The New York Times reports today of Mayor Bloomberg's plan to begin charging 6 cents for each plastic bag used in the city. Up until now there have been a few stores like Whole Foods and Ikea that have participated in various permutations of this plan (Whole Foods stopped providing plastic bags all together which is an even more effective way to cut down on plastic waste-- if customers bring their own bag they get a discount, otherwise it's paper for no charge; ikea charges for plastic bags and sells reusable bags for a small fee). At any rate in somewhere like New York City where there is so much of everything cutting down plastic bag consumption by even a little would be a great environmental help.

Read the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/nyregion/07bags.html?hp

Election day has finally arrived.... And we imagine many of you will be gathering with friends to watch the results roll in. If you care to make a party of it, our friend Payman made two tasty cocktails inspired by the candidates. The Juan McCain uses aged Panamanian rum, aged Irish whiskey, sour cherry juice and bitters. The Baroque Obama combines African Rum, American Gin, Maraschino liqueur, Hawaiian cane syrup, Hawaiian plum extract and organic lime juice. Try them out and enjoy! Get the written recipes here!

The Juan McCain:

The Baroque Obama:

Last week we were in Connecticut filming some cooking show segments for our fall season. Outside the Whole Foods in West Hartford there was this beautiful display of winter squash. I recognized several varieties from recent trips to farmer's markets, including some that I had never seen before this year, like the long Pink Banana Squash or bulbous gray hubbard squash. I was happy to see some of these less common varieties creeping into the mainstream, but then I saw the sign posted above them:

It made me rather incensed to see food being relegated to the category of ornament. Especially good, locally grown food. It reminded me of Barbara Kingslover's rant in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about the seasonal pumpkin recipes in her local newspaper- all of which called for canned pumpkins, while real pumpkins sat carved or solid as people's porch-side decoration.

It does take some training to go beyond the can and venture into the world of heirloom squash varieties. I was probably 11 or 12 the first time I had pumpkin pie made from real pumpkins and thought that the concept was totally disgusting. I wanted the pumpkin in my pumpkin pie to come from a can too, but I grew up and as I grew up I learned that eating the real thing is better for your body and the planet. So now I experiment with my vegetables. Two weeks ago I bought a pink banana squash from Evolution Organics at the Grand Army Plaza Green Market. I didn't know what to do with it, but wanted to tackle it anyway. It went whole into the oven and over the next week was transformed into a chocolate-oatmeal-pink banana squash cake and various soups. It was a lot of squash, but squash is a versatile vegetable and the more you have, the more you discover what can be done with it. 

Now if the first time I saw that pink banana squash was in a display of "ornamental gourds" I probably wouldn't have tried baking it. Which brings me back to the sign at Whole Foods.  I'm not saying that it's a supermarket's responsibilty to teach consumers how to eat, but it could be.  What if instead of calling those squash ornaments (or even gourds, which to me has no edible connotation), they offered recipes for gray hubbard squash soup, or pink banana squash muffins?

With the 2008 presidential elections rapidly approaching, we thought it was time for Kitchen Caravan to get a little political... You can make these "Be Like Barack Bars" for an election party, bake sale or inspirational treat. They are a simple bar cookie with carrots for vision, ginger for energy & zing (ginger is also anti-inflammatory, so hopefully the effect ginger has on our muscles will be similar to the effect Barack has on the rest of the world), oats for even blood sugar and sustained energy throughout the day (you will need that to run a country), and grated chocolate- one of our trade goods of choice- to remind us of the importance of foreign relations... enjoy!

Ingredients:

•1/2 c. butter

•1 c. brown sugar

•1 egg

•1 c. grated carrots

•3 tbl grated ginger

•1/2 c. chopped dark chocolate

•3/4 c. spelt flour

•1/2 c. oats

•1 tsp. salt

Mix spelt flour, oats and salt in a small bowl.

Combine butter and brown sugar, once fully mixed add the egg and beat well. Add grated carrots, ginger and stir until completely combined.  

Slowly incorporate the dry ingredients, once that is fully mixed add the grated chocolate.  

Put in a greased baking pan and bake for 20 minutes at 350˙

On Thursday Sophia and I went to a fundraiser for Obama in Park Slope.  It was organized in part by some of our new friends from Umami Mart (our preserves pantry  was happily placed next to Umami Mart's table at The Last Supper last week... we enjoyed the proximity to Payman's delicious and inventive Caprese Cocktail).  The fundraiser was a lot of fun- food photographer/ hostess Erin Gleeson had an amazing spread of food from the green market-- how often do you get to go to a party with roasted mini-eggplants, yellow and purple carrots and simply grilled vegetables?  Not often enough! Stay tuned on KC for a video of Payman's latest cocktail creation: The Baroque Obama....

Wendell Berry makes me want to do everything slowly and to make sure that I do it well. I'm reading The Unsettling of America right now, a book that has been on my father's shelf since long before I was born. After hearing Mr. Berry speak at Slow Food Nation a few weeks ago, I went back to my dad's apartment and scoured his shelves to find it (my dad claims his books are organized into categories, I have yet to find the key that breaks the code of this organization, but looking through them is always a fun journey).  This is the first time in a long time that I have read a book slowly, not just going for essence, but making sure that I am aware of every sentence (I'm still only on page 80).

Thinking back to the panel Mr. Berry spoke at I wonder if maybe he has this effect on everyone; he prepared some opening remarks for the culminating panel of the weekend (the all-star one with Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini). After reading these remarks, Corby Kummer (the moderator) asked him to re-read them so that the audience could more fully digest.  Within the context of the weekend this resonated with me. I was glad that not just food was valued as something to be prepared, enjoyed and discussed with integrity, but also the ideas and exchanges themselves. I had never seen anyone take the time at a panel like that to allow something to be respoken, to just get to sit with it for awhile.  Now that I'm actually reading Wendell Berry's work, I see that this is the effect he has. I want everyone to read his book, and maybe we can all start doing less a little better.

His remarks from the panel were about the neccessity of local adaptation, I've transcribed them here:

Sophia and I are in upstate NY.  Yesterday we were filming at Eve's Cidery in Ithaca-- we will be posting the video we made with Ezra, Autumn and James of Eve's Cidery the last week in September so stay tuned! Now we're in Cooperstown, we're going to spend the weekend canning and preserving foods, next week we are participating in The Last Supper, a multimedia arts show in Brooklyn on September 20th. We are doing a food installation- a recreation of a food pantry so we are busy bees this weekend getting prepared for the show.

Since we've been filming for the past few days I had a lot of editing to catch up on so that was most of the evening.  As I was editing away in the kitchen, Sophia was cooking us a tasty dinner-- she was testing a recipe we will be posting next week, a low-sodium soup for Senator Harkin.

 This is how we like to work, cozily traveling, good company, good food- cooking and creating as we go.

The Pickle and Chutney booth at Slow Food Nation, was one of my favorite stops in the Taste Pavilion. A highlight, beyond the pickled eggplant and kombucha, was Bay Area-based photographer Terri Loewenthal's Pickle Barrel Photo Booth. Her unmanned/unsupervised photo-booth enabled visitors to momentarily become part of the exhibit, an unique experience among the pavilions.

Each section of the Taste Pavilion was designed by a different architect. The Pickle and Chutney area was designed by Sagan Piechota Architects and featured canning lids hanging from the ceiling, racks of canning jars and pickling instructions in fun cartoon form lining the base of the booth. You can see all of the taste pavilion designs by clicking here or visiting the Slow Food Nation Flickr photo gallery.

Starting off a local eating month in California feels a little bit like cheating to me, mostly due to the fact that I've been up to my ears in figs. Figs have always seemed like the ultimate in vegetal indulgence. But it's not just figs, I have access to everything here-- there are nuts and pomegranates, citrus galore! Something I have noticed amidst all this plenty is that I'm having a hard time distinguishing what's local because it seems like it all could be. Even if something says "grown in california," which roughly 70% of all supermarket produce does*-- California is a big state, so it's not neccessarily grown within a reasonable distance of San Francisco.

Luckily today we went to Rainbow (my favorite grocery store on earth-- anything you could dream of comes in bulk) and Rainbow puts a tag next to every item that comes from 200 miles of the store. There is another side to all of this abundance though, I went to the farmer's market at the ferry building on Tuesday, and I will have to admit that it made me look forward to going back to the Union Square Green Market in New York. Things somehow feel more precious there, maybe because the growing season is finite... Or maybe it's just because I know right where to find my favorite edible jewels.

* Not a real figure, but one that I thought sounded about right.

My head is still swimming a bit from all that I heard and continue to absorb from the day. The first panel that I went to was titled: "Climate Change and Food." I didn't film it, but I will be posting highlights/transcripts as soon as my little fingers can type them up. Like the panel yesterday on re-localizing food, this discussion also focused on a decentralized food system and smaller farms as the only means of surviving the massive climate changes that are occurring and will continue to occur- and like yesterday there was a tone of optimism and promise that truly does make things appear less bleak.
Later on in the afternoon, I went to the culminating discussion "Slow Food Nation." Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini. The line up of speakers kind of seemed too good to be true, but it was true! And I feel so lucky to have been able to listen in on their conversation. I say listen in because it felt less like a presentation for the audience than it did an exchange of ideas and exploration of how to move forward given the current social, political and environmental state of the world. The people who were on stage this evening are all working towards a similar goal, but their experiences and expertise covered a wide range of activity. There was something incredibly powerful about seeing those experiences and expertises playing off one another. I don't know if any of the people on stage tonight will walk away freshly inspired with new ideas to take on the challenges our world currently faces, but there was a feeling, at least to me in the audience, that something was being born. Not an idea, but a charged energy and appreciation of the movement itself. The direction we and our political leaders need to go is clear. The discussion tonight felt like a burst of energy to fuel us into that direction. (Again, I will be posting transcripts... but it was 2 1/2 hours long so it might take me awhile).