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.

Do-over fever

Revisiting September’s efforts

By Joan Menefee

February 1, 2012

At times, I have believed that my greatest asset in life is my ability to live with my mistakes. In cooking, this often results in quick changes of plan or wolfing down the evidence before anyone else even knows I was trying to prepare food.

Phyllo dough dried out? Pop the sheets spritzed with water in the microwave and drape the resultant “noodles” in a baklava-ish pattern. Too much baking powder in the biscuits? Blam: six eaten at the stove.

In search of dramatic unities, television shows depict failed dishes as inedible. But the truth is that cooking failures are a gray area the size of Siberia. It’s not that the calories cannot be wrenched from the steaming tray before us without our wretching; it’s that these calories do not represent the ideals we were chasing when we first opened our pretty cookbooks.

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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.

Holiday buzz

Remembering the dance of the bakers

By Joan Menefee

December 21, 2011

In the 1980s and 1990s, I spent some raucous and inspired formative years working at Elephants Deli in Portland, Oregon. From Halloween until New Year’s Day, the store braced for holiday throngs.

The best way I can describe the holiday buildup at Elephants is to get you to imagine a faint hum that starts in the floorboards. At first you don’t notice it; you just think you’ve been on your feet too long. Eventually, though, the hum graduates to a buzz, growing stronger and more pervasive with every ring of the phone or opening of a door. The banging of pots and pans competes with a holiday-music loop (David Bowie and Bing Crosby‘s voices winding tight around your brain). Everyone carries at least one clipboard, each one a forest of checklists, crabbed notes, and coffee stains. Boxes get stacked along empty walls, making corridors so narrow that carts can barely pass through them. People yell at each other across the room and then admonish others not to yell. Your skin tingles, like you are a tuning fork that has been knocked against the side of a stainless-steel milk pail.

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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.

Deer tales

Democracy, hunting, and giving thanks

By Joan Menefee

November 30, 2011

Let’s not forget that most of our ancestors once farmed land that belonged to someone else. Though these peasant ancestors knew better than any lord or lady what the land looked like, how it behaved, and what it needed, this knowledge was irrelevant to possession of that land. To be so connected to the land, on one hand, and so disconnected from it, on the other, must have been damn weird.

Our ancestors, tenant farmers that they were, also saw animals differently than we do. Woodland animals belonged to the lords or, in some cases, were unique property of the king. Deer were reminders that the farmers themselves were a form of aristocratic property: They could not pick up and go wherever they pleased, nor could they hunt and eat anything they wanted. Fines for poaching in 18th-century England were steep; sometimes the offender was subject to ritual humiliation. It’s little wonder that Americans have such vexed ties to the land; there was, after all, a time when our ancestors were shackled to it.

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Originally from Houston, Texas, Jacob Grier is the lead bartender at Metrovino in Portland, Oregon. He writes the drink-and-policy weblog Liquidity Preference.

Sherry cocktails

Mix it up with one of the world’s great wines

By Jacob Grier

November 11, 2011

It seems that everyone who writes about sherry starts off by talking about how misunderstood it is. They point out that it’s much more than a sugary-sweet drink for old ladies, or that it definitely shouldn’t be confused with the low-quality “cooking sherries” found in the supermarket.

My own first association with sherry is from television: It was the drink of choice for fussy Frasier Crane and his stuck-up brother, Niles.

So yes, sherry has a bit of an image problem.

It probably doesn’t help that the many classifications of sherry, plus the complex way it’s aged, make it an imposing beverage. But there are only a few things you need to know to get started with sherry, and exploration will be rewarded with experience of one of the world’s great wines.

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Born and raised in the Bronx, Harriet Fasenfest has lived in the Northwest since 1978.

She teaches classes on food preservation and householding at Preserve, her backyard school house. She also keeps a blog, The Householder's Grab Bag.

Harriet’s book, A Householder's Guide to the Universe, was published in fall 2010.

Lessons in food and life

‘We knew how to be poor’

By Harriet Fasenfest

November 10, 2011

I recently went to the rolling and colorful hills of Vermont. It was a lovely trip replete with fall colors, old friends, new friends, farmstead parties, fabulous food, and a multitude of conversations with activists in the local food-security movement.

It is not for nothing that Hardwick, Vermont, has been called "The Town that Food Saved." The place buzzes with high hopes and hard work. These folks ain’t gentlemen farmers. Nope, there’s dirt under those fingernails, and sun on those necks. These are folks who put their shovel where their mouth is, and I dig it.

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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.

Playing with your food

Harvest time

By Joan Menefee

November 2, 2011

My romance with the Upper Midwest burns hottest this time of year.

During October, life is full of gold and red. In the daytime, these heraldic colors are set off by robin’s egg blues and slate grays. At dusk, they mute to soft orange and rust in the mist and hush.

As I bike to school, flocks of migratory birds pass overhead, air rushing from between their wings and bodies — whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. On the ground the air is sharp — sometimes with a cold wind drifting south from Canada, sometimes with wood smoke and rotting apples.

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A food and nutrition writer for 10 years and a vegetarian since the age of 13, Ellen Kanner is a fourth-generation Floridian living la vida vegan in Miami. She keeps a website and a blog and contributes regularly to the Huffington Post.

Brisket in bereavement

Why we eat when we grieve

By Ellen Kanner

November 1, 2011

Several hours after David, my father-in-law, died, my mother called. “I’m making a brisket,” she said.

“Now?” I glanced at the clock. It was 7:30 in the morning.

“I know.” Then her voice wavered. “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

None of us could. We couldn’t start making the awful phone calls and funeral arrangements quite yet. We couldn’t sleep — and hadn’t. We were overwhelmed by details like showering and getting dressed. So my husband, Benjamin, and I sat amid a war zone of crumpled tissues and held each other. We waited for our hearts to stitch themselves together; we waited for the world to make sense.

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Savita Iyer-Ahrestani is a journalist based in Westfield, New Jersey, who writes about business, parenting, travel, and food. She has lived in Switzerland, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, the United Kingdom, and Holland.

Celebrating Diwali — with meat

New traditions

By Savita Iyer-Ahrestani

October 26, 2011

Although my parents were strict vegetarians when I was growing up in Switzerland, there were only a few days when they required the same of my brother and myself.

The death anniversaries of our grandparents, for example, were always pure vegetarian days at home, per the Hindu Brahmin tradition. We were also vegetarian on certain important dates in the Hindu calendar, like the birthday of the God Krishna. And of course, we were always vegetarian on Diwali, the most important festival in the Hindu calendar, which falls today (October 26).

In my adult life, I’ve followed my parents and continued to respect these vegetarian dates.

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Savita Iyer-Ahrestani is a journalist based in Westfield, New Jersey, who writes about business, parenting, travel, and food. She has lived in Switzerland, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, the United Kingdom, and Holland.

Feasting days

In Mysore, the focus is on vegetables and sweets

By Savita Iyer-Ahrestani

October 12, 2011

Flavorful garlic idlis — the steamed rice cakes that are the staple of a South Indian breakfast and have become ubiquitous both in India and overseas — the size of quarter plates. Tomato rice drenched in ghee (clarified butter) and liberally garnished with fistfuls of almonds and cashew nuts. Thick, white rice pudding, known as payasam, studded with tapioca pearls.

These are just a few of the vegetarian delicacies from the glory days of the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India. (I lived in this region of India for two wonderful years not too long ago.) They are the kinds of dishes that require a multitude of ingredients and many hours of preparation; they are the dishes of grand occasions like birthdays, naming ceremonies, and major Hindu festivals, involving both the royal family of Mysore and their loyal subjects.

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Born and raised in the Bronx, Harriet Fasenfest has lived in the Northwest since 1978.

She teaches classes on food preservation and householding at Preserve, her backyard school house. She also keeps a blog, The Householder's Grab Bag.

Harriet’s book, A Householder's Guide to the Universe, was published in fall 2010.

A “chat” with Wendell Berry

The good-news view

By Harriet Fasenfest

October 4, 2011

It would be safe to say that I am obsessed with Wendell Berry. And I am not alone. Judging by the crowds that gather whenever he accepts a speaking engagement — which ain’t often — I know I am in good company.

Still, if I am not reading his novels, I am re-reading his essays. If I am not speaking of him, I am speaking to him, if only in my mind. And what we talk about these days is how “The Economy,” “The War,” and “The News” are needing a new narrative.

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