Chicken nuggets? Since when did mechanically separated chicken, bathed in ammonia, goopified, and doused with artificial color, count as food? Yet for millions of school children, nuggets may the best meal of the week. Not best for nutrition, but certainly the easiest for their school cafeterias to serve. The cafeteria workers in charge are partial to this processed, fully cooked food-like product because the directions in their entirety read, “Heat and serve.”
But a better way, called “cut and cook,” is wending its way through schools.
[Editor’s Note: I worked briefly at The Cleaver Company as an extern. My time there was cut short (pun alert!) when I snipped off the tip of my finger while chopping candied ginger for a dessert. Unfortunately I didn’t return, except as a customer at the neighboring Green Table.
These excerpts are from a talk that Cleaver gave as the first recipient of Slow Food NYC’s Snail Blazer Award at the organization’s annual gala.]
“As a chef and businessperson I practice seriously and embrace the ability and responsibility we have — the difference we can make — by consciously directing our food dollars.
I was fortunate to be raised on good food. I grew up cooking for pleasure and as a way of contributing to the family. We had large gatherings every summer on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay in southeastern Massachusetts, and feasted on corn picked just before dawn, clams dug from the sands of the tidal ponds, mussels harvested from the rocks by the creek, and seafood just off the boats of the then-formidable New Bedford fleets. I discovered that I enjoyed cooking for a crowd: I loved the camaraderie and cacophony of a well-fed group around a big table. I found that good food was appreciated and valuable; that it fed good spirits. That it was nurturing.
When I finished college in southern Vermont I wanted to buy a farm, raise goats and make goat cheese, but my intelligent partner of these past 35 years, Ashley Hollister, pointed out that I did not have the funds or skills to do that — so instead we moved to the marketplace of New York City to find jobs. I started out washing dishes in a fancy food shop, and it wasn’t long before I discovered I could make a living by cooking for people gathered around a big table.
Mark Firth, one of two founders of Brooklyn restaurant mini-empire, was once quoted as saying “We don’t like new.”
When he and partner Andrew Tarlow restored a 1927 Brooklyn diner the dilapidated ambience, talented kitchen under chef Caroline Fidanza and lively everyone’s-a-friend ambiance created an instant hit that in many ways inspired the Brooklyn food movement.
A big driver for Diner’s success was Fidanza and her Greenmarket sourcing. When farmers started delivering direct to Diner, Fidanza said “I could never go back to working with other ingredients. It just wouldn’t be worth it.”
Now each week Firth travels three hours from a Berkshire farm down a long dirt road in Monteray, Massachusetts to Williamburg, Brooklyn. In the process he swaps a T-shirt and rubber boots for a suit and martini glass. With incredible style and charm he manages to pull it off.
Can words make you hungry? Pick up a menu and the average diner begins to salivate. You imagine that salty bacalao with a side of something crunchy. Or a risotto served with pungent mushrooms. The words create a picture and an almost immediate sensation.
But what happens when you pick up a menu and all the words are new—utterly exotic—to you? That’s the experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and it’s wonderful.
Think of venturing into a new world without a map. Terrifying for some, perhaps, but a thrill for others, especially when your guide is chef Dan Barber.
Here is a sample—of ingredients, and of the ways that Barber has chosen to group them.
greenhouse: focea lettuce, ching chang bok choy, ruby chard, wild arugula, red deer tongue, green swiss chard, watercress, mokum carrots, bay leaves, rosemary, oscarde, golden frills, blackhawk, kohrabi, red Russian kale, dwarf pak choy, sulu, Annapolis lettuce, firecracker, Italian parsley, Bordeaux spinach, Tuscan black kale, Tokyo bekana, mizuna, tango, truckee, troutback, purple garnet, bok choi, claytonia, mache, galisse, starbor kale, ruby streaks, purple komatsuma, sage, bright lights chard, minutina, garnet giant, magenta lettuce
pasture: finn Dorset lamb, African goose, honey, Berkshire pork, eggs from our hens
field: green garlic, golden beets, stinging nettles, merlin beets, mokum carrots, rutabaga, purple kale, day lily shoots, eight row flint corn, Bloomsdale spinach, parsnips, Forono beets, Tuscan kale, Orion kale, Tropea onion, Samantha cabbage, celery root, rose geranium
ocean: Maine oysters, Long Island porgy, Bouchot mussels, wild Alaskan king salmon, bluefish, squid ink, black drum, Woodbury clams, dulse seaweed, Quahog clams, razor clams, hake
Dude, got some weed? The kind you find in your lawn, that you cut with a sharp blade or douse with herbicides?
I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion. The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed. But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.
Weed ‘Em and Eat
In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:
“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”
Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.
And it’s a rare weed indeed that has a book named after it: Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.
“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”
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