Quick, quick, (one month later...) I better get this blog up about the Fry Baby affair before it's forgotten, (like that BP affair :( this past summer....)

Culinary oil, essential oil and oil oil was the topic de jour... so much fun sliding between concerns about fossil fuels, carbon footprints and the health-giving/detracting qualities of different fats, and then getting to taste a variety of nut oils (Almond, Hazelnut, Sesame, Peanut and Walnut) and cocktails flavored with essential oils. Julianne Zaleta from Herbal Alchemy Apothecary http://www.herbalalchemy.net/ brought a set of essential oils (concentrated distillations made from herbs, barks, seeds, etc. One tiny drop will distinctly flavor several ounces of vodka!) Everyone mixed and matched a vodka concoction to their tastes to take home... (I made black pepper and blood orange.) Julianne also made a delicious cocktail: Fig infused vodka mixed with pear nectar and cardamon essential oil... We were off to a good start!

Our menu featured small plates from a bevy of crude producing nations: Homemade fresh-from-the-griddle Pita with Middle-Eastern Dukkah: a 'dip' of toasted seeds, nuts and spices... tear a piece of bread, dip in olive oil, then dip in the nut mixture. Venezuelan Areapas con Queso, Russian Borscht "shots," Gulf Coast Catfish Po' boys, Canadian cheeses (Canadian oil reserves if you include the 'sands' are 2nd in the world to Saudi Arabia! O how the US must envy our sisters to the North and South!) Alaskan Salmon Mousse and an assortment of Persian deserts. As folks were chowing, Sean Naughton from Bowery Lane Bicycles http://bowerylanebicycles.com and Jeff Prant from Transportation Alternatives http://www.transalt.org lead a brief albeit intense discussion about positive ways we can impact our local environment by using less fossil fuel (hmmm, what about those crazy new bike lanes?) And then... my favorite always: we skid into storytelling. Deena gave a great rendition of the seasonally appropriate Chanukah tale- accompanied by hot from the fry pan potato latkes served with dual dollops of apple sauce and sour cream. Rodney followed with a fantastic original Koan about finding Buddha in the every day- a wild tale of Buddha's journey from fossil fuel to bicycle chain oil... I can't do justice... you have to read it yourself... it's posted at the end of this blg... Our resident poet Pat followed reading a beautiful poem by Elisabeth Bishop called Filling Station. http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182897 and BTW- Pat's poetry blog can be found at: http://notinthenewstoday.com All this pleasure was in the amazingly comfortable, gracious home of Katherine and Don and their sons, here in Bklyn. They have a fantastic open kitchen, a beautiful yard, working fire places and great music! Thanks for opening your home to Communal Table!

We're excited to let you know in addition to our (near) monthly salon suppers- we'll be launching a once a month Sunday evening cooking salon starting at Don and Katherine's in mid-February. We've plans for a Bento making workshop- a celebration of all things pie- a dumpling fest... Deena and I'll provide the ingredients and some recipe ideas... and we can all work together making enough to enjoy some while we cook- and some to take some home. Keep posted for updates... Our first scheduled date is Feb 13th- we'll be playing with chocolate in honor of St. V... truffles and Mole and tamales too!

Diatom Buddha

by Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat

Once many long ages ago, in a time beyond all reckoning the Buddha was born in the form of an primordial sea organism called a diatom. He was single celled but lived in a massive colony of billions of other phytoplankton. He was a wise diatom, and while others of his kind swam about aimlessly, floating though their lives and becoming ocean floor sediment, the Buddha Diatom taught a path of simple awareness and joy in being a diatom. Of course, one day, the Buddha’s life as a diatom came to an end, and he became sediment buried on the ancient sea floor.

Over millions of years he was buried deeper and deeper. This was a long period of profound meditation and quiet. As even more millions of years went by he was compressed by enormous heat and pressure. Eventually he had become a thick brown flammable liquid. It was a dark existence, but as all different kinds of existences come to an end, the Buddha Crude was pumped up by men who had drilled a deep well. He splashed momentarily into the sunlight and then was put into a secure tank to be transported to a refinery. At the refinery the Buddha Crude was progressively heated and separated by distillation. After traveling through a complex system of processes he emerged at the end of a pipe as lubricating oil, and was placed in a can. The can was placed in a box in a warehouse, and eventually shipped to a distributor. The can that the Buddha Oil happened to be in was sold to a bicycle shop.

One day a young woman named Kimberly brought her bright peach pink bike with a wicker basket to the bicycle shop. The chain was squeaking and she thought it might have come out of alignment. The repair man looked carefully and said “It looks OK. Let’s try a little oil.” Unknowingly the oil that he dripped onto the chain was the Buddha. Immediately the chain stopped squeaking, and Kimberly’s bicycle rolled smoothy down the street.

http://www.whimsyload.com

Don't Be a Fry Baby! This Saturday

This Saturday Nov 20th

Sat Nov 20 in Park Slope Brooklyn
Communal Table invites you to explore essential oils as well as the slippery essentialness of oil to our culture. Dip, Sip, Rub and savor the richness, lightness and pleasure of an ingredient that has also inspired our culture's greediest and most destructive behaviors.
It's going to be a great evening. 

Be sure to RSVP 

Mushrooms and Moonshine was marvelous. Fantastic everything... the weather (gorgeous after a week of rain), the people and the fungi- I'm almost at a loss of what to write so used am I to finding the bit I'm critical of and writing about that...

We had incredible guidance from Paul Sadowski of the NY Mycological Society

http://www.newyorkmyc.org/nymsfuse/news.php who agreed to join us not knowing who we are... just 'cause he loves fungi and has faith in the goodness of mushroom lovers. Everyone

gathered for a foraging walk through nearby Beebe Hill State Park (aglow with autumnal splendor!) and then Paul lead an identification discussion before cocktails and supper at Deena and Rodney's beautiful Columbia county home. I should be able to write about all the fungi we collected (some were edible and we tasted them the next day at breakfast) but I was too busy in the kitchen getting supper ready... so MAYBE one of our guests will post a comment about what you found!!!!

Cocktails were Martini's with mushrooms instead of olives, and hors d'oeuvres included homemade pickle canapes, marinated button mushrooms, glazed shiitakes and crimini confit. First course was a light dashi broth with an assortment of dried and fresh 'shrooms Deena foraged from Chinatown in NYC. Entree was spinach, chard and ricotta Malfati (dumplings) with sage scented brown butter, sautéed Portabella's, Chanterelle and Oyster's deglazed with whisky, cider glazed Kachoba squash, and herbed roasted red onions. Salad was gorgeous heirloom tomatoes whose colors echoed the forrest. It was heavy Umami (a Japanese word describing the fifth taste sense: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the elusive Umami which incorporates foods high in natural glutamates.) Lots and lots of earthy flavors and a celebration of blustery fall. Dessert was gingered maple cake with creme fraiche, maple glazed pecans and cider caramel. While we were eating Deena spoke a bit about her experience making Apple Jack (hard cider) which we served later in the evening (along with s'mores) around a campfire...

Next morning... we had the incredible fortune to visit Ukulele Sara's island house- an 1920's speakeasy turned summer house on a tiny island in Lake Kinderhook. We canoed over for delicious mushroom and tarragon fritatta's, plum kuchen, caraway shortbreads, cream scones and good strong coffee (to help counteract the Jack wooziness from extended storytelling round the fire.) Sara serenaded with a ballad about the island's history and shared a brand new love "duet" between a dying tree and its symbiotic mycelium that she had composed in the wee hours of that very night. Folk songs followed, along with mimosa's and good cheer.

Communal Table's idea for this particular salon supper was to bring to the table the magical quality of fungi (which is it's own Kingdom of our Earth's five: animal, vegetable, multiple celled bacteria, single cells, and fungi,) and relate this to the storytelling aspects of fantasy kingdoms: fairies and ghosts and whatnot. Plus there's the whole bit about the psychotropic aspect of certain mushrooms... and the charge we feel dabbling in the potential for poison: defying death with every bite. There is certainly an element of a hunt, fungi foraging, but it goes beyond the thrill of the find- somehow there is an "otherness" that frightens, repulses and ultimately attracts. I think this aspect- being on the edge (yet eating and drinking heartily with friends) is what made this salon supper so successful. We so love to push boundaries yet are so relieved to do it safely, without consequence.

Mushrooms and Moonshine

pickle heaven

We pickled 'em good then pickled some more- offering snacks, pickles and pickle making to 120 people over two gloriously sun filled days in the garden at Old Stone House. Folks coming off the Farm City tour bus (run on compressed gas) having made rounds of several Bklyn farms were greeted with chilled Brooklyn Brewery beer and a plate of goodies featuring produce from some of the farms. Calaloo Empanadas (calaloo from East NY Farms!, Schenk Ave. betw. New Lots and Lavonia, mkt. Sat. 9 - 3) Corn Pudding with Tomatillo Salsa (ingredients from BK Farmyards, Kingston @ Winthrop, mkt, Wed. 3:30 - 7) Roasted Delicata Squash with Ethiopian Berbere spice rub (Delicata from Hattie Carthan Community Garden, 645 Lafayette Ave., mkt. on Sat. am- plus drumming circle, eggs, bread baking and cooking demo's) Garlic and Herb Roasted Red Onions (the Secret Garden Farm and Bushwick Farmer's mkt., corner B'dway and Linden, Wed. 10 - 6 ) and shots of Gazpacho made with cukes from Added Value in Red Hook. Cooking demo's (eggplants and okra) and pickle tastings added to the pleasure- and folks were delighted to fill a jar of their own to take home and enjoy later in the week. These are refrigerator pickles made by marinating raw vegetables in a salty sweet brine. They're not canned or fermented so they only last a week or two in the fridge... but they're fun and easy to make and are perfect on sandwiches or with cocktails!

. We'll be serving some of these pickles on rye bread with butter at the next Farm City event on Fri. 9/24 (along with other snacks including Deena's homemade peanut butter cups!) This is a fundraiser featuring a reading by Novella Carpenter, author of "Farm City" and an alt-country hoe-down with music by JD Durante @ The Commons, 388 Atlantic Ave starting at 7pm

Other Communal Table news... our next upstate salon supper (Oct. 2-3) is selling out fast- "Mushrooms and Moonshine" a week-end extravaganza with mushroom foraging, Apple Jack, and Ghost stories round a campfire, followed by a canoe ride to a tiny island for mushroom omelets the next morning...

Upcoming in Nov.- "Don't be a Fry Baby," a salon supper in NYC that explores essential oils and oils essentialness!

Farm City

As research for of the upcoming Communal Table pickle making workshop at the Old Stone House in September, I've been visiting the farms we'll be buying produce from (the farms are part of a tour during the Farm City event... itself part of Crossing the Life festival http://www.fiaf.org/crossingtheline/2010/2010-09-ctl-farmcity-tour.shtml which we'll be part of. This past week I visited the East NY Farmer's Market over on New Lots Ave, the Hattie Carthan Community Gardens in Bed-Sty, and BK Farmyard's acre on the lawn of the High School for Public Service in Crown Hts. All three of these gardens nurture youth empowerment, community activism and food justice, and the markets offer fresh and affordable vegetables in neighborhoods fresh vegetables are hard to come by.

Tooling around in my car, getting lost (poor sense of direction) and becoming found, seeing my beloved city anew with each foray, I am forever awed by the expanse of NYC- by the vast riches of culture but also by the scope of poverty and the divides between neighborhoods. Often, driving through the vastness of Brooklyn I despair the possibility of creating a more just and peaceful world. These markets are bright spots bursting with goodwill and hopeful energy, and for me, getting to talk with people I would not ordinarily meet is a joyful experience nearing the spiritual.

I bought half a dozen empanadas, tasted peanut punch and spice bread, learned about a new squash varietal and saw the magnificently lewd red seeds (?) that are inside a ripe bitter melon. I saw people taking care, kids proud and learning, listened to the sing song of vendors, smelled the perfume of sage. I realized again that in the narrowness of daily life the assumptions and thoughts that flow from limitation must be vigilantly challenged, and that a wonderful way to do this is to stand in a market and take it all in. Then take the goodness home and cook something to share with family; it is a joyful experience nearing the spiritual.

Meanwhile, it made me realize Deena and I have to totally rethink the menu we're planning for the Farm City Tour. Weeks ago, writing the proposal for this event I was thinking about what might be ripe during Brooklyn's September, and I ran these produce selections through my brains storeroom of tried and true recipes. I didn't even think to consider bitter melon or cucuzza squash or callaloo or peanut juice or spicy empanadas. What was I thinking?

Brooklyn farms are most importantly about her people and their stories, more so than about the actual vegetables. The acreage is small but the yield is mighty. Communal Table's great opportunity will be to pickle and preserve a tiny bit of it.

Meat proved hard to present:

not 'cause some feel it's wrong consuming flesh- or because of CAFO's (concentrated animal feeding operations) or rGBH (artificial growth hormones) or the disproportionate acreage devoted to corn and soy to feed livestock when the same acreage could feed humans, or even the manure generated green gas gasses trapped in the stratosphere.

For me it was because of the hands-on attention grilling meat requires, and the particular kitchen lay-out of our hosts gracious home. Instead of being "front of the house" at our party I spent the whole night tending stove.

In the days before the event Deena and I ran about

speaking with butchers- finding out the where and why of what

they were selling- mostly we bought from shops Suzanne Wasserman, our film-maker guest speaker recommended, so we knew we'd be able to get reputably raised and interesting cuts. Fleisher's in Kingston actually gifted a dozen plus chorizo sausages (thank you Jessica and Joshua!) As usual our menu ideas changed daily. I wanted meat appetizers but a veg meal that focused on the grains and grasses we feed to livestock- Deena (vegetarian that she is) thought otherwise... then I worried there wouldn't be enough and did the usual adding and adding, while D. tried to pair things down.

We had Malaysian Jerky, Liverwurst canapés and grilled steak with shredded Shiso to go with Bloody Martini's, and a Carpaccio and Arugula first course. This was followed by grilled Flanken (thinly sliced beef rib,) Chorizo, Lamb and Apricot kebobs, Grilled chili-rubbed Corn, Oats, groats and barley salad with eggplant and mint, and sliced heirloom tomatoes (to say nothing of the lemon shortcakes with blueberries and cream.) All local/organic and from what I can tell, sustainably grown... (by young white folks... hmmm!?)

The meat of the matter however (for me at least) is the storytelling. Viewing Suzanne's clip of "Meat Hooked" touched upon our collectively focused, reawakened effort to eat consciously- and after viewing, a vocal few passionately engaged in dialogue about slaughterhouse regulation and whatnot. Called to table, the conversation broke into multiple threads. We'd set a beautiful long outdoor table (and re-set and wiped it down multiple times before we all sat down because of intermittent drenching showers.) Long, flower-strewn tables look cool- but do not engender group conversation... so aesthetics aside, the table proved a detriment to the conversational engagement we'd envisioned for the evening. Missing too was Deena's or my gentle nudge to steer conversation, as we were cooking-away apart from the

crowd.

There is no doubt Communal Table puts out a mighty spread- as beautiful, tasty and thoughtful as could be- but what's still elusive is our intent to use the meal as a forum for storytelling. Pat read Roald Dahls "Lamb to the Slaughter" a masterful story- albeit long, and despite the glorious setting, fine food and flowing drink, folks squirmed; so not used to extended listening are we. Ukulele Sara sang several sexy songs about pork chops and butchers, author Steve Stern and graphic novelist Sabrina Jones shared "Hippie Hog Butcher of the Ozarks" which'll be published in the upcoming World War 3 issue # 41 "Food Chains" (that I'm co-editing! www.worldwar3illustrated.org) Beck amused with tales of raising cattle... It sounds like plenty- and we had invited each of these specific stories, but there followed no eruption of spontaneous storytelling or impromptu poems. Is there hesitation to engage with each other and the food in dialogue that shares our histories and dreams? Or was it that it's such a consuming effort to turn out food for 30 that I am missing the nuance of experience? Is this actually happening during our Communal Table salons?

Also, not to burden any potential readers to this blog- there's still the financial conundrum. No matter what we charge it is both too expensive and not enough to cover costs (this event was $55 per guest.) I bring this up not to complain, but because its interesting to ponder how as a culture we value food and entertainment, and how paying for an experience sets up hierarchical expectations between server and served. Deena and I are hardly ground breaking activists, the political consciousness we mark at table is gleaned from the populace. We're hardly ground breaking culinarians either, though our spread is mighty fine. These traits alone garner paying crowds to workshops or restaurants and underground supper clubs. Nor are we offering a bohemian basement where for five bucks cover and a beer you can hear young poets. We're trying to combine: political passion, exceptional and thoughtful food and engagement with all of this through storytelling( and on occasion hands-on making or tasting things.)

I know there's a marked divide between front and back of the house experience... I'd so love for our guests to use this blog space to offer feed-back and suggestions as to how we can combine all these experiences into an evening's salon.

With luck, our upstate NY, October 4th salon might just bring all these elements together. We've invited NY Mycologist Paul Sadowski to lead a mushroom foraging walk, which'll be followed by a mushroom supper and then a bonfire 'round which we'll serve homemade apple jack (and demonstrate how its made) and tell stories from the realms of fungi, fairies and ghosts.

Here's a list of the butchers we used:

Jessica and Joshua Applestone of Fleisher's http://www.fleishers.com (chorizo)

http://www.flyingpigsfarm.com (liverwurst)

http://www.aberdeenhillfarm.com (lamb)

Jake from Dickson's Farmstand in Chelsea Market http://www.dicksonsfarmstand.com (beef)

The jerky was like sweet, salty, spicy candy and came from Malaysia Jerky at 95A on Elisabeth St. http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2009/03/malaysia-beef-jerky-in-chinatown-nyc.html