Earlier this year, I mentioned reading Martha Bayne’s great article on how the food culture and the hungry are moving in opposite directions. After two nights serving soup at Bayne’s Soup & Bread, I recently read about a cause called “Food Bloggers Against Hunger“. As much as I eschew talking about blogs generally, this blog specifically or even referring to myself as a food blogger, I felt this was a good opportunity to contribute to a cause that I really care about.

You may have read about, or seen press junkets, for a recently released film called “A Place at the Table“, a documentary about families going through issues of food insecurity. APatT looks at hunger in a way that is real without being hyperbolic or falling into the trap of sensationalism. The issue is treated with far more calmness and measured speech than I could do. To me the calm tone opens up the dialogue to action rather than reaction. These are not just people getting squeezed by big Ag or by corporate America. It isn’t just those you see panhandling, those out of work or single parent families that struggle.  It is not just inner city folks or people in rural areas.

Far more people than I realized previously are limited to $3-$4 per day per person for food and no job or family situation is sheltered from hunger. Trying to subsist on that $3-$4 per person per day was the challenge I decided to take up for my family (my wife and I have two little girls). Before doing this myself, I would have speculated that I could come up with a few days worth of inexpensive meals, but there are few items worth considering to which I had not paid much attention. Continue reading »

As I stand over these ham hocks and greens and neck bones and Sea Island red peas and I look back at ringing in another New Year at Butcher & Larder, it is not lost on me that a week after I wrote about finding my sweet spot somewhere between Italian slow food and Deep South soul food in making Country Ham cured and dried pork belly, I was served a meal that had been in the planning for months that was precisely in that sweet spot.

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Last Year’s Winner: Fava, Preserved Lamb, and Yogurt (photo by Ron Kaplan)

You may remember reading in the 2011 installment of this very same post about my quest for health – 2012 was a continuation. After losing well over a hundo through eating better and exercising, 2012 was my first real year of running. In 2011, I ran in a couple 5k and was, and still am, proud to have done so, but starting in January, I started to challenge myself with distance. Starting by running my first half marathon in January (20 degrees and snowy) to running my second in May (90 degrees and sunny), I finished with a flourish – running my first marathon in October, but what in Fergus’s name does that have to do with food? Continue reading »

When the smoker is rolling, nothing is safe. In this case, the turnips went on the smoker filled with pork and peaches with no end result in mind. I knew that I loved turnips, but have never seen or heard of any good preparation for cold-smoked turnips. The texture is slightly less starchy than a potato and flavor slightly less peppery than a radish, but neither radish nor potato had obvious translatable applications to smoking.  Continue reading »