A Literary Culinary Journal
Bad French cuisine is perhaps the most unfortunate on earth.–Craig Claiborne
Craig Claiborne was an American restaurant critic, food journalist and book author. A long-time food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times, he was also the author of numerous cookbooks, including New York Times Cookbook, a great American classic. Click here to listen to an audio interview with him.
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by Jonell Galloway
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From artsy
Photo courtesy of Ilian
to philosophical and literary
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Photo credit: elycefeliz)
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by Jonell Galloway
One great thing about spending 3 days with a group of like-minded people, who have come from all over the country (and Switzerland) to pay homage to their “spiritual guide”, Wendell Berry, is that the audience is already filtered, and you can be sure to meet people you can relate to and that you will stay in contact with.
Wendell Berry speaking in Frankfort, Indiana
Such is the case with Elias Crim, a native Texan who spent “several good years studying classics and medieval Italian at U.C. Berkeley before wasting several more years in financial journalism around Chicago.” Crim has also written for The American Scholar, The American Conservative, the Washington Times and The Chicago Observer.
This is the only photo ID I could muster up and I think it rather amusing.
He also runs a website, Solidarity Hall, which he describes as “as a hospitable old hostelry, a mental oasis in the deserted landscapes that surround us. We no longer have the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century London, where Samuel Johnson and his friends said more of substance in an hour than our blogs today could manage in a week. Nor do we have a local culture of pubs such as Chesterton’s Old Cheshire Cheese, where friendship could flourish easily, even amidst clashing opinions.” I thoroughly recommend that you take a look and start a conversation of your own.
Elias was so kind to publish this article, “A Rambling Epicure,” about my work after the Wendell Berry conference. I invite you to take a look.
Start here and then continue on Solidarity Hall:
Jonell Galloway is surely the only person from Hardinsburg, Kentucky, to ever study Sanskrit. But that’s secondary. More important is the way this spiritual daughter of Wendell Berry has developed the Rambling Epicure, an encyclopedic and literate website which describes itself thusly: “A gastronome’s guide to mindful eating. A serious approach to real-food shopping, cooking, and dining.”
Click here to continue.
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Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.—Wendell Berry
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For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. This is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
Wendell Berry, “in the op-ed piece he published with his old friend and collaborator Wes Jackson, shortly after the economy crashed in the fall of 2008.” (Michael Pollan, in introduction to Wendell Berry’s Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food).
Wendell Berry speaking in Frankfort, Indiana
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by Jonell Galloway
There’s probably no better short overview of Wendell Berry‘s views on agriculture and sustainability than Mark Bittman‘s interview of Berry in The New York Times in 2012.
Wendell Berry speaking in Frankfort, Indiana
Here are a few excerpts about agriculture and sustainability:
“That’s one of Wendell’s recurring themes: Listen to the land.”
“If you imitate nature, you’ll use the land wisely.”
“The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.”
Mark Bittman (Photo credit: rebuildingdemocracy)
“You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency, and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.”
“[N]o great feat is going to happen to change all this; you’re going to have to humble yourself to be willing to do it one little bit at a time. You can’t make people do this. What you have to do is notice that they’re already doing it.”
“I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.”
Read The New York Times entire article here.
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by Renu Chhabra
“Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea.” –– Pythagoras
Pass the salt please.
We hear this often while eating meals. I sometimes think what life in the kitchen would be without salt. Nature’s pure offering and staple of any pantry! It’s one ingredient that can put life in any recipe. Just a pinch of it does wonders. But it’s the right amount of it, according to one’s taste buds that makes a recipe sing….. not too much or too little. Hence the term, “salt to taste.”
Some overly salty feta cheese was the center to make this dip. It was too salty for our taste buds. Really salty. And wasting it seemed unnecessary. To give it a new life, I combined it with a few ingredients on hand. A can of unsalted garbanzo beans worked well to mellow the saltiness of the feta. Parsley added color and freshness, and dill enhanced it with its delicate flavor. Lemon juice and garlic brought all the flavors together. I finished it with olive oil and a sprinkle of sumac.
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by Renu Chhabra
Food is capable of feeding far more than a rumbling stomach.–Anthony Beal
I have seen this acorn squash change from deep green to light golden on my kitchen counter over the last two weeks. Waiting for my much needed attention, it endured the neglect. I had a new idea about how to cook it every time I looked at it, so I would set it aside for yet another day. I loved seeing it sitting there turning into this beautiful objet d’art with a new stroke of color every day.
I enjoyed the the entire process, from start to finish, just as Monet enjoyed painting the same haystacks and façades day after day, in different lights.
Who would have thought a simple experience like this could also bring such curiosity? Every time I looked at it, I wondered if it would survive another day. Or would another stroke of green be lost. I touched it, inspected it, and set it aside, saying to myself, “I will make something tomorrow. Definitely.”
And it waited patiently for me, just like the Rouen Cathedral waited for Monet, looking more beautiful each day, and maintaining its freshness!
With half a dozen ideas in my mind about how to cook it, I settled for a simple recipe of roasting it and flavoring with some sweet and fragrant flavors like orange zest and toasted fennel seeds. I then combined the two with sweet paprika and sea salt to make a spice blend to toss into after roasting. Another wonderful spice blend with citrus! My new year started with spice blends.
After tossing the roasted squash, I finished it with a garnish of freshly ground cumin and parsley and a squeeze of lemon (optional). Simple and flavorful, this recipe takes very little time to make. If you have any left over, use it in your favorite grain or salad.
Herbs and spices are good for our health. Fennel seeds have wonderful healing qualities. They help digestion and have antioxidant properties. Fennel is also chewed as mouth freshener. I sometimes make fennel tea that is quite relaxing. Have it with a little honey. It’s delicious and calming.
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Eating is really one of your indoor sports. You play three times a day, and it’s well worth while to make the game as pleasant as possible.– Dorothy Draper
From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting….On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.–E.B.White (1899-1985)
Elwyn Brooks White was an American writer. He was a contributor to The New Yorker magazine and a co-author of the English language style guide The Elements of Style, which is commonly known as “Strunk & White.” He also wrote books for children, including Stuart Little and Stuart Little.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
