Parents Night Dinner = Big Success

We had a great crowd of parents, kids and staff at our "Parents Night" dinner celebrating our "food appreciation" classes. With staff plating the food and kids running the plates to the tables, everything moved like clockwork.

As you can see, there's nothing terribly fancy about the dining room. But we do dress the table with place mats drawn by the kids and laminated, plus laminated menus. And this year, you might be able to discern on the table a number of our pickles and preserves. We grouped jars of our dill pickles, sweet pickled green tomatoes, pickled watermelon rinds and pickled pumpkin. Plus, there were jars of apple butter and hot pepper vinegar to go with a very Southern menu:

Hoppin' John (beans & rice)

Collard Greens

Fresh Apple Sauce

Buttermilk Biscuits

Dessert: Apple

We urged the parents to take any leftover pickles home. And we had a selection by the door as well. There was no secret which one they liked best. "Hey, Ed!" Cried one group of parents. "We're on our second jar of green tomatoes!"

Well, I love the pickled green tomatoes as well. But my favorite may be the sweet pickled watermelon rinds, flavored with cardamom seeds. They are nearly irresistible.

The menu represents the beginning of our the virtual world culinary tour in this year's "food appreciation" classes. We started right here in the District of Columbia by pickling and canning our favorite produce. Then we started south, making all sorts of apple recipes in the Shenandoah Valley, then into North Carolina for skillet corn bread, the to Low Country for Hoppin' John and deeper into The South for our collard greens.

I would never have expected this meal to be so popular. But people were coming back to the food line for seconds and thirds. They were so disappointed when we finally served the last of the biscuits.

But there's not a spare moment to gloat over our success. It's already time to start planning for this week's food adventure....

Not Born in the USA

Our friend Eric was not born in the U.S. but in the city of Lille, France. His future wife, Mary, was American, however. They met in France and farmed together, then moved to this country.


We met Eric in the catering business. Eric had been a catering supervisor and was one of the best in the business here in the District of Columbia, or what may be the catering center of the universe.

Eric had an ingenious hobby. He collected the pieces and shards of broken platters from various catering events and turned them into incredible mosaics. At one point, he had his studio in our house. You always knew Eric was around by the sound of his snippers snipping broken ceramic to fit in his mosaics.

Mary died of breast cancer a few years ago and Eric now runs a small events operation for one of the local think tanks. But we love his company and especially his dry humor and his laugh. He always threatens to move back to France, but recently he made our country his country, becoming a U.S. citizen. We had to celebrate and raise the roof. My wife went all out.


The preparations took a week. First my wife made a visit to Ikea and picked up some flexible ice cube molds with stars and bars shapes. She used cranberry and blueberry juice to start freezing patriotic ice cubes. Then she devised an all-American menu: meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, braised green beans and Caesar salad with homemade garlic croutons, followed by ice cream and cookies.


She started on the cookies days ahead. Chocolate-chip, peanut butter, snickerdoodles--she made the dough, then used a small mechanical scoop to turn then into little balls that she then froze so they would be ready to bake later. Two days before the party, she was also scooping out small rounds of chocolate and vanilla ice cream and stuffing what might be best described a tall ceramic shot glasses. These would be displayed with chocolate and caramel sauces and whipped cream.

My contribution was the meat loaf and the green beans. Friends Keith and Janice brought the wine as well as a retro onion dip with rippled potato chips. My wife displayed patriotic dinner plates (we just happen to have a collection) in red and blue with white stars. Our best white linen napkins were freshly pressed and rolled with forks.

It was a great party. Eric, being the curmudgeonly Frenchman, had to be tricked into having a party at all. But he quickly turned into the perfect guest of honor, greeting all the guests as they arrived and circulating like a champ. He was beaming, and everyone else was lapping up the beer and raving about the macaroni and cheese.

The meatloaf and macaroni and cheese were every bit as good reheated the next day. And Eric is talking about being naturalized on an annual basis from now on.

Catered Brunch

One of our best friends is the dean of a very progressive law school here in the District of Columbia and each year my wife and I try to do our part for the cause by donating a catered event to the annual school auction.

More specifically, we donate our time preparing and serving dinner for eight. The auction winner pays for groceries and beverages.

In the past, the high bidder has been another friend who knows he can torment us by stretching the meaning of "dinner for eight" into a fabulous feast for a house full of his other friends.

Last year the winners of the auction item were a couple very prominent in the law school community. And I would be speaking of this particular meal in the past tense (since the auction was held more than a year ago) except that mostly what we've done with this couple for the past 14 months is exchange a lot of phone messages.

In fact, this particular donation has dragged on for so long that we stipulated in this year's auction that the offer of our services is valid for no more than one year. How else to keep these donated events from hanging over our heads like a death sentence?

This particular auctioned dinner has turned into a Sunday brunch for eight and it looks as though it actually will take place this week. So I thought I would share the menu, just to give an idea how a small-scale caterer approaches a seasonal Sunday brunch for a fairly intimate group.

I have many objections to the way catering menus are designed, some of which I may get into another time. Mostly, caterers pay no attention to the seasons and are simply trying to impress with culinary pyrotechnics. Trendiness drowns out all sense of functionality. The menus look like something straight out of a wet dream at Bon Appetit magazine, with simplicity, seasonality and good taste thrown by the wayside.

I look at menu designing as an opportunity to fit the food to the season, the client and the occasion. Also you have to consider the portability of the food, whether it will stand up to re-heating or requires cooking a la minute (hopefully not). Ease of handling and predictability of the end result are equally important factors.

Then you have to add all the knowns about what foods work with crowds. For instance, not everyone likes lamb--too gamy (shocking, I know). Some people will not eat chicken thighs (even though all the flavor is in the thighs). And you have to watch the heat factor in "spicy" foods (not something we need concern ourselves with when cooking for our own friends).

An artful caterer will manage to put all this together and still come out with a menu that looks just right for the time, the place and the client. It might not be what I would serve in my own home. Then again, I'd wager that most caterers rarely if ever cook in their own home.

So I unveil this brunch menu intended for a lovely Spring Sunday near the Chesapeake Bay. And while you are looking it over, I will be dialing up some lovely Spring weather to go with it....

Champagne, Mimosas and Fresh Orange Juice

Poached Salmon Steaks w/ Dill Sauce

Local Asparagus w/ Chive Vinaigrette

Celery Root Remoulade

Quinoa Pilaf w/ Peas & Fava Beans

Salad from Our Garden w/ Shaved Fennel & Fresh Goat Cheese

Strawberry Trifle

The Gentle Art of Re-Heating

I know many of you are anxious to hear the results of the parents dinner last night.

It was a huge success, with many raves for a menu representing the work I've been doing with the kids in my "food appreciation" classes.

Besides the kids themselves, the stars were the fresh Kielbasa sausages that the kids helped me fill over the last couple of days, plus a sauerkraut that I had fermented using our bucket method and braised with onions, apples, juniper berries and carraway.

The kids have been learning to peel vegetables. Lots of peeling going on. Se we also served boiled parsleyed potatoes and glazed carrots with dill. And for desert, highlighting our exploration of certain whole grains, oatmeal cookies with dried fruits and chocolate chips.

I had been told to expect 40 for dinner, so I made enough for 60, knowing how these things go. The trick is not so much making the food. No, that's the easy part. The challenge was getting the food hot again without overcooking it once we arrived at the school.

My wife and I have spent some years in the catering business and catering is all about reheating food. Many wedding guests may not realize that their fabulous dinner was actually cooked two days ahead of time, then merely brought up to serving temperature at the appropriate moment.

Yet that's why caterers get paid the big bucks. Most of the food, especially the side dishes, are prepared well in advance then re-heated with sterno in tall aluminum proofing boxes. The proofing boxes roll of the catering trucks and cans of sterno are arranged on baking sheets and lit under the food.

Some items, such as expensive beef tenderloin, chicken breasts and fish filets, are too delicate to cook and reheat. More often than not, they've been "marked" on a hot grill to give the food a chic restaurant look. Then the cooking process is completed over the sterno.

Imagine the value of a chef who can finish off, say, 30 whole beef tenderloins to perfect medium-rare doneness at exactly the right moment to serve a hall full of wedding guests? The thought is almost frightening, yet this time of year it's done all the time.

Now we cater our own dinner parties at home. Meaning, no crazy chefs running around trying to cook a la minute, scaring the guests. We have the meal cooked ahead so we it can just warm in the oven while we enjoy a cocktail and gab with our friends.

The food for last night's event had been cooked and refrigerated in the kind of big aluminum chaffing containers shown in the picture above. But we didn't have any proofing boxes at the school where we were serving dinner. Our heat source was the school's stove and range top.

How then to get all this food hot enough to serve at the moment our parents were ready to eat?

That's where my wife, the catering chef, comes in.

The method we used was to separate some of the denser and colder items, such as the sausages and the potatoes, into separate containers. I had not taken any chances with the pork sausages. They were already cooked through, but they were really cold after being in the fridge overnight.

My wife placed two containers of sausages in the oven, set at 350 degrees. She put one container of potatoes, dressed with some butter, in a small warming compartment on the side of the oven. That left containers of sauerkraut, carrots and more potatoes to heat. We accomplished that on the range top, setting the aluminums over four burners plus a full-sized griddle.

You just keep a close eye on the food on top of the range, stirring often to make sure nothing burns.

When the time came to serve, we had an assembly line ready at our food prep tables. The kids lined up to take plates of food and deliver them to their parents. Within a few short minutes, everyone was eating.

And if you listen closely, you can hear the sighs and the moans over our delicious food.

"My son won't eat the Kielbasa I make at home," said the school nurse. "But he came home this week and said he'd eaten the best Kielbasa ever."

You'd be surprised what kids will eat when they make it themselves.

Wild Pesto That Saved the Day

The chickweed pesto was a sensation at yesterday's schoolyard greening lunch.

So imagine my chagrin when, after getting up at the crack of dawn to make a last-minute vinaigrette for one of my pasta salads, and after pulling platters to display the lunch on, and after hauling all this equipment plus a cooler full of food to the National Arboretum ( to say nothing of getting my wife out of bed so she could drive me there so she could have the car for the day)--imagine my dismay when I finally arrived at the Washington Youth Garden at 8:30 in the AM to find that I had forgotten to pack the ckickweed pesto.

I just stared into that cooler. And stared. And stared...

It was one of those Can-We-Just-Have-One-Do-Over moments...

Jenny, the garden manager, soon to be moving to Brooklyn to manage a garden there, was particularly distraught. She had been so looking forward to that pesto. I thought she was going to make me run home--literally, on foot-- and fetch it. Then one of our organizers volunteered to drive the several miles back to my house in the District of Columbia to collect the AWOL container of pesto.

Yet, when I called home to alert my wife to all this, she saved the day by agreeing to deliver the pesto after dropping our daughter off at ballet, which happens to be not so far from the arboretum.

Whew...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was Day 2 of the annual Schoolyard Greening teacher's clinic wherein we subject the teachers to approximately four hours of hands-on instruction in seed planting and transplanting, cultivating and educating with herbs, composting and vermiculture and--for my part--maintaining the garden (e.g. preventing or getting rid of weeds in an organic fashion).

This being my first year as an instructor, I was relying on the kindness of these teachers to tolerate my fumblings and just let me get through it.

I did think it was highly appropriate (brilliant, even) that our pesto featured chickweed, otherwise a noxious garden intruder. To illustrate the point, I found plenty of chickweed frolicking over the Youth Garden grounds while I was giving my little clinic in weed maintenance. There were a few gasps when I demonstrated that there are more than one way to deal with weeds, and plucked a few of the more succulent chickweed stems and ate them au naturel.

Otherwise, there were cheers all around for the food. The curry-roasted cauliflower and the collard-goat cheese frittata were completely devoured. Many came back for seconds on the "Caesar" salad with fresh garden lettuce and homemade croutons. I simply made too much of the pasta salad duo: penne with grilled chicken, artichoke and chickweed pesto, whole wheat rotini with spring vegetables and lemon vinaigrette.

In fact, there were several requests for the chickweed pesto recipe. We'll just have to do this again next year. Maybe we can even work a few more weeds into the menu.

Triumph of the Chickweed

Chickweed, or stellaria media, normally is the bane of the vegetable garden. It grows in great creeping matts, insinuating itself into the beds, twining itself around the plants we are trying to grow for food.

This time of year, chickweed is just beginning to bloom and form seeds here in the District of Columbia. So by all means, get rid of it wherever you find it, right?

Well, not so fast. Yes, we are pulling it up everywhere we see it, or cutting it down with the mower. We definitely do not want it going to seed. But did you know that chickweed is edible?

Chickweed is high in vitamin C, also in magnesium, potassium and calcium. It's sold in tablet form as an herbal supplement. But that is hardly my point. What I'm trying to get at is, although I would not go around harvesting chickweed to serve for dinner, I am using great gobs of it for the lunch I am preparing for approximately 30 people attending Day 2 of our D.C. Schoolyard Greening teacher's clinic, taking place today at the Washington Youth Garden.

That's right, I am serving a weed for lunch.

I recently acquired a copy of The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, by Sandor Ellix Katz. He's the fellow that wrote the book about wild fermentation that I am so often quoting when making sauerkraut. The more recent volume is about various food movements, such as the raw milk movement, community supported agriculture, seed saving, to name a few.

Around page 34, Katz pauses to compose an ode to chickweed, which he apparently devours by the fistful when he's out in the garden. Sounds a bit primitive, I agree. But he also gives a perfectly reasonable recipe for turning said weed into a pesto.

So I thought, why not?

I gathered up a bag full of chickweed from the garden, making my vegetable beds very happy. I washed it a couple of times, picking out stray bits of this and that. I then committed a horrible sin: I ran several cups full of chickweed through the food processor.

Sorry, but I was in a hurry. I violated all my personal rules about making sauces and pestos in an actual mortar and pesto. So sue me.

I removed the chickweed and dropped about five cloves of garlic into the processor. Then perhaps 1 1/2 cups of walnuts. Then back in went the chickweed and maybe 1/2 cup of extra-virgin olive oil drizzled in while the machine was running. Then I added, oh, about 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese and whipped that in. And maybe 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

So it has all the look and feel of a real pesto, this chickweed concoction. My wife wasn't so very enthusiastic about it. But for me it truely is a revelation.

But wait--we're not done. I had a container of Latin crema, or sour cream, in the fridge, so I added that, maybe 1/2 cup. Now the pesto rose to glorious heights. I will be mixing it with a pasta salad of penne, grilled chicken, red onion, artichoke hearts and capers.

Sounds pretty delicious and springlike, no?

The rest of the menu cosists of:

A whole wheat fussili pasta salad primavera with asparagus, carrots, peas and baby lettuces out of our garden.

A "Caesar" salad of lettuces that overwintered in the garden, with homemade croutons.

Frittata with collards and kale harvested from the garden, along with goat cheese and garlic chives.

We had originally hoped to make this meal around locally grown produce. Then we decided it was too early in the year to find local produce. But lookey here: Half of this meal is made with ingredients out of my own garden.

Who knew?