Panzanella Salad with heirloom tomatoes!

This is one of my favorite recipes for summer tomatoes!

Panzanella Salad
Serves 6
Panzanella is an Italian salad that traditionally used day-old bread to add to a fresh tomato salad. We will be using good crunchy bread to make rustic croutons for our salad.

1 loaf county bread or sourdough bread town into bite sized chunks
4-6 beautiful tomatoes cut into chunks
1 red onion, thinly sliced
10 salty black olives, pitted and chopped
1-2 cucumbers peeled and chopped
1 bunch arugula chopped fine
2 tablespoons flat leaf parsley finely chopped
½ cup basil finely chopped
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup red wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss torn bread with a drizzle of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Place on a baking sheet and toast for 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Combine all other ingredients in a large bowl, toss in croutons. Make dressing with vinegar, garlic, olive oil and salt and pepper and dress and toss the salad. Plate in tall stacks on plates.

Charmed Honey

In The Kitchen is now carrying very special honey made with love by Dori Midnight!

Charmed honey is available In The Kitchen for $25 a spell…..

Check out Dorilandia!

Charmed Honey
Spell crafted local raw wildcrafted honey. Custom made for your intentions and wishes with herbs, spices, and flower & gem essences with a hand-drawn label.

Examples: Fertility Honey (to get knocked up), Honey of Health, Magic Boyfriend Honey, Love of All Kinds Honey, Rejuvenating Honey for the Tired, Bitter, Burnt Out Activist, Finish that Book, Honey!

Dori Midnight is an ordained interfaith minister and intuitive counselor who has come from a long line of tough ladies who healed people in their kitchens. She believes that healing is an “of the people, for the people” practice and works to keep healing accessible, affordable and full of magic. She teaches magic and folk & community herbalism to kids and adults, provides intuitive counseling and healing for individuals, creates rituals and ceremonies, and makes delicious potions in San Francisco.

Frances Moore Lappe: The Movement Mother

Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971 when its author was barely out of grad school, contained revolutionary ideas about food, its production and consumption, how the earth’s resources were being wasted, and the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. It became a best seller, and today’s raised-consciousness eating is a direct result. New York–based journalist and TV producer Anthony Lappé interviewed his mother.

I was born the year Diet for a Small Planet came out. I’ve always wondered how you were able to do both.
Must have been all those rice and beans.

Gourmet picked you as one of 25 Americans who’ve changed the way we eat. Did you ever imagine such impact?
No way. I’d never published anything, not even a letter to the editor. But when I discovered mind-blowing facts digging through UC Berkeley’s agriculture library, I had to tell somebody. My initial plan was to do a one-pager and post it in cafés.

What impact has the book had on you?
Realizing I wasn’t alone—that there were millions of people like me, wanting to find meaning in their daily acts. I learned how exasperating it can be trying to get the message out. On one early-seventies Pittsburgh late-night TV talk show, the only other guest was a UFO expert, and I got one question: “Ms. Lappé, what do you think they eat on UFOs?”

What’s been your biggest disappointment?
That many hear my message as “less” when I see it as “more”—eating more of what’s best for our bodies, the Earth, other animals, other people.

It must be gratifying that organic food and eating healthy is so in vogue.
Very. It feels like we’ve come full circle. From Super Size Me to Food, Inc., it’s even in your local theater. But what’s crazy and heartbreaking is that, while “healthy” is in, the American diet has also degraded so fast since I was your age [38] that treating diet-related diseases now costs Americans roughly as much treating tobacco-related diseases.

Were you upset that I ate meat?
I was consoled that you proved I was a mom who didn’t guilt-trip her kids. And, you know, I’ve noticed even you’ve forsworn red meat.

More or less forsworn. I’m still a sucker for grass-fed steak or lamb. I guess that makes Anna [my sister, author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen] the golden child.
Well, I’d love you if you ate Big Macs, honey. That’s the definition of unconditional love.

Frances Moore Lappé lives in Boston. With daughter Anna, she leads the Small Planet Institute.

Seed to Table- Summer Series

Seed to Table
Cooking and Eating the Fruits of Your Labor
July 20 and August 17th
$50/class or $120 for the full series!
6-8:30 pm

I think the best way to enjoy home-grown produce is right from the vine, but lets face it, after weeks, months even of summer squash, zucchini, eggplant, and even tomatoes, you can wonder, “well, what else can I do with this?”

In this 3 part class, taught on Mondays, June, 22, July 20 and August 17th, we will really delve into the home gardener’s bounty and what the various ways to cook and serve your beautiful vegetable gems.

In each class, I invite you to bring some of what is bountiful and we will incorporate it into our class and meal.

Each class ends with a lovely summer meals shared by all!

This month we are highlighting some lesser-known friends of the veggie kingdom and new ways to prepare them!
Butter Lettuces
Nasturtium Flowers
Garlic Scapes
Apricots
Radishes
Herbs

Garlic Scapes

Garlic scapes are the flower/seed stalk that shoots up from the garlic bulb. I like the way they curl and from what I understand if they not cut off they will eventually straighten out and bloom. The reason they cut them off they is so the bulb can get more energy to grow bigger and better.

The farmers’ markets and the CSA shares in this area are brimming with garlic scapes. Judging by the comments I heard at the market this morning, not everyone knows what they are or what to do with them. Tonight for dinner I’ll annoint them with some olive oil and grill them just like I do asparagus. They can be chopped thick or thin and added to salads and stir-fries.

My favorite thing to do with them is to make garlic scape pesto. It is super easy to make and refrigerates well for several weeks in a well sealed jar. I also plan on popping some into the freezer to top off my winter soups. I use this pesto on brushetta, pasta, eggs, foccacia, and just about anything I grill like shrimp, salmon, chicken. It’s also fabulous added to mayonnaise and smeared on a big roast beef sandwich. Now I’m hungry!!!

Garlic scape pesto

1 pound garlic scapes

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

Olive oil (about 1/2 to 1 cup)

Pine nuts if available

Chop the garlic scapes into 3 inch lengths. Put it in the food processor and process until pureed. Add the parmesan and pine nuts and process until smooth. Slowly add the olive oil as the food processor runs and continue until all the oil is combined into the garlic. Store in an air-tight jar in the refrigerator.

I found this article here.

From Cubicle to Farmer’s Field

This is a great article I found via the Atlantic Monthly. I think it brings an honest prospective on following your heart.

by Sara Lipka

Photo by Alexis Arieff

Deadlines make me daydream of farming. I’ve been a reporter in Washington, D.C., for several years, and I enjoy it, but last winter I looked out the window a lot. I imagined August heat and standing in rows of corn stalks under hazy blue silhouetted hills.

Sure, I had some predictable motives, like pastoral idealism and Michael Pollan. I’d become fascinated by the local food movement, and I was trying to eat seasonally from the Dupont Circle farmers market. Beyond that lurked cubicle ennui–and my ancestors. I kept envisioning a kerchiefed matriarch and wondering how to explain to her what I’d done that day. When there was no way she’d understand, I felt sad. And if she found out that younger generations had lost the ability to work the land? Oy.

But it wasn’t all whimsy. I’d worked on a produce farm in Massachusetts in 1997, between high school and college. I stooped to pick strawberries, lugged baskets of green beans, and snuck breaks in the walk-in cooler. During semesters in South America, I harvested coffee and coca and tended turkeys. Missing all that, I took a couple of weeks in December to groom herb beds on a small terrace farm in the British Virgin Islands. Tough gig.

My parents freaked out. They wrung their hands over the economic crisis and my potential homelessness and starvation. At least, I pointed out, I’d know how to grow food.Then, walking to work one morning, I stopped. I stood on the sidewalk and thought, “I am going to a building where I’ll sit until it gets dark.” The idea wasn’t depressing, just absurd. It reminded me of a friend who looked forward to changing his office’s water cooler, which he called relatively primordial.

I decided to talk to Emily, a seller at my farmers’ market. When she said she needed one more person this season, it was hard not to feel fatalistic. The next Saturday at 7:30 a.m., I biked in the rain to borrow a friend’s car. I drove 70 miles west to The Farm at Sunnyside, in Washington, Virginia.

Emily and I strolled thrugh the hoop houses and the foggy 420 acres: orchards, brambles, tilled fields, ponds, and pasture. Later that week, she offered me room, board, and a monthly stipend for the summer and fall. I sat, thought, sought a lot of advice, ate Sunnyside kale, and decided I had to do it.

My parents freaked out. They wrung their hands over the economic crisis and my potential homelessness and starvation. At least, I pointed out, I’d know how to grow food. When I told them I might be able to get my job back in October (no guarantee), I got a package of sun-protective clothing from L.L. Bean.

So I’m becoming a farmer, sort of. I took a bunch of chard out of the fridge the other day and wondered if, on the farm, I’d pick some for a few days and store it, or pluck it from the plant every time. Extreme local food! I could set a place in the field and eat right there.

If the real August heat makes me daydream of air conditioning and shift dresses, then shucks. I’ll still learn how to grow a decent artichoke.

Thank goodness for beautiful food!

My friend Morgan Levy came for a visit and to help me with some catering this weekend. She also took some pictures of the diner spread we produced. I was reminded of how beautiful food is. How amazing nature is for making such perfect beautiful food……I feel like practically all I do is warm it up! It is so amazing on its own!

This is Maria and some lemonade.

And this is me and Morgan a few years ago.

We must have laughing at something amazing.

Seed to Table Cooking Class

In The Kitchen Cooking School Presents

Seed to Table

Cooking and Eating the Fruits of Your Labor

June 22, July 20 and August 17th 6-8:30 pm / $50 a class or $120 for the full series!

The best way to enjoy home-grown produce is right from the vine, but lets face it, after weeks and months of summer squash, zucchini, eggplant, and even tomatoes, you can wonder, “well, what else can I do with this?”

In this 3 part class, taught on Mondays, June, 22, July 20 and August 17th, we will really delve into the home gardener’s bounty and what the various ways to cook and serve your beautiful vegetable gems. Each class ends with a lovely summer meals shared by all!

To sign up call 478-0669 or visit www.wendyvanwagner.com In The Kitchen is located at 648 Zion St, Nevada City

NYtimes: Many Summer Internships are Going Organic

Erin Axelrod, who graduated from Barnard College last week with an urban studies degree, will not be fighting over the bathroom with her five roommates on the Upper West Side this summer. Instead she will be living in a tent, using an outdoor composting toilet and harvesting vegetables on an organic farm near Petaluma, Calif. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/dining/24interns.html?_r=1&emc=eta1)

This is a trend that I have am witnessing directly in my own town, Tim Van Wagner’s organization, Living Lands Agrarian Network focuses heavily on an educational component directed at young emerging farmers, many of whom are fresh from university life.

The article in the NYtimes goes on site the many reasons young people are choosing to intern of organic farms instead of corporate high rises……the economy is so bad that living and working out of doors is much more appealing than living in cash stretched cities…..having an opportunity to put your values into action…….a return to traditional values.

To find more information on organic internships, check out www.thegreenhorns.org, organicvolunteers.org

Cooking a whole King Salmon

In Nevada City we have a fabulous new seafood company called Nevada City Seafood……Eric the owner makes 3 trips weekly to the piers in San Francisco to get the freshest fish right off the boats. This weekend I had the wonderful chance to cook with the most beautiful, fresh and huge salmon I had ever seen. This fish was caught the day before off the coast of Oregon and was 20 lbs!

In The Kitchen was catering a wedding in Cool, Ca…..and it was! Allie and Maria were at the grill taking this beautiful creature from fish to dinner……

The head and tail were removed in order for it to all fit on the grill……

I have never tasted fish like this before!