Three Stone Hearth Fieldtrip - Intro to Weston Price and CSKs

Ever heard of a Community Supported Kitchen (CSK)? I hadn't until this Tuesday, when we went to visit the one called Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, CA.

What is a CSK? It builds off of a growing trend in community-supported food suppliers, though the more commonly known version is a CSA, or Community Support Agriculture. The website LocalHarvest provides a handy central resource for anyone looking for more info on CSAs, which they define as:

...a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. Here are the basics: a farmer offers a certain number of "shares" to the public. Typically the share consists of a box of vegetables, but other farm products may be included. Interested consumers purchase a share (aka a "membership" or a "subscription") and in return receive a box (bag, basket) of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season.

With its history of generating new food movements (a la Chez Panisse), it's not surprising Berkeley also served as the birthplace for Three Stone, which I was told was the one and only CSK, but it looks like they have competition (though not really, since this one's in Portland).

We were given a background talk on Three Stone, toured the facilities, and spent four hours helping in the kitchen. To add to its one-of-a-kind vibe, Three Stone is in the cavernous space that previously housed my favorite Thai grocery store, Tuk Tuk (as in the mini-bus like vehicle used in Thailand). Half the space is still filled with Thai groceries and an actual Tuk Tuk bus. The other half is Three Stone Hearth, buzzing with music and volunteers, and saturated with slow-cooked, nutrient-rich food scents.

Our field trip also introduced us to Dr. Weston A. Price. Ever heard of him? Don't feel bad if you haven't, just like a CSK, I was clueless about this diet guru, called the "Charles Darwin of Nutrition." A Cleveland dentist in the early 1900s, Price traveled the world studying isolated human groups showing healthier traits and observing their diets in a quest to understand the causes of physical degeneration (including dental decay). Three Stone Hearth "follows the guidelines for human nutrition that were developed and discovered by indigenous and traditional peoples around the world and recorded by Dr. Weston A. Price." Among the guidelines Price set forward which you can learn more about at their website:

• Nutrient density
• Liberal use of traditional fats
• Raw and cultured dairy products
• Whole grains that have been soaked, sprouted, soured or naturally leavened
• Use of natural and unrefined sweeteners only, balanced by fats and proteins or lacto-fermented
• Animal products from pastured livestock
• Avoidance as much as possible of processed and chemical ingredients and toxic substances

None of these guidelines seem revolutionary. If we weren't all eating so much processed food of uncertain origins, we wouldn't need constant reminders of what "real" wholesome food is. But regardless, it's clear that Three Stone's food is high quality, and that they are extremely careful about sourcing ingredients. We were told some customers use them as a stepping stone from eating vegetarian back to eating animal protein, because they can be reassured Three Stone's meat is of the best quality. For individuals who want delicious, wholesome prepared foods but don't cook, I could also see Three Stone being a good option. Or for someone who's ill and looking for food at its most nourishing.

Three Stone does a weekly menu. My favorite thing was the Meaty Pint... exactly as it sounds, a delectable pint of extremely meaty stew. In our case, it had tons of chicken spiced with a Moroccan blend and studded with olives and raisins. We also made incredible coconut macaroons that were wheatfree and sugar free. I notice they have cherry cheesecake on this week's menu -- my all time favorite dessert. Unfortunately, their food, due to its quality, does not come cheap. One tin of cheesecake will run you $20. Three Stone is an exciting new type of food business with scrumptious offerings though, and one that those living close-by should consider checking out if their budget allows.

Hallelujah! Midterm Secret Ingredients Answer My Prayers

In my last post I wrote "...fingers are crossed that one of the ingredients we get is the stone fruit that's in season." Well guess what, I got cherries! A bagful of glistening ruby beauties with an abundance of juicy flavor that begged to be tucked into the spelt flour galette crust recipe I'd memorized in preparation.

My surprise challenge was to use the following:
Cherries, sweet potatoes, kale (ingredients)
Battonet, braise, cast iron skillet (method/equipment)

We spent time up front brainstorming. I sketched out a menu of two different galetes: one savory and one sweet, as well as fries (those would tick off my sweet potatoes, battonet knife cut and use of the cast iron skillet). From there, we had 90 minutes in the kitchen, along with our sous chefs, to make everything. I'm forever in debt to Shannon for pulling off the perfect galette pastry. Though I wrote out the specs, it was her implementation. As she worked on making the dough and rolling the mini pies out, I created fillings, and hacked up the darn potatoes, then fried and spiced them.

My final menu:
--Sweet galette, cherries macerated in cinnamon, almond extract, a sprinkling of sea salt, succanat (alternative sweetener) and arrowroot (to thicken). Garnished with pistachios.
--Savory galette, "mini pizzas" with tomato sauce, braised leeks and kale with garlic and oregano. Garnished with cheese topping and oregano.
--Marscapone and goat cheese combined as topping for both. This was a nice way to "bridge" the concept together.
--Sweet potato fries with garlic chili salt.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but should have photos thanks to my classmate Lara to post later.

Midterms! Go Team ShoShan

Hard to believe it, but midterms are upon us. My "iron chef" style challenge is about to begin... 3 surprise ingredients, 3 surprise skills and 90 minutes to create delicious food (we can make any number of dishes we want to take on).

Luckily, I have a rock star sous chef, Cauliflower Queen Shannon herself. She's dubbed us "Team ShoShan." My fingers are crossed that one of the ingredients we get is the stone fruit that's in season. I have a baking project I'd love to use them for, but who knows what's in the cards! I will post a complete report along with photos of our creations, though it likely not until next week since I'm off to LA this weekend for my roommate's wedding.

Fun with Food (or what happens when culinary students get bored...)

What happens when culinary students have too much downtime on their hands? They have "fun with food." In Japanese class, as we waited for rice to cook we occupied ourselves taking silly photos. Click on the "Fun with Food" photo album to see them all.

Have You Seen These Vitamixes?

We all showed up post-holiday weekend feeling a little off. It was the first time since starting classes we had a weekend away! Everyone was happy and ready to dive in to Thai Class when we discovered the laptop (normally attached to our lecture projector) missing. Maybe someone locked it away over the break? But then we started noticing other little things missing-- a juicer gone, a Kitchenaid stand mixer, and two Vitamixes. If you haven't seen a Vitamix, they look like an industrial-sized blender from the 70s. But these powerful machines are the Rolls Royce of food appliances, and carry an appropriately royal price tag as well. Could we have been robbed? The office desktop computer and mammoth-sized copy machine were also gone (these were no lazy burglars), and then a window bar was discovered broken. That pretty much confirmed it.

As we started cooking our Pad Thai, Red Curry Vegetables, Thai Iced Tea, green papaya salad, and other goodies, the cops were called. One lone officer showed up. He checked the place out, confirmed our suspicions (the window ledge had been wiped clean of footprints even), and left too early for dinner (poor him).

What I really want to know is what robbers are aware of the value of Vitamixes? After all, they left the food processors which had been right next to them behind! All really odd if you ask me. Somewhere in Oakland right now thugs may be pawning a juicer, Kitchenaid or those Vitamixes. Either that, or they're having a huge cake baking and margarita mixing party.

ps-- In other weird news I made "black bean brownies" this weekend. They were actually fudgy and incredible, as weird as that sounds (you'd never know what was in them). Posting with the full recipe and baking tips soon.

Fillet o' Fish...

In my first post I mentioned how "butchery" (or basically working with anything that resembles a live creature) doesn't appeal to me. Saturday's seafood class reconfirmed that when we had to learn how to fillet a whole fish. Lets just say I will not be eating fish for a while... and it's not the first time.

Years ago, under the delusion that I'd like to see my next meal from it's living breathing days through to my plate, I went to a live seafood market. After I chose a fish, they hacked its head off (I probably should have done that myself, but I at least watched) and handed it to me in a bag (the fish, not its head). I got my fish in a bag home. Its nerve endings were still so fresh that, as I rinsed it under cold water, it "flinched" and jumped onto the kitchen floor. Though I forced myself to eat that fish (it'd already given up its life), I couldn't eat fish after for months. The market also had poultry so I didn't have an appetite for chicken either. I was a vegetarian, except I'd eat beef. Makes complete sense, right? ;-)

Eventually I went back to eating seafood. A good thing, because when you eat the right seafood (more on this later), it's very healthy. According to my Bauman class materials, seafood's high-quality protein is easily digestible. Cold water fish are composed primarily of omega-3 fatty acids, which have anti-inflammatory effects and are important to heart health. Seafood can also be a good source of calcium (in fish with bones like canned salmon or sardines), zinc, iron, copper, potassium, iodine, phosphorus and selenium. Plus, most fish is naturally low in cholesterol.

Unfortunately, there are also negatives to seafood consumption today, due to sustainability concerns (fish farming pollutes coastal waters and harms eco-systems) and contaminants (mmmm, nothing like a good serving of mercury). The larger the fish (for example, shark and tuna), the more likely it contains contaminants. A helpful resource, as we try to muddle through what is best to consume, is this pocket guide from the Environmental Defense Fund. They even have a mobile app you can check while you're in front of the seafood counter.

My favorite part of seafood class was cooking "en papillote," which means "in paper." It's easy but looks impressive -- the best type of recipe! We placed individual servings of fish in the center of parchment paper (cut into a large circle or heart shape), seasoned them (salt, pepper, a bit of liquid or oil and whatever else you like), tightly crimped the packets shut and baked for about 12 minutes at 400 degrees. The parchment seals in steam so everything is nice and moist. I found this recipe using the en papillote method for dilled salmon. It calls for higher heat but a shorter cooking time than we used. I'm also going to use the method when I test a chicken and lentil stew recipe this week from the cookbook "Artichoke to Za'atar" (Modern Middle Eastern cooking). If it's any good I'll share!

Roasted Cauliflower Salad

As promised, sharing pictures of Shannon with the world's biggest cauliflower (this is her on the streets of SF meeting up for our commute). In class last night we all got a viewing of this beast (since Shannon was kind enough to bring it in rather than let it stink up my car). When everyone heard about Shannon's blog fame we decided to take a poll to see what she should do with her new beauty. Please cast your votes. Polls close on the 15th at 1:29pm. If you have other ideas or good cauliflower recipes please use the comments section below!

And here's the recipe Shannon's been using for her favorite cruciferous fix... She mentioned you don't have to use all the spices if you don't have them, so this is a general guide. You can also substitute different kinds of nuts or red onion for the scallions. Enjoy!

Ingredients

1 medium head cauliflower, cut in small florets with sliced stems (if desired)
2-3 Tbl coconut oil, melted
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp each sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
1/4 cup thinly sliced scallions, white and green parts
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves

Directions

Preheat oven to 450F.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl, toss cauliflower with coconut oil. Add spices, salt and pepper and toss to evenly distribute spices.

Spread cauliflower on baking sheet in a single layer. Roast for 30-45 minutes, until florets are tender and charred to your liking.

Put cauliflower in a shallow dish or on a platter and drizzle with lemon juice and olive oil to taste.

Garnish with pine nuts, cilantro, an extra sprinkling of sea salt and pepper, and serve.

Externship Update: First hours completed!

For Natural Chef certification, in addition to classes each of us has to "extern." My official externship is in the works (more on that once I have details...). But the excitement of this weekend was that my friend Brooks Nguyen, owner of Dragonfly Cakes, invited me to help at her bakery for my first official extern hours.

Brooks attended the baking program up at the Greystone (Napa) location of the Culinary Institute of America. Her bakery opened five years ago and is clearly a labor of love. They specialize in gorgeous hand decorated petit fours. Brooks created the seven flavors (my favorite was lemon), and has built the business to the point where she was featured on the cover of Harry & David's Mother's Day catalog! If you taste these things, you'll understand why they were featured.

I got to decorate about a thousand of the lemon petit fours with their little pink flowers using white chocolate as my "glue." Baking is a whole different realm for me, so it was quite the experience. Dragonfly's petit fours are carried by Mollie Stones, Whole Foods and Costco I believe, in addition to Harry & David. Highly recommend them, just please for the sake of their sanity wait to order until after the Mother's Day rush ;-)

I've added photos from my Dragonfly adventure under the class photos archive, along with the new sea vegetables, breakfast and alternative ingredients class pictures. Enjoy!

Recipe: Kale with sesame and ginger

I was assigned this recipe by default after spacing out and not raising my hand for the recipes I actually wanted (there goes that overachiever reputation). To my surprise, it ended up being my favorite from our "sea vegetables" class.

It calls for arame seaweed... they're little dark threads of relatively mild seaweed that almost look like mushrooms to me. You should be able to find arame at most natural foods markets or Whole Foods. If not, the flavor comes from the sesame and ginger, and this would still be nutritious with just kale (though there are a ton of additional minerals in seaweed). The recipes I'm posting are meant to serve our class of 12, so you likely want to cut this in half.

Before I dive in, a warning... We had a little seaweed tasting. I've really only had seaweed on sushi before, so I'm at the "open-minded novice" level. Most were fine. Dulse, however, I'm convinced is coated in fish guts and left to dry over mud flats, then sprinkled with fermented cow dung for good measure. I tried not to gag in front of everyone. It's the only thing I haven't finished in class so far. Not recommended.

Ingredients
¾ cup dried arame
3 Tbs toasted sesame oil
2 Tbs minced ginger
2 bunches dinosaur kale, chiffonade
2 Tbs minced garlic
3 Tbs tamari
2 Tbs sesame seeds, toasted

Procedure
1 Rinse the seaweed in water and let soak, covered in water, for 5-7 minutes. Drain seaweed and place in a large bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of dark sesame oil and the minced ginger.

2 In a large pan, heat 2 teaspoons of dark sesame oil on medium heat. Add garlic and gently sauté for 1 minute, until fragrant. Add the seaweed mixture and gently cook for 1 minute. Remove from pan back to the bowl and set aside.

3 Heat 1 Tbsp sesame oil in the skillet. Add the chopped kale. Add 2 Tbsp of tamari. Gently mix in the pan to coat the kale with the oil and tamari. Cover; lower heat to low; let cook for 5-10 minutes or until kale is wilted - soft enough to eat easily, but not so soft as to be mushy. Remove cover and let cook a minute more to evaporate any excess moisture. Remove from heat. Mix in the kale with the seaweed ginger mixture. Add more sesame oil and tamari to taste. Garnish with toasted sesame seeds.

Servings: 12

Author: Bauman College Staff

Seaweed, it's What's For Dinner

I just posted photos from our "Sea Vegetables" class. Coming soon... my favorite recipe from the class (kale with ginger, garlic and arame seaweed), and which seaweed made me gag.

Commuting with Cauliflower

I started to tease Shannon about showing up carrying heads of lettuce by the second week of class. We commute together. She works two blocks from me and lives out my way also, a perfect setup since we come from our offices and drag our disheveled, chef-uniformed selves home after each long day of work and class. Between parking downtown, bridge toll, and gas it's saving us (and the environment) a bundle. But the most valuable part of our setup, to me, is commuting with Shannon herself.

I mean, who shows up constantly carrying lettuce? Shannon is probably the only person I know who is more into farmers markets than me. She frequents the little weekday markets downtown. And during weekend spare hours, Shannon volunteers at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market. While she was at Stanford, like me, Shannon worked on "The Farm," coaxing vegetables out of the arid campus soil. She's developed a passion for sustainable agriculture, one of the main factors that drove her to Bauman, and makes her a die-hard farmer fan (you'd never find her in the TJs or Safeway produce sections).

But I've come to realize, now that we're really getting to know each other, that Shannon actually commutes with cauliflower mostly. Last week she raved about the price/weight ratio of the one she'd found that afternoon at the market and confessed her addiction. If it were me I'd have half the thing sitting around still after two weeks (I tried to lift it, it was heavier than your average bowling ball), but today she showed up again with a whole new cauliflower.

Commuting with cauliflower is fine if you drive it from one place to the next. But let me tell you, leaving cauliflower in a car for four hours gets stinky (and it was my car we drove today). I do like cauliflower though and I trust Shannon's expertise. So next time I pick some up I will make it the way Shannon suggests... by roasting it in a high heat oven (425 I think) with Indian spices and coconut oil, topped with herbs (cilantro ideally), nuts (especially pine nuts) and onions (either diced red or chopped green work). Maybe Shannon will be kind enough to post the actual recipe since she's the expert!

Coming soon... picture of Shannon with cauliflower (the two pictured separately will have to do for now). And by the way that stuff Shannon is sniffing is white truffle oil, which also happens to go very well with cauliflower.

Nothing like going for it...

This month I started the Natural Chef program at Bauman College in Berkeley, California. This was not an educational path I ever expected to take. Maybe submitting a recipe for "Yogurt Wheat Germ Balls" in the 2nd grade to our class cookbook should have been an early clue, or my weekly farmers market treks for produce oggling. But I've always been the responsible type... a class salutatorian brown-noser (with sky-high 80s midwestern bangs and plaid shirts to boot, sigh). I moved from Wisconsin's dairlyland to become a Stanford grad, then tech professional. College got me to the Bay Area and the tech bubble kept me here, but (dirty confession) it was really the number of restaurants that seduced me to the Bay Area (there are 4,285 restaurants listed under San Francisco on the restaurant review site Yelp), not a marketable diploma.

Fast forward more than 20 years after that fiber-rich but flavor-lacking 80s wheat germ craze to me today, a full grown avid foodie. My family teases me that before I could talk I hummed when I ate good food... and still do.

Over winter break my thoughtful Aunt Karen handed me the book "The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry," an account of Chef Kathleen Flinn's time at famed French cooking school Le Cordon Bleu. According to Entertainment Weekly's assessment, the book "should strike a chord with anyone who has dreamed... of following a passion for food."

Flinn's account of culinary school, while captivating, wasn't an experience I wanted to live. The rabbit butchering was enough to scare me away, and I associate French foods with cream sauces, and cream sauces with my lactose intolerence (cruel given my Wisconsin upbringing). The idea of going to the local California Culinary Academy had minimal appeal given its classical French foundation.

Then, one day, while on the hunt for recreational cooking classes, I read a local chef's bio who was a graduate of Bauman. "Huh, what's that place?" According to their website, a college for "holistic health and culinary arts." Interesting... a culinary program based on nutrition. No cream sauces. Seasonal, local, healthy food... the way I actually like to eat! The application deadline was in a month. I gathered references (thank you again Aunt Karen and Kathleen Miller), got permission to adjust my work schedule (I'm still working full time, the classes are evenings and weekend), and was thankful to grab one of the only 12 spots in class so close to the wire.

And here's the biggest shocker of all... I'm really doing it. I'm in culinary school. I didn't know what to expect or whether I'd like it. But now that I'm a month in I can honestly say this is the busiest and happiest I've been since high school. We're in the kitchen three out of four hours every class (the other hour is lecture), cooking recipes from that day's theme, and then we eat dinner together. My classmates are phenomenal, and each comes from a different background but common desire to eat good food that is also healthy. And not yogurt wheat germ healthy... but mind-blowingly delicious healthy. In fact, this is the best diet I've ever been on. Just good, healthy food. I can't wait to cook these dishes more for family and friends, but in the meantime starting by sharing more experiences via blog posts, photos and recipes here.

Next posting: classes we've had so far and the best recipes...