couples or smaller families, consider smaller hams, which aren’t always on the bone but can still be made with Australian pork. Just check for an “Australian Pork” sticker on the label.
  • There’s no need to be scared off by the thought of glazing your own ham. It’s actually quite a simple process and is guaranteed to impress your guests. First, choose a ham with at least a 1.5cm-thick layer of fat. Carefully remove the skin and use a sharp knife to score the fat in a diamond pattern, about 1cm deep. Take care not to cut through to the meat as the fat shrinks during cooking and a deep cut may expose the meat below and it won’t look nearly as attractive. Stud the middle of each diamond with cloves to stop the fat lifting away from the ham during cooking.
  • If you’re looking for a twist on a traditional glazed ham, try an Asian glaze by combining 1/2 cup soy sauce and pure maple syrup, Chinese barbecue sauce, a few drops of red liquid food colouring, two crushed garlic cloves and five-spice powder. Brush over your ham, already scored and studded with whole cloves. Refrigerate overnight then bake in a 160C oven for 40 minutes until golden and glazed.

What do I do with all that leftover ham?

  • Everybody wants to know what to do with leftover ham and the ham bone. Both can be frozen for up to one month and can be used in soups, sandwiches and casseroles. They must be placed in airtight containers and thawing should be done in the fridge.
  • The trick to keeping your ham fresh after Christmas Day, Matt Preston says, is to keep it in an old cotton pillowcase that has been soaked in a mixture of three parts water to one part white vinegar. Resoak the pillowcase every few days or when it dries out. For post- Christmas ham leftovers, Matt’s favourite is a ham sandwich on white bread with English mustard.

I’ve got 20 people for lunch of prawns. What’s the quickest, easiest way to peel them?

  • The most simple way to serve prawns to your guests is to present them whole on a platter. But if you want to give your guests a helping hand by peeling them first, Mark Maric from Dish Bistro in Brisbane says the easiest way is to twist off the prawn head, hold it by the tail, and with your thumb, work your way under the shell, lifting the shell up and away from the body. Look for a discolouration on the back, which is the start of the digestive tract. To remove this, find the beginning and peel it away. Remove any remaining discolouration with the point of a knife.
  • To butterfly prawns for the barbecue, Mark says to hold the de-shelled prawn on a chopping board and use a knife to slice it in half lengthways from the head to the tail until you’ve almost, but not quite, cut it through. Flatten it out and pop in a pan, on a grill or barbecue, butterflied side down. Butterflying helps the meat to cook evenly.

What’s the best way to cook a turkey so it’s moist and succulent?

  • A large, golden-skinned turkey is still the most impressive centrepiece for a Christmas meal, says Brenton Hamdorf, retail operations manager at Gawler River Cattle Company in Adelaide. Brenton reckons that a 4kg bird will feed 15 to 20 people, with some leftovers.
  • Remember to allow enough time for the turkey to defrost. A 4-5kg bird can take three or four days to thaw.
  • Couscous or rice, combined with fresh sage, walnuts and dried cranberries, is a delicious alternative to bread-based turkey stuffing. Visit taste.com.au for recipes.
  • Brenton follows a general poultry rule of allowing 30 minutes per kilo in a 180C oven in cooking his turkey – so that 4kg turkey will take 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Cover the breast with foil for the first hour to help keep it moist. Rest the turkey for at least 15 minutes before carving.
  • Other tricks for preventing the turkey drying out are to brine the turkey first; insert butter between the skin and breast; or cook the bird breast side down (although this method means the turkey that’s brought to the table may not be picture-perfect).
  • Matt’s trick for making sure the turkey isn’t overcooked is to take it out of the oven about 15 minutes before it’s fully cooked and allowing it to finish cooking while the meat is resting out of the oven.
    “If you’re unsure about doing this, buy a meat thermometer, which is the best present any Christmas Day host can ask for,” he says.
  • Roast pork is a favourite at the Christmas table – especially if the crackling is puffed and crispy. The secret to this, says Brenton, is to make sure the skin is well dried. Leave uncovered in the fridge overnight, pat dry with a paper towel and rub with rock salt.
  • Making a large quantity of gravy just when the whole meal is about to be served is a challenge. So cheat a little and buy some prepared items, such as gravy for the turkey. Good-quality delis and butchers often make their own gravy and sauces, which can be a quick substitute for homemade. Or skip the gravy and use other moisture-adding condiments such as cranberry sauce.

The pudding is done but I’m worried about lumpy custard. What are your tips?

  • Bernadette Templeman, from Sydney’s Restaurant Atelier, says her secret for successful custard in a stressful Christmas Day kitchen is to add a pinch of cornflour when she’s mixing together the eggs and sugar, which will stop the mixture splitting when the hot milk is added.
  • Making custard for a large group can be stressful, says Jason Peppler from Brisbane’s Confit Bistro. So for some extra help, he suggests home cooks use a kitchen thermometer to make sure the temperature does not exceed 80C.
    “This will avoid the eggs and cream curdling,” Jason says. “To check when the custard is ready, dip a wooden spoon in the saucepan, remove it, then draw a line across the back of your spoon with your finger. If the custard dribbles down in a consistent line, it is ready.”
  • But if making custard from scratch isn’t for you, serve a cheat’s custard by combining 300ml store-bought custard in a saucepan with 150ml of thin cream, dab of icing sugar and a splash of brandy. Stir over a low heat until the custard is heated through then pour into a jug for serving at the table. This recipe should serve six and chances are they’ll never know the difference.

I’m serving cold desserts this Christmas. Do you have any tips?

  • If you’re serving a frozen dessert instead of a plum pud, remember to remove the dessert from your freezer about five minutes before serving. Unmould and then, to stop further melting as you’re taking to the table, plate up on to a chilled surface.
  • There’s no rule that says cranberries can’t also star in your dessert. For a festive twist on a traditional pavlova, drain a can of wild cranberries and combine the syrup with a cup of caster sugar and a cinnamon stick in a saucepan. Bring to the boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for a few minutes until the syrup thickens. Remove from heat, stir in the drained cranberries and allow to cool before topping the pavlova.

Additional reporting by Simon Wilkinson, Fiona Donnelly, Gail Williams, Martine Haley and Grant Jones.

Information in this article is correct as of 13 December, 2011

Source

Taste.com.au – December 2011

Author

Zoe Skewes

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Recipes from 'Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg'

Recipes from ‘Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg’


Washington (CNN)Recipes excerpted from “Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg,” Copyright 2011, by permission of Supreme Court Historical Society

Martin Ginsburg’s recipe for “Simple Meatloaf”

Ingredients

1 medium-large yellow onion, finely chopped

1 Tbs. butter (or just a little more)

1 1/2 lbs. ground chuck and round, mixed

2/3 lb. ground pork

3 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

4 Tbs. ketchup

2 Tbs. Dijon mustard

3 Tbs. cracker meal

Salt (to taste)

Freshly ground pepper

Extra ketchup, about 7 tbs.

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to about 350 degrees.

2. Sauté the onion in the butter, stirring from time to time, over medium heat until lightly browned. Set aside to cool.

3. Mix well the ground meats and Worcestershire Sauce. Then mix in the cooled onions and all of the other ingredients except the “extra ketchup.”

4. Place the whole thing in a large loaf pan, smooth the top, and then pour the extra ketchup on the top spreading the cover fairly evenly.

5. Bake 1 hour.

6. Allow the baked meatloaf to sit in the loaf pan outside the oven about 10 minutes. Pour off and throw away the accumulated liquid, which is about 97% fat.

7. Remove from the pan, slice the meatloaf, and serve to the relentless applause of your grandchildren.

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Martin Ginsburg’s recipe for “Dense Chocolate Mousse with Pralines”

Ingredients

1 lb. high quality semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate, in pieces

3 egg yolks

1/2 tsp. instant espresso dissolved in 1 tbs. hot water

1/2 cup Grand Marnier

1 cup heavy cream, well chilled

4 egg whites, at room temperature

4 Tbs. praline powder

Preparation

1. In a double broiler, or even better in the microwave in a large glass bowl, partly melt the chocolate and then stir it smooth with a wire whip. (If you have used the double-broiler, turn the melted chocolate into a glass bowl.) Allow the chocolate to cool.

2. Add the egg yolks, one at a time, mixing well. Then add the coffee, then add the Grand Marnier.

3. Whip the cream until stiff. Beat the egg whites until stiff. Fold the cream into the egg whites.

4. Fold or stir a few tablespoons of the cream-egg white mixture into the chocolate to lighten. Then fold in half the remaining egg white and cream mixture. Then fold in the rest.

5. Finally, fold in the 4 tbs. of praline powder. Spoon the mixture into a glass bowl suitable as a serving bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap (I prefer Saran) and then with heavy aluminum foil. Freeze at least 3 hours, but overnight is better I think.

6. Before serving, place the bowl of mousse in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes so that it will soften somewhat.

7. Serve with sweetened whipped cream, or even better I think, with a few tablespoons of Grand Marnier sauce and, instead of whipped cream, a small bowl of excellent vanilla ice cream. If you have extra praline powder, a small sprinkle of it on top of the chocolate mousse is a nice idea.




Soup recipes with Bill & Sheila


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Washington Post’s top 10 cookbook of 2011

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Washington Post’s top 10 cookbook of 2011

2 “All About Roasting: A New Approach to a Classic Art,” by Molly Stevens (W.W. Norton, $35). A comprehensive and worthy successor to the author’s 2004 award-winning cookbook, “All About Braising.” Recipe to try: Slow-Roasted Duck Breast.

3 “Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi,” by Yotam Ottolenghi (Chronicle, $35). The Israeli-born chef elevates the level of vegetarian recipes in this, his second book. Recipe to try: Green Pancakes With Lime Butter.

4 “Jekka’s Herb Cookbook,” by Jekka McVicar (Firefly, $29.95). Called England’s “Queen of Herbs” by superstar chef Jamie Oliver, the author lays out the history and utility of her 50 top garden herbs.

5 “American Flavor,” by Andrew Carmellini and Gwen Hyman (Ecco, $34.99). Carmellini, the New York chef-restaurateur of Locande Verde and the Dutch, writes recipes that are easy to follow. This collection is thoughtful and diverse. Recipes to try: Red Chicken; Endive, Apple and Farmhouse Cheddar Salad With Country Ham and Wheat Beer Dressing.

6 “The Homesick Texan Cookbook,” by Lisa Fain (Hyperion, $29.99). Sprung from the popular blog of the same name, this book channels the right attitude and an impressive number of recipes that you. Must. Try.

7 “Ancient Grains for Modern Meals: Mediterranean Whole Grain Recipes for Barley, Farro, Kamut, Polenta, Wheat Berries, More,” by Maria Speck (Ten Speed Press, $29.99). The author fits healthful ingredients into the foods we crave without, as she writes, “taking the pleasure away from eating.”

8 “The Food of Morocco,” by Paula Wolfert (Ecco, $45). Beautifully presented, offering a real sense of place. Not to be missed are the author’s 10 tips for preparing Moroccan food. Recipe to try: Lamb, Tomato Cinnamon and Steamed Pasta Chorba.

9 “Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home,” by Jeni Britton Bauer (Artisan, $23.95). With this book, the founder of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio, satisfies a nationwide craving for her inspired flavors of yogurts and sorbets as well as her ice creams with a touch of cream cheese.

10 “The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes From Exceptional Home Cooks,” by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs (William Morrow, $35). It’s a testament to crowd-sourcing, to accomplished cooks who don’t necessarily blog, and to Food52.com’s smart curating.

Recipes:

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Greeks Stomach Economic Crisis With Help Of 'Starvation Recipes'

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Historian and cookbook author Eleni Nikolaidou with her book Starvation Recipes. Recession-hit Greeks are fascinated with the book's World War II-era survival tips and recipes.

Thanassis Stavrakis/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Historian and cookbook author Eleni Nikolaidou with her book Starvation Recipes. Recession-hit Greeks are fascinated with the book’s World War II-era survival tips and recipes.

Greeks Stomach Economic Crisis With Help Of ‘Starvation Recipes’

When Eleni Nikolaidou began studying the survival diets of World War II Greece a couple of years ago, she never expected to turn the research for her master’s thesis into a cookbook.

But a lot has happened in Greece in the last two years, and Starvation Recipes is selling well in a country that’s suffering through its worst economic crisis in decades, accompanied now by painful austerity measures. The cookbook, which is in Greek, recommends chewing your food slowly to feel full, saving crumbs from the table in a jar, grinding eggplant to use as replacement “meat,” and adding chestnuts for protein to recipes such as baked cabbage.

But Greeks also hate austerity. The unemployment rate has doubled, and personal bankruptcies, homelessness and even suicides are on the rise. Greeks are lining up at soup kitchens for hot meals and for care packages of flour, rice and oil at churches.

“I’ve even seen people rummaging through the garbage for food,” Nikolaidou, a high school teacher and historian, tells The Salt. “The situation is very bleak.”

 

This is troubling because food here is not just about subsistence. It’s about pride and even love. In a culture known for its epic meals and generous servings, the endless plates of meze and giant pans of homemade spanakopita shared with friends and strangers represent an open heart and a bountiful home.

But building that bounty took decades, especially after the devastation of World War II. That’s a time the Greeks call the katochi, which means “occupation,” and the word itself still conjures visions of starvation. My father and his two brothers lived in orphanages in the Peloponnese then, surviving on daily rations of wormy string beans and stale bread. Other rural Greeks lived off whatever land the Nazis didn’t burn and tried to manage with a chicken (for eggs), a skinny goat (for milk) and a few olives and figs.

But the Athenians, who were trapped in an occupied city, had it much harder. Nikolaidou says German soldiers confiscated nearly all of the food in the Greek capital, including basics such as flour, sugar and oil.

Desperate Athenians foraged for wild greens and weeds, which they ate boiled, without salt or oil. They picked through the German soldiers’ trash for potato peels. They even hunted stray cats and dogs. “They would eat anything so that they wouldn’t faint from hunger in the streets,” she says. More than 300,000 people died of starvation.

Greece still carries emotional scars from that time, so it’s not surprising that populists here call Germany’s push for austerity a symbol of a Fourth Reich. But even the angriest Greeks do not compare the horrific living conditions under the katochi (and under the devastating 1946-49 civil war that followed) with the tough times of Austerity 2011.

Evangelia Trifona, a 59-year-old housewife I met earlier this year, says she and her husband tried to open a small restaurant, which recently went bankrupt. But she says they’re managing with what they have. “We bake many loaves of bread and share it with our neighbors,” she says. “In return, they share their own food with us — casseroles, egg-lemon soup, the occasional piece of meat or fish. We never waste anything, and so far, we have not gone hungry.”

Tavernas are still busy, and cafes are packed even on weekdays — a sign that the wartime “coffee” made of ground roasted chickpeas won’t replace the real stuff anytime soon.

Nikolaidou says Starvation Recipes is resonating with those Greeks who want to make more with less. Surveys show that up to 90 percent of Greeks are changing their eating habits: They’re dining out less, buying less meat and cooking with cheaper products at home.

“They have a kilo of flour, for instance, so how do you make that flour last?” she says. Or they make a pot of fasolada, a hearty navy bean soup, that feeds a family for several days.

“Even in my house, there are no exceptions,” she says. “If my husband and son don’t like what I’ve cooked, tough. I say, ‘That’s our food. Now don’t waste it.’”

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Cooking with grandma, the new luxury food kick

Cooking with grandma, the new luxury food kick

Forget five-star restaurants. Food-loving tourists are getting their kicks in other ways, from cooking up a hotpot with a Mauritian grandmother to market shopping with a Venetian countess.

More than just fine dining, well-heeled travellers in search of gourmet luxury are seeking out “experiences,” sparking a shift in the tourist industry, according to experts at an upmarket travel fair in Cannes this week.

“Gourmet travel as a niche market is huge everywhere,” Jennifer Campbell, a member of the bespoke travel specialist Virtuoso network, told AFP at the annual International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM).

“The trend is growing strongly,” said Campbell, whose firm will shortly fly a small group of epicureans on a truffle-hunting expedition to Italy.

“Travellers now want to go out and about to see for themselves, for example, how truffles grow, where to find them and then cooking them.”

The movement kicked off three to five years ago, boosted in the United States, Britain and elsewhere by rising interest in organic produce and local food, as well as global television hits such as “Masterchef”.

Frank Farneti, regional head of France’s luxury Relais et Chateaux hotel network, told a packed conference on gastronomic travel that success rests on creating an impression of authenticity.

One example is “Grandma’s Kitchen” at the Shanti Maurice Nira beachside resort in Mauritius, an alternative to the resort’s high-end restaurants — run by the real cooking grandmother of one of the staff.

Grandma will be cooking up traditional Creole fare that might include honey lamb or fish curry at her home whilst sharing stories with her guests, before sending them off with a selection of handwritten recipes.

The simple experience has proved a hit with the resort’s well-heeled guests, along with a fish and rum shack set up on the beach.

“It’s all about taking people out of a cosseted, gated community and giving them a cooking experience that they can’t get by themselves,” said the owner and chief executive of Nira Hotels and Resorts, MPS Puri.

Hoteliers and restaurant owners are not the only ones to benefit from this new-found appetite for authentic dining.

From Italian aristocrats to ordinary housewives in China, individuals are opening up their homes to amateur cooks keen to master local dishes, from the most simple to the seriously exotic.

“These travellers want to learn about new ingredients and new mixtures,” explained Paul Bruning, head of sales and marketing at the Southern Africa branch of luxury travel provider Abercrombie and Kent.

The new Philippe Starck-designed boutique Hotel Palazzina Grassi, in the heart of historic Venice, is tapping into the culinary-driven market.

Guests can accompany one of the city’s best-known aristocrats, Countess Enrica Rocca, to the city’s famous Rialto market to learn how to select fresh, locally-caught fish.

The countess leads them and their shopping baskets back home to prepare Venetian specialities, whilst regaling them with stories about her family history.

Guests are coming from around Europe as well as Australia to enjoy a day out with the countess, at a cost of around 1,000 euros ($1,300), said a hotel spokeswoman.

The thirst to learn about local produce reaches beyond foodie tourists.

Vikram Madhok, the managing director of Abercrombie and Kent India, organises an annual trip around India for a group of London chefs, to visit spice markets and help them explore and cooking new regional dishes.


Italian Cooking with Bill & Sheila

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