Vanessa Barrington

Fall Chicories Salad and Free Soup Class this Friday in Emeryville

This is one of those salads I could eat every day for months. All local from the farmers' market. Annabelle's puntarelle and escarole, Blossom Bluff persimmons, Art Davis' pecans (spiced with a little brown sugar, cayenne and other spices), and Somebody's pomegranates but I don't remember whose. It's bitter and sweet and crunchy and spicy and refreshing and it's just a great salad. I usually make a lighter vinaigrette with shallots (no garlic) and lemon juice or Champagne vinegar.

In other news:

Nishanga and I will be teaching a FREE soup class this Friday at The Cog.

Ways with Soup
 
Join CoG members and cooking teachers Vanessa Barrington and Nishanga Bliss in an exploration of the many ways of making economical, nourishing, delicious soups.  Veggie stocks and bone broths, the wonders of miso, cream soups and bean soups, soups and fermentation, recipes, and much much more!  Bring a mug and spoon for tasting.  FREE! If you're not a member come and learn from Susan Fleming how The Cog can save you money.
 7pm at The Cog 67th and Hollis in Emeryville.

Curtido & Raita from the Eat Real Festival

Thanks to everyone who attended my fermentation demo on Friday at Eat Real. I had a blast and it was great to see so many enthusiastic fermenters out there. As promised, here is the curtido recipe for those who did not get one and following that, a link to Nishanga Bliss' blog post about fermenting with her raita recipe. I can't recommend her blog enough, especially for people who want to learn more about nutrition and how to eat deliciously. She's a macrobiotic chef, an acupuncturist and she's working on her doctorate right now.

 Curtido

Time Required: 15 minutes active; 3 to 5 days passive

The technique for making curtido is exactly like sauerkraut. Curtido is a great foil for rich, heavy, meaty, or fatty foods, which is why it’s so good on pupusas. I like it on tacos and beans too.

Makes 1 quart

1 medium head green cabbage, sliced as thinly as possible
1/2 a small onion, peeled and sliced thinly
2-3 carrots, peeled and grated on the large holes of a box grater
1-2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 jalapenos, cut in quarters lengthwise, seeded and sliced thinly
1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, crushed

Put the cabbage, onion, and carrots in a large bowl. Add the salt and, with clean hands, toss and squeeze the vegetables until they start to soften and release their liquid (about 5 minutes). Add the jalapenos and oregano and toss to distribute. Pack the mixture tightly into a one-quart, wide-mouthed glass Mason jar, pushing down on the vegetables with a wooden spoon or your fingertips with as much force as you can until the level of liquid rises above the vegetables. Put a smaller jar inside the glass jar to keep the vegetables submerged. Cover with a clean tea towel and secure with a rubber band.

Leave out at room temperature for about 3 to 5 days. Check once daily to be sure the vegetables stay submerged, pushing down on them if needed. Taste daily starting on the 2nd day. The curtido is ready when it tastes good to you. When it’s to your liking, fasten the lid and transfer it to the refrigerator. It will last months in the refrigerator. It doesn’t really go bad but will soften over time.

Nishanga's Blog

Me and fill-in MC, Michelle Fuerst, having a good time in the Scratch Kitchen.

Photo Credits: Susan Fleming

Sea Vegetables & Have you heard About the Free & Fun Workshops at The Cog?

I’ve been teaming up with Nishanga Bliss on a series of FREE workshops at The Cog. It’s been fantastic, so I just wanted to share. Nishanga is a wealth of knowledge about sustainability, nutrition, and tasty food. A chef and acupuncturist, she holds a Masters in Chinese Medicine.

We make a great tag-team because we’re both passionate about food and strive to eat and teach others to eat as sustainably and healthily as possible. And Nishanga knows about all the stuff I don’t know about, like sea vegetables, so I love her for that. Plus she’s cool.

Her workshop really opened my eyes. I’ve always enjoyed sea vegetables when I’ve encountered then but I knew next to nothing about them. She talked about how sea vegetables can absorb and flush environmental toxins from our bodies and that they are a super sustainable way to get some of the important nutrients we get from the fish in our dwindling oceans (PS: I’m reading Bottomfeeder great read and—yikes!) But we have to be careful where our sea vegetables are coming from…because they do absorb toxins and heavy metals and we don’t want to eat that stuff. There’s a local brand called Mendocino Seaweed Company that harvests from the clean waters off the Mendocino Coast.

She demonstrated and talked about the different types of seaweeds from strand seaweeds like arame, hijiki, and sea palm, to the strip seaweeds like kombu and wakame to the sheet seaweeds like dulse and wild nori. I went from knowing that kombu was good for cooking beans and that I really liked nori to knowing much more—like the different applications for each seaweed and that dulse is seriously tasty. I even walked away with some good recipes.

We’ll be doing another round of workshops starting in May. We’re thinking of fermented drinks, another kraut/kimchi workshop, homemade body products, main dish salads, and some other ideas. These are free workshops so they are a great way to gain knowledge without shelling out $50-75 for a cooking class. You don’t have to be a member of The Cog, but we’d love it if you join. Then you can run your own workshop on whatever you do well. This is just the beginning of what a community based food system looks like. Check it out! And check out Nishanga’s blog. You’ll learn a ton.

January Events: Book Signing, Winter Soups and Stews Class, Fermentation Workshop

Hitting the New Year Running:

Saturday, January 10th--book signing and food samples from Heirloom Beans at Omnivore Books
3-4 PM Free!

Wednesday, January 14--Winter Soups and Stews class at Sur La Table in San Francisco 6pm. $75

Saturday, January 24--Fermentation Workshop at The Cooperative Grocery in Berkeley. Time of day to be determined. Email or leave a comment, if you're interested. The Cog is also looking for new members. Now is the time to join! Workshop Free! Bring your own veggies and jars. I'll bring salt and recipes.

Fun Bean Class at Kitchen on Fire

Here are a few shots from my class at Kitchen on Fire on Saturday. It was fun. We had a really good turnout and at some point I realized that when you teach a class based on beans, whole grains, and fish, you're actually teaching a healthy food class. If we'd named it that, nobody would have come.

Menu:
Seared Steelhead with French Lentil Salad
Farro Risotto with Cranberry Beans and Mushrooms
Beet and Quinoa Salad with Scarlet Runner Beans and Avocados
Flageolet Bean and Halibut Stew with Herb Pesto
Stuffed Gypsy Peppers with Wheat Berries and Rattlesnake Beans

Sorry E for not using your pictures. I just don't like putting pictures of myself up here.
the beans plus a corner of the halibut stew

Beet Quinoa salad. Good salad. Bad lighting. Bad picture.

Asian Culinary Forum

Saturday I devoted the day to something I love more than anything: studying, talking about, tasting, and discovering food traditions from different cultures. I attended two events at the Asian Culinary Forum. The forum is an educational nonprofit that aims to celebrate, investigate, and expand Asian food and culture. Founded by cookbook author Andrea Nguyen and writer and Asian food expert Thy Tran, the forum held its inaugural events this weekend. 

First I took a class at Sur La Table on Chutney, Kimchi, and Sambal. It was totally mind and palate blowing. Three masters of their genres, Niloufer Inchaporia King, author of the award winning My Bombay Kitchen, Huynjoo Albrecht, proprietor of CookingKorean.com, and Daniel Sudar, chef at Red Lantern Restaurant in Redwood City (if anyone local is up for a field trip, let me know. The restaurant is steps away from the Cal Train station) demonstrated some amazing staples of Indian, Korean, and Indonesian cuisines. The tastes jumped around my tongue and left my head spinning with ambition to recreate the flavors I sampled. I left truly inspired to push the boundaries of the familiar even further in my kitchen.

Then I headed over the Ferry Building to attend a panel discussion on Meals, Meaning, and Memory in Asian Diasporas. It was scholarly in the way that panel discussions by scholars often are (by that I mean the talk required concentration) and hours later, I found myself continuing to run over in my mind some of the ideas that were brought up: why food-based cultural habits are the last to change when immigrants assimilate, the ways in which immigrant’s eating habits vary depending on who they are eating with, feelings of being “other” around food, and the roles of caste, gender, in ascetism in Gandhi’s vegetarianism.

What did I cook when I got home? I pulled out Andrea’s book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen,
which I love and cook from often. I made two dishes I hadn't made before: a simple soup of shrimp and cabbage (to which I added rice) and rice noodles with Chinese chives, tofu, and dried shrimp (instead of the fresh shrimp and pork called for). It’s fun that I’m getting comfortable enough with the Vietnamese techniques and flavor profiles to vary the ingredients and still end up with very good dishes that are almost always better than anything I can find in a Vietnamese restaurant.

Next up: Kimchi!

I'm so glad I treated myself to this wonderful day. I wish I'd gone to the all-day symposium on Sunday too.

Heirloom Beans

Got my author copies yesterday! The book will be on the shelves soon. You can preorder it now on Amazon cheap. Or you can "support your local bookstore".

I'll be teaching a bean class at Sur La Table on Maiden Lane in San Francisco September 13. We'll be hitting the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market to meet Steve, talk beans and buy ingredients, then we'll head back to the kitchen and prepare a variety of bean dishes.

Steve and I will both be at Jimtown Store on September 14th from 2 to 5 signing books.

I'm teaching in Cleveland October 20, 21, and 22 and then at Kitchen on Fire on the 25th.

Whew! here we go.

Hands-on Cooking Classes June 19 & July 24: Mexican Fiesta! Fun Finger Foods for Fabulous Parties

I’ll be teaching this in two locations this summer. On June 19th the class is at the San Mateo Whole Foods Market and on July 24th it’s at Kitchen on Fire in North Berkeley.

Menu:

Sweet & Spicy Pepitas
Mango, Jicima, and, Pineapple Kabobs with Chili and Lime
Shrimp Cocktail Dip with Avocado
Bite-sized Chicken Empanadas with Tomatillo-Avocado Salsa
Creamy Queso Fundido with Spicy Chorizo Sausage
Spiced Mexican Wedding Cookies
Jamaica Tea

In case you can’t join us, I posted the recipe for the empanadas back in April

Cooking Class—Beyond Lasagna: Warming Winter Casseroles

Monday, February 25, San Mateo Whole Foods Market

Casserole. The word gives me an old-fashioned, cozy feeling, but also conjures up memories of sludgy cream of mushroom soup and mushy noodles. But casseroles are really wonderful things for working cooks. A couple hours work yields about 12 servings of ready-to-eat home cooked food for lunches and for reheating on busy nights. Most casseroles freeze well too so you can make food for the future. And there are so many options besides noodle casseroles and lasagna. It’s also a really nice custom to bring a casserole to the home of a friend who has recently had surgery or a baby.

The Menu:
Picadillo Tamale Pie (pictured)
Chicken and Butternut Squash Pot Pie
Cannelini Bean and Sausage Gratin with Kale
Sweet Potato Bread Pudding with Caramel Pecan Sauce

Sign up Here

Bean Class: Monday, Feb. 4th San Mateo

Reinvent the Pot of Beans

February is Heart Health month and beans are great for your heart so why not kick off the month with a class on cooking beans? While I was working with Steve Sando  on the Heirloom Bean Book for Chronicle Books, I discovered how easy it is to cook a pot of beans and then reinvent the pot to make other dishes.  The concept is perfect for working people who want to prepare a quick and healthy dinner at home. Cook a pot of beans on Sunday and you’ll end up with enough beans for 3 or 4 more dishes for the week.

In this class we’ll cook a pot of cranberry beans and make the following three recipes:

Cranberry Beans & Pancetta with Rapini, Poached Egg & Bread Crumbs
Cranberry Bean Bruschetta with Dried Tomatoes
Cranberry Bean, Fennel & Arugula Salad with Garlicky Tomato Dressing and Pecorino Romano

Sign Up