The arepa did not look like much. I watched as Lis Hernandez, the young proprietor of Arepa Mia, a soon-to-be-opened restaurant in historic Sweet Auburn Curb Market, undid little lumpy foil-wrapped balls onto a hot griddle. Ten minutes later, when I bit into the crunchy, chewy, umami, unctuous wonder, it singlehandedly undid some of my concern about the scarcity of local foods in my 2012 Atlanta Food & Wine Festival experience.

I was lucky to meet Lis and her arepa. An hour earlier, as I walked up to the Loews Atlanta Hotel for day two of the Festival, I saw two men preparing to close the doors of a long black van. On impulse, I asked, “Market Tour?” and yes, one seat remained. I hopped in with my three bags of equipment, and away we went to the Market—which made this day just like any Saturday for me. Except the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, also Atlanta’s Municipal Market, is not a farmers’ market.

Our able Market tour guide, David Jones, host of EatBufordHighway, made it plain that much of the meat and produce in the appealing market came from outside the region. We learned that even the pork, which rules this market, typically comes from Colorado, Minnesota, or other states many hundreds or thousands of food miles way.

The Sweet Auburn Curb Market shares this characteristic with much of the food sourced for the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival 2012: both depend primarily on the prevailing, petroleum-based, widely distributed, commercial-industrial food system to feed their customers. That is surely, in part, because it is early in the growing season. Yet even non-seasonal foods like the meats at Sweet Auburn Curb Market and many Festival booths come from the great “wherever.” Locally grown ingredients are scarce, even ones that I expected would come from nearby, including all the pork, much of the beef, chicken, some seafood, and other proteins at the Festival.

Arepa Mia’s signs caught my attention during the Sweet Auburn Market tour precisely because they emphasized local sources.

Lis Hernandez will open Arepa Mia in the Market as soon as the inspections are complete. I hope the opening—in a setting that has a track record as an incubator for successful restaurants—signals a turn toward a new food system.

My reasons: when sustainable Georgia farms are the main producers of the pork Georgians eat, Georgia communities and farm families will reap economic benefits. It’s all mixed up to have Georgia, where pigs could live in hog heaven, importing pork from Minnesota.

Second, a shift toward local ingredients and seasonal eating, along with a concentration on preserving food, will make food better. Flavor, texture, nutrition, freshness, and visual appeal all increase when food comes from nearby.

It is surely possible to grow and cook tasteless local food. It may even be possible to grow food well and sustainably, and still have it lack flavor. It is just not likely. I have yet to have that experience. Instead, as I find ubiquitous bits of ramps in the Festival food, I wonder where all the spring onions are, the baby Vidalias. Where are the tender lettuces and spring greens? Would some south Georgia farms, in this particularly warm spring, have tender English peas, snow peas, and potatoes by now? What about broccoli, kohl rabi, turnips? Chard?

The arepa Lis Hernandez put in my hands this morning had three components:

• a hand-made shell, built of a special pre-cooked corn flour, salt, and water
• a filling of organic Riverview Farm pork, slow-cooked with onions for 12 hours
• a pale green cilantro-laced aioli-like sauce

Everything is as local as Lis can make it, including the cilantro, when possible. I failed to ask about the corn flour, but I assume it is imported.

By the time I bit into Lis’s arepa, I had tasted perhaps 100 bites and sips of carefully made food and drink since arriving at the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival. Quite a few had been good, even very good.

The arepa wiped those other bites out of my head. The biscuit-sized cornflour “wrapper” tasted of salt and roasted corn from the hot grill. The texture, a cross between crunchy and chewy, seemed like something I always want, but rarely find. The slow-roasted pork could serve as umami’s poster child. And the acid, pungent, silky sauce filled in all the remaining little niches I could imagine across an entire savory flavor spectrum.

Lis chose prime local ingredients, gave them expert care, and produced a marvel. Unfortunately, what she is doing is still rare.

As sophisticated as the food scene in the USA has become, it still fails to take full advantage of the best ingredients, grown well nearby, to boost flavor to the ultimate. I’m surprised that local is not yet the norm, even at one of the most elite food events in the country.

Bonus: One more tasting bite stood out during this afternoon’s edition of the daily Festival extravaganza called “Tasting Tents.” American Grocery Restaurant of Greenville, South Carolina served “Fresh ham over ramp socca with smoked paprika cream, guanciale chip, and pickled mustard seeds.” Chef Joe Clarke told me that all the ingredients are local. His restaurant manages to find and use about 85 percent locally sourced ingredients year-round. Because the mainstream food system most easily delivers food from anywhere, building such an individual local supply system takes amazing work, relationships with growers, flexibility, planning, and persistence.  Wonderful!

I looked up recipes (not American Grocery Restaurant’s recipes, please note) for some of this delicious dish’s components:

Socca: a crepe made from chickpea flour

Guanciale: cured pork cheek or jowl

Pickled Mustard Seeds

Final word from the middle: In mid-festival, I’m seeing some signs that we may be in mid-change toward building and sustaining food systems that are primarily locally sourced. It is early. We aren’t there yet, but some fine leaders like Lis Hernandez and Joe Clarke are pointing the way.

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Note: Savoring Kentucky hosted its first guest writer competition this spring, offering a $50 prize and a signed copy of Sweet, Sweet Sorghum to the winner of the best 700 word essay on “How did you learn to cook?” We have that winner: Margaret Lane of Woodford County, Kentucky. Read Margaret’s flavorful post, followed by a short bio of Margaret’s interesting life and work. We thank everyone who entered our first contest. Over the next several weeks, we will publish six finalists’ essays, each with its own sweet charms. Enjoy!

Learning to Cook, and Other Life Lessons, by Margaret Lane

As an eighth-generation Kentuckian, my heritage includes many good cooks… country, land-
to-table, farm-to-kitchen experts ….and thousands of platters of fried chicken, local pork, crisp
fried perch fresh-caught from the pond, lard-crusted pies, and early spring lettuce, radish, and
onion salad. Fried creatures offered by the resident hunters and that suspicious pan of wondrous
orbs proudly brought to the farm kitchen by my cattle-farmer father expanded our culinary
horizons. (They didn’t look like any ‘fries’ I’d ever seen.) We enjoyed the offerings of my
mother, grandmothers, and aunts who prepared the best from the land and garden with the goal
of sustaining the family and sharing love at the communal table.

My maternal grandmother was known for her potato yeast rolls, the wafting aroma of which
lured many a family member to her well-appointed table. On my paternal grandparents’
Bourbon County farm, Granny and Pa Adams raised, in addition to five sons, hundreds
of animals and a large flock of chickens, Granny’s ‘girls.’ The pampered hens supplied
components of rich yellow custards and the famous meringued banana pudding. Extra russet
jewels also contributed precious ‘egg money,’ primarily designated for the missionaries from
church.

On summer Sunday mornings before church, I accompanied my Granny to the chicken yard
as she selected just the right-sized fryer to be sacrificed and prepared for the table. In her country
kitchen, she performed whatever mysterious processes were hers in producing a platter of crisp,
crusty fried chicken…. special touches that involved the big black cast iron skillet and globs of
white lard from last winter’s hog killing.

Still in our Sunday church clothes, the extended family gathered at the dining room table to
enjoy fried chicken, velvety smooth milk gravy, fresh fruit salad with grapes, Granny’s famous
soda biscuits, and delectable cake or pie. Ample culinary largesse was always accompanied by
lively conversation and fond family memories.

Both grandmothers maintained an exclusive kitchen domain, with children observing from a
distance and, of course, enjoying the product…but my mother welcomed her four young children
into the farm kitchen as she pasteurized milk from our own cows, allowed us to turn the churn
producing homemade butter or peel potatoes for supper. A fine cook in her own right, she and
my father complimented our smallest offerings…a well-made sandwich or beautifully-decorated
plate.

An early memory involves the cherry cobbler my young sister and I prepared as a surprise
for a special occasion. The cherries from our back yard tree glistened red ripe in sugar syrup
and rested under a golden, fragrant crust…beautiful! First bites accompanied by ice cream
were VERY crunchy, as we, in our culinary naivete, had failed to pit those darn cherries! The
gracious company (yes, company) gingerly ate the offering and departed with most of their teeth
intact, leaving discrete mounds of cherry pits on each plate to remind us of our sinful omission!
Although brother loves to remind us of our first unfortunate culinary foray, Mother encouraged
us to continue our kitchen efforts and I’m proud to say we never served a crunchy cobbler again!

My two sisters and brother were raised to ‘waste not, want not’ and of course, to remember
the hungry children in China. (wonder if today’s Chinese children are admonished to remember
the hungry children in America…) The land produced our dairy products, eggs, chicken, meat,
vegetables, and fruit. It was unthinkable that my generation would not learn to prepare what
agriculture had provided.

The more important memories involved family working together to make the most of nature’s
bounty in providing a good life on the farm. We had observed the finest cooks, had been
allowed to experiment with failures and successes, but most importantly were instilled with a
love of learning and stewardship passed from generation to generation. That’s how I learned
many of life’s lessons…and to cook.

~~~~~

Savoring Kentucky asked Margaret Lane for a bit of biographical information. Here’s what she told us:

I’m a former educator who served as Executive Director at both of Kentucky’s Executive Mansions (12 years), where I had the honor of working with some of Kentucky’s  fine chefs.  It was my distinct honor to work with Kentucky’s Historian Laureate, Dr. Thomas D. Clark, in publishing a history of Kentucky’s Governor’s Mansions (The People’s House, 2002).  Since then I’ve published three more books, including the latest, Beyond the Fence: A Culinary View of Historic Lexington.  My husband and I live and work on our Woodford County farms, where we honor our heritage of land stewardship and  good Southern food..…you’ll be pleased to know that I now have my own collection of cherry pitters!!

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A few rules hardly need stating, but even so, I’ll state two: If invited to a Bluegrass farm, try to go. If invited to an iconic Louisville restaurant, same thing. When an invitation arrived to attend a Lunch & Learn at Proof on Main in Louisville, the house restaurant for the also-headed-to-Lexington  incomparable 21C Museum Hotel (YEA!), I paid a lot more attention to the lunch than to the learn. I knew lunch would be interesting.

As it turned out, I discovered I have even more interest in the lunch topic than I had in the lovely butternut squash salad, Loch Duart Salmon with pineapple & Bourbon salsa, or even the yogurt honey mousse with poppy seed, strawberry & grapefruit Campari sorbet I ate that February day.

Once Dominique Love described the nature and purpose of the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, learn trumped lunch. Dominique, standing, in red, above left, is co-founder of the Festival, billed as “A four-day, culinary exploration of the South.” The Festival began in 2011; the 2012 event launches on Thursday, May 10.

I have been longing for a particular kind of food and drink festival in the Bluegrass for some time now. Oakland’s Eat Real Festival (“Eat it. Make it. Grow it”), launched in 2008, has been the most inspiring model. The Food Craft Institute, a sister project of Eat Real, has made me even more interested. It is worth quoting from the “top language” for both these efforts:

About Eat Real: 

Eat Real combines a state fair, a street-food festival, and a block party to create a celebration of good food. At the Eat Real Festival, participants learn where food comes from, who grows and makes it, and how they make it. Eat Real Festival attendance is 100% free of charge, all food at the festival costs $5 and less, and all food incorporates regionally-sourced, fabulous, and sustainably-produced ingredients.

Eat Real is a social venture business with an affiliated non-profit focused on promoting and teaching food craft. Eat Real’s mission is to help revitalize regional food systems, build public awareness of and respect for the craft of making good food and to encourage the growth of American food entrepreneurs.

About Food Craft Institute:

The Food Craft Institute (FCI) is a new educational institution that works to create and improve the viability of small and medium-scale value-added food businesses in rural and urban America….Food Craft Institute seeks to reinvigorate the creation and success of artisan food craft businesses in the U.S. through a combination of food craft training courses steeped in traditional techniques along with a rigorous entrepreneurship program.

See how wonderful this all sounds, how fun, and how useful to building a strong local food system and culture? I have been hoping some young, energetic, capable people will take all this on and invent just the right festival for central Kentucky.

I did not expect the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival to intrigue me, really. Without knowing a thing about it, I assumed it would be an expensive place for indulging in non-local, highly stylized food and drink. There is some of that—in fact, the Festival includes a whole “Connoisseur” track that costs a lot more and offers “a more exclusive, lavish experience”— but the Festival also includes technique labs aimed at cast iron cooking and biscuit-making, along with sessions in which chefs and food experts illuminate topics like preserving, barbecue, and country ham.

Here’s some of the language the organizers use to describe the purposes of the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival:

What is the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival?
The Atlanta Food & Wine Festival is the first culinary weekend in the nation dedicated to showcasing the food and beverage traditions of the entire Southern region….The Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, a culinary experience like no other, unites leaders of their craft—barbecue pit masters, award-winning chefs and mixologists, sommeliers, fry cooks and local growers—in the spirit of celebrating the rich food and beverage traditions of the South.

Tasting tents each day include more than 100 award-winning chefs and “are designed to lead guests through a culinary exploration of the South, featuring 15 themed tasting ‘trails,’ like Bourbon, Craft Beer, Farm Fresh, Fried Chicken, Seafood, Whole Pig…from southern regions around the globe.” I particularly like the inclusion of southern regions outside the U.S.

Well-known chefs around the south (or South) helped guide the 2011 Festival into being and now serve on its Advisory Council. Proof on Main chef Michael Paley (standing on the left in top left photo) and Seviche chef Anthony Lamas (standing, middle, top left photo) serve as Advisory Council members. That is why they cooked and hosted the Lunch and Learn. Chef Paley will lead a Festival seminar on preserving. The full presenter list is not yet available on the event website, but the festival schedule includes such notables as John Besh, Andrea Reusing, Matt Lee, and Sean Brock.

Want to go? Here is ticket information. Take good notes!

Want to create an excellent, local food-centric festival in central Kentucky? Great! Find some allies and get going. We have a lot to show, tell, and learn. Checking out the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival seems an excellent way to begin the research on what would work here.

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One reason Alfalfa weekend brunch is legendary: beautiful local ingredients.

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Recently quite a few local restaurants, including those just opening, state their commitment to using locally grown ingredients in their meals. While we cheer the fact that “local” has become a positive marketing term here, knowing a bit about seasonality and even about local food distribution can lead to a bit of skepticism about some claims. Curiosity abounds about whether the stated intentions and the reality on the plate will match. In this post we check out the extent to which a few local restaurants live up to their written aspirations to serve locally sourced food.

Editor Tom Martin’s Business Lexington story about Sabio, the new restaurant opening in Dudley Square, included a statement by executive chef Javier Lanza that begged to be checked out: “’We want to use as much Kentucky Proud produce as we possibly can. That is key to everything we do,’ Lanza said.”

So in service to you, dear readers, off we went to lunch at Sabio to check out its local-ness, also touted on  the restaurant’s website.

Before elaborating on that,  I can report that the food is nicely prepared. My companion said the complimentary bread plate included the best baguette-type bread he has had in a local restaurant. The rich French onion soup pleased me. The two roast beet/goat cheese frisée salads we had, one with chicken, had much to recommend them—just not local sourcing, as far as we could tell. Our server knew of nothing we were eating that came from local farms.

Our simple Sabio meals included lots of opportunities for using local ingredients in April. Flour, butter, onions, beef (or perhaps veal) for the soup stock, greens, chicken, goat cheese, herbs, and possibly beets could have been local, Kentucky Proud products. Perhaps some were, but if so, the restaurant had not yet trained its staff to know and share that information.

We saw a brunch menu by mistake. It included Weisenberger grits for a Shrimp and Grits entree. Sabio serves Caffe Marco coffee, roasted in Paris, Kentucky. That’s it, so far, for what we know about local-ness at Sabio. With a capable chef who wants to support local growers, let us hope the server has not yet been trained, or the local supply chain simply not yet established at this promising new spot.

We checked out The Local Taco, too, curious about reports that they served “a lot of local stuff.” For example, one of their signature tacos is called “Local BBQ,” but it seems that particular “Local” refers more to the name of the restaurant than to the source of the meat. I asked the cashier before ordering what ingredients are local. “All our meat is local,” she said. “All?” I asked. “Yes, it all comes from Critchfield.” I appreciate much about Critchfield Meats, but meat that comes from Critchfield could be sourced from a lot of non-local places.

On the other hand, Alfalfa Restaurant, subject of an excellent Lexington Herald-Leader review today, has always bought produce and meats from local growers, as best it could. Recently owners Jim Happ and Jake Gibbs have doubled down on local sourcing. All eggs now—125 dozen a week—come from central Kentucky farms. Chicken dishes include an option: for a small upgrade, diners can choose Kentucky chicken. Saturday brunches, always legendary, now include the extra benefit of Kentucky ingredients bought that morning from local growers at the Lexington Farmers Market two blocks away. The cute cart Alfalfites use to wheel the local goodies to the restaurant may be Alfalfa’s mid-life crisis vehicle—the restaurant will soon turn 40.

Like Alfalfa, Windy Corner Market and Wallace Station feature many locally sourced items, without charging fine dining prices. Honestly, I don’t know quite how they do it.  Savoring Kentucky hopes Sabio, other new restaurants, and established eateries will figure out the magic and expand their locally sourced offerings. Either that, or perhaps our local farms will follow a trend toward on-farm restaurants that cook what they grow. Nothing is more local than that.

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Note: Savoring Kentucky veers off the path of short(ish) blog posts today and offers an essay in five parts, in tribute to Wendell Berry.

I’m on Wendell Berry’s team. I put myself there. I’m a walk-on, unrecruited, at the far end of a  bench so long even visionary Wendell cannot see that far. No chance I’ll go pro. Wendell has never sent me onto the floor in the last two minutes of a game when our team is ahead by at least 30 points. In fact, our team doesn’t have much experience being ahead. Even so, a lot more people seem to be walking on recently.

I hang around and practice, feeling lucky to live at the same time as Wendell. I don’t “bleed Wendell,” but the man’s life and words dwell in the center of my heart, where only the most profound commitments have a home. Wendell doesn’t get paid for it, and my shortcomings have nothing to do with him, but he is my life coach.

~~~~~

When he delivered the 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture on Monday night, Wendell Berry spoke right to me. Wendell’s words find and fuel the part of me that considers most deeply what my purpose is, why I am alive. That’s been going on since 1971, when I first read The Hidden Wound and  A Place on Earth. Wendell has revised the latter book since then, and I have read it two mores times, along with the wealth of novels and stories based in Port William, a community that seems only a couple of counties away from Wayne County, where I grew up.

Wendell’s fiction shocked me as a young adult, because he begins with ingredients as familiar to me as eggs, butter, and milk, and then transforms them immediately into soul-searing art, the process seemingly in plain view and yet beyond my grasp. I knew his characters and their community deeply, but had failed, until reading Wendell, to realize their importance. With eyesight sharpened a little by Wendell’s fiction, and Wendell himself, now I see the value of working on the world that is right around me, in the middle of the large town where I am rooted. As I have described before, moments of learning and Wendell-inspired insights punctuate my adult life.

~~~~~

This work I do, assembling words and pictures about food and farming, would seem impossibly frivolous if it were not for a lesson learned from another book, one that fascinated me as a child: The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. I adored the country bunny DuBose Heyward invented in stories he told his five-year old daughter, Jenifer.* I wanted to visit the Easter egg-tinted world Marjorie Flack illustrated after she convinced her friend Heyward to put the story on paper.

The country bunny’s story filled my childhood heart with a sense of possibility I still feel today. The story champions women, racial justice, country virtues, the value of organization and hard work, common sense, and sound character development, all without preaching.

As a country girl, I adopted two of the wonderful themes of this book as part of my worldview: first, women are superbly capable. Second, and most important to this present writing, the expressive arts, including cooking, are legitimate lines of work in the world. The country bunny taught her 21 children to work as a team to handle all the household duties, assigning each task to two bunny children. Most thrilling of all, she assigned two to dance and two to sing to keep up the spirits of the others as they worked. Children are capable, too—I knew that as a farm kid. But what joy to draw the assignment to sing and dance—or write and take pictures! I speak from experience now that I’m making my own work assignments: there is ineffable happiness in living an expressive life and still contributing to the team by raising the spirits of those who are doing the hard, real tasks (like actual farming, for example)!

Wendell does both. He farms, helps others farm, works to save soil and to save the Earth, teaches about place and community, and then he also pours out an expressive language so fine New York Times writer Mark Bittman said this week, “I doubt there is a more quotable man in the United States.” Oh, what a fan I am, and how satisfying it has been this week to see Wendell command a national stage with his imagination, insights, and guidance.

~~~~~

Fan-dom fascinates me, living as I do in the middle of Big Blue Nation. We choose to follow a team, a choice that seems one of the most perfect examples of the social construction of reality, a premise about how we confer meaning and make sense of our world that was almost worth the pain of graduate school. We could choose a different team, or no team. We could choose to release ourselves from the misery we feel when our team falters—an infrequent experience with University of Kentucky sports teams this year, and certainly infrequent with Wendell Berry, in any year. Yet we stick with the team we have chosen, our spirits (and our local economies, apparently) rising and falling with their fortunes.

We speak of loving our team, meaning we have chosen to love it, to make it ours. In Wendell’s Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns On Affection,” he makes a point I had never considered: our affections are best and most appropriately conferred on connections we can make personally. Affection operates on the personal scale, which constitutes a built-in limit—the necessity of limits being a powerful Wendell theme. Wendell says, “…we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection.” We do, and should, worry about affection for our place and its members.

I take joy in the way Wendell blesses personal affection as a screen for what is worthy and deserving of our best work, as he reminds us that we should  ”give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful.” I take delight, as well, in the country bunny’s notion that some of us must apply ourselves to keeping up the spirits of those who do the heavy lifting.

~~~~~

Wendell’s ideas and his life require me, as a fan of his, to find practical forms of love and encouragement for people who farm, grow food, and care for the land. I am part of the community of central Kentucky, and part of a small neighborhood in downtown Lexington, complete with the obligations and benefits of membership in both. Wendell’s portraits of Port William’s members have helped me understand this. When I say I practice with the team, I mean that I work from this understanding daily, even though my skills and contributions are limited.

I live in community with so many people I love and trust, to whom I am connected by bonds that bring to life the rich synonyms Wendel offers for affection—”love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence.” These friends and neighbors are on Wendell’s team, too. They bring real skills to the work of reaching goals even bigger than an NCAA championship or a national humanities honor. A growing number of people near me now work toward a goal most simply stated as “We can feed ourselves well.” We live in a region graced by the soil, water, climate, and people capable of producing, processing, and delivering abundant, delicious food to all our community’s membership, using practices that will sustain us and our land as far into the future as we can imagine. This is what “eating local” means to me: eating splendid food from our own place, made possible by the work and spirit of a connected community of people who have mutual interests and exchange interweaving gifts.

The bench for Wendell’s team has been getting more crowded for a few years now, accumulating growers, teachers, policy types, cooks, processors, composters, inventors, beekeepers, communicators, systems thinkers, backyard farmers, distribution experts, chefs, researchers, environmentalists, and even a few poets. One person, Roger Lee Leasor, singlehandedly fits in a good number of those categories. He’s one of the most gifted actors and song-and-dance impresarios in central Kentucky history. To keep himself entertained, he manages Liquor Barn, a chain of super-stores that sell spirits and party supplies. In his Liquor Barn role, Roger makes sure the stores carry a long shelf of Kentucky-made wines, most of them unknown and hard to sell. Explaining his tendency to say “yes” to Kentucky-made wines, Roger says, “I want to live in wine country. The way to do that is to help Kentucky vineyards and wineries succeed.”

As more of us apply that same enlightened self-interest to food, self-sufficiency begin to seem possible, though almost impossibly challenging. We want to live in a place where all of us feed ourselves from the brilliant food our region grows. The way to do that is to help Kentucky farms succeed, to build and be part of a permanent local food system. That’s Wendell’s team. That’s the team I choose. I’m scooting over on the bench now, making room for you.

*DuBose Heyward also wrote the novel Porgy, the basis for the Gershwins’ opera Porgy and Bess, for which he wrote the libretto and helped produce the lyrics. Marjorie Flack wrote many children’s books, including The Story About Ping.)

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News for people excited about the new Media Working Group documentary, Coming To Ground: The lively and intrepid Slow Food Bluegrass duo, Susan Miller and Elaine Shay, invite you to a barn party to celebrate Earth Day while watching the premiere of the documentary. The party (and the video) start at 2 PM on Sunday, April 22, 2012. Details here.

My apologies to email subscribers to Savoring Kentucky – you wonderful people! Yesterday I unintentionally sent you an early draft of the main post on Coming To Ground, complete with typos and grammos, and incomplete in every other way. I’m sorry to share the view of the blog-sausage as it’s being made. Here is the full post.

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Ann Bell Stone, of Elmwood Stock Farm, appears in "Coming To Ground."

We’ll see a lot of our favorite growers when the feature-length documentary Coming To Grounddebuts this weekend, nicely timed to coincide with the most extensive local Earth Day celebrations I’ve seen. Acclaimed filmmakers Jean Donohue and Fred Johnson of Media Working Group have worked on this project long enough to cure several seasons of country hams the old fashioned way. What we will see results from years and years of planning, raising money, connecting, raising money, interviewing, raising money, filming, writing grant proposals, editing, raising money, promoting, and more promoting.

I have seen much of the video, and I am excited about it. Watch (or tape to watch during a weekend shower): Kentucky Educational Television, Sunday, April 22, 2012, at 2 PM, or many additional showings.

The “Ground” in this project is Kentucky earth. The story follows growers and policy-makers as they consider and describe their responses to economic and environmental crises that threaten farms, water, and forests in Kentucky and around the world.

Growers describe their experiences with developing sustainable agriculture after the end of cash subsidies for growing tobacco. Growers and commenters point out the importance of Kentucky policy decisions in helping Kentucky agriculture move toward a new set of possibilities after tobacco subsidies ended.

At the end of the 1990s, using half the money that came from tobacco companies’ settlements with states, Kentucky formed the Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy and the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board, charging the board to “invest these funds in innovative proposals that increase net farm income and affect tobacco farmers, tobacco-impacted communities and agriculture across the state by stimulating markets for Kentucky agricultural products, finding new ways to add value to Kentucky agricultural products, and exploring new opportunities for Kentucky farms.” The video points out the benefits for both growers and consumers of the more than $300 million the Kentucky Agricultural Development Fund has since invested in farms, markets, and promoting the Kentucky Proud brand of agricultural products.

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Egg salad can be goopy, soupy, and utterly ridiculous, or it can be sublime. Now which kind of egg salad would you like to make?

Sublime, I’m hearing. Good judgment! In this case, sublimity and its close cousin, simplicity, join to yield a food that is utterly satisfying. But beware: you must be initiated into the Three Secrets, and practice them faithfully, or you may end up wandering in the scary, swampy egg salad wilderness, wondering how anyone could possibly love such an icky food.

Ready? Here come The Secrets.

Secret 1: Choose excellent eggs, and boil them wisely.

The first part about the quality of the eggs—Secret 1A—requires having your own hens, being blessed with generous neighbors, or choosing pastured, organic eggs from a grower you know. Secret 1B, wise boiling, is the easy part; instructions coming right up, but first…

Bonus! Secret 1C: Make sure the eggs are at least one week old, or you will not be able to peel them after they are cooked. Trust me on this.

Wise boiling instructions: in a saucepan that has a lid, cover cold or room temperature eggs with cool water to an inch above the tops of the eggs. Put the lid on the pan, set it on a burner, turn to medium high, and don’t go too far away. As soon as the water comes to a complete boil, which means it is bubbling all over the surface and you can hear the eggs jostling around a little against each other, turn the heat off. Leave the covered pan where it is. For large eggs, set a timer for 12 minutes. Smaller eggs need 10 minutes, and extra large ones may need up to 14 minutes. When the timer goes off, dump the hot water into the sink and immediately run fresh cool water onto the hot eggs to stop their cooking. Dump out the first cool water immediately and fill the saucepan again with cool water. This time, let the eggs cool until you can handle them, about five minutes. Crack them all over, peel, rinse or wipe off any bits of shell, dry the eggs if needed, and put them in a clean bowl.

Secret 2: Ensure an appealing texture.

Using a box grater on the side with the largest holes, gently grate the eggs into a bowl large enough to hold your egg salad. This is an odd step, but it makes all the difference in “mouth feel.” Bonus: it’s kind of fun, pressing the warm, slightly wobbly egg through the coarse, sharp holes in the grater, seeing how it all turns out. Press gently and you will avoid grating fingers into the egg salad. At the end of each egg, you may have a chunk of hard-boiled white still in your hand. Press it carefully through the holes. Just do the best you can. I credit Mark Bittman with offering this grated egg tip somewhere along the way. I cannot find the tip online, so we’ll just thank Mark anyway, since he lights up the world of real cooking and good food in so many ways.

Secret 3: Homemade mayonnaise.

You made it, right? If not, you can do it in four minutes, or maybe six the first time you try.

That’s it: all these words, and it comes down to lightly stirring together grated hard-boiled eggs and homemade mayonnaise, yielding an egg-on-egg food so simple and sublime you feel glad to be alive. That’s assuming you used good ingredients at every turn. This is naked food. It will taste of the eggs, the oil in the mayonnaise, and not much more. Poor quality or mediocre tasting elements have nowhere to hide.
 
How much of each ingredient? I use about 1/3 cup mayonnaise for six large eggs. Start with even less mayonnaise and see what texture and taste you like. Please note that once you make your mayonnaise, you can build egg salad in about 14 minutes with only ONE egg, if you want, and most of that time you can read a good book while waiting for the egg to finish cooking. Just boil, peel, grate, add a dab of mayo, and there’s lunch: one more reason to keep your homemade mayonnaise container filled and ready.

Add-ins? Sure.

• Chopped fresh chives from the Campsie side garden are a favorite of mine. And who knew chives (and dill) are “packed with kaempferol, a flavonoid that has been shown to increase the production of metabolism-spurring thyroid hormones by about 150 percent,” according to Dr. Mehmet Oz in the May, 2012 O Magazine?
• Finely diced scallions will add a subtle allium bite and a bit of texture. (If you just want the texture, use tiny bits of celery instead.)
• Spring-fresh asparagus, lightly steamed and chopped, adds crunch, color, and complementary flavors.
• Finely diced sun-dried tomatoes, especially ones that took a nice long bath in herbed olive oil, punch up the flavor.
• Finely chopped green olives and roasted red peppers take egg salad in a tangy direction.
• Spike up the piquancy with chopped canned or fresh chilis. I advise staying away from smoky chilis in this case. Just go for clean heat, like a finely chopped Serrano from your own garden.
• Some people like pickles in egg salad. Hmmm – you have my permission to try them. Gherkins/cornichons, bread and butter, half-sours, dills: test and taste.
• A bit of mustard, horseradish, or wasabi pleases some palates.

• Spread it on a slice of whole grain bread or brioche,
• Eat it on crackers. I like Hint of Sea Salt Nut Thins, a delicious gluten-free option.
• Dip celery sticks into it.
• Roll 1/3 cup in a toasted nori sheet for a little green-gold bundle that looks like sushi and tastes like a smart lunch.
• When your tomatoes are ripe, cut one in quarters into each of two small bowls. Drop a dollop of egg salad in the center of each tomato, sprinkle with coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper. Pick up the bowls and two small forks, and go find a friend to share your bounty.

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Sometimes I know the name of the chicken that lays our eggs. My favorite chicken names, among friends’ chickens, are “Teacup” and “Chicken.” Yes, Chicken is a scaredy-cat hen, but her eggs are the opposite of scary. They are safe and completely reassuring.

Fresh eggs from known sources abound in our house these days, courtesy of the wonderful pastured, certified organic egg operation at Elmwood Stock Farm, as well as the generosity of neighbors with backyard urban flocks. This development—great, safe, healthy eggs all the time—is one of my favorite local food system advances, one I have enjoyed for the past six years or so.

Safe eggs are crucial to homemade mayonnaise. I have said before that I am both a mayonnaise snob and a mayonnaise wimp. I don’t like the stuff unless I make it myself, and I’m afraid of the canned versions other people use. So I make most of the mayonnaise we eat, without a single concern about food safety.

In fact, I make my own mayonnaise not only because homemade mayonnaise is delicious, but also because I can make it healthier by controlling the kind of oil I use (organic grapeseed or olive oil) and how much I salt it (lightly).  I can certainly avoid adding preservatives and chemicals with unpronounceable names. I can eat delicious mayonnaise with confidence that the eggs I eat have not bumped into a new microbe of some sort, developed in the fertile breeding grounds of confined animal feedlots. I can keep an eye on the age of my mayo, and get rid of any that ages to a questionable point.

I can control the flavor by selecting or avoiding add-ins (horseradish, cayenne, miso, green chilis, fresh tarragon, chives). I like all this control,

With a blender, room temperature ingredients, and this Joy of Cooking recipe, I make mayonnaise from scratch in about four minutes. It would take longer than that to locate the correct aisle in the store, find the jar, and pay for it. I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for years before realizing I could simply wing it: put salt, pepper, a few seasonings and a single fresh egg in the blender, drizzle in oil while the blender is running, listen for the sound of thickened emulsion, add juice of one lemon, listen again, add more oil, stop and taste.

Homemade mayonnaise has a hundred uses in my kitchen, including these:

• Top leftover salmon
• Mix with tuna
• Spread lightly on chicken breasts before broiling
• Use as a dip for cold steamed asparagus or green beans
• Thin with more lemon juice, add something sweet and chopped mint to make a delicious light dressing for fresh fruit
• Spread lightly both inside and outside a grilled cheese sandwich (whir of the rotary beater to Ruth Reichl for the “outside” suggestion)

One word about cost. I have not done a real comparison of the cost of homemade and commercial mayonnaises. Because I use high quality oil—and mayonnaise is mostly oil—my version may cost the same or more. It is still a bargain because of the intense flavor a small amount adds to so many foods.

The eggs? Even more so. Certified organic eggs from a farm near you may cost three or four times as much as commercial eggs, and they look much the same on the outside. Why spend extra? First, because eggs offer splendid, versatile, affordable protein, even at certified organic prices. Compared to meat, eggs are a fine bargain. Second, as you may notice I have been saying, locally grown eggs from sustainable farms are safe to handle, eat, and serve to your loved ones. Third, locally grown, pastured, fresh, organic eggs taste better. Fourth, the money you spend on local eggs supports growers who do painstaking, exhausting work to get great eggs to you.

So with eggs, most of us can afford the best. There are few things in my life for which that is true, which makes me enjoy eggs all the more.

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