Cake and Commerce

Local New England Asparagus is here...finally!

For two years I drove by a wildered patch of green fenced in by a stone wall and years of stubborn weeds and vines. I didn't stop to think about what lay behind the fence until I took an early-May bike ride out to our local produce stand at Verrill Farm and was invited on a Chef's Collaborative-sponsored tour of some of their fields, including the one behind the stone wall.

What I thought was an abandoned lot actually turned out to be a well-established field of asparagus. We were handed small pronged tools for the quick, frustration-free picking of asparagus. A quick jab with the sharp forked knife was all we needed to harvest the quick-growing spears.

Since then, I always look forward to the brief appearance local asparagus with anticipation and as the first sign of the growing and harvest season to come.

Last week I enjoyed my first local asparagus. It was delicious as always and so much more satisfying than the California-grown organic stuff in my local Whole Foods.

I like my asparagus simple and minimally cooked. A quick roast in the oven with olive oil and garlic, salt and pepper usually does it for me. Yesterday I tossed some with a little sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger, mirin and chili. I prefer eating the spears with my fingers rather than processing them into soup or sauce.

Now when I drive by that patch of green, I always slow to catch a glimpse of the asparagus. I can't tell if it is still there, but I like to think it is. That day of asparagus picking is more enduring than my memory of breakfast this morning.

RV Eatin' - Pittsburgh, Sustainability, and a refurbished RV

(Note: In August, during a trip to Pittsburgh, maybe the second time in my life I had ever visited the city on the delta, my friend Weldon and I came upon a peculiar sight - a vintage RV surrounded by three young women, one cooking, one  setting up a fire, and the other, clipboard in hand, talking to passers-by about what they were doing. These women - Laura, Claire and Dawn - have set up shop as RV Eatin', a portable catering company that is more non-profit than business. Their goal is to facilitate great food, great company and great discussion about food, sustainability, nutrition and resources through the cooking and sharing of a local, mostly vegetarian meal out of their portable RV.)

It was one of those perfect Pittsburgh Saturday mornings in early August - no humidity, a light breeze, a clear sky and not too hot. As we were walking to the car after visiting the local/organic/sustainable farmers market in the strip district, we found a young woman busily chopping vegetables in front of a vintage RV while another young woman asked us if we wanted to make a reservation.

A reservation? For an RV?

We were intrigued.

Outside the RV, Laura, a passionate cook, was preparing to grill a range of fresh vegetables that Claire, one of the three partners in RV Eatin, their collective, had procured through her work at one of Pittsburgh's urban farms, Mildred's Daughters.

Claire and Laura preparing a sample meal

While Claire and Laura cooked, Dawn (who is their spokesperson and main server) told us about their RV (borrowed from a Carnegie-Mellon professor, Jon Rubin), and their brand new endeavor, RV Eatin'. All three were Carnegie-Mellon art students and met through the program there. Through a mutual love of food - and lucking into the RV - they decided to create a performance space cum 'inverted food truck' that they would use to connect people to one another and people to the source of their food by making and serving simple vegetable-based meals.

They explained to us that for $10 per person, RV Eatin' would bring their RV to Weldon's house (or farm or school or pool or playground or parking lot or anywhere, really) and cook, either alone or with our help, a nutritious meal made from local produce. They would eat with us in the RV (if there was room) and talk to us about what they were doing, where the produce came from, and how we could make similar meals at home. Weldon and I loved the idea.

RV Eatin' is similar in some ways to the better known (and more commercial) Outstanding in the Field (meals start at $180), but with an eye toward community outreach and education and, in contrast with Outstanding in the Field, less about bringing wealthy foodie consumers to the farm to commune with the source of their food than about bringing the farm to communities and people that otherwise may not have access to it. With prices last summer starting at $10 per person per meal, the women of RV Eatin' are trying to create a service that almost anyone, regardless of socio-economic status and buying power, can enjoy. Another advantage the women enjoy is that they did not create RV Eatin' to be a profit-center and their sole source of income but to be a low-cost, seasonal labor of love that generates enough money to cover their gas and food costs.

Although Weldon and I didn't realize it at the time, this canvassing of the parking lot in the strip district was RV Eatin's first day out. We weren't the only ones to take notice of the RV and the BBQ in the parking lot. Other photographers stopped by to capture RV Eatin's set up and a few others even made reservations for meals. I found this out reading their blog, which documented the day we visited.

Inside the RV

Because they all work other jobs, reservations are taken primarily for Saturdays. I don't know if they are going to run RV Eatin' this coming season (2009) but I certainly hope they do. And I hope other people in other cities around the country try their hand at this type of community outreach. Not every effort to educate and feed and share needs to have a profit motive or be backed by a deep-pocketed non-profit. All it takes is desire and passion sprinkled with a little luck and a lot of idealism. Right now, I'd say we all need more of that.

If you want to know how other people in other communities are fighting back in their own way, check out Food Renegade's Fight Back Fridays post.

O.N.C.E. - A locavore (more or less) dinner in the middle of Winter

It's amazing how a cover of tablecloths, wine glasses, plates, glowing candles and the night can do to change the ambiance of a space. In a non-descript Thai restaurant in the middle of Union Square in Somerville, MA that was shut down for the night, locavore and private chef JJ Gonson* of Cuisine en Locale, staged a $50 per person, 10-course banquet on a snowy Sunday night to a capacity crowd. She calls these meals "O.N.C.E." - One Night Culinary Events. She plans the menu and sends and email out to her list and posts about it on her blog. Guests are treated to one of JJ's wholesome, extravagant meals, usually for a bargain price. Each dinner has a different theme - this one focused on the dead of winter, one of the more challenging times of the year for executing culinary variety and artistry. She had planned two seatings - a buffet for families and a more formal sit-down plated meal for adults.

When she told me about the event, I wanted desperately to attend. My current state of unemployment makes that virtually impossible, so instead I worked for JJ as her front-of-the-house 'manager' - which in my case meant awkwardly greeting guests, fumbling attempts to count and recount diners, forgetting courses for an entire table, and trying to keep everyone's water glass full.

It took hours to get to this point, though, half of which I missed by sleeping through the night. Overnight, JJ and her team labored to prepare many of the courses, from the delicate lobster ravioli that took 6 hours from start to finish, to a hearty country pate with star-shaped pastry dough. By the time I arrived at the Cuisine en Locale base camp about 5 hours before the first seating, the prep kitchen was empty of life and the bags and pans and bins were full and waiting to be taken to the Thai restaurant for the evening's meal. The only hint of what was to come was contained in a notebook, with a list of 'to-dos':

Lining the walls were the bags and pans and bins:

I wandered around for a few minutes, peeked in a pantry, looked at the refrigerator and tapped my fingers before JJ showed up. I had made a stop for Shaw Farm Dairy ice cream (read the ingredients carefully before you buy - not all flavors are all-natural) and milk for her and wanted to make sure I picked up a few things before heading to the restaurant to set it up for the dinner.

JJ showed off her racks of lamb, which she had acquired from Stillman's:

I helped her portion out her ravioli into bags:

She showed me her pate, too - apparently she's been really into making forcemeats since her return from Paris a few months back. This one was made in celebration of Pork Day - it was made with pork liver and loin and a few other cuts. I didn't try any (as I do not partake of the four-legged beast) but friends reported it was delicious.

After checking out JJ's prep, I ran over the restaurant and began rearranging tables (my apologies to anyone who felt squished that night - we didn't have much space to work with). Within an hour JJ and her team arrived with the prep and started planning out the sequence of their meal. Here's what they ended up with:

To the best of her ability, JJ sourced local ingredients for the dinner, as she does for all of her cooking. Grains remain a challenge for those of us in Massachusetts - there's not much here at all, and what there is is hard to find. So JJ used Texas rice and Italian pasta and Midwestern wheat flour. She threw in a bit of Florida citrus - from a small grove, of course. Otherwise, most of the ingredients were local - cheese, vegetables, lamb, apples, cranberries, squash, pork, lobster, seaweed.

Before the crowds arrived, JJ set to work in the borrowed kitchen. The team wears brown - that's the official un-uniform of Cuisine en locale. I didn't know this ahead of time and by chance I was decked out, head-to-toe, in brown. JJ thought it was serendipity. Which is was to an extent. Truthfully, half my winter wardrobe is brown, so there was a 50% chance that I would be wearing brown.

In the hour before service began, Henry and I jumped in the car and hit a few stores looking for simple tablecloths to cover the Formica tables. Attractive natural-fiber tablecloths were prohibitively expensive, so we settled for some rather ugly light blue polyester cloths that were met with JJ's stinging disapproval. "I'll never use them again," she sighed as I forced them on her at the end of the night.

The first seating - which began while the sun was still in the sky - was a simple camp-style buffet for families: mac 'n cheese, sauteed cabbage, some squash. It was a simple way to start out the evening, requiring only minimal prep and service.

For dessert, JJ served up a massive apple grumble- a combination of apple chunks, cranberries, oats, and sugar. She paired it with Shaw Farm Ice cream.

At 6 pm the dining room cleared and we reset it for our 7 pm seating. We cleaned, moved tables (again), redecorated the tables. JJ and crew - which included her right hand Bonnie, Arun the engineer, Darius, and Eddie the dishwashin' machine, set to work getting prepping the formal meal.

Arun and Darius slicing bread for the pate course.

When JJ's guests started arriving at seven, I went into disorganized hostess mode. I had counted the number of tables incorrectly and was short three seats. Luckily, one table pulled a no-call/no-show and we were able to accommodate everyone. The restaurant took on an air of civility as wine glasses were brought to tables and wine was uncorked.

(That's my friend Alex on the far left. Hi Alex!)

The first course came out quickly once the seating was worked out. One of JJ's signatures is a filled savory profiterole. Don't call them gougeres!

I missed photographing the soup course - it was a fragrant  vegan seaweed soup. Likewise I missed the pate course, though I did capture it whole. Before JJ cut into it, she had me present it to every table and explain what it was. Of the 37 guests, only 3 passed on it. The rest cleaned their plates.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, JJ, Bonnie, Arun and Darius plated up the next course - a raw salad with pea sprouts, sunchokes & beets with an umeboshi dressing.

Next up - lobster ravioli. JJ made these ravioli as pure as could be - just lobster, seasoning, and essence of lobster, made from a lobster stock and reduced to almost nothing. She sauced it with a little butternut squash and vanilla essence:

This ravioli, was, from the perspective of time, effort, and ingredients, may have been the highlight of the meal. She had a few left over and I was able to indulge in one. It was packed full of lobster flavor.

The lobster was followed by an intermezzo - a simple grapefruit and fresh mint palate cleanser. It was refreshingly acidic.

Next up: Stillman's lamb. JJ made a rub of various nuts - pistachio and almonds, I think, with plenty of salt and pepper. Though I didn't taste the lamb (again, no four legged animals), I did sample the rub, which was just perfect. She served it alongside a sunchoke and arborio risotto and a beach plum-Grand Marnier sauce.

JJ single-handedly portioned out the lamb, chop by chop:

The team garnished:

And the guests enjoyed:

The third-to-last course was a duo of cooked salads - one based on sweet potato, the other kale:

During this course, JJ asked her guests if they wanted to keep going. They had already eaten 8 courses. A unanimous "MORE" was the response. So JJ complied.

Next up: Mac 'n Cheese, made with local Gouda and cheddar, and scented with truffle oil:

At this point, JJ and Bonnie and Eddie were starting to feel the burn and were exhausted. It was nearly 11 pm, 4 hours since the diners first sat down.  My shoes were beginning to torture my feet - I hadn't sported heels in months and my 4" heels were wearing the balls of my feet into achy lumps. I had been serving and clearing every course, along with John, and making sure no one went thirsty. The water filter was in back of the kitchen, so there was a lot of lap running between courses.

Finally dessert arrived - plated apple grumble with Shaw Farm Dairy ice cream. I noticed not a drop was left in bowls when I cleared the tables for the last time.

By 11:30 the room was empty.

By 12:30 am the room was returned to its normal, pre-O.N.C.E. state. There wasn't a trace of locavore left.

To find out more about JJ Gonson and her food, check out her website and sign up for her events announcements: http://www.enlocale.com/

To read about a diner's experience of O.N.C.E, check out The Basil Queen's Blog.

To read another diner's perspective, check out Richard's post.

*full disclosure: I've known JJ for about 23 years, as her sister Claudia is my closest friend.