Chef Danielle Turner is a personal chef, cooking instructor, food writer, and adventurous eater. She lives and eats for sport in the wilds of suburban D.C. with her husband and daughter.

Going with the grain

Getting comfortable with grain salads

By Danielle Turner

June 30, 2009

Growing up, the only salad I ever ate consisted of a bottle of creamy cucumber salad dressing, a little iceberg lettuce, and sliced tomatoes. In that order.

Seriously, it was all about the dressing. The lettuce and anything else were just vessels for transporting the dressing from plate to mouth.

My take on salad has (thankfully) evolved, and it remains one of my all-time favorite things to eat. In recent years I’ve expanded my salad horizons, abandoning iceberg lettuce and occasionally replacing my treasured arugula, watercress, and assorted mixed greens with whole grains like wheat berries, bulgur, and quinoa.

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Caroline Lewis is a gardener and cook in Portland, Oregon, and the proprietor of Verdura Culinary Gardens.

Penelope’s garden

Feeding the hungry in Portland

By Caroline Lewis

June 12, 2009

Of all the gardens we’re working on this year, the most wonderful has to be Penelope’s Garden. Four years old and born into poverty, Penelope is a fourth-generation Oregonian. She has stunning blue eyes, a sweet smile, and a heart of gold. Penelope is being raised by her new family, an extraordinary couple who have been so appalled by their glimpse into the world of hungry children that they decided to do something about it.

Penelope’s new family, who have asked to remain anonymous, own a home in the Portland area with a large, sunny back yard. They decided they would like to dedicate their property to helping alleviate hunger. Their friend and realtor, Alexsandra Stewart, had met Larry and me at one of our spring Supper Club events, and suggested we get together with Penelope’s family.

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Cynthia Lair has been a member of the nutrition faculty at Bastyr University since 1994. She also stars in the humorous online cooking show Cookus Interruptus.

Lura Jane’s only cookbook

Saying goodbye to an inspiration

By Cynthia Lair

June 9, 2009

My mother-in-law, Lura Jane, was a risk-taker. She was undaunted by any “no” that crossed her path. This was lucky for me (you’ll see why in a minute). After 88 good years on this earth, she died several weeks ago. Family surrounded her in her Leavenworth, Kansas, apartment, as her breath grew slower and slower until it faded.

Rain poured at the pretty Midwest graveyard where we gathered with umbrellas after the morning church service. No one said much. I felt a desire to speak, but the legacy I wanted to share didn’t fully form until I was on the plane back to Seattle.

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Joan Menefee has never been a picky eater. She and her husband live in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where they tend gardens in two counties and eat plums and grapes in public parks.

Pizza and the two Gs

Gathering and grilling

By Joan Menefee

June 2, 2009

Here’s a purely anecdotal observation, but I believe it has merit: People blog less in the spring.

OK, I blog less in the spring. When I have purged my email (last time since January); when the piles of whatnot have been cleared from what reveal themselves to be a desk, three chairs, and a nifty vintage rolling cart (last visible in January); when I feel unfettered and light-footed, I go outside and look at stuff, leaving my laptop in the gloom of a newly tidy office.

“What survived winter?” I ask myself, stalking the garden apprehensively. This is a serious question. For the first time in a decade of wimpy winters, we had a solid 30-below nighttime low. (And none of that wind-chill-factor baloney — this was a ground temperature.) Suddenly, our global-warming-influenced Zone 4 botanical bets seemed lunatic.

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Sarah Gilbert is a freelance financial writer; she keeps chickens; and she’s a beginning urban farmer. She lives with her three small boys and husband in Portland, Oregon, and keeps her own blog, Cafe Mama.

Notes from an urban farm lover

Harvesting a lost garden in the city

By Sarah Gilbert

May 20, 2009

Gardening is not easy for someone socialized in our instant-gratification culture. For many years, I resisted growing vegetables and fruits for much this reason, laughingly explaining I couldn’t possibly wait a few months to harvest peas or beans, let alone the years required for asparagus, or grapes, or cherries.

“Besides, I have a black thumb,” I’d say, describing how I’d killed a houseplant in college by watering it with Sprite. (It looked thirsty, and I didn’t want to get up.)

And then came the second trimester of my third pregnancy, when I learned the true meaning of “nesting instinct.” I still theorize that nesting gets stronger in every pregnancy. If I have another baby, I’m sure I’ll be adding on to the house for his room, and doing the framing myself.

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Chef Danielle Turner is a personal chef, cooking instructor, food writer, and adventurous eater. She lives and eats for sport in the wilds of suburban D.C. with her husband and daughter.

Fresh food inspiration

Jump-start your cooking

By Danielle Turner

May 12, 2009

It happens to the best of us. Despite the stacks of dog-eared food magazines piled high on our coffee tables, the eclectic cookbook collections that fill our bookshelves, or even our best intentions of whipping up delicious fare for our families, dinnertime can turn into an uninspiring rotation of the same handful of reliable recipes, week after week, month after month.

As a personal chef, I make my living preparing meals for individuals and families alike. But professional experience aside, I’m still a busy working mom who’s often stymied by the age-old question: “What’s for dinner?”

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Joan Menefee has never been a picky eater. She and her husband live in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where they tend gardens in two counties and eat plums and grapes in public parks.

The lonesome palate

Or, a cook’s guide to solitude

By Joan Menefee

May 1, 2009

For my co-op’s annual meeting, I put together a slide show of photographs taken by the WPA in the 1930s and quotations from two books: How to Cook a Wolf, by M.F.K. Fisher, and The Great Crash, by John Kenneth Galbraith. (From these choices, you can easily see what’s been on my mind for the past six months.)

A point Fisher makes in How to Cook a Wolf has stayed with me: Eating alone makes food less tasty. She writes, “When you are really hungry, a meal eaten by yourself is not so much an event as the automatic carrying out of a function: You must do it to live. But when you share it with another human or two, or even a respected animal, it becomes dignified.”

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Caroline Lewis is a gardener and cook in Portland, Oregon, and the proprietor of Verdura Culinary Gardens.

Farmers’ market fondness

An inside view of the market

By Caroline Lewis

April 29, 2009

The chilly weather has generally persisted this spring, but somehow we really scored with the weather the dates we were invited to join the vendors at the Hillsdale Farmers’ Market. Both days — April 5 and April 19 — were gloriously sunny and over 70 degrees. That was just the first of many surprises we encountered in our glimpse into a world we had only ever seen from the outside, as customers.

Our farmers’-market experience began when manager Eamon Malloy invited Verdura to join the regular vendors for both April market dates. Eamon often brings in companies like ours as well as musicians, guest chefs, and others who might enhance the market experience for their customers.

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Cynthia Lair has been a member of the nutrition faculty at Bastyr University since 1994. She also stars in the humorous online cooking show Cookus Interruptus.

Making the most of miso

When you need a salty seasoning, look at your options

By Cynthia Lair

April 16, 2009

Miso-making is considered a fine craft in traditional Japanese culture, and miso itself has been a staple of Japanese cooking for 2,500 years.

Miso is thought to promote long life and good health and has also been touted as neutralizing some of the negative effects of smoking, air pollution, and radiation sickness.

Miso is a savory, salty soybean paste made by combining soybeans with a fermented rice culture called koji. Koji is made from a lactic-acid-producing bacteria, a grain, and Aspergillus oryzae. The soybean/koji mixture undergoes an intricate fermentation and aging process for six months to two years.

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Ronnie Fein is the author of Hip Kosher. She has appeared in cooking segments on such shows as “Good Day New York.” She lives in Stamford, Connecticut.

Secret food for Passover

Chremslach is an undiscovered delight

By Ronnie Fein

April 4, 2009

Wasn’t it just Passover 2008?

It seems as if I just finished last year’s can of matzo meal and just put the silverware away. Yet here I am again, thinking about cooking and getting ready for our family Seder on the first night of Passover, when the sun sets on April 8.

There’s always so much to do; regular spring cleaning is nothing like the pre-Passover ritual. We discard everything that has chometz — foods forbidden during the holiday, like pasta, bread, and frozen pizza. And then there are all the other chores: sponging the cabinets, getting out the Passover plates and utensils, shopping for an enormous meal, preparing that meal, setting up the extra tables, making sure the tablecloth and napkins have been laundered. And so on.

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