Community Kitchens Northwest

Chef Ryan brought in some interesting spices for this month’s community kitchen then taught us how to use them.  The kitchen smelled incredibly good.

Spices from the Pike Place Market

He combined these spices with fresh vegetables from the Pike Market seconds bins for some amazing dishes.

Colorful carrots

Golden beans, ginger and hot peppers

There won’t be a kitchen in August but join Chef Ryan for the September kitchen for another culinary adventure.

Fresh Tomme Cheese

Have you ever wanted to make cheese?  The first time I tried was as a Peace Corps volunteer living in the West African country of Mali.  I was really missing pizza so went down to the local market and bought some milk in a calabash gourd, bread dough and a few dabs of tomato paste on a banana leaf.  Once I got home I put vinegar in the milk then strained it through mosquito netting to separate the curds from the whey.  Voila!  A simple cheese that actually made an ok pizza when baked in an adobe oven.

Over the years I thought it would be fun to try again but lack of time and a good milk supply prevented me from giving it a go.  Now that my goat, Ophelia, is producing a gallon of milk a day I definitely was ready to try again.  First Madeline and I took a class then the cheesemaking began!

The first cheese I made was a simple chevre.  You just add a bacterial culture then let it sit until a nice soft curd forms.  This gets ladled into chevre molds and once the whey drips out the cheese is ready to eat.  The next one I tried was a tomme cheese.  This was a bit more difficult with culture then rennet needing to be added.  This cheese needs to age so I won’t know how it turns out for a while.

What do you think of trying this in a community kitchen setting?

I know it was only in the low fifties this morning but it is mid-July and is at least being called summer.  Many kitchens take a break during the month of August so check in with your leader to see if your kitchen is running next month.

So what can you do with a free afternoon?  There are lots of U-Pick farms where you can go and get fresh veggies to can or freeze.  There are also many wonderful classes available through Seattle Tilth or you can always do one of my favorite August pasttimes – lounge in a nearby park!

A big thanks to Rachel for sending on this great article from the New York Times:

Dinnertime in our home, once a source of great pride and pleasure, became a rather lackluster affair after the birth of our son in 2008. Mostly it involved repurposing takeout leftovers or, on a more ambitious night, mixing chunks of frozen vegetable purées, meant for the baby, with macaroni and cheese. It was family dinner in the sense that it was marginally edible food, consumed together in the home, but prepared with the same care and passion I brought to refilling the cat’s water bowl.

A cooking co-op, or dinner swap, is simply an agreement by two or more individuals or households to provide prepared meals for each other, according to a schedule. The goal is to reduce the time spent in the kitchen while increasing the quality and variety of the food eaten.  More…

Here is yet another innovative way to get good food into people’s bellies from the Your Hub blog:

The Comfort Café is Denver’s newest community kitchen-a not-for-profit restaurant with a not-so-regular vision. Instead of a set menu with fixed prices, The Comfort Café’s menu changes daily and pricing is flexible. You select the items you want to eat, choose your portion size, and pay a fair price (or a little more if able) for your meal- with money, time or both.  More…

From USA Today here is another group working on not for profit restaurants:

As the first crowd of customers filed into Panera’s nonprofit restaurant here, only the honor system kept them from taking all the food they wanted for free.Ronald Shaich, Panera’s chairman, admitted as he watched them line up that he had no idea if his experiment would work. The idea for Panera’s first nonprofit restaurant was to open an eatery where people paid what they could. The richer could pay full price — or extra. The poorer could get a cheap or even free meal.

A month later, the verdict is in: It turns out people are basically good.

Panera, which operates 1,400 franchised and corporate-owned bakery-cafes across the country, plans to expand the nonprofit model around the nation, opening two more locations within months.  More…

Hello everyone! 

Here is a thought provoking post from the writer of the Food A Live blog on ways that community kitchens can promote food justice.

Food related issues are extremely intertwined and interconnected by broader systemic relations influenced by the forces of globalization, with policy having a large role in shaping its trajectory. Community Kitchens contain a unique organization of space that provides a platform for participants to not only share their skills, but also to communicate broader issues of food justice, food sovereignty and health while creating a network of support through conversation. The act of conversing while collectively preparing the food, eating, and cleaning, is moving health beyond the concept of nutrition and food groups to social and mental health. These programs are successful in empowering people and providing concrete skills, however, it does not challenge the food system enough to deal with the reality that there isn’t enough space in our city to address our basic food needs.  More….

A huge thanks to the Seattle Tilth board for voting to become CKNW’s new fiscal sponsor.  This new partnership is a wonderful next step for community kitchens and a nice blend of Tilth’s local food production and CK’s cooking up community.

Here’s an interesting twist on Community Kitchens from the people at Just Means.  What do you think about this model?

You’ve heard about Community Supported Agriculture and the success the CSA model has brought to small, sustainable farms. But what about CSKs? Community Supported Kitchens may just be the next best thing since sliced bread and they’re starting to crop up all over the place, providing not only a community space for food education, but also serving up lots of delicious, healthy food with the help of CSK members.

As implied by the name, Community Supported Kitchens aren’t all that different from the CSA model used by small farms. In some sense, the CSK takes the CSA to the next level, transforming local, sustainable foods into a nutritious meal ready for the table. Often a CSK will offer a weekly pick-up box of nutrient-dense prepared foods made from local, seasonal fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, etc. The menu changes weekly or you can pick and choose which items you would like, but often the prepared foods are not necessarily meals but rather a variety of sides or meal supplements. One community kitchen in Oregon offers things like orange curd, seaweed kraut, and rose-cardamom kombucha, among other interesting and super nutritious foods.

Community Supported Kitchens, however, aren’t about offering uber-healthy gourmet, expensive food. In fact, many CSK memberships are quite reasonable in price, comparable to a CSA. They also offer various payment options and are willing to work with members to find a way to accommodate their financial needs. Other CSKs offer a wide variety of foods that you can pick and choose weekly or whenever, without the commitment of paying upfront for 12 weeks worth of food. you simply pay as you go.  More…