In the Kitchen

What's New at Paulding & Company

August 2010

Teamwork

I was talking with a client last week, describing for her how our team building events typically run. In explaining the effect of getting a group together to cook and dine, I compared it to the results of a good recipe. You take a few ingredients (or ingredients and people) and create a dish (or experience) far more interesting than the basic parts. A sort of alchemy happens with a team building group, just as it does in making a good dish. The results of this shared experience are savory, warming, delicious—and carry back to the office. I invite you to join this experience, and bring your work group in to the kitchen.

Cook! Program News

It’s the final week of camp already! The kids have had a stellar time. Many returned from last year’s crew, and eager new faces joined them. Enrollment came close to doubling from last year. The kids played in the park, cooked up a storm, and ate like growing kids should—with gusto! Throughout all of it, Tracy and the crew have kept intern Kevin Imah busy, clicking away with the camera. On the website, there are pages and pages of sweet shots from every session, as well as the recipes each group made (you’ll be amazed!). Kevin’s blog, from a teen perspective, is a great read as well. Tracy says “check out the Masala Munchies entry” from last week—it’s great!

Tracy first met Kevin at St. Mary’s College High School, two years ago. He was one of 16 students who had signed up to join her week-long cooking class, humbly housed in the school’s cafeteria kitchen. Among the challenges that week were constant distractions from curious passers-by, who followed their noses straight into the kitchen and then lingered to chat and hope for tastes. The classroom was a fish-bowl, glass windows on three sides. Perfect for lunch service, however it’s central core of equipment with just a pathway around it created a challenge for the easily distracted teens and a teacher who couldn’t see everyone at once. They cooked many meals that week, including one that fed all the students on campus—several hundred—the final day, with Tracy running back and forth to teach, help, and reign in the distracted. Kevin came forward as a student whose interest in learning was proven by his self-motivated engagement in the subject matter. He won Tracy’s admiration, and she wanted to find a way to bring him into the fold of our budding new kids and teens summer program, COOK!

Thus began Kevin’s internship, in the program’s first and wildly adventurous summer. His sharp mind, focus and skills were a boon to the program, and as his confidence grew, so did his interest in returning for another summer with the program. Wanting to challenge Kevin creatively, Tracy proposed that he create and maintain a COOK! blog, as well as serve as the program’s photographer. They began meeting on Fridays for practice runs. Tracy would cook something, Kevin would photograph and then blog about it.

Kevin will enter his Freshman year at Stanford this fall, but he and Tracy are already plotting ways for him to keep up the blog all winter, along with his academic program. So, stay tuned! The fire’s still on, the pots are boiling, knives are sharp and the food is always fresh...

Even though this week’s Cook! session, Making it Last, a canning, pickling and preserving marathon signals the end of week-long camp sessions this summer, it’s not quite all over! After that, there’s the End of Summer Festival on Sunday, the 15th. It’s for kids and parents and friends, and also an opportunity, if you’re already thinking about next year, to visit with your future camper. Reservations are required, so sign up—it will be a fun day!

Finally, a Piece of Business: Tracy has added a Yelp page for Cook! Programs, so all of you campers, parents and guest teachers who have been waiting to comment, feel free!

Adult Classes

Rosetta, as the months wind down towards the release of her book (in November), has only a few classes on the calendar. There is, however, no “sold out” sign on any of them as yet. Which means you can, if you hurry, sign up for Eggplant, the Queen of Vegetables, Preserving the Calabrian Way, Festival of Peperoncino, and Ricotta class, before book tours take her away for a while.

Selome has put a new Ethiopian cooking class on the schedule, for Saturday August 21st. This class is vegan, featuring mushrooms for the main course. The menu sounds delicious, even to this inveterate meat lover. If you’ve not yet taken one of Selome’s classes, they are rich with food history, new flavors and techniques, and profoundly delicious.

Do you and your friends want to get together and make a meal? Gather a group of 12 or more, and I’ll be happy to host and teach! Just contact me to figure out the details. It’s a great alternative to hosting at home—and delicious, too!

I’m also reviving the Thanksgiving Dress Rehearsal class, for the first time in three years. It’s a long time off, November 7th, but this will give you impetus to save the date—a Sunday afternoon, from 2-6 PM. It may also inspire you to invite everyone to your own Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks later. We’ll make a traditional meal, a simple one that will not intimidate you, with turkey and all the trimmings plus a great appetizer and desserts. It is a wonderful holiday, and homemade food is just so much better than the many alternatives. The class will also give you plenty of courage to take a homemade contribution to Thanksgiving at someone else’s house if that’s what you’re doing—one you can be assured will be a hit.

In the Market

For a lover of berries and fruit, this is the overwhelming season. Saturday morning’s Grand Lake farmers market had blackberries as big as my thumb, sweet blueberries and raspberries, the year’s best strawberries, peaches so luscious it was hard to choose between the stands, nectarines (I love the white ones, which are ultra-sweet with a hint of tart) and plums and pluots and apriums, melons of all sorts, from red watermelons to delicate, pale canaries. Then there were grapes—flames and green and some that looked like Concord! Just to add bewilderment, the Gravenstein apples have arrived for their very short season. These tart-sweet fruit are only here for a few mid-summer weeks, and then they disappear for another year. But who can eat apples when there’s all that other bounty? What a difficult life we have!

I went to the new Emeryville market Thursday afternoon as well—only to find the season’s first pears among the many splendid offerings. This is an easy market to attend, plenty of parking on Park St., not so many stalls as to cause consternation trying to choose, and some things that I haven’t found at the other markets this year, like gorgeous Romano beans, my favorite green bean of the year.

I haven’t even mentioned all the great vegetables of this rich season yet. I love sweet corn, especially yellow and bicolor varieties, which have more depth of flavor. Freshness is paramount—the sugars start degrading to starch as soon as it’s picked. Look for bright green husks, yellow silk, and full, crisply taut kernels for the best corn. Don’t be too scared of worms, but do check to make sure they haven’t made inroads down the side of the ear. I have found, though, that they pick the best ears to invade, and all you need to do, usually, is cut off an inch of the top to get rid of them altogether. There are now peppers of all sorts (check out the Hungarian stuffed peppers recipe in the archives, and this month’s recipe too!), eggplants, delicate summer lettuces and spicy summer salad cresses, beans, peas of every kind, broccoli, okra if you’re an aficionado, and of course, tomatoes. The heirlooms and the Sungold cherry tomatoes are now everywhere, most of which are gorgeous and delicious. I grew up in Beefsteak tomato country, a giant, sweet and dense slicing tomato that doesn’t seem to do well on the west coast, and although I love the various flavors in the heirloom varieties, my favorite tomato here is the dry farmed Early Girl, which is just starting to arrive in the market. Every year I eagerly wait until they are plentiful (and a bit cheaper) in late August and September, then buy many boxfuls to freeze, either putting them whole, in zip bags or first making them into a lightly cooked puree which I run through the food mill, then freeze in quart containers. I pull both out for all manner of winter uses. Dry farming makes their skins thick, and their flesh very meaty and low-water, so they freeze perfectly in both forms, making up for my lazy antipathy to canning. I am lucky to have a walk-in freezer!

Recipe of the Month

This month, I think we’ll honor an old friend, chef Cheryl Beere, vegetarian cooking teacher, and someone many of you long-time readers will remember. I’ll print one of her wonderful and simple Tapas recipes, using any or all of the great peppers you’ll find in the market. In case you wonder, Cheryl and her husband Sven moved back to New Zealand a few years ago, and they are now the proud parents of two lovely boys. Since I know she reads the newsletter, here’s a “hallo” from all.

See the recipe »