Yesterday at a membership meeting of Slow Food Bluegrass, our one-year old convivium, I heard for the first time that activists who promote sustainability and other aspects of Slow Food’s “good, clean, and fair” values intend to lobby for changes in the federal “Farm Bill.” This legislation comes up for renewal every five years, and 2007 is the next renewal year.

Today in an opinion piece in the New York Times, chef and sustainability educator Dan Barber lists many ways the bill should change to support sustainable agriculture instead of unsustainable industrial agriculture. Among other things, Barber proposes rewarding farms that grow a wide range of crops, improve nitrogen fixation in their soil, subsidies that support regional agricultural strengths, and local or state-regulated abbatoirs that cater safely to small scale producers.

Read a couple of quotations from the article. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Lahey has changed life at our house. Jim — I’ve seen him in a video and he just cannot be “Mr. Lahey” — owns the Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan and has figured out something new. In every house that has time, flour, water, salt, yeast, a heavy covered pan and a hot oven, people who have never made bread before can now make bread that crackles and chews like the finest ciabatta.

Thanks to recent policy changes at the New York Times, here is the original story that included the recipe. And here is the follow-up story, one month later (December 6, 2006), that featured a few helpful tweaks — but still no kneading.

Not only that. This is the easiest AND best bread we have ever made.

Jim invited New York Times food writer, chef, and cookbook author Mark Bittman to visit the Sullivan Street Bakery (which is actually on West 47th Street) and use the New York Times food pages to describe the wet dough, slow rise, and covered high heat bake that produces this REAL wonder bread. The world — or at least the millions of us who value real food, love to cook, and don’t happen to live down the block from an artisan bakery — is responding with delirium. Some devotees have skipped a few bureaucratic steps and conferred sainthood on both men.

Really, I agree.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I went to Midway, a beautiful tiny town halfway between Lexington and Frankfort (I guess). Incredi-chef Ouita Michel and her husband Chris renovated the mid-1800s Holly Hill Inn building and began serving memorable meals there in 2000.

A little bit of what’s great about Holly Hill Inn: After people eat at Holly Hill, no matter how many times they have eaten there, they talk about their meal. A LOT. They tell people about the beautifully prepared food, much of it made with fresh, locally grown ingredients, and they talk about the warmth, kindness and graciousness of the people who served the meal.

Holly Hill Inn turned into a magnetic force, attracting people to Midway and to the idea of supporting local growers and securing top quality ingredients by buying as many ingredients locally as possible. Holly Hill Inn became a destination.

Now Midway itself is a destination, helped by the work visionary, diplomatic mayor Becky Moore set in motion to make Midway’s historic Main Street buildings and grounds beautiful and appealing again. Today I ate lunch at the Black Tulip, and then had dessert and coffee next door at Quirk’s Café.

Good things about the Black Tulip: Cream of tomato soup rich with cream, topped with perfect tiny homemade croutons and some deep green parsley. On a wintry day I also enjoyed the brick red paint and red oriental rugs, and the gas log fire just beyond my right elbow.

Good things about Quirk’s: French press coffee — I had Guatemalan; creme brulée made with fantastic vanilla. The creme itself was silky and thick without being heavy — perfect. The brulée, too — just right. My favorite dessert, prepared as well as I have ever had it. Quirk’s uses a ramekin for the custard instead of a flatter, wider dish. I wondered if I would like the deeper layer of custard and the relatively smaller amount of the torched sugar topping. I did, indeed. I also liked that Quirk’s has at least one Kentucky wine on its menu, a bottle from nearby Equus Run Vineyards.

I just discovered Regan Daley’s In the Sweet Kitchen, included as the source of some recipes appended to Jeanne Ray’s novel, Eat Cake. Toronto pastry chef Daley opens her 692-page cookbook with these two sentences: “My first encounter with a vanilla bean was an epiphany. Strange, perhaps, but for me it marked the moment when I realized the difference good ingredients can make.”

A weaver from western North Carolina, near Asheville, surprised me when she said “We craftspeople are the luckiest people in the world because we get to work with materials.” I had no idea what she meant.

A year later, as I chopped a red pepper from the Lexington Farmers Market, I got it. I think I’m lucky because I get to work with ingredients. The pleasure of the real, and the satisfaction found in combining and transforming ingredients draw me to the kitchen over and over. Read the rest of this entry »

Wonderful science teacher Becca Self and others supported middle school students in conducting careful research on making a new school’s grounds and buildings eco-friendly. I watched the Montessori Middle School of Kentucky students present their proposals to their thoughtful school board and described the experience for Nougat Magazine. See Students Resolve to Change Our World, part of Nougat’s January, 2007 issue on health and wellness.

In the sweet days at the very end of the year, we had a meal with friends that ended with a cake so beautiful my man said, “I have to ask: If you moved to another place, how long would it be before you found someone who would bake a cake like this for you?”

Not that anyone really meant to move. We live in a possibly purple town in a red state, and sometimes state politics and the local love affair with chain restaurants grate. We forget for a minute that most of our days neighbors and strangers alike treat us with kindness and a cheerful live-and-let-live decency. We forget about the great food we grow or buy from local growers. While we are forgetting, we drift toward talk that idealizes the food wonderland on the west coast or the politics of Massachusetts.

Kate’s cake called us home.

Kate made the Butter Layer cake from The Cake Club cookbook by our neighbor in Woodford County, Susie Quick. All of us want Susie’s Honest Farm and her energetic food enterprises to succeed. Anita, another friend at the table, bought copies of The Cake Club for Kate and me - and now it all came full circle, or maybe full spiral, on a sweet night in Lexington. Kate made the cake for Anita, me, and all the others at the table.

Between the first and second layer, and mixed with the whipped cream frosting, Kate spread lemon curd she made from her sister’ Meyer lemons. Kate’s sister’s tree in New Orleans somehow survived Katrina and so, 740 miles north, we shared the fruits’ flowery tartness and remembered how much we love each other, and our place on earth.