Last week I taught a fermenting workshop and did some demonstrating and q-and-a, as part of the really brilliant Liverpool Food for Real Film Festival put on by Squash Nutrition and Liverpool Food People, “a network of food growers, composters, buyers, cooks and eaters passionate about a positive healthy food culture for lovely Liverpool.” If you are working in your way towards food justice and urban growing, health and food sustainability and local responses to hunger– the whole shebang– it’s really worth looking up these groups and exploring what and how they do things. They are energetic, creative people working hard in unique, inspired ways. I fell in love with them, and with Liverpool. From my point of view, I was really glad as well to be sharing my knowledge with a truly multi-aged and multiethnic group of people, much more diverse than usual. This made for an especially interesting conversation about how people were going to go home and integrate these new food preparation techniques into their home cuisines.
Several years ago I began to ponder the internet recipe site of Abel and Cole, the major organic vegetable subscription service in the south of England. There was was something so incredibly interesting, and original, light-handed yet educational and resourceful there, a joyful and free competence around food that felt rare and precious and kept pouring forth, anew. Visit that site; it’s such a great resource for recipes (even though I’m more drawn these days to the idea of “freecipes,” there’s still lots to learn from reading them).
For people who cook, who take their cooking “practice” seriously, learning from others is enriching and serious business, and I make it a task to learn as part of my love of cookbooks, and prefer most of all writers with style and a unique way of going about the kitchen.
Recently I met the Abel and Cole food editor Rachel de Thample. She is in person everything her food seems to be: warm, fun, intelligent, committed to a better food system, creative, interesting… So as a cookbook aficionado I was really excited to read her new book Five: 150 Effortless Ways to Eat 5+ Fruit and Veg a Day. On the one hand this book is what the subtitle says, an effort to get us all eating the way we should. On the other hand, and more excitingly, it’s a wonderful insight into an original cooking voice with lots to teach, inspire and entertain.
Mission #pumpkinrescue: Thoughts on the comprehensive culinary flexibility of pumpkin, as well as links on juicing, sprouting, fermenting Harry Potter style and DIY skin treatments…Read the rest of this entry »
Ah the infinities of interesting worlds on the internet… I have a file “Links for Blog” into which I save items to share; despite good intentions, they languish and amass. I’ve now prepared this post and am aware it might be overwhelming. Please forgive me if so! May some of it be useful to you… Mostly Food Politics on the top, then a nice round-up of cooking and food links.
Hooray for the Vegetable Orchestra, and hope you enjoy listening while you peruse below. As usual, articles, resources, links et al. are piling up on my to-share list. They’re the customary Kitchencounterculture mix of political, community, and DIY domestic. Hope they are of interest…
I’ve decided I’m not going to write a post about Guava Jelly, even though Bob Marley singing about it is happy and sexy. Enjoy the song and feel reprieved…
Instead I am going to share all those web links that accumulate in files on my computer. I guess these offerings of links really do illustrate the Kitchen-Counter-Culture approach to food, cooking and eating. Here goes:
There’s a campaign that’s very important protecting the interests of small and poor farmers in Africa against the land-grabbing and market-dominating tactics of big corporations–Read this Red Pepper article as well as this interesting portal. Here’s a link to the World Development Movement campaign. This is important. Food Security for people means small systems, not being marginalised in the big ones. Where we still have any leverage, we must use it.
A recipe for an alternative soy sauce though calls for beef stock. Interestingly I remember being suggested a vegan beef-stock alternative as a good mixture of black-strap molasses and soy sauce.
A wonderful list of things to do with dandelions — I love these kind of lists — and there are so many more ideas as well. Dandelions, in their abundance, are such an incredible gift, and feeling thankful for them is a spiritual practice of spring and summer for me. Here’s a recipe for Spicy Fried Dandelion Flowers. And a piece on Dandelion Root and, among other things, dehydrating them. A few weeks ago, inspired by Pascal Baudar of Urban Outdoor Skills (operating in dry Southern California so very different from my cool moist world here), I made a kimchi with lots of dandelion leaves– it turned out really well. Get ready for a fun Dandelion post from Moi-Meme coming up in the next few weeks 🙂
Getting personal: After all those years I had migraines, small ones and large ones, I did come to believe a leaky-gut hypothesis, and pretty much feel healed by eating very very low (though not no) gluten and sugar. This article talks about a the role of Zonulin in Leaky Gut syndrome from a Paleo point of view.
First, should you be experiencing this Deep-Winter Blue-Mood, here’s a little pep-talk of a dance number. You are a star! Everybody is one!
Second: I have a habit of accumulating internet links to explore further, but they are beginning to want to break free of my private files. So, though eventually I may revisit them, I’m just going to post them here, now, for readers’ scintillation.
A piece called Spice Tile on the BRILLIANT blog Edible Geographies about an art exhibition at the Victoria and Albert in London until the 21st of April– hope I can get there to see it.
An interesting article called Why Skipping is a Necessary Evil (though I’d never use the word “evil”) that puts people’s personal hunger in a broad political context.
A book on Home Aquaponics (combination aquaculture [growing fish] and hydroponics {veg grown in water not soil] ) which interests me very much but I haven’t got a kindle…
An interesting, short documentary on The People’s Kitchen — “a place in which people can come to eat, as well as express themselves, find themselves in society.”
and a blatant plug for my friend Sharon Kane’s Gluten -Free bread assundries website and business. She’s a woman who reclaimed her own health and is on an amazing mission to share everything she’s learned! She is based in Massachusetts, for American readers keen to do some mail-order.
And, lastly for today, an important plea for seed diversity in the face of this thing we call Climate Change.
Kitchen Counter Culture 