Tread Kindly, Eat Well

I never attended summer camp when I was young, so this inaugural year of Camp Kindness was a first for me. If I were to have written a post card home, I would have said, "Love you Mom from vine to fruit to seed again, taking a quick side trip through the compost pile. Betsy even brought some worms to add to the process. The kids had already participated in clearing stables, and were aware of the manure and compost content of our soil. They were amazed when they experienced that the compost actually smelled the worst!"

I watched these young people absorb the excitement of a garden. Those who had gardens at home offered more information for all of us to consider. I learned more about regional gardening, and the great variety of things growing in the gardens up and down the valley.

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I hope you tried the recipe in my last entry, Seitan with 40 Cloves of Garlic. As I learned in the class I taught last weekend, many people are unfamiliar with seitan, tempeh, and even tofu. Often, they are categorized as ‘meat analogues,’ even though they existed well before the modern coining of the word “analogue” itself.

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Timing is one of those elusive important things. You can’t always predict when the right time is to do a certain thing. Sometimes it just works out. 

The recent report of the USDA’s closure of Murray’s Chicken, a Sullivan County poultry processing plant, came as I was finishing up a recipe for Saugerties, NY’s famed Garlic Festival. It’s based on a French classic, “Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic.”

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A frequent question in class is this: "What is your favorite cookbook?"

Well, truth be told, I don't have a single favorite. I seldom use them anymore, so that makes it difficult to have a frontrunner.

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