Meatless Monday: It’s Food Day Today!

Happy Food Day! Yes, today, October 24th, is a very special Meatless Monday. The goal of this first annual Food Day, sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is “to bring together Americans from all walks of life to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way.” Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) are the Honorary Co-Chairs for Food Day 2011. There are events large and small scheduled to take place around the country. Click here to find an event near you.  

In my city of New Haven, CT there will be lots of things happening over the course of the day. Here are some highlights:

• In a morning event, second graders from New Haven’s Columbus School will walk to the Chabaso Bakery Farm for a teach-in with New Haven Public Schools Food Director “Food Dude” Tim Cipriano and his colleague, dietitian Sarah Bourque. The students will be the first to taste Chabaso Bakery’s new “Ollie Bread,” made with all natural ingredients and whole grains such as wheat, honey, raisins, millet, flax, and rye. The bread will be served in New Haven public schools.

• At 5 pm on the Yale campus, Chef René Redzepi, owner of Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, named the “world’s best restaurant” in both 2010 and 2011, will present a talk co-sponsored by the Yale Sustainable Food Project and the Yale Agrarian Studies Department. Redzepi goes beyond the usual farm to table route to source everything locally: he is a forager. The story goes that on one particular day during a very harsh winter, the only hyper-local ingredients he and his team could procure were some dark blue carrots which had wintered over in an icy field. Redzepi is reported to have turned the leathery carrots into a delicious dish after braising them for hours in goat’s butter and serving them with fresh chamomile tips and sorrel.  For more, check out Dishes from Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. 

• At 6 pm the public is invited to the City’s Barnard Environmental School for some healthy snacks and a screening of What’s On Your Plate?,  “a witty and provocative documentary produced and directed by award-winning Catherine Gund about kids and food politics.” Admission is free. There will be door prizes! City Seed’s New Haven Cooks will be available for purchase.

Even if there are no scheduled events in your area, you can still observe Food Day. Here is a link to send a message to Congress asking for support of Food Day's goals. Here is another to special Food Day recipes. 

Wherever you are, whatever you do today, be well and eat well. Happy Food Day. Have a great week.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”

PS Please don’t forget about the frozen beans from China. The petition count is still rising, but at a slower rate than it has been, still going for 500. If you are interested in signing on, you will find my widget one post back. Thanks.

Meatless Monday: It’s a Frugal Thing

Happy Monday everyone.

By now most of you have heard that “going meatless” one day a week is healthy for you and for the planet. But have you ever thought about how healthy it is for your wallet? 

A bean-based meal, particularly if you soak and cook the beans yourself, is hard to beat in the frugality category. If you’re planning a dinner party on a budget, and if you have some time on your hands, choose a main dish with beans as a base. With all the money you save, you’ll have some to spare for a few more costly ingredients. 

We did that last week when we celebrated the first Meatless Monday of the new year with four friends, omnivores all! The dinner’s main course was Provençal Tomato Bean Gratin, a recipe from the New York Times which readers may recall from a post last March. As a side, I prepared Green Chile Corn Pudding, a new recipe from the Whole Foods site. Both were tasty and well-received. The most expensive ingredients were two cans of organic tomatoes ($1.79 each) and a small piece of Gruyére cheese ($2.85) for the bean dish, and 3 cans of chiles ($1.50 each) for the corn pudding. The bag of beans was $1.19. People had seconds, but there were still ample leftovers.

The star of the meal, however, was a sandwich inspired by one I had at a café years ago. For my attempt to replicate the recipe, I had splurged on the following ingredients: a jar of organic fig spread ($5.99), a package of organic baby arugula ($3.49), a 4 oz. log of goat cheese ($4.49), and a bag of Chabaso Bakery’s Olive Oil Ciabatta STIX™ ($2.99). 

To make the sandwiches I first cut each of the three STIX™ in half lengthwise. I was a little behind, so the first guest to arrive pitched in as sandwich assistant. She spread a thin layer of fig on one half of each pair, and a third of the goat cheese on the other. I sprinkled arugula on top of the cheese and closed up the sandwiches. We cut each stick into six pieces. Success — the sandwich of my dreams! There were no leftovers!

The carbon footprint for the sandwiches was a little large with the fig spread traveling from Croatia (4000+ miles) and the arugula most likely from California (around 3000 miles). The goat cheese was from Vermont, though, and Chabaso Bakery IS in New Haven. I try to be a locavore, but I admit that I am not hard core, particularly when planning a party to brighten up these oh so very short Winter days. 

The menu also included black-bottom cupcakes and libations (some local — while local wine may be a problem, local beer is not). No one missed the meat  — no one! And nothing went to waste — I assure you! What better way to start off the new year than by celebrating Meatless Monday with a few friends?

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

The Once Discarded Scape

The garlic scape's existence managed to escape my attention until last year when my friend gave me a small bagful of them. They called to mind stiff, curly, scallions without the white part. I had to ask what they were and what to do with them.

My friend explained they were the trimmings from the garlic that she had planted in her garden for the first time, that cutting off the curl allowed the garlic bulb to grow bigger, and that the scapes were both edible and delicious.

I realized how fortunate I was to have received the scapes as a gift when I began to see them for sale at the farmers’ market and in the local gourmet stores. What was once discarded had been discovered as a flavorful, seasonal ingredient and was commanding a very good price.

I was not alone in my ignorance. I checked all my cookbooks (of which I have quite a few) and found no reference to this ingredient anywhere. I asked around, did a few searches, and decided to mince and then sauté my scapes in olive oil. They were delicious in a cheese omelet.

So, what is the story behind the scapes? My friend began to grow garlic in her garden, partly in reaction to her discovery that much of the garlic for sale in the US now comes from China (a future post). The garlic commonly chosen by Connecticut gardeners is the hardnecked variety that grows in colder climates. It is this type of garlic that has the curled flower stalks that are cut off in the Spring to encourage better bulb growth. Somewhere along the line (c. 2007?), their wonderful flavor was discovered, and garlic scapes have been in demand ever since.
 
It is scape season in Connecticut. I have spotted them in a range of prices (from pricey to very pricey), but my friend just came through once again. This time I decided to be more adventurous and to look for recipes online. The first reference to garlic scapes I could find in The New York Times was an answer to a 2005 query about the proper time to trim them. On June 18, 2008, the garlic scape finally hit the big time when it was featured in the NYT’s Dining & Wine with a lengthy article accompanied by several recipes.

I chose the White Bean and Garlic Scapes Dip as my experiment for this year. In preparation, I soaked and cooked a bag of cannellini beans (excess already frozen for future use). The remaining ingredients are probably on-hand in most of your kitchens: lemon juice, salt, pepper, extra virgin olive oil. Once the beans were cooked, the remaining prep time and clean-up was no more than the 15 minutes provided as the estimate. This dip is creamy and flavorful – as good or better than anything you might purchase prepared. With a little extra olive oil drizzled on top, it was the perfect accompaniment to the Rainin’ Grains Ciabatta, baked by New Haven’s Chabaso Bakery, that I had picked up yesterday at the first (and I hope annual) Orange Street Festival.

This season is almost over. But I’ll be ready next time, with the goal of turning the entire bag of beans into dip as long as I can score enough scapes.

Perhaps I should have kept this discovery a secret.