THE REAL FOOD CHALLENGE

Menu for Friday, May 15

2009-05-12T23:31:00.000-07:00

Here is the updated menu (please note vegetarian versions will be prepared for dishes with meat):

Spicy Greens Salad with Apples, Candied Pecans, and

Homemade Pizzas

Smoked Halibut Risotto with
Lemon, Asparagus, Green Garlic, and Spring Herbs

Braised Kale Rabe with Bacon

Onion Bread

Rhubarb Crisp with Whipped Orange Crème Fraiche

Dinner Plans for May 15

2009-05-11T22:57:00.000-07:00

We decided to try to have a broad array of different vegetable dishes for this meal (see what we bought in the little narrative below), but we haven’t come up with a plan for a main course yet. Feel free to make suggestions. Some of the ideas that have been floated so far are:

Quiche
Pasta all’amatriciana (pasta tossed with carmelized onions, red peppeer flakes, pancetta, diced tomatoes, and lots of parmesan)
Paella with homemade chorizo sausage (we would need a vegetarian/vegan analogue for this entry)

A group of us went to Bainbridge and we had a beautiful Saturday on the island. We started with the farmer’s market, where we bought young garlic (like scallions only with a garlic taste), kale raab (kale leaves with tender flower heads), and rhubarb (for making pie or a crisp). We had lunch at the market and then went to visit the farm (or group of farms) where Ariana is interning. She took us around the farm and then we had a wine tasting at Bainbridge Island Winery, which is part of the farming consortium. We bought four bottles of their Madeleine Angevine, a crisp dry slightly flowery wine made from a grape from the Loire Valley. This is one of the few grapes that do well in the Puget Sound region and this winery is also one of the few that grow all their own grapes used in their wines. We also visited another farmer in the group where we bought asparagus and then back to Ariana’s farm to help her weed the garlic beds.

The farmland was originally owned by the Suyematsu family who started berry farming there in the 1920s. They were interned during the war but the original owner of the land helped them keep up with their payments during the war so that they did not lose their land. The last remaining family member is 87-year-old Akio Suyematsu who wants to keep the land agriculture and has been selling off parcels to small scale sustainable farmers. The current farmers use draft animals as well as mechanized tractors to work the land.

May Event Sign Up

2009-04-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

It turns out that May 10 is Mother's Day, but Ariana suggested we come to the farm on Saturday, May 9. She said that the farmer's market closes at 1 and if we arrive about 2:30, they will arrange a wine-tasting for us! We may want to purchase some wine for our dinner.

Please use the comment function to sign up for our trip to the farm and/or for dinner. Please indicate if you are signing up for one or both activities. Also, please let me know if you can help drive to the farm (on May 9) or help cook dinner (on May 15).

Also, please let others know about our dinner. It would be great to expand our numbers. I would also like to set the cost of dinner at $10 per diner this time, but $15 with wine. We didn't discuss this at our last meeting, so feel free to comment on this as well.

Meeting Notes from April 15 Meeting

2009-04-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Farm Visit
The group decided to plan a trip to Bainbridge Island to visit the consortium of organic farms where Ariana is interning this spring. A weekend in the first half of May was decided upon as good timing in terms everyone’s schedule with regard to the 10-week quarter. Ann will write Ariana to determine which weekend might be better from their end. It might be a bit early for some produce but we will just have to work with the season and with the reality that things might be a little late this year. Once the date is set, we can plan logistics for getting there. It would be wonderful if we could travel as foot passengers on the ferry, but it depends on what transportation will be needed once we get to Bainbridge. I will get that information from Ariana and will pursue the rental of a UW van if that seems like the best way to go.

I will also set up a doodle poll to determine the dinner date. A strong preference was expressed for a Friday evening in mid-May.

Slow Food on Campus
Emilia Ptak talked to us about her conversations with Slow Food Seattle. Affiliation might bring some resources to help us fund (and expand) what we are already doing and also might make it possible for us to send a delegate or two to Terra Madre in 2010. Student membership is only $10 (which includes the magazine Slow and the monthly newsletter). The question arose as to whether our current group is large enough to meet the organizational requirements for organizing as a Slow Food convivium (we need a full roster of no fewer than 10 officers!). We agreed that we could use our next meal event as an opportunity to increase our numbers. Emilia agreed to take the lead on any planning to pursue an affiliation with Slow Food in the future. She also mentioned an upcoming visit to Washington State by Josh Viertel, the President of Slow Food USA and director of the Yale Sustainable Farm Project, and we might want to see if we can either invite him to campus or send a group off to meet him (Emilia, can you provide us with some details on his visit? I forgot to make notes on that).

Broadening Our Base
Other opportunities to expand the group were discussed: a table on Earth Day (coming up soon on April 22), having a fundraiser at the cob oven, seeking affiliation with the Green Coalition. If any of you would like to take the lead on this, please let me know. I would especially like to have a table on Earth Day. It seems like too good an opportunity to pass up to get the word out about what we are doing. If any of you know what this entails, please get in touch with me. I would be willing to help out with this, but I need a student who knows the ropes about how to set one up.

Eat In
We discussed briefly the possibility of staging an "Eat-In" similar to the one that happened at Slow Food USA last Labor Day weekend. It is too late for this year, but we might want to think about it for next fall--a kind of harvest home. If you would like to learn more about staging this kind of event, please check out the Eat-In website.

Making Plans for Spring Quarter

2009-04-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

Our next Real Food Challenge Meeting will be this Wednesday, April 15, 5-6 p.m. in 401 Denny. Please come and help us plan for our farm trip later this quarter.

More news:
We had discussed last quarter about the possibility of planning a farm visit in preparation for our meal event for spring quarter. I have written Ariana Taylor-Stanley to see if we might visit her at the farm where she is interning on Bainbridge Island. The other possibility is to follow up on Mark Madsen's invitation to visit him on Lopez Island.

Emilia Ptak, who is a UW student, has contacted me about the possibility of setting up an affiliation with Slow Food on Campus. She has been in touch with the Seattle Chapter of Slow Food and she would like an opportunity to present to our group what this might entail in terms of organization and what resources we might draw on. We might also want to discuss whether we want to form an ASUW registered student organization, which would enable us to draw on ASUW resources to support our activities.

Plans are getting underway with the video blog project. Theresa Klaassen and Chris Brown are collaborating on a first installment of an online cooking school and we may have located a kitchen that would be good for videotaping.

Finally, Lucy Jarosz and I are still trying to figure out how to get the word out about our study abroad program for Fall Quarter (The Culture and Politics of Food in Italy). If you know of any students that might be interested, please help us spread the word!!

Another Success!

2009-02-07T14:18:00.000-08:00

Our second meal event was very successful. We started cooking at 4:30 and sat down to dinner about 7:10 with a total of 21 diners. Everything went reasonably smoothly, despite a panicked search for the sausages, which were finally found in the back of my car where they had fallen out of one of the grocery bags en route to campus. I discovered that the Bosc pears I had selected at PCC for the pear tarts were not very ripe and so Theresa and Chris simmered the cut slices in a simple sugar syrup to sweeten them up. Lesson learned: select by fragrance and not just appearance! We had lots of pear slices left over, which were added to the roasted beet and fennel salad. Nothing was wasted: the beet tops were added to the dinokalopita as were the egg whites left over from the tarts.

Chris Brown archived the event with his camera and has promised to put the photos online soon. I will update this post once I get the link.

The cost of the meal came out at about $10 per diner. We now have an accumulated fund of about $130 (including the extra money from our first event). For our spring event, we might want to consider a more elaborate meal. Or we can use the accumulated extra funds to help fund our tentative plans for an "eat in."

Menu for February 6

2009-01-31T12:20:00.000-08:00

Ta and Lisa joined me this morning to shop for our dinner coming up this Friday. As we shopped, the following menu came into focus (please note the embedded links lead to a recipe):

Starter: Dinokalopita Frittata (like Spanokopita but with Dino Kale instead of Spinach)

Salad: Roasted Candy Cane Beets, Golden Beets, and Fennel, with a Roasted Shallot Vinaigrette.

Main Course: Tuscan Bean Stew (two versions, one with Italian sausage and one vegetarian) served with Polenta grilled with Montasio Cheese

Dessert: Pear Tart with Homemade Crème Fraîche

Update on Plans for Feb 6 Dinner

2009-01-30T08:18:00.000-08:00

I will be in the U-District Farmer's Market tomorrow at 9:30. I would love to have some fellow shoppers. Let me know if you can join me.

Also, I am still collecting a headcount, so let me know if you plan to come to dinner and if you will be bringing guests.

I have decided to wait until next Sat or Sun to make anti-CAFO cookies.

A Bake In?

2009-01-28T10:25:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of some anti-CAFO cookies I found on the F.A.R.M. website (Families Against Rural Messes). These were made by some residents of Rock Island County, Illinois.

I would like to organize a work party to make 300 of these (yes, you read that right) to serve at the Wednesday University series on food issues that Lucy and I are presenting this quarter. I will be delivering the lecture on February 11. Would any of you be interested in helping me? We could use the Husky Den Kitchen for this, I am pretty sure. I will also ask Seattle Arts and Lectures to allow you free admission to the session so that you can receive acknowledgment from the class participants for your contribution of labor to the cause!

January 9 Meeting

2009-01-09T18:48:00.000-08:00

Sara McCurdy, Brady Ryan, Theresa Klaassen, Trang Ta, and Ann met to discuss our next event. Instead of coming up with a menu, we decided to embrace the challenge of seasonality and work with a local farm to see what is available in early February and have that set the menu for our next meal. Ann will visit the Farmer's Market tomorrow to talk to the farmers who are still bringing produce to market to explore with them what they might have in a month's time. Another sub-theme for this event might be "expanding our vegetable vocabulary." Maria Hines, of Tilth Restaurant, was interviewed on KUOW yesterday evening and she was talking about the year she spent in France and the tremendous diversity of winter vegetables you can find there that we hardly ever see here. You can find some of the recipes using these vegetables on her blog.

We decided to move the date to Friday, February 6. We also set a deadline of January 28 to get a head count for dinner and collect money ahead of time as much as possible so we have some funds for shopping for the meal. We are keeping the cost to $15.00 for participants, plus $10.00 for guests. Those of you who overpaid last time can deduct that amount for this time. We are also planning a trip to the farm to pick up the produce either Jan 31 or Feb 1, and we will need to get a head count for that activity as well so that we can plan transportation.

Change in Meeting Time

2008-12-24T10:32:00.001-08:00

The farm group is meeting at the same time I proposed for our next organizational meeting, so I am changing it to Friday, January 9 at 5:00 pm.

The proposed date for our next meal event remains, Friday, January 23. Meal prep begins at 4:30 and dinner is served at 7:00.

Our Next Event

2008-12-11T09:22:00.000-08:00

I know you all have the end of quarter and the holidays on your mind, but I would like to also start us all thinking about our next event. A number of you mentioned that you would like us to schedule our next real food challenge meal before mid-terms get started. I propose a date of Friday, January 23. Classes start on January 5, so we should have a planning meeting at some point in the first or second week. I am thinking maybe Wednesday, January 7 at 5:00. Let me know if that date works for you by inserting a comment below.

But we can start thinking about the menu even before then. Think about what might be available in the mid-winter market. I made a Tuscan bean stew (with savoy cabbage, white cannelini beans, and sausage) last night that I thought was pretty good. I found the recipe online. It seemed like a great way to use a small amount of meat as a condiment for a hearty meal. If we did that, we would need to come up with a vegetarian version or at least another vegetarian main dish. If you have ideas, send them as comments below, so that all members of the group can see them and we can get a discussion going.

BTW, I found the website for a group doing very similar things at the "other" UW (University of Wisconsin). Check out their website!

One other piece of news: Mark Bittman, the "minimalist cook" and food writer for the NYT will featured at an event at the U Bookstore on January 14. He has been an advocate for using meat as a condiment to counter the environmental harms of industrialized meat production. You can view a short 10-minute talk by him online!

Have a great holiday and I hope to see you at our next meeting!!!

November Real Food Challenge Meal

2008-11-16T17:43:00.000-08:00

You can see Xia's pictures from our dinner by clicking here!

First Real Food Challenge Meal a Huge Success!!

2008-11-15T13:18:00.000-08:00

I believe that our first meal would be considered an unqualified success by all 21 diners in the Husky Den on Friday night. It was amazing how everything got done in time for us all to sit down together promptly at 7. Xia Zhang took lots of pictures and I hope to upload a slide show of the event to the website soon. I would also like to upload copies of the recipes we used, so please send them to me as soon as you can, given how busy everyone is at this time of the quarter.

The finances worked out well within budget. We have about $45.00 left in the pot for the next meal. I know some of you paid in $20 because of the lack of change and I have you on record so you can pay $10 for next time.

There seemed to be general agreement that we should have our next meal earlier in Winter quarter, preferably before midterms begin. I am open to possible dates. Friday night seemed to work out well this time, so be thinking of an ideal Friday in January for our next foray in communal cooking.

Update for November 14

2008-11-09T07:34:00.000-08:00

A bunch of us went shopping at the Farmer's Market, where we purchased a lot of the ingredients for our first meal this Friday, and then we went to my house and made ricotta cheese for the lasagna, roasted pumpkin and shelled walnuts for the pumpkin walnut bread.

If any of you have receipts for anything purchased for the meal, please keep them and give them to me when we get together for cooking on Thursday and Friday. But do send me an email with how much you spent, what it is for, and if you remember, who you purchased them from. We would like to make this as much of a farm-to-table meal as possible and it would be fun to keep track of where we sourced the food. I just want to keep close track before we forget. We can settle up on Friday.

For the Apple Cobbler work team (Andrea and Laura), I just want to let you know that we purchased apples at the market for the apple cobbler. There was some talk of maybe doing a crisp instead. Let us know what you have planned and if you are still able to join us.

I know a lot of you are getting slammed by the unrelenting quarter system, but if you are planning on coming, please do confirm your seat. We need to work out portions to make sure there is plenty to go around.

Group List

2008-10-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

Attendees at the October 13 Meeting:
Ann Anagnost (anagnost@)
Andrea Bote (acbote@)
Theresa Klassen (tk107@)
Laura Plambeck (lep11@)
Michelle Stitzer (stitz@)
Sara McCurdy (saram88@)
Laura Brady (labrady@)
Arianna Taylor-Stanley (taylorstanley@gmail.com)
Lisa Kass (kassl@)
Inness Wragg (inness@comcast.net)
Xia Zhang (toxiz12@gmail.com)
Ashley Baker (asbaker@)
Brady Ryan (bradyr@)
Joanna Wright (joanna3@)

Those who could not attend:
Kate Lien (kathrl@)
Kelsey Hinton (khinton@)
Sarah Choe (choes2@)
Trang Ta (tta@)
Kyle Pennell (kpennell@gmail.com)
Lisa Lieberman (fijigin@comcast.net)
Charles Cange (cwcange@hotmail.com)
Shannon Glass (hortiste@)
Katherine Burge (kburge@)
Lydia Caudill (isa101799@yahoo.com)
Crystal Cheairs (sahmia@yahoo.com)

Menu for November 14

2008-10-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

Our goal is to aim for seasonality. The menu may change pending what is available locally in mid-November.

First Course
Potato Leek Soup
Pumpkin Walnut Bread

Second Course
Lasagna with homemade pasta
Braised Greens (Chard/Spinach/Kale)

Third Course
Salad with roasted pears and cheese

Dessert
Apple Crisp with Homemade Cinnamon Ice Cream

Menu Committee: Theresa Klaassen (tk107@), Sara McCurdy (saram88@), and Lisa Kass (kassl@)

Work Groups
Potato Leek Soup: Michelle Stitzer (stitz@), Sara McCurdy (saram88@), Inness Wragg (inness@comcast.net)

Pumpkin Walnut Bread: Kate Lien (kathrl@), we could use one or two more volunteers here.

Lasagne: Theresa Klaassen (tk107@), Xia Zhang (toxiz12@gmail.com), Ariana Taylor-Stanley (taylorstanley@gmail.com, Brady Ryan (bradyr@) We could use one more person.

Braised Greens: Joanna Wright (joanna3@) We could use one more person.

Salad: No one has signed up for this yet.

Apple Cobbler: Andrea Bote (acbote@), Laura Plambeck (lep11@), We could use one more person.

Harvesting Committee: We have had a possible offer to harvest some of the ingredients (leeks, kale, collards, beet greens, chard, squash) for this meal at a farm in Fall City. My car will hold four passengers. Let me know if you are interested in doing this. We probably would go up the Sunday before our dinner. It is about a 25-mile drive. Sign ups: Xia Zhang

Other tasks:
Archiving Menus and Food Sources: Joanna Wright
Photo archiving for the website: Xia Zhang

Organizational Meeting

2008-10-13T20:12:00.000-07:00

A meeting was held Monday, October 13, 5:30-6:30 in Denny 401 with 13 in attendance.

A date of Friday, November 14 was selected for our first meal. This is subject to approval by Robert Barker (Ann will email him). We will have another brief organizational meeting on November 5 to work out any final details and collect money for shopping.

A menu was selected (see above) and a menu committee was formed.

Small work groups were set up for the different menu items. Each work group is responsible for finding a recipe, running it past the menu committee, sourcing, shopping, preparing their menu item. The work group is responsible for keeping receipts of all purchases so we can keep track of the costs.

The menu committee can help review the recipe to foresee any problems and help the work group figure out the logistics for their menu item (equipment, ingredients, cooking for a large group).

If all students participating in producing this meal (about 20) were to bring one guest, we will need to cook for about 40 people.

At our next meeting on November 5, we will work out a rough budget and collect $15 from each participant to cover the shopping costs. A $10 charge will be for your guest. Any funds left over, will go toward the next meal. Once we have been through this process, we will have a better idea if this amount is suitable.

Future Project Ideas:
Setting up an Outreach Committee to seek support from local organizations.
Fundraising, possibly from the Kellogg Initiative