Sing For Your Supper

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Communal Table's What's Cooking Club BentoFun

This Sunday April 10 4-7PM  in SoHo NYC

Lunch becomes a composition and a thing of beauty in the Japanese Bento Box. Have some fun with Japanese CharaBen (character bento) and geek out making rice ball bunnies and sushi frogs. Or eschew silly fun and go all elegant with traditional Japanese arrangements. Either way it's a great way to make a meal.
We'll supply the ingredients and the tools, you bring your imagination- and maybe some wine or other drinks not usually associated with box lunches.


25.00 per person
RSVP required
BUY TICKETS HERE!


want to know more about this whole Bento phenomenon?
check out the links:
kawaii bento

gacha gacha bento
elegant bento

bento 4 Japan auction

Oh, boy, ticket prices reduced to $20

Covered Dish: A Potluck of Ideas is this Wednesday, March 30 
6:30PM @ 61 Local Public House in Brooklyn
Tickets have been reduced to $20.00 so get one and come on by!
BUY TICKETS HERE

Believe me, it's a terrific deal- the food will be great, you'll be in excellent company and the beer and wine is fab. 61 Local is really beautiful- if you haven't been there yet, it's worth checking out. 
Come talk, listen and eat. Everyone has a potluck, church supper, school picnic, family reunion story..... what's yours?

Covered Dish: A Potluck of Ideas

BUY TICKETS HERE

Pie²+∞♀(and 1 ♂)= ☺+many Kcal's

am still nibbling pie three days later- herbed spinach with olive oil crust, lemon meringue, and then there were the slices distributed round the neighborhood to pay off or conversely, create debt: two kinds of chocolate, arborio pudding glazed w. apricot jam, yeasted Wisconsin/Belgium-style prune, and pizza dough "rustica" with cheeses, sausage and ham. And that's only to name a few. The real celebration is a bunch of folk- some having never met, coming to "our Communal Table" to bake pie, together. Welcome to What's Cooking? club.

the What's Cooking column

Probably the coolest thing I made since the last "What's Cooking" post was apple fruit-leather: un-sweetened apricot applesauce spent 20+ hrs. atop microwave safe plastic-wrap (so it could be easily peeled-off) on a sheetpan, dehydrating in my oven. Turned out really delicious- a bright sweet concentrated flavor... toothsomely chewy- and it would've taken shorter if my oven had better controls... (it's supposed to take 8hrs. @ 140∘ but mine kept shutting off.) This would be a good thing to put in (a better oven than mine) before bed... and then viola! the perfect snack sometime mid-day or next day or whenever- as this is a preservation technique from days-of-yore and the stuff stores well w/o refrigeration.

I brought it to this month's PST (the salon I cook for where different people present a talk each month and the meal relates to the talk.) This month featured Lincoln Bickford, a PhD, MD whose talk (in part) was about his journey across the world seeking healing, and spiritual healing techniques that enhance Western medical practice. Lincoln suggested I look to Taoist or Ayerverdic recipes for inspiration- and I did make Kitchari, a spiced basmati and mung bean "pilaf" recommended for easy digestion, paired with organic chicken broth & matzoh balls (from my own ethnic healing traditions) with a scoop of alphabet noodles to represent the healing power of words. This was served with iron rich sauteed greens, high in antioxidant blueberries and dark chocolate (and the fruit leather.) It was an amusing contrast to last months meal that focused on the fortifying properties of "comfort" foods- that meal was a butter, egg and cheese feast while this months was lightness and simplicity, but both aimed to taste of nurture and well-being.

Another cool thing this week was to lend a hand to friend Mihir Desai, who was preparing a collaborative performance/meal with Natalie Jeremijenko at Postmaster Gallery, focusing on climate change and agriculture. The five course menu was laced with the tastes of smoke, ash and soil. I got to nibble as we sculpted, squirt and scattered ingredients into gorgeous array, but found a number of the tastes overly intense for my palate. Mihir's food is a festival of Modernist cuisine. An engagement with sensation that in ways places sense experience over deliciousness, but the attention to detail and aesthetics are phenomenal. One fantastic dish was a slice of ash coated goat cheese aside a button of pineapple, ginger and caper geleé, paired with a scallop that lay under a smoke filled glass, which when lifted allowed charred applewood and orange peel scent to waft to your nose. Mihir has this great smoke gun that looks like a hot-glue gun, and all sorts of foamers and dehydrators and digital water-bath thermometers.

I'm trying to explore the gap between Mihir's work and Communal Table's, not by way of judgement, but because I want to understand the vastness of food's possibility. Mihir's work, more than many of the chef's working with technologically based cuisine, is content driven, layered equally with theory and narrative- so I'm baffled by how strongly I feel it diverges with ours, though we too try our best to layer these things. There is something about the demand of focus on isolated sensation, something about the technological showmanship, something masculine vs. the feminine focus on commensality and nurturance Deena and I tend towards. Perhaps it's highbrow vs. low/pop, excitement vs. comfort, or perhaps this is hopelessly cliched and the binary hopelessly simplistic. While I was so happy to have been able to see, smell, touch and taste a bit, I admit I was pleased go home and eat a big bowl of pesto noodles and chicken parmesan with my son.

In contrast, this past week Communal Table cooked for the NES conference @CUNY which was also about climate change and agriculture. http://opencuny.org/nature/blog/ The food organizing committee was committed to "walking the walk;" offering a "sustainable" meal to conference participants. We sourced local (Bed Sty. chicken's egg salad sandwiches,) used organics (grain salad with watermelon radishes) and seasonal (homemade beet, carrot and onion pickles.) Offered vegetarian, with vegan and gluten free alternatives, and served everything on recycled or compostable "paper-goods" that were actually brought to a community garden in Queens for composting. There was soup too, and dessert and home steeped herbal iced tea-- The meal was colorful, healthful, tasty and full of love-- everyone was thrilled, yet it was far from sustainable! Why? Because there's no way to charge enough for Deena and I to earn anything even near minimum wage producing such a meal. Mihir's extravaganza served 20 in a fancy Chelsea gallery for a price I couldn't afford-- and his costs and equipment are underwritten by arts grants. Communal Table put out quality food for 125 guests@ under $10 a head, which stressed the Academic's coffer... it's hard making sense.

Pie-a-palooza

Can't quite remember whether pi measures circumference or diameter or if it helps figure out relationships, but I am thinking about shepherd's pie, pizza pie, and my mom's instant graham cracker My-T-fine pudding pie, and oh yeah, Marcella Hazan's rice pudding pie glazed with apricot jam. Deena's talking about hot water crust meat pies a la the UK except in a vegetarian iteration, which may not sound sexy- but the savories and hand pies Deena's put out in the past, preceed her!

What pie's in your eye?

Never wrestled dough before? We'll teach ya!

Communal Table's What's Cooking club meets next Sunday afternoon 3/13 (as close to 3.14159265 as we could get.)

Remember- cooking club is conceived to be a real club- like: we're all equal participant members who want to cook things together we might not be so willing to attempt alone in our own kitchens! It's a chance to try an ambitious recipe, learn skills from each other, or taste something new. CTW'sC club has set the theme for the next two months- pie, and then 4/10: Bento Fun!, but after that it'll become a collective decision making process. We're thinking rather than Communal Table buying ingredients and charging you, dear reader/eater, we'll all contribute enough to share and nibble and take home a bit to share with family and friends, (ahh, so much for CT becoming a lucrative business-- why not at least create a fantastic community of cohorts!)

Though the theme for pie is set, the specifics of what we'll be cooking are not yet. Details'll come from back and forth emailing as we collectively set a menu and figure out ingredients, who buys what, etc. SOOOO, PLEASSSSE... email if you wanna come. Tell us your ideas, or come and contribute even if you haven't a clue... we'll put you to work!!!!!

hmmm... my techno-saviness is zilch... so email me directly rather than through any other obscure portal: amenyc@earthlink.net RSVP is required so we get enough ingredients, etc.