The great apple cake caper

If there’s one thing I love more than a great recipe, it’s a great recipe that features ingredients that come in my CSA box. And if there’s something I love even more than that, it’s a great recipe that takes some piece of CSA produce that’s been sadly neglected and rescues it from certain composting.  As I’ve mentioned here before, we tend to be a bit on the picky side when it comes to fruit texture, and we can detect a less-than-crisp apple a mile off. They’re not rotten, though, so I can’t bear to toss them; instead they just sit on the glass cake plate we use as a fruit bowl, holding up remarkably well but certainly not getting any crisper.

Back in July I just couldn’t bear to look at the sad apple graveyard any longer. Cooking fruit goes a long way towards dealing with poor texture, so I must have looked at a billion recipes for apple crumble, crisp, and cake before I found a delicious-sounding recipe for Apple Upside-Down Cake. I only had enough apple rejects to make half a recipe, so I made it in a loaf, rather than square, pan. It turned out… amazing. Moist, dense, exquisitely flavored cake topped with perfectly cooked, caramelized apple slices. The kind of thing you dream of for months.

We were still dreaming of it, in fact, as we watched the apple casualties begin piling up again last month. This time I felt much more relaxed when less-than-stellar apples arrived in our box, knowing that their alchemical transformation into dessert gold was always near at hand. Except for one thing. When I finally went to look for the recipe last week, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I checked the binder where I keep hard copies of favorite recipes with my own notations and changes, combed frantically through my collection of recipes bookmarked online, and then finally just started searching randomly with Google, hoping to stumble across a recipe that sparked my memory. Part of the problem was that I couldn’t remember whether it had been a gluten-free recipe that I had veganized, a vegan recipe I had converted to gluten-free, or even that rarest of things, a recipe that was already both.

Tonight, as we were contemplating what to do with our evening after a busy day of guests, Duck said to me, “Let’s make an apple cake.” It was clearly the perfect thing to do. Except for that tiny hitch. I started the search again, looking at apple cake recipes far and wide. I must have looked for ten minutes when Duck came in and sat down next to me. “Have you tried searching your bookmarks?” Yep. “Your browsing history?” Yep. I kept typing and clicking, not really paying much attention anymore, when suddenly, there it was. I gasped. I remembered everything – the photo, the recipe, even the little story about the blogger having the cake for afternoon tea with her friend.

Needless to say, I bookmarked it, printed it out, and saved a copy to my hard drive. We had more than enough apples for a full-size version tonight, and it’s so good that Duck (normally the foremost despiser of anything involving cooked fruit) drew a line down the center of the cooled cake with a knife to make sure he got his fair share.

So here’s to you, Mrs. G.F. of Recipe for a Gluten Free Life. To you and your amazing, sublime, miraculous Apple Upside-Down Cake. For rescuing my mushy apples – twice! – and for reappearing out of the internet mists in the hour of my greatest need.

This recipe is, for me, ultimate comfort food. It assuages my guilt (no wasted produce!), and feels reasonably healthy (an apple a day and all that) rather than overly rich and heavy, which is actually pretty vital to a pleasurable dessert experience for me. I don’t tend to gravitate towards the big indulgences when it comes to sweets (not that this isn’t plenty indulgent!) – I save my overkill for the savory side of things. It’s warm, and it’s soft, and it’s sticky and sweet, and, this time around, I made it with someone I love. What could be more comforting than that? So I’m going to submit this to January’s Sugar High Fridays, which is hosted this month by A Merrier World, with the theme of Sweet Comforts.

The recipe, as  it turned out, was gluten-free, not vegan, so below is the vegan version with my very minor changes:

Apple Upside-down Cake (aka “What do I do with my old mealy apples?”)
Original recipe is from Recipe for a Gluten Free Life. God bless her for figuring out to make a Better Homes and Gardens recipe gluten-free. The first time I made the recipe, I used a gluten-free baking mix that didn’t have teff or sorghum flour, and it came out fantastic (as she assures us it will). This time I had on hand the exact flours she specifies and it came out even better. The teff is just indescribably good. But it’s great without it, too. One warning: this cake doesn’t keep well. All the sugar and fruit make it get too moist too fast. Best to eat it all right away, or at least within a day or so.

5 tablespoons Earth Balance (or other non-hydrogenated vegan margarine), cut into pieces
another 5 tablespoons Earth Balance, softened
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
4 apples, cored and sliced in wedges, skin on
1 large apple, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup teff flour
1/2 cup sweet sorghum flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
1/4 teaspoon xantham gum
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2/3 cup soy or hemp milk
1/4 cup soy yogurt
2 teaspoons vanilla
3.9 oz applesauce, unsweetened (the size of a little packaged lunch-size tub)

Preheat oven to 350. Put the 5 T. chopped Earth Balance in the pan, a 9X9, and put in the oven until melted, but be careful not to brown it. Sprinkle brown sugar over Earth Balance, mix together. Put in the apple wedges and put back in the oven for 15 minutes.

In the bowl of your mixer (if you have one), combine flours and dry ingredients and whisk. Add wet ingredients, including the softened Earth Balance (the other 5 T. that you didn’t put in the oven), soy milk, soy yogurt, vanilla and applesauce. Use a mixer if you have one, otherwise stir until combined. Fold chopped apples into the batter.

Spread batter evenly over the apples in the pan. Bake about 35-45 minutes, or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely, then invert carefully over a large plate. Serve with the apples all gorgeous and caramelized on top.

A Glorious One-Pot vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday

During my great Dutch oven quest (both the quest to acquire the Dutch oven and the subsequent quest to find something vegan and gluten-free to cook in it) I kept coming across references to a Dutch oven cookbook, Glorious One-Pot Meals, by Elizabeth Yarnell.

I ordered it from the library and when it arrived I was pleased to see it had a pretty large vegetarian section with interesting-sounding recipes. There are a few that call for eggs or rely on cheese to the extent they can’t be veganized, but (if you include pasta recipes where GF pasta can be subbed), there are about a dozen recipes that could be prepared both vegan and gluten-free.

While reading the back cover, I was bemused to see that Yarnell has patented her Glorious One-Pot Meal process. I’m not sure how you can patent a cooking process (as opposed to a particular piece of cooking equipment) but I am excited by her method. It seems to work a bit like a slow-cooker and bit like lasagna – you layer your ingredients, which may include dry lentils, rice, pasta, or polenta, as well as liquid, vegetables, and spices, into the Dutch oven, and bake the whole thing in the oven. 45 minutes later, she promises, you have a Glorious One-Pot Meal.

If this works, I will be over the moon. We had a brief flirtation with slow-cooking, but everything turned out in monotone – one texture, one flavor – it was convenient (sort of) but just not appealing. But we find ourselves getting cranky and exhausted when we make meals that end up calling for every pot and pan we own. My favorite dessert cookbooks are Andrew Schlosser’s One-Pot Dessert series, and I would be thrilled to learn a similar technique for easy dinners.

So this week we’ll be giving this cookbook a major test-drive. It has to go back to the library at the end of the week, so Glorious One-Pot Meals gets seven chances to blow us away and make a case for becoming part of our permanent collection. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to give a review of the recipes and maybe even post a stand-out or two.

The Gluten-Free Menu Swap is hosted this week by the fabulous Kimberly of Gluten-free is Life. Her theme of the week is GF pizza, and I just seem to be all out of step with the Swap themes the last few weeks. No pizza on this week’s menu as it’s all one-pot, all the time, but I am excited to check out all the other pizzas! One of my favorite pizzas I’ve ever made is my Umami Pizza – I’ll have to make that one again sometime soon! And for a huge round-up of menu plans, check out the giant Menu Plan Monday compendium over at OrgJunkie!

Monday
Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and Sticky Rice (p. 174)

Tuesday
Israeli Tempeh (p. 182)

Wednesday
Thai Curry with Tofu (p. 200)

Thursday
Farmhouse Pasta (p. 178) subbing Peppered Cashew “Goat Cheese” for the goat cheese (start cashew cheese the day before!)

Friday
Boulder Polenta (p. 168) using just tofu “ricotta” (VCon) instead of the tofu and cheese mixture

Saturday
Aloo Gobi (p. 164)

Sunday
Sesame-Shitake Tofu(p. 192) using homemade Sesame Dressing rather than store-bought

Starting out simple with a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday

Rice shells with broccoli rabe, arugula, and homemade tomato sauce

It’s been a long holiday season. I’m pretty tired and looking forward to some downtime to recover my energy. So for the first menu plan of 2010, here’s a simple menu plan for a (hopefully) simple week. I even found some pages of the Moosewood Cooks at Home cookbook that are online through google books, so I was able to link to the original recipes for you. Doesn’t get more simple than that! Almost everything else isn’t based on a recipe – it’s more a “throw a sweet potato in the toaster oven” and “simmer a can of diced tomatoes into a pot with spices and other stuff from the fridge” kind of week.

Monday
“Sloppy” sushi with Moosewood broiled tofu and Asian cabbage salad (made with Savoy cabbage) and toasted cashews

Tuesday
Butternut squash and sage soup, Udi’s GF toast with almond butter

Wednesday
Rice pasta shells with broccoli rabe, arugula, and homemade tomato sauce with Sicilian black olives, capers, red onion, garlic, baby potatoes, thyme and marjoram

Thursday
Braised kale with sesame oil, Veganomicon broiled lemon tofu with tahini sauce, brown rice

Friday
Baked sweet potato, polenta with tempeh bacon

And that’s it, because honestly I’ll be lucky if I make that many meals this week, and the rest will be Little Chihuahua, Best of Thai Noodle, and Tasty Bites.

Find more inspiration at the Gluten-Free Menu Swap, hosted this week by Asparagus Thin with the theme of Movies (so sorry, this would have been a really fun theme, but it was all I could do to pull together a menu – a theme was beyond me this week) and the huge round-up of Menu Plan Monday posts over at OrgJunkie.

Cabbage Gratin with Tempeh Bacon does the “freegan” thing

Savoy cabbage gratin with tempeh bacon

My menu plan this week included a Savoy cabbage gratin, accompanied by a photo but no recipe. I made the gratin starting with a recipe from Deborah Madison’s veggie cooking bible, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I initially didn’t post the recipe for two reasons: one, because I try not to post too many recipes from a single cookbook, to encourage people to buy the cookbooks I love; and two, because this was a strange little “in-between” recipe, not quite vegan but not quite full-blown eggs-and-dairy.

However I got a couple of requests for the recipe almost as soon as it went up, so I checked around and the original recipe for the gratin is already posted online. So the cat is out of the bag, as it were, and I’ll post my annotated version here. The recipe is just a step away from veganization, and hopefully my notes on the changes that did work will help someone take it that final step. I’m even tagging it as vegan because I feel sure that an experienced vegan cook could take this gratin to vegan-recipe paradise without a second thought.

Why not entirely vegan? Well, last week Duck and my families had a lovely Chanukah party that included sour cream for the potato latkes. Nobody wanted to take home the sour cream, so under the rules of “freegan” eating (if it’s destined for the trash we may as well eat it, at least in terms of our environmental/animal welfare/consumer impact) I brought it back with me. And when I was looking for something simple to do with one of my two Savoy cabbages I decided a gratin would be a good place to use some of the sour cream.

Nearly Vegan Cabbage Gratin with Tempeh Bacon
Below I give you the original recipe with my changes and notes in italics

Butter and freshly grated Parmesan for the dish (I used Earth Balance and nutritional yeast flakes)
1 1/2 pounds cabbage diced into 2 inch squares (I used one large Savoy cabbage)
1/3 cup flour (I used Pamela’s GF baking mix, which contains leavening and xanthan gum)
1 cup milk (I used hemp milk)
1/4 cup creme fraiche or cream (I used the sour cream)
2 tablespoons of tomato paste
3 eggs (I used Energ-G egg replacer equiv. to 3 eggs)
3 T. minced parsley
salt and pepper
4 strips of tempeh bacon
Other possible additions: mustard, other cheeses, fresh dill, caraway seeds

Preheat the oven to 375.

Butter a gratin dish and coat the sides with nutritional yeast/parmesan.

Boil cabbage for 5 minutes in salted water (or steam in a steamer basket for ~8-10 minutes to preserve nutrients).

While the cabbage is cooking, pan-fry the tempeh bacon in a pan with a little olive oil until the bacon is brown and a bit crisp. Cut bacon into small pieces.

Rinse and drain the cabbage, pressing out as much water as possible.

Whisk together flour, milk, cream, tomato paste, egg (replacer), parsley, salt, and pepper, until smooth, and then add tempeh bacon and cabbage, stirring to combine. Pour the mixture into the prepared gratin dish.

Bake uncovered for 50 minutes (or 70 minutes, which is how long it took to get firm with the ingredients I was using) until firm and lightly brown. To check for doneness, use a wooden spatula to gently pull apart the top layers of cabbage. If the gratin is still runny in the middle, keep cooking until it becomes firm. Keep an eye on the top layer to ensure it doesn’t burn.

Serve hot.

Eating with the season on a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday

I’ve just arrived home from a fascinating four days at the Hazon Food Conference in Pacific Grove. The conference explored all kinds of interesting intersections, between environmentalism and food systems, Judaism and food ethics, social justice and foodie culture, personal financial investment and sustainable agriculture, and many more. I learned so much, both from the sessions and panels I attended as well as all the informal conversations I had with fellow conference-goers. You can read more about my time there here and here. I feel deep gratitude to the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation for sponsoring around 40 young adults, including me, providing full scholarships for all of us to the conference.

The Local Foods Wheel

On Sunday, right before we left for home, the conference had a big marketplace where folks could give out info and sell books they’d written or published, foods they’d made, and so on. At one of the tables I came across one of my favorite things ever, the San Francisco Bay Area Local Foods Wheel, being sold by one of the wheel’s creators. I first encountered the wheel, which is a stunning combination of gorgeous artwork and design with intriguing, well-presented information, on a refrigerator in the Spirit Rock kitchen when I was working back there during a retreat. (You’re not supposed to read anything on retreat, but who could resist those tiny, perfect line drawings with their little cursive labels?) Now it’s the most popular item on our refrigerator; every guest and visitor is magnetically drawn to it and we usually have to pull them away – they just want to stand there spinning it and spinning it and looking at every picture! The wheel shows on its top layer all the foods that are in season year-round in the Bay Area (and we’re lucky – there are so many of them!). Then you spin the top layer around to match up with the current time of year, and the bottom layer reveals the foods in season at this time.

Our CSA keeps us local and seasonal at every meal, but we’re not getting a box this week, so I turned to the wheel to help me plan this week’s menu. (My other goal for the week: use up all the lettuces from our box we’ve been keeping on life support for the past couple of weeks!)

For an assemblage of great, gluten-free menu plans, check out this week’s Gluten-Free Menu Swap over at The GF CF Cookbook. (The theme for this week’s swap is leftover ham, which, as a vegetarian, I can’t contribute to at all. I do have smoky beans and tempeh bacon this week, though, which are kind of the same flavor profile.) And, as always, for a huge round-up of menu plans from all over the web – and the world – check out the giant MPM compendium over at orgjunkie.

What’s in season:

Monday: Winter greens
Wine braised lentils over toast with Tuscan kale and pearl onions (Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Suppers)
Red leaf salad

Wine braised lentils over gluten-free quinoa toast with Tuscan kale and pearl onions

Tuesday: Butternut squash
Vegan “mac and cheese” made with butternut squash “cheese” and Tinkyada brown rice spirals
Romaine lettuce salad with balsamic vinaigrette

Wednesday: Brussel sprouts and wild mushrooms
Brussels sprouts and mushroom ragout with herbed vegan, GF dumplings (Vegetarian Suppers)
Mixed lettuces salad

Brussels sprouts ragout with wild mushrooms and herbed gluten-free dumplings

Thursday: From Duck’s mom’s garden!
Simple oven-roasted butternut squash
Arugula salad with sauteed red onions and toasted walnuts
Tangy red lentils
Quinoa with coconut oil

Friday: Savoy cabbage
Savoy cabbage gratin with tempeh bacon
Baked sweet potato
Homemade smoky pinto beans

Savoy cabbage gratin with tempeh bacon

Saturday: Parsnips, winter radishes, rutabegas
Roasted root vegetables with home-grown rosemary
Chard and walnut yum
Impressionist cauliflower

Sunday: Meyer lemons
Roasted broccoli with meyer lemon zest and pine nuts
“Sloppy” sushi with balsamic-glazed portobello mushrooms

Seasonal extras: Turnips and pomelos
Middle Eastern-style turnip pickles

A fresh batch of turnip pickles (with beet for color)

Candied pomelo peel

Candied Pomelo Rinds Dipped in Bittersweet Chocolate

Food for Thought ~ Hazon Food Conference

Well. the Hazon Food Conference is almost over. Tomorrow is the final day, and then at around 1 we’ll head back up or down the coast, or across the country, hopefully bringing some of what we’ve learned back to wherever we call home.

A few highlights from the last few days:

Learning from the owners of Lotus Foods about SRI, the “system of rice intensification,” an entirely different way of growing rice that is better for the rice farmers and the planet. Lotus Foods makes the black and red rices I use in the “I am DIY”/Cafe Gratitude-style rice bowl you all know and love, so it was amazing to learn more about how this rice is grown. I will be writing more on this in the future, I promise!

Catalyzing inspiration from a participant at one of the many Food Justice sessions: “How do we integrate the food movement with the hunger movement? How do we fight for a sustainable food system that also ensures no one goes hungry? People at this conference are not necessarily thinking about hunger; they’re here to think about food, which implies having food.” Time for foodies and food security (aka anti-hunger) activists to unite, and I want to be part of it!

Get some friends together to support each other and pick a week to try the Food Stamp Challenge Diet (eating for a week on $21, or $1/meal). Wouldn’t that make an interesting blog event?

The word sustainability is thrown around like crazy these days. I even found myself using it much more than usual. “What brings you here?,” people would ask me. “I’m very interested in sustainable food systems,” I would reply. It sounded great and felt like something I definitely was interested in, but I realized I had no idea what I was actually saying when I said it. Michael Domick, the dynamo president of Roots of Change and former chairman of Slow Food USA, listed these components when I asked him (I am paraphrasing here, so these are my words, not his). According to Roots of Change, a sustainable food system aims to:
Eliminate toxicity from the system (defined as the type of toxins the earth can’t process and deal with naturally)
Not overtap aquifers
Treat farm workers with respect and provide opportunities for them in terms of career advancement
Stop creating unhealthy foods
Bring in a diversity of scale, emphasizing regional, rather than national/central, food systems
Eliminate CAFOs and make animal processing local rather than centralized (with an eye to more humane animal raising and processing)

One of the tracks/themes of the conference was about fasting, and I realized that, at least in the reform/renewal Judaism I grew up with, we’ve kept all the feast days from the ancient Jewish calendar but eliminated all but one of the fast days. Very thought-provoking.

For more voices from the Hazon Food Conference, check out:

The Jew and the Carrot
The Boulder Jewish News
Pretty Girls Use Knives
Jewschool
The food conference Twitter feed

Who Will Eat the Goat? ~ Hazon Food Conference, Day 3

Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, asked us two questions during his keynote speech last night at the Hazon Food Conference. It felt like the beginning of one of those Jewish parables, the ones where the wise rabbi asks or tells us something that means more than it seems on the surface, where you ponder on the teaching and the world opens up in a new way.

“Stand up if you eat meat, but you wouldn’t if you had to kill it yourself,” Nigel called out. A number of people in the packed hall rose from their seats. I applauded them for their self-awareness and honesty, while of course maintaining a certain degree of vegetarian smugness.

Then he asked us another question. “Stand up if you are vegetarian, but would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” This time fewer people stood up, but it was still a significant number.

Then Nigel told us the story of the goat.

Two years ago, while putting together the second annual Hazon Food Conference, the planners decided that one of the activities offered would be the opportunity to see a goat killed in a kosher manner. A shochet, or ritual slaughterer, and a rabbi explained the whole process as they performed it. The death by slitting of the throat was almost instantaneous, as kosher law requires. Then there were several more hours of curtting off the goat’s head, hanging its body to drain the blood, opening it up to inspect its organs.

That night the same goat was served for dinner, on a separate table from the rest of the meal, which was vegetarian, and everyone was invited to partake. Nigel asked those same two questions afterwards, but this time he asked who among the diners who normally ate meat had abstained. More than 40 people out of a few hundred stood up. Then he asked if any people who were normally vegetarians had eaten the goat. Around 20 people had, for their own numerous and varied reasons, made this choice.

When word got out before the conference that the ritual slaughter of a goat was to be part of the programming, this provoked some intense reactions. A Jewish vegetarian organization disavowed Hazon and called on others to do the same. For a more detailed look at the sentiments behind the reactions, check out this post and its comments section to read a dialogue which took place this year regarding Hazon’s intention to ritually slaughter chickens and serve them for Shabbat dinner.

I’m a vegetarian, so this doesn’t have much to do with me, right? I can pick a side based on my own principles, but those goats and chickens aren’t being killed and served up in my name.

Except for one thing.

That goat was my goat.

No, I don’t mean he was my own pet goat. I mean that goat was my responsibility. I brought him into this world. His fate was directly linked to me.

That year the Hazon conference was held at the Isabella Freeman Jewish Retreat Center, and the goat in question was from their farm, Adamah, part of Adamah’s “boy’s town.” “Boy’s town” is the separate pasture for all the male goats who are born to the herd of dairy goats Adamah raises to produce milk and cheese. In order to make milk, goats need to be lactating, and to lactate they must be pregnant and then give birth. According to the wonderful Abbe Turner of the Lucky Penny Farm, who answered my questions (during today’s panel of Jewish Female Farmers) with deep compassion and groundedness, around 56% of the kids born in her herd are male. None of these little guys will be producing milk any time soon. So what happens to them?

I imagine this answer is different for different goats. And then there also the even more numerous males born to dairy cows, and all the males born to laying hens. Some end up as featured delicacies in local gourmet retaurants, like Abbe Turner’s. Others are killed quickly and cleanly by a shochet and eaten by those who raised them, like the goats at Adamah. Most others I imagine go to central processing plants to become stew meat or pet food or veal calves or are even ground into livestock feed, like male laying chickens.

When I eat eggs and dairy, even from the most humane, sustainable, small-farmer-owned, organic, local farms, I am not only drinking this milk and noshing on this cheese. I am calling forth this male goat, this living animal who is brought into a world that has very few options for him. Farmers could keep these male animals and raise them – and Abbe Turner does send some off to live lengthy lives as 4H projects or grass shearers. But to keep all of these animals would be to make pets of them, and the strain this doubling of the herd would put on the resources of land and water and farmer would be enormous beyond justification.

In saying that, I’m not saying that the strain on resources of keeping these “extraneous” male animals alive is not justified by the saving of their lives; I’m saying that it’s not justified by the resources (i.e., money) that I’m willing to contribute to get myself a delicious chevre or some tasty yogurt. I’m not paying so much for my cheese that there’s money in there to fund a goat sanctuary as well. So, the goat goes off to the knife. Someone kills him, someone cooks him, someone eats him. It’s not me, though.

No, I’m a vegetarian.

This post is cross-posted to Hazon’s food blog, The Jew and the Carrot. It is not intended to endorse any particular diet or agenda, e.g. to say that being vegan (abstaining from all animal products) is the only way to live, or that vegetarians are hypocrites. It merely hopes to be an exploration of one of the least considered aspects of our food chain.

Nibbles & Snacks ~ Hazon Food Conference, Day 2

Tasty stuff:

I am experiencing the unparalleled pleasure of having total foodie-obsessive conversations with everyone I meet. Conversations cover everything from animal welfare as it pertains to the dairy industry to whether or not gluten intolerance can be ameliorated through sourdough fermentation or by using non-rancid flour to an animated joint recounting of every vegan and vegetarian dish ever cooked on Top Chef. (By the way, if you haven’t watched the episode of Top Chef Masters where they have to cook a vegan meal for Zooey Deschanel and her friends, and all these professional chefs are totally confused and intimidated and crying about how it’s “like cooking with one hand tied behind your back,” you really need to check it out. I guess I’m a Master Chef since I somehow manage to cook creative, tasty vegan food every single day.)

I am very clearly not going to starve as I had feared. In addition to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we have three snack breaks a day, and today’s snack schedule was additionally supplemented by an evening wine and cheese tasting for Shabbat. I feel like a hobbit – “breakfast, then second breakfast, then elevenses, then lunch, followed by afternoon tea, then dinner, then supper…” – and the fact that Mary’s Crackers sponsored our after-lunch snack break only adds to joy. The Joy of Noshing, this conference could be called!

Santa even makes Christmas morning deliveries to Jewish Food Conferences, for those who believe in him. I’ll say no more on that one. (Thanks, Mama Santa!)

I am like a walking tourist bureau for San Francisco’s dining establishments. A bunch of conference attendees are taking a few more days of vacation in the City and are looking for recommendations. This being a food conference, I have found receptive ears for my detailed descriptions of my favorite places to eat. I created a vegan visitor’s tour tonight for one of my tablemates, debated Millenium vs. Greens with another, and Burma Super Star can thank me for the huge bump in business they can expect after the conference (not that they need any help!).

A little sour:

One bummer was that they served barley at lunch, with no signage to warn people or info about whether or not another grain was available for those of us who can’t eat gluten. After asking us on our applications whether or not we were gluten-free, this kind of oversight was surprising and disappointing. One woman at my table even asked one of the Asilomar chefs if it contained gluten and was told no, so she just figured it must be very large-grained brown rice and chowed down. A few bites in she realized her mistake. I hope she doesn’t get too sick! C’mon, Hazon, that’s an important one to get right…

The accessibility issues still seem pretty severe. I’m plum tuckered from hiking back and forth from my room to the social hall, dining room, and various session locations. The sessions are really spread out (though they could be even further apart – Asilomar is huge!), and I am curious about the logic behind the room assignments for each session.

The worst part, though, from both a low-energy/movement-compromised perspective and a cognitive disability perspective (as, sadly, I am qualified to assess from both) is how confusing everything is geographically. Our conference program has a map in the back, laid out of one of those grids with numbers along one side and letters along the other, but there’s no map index! So there’s no place to look up the session locations by name and then be led to them on the map.

I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time so far squinting at this map, scanning each quadrant and trying to find the place I’m looking for. And then, once I’ve found it on the map, that’s still no guarantee I’ll be able to find it in real life. All the paths here are circuitous, and none of the buildings are well-marked. Today I walked down a road, followed a little path, and then circled a building almost entirely before coming across the tiny sign that announced its name.

I had passed SIX separate entrances to the building, but none of them were marked with the building’s name. After circling the entire building I finally found the small, discreet sign (dark yellow lettering on brown) that told me I was in the wrong place. I was so tired by then that I just wanted to go back to my room and never leave. My room, however, was uphill, and the place I was trying to get to was downhill, so I continued onward, following the path of least resistance.

First Impressions ~ Hazon Food Conference

I’m in hour 7 of the Hazon Food Conference and I’m exhausted! I thought I would be watching a movie about Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma right now, but I decided to stay in and rest in my room with my stream-of-consciousness-emitting, jet-lagged roommate who was adorably entertaining before she passed out cold from still partially occupying a timezone 19 hours ahead.

Highlights so far:

• My ride down the coast with four strangers who needed lifts to the conference, all fellow “young adults,” sharing stories and conversation and getting a general preview of things to come.
• The pickling and fermenting workshop where the handout included the instructions, “skim the mold off the top.” Finally! Do you know how many batches of sauerkraut Duck and I threw away due to scummy foam (and fermentation-related paranoia)? And all this time we were just supposed to skim it off the top… Expect to see some pickling and fermenting appearing soon out of my box – I have a whole Savoy cabbage waiting for me at home and I finally feel ready to do this thing.
• Sitting in the dining hall with all the other Young Adult Fellowshippers, particularly the conversation we had brainstorming things to ask/talk about other than, “So, what do you do?” Our favorite one: “What do you like to eat?,” which yielded up rice cakes with hummus, sauerkraut and butter pickles. Wow! That sure beats, “I’m in accounting” for a conversation-starter.
• Chinese food for dinner, since we’re Jews and it’s Christmas Eve. Cute. (My family is always totally bemused at these “Jewish traditions” that we’ve never followed.)

Bummer:

• Pretty poor registration process. The capper was that when I showed up, hurrying to get to the pickling workshop that started momentarily, no one had any idea where I should park. It was as though the idea of parking had never before been discussed or addressed. I felt like I was met with the kind of anti-car sentiment I’m used to encountering from bike/transit folks but, excuse me, we’re in the middle of nowhere (transit-wise) and I had just used my car to transport five conference participants who had no other way to get down here. The whole conference is volunteer-powered, though, which makes me feel much more forgiving of disorganization (but not of attitude!).
• I’m afraid I’ll starve before this food conference is over. The portions at dinner were tiny and they ran out of food before everyone was fed (they did cook some other stuff, so no one actually starved tonight). Plus I can’t eat the bread, cookies, scones, and such that are probably meant to fill us up. Maybe I’ll live off the idea of food, like Judge Ooka’s famous Case of the Stolen Smell, since there is sure to be plenty of that in the air this weekend.

A more serious concern:

• It never fails to astound me how much I took for granted when I was hale and hearty and able-bodied. Asilomar is a maze, a warren of pathways and stairwells and steep pebbled pathways. There are handrails, which is good for folks who need those, but if someone needed to avoid stairs entirely they would need Theseus’ string to find their way to and fro and probably his biceps as well to haul themselves up these steep paths.

  The young adults self-assembled outside the dining hall after dinner to introduce ourselves, but when the introductions where done the conversation continued on and on, keeping us all standing upright out in the cold without offering some kind of opening for those who needed to sit or leave to go on their way. Again, stuff I just never thought about when my body did pretty much everything I asked of it. But it seems just mind-blowing to me now.

  This whole conference and space feels very geared towards able-bodied folks. It’s a kind of consciousness that I barely have myself, with my own body screaming feedback at me, so it’s not surprising that it might be hard for the organizers to keep in mind (for example, there was no specific place to discuss accessibility needs on the application).

Jews and Food ~ Week of December 24th

Duck and I put our CSA on hold again for a few weeks while we catch up on the backlog, but something even better came in my box this week: a full scholarship to the Hazon Food Conference, home of the New Jewish Food Movement.

I still can barely believe I get to go. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation, who sponsored several complete scholarships (conference tuition, room, and board) for young adults “who have not yet been involved in a leadership capacity in the New Jewish Food Movement.” First of all, when do I ever get to be a “young adult” anymore? The cut-off is usually 30, max, and it’s been a couple of years since I qualified for that. Second of all, who has ever heard of a scholarship where they want people who haven’t done a lot of work in the field already, where you don’t have to prove yourself worthy while being totally anxious that you’re underqualified?

This is an amazing gift. The conference sounds incredible, but there’s no way I would have been able to go without subsidization. The goal of the scholarship is to “bring a large contingent of young adults to the Hazon Food Conference and to catalyze the energy and learning from the conference to bring substantive work around food and Judaism, as well as other meaningful points of connection to Jewish life, back to your communities and your everyday lives.” So I’m bringing my sparkle and my listenin’ ears, all ready to learn and catalyze and connect!

What’s in my box this week: (the conference is organized around 8 themes)
Do-it-yourself food
Food justice
Jewish tradition and food: History and culture
Health and nutrition
Food systems and sustainability
Israel: Food and agriculture
Jewish food education
Fasting

I am most excited about the DIY and Food Justice tracks. It’s entertaining to see how my interests evolve – a few years ago, when I was preparing for Naturopathy school, I would have only had eyes for Health and Nutrition, and at another point in my life Fasting would have been a main attraction. Jewish Tradition and Food is always interesting, of course, but from reading the program descriptions that track seems mostly historical and informational, whereas I am betting DIY and FJ are going to be the most hands-on, action-oriented workshops.

I have a complicated relationship with Israel – so many of the activist communities I am part of are pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, which is overwhelming (particularly the internalized anti-Semitism I see in Jewish activists), and so much of the situation in the Middle East is wrapped up with US policies that make me very uncomfortable, so I tend to kind of hide my head in the sand when it comes to having opinions or feelings about Israel. Consequently the food and agriculture of Israel are about as interesting to me as, say, the food and agriculture of Turkey or Vietnam. It wouldn’t feel particularly like learning about the food systems of my ancient homeland, I don’t think. On the other hand, I identify strongly with the food traditions of Western Russia and Moldavia, where my family was before coming to the US, so I may just have a more recent definition of “home.”

Some of the things I hope to do while I’m at the Hazon Food Conference:

• Talk to the owner of the Lucky Penny goat dairy farm to get the real skinny on whether humane goat dairy is even a possibility (by my definition of humane, of course)
• Learn to make pickles and/or mozarella
• Attend seminars on Food Justice Tools, Keeping the Justice in Charity, Slow Money (investing in the slow food movement), Jewish Female Farmers, Urban Agriculture, and Environmental vs. Animal Rights
• Meet and mingle with the other young adult participants at a special dinner and meeting set up just for us to network and kibbitz
• Learn more about the Hazon CSA, which has branches all over the country
• Talk to the owner of Lotus Foods, which is the company that imports all the special rice we buy (like the black and red rices in the I Am DIY Rice Bowl), and learn more about their sustainable rice practices

There’s also a game night (I’m bringing a mere 5 out of our collection of nearly 50!), a “chai house” (yum!), a “cosmic walk,” that movie about Jewish chicken farmers in Petaluma I’ve been meaning to see for years (according to family lore that’s where one branch ended up), and of course community Shabbat, organic, local, and seasonal vegetarian and vegan food, and lots of lots of people who are as obsessed with food as I am!