How Patty Pan Upgraded Our Ingredients, Retained Our Low Prices, and Maintained Our Impressive Food Cost Percentages

Patty Pan tried an experiment this past summer. We began using better cheese, better corn masa, better corn, better beans, and better tomatoes. (Our quesadilla vegetables and our meat were already high quality and didn't need to be upgraded.)

But we didn't want to raise our prices. We pride ourselves on low prices and it felt important to continue offering a good value. Times are still hard.

We approached the question as a creative problem-solving exercise, analyzing the cost of each of our menu items and looking for ways to tinker. Here's an example: I've noticed for years that most of my staff used too much cheese when they made quesadillas.

Of course we didn't want to skimp on cheese, but when you use too much cheese it oozes out the sides, gets all over your spatula, and generally creates a sticky, unpleasant quesadilla-making experience. Over the course of making hundreds of thousands of quesadillas, I've found that it's easier to keep the cheese an inch from the edge of the tortilla. It spreads so the result is sufficiently cheesey, and you end up using a lot less cheese.

I'd tried to communicate this to my staff on various occasions, but somehow it didn't click and in the end it felt sensible to just pick my battles. But when we started using more expensive cheese, it became more urgent to get this point across.

We use twelve-inch tortillas. I asked a math whiz friend to calculate the area of an eleven-inch circle relative to the area of a twelve-inch circle. It turns out that an eleven-inch circle is thirty seven percent smaller that a twelve-inch circle. Thirty seven percent. So, armed with this information, I set out to make my point again. This time it clicked, my employees began keeping the cheese away from the tortilla edges, and we were able use higher quality, more expensive cheese without spending extra money on cheese.

We also revised our menus, putting the items with the best food cost percentages closest to the top. Folks tend to order more of items that are listed higher up on the menu. It cost a chunk of money to reprint five sets of menus, but it was a good investment and had the desired result: folks ordered more of those higher margin items.

Actually, we did raise one price: the kid's quesadilla. We raised it because we introduced a couple of varieties of kid's tamales and we wanted to get the parents on board with encouraging the kids to eat tamales rather than quesadillas. We figured we could achieve this by offering the kid's tamales for a lower price than the kid's quesadillas.

We think our kid's tamales are better products than our kid's quesadillas. They use better ingredients and they're much easier for us to heat and serve. They're also a better gateway product, one that is more likely to encourage kids to eventually try our adult tamales. There's a much smaller step between eating a small tamale with beans and a big tamale with beans than between eating a small white quesadilla with just cheese and eating a big red quesadilla stuffed with cheese and vegetables.

Now the numbers are all in, and we were excited to discover that our food cost percentage didn't change at all compared with last year, even though we upgraded our ingredients and, for all practical purposes, didn't raise our prices.

So here's the lesson: Don't believe any business that tells you it has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. Of course, there really are some situations when a business has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. But there are also so many ways to tinker with numbers and marketing strategies and find alternative approaches to make it all work.

In the end, we're limited only by our imaginations.

Buzz Words

Until this year, I've resisted using buzz words to market Patty Pan's products. I'm talking about those convenient short hand terms that consumers use to make quick decisions about whether they want to buy. When customers asked whether all of the ingredients were organic I used to answer, "Anyone who tells you that all of their ingredients are organic is lying." (Really? Organic salt?) Or sometimes I'd respond that I think organic certification is a racket.

I really do think that organic certification is a bit of a racket. Small-scale farmers spend far too much money and time on fees, paperwork, and explaining the nuances of farming to inspectors who don't know how to farm. And agribusiness had too large of a hand in crafting the regulations, so they don't include important considerations such as whether a particular farmer's practices actually nurture the soil and build a healthy integrated ecosystem rather than simply avoiding chemical fertlizers and pesticides.

But a customer who asks whether a business uses all organic ingredients doesn't want to hear a cynical critique of the organic regulatory process. It sounds evasive and dishonest even though it may be the most honest response. But I can be a slow learner and it sometimes take a while to figure out this kind of thing, especially when it comes to marketing.

So this year Patty Pan shifted gears. We began communicating more proudly about the quality ingredients that we use and we began upgrading the handful of mainstream ingredients that seemed like sensible choices when we first started out. And we made a sign proclaiming it to the world. (We call it "the buzz word sign.")

We had an outrageous market season. Sales were off the charts, morale was high, and we felt more love than ever from our clientele. I think the buzz words played a big role. The weather helped, too. We're excited about the future.

Humble Feast at Skelly and the Bean

photo by Bean Fairbanks

Until last week, the Humble Feast was a vision in search of an audience and a home. For years I've wanted to hold a series of monthly dinners serving affordable food focused on local ingredients, an alternative to the events that showcase local chefs and producers creating fancy, pricey menus.

Folks told me that they thought it was a great idea but I found it to be a tough sell. We held a dozen dinners last year but, aside from a handful of regulars, turnout was disappointing. I lost money. It was also hard on my morale to put my heart and soul into this endeavor and to have so few people show up.

So after last October's dinners, I put the Humble Feast on hold. I'd originally planned to just stop for November and December, when folks were busy with the holidays, but January and February came and went and I still dragged my feet about scheduling another dinner.


At last October's event, three women who had devotedly attended the dinners accidentally paid us twice. I offered to refund their money, but they said they'd rather apply to sum to an upcoming dinner. They got in touch with me last month and asked when I'd be starting up again, so I decided to act on an idea that had been germinating for a while.

Skelly and the Bean is a relatively new Capitol Hill restaurant whose offerings, like my own, are based on market ingredients. Zephyr, the owner and mastermind, launched the business with funding from the neighborhood and community. She sold shares that involved prepaying for upcoming meals, and she enlisted supporters to come sand floors and paint walls.

On Monday and Tuesday nights, the restaurant hosts incubator dinners, opportunities for local chefs to host pop-up restaurants. I thought this might be a good fit for my Humble Feast dinners, and a venue that could help me solve some of the biggest obstacles I'd encountered when I held the dinners last year. I wouldn't have to rent a space and wouldn't have to haul the dishes back to my kitchen and wash them the next day. There was a marketing infrastructure already in place, and the restaurant would be serving drinks, which can certainly make any meal into a more enjoyable experience.

This time around, I enlisted help with the marketing. In addition to tapping into Zephyr's systems for getting the word out to the media, other folks helped to spread the word through list serves and word of mouth. Something clicked. Synergy happened.We drew a crowd, almost filling the first seating and pushing the limits on seating capacity for the second round, filling every spot in the restaurant as well as every seat out on the deck. We set the restaurant's record for turnout.

We also ran out of food before the last few people were fed. Zephyr whipped up some supplementary fare using whatever she had on hand. Most people were quite happy, but several weren't pleased. I think it came down to customer expectations: folks who turned out to enjoy a community dinner were willing to overlook rough spots, while people who were expecting a dining experience were less forgiving.

One tricky element was the fact that the restaurant made their money from the event by selling drinks while we made it by selling food. The restaurant crew didn't want to let people up to the buffet until everyone had placed a drink order, and the process took a long time because the place was packed. And then everyone came up at once, so the line was long and progress was slow.

We'll work out those kinks. Needless to say, we'll hold another dinner. I'm thinking we should schedule them seasonally rather than monthly, so they're somewhat regular yet there's plenty of down time in between. We're also talking about having two seatings two nights in a row, and I think that's a great idea which will ease some of the pressure if we continue to draw crowds.

The idea of affordable local foods buffets also seemed to resonate with folks who work with nonprofits. I've had several people contact me since the dinner wanting to host similar types of events for occasions or organizations.

I'm not sure what lesson to draw, other than the fact that it sometimes takes just the right combination of elements to make a venture succeed. I once read an interview with the guy who pioneered the Silk soymilk brand. He said that he knew that he had a solid idea, so if it wasn't working then he must be doing something wrong. I felt the same way about the Humble Feast. And I'm thrilled that we seem to finally be starting to get it right.http://pattypangrill.com/dinners.php

Authenticity

Lately I've been struggling with the idea of "authentic" food. I'm a Jewish girl from Brooklyn who makes a living selling tamales and quesadillas. My tamales use olive oil instead of lard. Recently we even switched to non-GMO masa and parchment paper "husks," in an effort to steer clear of ingredients that most of our customers wouldn't want to feed to their children, if they stopped and really thought about it.

At a handful of markets my business faces competition from a vendor with genuine roots in Mexico. They prepare a menu that is considerably more authentic than mine in the sense that they understand the flavors, recipes, culture, and cooking techniques in ways that I never will. They serve large, inexpensive portions, using primarily industrial ingredients.

Competition is a strange animal. Even when you respect your competitors, you look for ways to set yourself apart from them, and give customers a good reason to buy your product rather than theirs. In my case, I'm looking to set my business apart by choosing my ingredients carefully. But I can't help feeling a bit disingenuous as I struggle for ways to communicate that I'm using "better" corn than the folks who come from the land where corn was first cultivated, whose ancestors built a vibrant and sophisticated mythology based on the sanctity of corn.

On the other hand, the cheap corn that's available in this country--the corn my competitors use--is largely degraded. It's monocropped on industrial farms using seeds that have been selected more for hardiness than for flavor. According to the Center for Food Safety, 85 percent of the corn grown in this country is now genetically modified. It's a safe bet that any corn or corn products that come from mainstream sources,grew from from these suspect seeds.

So whose food is more authentic? I wouldn't venture to claim that mine is, but the question does make me wonder about our collective infatuation with "authentic" food. We crave flavors and ingredients from distant regions prepared using traditional recipes and techniques, but preparing these dishes commercially almost always takes modification, and the foods inevitably lose something in translation.

At the same time, even so-called traditional foods are always changing. Beef and pork aren't indigenous to Mexico (just as tomatoes aren't indigenous to Italy and potatoes aren't indigenous to Russia).

For now I'm looking at the question this way: I wouldn't go so far as to call my tamales ""authentic". But I'm proud of them nonetheless.

Street Food

Patty Pan is getting a tamale cart! I've spent much of the past few weeks brainstorming about logistics, filling out the cumbersome health department application, and driving down to Oregon to order my custom cart. I can't wait.

I've wanted a tamale cart for years; in fact, when I opened my ill-fated cafe a year and a half ago, I really wanted to get a tamale cart instead, but at that point the Seattle health department still wasn't letting you sell any savory food other than hot dogs off a street cart. Because, after all, hot dogs are so much safer than any other kind of food you could cook on a cart (?)

I'm still not quite sure how my tamale cart will fit in with Seattle's evolving street food scene. To be honest, I've been somewhat ambivalent about the recent hype about the rapidly expanding lineup of local food trucks. Growing up in New York, I knew street food as the experience of buying an expedient hot dog, knish, or pretzel from a no frills cart, and inhaling it while rushing down the street, weaving in and out of pedestrian crowds.

I've always thought of street food as a deeply populist eating experience. The gourmet trucks that have been proliferating lately are strange to me. One truck owner I've worked with struts around in a t-shirt that reads, "I'm only wearing this t-shirt because my chef coat is in the laundry."

I spent a night in Portland last week when I drove down to order my cart. I did a lot of walking, and I ate some street food. I learned from the guy who's building my cart that the health department regulations in Oregon are significantly more relaxed than the rules in Washington State. Unlike many of the Seattle trucks I've seen, most of the Portland trucks looked like low-budget ventures.

 Peeking in windows, I saw plenty of basic, home-style kitchen range hoods and domestic stoves. The Seattle health department requires you to have all professional equipment. I saw many complex and elaborate menus, and realized that the Portland model provides a relatively low budget opportunity for entrepreneurs with restaurant dreams to get started. On the other hand, some of the Seattle trucks likely required as much startup capital as a small restaurant.

So I'm trying to figure out how a Patty Pan cart will fit in. Our success at farmers' markets has come in part from the fact that we were in the right place at the right time and were lucky to be the city's first enduring, tenacious farmers' market concession. We also do well because our menu is set up to prepare and serve food very quickly during the limited hours when we operate. Oh yeah, and we also provide a great product.

To use a Moneyball reference, Patty Pan has never aimed to be the New York Yankees. We'd rather be the Oakland A's: smart, scrappy, and profitable.

The man I've been working with at the Seattle health department told me that they've gotten very few applications for new kinds of carts since they started allowing foods other than hot dogs. So I'm excited to be getting in on this early. In some ways a cart seems more versatile than a truck: it can operate in a smaller space--even a sidewalk--and it's less of a production to get it up and running on any given day.

We're going to offer plenty of tamale varieties, plenty of different salsas, and also chili. And we'll have griddles that can fit over the burners we use so that the operation can double as a quesadilla cart, but we won't try to sell both tamales and quesadillas at the same event. We want to keep it simple, and leverage our long-time experience in getting food into customers' hands as quickly as possible.

If everything goes according to plan, we should be up and running by early July. Stay tuned.

Farming Heroes

Farming is backbreaking work. You get up before the sunrise, and you often work until after sundown, tying up loose ends, tinkering with equipment, and taking care of paperwork. You’re at the mercy of weather systems and price fluctuations which can bankrupt you even when you make good choices and dedicate every waking hour to your harvest.

The state of farming in this country is a mixed bag. On the one hand, big companies have spent the past hundred and fifty years—or longer—getting as much land as possible into the hands of a few big players. At the turn of the twentieth century, forty eight percent of American families made a living from agriculture. A hundred years later, that number was closer to two percent.

Many of the families who were farming at the beginning of the last century but not at the end didn’t want to give up their land; they were forced to move because of bad harvests or unfavorable market conditions. You could say that small scale agriculture is dying, as families who have farmed for generations find that they can’t compete with the massive investments that their corporate competitors make to grow corn, wheat, and soy on an industrial scale.

Despite this bad news about family farms, there are more than ten times as many farmers’ markets in the United States today as there were forty years ago. Free-thinking farmers are somehow finding ways to start working small pieces of land, selling their produce directly to free-thinking customers. Farmers’ markets are so hot that even large mainstream corporations are aping them in tacky promotions.

Wherever you find an economy where small-scale farmers thrive, you find a system of government where individuals are willing and able to speak out. This has been the case since ancient times. When a small minority gains control of most of the land or resources, government grows corrupt, workers are exploited, and the average person doesn’t have much of a say.

Ancient Babylon (present day Iraq) lay between two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their water was rich in minerals, and when the rivers flooded their banks, the silt that was left behind created fertile and productive plots. At some point a proactive priest or engineer discovered that he could make the land even more bountiful by channeling river water into irrigation systems. As large scale irrigation projects grew successful, the folks who were organizing the effort grew rich and powerful, and came to own most of the land.

There’s a tablet bearing ancient Babylonian laws that turned up about a hundred years ago in what was once Persia. One of these laws states that when someone works land that another person owns, he is entitled to keep one third of the produce he grows there. One third. Think about it. That’s sharecropping. And yet some lawmaker took the trouble to pass a law and inscribe a tablet to protect the tenants’ right to keep that one third. It must have been even worse for many renters.

Nearby, in ancient Israel, folks followed a custom known as the Jubilee Year. According to this tradition, every fiftieth year all debts were forgiven, and all land that had changed hands due to unfortunate circumstances was returned to its original owner. In other words, if you lost the family farm, when the Jubilee Year came around, you’d get it back.

If a Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the dustbowl years, thousands of Great Plains farmers wouldn’t have lost their land and trekked out to California to become migrant workers. If the Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the recent mortgage and foreclosure crisis, we wouldn’t be facing the current level of homelessness and poverty. Homes excavated from the ruins of ancient Israel tend to be relatively uniform in size. That culture didn’t have the kind of wealth disparity that you found nearby in Babylon, where people who lost their land during tough times were unlikely to ever get it back.

 In early Greece, most of the good land was grabbed early on by the military elite, and regular folks were left with rocky hillsides which they had to nurture patiently in order to get anything to grow. They planted olives and grapes, crops that the richer landowners didn’t bother with because they took too much time and patience. But olives and grapes were the right crops to grow on rocky hillsides, which weren’t much good for the wheat and barley which the wealthier landowners grew on the better lands, delegating the labor to their slaves.

Unlike wheat or barley, which grow easily and are replanted every year, olive trees and grape vines can take generations to get established. Folks who grow them can make secondary items—olive oil and wine—which are much more valuable than the basic produce, especially if you learn your craft and put out a great product. Once you put in the time it takes to get a grape vine or olive tree to bear fruit, you feel proud of your work and you want to keep that vine or tree in your family.
These early Greek farmers developed pride and independence, and before long they had started history’s first democracy. It wasn’t perfect—slaves couldn’t vote, and even wealthy landowners were shut out at first—but it was a start.

After the fall of Rome, warlords again grabbed all of the good land in Europe, just as the military elite had done in ancient Greece. They used the feudal system to offer contracts to poor peasants, who farmed land they did not own under disadvantageous terms. But around the end of the first millennium, Europeans began inventing better agricultural technologies and becoming more successful farmers.

Land ownership arrangements changed. The wealthy land owners found that it was now more profitable to hire labor and harvest their own crops than to offer long term leases to peasants.  Poor people struck out on their own, and began clearing marginal hillsides of trees and shrubs. Like the ancient Greek olive farmers, they didn’t have the kind of resources that large scale land owners enjoyed, but the process of taking a piece of land, making it their own, and getting crops to grow there transformed them from peasants into free thinking citizens. They passed laws that recognized the rights of individuals, and began challenging authority.

There’s been a similar dynamic in the United States, reaching back hundreds of years. Like the warlords of ancient Greece and medieval Europe, cattle and railroad barons grabbed up much of the land as quickly and ruthlessly as they could. At the same time, this country was founded by people who were trying to get out from under oppressive governments. Forward thinking legislators and radical farmers have always challenged the efforts of cutthroat entrepreneurs to buy up as much land as possible.

Thomas Jefferson wrote prolifically about the importance of broad based prosperity and land ownership. He was a wealthy landowner and slave owner himself, but he did have some good ideas, and he helped to create an ethic and an ideal. During the following century, the federal government encouraged the settlement of the western part of the country by offering one hundred and sixty acre parcels to homesteaders who could demonstrate that they were capable of working the land.
Despite the fact that the railroad companies were awarded half of the land--and grabbed much of the other half by sponsoring sham claims--this policy on some level was intended to foster equality, once you factor out the fact that it displaced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from areas where they had lived for centuries.

After the Civil War, the government launched a similar program aimed at helping freed slaves to get back on their feet by offering them forty acres and a mule. Like the movement to settle the west, the reality of these land grants hardly lived up to the ideal. Many freed slaves ended up as sharecroppers, rather than landowners. Despite these failings, it was a good idea, and if it had been seriously implemented, it’s hard to imagine that we’d have the kind of social and economic disparity on the basis of race that we see today.

Once most of the land out west had been settled late in the nineteenth century, big railroad companies began getting into the food business. Food was an ideal product to transport on the new railroads because the demand for it was ongoing, and there was plenty of room out west to raise food for the densely populated Eastern cities, which were growing more densely populated every day.

The railroad companies got involved in food production in the west, raising cattle and growing lettuce. They also formed alliances with the giant meat packing companies, when they weren’t competing with them for their own share of a very profitable business. Cutthroat entrepreneurs grabbed up as much western land as possible. Their agricultural production technologies grew more expensive and efficient, as they bought bigger tractors to work bigger parcels of land.

The family farmers who had managed to get their hands on homesteaded plots had a hard time competing. They were often growing the same wheat and corn as the large-scale landowners, but they didn’t have the acreage and the equipment to achieve economies of scale, so they couldn’t put out the large enough quantities to succeed, and they couldn’t keep their small operations viable with the low prices that their industrial competitors were able to charge.

As these independent farmers found themselves unable to pay their bills and cover the cost of their seeds, they began mortgaging their land and borrowing against their equipment. The situation didn’t improve. Many were never able to pay back their loans, and eventually they lost their land. They left their livelihoods behind and went off in search of wage labor, often with young families in tow.

Big agriculture got bigger, and before long folks living in cities and even in rural towns were buying most of their food through grocery chains that did most of their business with the food conglomerates that managed most of the food chain. The big food companies built strong lobbies that shaped a political system where corporations had a disproportionately large voice, and individuals struggled to be heard.

Today we’re used to hearing about a monster food system that has so much political clout that it keeps many Americans unhealthy by offering products that are profitable but lethal, but this is hardly a new story. In the early years of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair published a muckraking novel about the industrial slaughterhouses in Chicago, exposing the filthy food processing operations and hazardous conditions for workers.

The public outrage that the novel stirred made it obvious that the government had to take some action. Unfortunately,  rather than taking the opportunity to pass laws that would really make folks safer, government officials worked with industry representatives to create the illusion that they were making the food supply safer, when they were mostly just managing their own images.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was certainly an improvement over the earlier regulatory environment. It put a cursory inspection system into place, and made it illegal to mislabel products. But the legislation was also a tragic missed opportunity to actually reform the food system by creating serious standards for regulation and food safety.

There’s a similar situation today, as monstrous factory farms breed diseases nobody could even have imagined a hundred years ago, diseases caused by overcrowding, indiscriminate use of hormones and antibiotics, and crazy practices like feeding byproducts from cow slaughterhouses back to cows, and byproducts from chicken slaughterhouses back to chickens.

We hear nearly every week about a new food safety scare linked directly to industrial farming practices. Pathogens that make their way into the industrial food supply ruin millions of pounds of meat, and outbreaks from food borne illnesses sicken thousands of people. And yet it’s tough to pass regulation that might actually improve the situation because large food companies fund such powerful lobbies, and contribute heavily to the campaigns of elected officials.

The consolidation of the food industry undermines democracy because the political influence that the large corporations enjoy ensures that fewer people have a real say in crafting laws and policies. However, the small-scale farmers who are driving the farmers’ market movement do manage to make some noise, and the more they prosper and find ways to sell their food and share their ideals, the less powerful corporate agriculture will ultimately become.

If it hadn’t been for the strong voices of independent farmers and the customers who support them, federal organic standards would allow genetically modified foods to be labeled as organic. These free thinking producers have been the force between today’s sustainable food movement, which has forced the government to overhaul nutritional recommendations, re-evaluate the school lunch program, and fund vouchers to help low income shoppers buy produce at farmers’ markets.

We’ve got a long way to go, when it comes to building a sensible, fair food system, and there’s certainly no shortage of bad news, from e coli and salmonella outbreaks, to epidemics of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. But the flashes of good news are more than just isolated incidents. Instead, they’re the work of a grassroots movement that gets stronger every day, and has the potential to change not only the way we eat, but also the way we live.

Food Ghostwriting

A couple of weeks ago Julia Moskin wrote a New York Times article exposing the fact that (gasp) not all chefs write their own cookbooks. Cookbook authors such as Rachael Ray and Gwyneth Paltrow were quick to point out that they did, in fact, compose their own material, and they felt maligned by the suggestion that they didn't. The controversy has led to plenty of earnest discussion about the role of ghostwriters in creating and producing cookbooks, with plenty of focus--as usual--on high profile celebrities with big names and big egos.

This past winter I've been doing a bit of cookbook ghostwriting myself. I'm finding I really enjoy the process of helping other people to channel their food knowledge into written form. I love writing but I can't really market my way out of a paper bag, so ghostwriting feels like a perfect fit: I get to focus on the part that I do well, and another person has the job of promoting the material. I started out as a fiction writer, and ghostwriting also enables me to go back to chameleon mode, learning and imitating someone else's voice.

I've been working for peanuts so far, thinking of the process as an internship of sorts. If I get some experience, then down the line I may be able to work on more lucrative projects because, after all, a girl's got to earn a living. But reading Moskin's account of the treatment she received from some of the big names she worked with has given me a new appreciation of the type of work I've been doing.

I've mostly been helping non-native speakers express their food knowledge in ways that will be accessible to an American audience. I edited a cookbook for a Russian guy with a thick accent who had been working with voice recognition software: this became clear when I came across the phrase "feel the pastry shells." I worked with a Greek food personality who wants to teach American cooks about the food lessons that he and his compatriots have learned as a result of their country's economic turmoil.

I'm finding this work fascinating. In addition to learning a lot about unfamiliar cuisines, it's gotten me thinking about the role of food writing in the digital age. We all want to promote who we are and what we know. We create platforms, project personalities, and build audiences. But the people with the deepest, broadest food knowledge aren't necessarily the ones who have the writing skills or the tech savvy to communicate what they know.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the ways that new information technologies have been lowering the qualty of food writing and diluting the brands of folks who immerse themselves in the craft and the business of creating food books and magazines. But digital media and the recent innovations in self-publishing have also created a field that is potentially quite egalitarian and food is, after all, a deeply egalitarian medium.

By the way, if you're ever looking for a ghostwriter, I hope you'll keep me in mind...

Roasted Sunchokes

I used to scoff at sunchokes. Walking around the winter markets, it always seemed like everybody was selling them but nobody was buying them. I once even asked a farmer whether there was actually a demand for them, or whether farmers just offered them for sale because they were easy to grow. I'm not much of a gardener, but I've heard that they are, in fact, very easy to grow.

Sunchokes used to be known as "Jerusalem artichokes" until a bunch of marketing folks got together and tried to figure out why nobody was buying them. Someone suggested rebranding them as "sunchokes", which wasn't as big of a stretch as it sounds because they are, in fact, part of the sunflower family.

Nobody knows why they came to be known as "Jerusalem artichokes" in the first place. They're definitely not part of the artichoke family, although they do have a distinctly artichoke-like flavor. They're indigenous to this hemisphere, and one theory is that whoever first came up with the name was referring to the New World's one-time reputation as the New Jerusalem. Another theory as that the "Jerusalem" in the name is a bastardization of "girasole", which is a flower that bends towards the sun, like its sunflower cousins.

In any case, they're quite good for you. They're reminiscent of potatoes, but have almost no starch and plenty of fiber. They're also bountiful at a time of year when there isn't much other local produce available.

Up until the past few weeks, I never had much luck cooking sunchokes. For some reason I thought that you absolutely had to peel them, and they're knobby and small, and it seemed like a lot of work for not very much food. I also didn't seem to digest them well.

I brought some home a few weeks ago because a farmer had a big box of them left over at the end of a market and offered them to me for free. I said I didn't have the patience to peel them, and she said she never bothered. It was a revelation.

So here's how I've been preparing them. It's so simple that it seems silly to use a recipe format. Slice them thinly. Aim for the thinness of potato chips, although--if you're anything like me-- most of them won't end up quite that thin. Toss the slices with olive oil. Use your hands, so you can actually coat them without using an insane amount of oil. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and roast them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes.

It's that simple. The thicker ones will be tender and satisfying. The thinner ones will be almost crispy, like artichokey potato chips. It makes me think of the amazing possibilities for someone with a big budget and plenty of marketing savvy: Sun choke chips!!

The Farmers' Market Apostrophe

This winter I've been studying editing, taking online courses in an effort to become a better writer and also to improve my skillset as a freelancer. The other day I came across a disturbing piece of news in my course materials: the apostrophe I've been using in the phrase "farmers' market" may not actually belong there.

At the risk of sounding like a language nerd, I love that apostrophe. It says that the market belongs to the farmers. The instructor's rationale was that in this particular phrase, "farmers" functions as an adjective rather than a noun, therefore it shouldn't take the possessive form.

I've used the possesive form throughout this blog, even in the header. When I was working on my cookbook Local Bounty, the editor suggested that we drop the apostrophe. I suspect she used the adjective argument, but it was a while ago and I don't fully remember. I indicated that I felt strongly about it and she let me have my way.

In addition to the thorny intricacies of grammar, my coursework has also dealt with the interpersonal complexities of marking up someone else's work. I realize now that this editor exercised discretion and flexibility in a way that probably ran counter to her sensibilities, because it was apparent that this particular apostrophe mattered to me.

That's the kind of editor I want to be. And in the meantime, I'm going to keep right on using that apostrophe, consistently and defensibly.

Cooking is Subversive

I've been working a bit with the Occupy Wall Street folks in New York, who are putting together a cookbook, and it's gotten me thinking about the subversive nature of simply picking up a knife and preparing your own dinner.

When you cook for yourself instead of reheating processed convenience food, you opt out of the garbage that the mainstream food industry wants you to eat. Cooking for yourself is a way of thinking for yourself, choosing not to believe all of the advertisements telling you that it’s too hard, or takes too much time, or you’ll never make it taste as good as the celebrity chef who’s got his name on the package.

Don’t believe it. Don’t let any celebrity chef ever convince you that you don’t know the right way to hold a knife, chop an onion, or bone a chicken. There are as many ways to hold a knife as there are people handling knives. You may be able to learn some tricks that will make you more efficient, or make your cooking look more professional. But in the end, as long as you cook something reasonably tasty, don’t hurt yourself, and don’t make anyone sick, then you’ve done something right, regardless of how you’re holding your knife or slicing your onion.

Cooking is a subversive act because it involves taking back the power to choose every ingredient in your meal, making the decision to buy from folks who give a damn about the people who work for them and about the soil, air, and water. When you buy ingredients from small farmers, you support individuals and families who have chosen to make a living outside of the mainstream food system. They’re usually kinder to to their land than industrial operations, and they make their own calls about what they’re going to grow, and where they’re going to sell it.

Shopping at a farmers’ market is a subversive act. When you choose heirloom fruits and vegetables rather than tasteless, industrial varieties, you do your part to preserve ancient plant knowledge and species diversity. At a farmers’ market you have the chance to buy ingredients from farmers who use age-old seeds and knowledge to produce tasty, healthy food, rather than squeezing as much low quality produce as they can out of land that’s already tired.

Shopping at a farmers’ market or joining a community supported agriculture program is a subversive act because you’re doing your part to help build on alternative economy, one that doesn’t rely on multinational corporations or transnational trucking firms. You’re paying for the fruits and vegetables that you actually get, rather than spending extra money for the services of middlemen who jack up the price of your groceries without giving back anything of value.

When you cook for yourself and plan your meals around fresh, local ingredients, you buy from people who keep your money close to home, as they turn around and support other local businesses instead of extracting profits that ultimately go to a corporate office in a distant city. When independent businesses can generate their own livelihood, fewer people are at the mercy of low paying jobs with companies that charge obscenely low prices for products made by people who work for even lower wages in developing nations.

Cooking is a subversive act because it is a magnet that brings people together to work collectively, gathering and prepping ingredients, and then sitting down and enjoying the results, taking time to exchange thoughts and ideas, visiting face to face instead of through a computer screen. Cooking creates connections, providing a meeting place with cooperation at its root. Cooking with a community involves sharing skills, and building something bigger than the work of lonely individuals. Cooking and sitting down to meals is time that you don’t spend working, shopping, or watching television.

Cooking is a subversive act because it brings different cultures together to enjoy each other’s food, creating connections instead of going to war. Strangers are less strange once you have tasted their recipes and sat at their tables. Each individual act of connecting to someone who is unlike yourself, someone the media teaches you to fear, helps to defang the myth that the world is a hostile place, and weapons are the only solution.

Cooking is a subversive act because it gives you control over your health. The better you eat, the more likely you are to are to get up and do something rather than sitting on the couch. The better you eat, the less you need to support the mainstream medical industry, and the less you rely on highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs and an insurance industry that doesn’t insure much. Using your own judgment and developing your own knowledge base about the way for you to eat makes you less vulnerable to bogus claims on food labels telling you that a product will help your heart, boost your energy level, or keep you regular.

Cooking for yourself is a process of getting to know your own needs and your own mind. The more you produce your own food, the more your food choices depend on what you really want and need, rather than what the food industry wants you to buy so they’ll make more money. Choosing your own ingredients allows you to tune into the ways that different foods affect your well being and your metabolism, and choose combinations that help you thrive.

Learning about your own food allergies and sensitivities gives you the knowledge and power to heal yourself, and stay alert and engaged. Cooking for yourself allows you to choose your own portion size, figuring out how much food you really need, and it allows you to choose the right amount of salt for your meals, rather than consuming all of the extra sodium that convenience food manufacturers add to their products so they’ll last long on supermarket shelves while they’re sitting and waiting for you to buy them.

Cooking is easy, once you get past the idea that you have to make something complicated and dazzling. Use good, fresh ingredients, and prepare them simply. Practice and build your skills. Learn from the folks around you, and share your own knowledge. Cooking is power. Cooking is wealth. Cooking is subversive.