Monday, October 25, 2010

Radicchio

Local Food: The burgundy leafed radicchio is an Italian staple, and though it looks much like green leaf cabbage, it is actually a variant of chicory. Slightly bitter - with a hint of spice - when eaten raw, slowly braising or even roasting or grilling radicchio mellows the deeper flavors. Steven prepares the mildly spicy, crispy radicchio to complement the sweetness of the apples and celery root he serves with grilled scallops. The rich brown butter sauce with crispy sage and fennel confit round out the dish and balance the earthy winter vegetables.

Around the Galaxy: Galaxy welcomes Pamela Kristan on Tuesday at 7P.M. Pamela will discuss her book, Awakening in Time: Practical Time Management for Those on a Spiritual Path. She has spent the last 25 years helping others find practical, creative strategies to help improve their lives through her workshops, talks and individual consultations. Come to Galaxy on Tuesday, October 26th.

Music Notes: Dan Haley is Mister Casual returns this Thursday, October 28 at 7:30. Support local music and listen as he crafts a 100% original chord garden of acoustic/electric art pop with clever lyrics, innovative harmonies and tuxedo shirts."

Local Events: Sterling College alumna and Salvation Farms founder Theresa Snow will present on food security in the state tonight at Simpson Hall at Sterling College. The event is free and open to the public.

Jeudevine Library's monthly poetry readings continue this Wednesday, October 27 at 7:00pm. Peggy Sapphire, Len Irving and Elenore Grimes will each read for 20-25 minutes, followed by refreshments and conversation with the poets. For more information, call the library at 472-5948.

Aaargh! Pirates the at Haunted Library! Stop by the Haunted Jeudevine Library on October 31 from 5:30-7:30 to plunder some loot. Be sure to visit Claire's for some Halloween treats as well.

Reminders: We are open daily after 2:30 for coffee, bar service, and baked goods, and free WiFi, with dinner reservations available from 5-9, Sundays from 5-8. We serve our special Blunch menu Sundays from 11-2. Claire's is closed every Wednesday.

We appreciate it when you reserve a table with us, as it helps us plan a relaxed and hospitable experience for you and all our guests. To show our appreciation, when you call, email, or stop by to make a reservation, you will be entered into our weekly drawing for a $20 gift card for your next visit.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Tart it up

Local Food: At any time of year, Steven's tarts are a local showcase. Right now, with our long, warm fall just turning to cold and damp, and before the hens slow down their egg laying, they are quite a treat. Start with eggs from Windhorse Farm in East Hardwick, whipped with half & half from Strafford Organic Creamery. Add the last of the year's broccoli from Pete's Greens, then leeks and squash from Hazendale Farm. Top the tart with Hartwell cheese, a velvety and mild variety from Ploughgate Creamery. The pâte brisée crust is made with butter from Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery, and it is all baked until the cheese on top melts and develops a slight crispy texture.

Around the Galaxy: Come to The Galaxy Bookshop on Tuesday at 7PM to hear Tim Simard talk about his new book Haunted Hikes of Vermont. Just in time for Halloween hiking, the book is filled with both fanciful legend and practical trail information. Come on Tuesday, pick up a copy of the book and head out for a hike if you dare.

Music Notes: The Eames Brothers return this Thursday, October 21 at 7:30. Don't miss their "uplifting, soulful, mysterious" music that flows from "stinging electric shuffles to sparse delta blues."

Local Art: We welcome new art on our walls for the months of October and November by Kathy Stark. Join her Monday, October 18 from 4-6 for her artist reception.

Local Events: This week is particularly fruitful for those Vermonters interested in food politics and global activism. On Monday at the Town House, the New England Region of Witness for Peace, Buffalo Mountain Co-op, the Highfields Institute, and the Center for an Agricultural Economy welcome Kiado Cruz, an organizer with the Autonomous Network for Food Sovereignty in Oaxaca, Mexico. On Tuesday evening, Saint Michael's College in Colchester inaugurates the college's new Environmental Studies major with a special address by Indian scientist and food activist Dr. Vandana Shiva (note that the location has been changed from the Arts Center to the chapel). Read a recent interview with Dr. Shiva published by Rodale Press. And the focus is closer to home next week when Theresa Snow, founder of Salvation Farms, discusses hunger in Vermont and her work with the Vermont Food Bank on October 25th at 6:30PM at Sterling College.

This Saturday, the Wacky Worm Sisters of Down to Earth Worm Farm in Greensboro will host an Indoor Composting with Red Wigglers Workshop at 1:00pm. The workshop is free. Please RSVP to 533-9836 or newleaf@vtlink.net.

Reminders: We are open daily after 2:30 for coffee, bar service, and baked goods, and free WiFi, with dinner reservations available from 5-9, Sundays from 5-8. We serve our special Blunch menu Sundays from 11-2. Claire's is closed every Wednesday.

We appreciate it when you reserve a table with us, as it helps us plan a relaxed and hospitable experience for you and all our guests. To show our appreciation, when you call, email, or stop by to make a reservation, you will be entered into our weekly drawing for a $20 gift card for your next visit.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Counter Revolutions, or Can "Eating Together" Save Food?

by Mike Bosia

I approached last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, devoted to “eating together,” with a mix of enthusiasm and trepidation. The series of articles and essays promised a glimpse of the multidimensional character of food, bringing us back to the social nature of an activity many Americans have reduced to mere calories. At the same time, this latest venture in food journalism arrives just after the fall series of style magazines in the Sunday Times (men’s and women’s fashion, design, and travel), with their glossy images and painfully anachronistic consumerism. Would there be something new in this communal take on eating? Or is The Times enshrining food as another dimension of “style”?

Of course, the answer is a lot of both. The articles and their similarly arresting illustrations are like one of those PBS documentaries that seek all at the same time to describe and define a stereotypical Americana while avoiding the politics and power that shapes those stereotypes. Snappy and artfully evocative (explains an article on a pie cooperative in Alabama: “Behind a counter made of planks salvaged from abandoned sharecropper shacks, two young women slid pie tins into a double oven stack. At trestle tables, beneath industrial pendant lights, four young men, on lunch break from their G.E.D. classes, dug into slices of taco pie and made weekend plans”), the Magazine travels from the Maine coast, through the South and Southwest, out West to California’s irrigation fueled farmlands – without mentioning water – and past a kosher restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There’s even a snarky gay man on Long Island who learns a thing or two about community and wellness from his deprecating spouse and a taciturn farmer.

With the essay, “Growing Together,” the Magazine’s food editor, Christine Muhlke, sets the tone. By her own admission, she was initially interested in farmers as the force behind the urban chef, and discovered that in rural communities, well, there is community (or “comm” as she unselfconsciously shorthands it). Muhlke’s piece places the right amount of emphasis on the efforts to build community, and the stunningly important part community plays as a resource for both rural living and sustainable farming. She also notes how limited the scope of these communities are despite the wide variety – very intimate, first hand, based in trust, and comparatively few in number within the broader food economy. She concludes with a quote from Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, a reminder for me that “eating together” is nothing new. The Slow Food movement was founded more than two decades ago.

During a talk I gave on gender and local food politics last month for the Wellesley College Peace and Justice program, one first year student asked me a question that struck at the core of our food dilemma, overlooked by The Times’ much more celebrated food experts. “What about the Kenyan organic farmer,” she asked, “who makes a living growing food for European consumers?” The question of distance and community was brought home again last week, after I sent around an announcement about the founding events for the US Food Sovereignty Alliance to a variety of listserves and friends (my virtual food community). During a full week of direct action on food, October 11 would see people across the Americas calling attention to the latest global land grab and “indigenous resistance to conquest” – instead of Columbus Day. I received only one response, from a Vermont farmer who was especially disturbed that some people he would never meet might not revere Columbus: “Please don’t waste valuable electrons by forwarding nonsense like this,” he wrote to me.

The student and the farmer illustrate our dilemma from different perspectives, which is the real politics of community overlooked by all this talk of “eating together” (or, as Muhlke admits, groups of people with shared interests around food). Eating emphasizes the process of consumption, and so grounds communal relationships in food markets (admiringly cooperative) that bring together consumers and producers around interests. As we cultivate relationships in real time and actual physical space like farmers markets and CSAs, we also make choices about how we live and what we value in our communities. And this is complicated. In some ways, for example, we pull inward around a now communal dinner table, but a local and isolated one nonetheless, that at times draws on the same hierarchies of power and privilege of the traditional dinner table, with a man at its head.

This is how we risk substituting a democracy of consumer choice for the democratization of power. Building a network that brings together producers and consumers in cooperative markets, we might lose sight of the political. What happens, for example, when local markets can’t overcome deeply entrenched patterns of privilege or resentment? Or when we don’t share some of our most obvious and immediate interests, our experiences or perspectives, either locally or at a great distance? And how do we develop broad coalitions of solidarity beyond our own communities so we can knit “eating together” into a global political movement that can translate the best norms of cooperative markets into actual policy? One of the most insightful political economists of the last century, Karl Polanyi, drew a stark contrast between free markets and society. Before the rise of the free market, he demonstrated, production and consumption were part of fixed hierarchical social relationships based on reciprocity in rights and obligations. Nevertheless, Polanyi didn’t presume that hierarchical cooperation was in itself without politics – in fact, reciprocity was superior to free markets because economic activity was recognized as innately social and entirely political.

The politics of power and true democracy lurk beneath the consumerism of the Sunday Magazine coverage of food communities and our own burgeoning local food movement. This month, Vermonters can hear from two activists working on these issues globally and locally. On Monday, Kiado Cruz from Santa Cruz de Yagavila outside Oaxaca, Mexico will speak at the Hardwick Town House at 7 pm. Cruz is a farmer and organizer building democratic institutions around food produced for either local exchange or global sales. On Tuesday, Vandana Shiva, a founder of the international movement of peasants and farmers called Via Campesina, comes to Saint Michael’s College. Shiva is a renowned scientist who left the Indian Institute of Science to devote herself to the rights of farmers and the preservation of agricultural biodiversity. With Via Campesina, she has championed what the organization calls “food sovereignty,” a political process of building communities that emphasizes local decision-making and substantive democratic practice, coupled with the explicit empowerment of women and youth at all levels of governance.

Like the French farmer José Bové, another co-founder of Via Campesina whose visit to Vermont a decade ago represented the culmination of one stage in the development of an alternative food movement, these visits can inspire us to examine where we are and how we move forward within a global movement, to seek alliances with farmers and consumers around the world. Through the substantive forms of democracy advocated by the global movement, we can address our assumptions about power and privilege, and at the same time, draw on our own deeply embedded form of rural democracy and communal decision-making best exemplified by the institutions of the town meeting and Main Street.

“Eating together” should not be the limit of action; it is just the start.

Emphasizing local news, menu updates, and recipes, from time to time New Vermont Cooking also will feature reviews and ideas. In addition to being a co-owner of Claire’s, Mike is a political scientist at Saint Michael’s College working on food politics and political movements. He and Jeffrey Ayres at Saint Mike’s, with Carleton University’s Peter Andrée and Marie-Josée Massicotte of the University of Ottawa, are co-editing a book called Globalization and Food Sovereignty: Global and Local Change in the New Politics of Food, at University of Toronto Press.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Finger Lickin' Good

Local Food: If you never imagined chicken nuggets at Claire's, we have news for you. Steven starts with earthy, rich and smooth chicken livers from Deb Hart at Windy Acres, soaks them in batter, and fries them until they develop a golden crust and a tender interior. Dusted with smoked paprika and cumin to add a hint of spice and smokiness, the livers are paired with a mild salsa of tomatillos from Rowan Farm and jalapeno and cayenne peppers from Pete's Greens. Just the right balance of rich flavors, indulgent textures, and bright acidity.

Around the Galaxy: For Halloween hiking, pick up a copy of the newly arrived Haunted Hikes of Vermont, and see if you dare check out any of the trails that are rated on a ghostly scale after you have read it. Filled both with fanciful legend and practical trail information, the book has something for every member of the family. Author Tim Simard will be at Galaxy to talk about his new book on Tuesday, October 19th at 7PM.

Music Notes: Fresh Greenes join us this Thursday, October 14 at 7:30 for their first performance at Claire's. Come in and enjoy the original music by father-daughter duo Chris and Juliana Greene on vocals, guitar and keyboard, with Sarah Cannon on fiddle.

Local Events: The Hardwick Fall Film Festival takes place this weekend at the Hardwick Town House. The festival, organized by Harriet Wood and David Rodgers, features four films by independent Vermont filmmakers. Take a look at the full schedule here.

Kiado Cruz, community organizer for food sovereignty in a rural community near the city of Oaxaca, Mexico, will speak at the Hardwick Town House on Monday, October 18 at 7:00. Cruz will address sustainable agriculture and community participation that are instrumental in the current autonomous movements in Oaxaca and Chiapas. The event is sponsored by the Highfields Center for Composting, The Center for an Agricultural Economy, The Buffalo Mountain Food Co-operative Learning Exchange, and New England Witness for Peace.

Reminders: We are open daily after 2:30 for coffee, bar service, and baked goods, and free WiFi, with dinner reservations available from 5-9. We will return to our regular Sunday dinner hours on October 17, seating arriving guests from 5-8. We serve our special Blunch menu Sundays from 11-2. Claire's is closed every Wednesday.

We appreciate it when you reserve a table with us, as it helps us plan a relaxed and hospitable experience for you and all our guests. To show our appreciation, when you call, email, or stop by to make a reservation, you will be entered into our weekly drawing for a $20 gift card for your next visit.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Gingerbread is in the House

Local Food: Summer's turn to Fall marks the end of fresh herbs, but the cool, crisp weather means that spices call out for greater attention. Steven's blend of cinnamon, star anise and black pepper - along with some secrets - combine with the zip of crystallized ginger in his warm gingerbread cake. He adds molasses and maple syrup from Caledonia Farm for a touch of our orange and red "leafy"sweetness. Caramelized apples and pumpkins are added for texture, and cider-butter sauce to round out the spice, along with vanilla ice cream from Strafford Organic Creamery. Try the gingerbread cake with a taste of WhistlePig Whiskey, the new rye at our bar, distilled in Shoreham, Vermont.

Around the Galaxy: If the cooler weather puts you in the mood to stay near the stove, try some recipes from two new books Apples: More Than 75 Delicious Recipes and The Comfort of Apples: Modern Recipes for an Old-Fashioned Favorite. Perhaps some Cider-Braised Ribs, Apple and Sage Burgers with Camelized Onions or Curried Apple Lentil Soup? And you can keep apples all Winter long with the help of The Complete Root Cellar Book: Building Plans, Uses, and 100 Recipes. Come by and check out these books along with many more in the Fall crop of books.

Music Notes: Mark Struhsacker has played guitar and sung in Montana and Vermont based bluegrass bands for over 35 years. He created and has fronted the WDEV Radio Rangers radio show which has aired on WDEV every Saturday morning at 10:30 since June 1986. Check out his bluegrass flat picking and cross picking guitar style on Thursday at 7:30.

Local Events: The sixteenth annual Share the Harvest fundraiser will be held Thursday, October 7th to benefit NOFA-VT's Farm Share Program. The program helps limited-income Vermonters afford CSA shares from their local farms. On October 7th, restaurants, co-ops and food stores will participate in Share the Harvest by donating a portion of the day's sales to the program. Both Claire's and Buffalo Mountain Co-op in Hardwick will participate.

Reminders: We are open daily after 2:30 for coffee, bar service, and baked goods, and free WiFi, with dinner reservations available from 5-9. We will return to our regular Sunday dinner hours on October 17, seating arriving guests from 5-8. We serve our special Blunch menu Sundays from 11-2. Claire's is closed every Wednesday.

We appreciate it when you reserve a table with us, as it helps us plan a relaxed and hospitable experience for you and all our guests. To show our appreciation, when you call, email, or stop by to make a reservation, you will be entered into our weekly drawing for a $20 gift card for your next visit.