A Bake In?

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

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

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

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

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

First Real Food Challenge Meal a Huge Success!!

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

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.