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April 2010
Author Shannon Honeybloom: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
After years of moving quickly through life (traveling the world, getting three degrees, acting in commercials), Shannon Honeybloom decided to slow things down. Way down.
She was a mother of two children in one of the busiest cities in the world. In a Statesman story earlier this month, Honeybloom recalled how having kids made her remember her own laid-back childhood where getting things done wasn’t as important as just enjoying whatever the day held.
She and her husband moved from New York City to Austin, where they now live with their three young kids and where all kinds of “slow” movements have converged. Creating a “slow” life at home is the subject of Honeybloom’s new book, “Making a Family Home.”
Taking the time to enjoy the process of cooking and eating is at the heart of the Slow Food movement, which means Honeybloom’s refrigerator is essential to her family’s effort to live life more slowly.
What three things are always in your fridge? Apples, butter, and hopefully something that contains chocolate.
What’s your favorite condiment? Mustard, especially spicy.
What’s the first thing you pull out of the fridge in the morning? I pull out the ice tea: I’m on a smoothie kick right now, and I like to use herbal tea in it. So I’ll fill up the blender with fruit, a little almond milk and chilled herbal tea — for a refreshing morning shake!
Photo by Shannon Honeybloom.
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Council approves some farmers market changes, leaves prepared food item in committee
Austin City Council approved changes to the city code that will allow farmers market vendors to provide samples of their prepared product, but the issue of serving prepared hot food is still a few weeks from being voted on, according to David Lopez, manager of the health and human services department’s environmental and consumer health unit.
This leaves vendors, including Dai Due Supper Club and Thai Fresh, who until the city restricted the use of temporary permits had been selling freshly prepared foods on Saturday mornings, unable to sell food prepared on site.
UPDATE: Market director Suzanne Santos, who coordinates the three main SFC markets downtown, in Sunset Valley and at the Triangle, says that the main change is that vendors can obtain a sampling permit ($210 per year), which will allow them to give samples using compostable spoons instead of having to prepackage each sample in a closed container.
As for the prepared food issue, until the council votes on changes, hot food from Dai Due and other vendors will continue to be served at the Sunset Valley market on Pillow Road on Saturday mornings and at the downtown market days that have been designated “special events.”
The next “special event” market downtown will be May 15, which is the launch celebration of the summer season. For five weeks starting June 5, the downtown market will host its annual fruit and veggie fest, which will feature activities, samples and, because of the “special event” designation, prepared food.
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Johnson’s Backyard Garden teams up with Whole Foods
As one of the area’s community-supported agriculture programs, Johnson’s Backyard Garden is always looking for new pick-up locations for its CSA subscribers.
CSA subscribers pick up boxes of produce once a week instead of buying that produce at a grocery store, which makes a new partnership between Johnson’s and Whole Foods Market particularly interesting.
Farmer Brenton Johnson met staff from Whole Foods Markets after the Slow Money Showcase at City Hall last week.
Johnson says they were able to work out an agreement where, staring next week, CSA members could pick up boxes of Johnson’s produce at the customer service counter at Whole Foods Market downtown. (You can sign up for the CSA online.)
Johnson also says that starting in about a month, Whole Foods wills start buying wholesale produce, starting with tomatoes and eggplants, from them on a regular basis to sell in area stores.
(In the photo above, farm intern Marissa Lankes weaves string around stakes to shore tomato plants on Thursday at Johnson’s Backyard Garden, where farm staff have planted about twenty-thousand plants in the ground.)
“They want to help us get equipment like a greens harvester and a bagging and wash line to grow and process stuff that they want to sell like baby spinach and salad mix,” Johnson says.
Another benefit, Johnson says, hopes to see come out of this new working relationship is that Whole Foods can train his staff in food safety as well as harvesting, packaging and post-harvest handling.
Photo by Alberto Martinez for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Hunger Awareness Project: A week later, an empty shelf
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Not literally, of course. In this middle-class American food society, where our pantries and freezers are stockpiled with a month’s worth of food and then some, I have plenty I could serve my family.
Having attempted this week to walk in the shoes of the millions of Americans who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, my kitchen feels like an embarrassment of riches.
Chicken, pork shoulders and meatballs in the freezer. Cans of soup, dried beans, pasta, rice, dried fruit, nuts, cereal and bread in the pantry. Leftovers from this week’s pantry project in my refrigerator, whose door packed to the gills with condiments and preserves.
But the shelf of a month’s worth of food pantry fare from which I cooked is almost bare. All that remains are a few beans, rice, spaghetti, spaghetti sauce, juice and jalapenos.
I was able to squeeze in a few meals this week using things from my garden, including this giant chicken salad served with a side of pinto beans.
Both the protein and the vegetables ran out quickly. (Megan of Stetted wrote about how she made chicken last for twice the number of meals I was able to stretch it out for.) I’ve been eating leftover beans for what feels like days, and I finally broke down and had to buy more fresh fruit, vegetables and milk from the store. I only spent $25, which would still keep me under the food stamp allotment, but doing this project has made me more aware than ever of how much food costs and how quickly it seems to run out.
Justin and Han of Keep Austin Tasty have a nice post wrapping up what they’ve learned, one of the biggest being that variety in one’s diet is a luxury. Summer of Something to Chew On and Kim of The Dinner Hour both blogged about how difficult it can be to cook at all, not to mention from a restricted number of items, when life gets in the way.
Cameron of What To Eat dug deep into her pantry for a spicy chili chicken coriander soup that might make you forget you were cooking on a budget, and Kristi of Austin Farm To Table dug deep into her past — and tested her willpower — when she made Hamburger Helper. Aaron of Austin Epicurean came to terms with his childhood hatred of canned vegetables and actually enjoyed eating them in a stir fry.
I’ve been so impressed by the commitment of local bloggers. This has been an eye-opening experience just from my own time spent in the kitchen and at the dinner table with my family, but reading about how they’ve navigated this week has given me even more insight than I could have imagined into a very real situation that so many face.
The week-long project is ending, but now that I have a little better idea of what these people go through, I realize how much work there is to be done.
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Stay on the lookout for small orange fruits during Loquat Awareness Week
Have you seen this fruit?
These little orange fruits are called loquats, and they taste like a cross between an apricot and a kiwi (and no, they aren’t related to kumquats.)
I first tried them when I was living in Spain, where they are called nisperos and you can buy them by the kilo. I had no idea anyone grew them in the U.S., so you can imagine my surprise when I moved to Austin and found them in yards all over the city.
And the saddest part? Most homeowners lucky enough to have a loquat tree in their yard consider them a nuisance because the fruit overripens, makes a mess on the ground and attracts a ton of squirrels and birds.
Pear, peach, apple and lemon trees are prized for their fruit output, but everyone overlooks the lowly loquat, even though it produces one of my favorite fruits.
This is why I’m declaring the first week of May to be Loquat Awareness Week in Austin.
For the next week, keep your eyes peeled for these little orange jewels, and when you find one that is bright and is just soft enough to feel like a ripe nectarine, give it a taste and let me know what you think.
(You can eat the skin, but I prefer to peel mine before eating, and don’t eat the large smooth seed inside.)
If you find yourself with a huge crop of loquats, you can make jam or even cocktails and entire loquat feast like the Tipsy Texans did a few years ago.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many pounds of these nisperos we ate in Spain, and it makes me nostalgic every time I eat them here, even though I have to forage to get them.
Of note: Renee Studebaker of Renee’s Roots says that there probably won’t be as many loquats ripening on trees right now because of the harsh winter. Did your loquat tree produce many fruits this year? She says many of the Hyde Park trees don’t have fruit, but I’ve seen several loquat trees in South Austin with plenty of fruit.
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Hot Links: Hunger Awareness Project, Denny’s famine ads, hipsters on food stamps
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Keep Austin Tasty: Justin and Han are sticking with their initial goal of showing what it “might be like for a young Chinese couple, possibly recent immigrants to this country, trying to reproduce the familiar flavors of home with our available ingredients” by making dishes such as garlic fried rice and skipping meals.
Savor The Earth: Beans and rice were already staples in Nicole’s diet, and she has a good stove-top method for cooking rolled oats.
Stetted: In addition to feeding her family of three from the food pantry list and food stamp money, Megan is being diligent about tracking how much each meal costs, as well as incorporating fresh produce from her garden. A dinner of potato pancakes cost less than $2.51 to make.
Girl Gone Grits: Kristina plotted out a week’s worth of meals using the list of ingredients from the food pantry. She even posted an easy recipe for lasagna soup, which calls for a box of Lasagna Hamburger Helper.
Texas, Times Two: The mother-daughter team of Lauren and Dee Kincke are blogging about their experiences on Bytes from Texas and Texas to Mexico. If you’re looking for new ways to eat oats, check out Lauren’s recipe for oatmeal pancakes. Dee has a recipe for stuffed cabbage rolls that use many ingredients already in your pantry.
Lisa is Cooking: With so many pinto beans to work with, Lisa made vegetarian collard rolls with poblano rice stuffed with protein- and fiber-rich beans.
Austin Farm To Table: Kristi, who has been volunteering with the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas for four years, is incorporating vegetables from her Farmhouse Delivery CSA with the items from the food pantry list to create meals for the week, which included a kale and egg Spanish tortilla.
South Austin Foodie Adventures: Suzanna has been getting creative with her ingredients by making a dip from cannellini white beans and granola from the oats. “I don’t know why, but granola cereals (well, cereals in general) are some of the most overpriced items, and you can make your own for pennies!” she writes.
Something To Chew On: Summer writes about what a luxury it is to spend $20 on burgers and fries with her husband when they were out and about and starving. “We had just spent — in five minutes on one meal — almost what I spent to supplement this project for a whole week.” Concern for food waste has prompted her to enroll in a free composting class hosted by the City of Austin.
Fete and Feast: Natanya created a podcast about why we’re doing this project, which includes some good information about how you can help. The Capital Area Food Bank can buy $25 worth of food with a $5 donation, which Natanya points out is like one drink at happy hour.
Austin Epicurean: Aaron is making good use of a whole chicken by eating the legs for dinner one night, cold chicken salad on garlic toast the next and turning the rest into stock.
Cheap, Cheap: Eggs are one of the cheapest and most diverse forms of protein, and two bloggers (Cameron of What To Eat and Justin and Han of Keep Austin Tasty) made similar spring onion pancakes using eggs and green onions. Tired of scrambled eggs? Former restaurant critic Leslie Kelly getting creative with her egg-a-day experiment, where she’s cooking and eating at least one egg a day and blogging about it.
Food Stamp Challenge: In 2008, Capital Area Food Bank of Texas CEO David Davenport ate for a month on the amount of money allocated from food stamps. He was allowed to spent $21 a week on food and beverages, and by the end of the four weeks, he’d lost 18 pounds, four pounds less than his doctors allowed, which meant he had to stop the challenge just a few days shy of a month.
Hipsters on Food Stamps: The bad economy and rising unemployment rate has hit twenty- and thirty-something hipsters just like everyone else, which means that some of them who qualify for food stamps are using the money to eat better than they’d be able to afford to otherwise.
Stamp Out Hunger: On Saturday, May 8, the U.S. Postal Service is hosting its annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. All you have to do is place nonperishable food items such as juice, pasta, cereal, rice and canned vegetables, fruits, meats or soup in a paper bag near your mailbox, and your mail delivery person will pick it up and deliver to a local food bank.
Famine Isn’t Funny: After facing criticism of being insensitive to victims of one of the worst famines in history, Denny’s pulled a promo for all-you-can-eat fries and pancakes to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Irish potato famine earlier this year.
Overweight and Hungry?: It’s a hard scenario to comprehend, but millions of Americans, especially children, struggle with both their weight and food insecurity. Low-income families who don’t have much money for food end up spending it on high-calorie, but nutritionally deficient meals, which is especially hard on the still developing bodies of young children.
Lasagna soup photo by Kristina Wolter, chicken salad photo by Aaron Kull, potato pancake photo by Megan Myers and collard roll photo by Lisa Lawless.
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Hunger Awareness Project: Using WIC, food stamps to buy local food
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Because I was only employed part-time at the newspaper and Ian didn’t have much work at the time, our income level was just below the cut-off point to receive vouchers for things like milk, cheese, juice, cereal, peanut butter, eggs and cans of tuna from the Women, Infants and Children program.
Growing up, my family hadn’t ever had to rely on food stamps, but I wasn’t too proud to research my options and apply for benefits when I found out we were having a child.
I ended up working full-time later in my pregnancy, but in the few months that I was among the millions of Americans enrolled in WIC, I learned a lot about a situation that for many isn’t temporary.
It was definitely nice not to have to pay for some very basic staples, but I was so impressed with the other benefits of the program, mainly the classes on breastfeeding and basic infant care. Immersed in a society that has over-commercialized birth and babies, I enjoyed being among other families that were trying to do things as simply as possible.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take advantage of the ability for people enrolled in WIC or SNAP food benefits, or food stamps, to buy food from local farmers markets.
At the Sustainable Food Center’s three farmers markets (downtown and in Sunset Valley on Saturday mornings and at the Triangle on Wednesday afternoons), you can buy eligible food using your benefits by swiping your card at the information booth in exchange for these wooden coins that many of the vendors accept.
When buying food for this week’s Hunger Awareness Project, I picked up a pound of store-brand lean ground beef ($2.97), and as soon as I felt the squishy tube, my stomach got a little queasy.
Because industrial ground beef is the cause of so many massive food recalls and made with animals who are grain fed and sometimes not in the best of health when they are killed, we’ve made the switch to eating ground beef made with local and sustainable meat.
On Saturday, I bought a pound of ground beef ($6) from Richardson Farms in Rockdale to do a side-by-side comparison with store-bought ground beef.
Because I knew which meat was which when cooking up hamburgers last night, this test was in no way objective, but for my own curiosity, I wanted to see what the difference was in meat from the store (left) and local meat (right) that cost twice as much per pound.
(This photo is just a friendly reminder to stop using charcoal lighter fluid and invest $10-15 into one of these stand-up starters. Instead of wasting half an hour and half a bottle of smelly, chemical-laden fuel to get the coals going, you can have a blazing hot heat source in just 15 minutes with one of this nifty contraptions, which only requires a rolled-up ball of newspaper and a match to get started.)
I seasoned both meats with salt and pepper and grilled them alongside some smashed potatoes.
(I got the idea for this method from a Gourmet recipe for pan-fried smashed potatoes. Turns out, the boiled-then-smashed-then-grilled potatoes taste even better than the pan-fried ones.)
The taste difference between the burgers wasn’t as obvious as I thought it would be, but the local meat burger (right) was definitely juicier and richer in flavor. I didn’t really like the texture from the super-fine grind of the store-bought burger (left), which was more mild and less beefy than the local stuff.
When you’re on food stamps, paying twice as much money for local meat might seem illogical, but there are many ways to stretch the meat and for many concerned with the health and environmental benefits of sustainably raised meat, it’s worth the extra cost.
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Hunger Awareness Project: Leftover Tuna Helper ain’t pretty, but it’s food
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
When I was young, having dinner made from a boxed meal like this almost seemed like a treat. (Probably because that’s how the commercials pitched it to an impressionable kid during breaks in “Saved By The Bell.”)
As an adult, I’ll occasionally buy the flavored pasta in a bag for my husband, but in general, we get by just fine without a “Helper” in the kitchen.
But for this Hunger Awareness Project, I bought a box of Tuna Helper last week, which Ian turned into dinner one night when it was just him and the kid.
Which meant that, lucky me, I got to eat leftover Tuna Helper for lunch the next day.
I don’t recommend this.
But hey, it was food, I was hungry and I needed a reminder: Eating on a budget ain’t always pretty.
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Hunger Awareness Project: Thinking outside the (food pantry) box
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
As soon as I saw the list of food for this Hunger Awareness Project, my wheels started spinning about how to use the ingredients so that we wouldn’t get bored by Day Two.
It’s not just about being bored, though. When you don’t look forward to meals, your morale drops. I imagine being down and out, perhaps looking for a job or even trying to make a special dinner when there’s no money for going out to eat, and looking at a whole chicken and a bag of rice with no hope of having more than, well, chicken and rice.
In fact, on the very first night of this challenge last week, chicken and rice is exactly what we ate.
Roasting a whole chicken is the first step to at least two meals, three when you include the soup you get to make from the carcass. Rub the raw bird with oil, salt, pepper and spices (we used lemon and thyme), and place in a cast iron skillet. Roast at 400 or 450 for about 45 minutes.
My go-to method for cooking rice, food pantry project or not, is to saute a few smashed pieces of garlic, add the dry rice, stir for a few minutes and then add stock or water with chicken bouillon cubes.
(I should have tried a little harder to spiff up the green beans. I forgot how mushy and flavorless canned green beans are.)
From the chicken drippings, Ian made a gravy that was one of the best he’s ever made. He added water and flour into the skillet (see why it’s good to use a cast iron skillet to start with?), stirring and adding seasoning until he got it just right.
A simple meal, but a delicious way to kick off the week.
With the leftover chicken, I could have made chicken and dumpling stew, but I wanted to use up a few cans of coconut milk that had been collecting dust in my pantry over the past few months.
Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” is one of my all-time favorite cookbooks because the recipes don’t require many ingredients and are highly adaptable. I found one for a chicken soup with coconut milk and rice, so I added canned green beans and corn, powdered ginger, a few sprigs of cilantro from my garden and other spices to create a soup that if you closed your eyes and used your imagination tasted almost Thai.
But the real winners were the samosas I made using potatoes and a tortillas that I bought with my SNAP food assistance (aka food stamp) allowance. While I microwaved the potatoes, skin on, for 10 minutes to soften them, I sauteed chopped onions, turmeric, garlic, coriander seeds and cumin. Once the potatoes were soft, I mashed them up with the spice mixture.
Instead of making samosa dough from scratch, I just cut a tortilla in half and placed a small amount of potato in the center, folding the two corners on top of each other and sealing the edges with water and a firm pinch. (Here’s a good visual tutorial if you need one.)
In a hot pan with about an inch of vegetable oil, I fried the samosas for a few minutes and then served them with the soup.
Both meals were hearty and enjoyable to eat even though they used many of the same ingredients. Just goes to show that basic ingredients are just that: a base for whatever your imagination can conjure up.
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Hunger Awareness Project: The cheap, wonderful world of oats
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Old-fashioned rolled oats are one of my favorite pantry staples, food pantry project or not. Of course, they are essential for many cookies and streusel toppings, but I’ve always been a fan of oats for breakfast.
I have no patience for quick oats (rolled oats that are just chopped into pieces to cook faster), which just taste like mush or, if you’re using the little flavored instant packets, ridiculously sweet mush.
I was happy to see oats on the list of things that the Reaching Out Center in Pflugerville gave out to clients last week. (The Capital Area Food Bank of Texas gave us this sample list of food that a family would get once a month at a pantry like the one in Pflugerville.)
Not only are old-fashioned oats cheap, full of fiber and good for lowering your cholesterol, they are easy and quick to cook. I just throw a couple of handfuls of oats in a bowl, cover them with milk and microwave for three minutes. (You can cook for a few minutes longer, but I like mine with texture.) Add a few raisins, nuts and a sprinkle of brown sugar, and you’ve got a hearty breakfast that those “instant” maple syrup apple cinnamon oatmeal packets can’t quite rival.
(Flaxseed, hemp seed or wheat bran also mix well into oatmeal if you’re looking to incorporated more fiber or omega-3 in your diet.)
The only other breakfast item on the list was toasted oats cereal, similar to Cheerios. I stuck with the store brand when I stocked up for this challenge, and I’m happy to report that the honey nut toasted oats in a bag are a fine (and much cheaper) substitute for the name-brand cereal. In fact, I have a feeling I’ll be buying a lot more of these bagged toasted oats long after this project is over.
One thing that wasn’t on the food pantry list was milk, an ingredient that both of these breakfast options traditionally require. (I’d hate to have to eat toasted cereal soaking in water, but I’m sure many people have no choice.) Powdered milk was an option, but because milk is one of the items that my family would receive if we were enrolled in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, I chose to buy milk instead of rehydrate it.
UPDATE: Blogger Lauren Kincke made (and posted a recipe for) oatmeal pancakes that she made with her rolled oats.
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Hunger Awareness Project: Feeding a growing need
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Let that figure soak in. A 60 percent increase in need in just 12 months. And this is despite news that the recession is starting to get better.
At a meeting at the food bank last week to kick off this Hunger Awareness Project, Austin food bloggers toured the facility with Lisa Goddard, online marketing director for the organization, one of the largest of its kind in the country.
She walked us through a gigantic warehouse that stored everything from canned goods to fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy. The food comes from individual donations, like the canned food drives at the Reggae Fest or local schools, as well as big grocery chains such as HEB, Randalls or Walmart.
Last year, the facility in South Austin brought in, inspected, sorted and distributed 23 million pounds of food, up from 17 million the year before.
Goddard said that because of the economy and unemployment rate, the food bank’s 350 partner agencies — which includes food pantries, soup kitchens, after-school programs and programs for the elderly, Boys and Girls Clubs and health outreach organizations — are seeing more first-time clients than ever.
Who are these people? Goddard says that some people wait until the pantry shelves are completely bare before asking for help, while others know that at a certain time of the month, they will need a little boost to make it through until the rent and childcare checks clear. For some, unexpected medical emergencies leave them shorthanded, and for others, it happens when additional families members move into an already strapped household.
So how can you apply these unique situations to your life, even if you haven’t ever used food assistance? For one, many of us are always trying to find new ways to eat affordably. Sure as the summer heat, gas prices will continue to creep up through the summer, which always affects the cost of food. Staples such as rice, oats, pasta, dried beans and canned vegetables sit humbly in our pantries, just waiting for us to consume the sexier, more expensive perishables — yogurt, cottage cheese, lunch meat, fish, bread, etc. — we stock fresh week after week.
If you’ve ever donated food, you probably don’t think twice after dropping the cans or bags of beans in a box. Nothing like cooking with some of the most-donated items to make you think twice about unloading the stuff from your own pantry that you just don’t want to eat.
Gardening is one source of food that people of all economic backgrounds can benefit from. Yes, you have to have money for start-up costs and access to water, but growing your own food, no matter your income level, is something many of us are trying. (In fact, the vegetables in my own backyard garden will be the only fresh veggies we eat this week because canned was all that was available from the food pantry list.) At the food bank, Goddard showed up a dozen or so square-foot beds, which the organization uses as teaching tools so partner agencies can then build beds and show clients how they can grow food.
(One of my favorite parts of the tour was this odds-and-ends shelf with nontraditional donations. Armadillo milk, anyone?)
Anyone can participate in this project. The goal is to tell different stories of hunger and raise awareness about an issue that’s easy to ignore. Here’s a list of bloggers who are taking on the cooking-and-eating part, but your comments, tweets, Facebook shares and related blog posts are just as important. (If I’ve left off your blog, just shoot me an e-mail. This list was complied from the bloggers who went on the tour, but I know there are others participating.)
- Suzanna Cole - South Austin Foodie Blog
- Summer Huggins - Something to Chew On
- Lauren Kincke - Bytes from Texas: One Longhorn’s Adventures
- Dee Kincke - Texas to Mexico
- Aaron Kull - Austin Epicurean
- Lisa Lawless - Lisa is Cooking
- Stephanie McClenny - The Cosmic Cowgirl
- Megan Myers - STETTED editing toward a well-fed life
- Nicole Ray - Savor the Earth
- Han Ren and Justin Ong - Keep Austin Tasty
- Alexandra Richmond - Austin is Delicious
- Kim Usey - The Dinner Hour
- Kristi Willis - Austin Farm to Table
- Kristina Wolter - Girl Gone Grits
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Austin Kleon: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
For Austin Kleon’s sake, I hope newspapers don’t go away any time soon.
(For my sake and your sake, too, but for entirely different reasons.)
The Austin-based artist makes poetry by blacking out all but a few words in newspaper articles. He uses a Sharpie to create art by taking away, just like a sculptor would by chipping away at a block of wood.
Kleon just released his first book “Newspaper Blackout,” a collection of poems that are as diverse as the articles from which they are derived.
The book came out last week, which meant the Kleon celebrated with a release party at his house. This explains, he says, the “trashy” condition of his fridge, including the Mountain Dew Throwback and leftover salsa in a foam container. (Wish I had a good excuse for the train wreck of a fridge in my house right now.)
What three things are always in your fridge? To quote the title of my friend Bill Keaggy’s book, Milk Eggs Vodka.
What’s your favorite condiment? If I ever drown myself, it’ll be in Mi Madre’s salsa.
What’s your go-to snack while reading/working with a newspaper? Almonds…and beer.
When I asked Kleon to send me a picture of his fridge, I also sent him a scanned copy of a March food section that included an article of mine, from which he created a poem called “Tall Boys.”
I’m not sure if he considers what he does collaborative art, but I do. The thought that someone might take the words I so painstakingly peck out for the paper each week and give them new life as a new art form — be it blackout or even just a simple collage — makes me incredibly happy.
Photo by Meghan Kleon.
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Hot Links: Bittman’s new app, Austinites on Food Network and the war on salt
‘Everything’ on the Go: Mark Bittman’s celebrated cookbook, “How to Cook Everything,” now has an iPhone app. I haven’t had a chance to try the new app, but if I like it even a tenth as much as I love the book, the app might give Epicurious a run for its money as my favorite food application. (As for the new Nigella Lawson app — $7.99 for 70 recipes — I think I’ll pass. Bittman’s app costs $1.99, for now, and has all 2,000 recipes from the book.)
Austin’s ‘Next Food Star’: Two of the 12 contestants on “Next Food Network Star” are from Austin. Dzintra Dzenis owns Plate by Dzintra, and Brad Sorenson works at Asti. Show premieres on June 6.
4/20, National Ranch Dressing Day: The anonymous Austin pizza delivery blogger A Pizza Girl reports that yesterday (4/20, something of a national holiday among marijuana smokers) should be called National Ranch Dressing Day because “you may not know this, but stoners love ranch dressing; If more than two are ordered per pizza, you can be sure they are smoking up.” This girl is hilarious, despite the fact that she usually pulls in less than $3 in tips per delivery.
‘Food, Inc.’ on PBS: If you haven’t seen “Food, Inc.,” the Robert Kenner documentary that was up for an Oscar earlier this year, tonight’s your chance. PBS’s POV is broadcasting the movie tonight at 8 p.m. People across the country are so excited for this national television premiere that they are hosting potlucks and other gatherings to get friends and family to watch.
Ramp Crazy: Elsewhere in the country, ramp fever has struck chefs, home cooks and food bloggers, who just can’t get enough of these wild leeks. Joel Ozersky wrote about the Church of the Ramp in last week’s Time. They are a sign that spring has arrived at local farmers markets, which is always a good thing, but I just don’t get it was the fuss is about. Now Brussels sprouts. That’s a church I could join.
Double Take: KFC just can’t seem to get it right. Just weeks after releasing the Double Down, they launch Buckets for the Cure, pink buckets of fried chicken to help raise money for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. (Ad Age reports that none of these promotional efforts seem to be working.) Good for them for raising money for a good cause, but they’d cause a lot more change if they reconsidered their products and what goes into them. (Mike Sutter tried the Double Down this week and didn’t think much of it either.)
Gum Banksy: If you’re familiar with the renegade artist Banksy, you’ll love Ben Wilson’s gum art. The Londoner has had plenty of run-ins with the police and, unlike Banksy, he’s not anonymous, but his work is pretty cool.
War on Salt: Sodium in Americans’ diets has long been a public health concern, but just this week, the Washington Post reported that the FDA is taking serious steps toward regulating how much salt companies are allowed to put in food. The initiative hasn’t been formally announced, but anonymous sources said the government would set limits on the amount of salt in food, gradually paring down sodium consumption. “The changes would be calibrated so that consumers barely notice the modification.” Of note: Three-quarters of our sodium intake comes from processed foods. Only 11 percent comes from either cooking or what we sprinkle on at the table.
‘Food Revolution,’ Episode 5: Speaking of processed food, Jamie Oliver is nearing the end of his stint working in West Virginia on the ABC show “Food Revolution,” which airs on Friday nights. In last week’s episode, he set out to get high school students and the big wigs with the local hospital on his side. Things were going well at the elementary school until Oliver found the chocolate and strawberry milk back in the bin. With enough pushing and prodding, he got the school to request that the milkman come back and pick up the sugar-filled milk and replace it with white. As for the lunch staff? Oliver has convinced even the stodgiest of them to be open minded about his approach. (Fed Up With School Lunch blogger has a fascinating Q&A with a real-life lunch lady: “What’s the hardest part of your job? Seeing the tired and dirty and hungry children. Trying to make a change when you know you can’t.”)
You Are What You Eat: If you like What’s in Your Fridge Friday here, then you’ll get Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat photography series from a few years back. GOOD recently featured a handful of the photos, including a good number from Texas. He toured the country for three years exploring food issues, and he found that he could tell a profound story just by photographing the inside of stranger’s fridges.
Fast-Food Investment: Harvard Medical School researchers found that 11 major insurance companies owned nearly $2 billion in stock in the five biggest fast-food companies. companies that offer life, disability, or health insurance owned about $1.9 billion in stock in the five largest fast-food companies as of June 2009.
I’ll Take the Dry Red: Ever feel like an idiot ordering wine at a restaurant? Serious Eats has a good list of tips to avoid making a food of yourself.
Colorful Cake: Eat Me Daily points us to a cake fit for one of my favorite sites, ColourLovers.
Ramp photo from The Kitchn, cake photo from Eat Me Daily.
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Bloggers team up with food bank for hunger awareness project
Food insecurity is a lot of things.
For one, it’s prevalent. Not just in far-off places seen only in news clips. Here. In Austin. In your neighborhood. One in six people in Texas don’t know where their next meal will come from.
Second, people who face this problem come from all backgrounds and find themselves in this situation for a million different reasons. More than forty percent of people served by the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas are children. Almost half of their clients have at least one working adult at home. Only 18 percent of the people who get food from the partner agencies are homeless, and more than a third of their older clients go extended periods of time without food.
Third, food insecurity is growing. In eight years (2000 to 2008), the number of people who said they did’t have enough to eat grew by a third, and Texas has the second highest rate of food insecurity in the nation.
Statistics only tell part of the story. In an effort to understand more about the situation thousands of fellow Central Texans face, 30 local food bloggers have taken a week-long challenge to cook and eat from a typical bag of food that someone might get from a food pantry or other agency.
Let’s face it, a week doing a project like this isn’t even close to actually looking at your bank balance and realizing there’s not enough for both rent and food. Not one of the participating bloggers would pretend otherwise, but the goal is to get us all thinking and talking about a very real problem that is easy to forget, even in this food-obsessed society we cultivate.
So here’s how it will work: The Capital Area Food Bank of Texas gave us a list of what one bag from an area pantry might contain, and the bloggers will go out and buy the food from a grocery store.
I spent $36 at H-E-B last weekend buying rice, beans, pasta, canned corn and green beans, spaghetti sauce, oatmeal, store-brand cereal, potatoes, Tuna Helper, a chicken, ground beef, juice and canned fruit, an amount of food that a family could pick up once a month. (Every partner agency offers a slightly different choice of products, which often include bread, fresh fruits and vegetables, so keep in mind that this is just a sample list.)
Bloggers can also supplement with the amount of money that would be allotted to them if they were enrolled in food stamps or the Women, Infants and Children program.
I’ll be highlighting some of the bloggers’ posts, as well as my own experiences, on Relish Austin in the coming week, but the food bank’s blog will be the best place to stay tuned to all the posts.
Thanks ahead of time to the bloggers who have signed up to participate, the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas for being open to it and readers who follow along.
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Dig into your family’s past through food
In 1891, my great-great-grandmother boarded a ship in Sweden bound for America and for a husband who’d left for a wagon factory job in Springfield, Mo., when she was pregnant seven years before.
In tow were two children, one a 7-year-old girl who’d never met her father, and a suitcase that carried just a few necessities, including a bread knife and a rolling pin from a country Carolina Sophia would never visit again.
Almost 120 years later, the sturdy black-handled knife with razorlike teeth and the long, smooth rolling pin are still in use in my grandmother’s kitchen, less than 40 miles from where her grandmother first unpacked them after the long journey.
I retold this story in today’s column as a way to get people thinking about their own past through food.
Dawn Orsak, an expert in Texas and Czech foodways, knows how powerful food is connected to personal history. She offers tips in today’s story about how to get relatives talking about their own past by asking them about food and what to do with the information you get.
“Talking about food is just another way to get to the information about your family’s past,” says Orsak.
Homemade cookbooks with family memories woven in with the recipes is one of the first things that people think to make, but Orsak encouraged people to think about ways to bring these traditions alive by hosting heritage dinners or meals where everyone brings a significant dish. Writing personal narratives can be a good way to document your discoveries, which you can then pass along to your kids or other members of the family who are interested in genealogy or family history.
And I’m preaching to the choir here, but colorful bits of family food stories make great fodder for a blog, too.
To get you thinking about questions to ask yourself or your relatives, here are a few prompts that will hopefully lead to deeper insights about who you are today:
- If you were given a dollar to buy treats when you were a kid, what would you buy?
- Was dessert a special treat or a nightly ritual?
- What food do you throw out? Do you eat leftovers?
- What kind of cooking did your father do when you were growing up?
- Who did the grocery shopping?
- Did your family say grace before meals? What was said and by whom?
- Where did your family get meat from when you were a kid? If you don’t eat meat, why and what prompted that decision?
- What did you feel your kids when they were babies or toddlers? Did you restrict your diet when you were pregnant?
- What was your life like as a newlywed? How did you accommodate your wife/husband’s food preferences when you first got married?
- What was the first product you remember scanning? First candy bar?
- Did you ever steal a pack of gum?
- Did you make your own beer or wine?
- Did you share food with your neighbors? Could you borrow a cup of sugar from them?
- What did your mom make you when you were sick?
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Cake in a jar? Austin pastry chef launches new company
Cake has never been more portable.
Austin chef Scott Calvert, who for 14 years has been making cakes and desserts for his company, the Cake Plate, is now selling cake in a Mason jar with a screwtop lid. Calvert had the idea for selling cake in a jar when someone showed him cupcakes in a jar. “But I’m kinda over cupcakes,” he said.
Earlier this month, he launched the Cake Jar, which offers more than 14 specialty cake, icing and mousse combinations, as well as a handful of standard flavors, in two jar sizes ($6 for a half-pint jar, $8.25 for a pint jar).
Now you can take a jar of Pancho and Lefty (Mexican vanilla cake with pastry cream and strawberries) with you on your next picnic, “plus, you get to keep the jar,” Calvert says.
Photo from the Cake Jar.
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Hill Country Wine & Food Fest: John Besh cooking demo
The affable and award-winning chef has had a successful year, appearing on “Top Chef Masters” and publishing his first solo cookbook, “My New Orleans.” He now owns six Louisiana restaurants (August, Luke, Domenica, The American Sector, La Provence and Besh Steak), most of them in New Orleans.
In August, Besh will opening his first restaurant out of the state — another Luke, named after one of his sons — on San Antonio’s Riverwalk. In charge of the kitchen will be chef Steve McHugh, who just moved to San Antonio to work on the restaurant and was on hand for the cooking demonstration on Saturday.
Besh kicked off the class by talking about the relationship between Texas and Louisiana. “The partnership between these two states is something special,” he said. Take what happened after Katrina, for instance. Many of the cooks and staff from his restaurants took refuge in San Antonio and other parts of Texas, he said, and “if it wasn’t for that (hospitality), we wouldn’t be here today.”
He takes great pride in explaining the food traditions both tangible (never, ever throw away shrimp or crawfish shells without making a stock from them first) and intangible ( “New Orleans cuisine, you either get it or you don’t.”) of his home state.
While showing the crowd how to make fresh pasta to go with a crawfish ragout, he said to salt the boiling water because it “needs to taste a little like Lake Pontchartrain,” the saltwater lake north of New Orleans.
Besh talked a little about his family, which includes four boys under the age of 18 and wife Jennifer, who was in the audience. “I want to bring the boys up with a close connection with food and cooking,” he said. “Men take just as much pride in cooking as anyone. Hunting, fishing, cooking and eating all work in the same circle.”
The chicken and dumplings with chanterelles and peas gave him an opportunity to talk about the chickens on the farm at La Provence, his restaurant in Lacombe. (A note about the food: All of the courses were wonderful, but this chicken and dumpling dish stood out, probably because of the dumplings, which were made with ricotta and were some of the most tender I’ve ever eaten. I’ll post the recipe below as soon as I get it.)
” ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ scared me to death,” Besh said. The working farm gives him a chance to produce at least some of the meat, eggs and vegetables he serves, but even more, it’s a way for his staff to feel more connected with where food comes from. Cooks are required to spend time on the farm, and the scraps from the restaurants, as well as the barley left over from the beer brewed for La Provence, to go the pigs and chickens.
It’s going to be a busy summer for Besh. In addition to opening the new restaurant and making more of these colorful berry tarts, he has two TV shows in the works: “My New Orleans,” which will air on PBS next year, and “Inedible to Incredible,” a TLC show to premiere in June. He’s also making an appearance on a few upcoming episodes of HBO’s new New Orleans-based series, “Treme.”
I got to talk to Besh before the class began about the TLC show, which he’d compared to a “What Not to Wear” about food. After he heard about my stint on “What Not to Wear,” he laughed and explained that his show would be similar because it will help people break bad habits in the kitchen.
People make it so difficult, he said.
“Keep it simple.”
Chanterelles, Chicken and Dumplings
Often, when I roast a few chickens, I’ll save those delectable chicken oysters (the little nuggets of the chicken back that look like oysters), or I’ll use the meat from roasted chicken legs for this dish. For cooked chicken, don’t brine the chicken first, reduce the amount of stock to one cup, and follow the process from step 2.
For the chicken:
1/4 cup sugar
Salt
6 boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into pieces
2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
3 shallots, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. minced peeled fresh ginger
1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
2 cups chicken stock
1 cup fresh chanterelle mushrooms, halved lengthwise
Leaves from 1 sprig fresh thyme
Leaves from 1 sprig fresh sage, chopped
1/2 cup shelled sweet peas or shucked, peeled fresh fava beans
2 Tbsp. butter
Freshly ground black pepper
For the dumplings:
1 cup ricotta cheese
3 egg yolks
1 pinch nutmeg
1/3 cup flour
Leaves from 4 sprigs fresh chervil
For the uncooked chicken, dissolve the sugar and 1/4 cup salt together in 1 quart cold water in a medium bowl. Add the pieces of chicken thighs and let them marinate in the brine, refrigerated, for 1 hour. Drain the chicken and pat dry with paper towels. Discard the brine.
Heat the olive oil in a wide heavy-bottomed pot over high heat. Add the chicken and saute until it is no longer pink. Add the shallots, garlic, ginger and pepper flakes, reduce the heat to moderate, and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in the chicken stock and simmer until the liquid has reduced by nearly half, about 5 minutes.
Add the chanterelles, thyme, sage, peas and tomatoes to the pot. Increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring often, for 5 minutes. Add the butter and season with salt and pepper. Cover and reduce the heat to low to keep the chicken and vegetables warm while making the dumplings.
For the dumplings, bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil, then reduce the heat to moderate to maintain a very gentle boil.
Combine the ricotta with the egg yolks, nutmeg and 1/4 teaspoon salt in a medium mixing bowl. Gradually stir in just enough flour to form a soft dough. Test the dumpling dough before adding more flour by dropping a small spoonful of the dough into the boiling water. Once the dumpling floats to the surface, let it poach for 45 seconds. If the dumpling breaks apart while cooking, you’ll need to add a bit more flour to the dough and test again. Just don’t overwork the dough, or it’ll become tough.
Drop the remaining dough by teaspoonfuls into the boiling water and poach the dumplings for 45 seconds. As soon as they are done, use a slotted spoon to transfer the dumplings to the pot of chicken and vegetables.
Serve the chicken and dumplings in bowls and scatter the chervil on top.
— From ‘My New Orleans’ by John Besh
Top photo by Alberto Martinez for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Hill Country Wine & Food Fest: Texas Wine and Food Pairing class
I like wine and I like cheese. I like nice restaurants and I like local artisans.
This weekend’s Hill Country Wine and Food Festival is a celebration of these things I like, and because I just turned 21, I get to participate.
I don’t know much about wine. I know that it’s better in a bottle than a box, but beyond that, it’s all pretty fuzzy.
I was apprehensive about attending the Local Focus: Texas Wine and Cheese Pairing held at the Carillon at the AT&T Conference Center & Hotel on Saturday because I didn’t know what to expect. I worried that it might be a pack of wine experts in tailored suits, swirling fragrant glass of white and red, talking about the different notes in each glass.
The room was packed when I arrived. At each place setting there were four wines of varying hues and a plate of cheese. The glasses were set on cheat sheets that explained what the consumer was supposed to experience with each wine and cheese pairing.
Cathy Strange, the global cheese buyer for Whole Foods Market, led the discussion. The wine and cheese artisans were also in attendance to explain their products. Strange explained how swirling the wine allows oxygen to get in and express the flavors of a wine more fully. So we swirled.
There were wine tasting veterans around who chatted about details of the drinks, but there were also many in attendance like me, who simply said “This is good. I’d buy this.”
I ate blue cheese, goat cheese and mozzarella. I drank red wine, white wine and port. I learned that Texas’s fickle climate can prove to be challenge for wine maker’s vines. I left the class with the new understanding that Texas is just starting to come into its own in wine production, and we’re achieving status one independent winery at a time.
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Hill Country Wine & Food Fest: Stars Across Texas Grand Tasting
With reggae beats from the Austin Reggae Fest wafting across Riverside Drive, dozens of the state’s top chefs served food alongside wine- and spirit-makers at the Stars Across Texas Grand Tasting at the Long Center.
Like last year, rain and tartare, such as the above version from Aquarelle, were themes of this year’s grand tasting, one of the big events of the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival, which is in its 25th year.
Chefs aren’t allowed to use propane on site, which leads to a surprising number of similar dishes that can be held at a constant temperature during the three-hour event, but even under those circumstances, not to mention the wet tents, the chefs pulled out some great dishes.
Highlights included blue corn and huitlacoche tamales from Fonda San Miguel, cold-smoked shrimp from SWB’s Kevin Dee (above) and house-cured salmon mousse on homemade crackers glazed with beet and red wine marmalade from Jeffrey’s chef Deegan McClung.
Moonshine Patio Bar and Grill chefs battled a stream of water flowing under their prep area as they assembled biscuits with quail eggs and topped with ham.
Uchi pastry chef Philip Speer served two of the most scientific dishes of the night in the VIP lounge on the second floor of the Long Center. In my simplified interpretation, one was based on corn and included a corn sorbetto and another — my favorite — a ball of tobacco cream glazed in scotch served with a paper-thin sheet of huckleberry on top of candied nuts and more cream.
He must have explained these dishes 200 times tonight, including half a dozen times while I was trying to comprehend the science behind his pastry magic, but I’m still not entirely sure the contents of his creation.
Details be damned. It was delicious.
Austin’s food elite stayed dry (unlike the reggae fest-goers across the street, who were still jamming late into the evening) as they balanced clear plastic trays loaded with colorful morsels throughout the night.
About half an hour before the event was scheduled to end, chefs starting running out of food. This made the winemakers and spirit companies an even more popular attraction, especially for the people working the food stations who finally had a moment to relax with a glass of wine and a smoke on the terrace, catching a few of the tunes from Auditorium Shores.
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Reef chef/owner Bryan Caswell: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
The Houston-born has been catching fish in the Gulf of Mexico since he was a kid, and it wasn’t until he was in his 20s that he considered cooking for a living.
Caswell went to the Culinary Institute of American in New York and was hooked. He spent the following years traveling and cooking in some of the world’s best kitchens before coming back to Houston, where he now is the chef/owner of four restaurants: Stella Sola, Little Big’s, a burger and wine bar with two Houston locations, and Reef, which has won more accolades in the few short years since it opened than almost any other restaurant in Texas earns in a lifetime.
In 2009, Food & Wine magazine named his as one of the best new chefs in the country.
Caswell, whose fishing and cooking adventures you can follow on Twitter or his Whole Fish blog. is one of more than two dozen of the state’s top chefs cooking at tonight’s Stars Across Texas Grand Tasting, one of the biggest events of the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival.
I just hope they give the guy a bottle of Pellegrino to get him through the night.
What three things are always in your fridge? Agua con gas, Lone Star, whole milk
What’s your favorite condiment? Pickled anything
What’s your go-to late-night snack? Omelet
Photo by Bryan Caswell.
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Hill Country Wine & Food Fest: Storms doom ‘rain or shine’ Texas25
“Rain or shine” doesn’t always mean what you think it does.
Locally heavy rain fell across the area on first day of the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival yesterday, and ticket holders to last night’s Texas25 event at Whole Foods Market received an e-mail reminder that the event would take place “rain or shine.”
The sold-out event was scheduled to start at 7 p.m., and just after 6 p.m., festival officials decided to cancel it due to safety concerns from the afternoon downpours, a festival spokesperson said Friday.
The last-minute cancellation left both ticket holders and vendors frustrated. A commenter on the Forklore blog said she spent two hours in traffic going to and from the event after receiving the reminder that the event would be held no matter what. Several vendors tweeted that they weren’t sure what to do with the product they’d prepared to served; Retro Bizzaro and Izzoz Tacos spread the word through Twitter that they were giving away tacos and snack treats at the nearby Kung Fu Saloon.
“They had to take the safety of everyone into consideration,” the festival spokesperson said. Tents set up on the rooftop plaza of Whole Foods downtown would withstand light or even moderate rain, but the rain had soaked electrical outlets, creating an unsafe environment for both vendors and guests.
“The non-profit festival was willing to take the hit for the safety of everybody,” she said. “We feel terrible, absolutely terrible.”
This was the first year for the $25 event, and people who bought tickets can apply that money toward a Stars Across Texas or Sunday Fair ticket. Stars Across Texas, which starts at 7 p.m. tonight, costs $100, and Texas25 ticket holders can get the early bird price ($40) for the Sunday Fair.
If you’d like a refund, send an e-mail to info@texaswineandfood.org.
There’s plenty of rain left in the weekend forecast, but festival organizers say the tents at Stars Across Texas at the Long Center and the Sunday Fair at the Vineyards at the Salt Lick can handle even the strongest downpours, so the events will take place, no matter what the skies bring.
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Hill Country Wine & Food Fest: Stone House Vineyard luncheon
Bluebonnets and wine are excellent excuses to visit the Hill Country this time of year.
It just so happens that we’re having a banner year for wildflowers, including the beloved state flower, which made the drive out to Stone House Vineyard on Thursday for one of the first Hill Country Wine and Food Festival events even more enjoyable.
Many of the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival events happen in Austin, but a handful, including several sold-out luncheons today, take place at vineyards in the Hill Country west of the capital city.
Started by Howard and Angela Moench 11 years ago, the winery is known for growing Norton grapes, a disease-resistant varietal native to North America that often associated with my home state of Missouri.
With the help of a California-based winemaker, the Moenchs make two wines the Norton grapes: Scheming Beagle Port and Claros, a fragrant, acidic old world-style red whose “bark is bigger than its bite,” as one lunch guest complimented.
“It’s a purist endeavor,” Howard Moench said during a three-course lunch at the vineyard on Thursday. “We’ve made so many advances (since first bottling Claros in 2002), but the character has remained the same.”
Claros was sandwiched between two wines — Buckin’ Horse White and Muscato Blanco — from Flat Creek Estate, a winery just across Lake Travis from Stone House.
To kick off the lunch, guests enjoyed Buckin’ Horse White, what winery owner Madelyn Naber called a “phantom sweet” Viognier, paired with two hot and crunchy shrimp on a tomatillo carrot salad from Hudson’s on the Bend chef Kelly Casey.
Stewart Scruggs, chef and co-owner of Wink and Zoot restaurants, served pork on white truffle-infused polenta, which was a perfect complement to the tannic 2006 Claros.
For dessert, Rebecca Rather of Rather Sweet Bakery & Cafe in Fredericksburg prepared a lemon-lime pudding with a maple pecan shortbread to go with Flat Creek’s not-too-sweet muscato. (As soon as the lunch finished, Rather was headed to the Four Seasons in Austin to prepare for her first appearance at the Culinary Masters Dinner tonight. Her dessert will be capping off a dinner served by chefs David Bull, Elmar Prambs and Kent Rathbun.)
A very fine meal to kick off the 25th Hill Country Wine and Food Festival. There are still tickets available to several of the wine tastings on Saturday, as well as The Big One, the Stars Across Texas Grand Tasting Friday night at the Long Center.
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Michael Pollan to speak at UT in December
Food activist and author (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food”) Michael Pollan is scheduled to speak at the Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas in December.
Pollan’s talk is part of a just-released lineup for the 2010-2011 season of UT’s Texas Performing Arts and is presented in partnership with BookPeople and Edible Austin, which will be hosting Eat Local Week that week.
Tickets ($26-$42) aren’t on sale yet, but stay tuned to find out details on when you can buy them.
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Fresh favorites in new Lebovitz book ‘Ready for Dessert’
The talented — and hilarious — pastry chef David Lebovitz might be known as the king of custards and ice cream (his 2007 book “Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments” made him a household name among foodies), but in his new book, “Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes” ($35, Ten Speed Press), the Paris-based author goes back to his all-time favorite desserts: cheesecake brownies, ginger cake and raspberry-fig tarts.
From the complicated (Champagne Gelee With Kumquats, Grapefruits and Blood Oranges) to the comforting (Plum-Blueberry Upside-Down Cake), bakers and cooks will find the former Chez Panisse pastry chef’s humor, a classic mix of snark and self-deprecating sarcasm that keeps his 20,000 followers on Twitter entertained, woven between the recipes that might soon become their favorites, too.
Fresh Fig and Raspberry Tart with Honey
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sliced blanched almonds
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces and chilled
2 large egg yolks
3/4 tsp. almond extract
Filling
1/4 cup raspberry jam
12 ripe fresh figs
1 1/4 cups raspberries
3 Tbsp. honey, warmed
To make dough, grind in a food processor fitted with metal blade the flour, almonds, sugar and salt until the almonds are very fine. Add butter and pulse until it is pieces about the size of grains of rice. Add egg yolks and almond extract, then let machine run until dough starts to come together. Transfer dough to a work surface, knead it briefly with your hands until smooth and press dough into a disk.
Lightly butter a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom, or use one with a nonstick coating. Transfer dough disk to the pan. Using your hands, press the dough as evenly as possible into the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Freeze the dough-lined tart pan for at least 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Set tart pan on a baking sheet and prick the frozen tart dough about 10 times with a fork. Line dough with a sheet of aluminum foil and fill with pie weights or dried beans. Bake tart shell on baking sheet until dough is set, about 20 minutes. Remove foil and pie weights and continue to bake until tart shell is deep golden brown, about 10 minutes more. Let cool completely.
To fill tart, spread raspberry jam in an even layer in the bottom of the cooled tart shell. Trim hard stem ends from figs and quarter them lengthwise. Arrange figs in tart shell in two concentric circles, cut sides up, fitting them snugly against the sides of the tart shell and each other. Arrange raspberries snugly in the center. Drizzle warm honey over the tart.
Remove tart pan sides by setting tart on an overturned bowl or other tall, wide surface (a large can of tomatoes works well). Gently press down on the outer ring and let the ring fall to the countertop. Set the tart on a flat surface. Release tart from the pan bottom by sliding the blade of a knife between the crust and the pan bottom, then slip the tart onto a serving plate. (If it doesn’t release cleanly, simply serve the tart on the pan bottom.)
- From ‘Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes’ by David Lebovitz
Photo by Maren Caruso.
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Show your love of Texas through cookies
Texans are obsessed with the shape of their state.
Texas-shaped logos on business cards, neon signs, manholes and even tattoos show up all over the Lone Star State, so why not in your oven?
AnnClark.com sells hundreds of cookie cutter shapes, including one of our beloved state ($3.99). You can also buy a gift set of five Texas-themed cutters ($14.99), because who knows when you’ll need to bring hat- or boot-shaped sugar cookies to your next party. You can also find the cookie cutters at Callahan’s General Store, 501 U.S. 183.
Photo from AnnClark.com
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Hot Links: KFC’s new low, food blogger potluck, Fey makes out with a brownie
Now They’ve Really Done It: I can’t even bring myself to try KFC’s new Double Down sandwich. Just can’t do it, even after Slashfood said cheese and bacon sandwiched between two fried chicken breasts wasn’t all that bad. New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton got himself stalked by Eater when he went to try it. (The official word from Sifton: “a disgusting meal.”) Fast food companies are just going to keep developing gimmicky products when they know the foodosphere will respond with a flood of coverage even though the product is just downright ridiculous, not to mention greasy and packed with a day’s worth of sodium.
Pulitzer for Meaty Reporting: Michael Moss of the New York Times won a Pulitzer this week for his story last year, “The Burger That Shattered Her Life” about a 22-year-old woman who was left paralyzed after eating ground beef contaminated with E.coli.
Food Blogger Potluck: I was kid-wrangling during the Austin food bloggers’ potluck this weekend, so I didn’t get much of a chance to shoot photographs of the delicious dishes the bloggers brought. I’ll leave the storytelling to Aimee Wenske, Franish Nonspeaker, Girl Gone Grits, Lisa is Cooking, Thai Cooking with Jam and Foodie is the New 40. Thanks to all the local food bloggers who attended.
Hopping on the Train: Both CNN and the Huffington Post are getting into the food blogging game. HuffPoFood, which — like everything else on that site — appears to be a clusterfudge of aggregated content, started on Monday; no launch date yet for CNN.
With or Without Nuts: Tina Fey is winning back our belly laughs. There’s more funny in 22 minutes of “30 Rock” than in all of “Date Night,” but the funny is back in this Brownie Husband skit from Saturday Night Live. “Brownie Husband can satisfy all of your cravings…The perfect blend of rich fudge and emotional intimacy.” We still love you, Tina Fey.
Food Revolution, episode 4: Those sly editors at ABC set us up for a good one this week. The battle between Jamie and radio host Rod escalated to a bet that Jamie could teach 1,000 people to cook in a week. It was dramatic. There were tears. The governor showed up. Jamie won. Happy ending, at least for now. There are only a few more weeks left of the show (you can watch them all here), and he surely hasn’t conquered the city yet. The coolest part of the whole episode was when he got dozens of Marshall University students to do a flash mob stir fry dance, which Ryan Seacrest, the show’s executive producer, posted on YouTube.
(The Times has this interesting profile of Oliver based on an interview just as the show premiered, where the chef talks about the Oliver brand, not being able to get bank loans, being away from his wife who is expecting their fourth child and big wigs in Washington pulled out of their commitments to talk with him after the negative press started.)
Props, Homeslice: The New York-based pizza blog Slice has deemed Austin’s Homeslice a close approximation of true New York-style pizza, even though it is “just a tad too flat.”
Bill Maher, meet Alice: Eater has a nice recap of Alice Water’s appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” including a clips with a few funny jokes about peaches, McDonald’s and France. The interview between two food-conscious Garden State natives isn’t quite the zinger you’d expect, but it’s still worth watching.
45 Across, Folded Eggs: Food52 has started a food crossword series with puzzle maker and food writer Michele Humes. I’m horrible at crosswords, no matter the theme, but for you cruciverbalists out there, you can print it out or complete it online.
Chef Besh on the Small Screen: Ahead of his appearance in Austin for the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival this weekend, reports surface that New Orleans chef and author John Besh has not one but two TV shows coming up this summer. One is on PBS and will be based on his 2009 book, “My New Orleans.” The second, starting in June, will really thrust Besh into the national spotlight: “Inedible to Incredible” on TLC, which he describes as the “What Not to Wear of the food world.” You know I’m just dying to ask him about this one at his cooking class on Saturday.
‘Insatiable’ headed to Starz? Famed restaurant critic Gael Greene confirmed this week that Starz is looking at creating an hourlong series based on Greene’s “Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess,” which outlines her time, ahem, on top of the New York food scene in the 70s and 80s.
Comic Book Planters: Dissertation to Dirt found a cool way to sprout seeds: Manga comic books.
Plastic-Free Lunch: Last summer, I wrote a story about tiffins and bento boxes, and now The Kitchn has this list of 10 other reusable lunch containers.
Manga planters photo by Koshi Kawachi, carrot photo by Peter Tsai.
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Johnny Cupcakes brings suitcase tour to Sugar Mama’s
Johnny Cupcakes doesn’t sell cupcakes.
It took me a while to figure this out when Ian and I walked into the Los Angeles Johnny Cupcakes shop last summer. The place looks like a bakery. Black-and-white checkered floors with glass cases and what looked like refrigerated cases at Dairy Queen where you’d pick an ice cream cake.
The only thing that’s missing is the smell of buttercream.
But pretty soon, you realize that instead of baked goods, the store is selling punk-inspired T-shirts, ties, underwear, bathing suits, hoodies and gloves. You name it, Johnny Cupcakes is selling it emblazoned with a cupcake/punk-rock hybrid design.
It’s a cute idea that has won Johnny Earle, aka Johnny Cupcakes, a ton of fans. So many in fact that he’s set out on a road trip across the country and will be making a stop in Austin on Tuesday.
Cupcakes started the brand out of his beat-up car almost 10 years ago, and now he’s created a suitcase tour in a van to drive across the country to meet up with people who love his stuff.
It’s no understatement to say that he’s hauling ass. He started in New York at the beginning of April, and he’s worked he way down the coast, posting videos of every stop.
Today, he’s at Crave Cupcakes in Houston, and at 8 p.m. tomorrow, he’ll bring the show to Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop, 1905 S. First St., where his team will be selling six exclusive shirt designs, plus a handful of accessories and other Cupcake goodies.
Sugar Mama’s will be handing out free cupcakes of the sugar and icing variety, and Lincoln Durham will be playing tunes.
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Ample shade, produce at new West Lake Hills farmers market
One of Austin’s newest farmers markets is tucked away behind a flock of plastic flamingos and bluebonnets at northeast corner of Capital of Texas Highway (Loop 360) and Bee Cave Road.
The Truck Farm Farmers Market takes place from 3 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays and, as of last weekend, 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.
You won’t find a sign (vendors told me that West Lake Hills officials have prevented them from posting signage near Bee Cave Road), but you’ll see the flamingos before the vendors, who are set up underneath the ample shade of the trees at the Pots and Plants Garden Center (aka The Flamingo Place).
During my first trip to the market last week, I picked up ground bison from Hill Country Bison, ground beef and short ribs from 6J Ranch and freshly picked carrots that went into a salad later that night. Other vendors at the market include Retro Bizzaro, Tommy’s Salsa, Me Myself and Pie, San Antonio cheesemakers Humble House Foods, Texas French Bread and Arte y Chocolate, as well as people selling soap, wine, pizza, Mediterranean food, Poteet strawberries and tons of spring vegetables.
The nursery has even set up tables covered in white tablecloths so you can enjoy the laid-back feel of the market while nibbling on food you’ve bought.
One of the best things I tried at the market were new gluten-free cookies from Austin market staples Jake’s Granola.
Jake’s owner David Levy says the so-called biscotelle are twice-baked cookies similar to biscotti, but unique in their own way. “Most people who go gluten-free feel like they have to imitate gluten full,” he says. Instead of trying to recreate a familiar product, Levy says he wanted to create a crispier, lighter sugar cookie type of treat with rice flour. The pistachio biscotelle I tried had that perfect melt-in-your-mouth crumble and burst of sweetness you’d expect from a cookie-like treat, gluten free or not.
You’ll find the biscotelle ($5, choose from white chocolate orange, chocolate chocolate walnut, almond, lemon poppy, pistachio crusted raspberry flavors) exclusively at the downtown, Truck Farm, HOPE and Cedar Park farmers markets.
“Farmers market (shoppers) are our focus group,” Levy says. “It allows us to hear right on the spot what people think,” and then we can adjust the product before it hits coffeeshops and the online store.
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Sweet Leaf Tea founder Clayton Christopher: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
In 12 short (or not-so-short, depending on whom you ask) years, the 37-year-old led the company to a national stage, where it now brews more than 10,000 gallons of tea a day and sells bottles in all 50 states. Last year, Nestle Waters invested more than $15 million into the company.
But Christopher, who was recently named Austinite of the Year at the Austin Under 40 awards, is passing on the Sweet Leaf Tea bottle whose caps carry the sayings of Mimi, the grandma whose tea started it all.
Last month, he announced that he would be stepping down as CEO, which will give him plenty of time to jog around Lady Bird Lake and drink kale chard smoothies.
What three things are always in your fridge? Kale, coconut juice (for smoothies) and hemp milk (for my cereal).
What’s your favorite condiment? Good balsamic vinegar.
What’s the first thing you pull out ofhe fridge in the morning? Stuff for my green smoothie: frozen banana, kale, chard, coconut juice and apple. It’s best way to start your day with clean energy!
Photo by Clayton Christopher.
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Hot Links: Eating up the iPad, sustainable hot shots, national champion cheesecake
iPad Mania: BlendTec put the iPad to its “Will It Blend?” test.The Kitchn was as blown away by the iPad app from Epicurious as I was. I gave it a spin on tech reporter Omar Gallaga’s iPad, and it’s even sexier than the Epicurious iPhone app I’ve been obsessed with. (I wrote about a slew of food apps for your iPhone in today’s paper.)
Food Revolution, part 3: In episode three of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” he gets a crew of high school kids on his side, just as the school lunch official yells at him for not serving enough vegetables in his pasta dish. Add some French fries and you’ll have enough vegetables, she tells him with a straight face. (The Atlantic now has a school lunch expert chiming in on the episodes.) If that’s not depressing enough, maybe this survey taken after the show stopped filming will help: 8 in 10 kids were “very unhappy” about his changes.
In other school lunch news, the anonymous Fed Up With School Lunch blogger keeps getting more and more media attention, appearing last week on “Good Morning America,” while another passionate teacher who wasn’t anonymous nearly got fired for trying to start a food revolution in her school. The good news? A new magazine called ChopChop that aims to help young kids get into cooking healthy food.
A National Championship for Cheesecake: A surprise winner in the pie versus cake bracket on Jezebel.
‘Fast’ Food: Fast Company names the 10 most inspiring people in sustainable food, including Blue Hill chef Dan Barber and our boy Jamie Oliver. (Of note, only two women on the list.)
Tony Loves Austin: Bourdain fever swept Austin last week as the TV host hit hot spots like Perla’s ahead of his appearance at the Paramount. Girl Eats World has a recap of his talk.
Top Chef Masters: Cheer on Houston chef Monica Pope tonight in the premiere of “Top Chef Masters,” plus a guide to the other cheftestants.
‘Nobody is going to buy wine out of a cardboard box and a plastic bag’: The inventor of boxed wine dies at age 92.
Best of the Blogs: Saveur gave out its first-ever food blog awards, honoring favorites such as Homesick Texan, David Lebovitz and Smitten Kitchen.
Old Meat: From a butcher’s perspective, the fine line between aging and rotting meat and the difference between dry and wet aging.
Framed Food: Fine Cooking has a cool audio slideshow with artist Carl Warner, who creates beautiful landscapes out of food.
No More Bacon: Thirteen things that should never be made with bacon.
Foodie Backlash: Tired of this national food craze? (After all, the New York Times just wrote about how obsessed we are with taking pictures of our food.) You might like the new blog Shut Up, Foodies, whose authors are fed up with bacon.
Embarrassing Cookbooks: Seattle Weekly lists seven cookbooks you wouldn’t want your friends to find on your bookshelf. I have one from their list and a few others I’d add, all of them very sweet gifts from friends that I feel obliged to keep, just in case they come over and look closely at the shelf.
Photos from Fast Company, Fine Cooking video and morberg via Creative Commons on Flickr.
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Learn how to preserve your family’s food history
Family food traditions are as embedded in family trees as our genetic code.
Don’t believe me? Thanksgiving might seem like an eternity from now, but imagine your family’s Thanksgiving dinner with roasted parsnips instead of mashed potatoes, Brussels sprout salad instead of green bean casserole, a grilled pork tenderloin instead of turkey and cookies instead of pie. Think you could pull that off without protests from nearly everyone at the table?
Holiday food rituals are the biggies, but the everyday traditions — moosebread, applesauce muffins, Mexican casserole and chicken and dumplings are just a few examples in my family — are just as rich with meaning.
Dawn Orsak, culinary guru and past executive director of the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival, is getting ready to teach a two week informal class at the University of Texas about capturing family history through food.
The Recipes for Family History class costs $38 ($44 for non-residents — people who are not faculty, students or staff; members of Texas Exes, Wildflower Center or the Littlefield Society, or 65 or older) and will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on April 14 and 21 at UT. Register online or by calling 232-5277 (class ID number is 7630.601).
For Christmas presents a few years back, my mom collected family recipes in a three-ring binder to create a cookbook that is as rich in memories as it kooky dishes like Trees and Raisins and Champagne Salad. She included at least one recipe connected to each of us, and she shared a story to go with each one of them: My grandmother’s coffeecake and chicken noodles, my mom’s turkey manicotti and my dad’s gumbo.
I look forward to putting something like this together for my family members, but I’m also really looking forward to Dawn’s class to learn some other ways to capture my family’s unique past through the food traditions it has passed down from generation to generation.
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After farmers market shuffle, more really does mean merrier
Change isn’t always a good thing.
I was more than a little worried a few weeks back when news spread that the former Sunset Valley Farmers’ Market was changing its name and moving to Barton Creek Square mall.
At the encouragement of several vendors and farmers, the Sustainable Food Center submitted an application to the city of Sunset Valley, an enclave in South Austin, to set up a farmers market near the Toney Burger Activity Center.
The relationship between the Austin Independent School District, which owns the Burger Center property, and the Sunset Valley Farmers’ Market folks had dissolved. The market had lost its lease and was looking to sign a new one.
A mall isn’t an obvious choice, but with less than a week’s notice last month, many of the vendors who’d been selling produce, meat, dairy, crafts and even poems at the Burger Center for years set up shop in the northeast corner of the Barton Square Creek parking lot.
However, a good number of the vendors decided to stay in Sunset Valley, switching to the market now run by the Sustainable Food Center, which also operates the farmers markets downtown on Saturdays and Triangle on Wednesdays.
After a few weeks to let the dust settle, I went to both of the markets to see how they were faring, and I couldn’t be happier to report that they are as thriving as they are different.
The now Barton Creek Farmers’ Market has always allowed more vendors who sell crafts, prepared food and artwork than the Sustainable Food Center’s certified growers’ markets, which means that 51 percent of the vendors have to be growers or producers.
Last Saturday, I found that the jubilant fairlike vibe has followed the market to the mall parking lot, which is situated on a big hill overlooking the Austin skyline. Many of the familiar artists, jewelry makers and even Jena Gessaman, a fixture at the market who types poems on the spot on her old-fashioned typewriter, are right next to vegetable growers and other food artisans.
The new market at Sunset Valley, above, has the feel of the downtown market before it moved into the Republic Square Park earlier this year. A long line of vendors, primarily farmers and meat producers, and a healthy number of customers, including this young girl with her own little shopping cart, stocking up on goods.
Many familiar produce growers and meat producers who’ve always been in Sunset Valley are still in Sunset Valley, but there certainly wasn’t a lack of vegetables, meat and dairy available at the Barton Creek market. A handful of vendors who have been selling at the downtown market and now selling at both the downtown and Sunset Valley markets.
I didn’t seen any signs of discontent among vendors or customers after this big switch, which indicates that there’s enough of a demand for locally sourced goods — from milk and cabbage to black and white photography and handcrafted poems — that there’s plenty of room for both markets.
Next up to try: The new farmers markets in West Lake Hills on Thursdays at 360 and Bee Cave Road and in Cedar Park on Saturdays at US 183A and FM 1431.
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In fight against fraud allegations, Yelp lets users see filtered reviews
Yelp has been fighting an uphill battle in recent weeks after a February class-action lawsuit claiming the company forces businesses to pay to have negative reviews removed from the site.
The company has gone to great lengths to dispel myths about how it filters and arranges reviews, as well as what is included in the advertising packages it sells to businesses, and yesterday, it made some substantial changes in how it operates, likely in response to the lawsuit.
Yelp announced that it is allowing users to see the reviews that have been filtered by its secret algorithm, which the company says is in place to detect “fake, shill or malicious reviews” by a business’s friends, family, employees or its competition or former employees.
When you initially look at a business’s page, you’ll see the filtered reviews, but at the bottom of the page, you’ll see something like this: “1 to 40 of 45 (15 Filtered),” with a link to the reviews that Yelp’s filter removed from the initial search. I tried it out today, and it’s kindof fun to read the whack reviews that people have submitted. Of course, there are some reviews that have been filtered even though they seem reasonable, but the majority of them clearly violate the site’s terms of service.
Another change is that the site has done away with the “Favorite Review” feature, which allowed a business owner to pick a review that would sit on top of the other reviews, that was part of the advertising package offered to businesses. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said that “doing away with ‘Favorite Review’ will make it even clearer that displayed reviews on Yelp are completely independent of advertising.”
Yelp has also created a Small Business Advisory Council consisting of local business representatives that will advise it in the future, and it will allow businesses that advertise with Yelp to post videos to the slide show on their page.
These changes come just a few weeks after a South by Southwest Interactive talk that I co-hosted called “The Yelp Effect: When Everyone’s a Restaurant Critic,” which explored how user-generated review sites like Yelp are affecting the restaurant industry.
I’m most happy to see the ability for users — and business owners — to read the filtered reviews. It does create a sense of transparency, but you have to know that you’re looking for the filtered reviews to find them. As for the “Favorite Review” feature, I could take it or leave it, and I doubt many users will be sad to see it go.
It’s also of note that Yelp has set up that council with business representatives to deepen the relationship between the company and the people who stand to gain or lose the most from its services.
I’d like to see community managers, who cultivate a network of “elite” reviewers in more than 40 cities, to do something similar. It would be a nice gesture to to reach out to the business owners as much as they do the most active reviewers.
What do you think of the changes? Do they make the company more transparent? Has Yelp done enough to reach out to businesses?
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Funky Chicken Coop Tour makes me hungry for fresh eggs
The popularity of Austin’s Funky Chicken Coop Tour proves I’m not the only one smitten with the idea of getting fresh eggs from my backyard.
For the second year, the tour has allowed people like me who are curious about setting up their own backyard chickens to have a look at established coops around the city and talk to the people who’ve taken the poultry plunge.
More than 1200 people participated in Saturday’s tour, including Statesman writer Joshunda Sanders, who wrote this story for Sunday’s paper. (Here’s a gallery with more pictures.)
I checked out the coop at HausBar Farm, Dorsey Barger and Susan Hausmann’s new East Austin farm, with videographer Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon. They have 200 chickens, which combined with the chickens at Barger’s Eastside Cafe, provide all the eggs needed for the Manor Road restaurant.
We’d only need a few chickens to lay enough eggs for our family, but it’s a big jump to go from wanting chickens to actually building the coop, buying the hens and feed and making sure they are well kept.
Watching chickens and their owners in action on the tour has been a big boost to my own confidence that we could have a backyard flock, but I think the next step is a trip to a feed store to scope out chicks and supplies. We’re on the fence about whether we’d build a coop or chicken tractor or buy one already assembled.
We still have lots of investigating to do, but the temptation of having fresh eggs from our own chickens is pretty persuasive. Are you thinking about getting backyard chickens? If you already have them, what finally convinced you to follow through and get them?
Photos by Laura Skelding for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Rainy spring means happy plants, happy snails
El Niño is a gardener’s best friend.
The weather pattern that comes every few years brings front after rain-soaked front, and in drought-prone places like Central Texas, the rain couldn’t come at a better time. Wildflowers, farms, trees, lakes, greenbelts and backyard gardens have been brought to life after one of the most severe droughts in the region’s history.
Although El Niño isn’t as welcome in already soaked areas of the country that deal with tomato blight year after year, Central Texas gardeners like me look forward to watching that next wave of green on the radar sweep toward our thirsty beds.
One of the side effects of all this rain is a resurgence of the snail population. Many gardeners are losing lots of crops to snails. We ended up having to put some snail bait out earlier this year just to keep the seedlings from getting eaten up, but now that the plants are fully grown, we let them eat a few leaves here and there. (If you’re curious about eating them, here’s a good how-to on foraging and purging them from the folks over at Chow.)
We’ve been able to keep the broccoli, Swiss chard and collard greens from bolting, or going to seed, by trimming the most mature leaves and buds before they get too big and start to open up.
One of the collard plants started to bloom and it was just too beautiful to cut back.
Mint and lemon balm, which are notorious sending out shoots underground to spread quickly, are taking over their corners of the garden. (In an ideal world, I’d have a yard full of pineapple, chocolate, orange, lemon and every flavor of mint and thyme imaginable.)
My sage plant didn’t just survive the winter, it’s now thriving and full of purple blooms.
Carrots and sugar snap peas are almost ready. Did you know you can eat the white pea flowers and shoots? They have the most delicate pea flavor.
One of the nicest garden surprises this year has been three potato plants that have popped out of last year’s compost pile. As the plants grow, I cover them with more compost and soil, and hopefully in a few months, we’ll have a crop of accidental taters.
I wish I’d given a little more TLC to these strawberry plants. Rather than water them (they are in the far back of the yard where the hose doesn’t easily go), they’ve survived on rain alone and have produced these tiny little berries.
These pretty purple flowers have popped up on the native spiderwort in my backyard, and I saw them all over the Greenbelt this weekend, too.
Mosquito season will be here any day now, but in the meantime, it’s these crane flies, aka mosquito hawks, that have flooded the air in our backyard. Unfortunately, despite what my neighbors have been telling me, they don’t actually eat mosquitoes.
All of us are crossing our fingers that the frequent rains will continue into the summer. The rain will continue to fill the lakes and our reservoirs and keep the plants and animals happy, not to mention the farmers and gardeners.
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Austinite’s appetizing shot at $1 million Pillsbury prize
“I’ve watched (recipe contests) on TV and thought, ‘I could make that,’ ” Mobley says. She incorporated two Pillsbury products into an appetizer based on a beef tenderloin that she served to her family at holiday dinners, and the Razzle Dazzle Beef Bites earned her one of 100 spots in the bake-off final, which takes place April 12 in Orlando.
Starting at 8 a.m., she’ll make her recipe three times and submit the best of the three to judges, who will announce winners in four categories that night. Then, for the first time in the contest’s history, the four winners will then fly to Chicago to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on April 14, where the queen of daytime TV will announce the $1 million overall winner.
Mobley says she’s not too worried about making her dish for the judges. “My recipe is pretty foolproof, so I’m not too worried,” she said last week en route to Georgia, where she was picking up her sister-in-law who would join her for the finals in Florida.
Razzle-Dazzle Beef Bites
1 can (8 oz.) Pillsbury refrigerated crescent dinner rolls
1 package (3 oz.) cream cheese, softened
1/2 tsp. lemon-pepper seasoning
1/2 cup Smucker’s Red Raspberry Preserves
1 Tbsp. prepared horseradish
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
3 oz. shaved cooked roast beef (from deli)
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley
Heat oven to 375 degrees. If using crescent rounds, remove from package, but do not separate rounds. If using crescent rolls, remove from package, but do not unroll.
Using serrated knife, cut roll evenly into 16 rounds; carefully separate rounds. Place 1 round in bottom of each of 16 ungreased regular-size muffin cups. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until golden brown.
Immediately press back of rounded teaspoon into center of each baked round to make indentation. Remove rounds from muffin cups to cooling rack; cool 10 minutes. Meanwhile, in small bowl, mix cream cheese and lemon-pepper seasoning. In another small bowl, mix preserves, horseradish and mustard.
Spread 1 tsp. cream cheese mixture into each round; top with 1⁄2 tsp. preserves mixture. Divide beef evenly among rounds; top each with 1 rounded teaspoon preserves mixture. Sprinkle with parsley. Makes 16 appetizers.
— Sharon Mobley
Photos from Pillsbury.
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‘Icing on the Cupcake’ author Jennifer Ross: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
In a new novel by Austin author Jennifer Ross, cupcakes aren’t just an obsession for Ansley Waller, a Dallasite who gets dumped by the fiance everyone thinks is perfect. Waller moves to New York, starts a bakery and whips up more than a new cupcake career.
“The Icing on the Cupcake” (Ballantine Books, $15), which came out this week, is Ross’s third book, and the former Wall Street Journal reporter will host a cupcake contest and book-signing at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 6, at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd.
What three things are always in your fridge? Nonfat milk, yogurt and European butter (higher fat content so, of course, it tastes better).
What’s your favorite cupcake topping? Childhood icing, you know, the kind made with butter, powdered sugar, a little milk and vanilla. Creamy with a little bit of tang to it.
What’s the first thing you pull out of the fridge in the morning? Mushrooms. Nothing like a sauteed mushrooms with a side of scrambled egg whites for breakfast.
Wake Up and Smell the Scandal Carrot Cupcakes
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. finely ground salt, either sea or ionized
6 carrots coarsely grated
1/2 cup dried bing or tart cherries
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips
1/2 cup sweetened flaked coconut
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and coarsely grated
3 eggs, room temperature
1 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
For cream cheese frosting:
4 oz. softened unsalted butter
4 oz. softened cream cheese
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups powdered sugar
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place 18 paper liners into cupcake trays. In a bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Stir in carrots, cherries, pecans, chocolate chips, coconut and apple. In another bowl, whisk together eggs, oil and vanilla, then add to flour mixture until just combined. Pour batter into lined cupcake tray, filling to the top. Bake 30 minutes, until springy to the touch. Cool in pans for five minutes and then turn out onto a rack. Makes 18 cupcakes.
For icing, cream butter, cream cheese and vanilla together with an electric mixer until fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add sugar and beat until smooth. Frost cooled cupcakes.
— From ‘The Icing on the Cupcake’
Photo by Jennifer Ross
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