The other week Rachel and I saw another film that will make you look at the food on your plate a little differently.  The movie was Forks Over Knives, and it was based in part on the research by a Cornell nutrition professor, T. Colin Campbell. Dr.  Campbell grew up a dairy farmer, but spent most of his career looking at the connection  between the western diet and degenerative diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and cancer.   The fim follows Campbell and Dr. Esselstyn, a surgeon and head of the Breast Cancer task force with the Cleveland Clinic.   Their research led them to conclude that many degenerative diseases could not only be prevented but reversed by adopting a whole foods, plant-based diet.

With the healthcare system and sustainable food movements becoming a significant part of our cultural dialogues, this film is relevant and compelling.   Watch it if you have a curiosity, but be prepared to look at the glass of milk or steak a little differently afterwards.  One of Campbell’s arguments is that casein, a protein found in milk from mammals, is the most significant carcinogen we consume.

Yesterday, Ethan and I spent our date night at Cinemapolis for a screening of “May I Be Frank“, co-produced by someone Ethan knew growing up in Ithaca, Conor Gaffney.  Conor was out in San Francisco working with friends for Cafe Gratitude, (a Vegan/Raw Food restuarant), when their worlds collided with a native Brooklynite, Frank Ferrante.  Frank, A 54 year old, obese and depressed addict, caught the affection of Conor & his friends, who put him on a 42-day regimen to transform his life, in quite the opposite way of Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me.

The result is a very real, raw account of the various steps he commits to take as he begins to heal his body, mind and spirit.  It really, really moved me and his message is still with me today - that we, and only we, have the power to be who we want to be.  Cliche, cliche, but there is nothing more true that that.  Yes, this includes facing your demons and taking risks but Frank lets us into all of this and coming through the other side is a more centered, authentic and fulfilled person.   The film also beautifully demonstrates the power of community and giving of your self to impact a life.

If it screens near you, check it out.  If not, the DVD will be up on their website soon.

Here’s to paying Frank’s transformation forward in little ripples…

Moosewood restaurant is a famous vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, but not as famous as the cookbook by Mollie Katzen of the same name.  Below is my favorite recipe from the cookbook.  It’s a healthy alternative to the classic  mid-winter dish of baked mac & cheese.  I make it without the dill, and use plain yogurt instead of buttermilk.  Also added broccoli & shredded carrots along with the cabbage.  Can you tell we’re hunkered down for the winter in upstate NY?

1/2 lb (approximately 3 cups) dry pasta - a short substantial shape, like
    fusili, penne, macaroni, 1-inch shells, etc.
2 TB butter or margarine
2 cups chopped onion
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
1/2 lb mushrooms, sliced
4 cups shredded cabbage (~1/2 an average head)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp caraway seeds
1 bunch fresh spinach, stemmed and coarsely chopped
1 lb (2 cups) cottage cheese (lowfat ok)
1/2 cup buttermilk or yogurt
2 TB fresh (or 2 tsp dried) dill, finely minced
fresh black pepper, to taste
2 cups (packed) grated cheddar
Handful of sunflower seeds (optional)

Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease a 9x13 inch baking pan

Cook the pasta until just barely tender. Drain thoroughly and transfer
to a large bowl.

Melt the butter in a large, deep skillet, and add the onions. After sauteing
for about 5 minutes, add garlic, mushrooms, cabbage, salt and caraway.
Stir, cover and cook until the cabbage is just tender (10 minutes). Stir in
spinach and remove from heat. Add to the pasta.

Stir in cottage cheese, buttermilk, dill, black pepper and half the cheddar.
Taste to adjust seasonings, and spread into the prepared pan. Sprinkle
with the remaining cheddar and a few sunflower seeds, and bake uncovered
for 20 to 30 minutes or until heated through.

I haven’t posted one of these in a while, but not for lack of reasons.  Most people know of the Finger Lakes region as a destination for touring wineries.  But there are a growing number of farms in the area producing artisan cheese from raw (unpasteurized) milk.  Recently, the Finger Lakes Cheese Trail was formed to provide the public with organized open house tours.  But you don’t have to visit during an open house date, as most of the farms operate like a winery,  allowing you to drop in, watch the production process & sample the goods.

During the holiday break, we visited one of the farms and owner Nancy Richards at Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese.  Nancy gave us a tour of the cheese-making facility, the farm and the storage rooms.  We sampled her range of gouda cheese including Bier Meck, which is soaked in a brine made from Ithaca Beer’s Smoked Porter Ale.  We brought a few blocks home, and keeping with Nancy’s advice, let the Schuyler cheese rest in its natural habitat under glass on our counter.   What a difference.  Thanks Nancy…wishing you success with the business.

For New Year’s Eve, we had friends over and made a killer mushroom lasagna from our favorite food magazine, Cooks Illustrated.  While you need a password to access the recipes on Cooks Illustrated, someone took the time to transcribe the whole thing on food.com.  Give yourself about an hour to make it, but it’s worth the time.  On a related note, is there a better meat replacement for vegetarian recipes than porcini & portabello mushrooms?  http://www.food.com/recipe/mushroom-lasagna-181411

When we moved to Ithaca from Brooklyn, I had grand visions of our family homestead.   There would be a big backyard for dog and kid.  We would have a pond for winter hockey and summer fishing.  There would be a bonfire for s’mores and a hill for sledding.  And most important, there would be a garden.  A garden filled with summer squash, sweet corn, green beans, sugar snap peas, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers for picking, and tomatoes for canning.  Rachel and I would be living off the land.  We would watch our seedlings grow into towering vegetables, harvesting to share with our friends and family.

Oh, did I have a lot to learn.  Thoughts and lessons from year one of gardening:

1. Gardening takes time.  You can’t just pop your seeds in the earth, hook up the sprinkler and expect mother nature to work her magic.  Nope, you need to be ready to commit to that garden day in and day out.
2. Taking on gardening with a full time job, work travel, a new house, and a new baby, was a little ambitious.
3. Don’t buy 30 packets of vegetable seeds in your first year.  Try five, see if you can get those right first.
4. A 12 ft. by 3 ft. space is not enough room for 30 packets of seeds.
5. Check for holes in your garden fence.  If you don’t look for them, the groundhogs and rabbits will.
6. Gardening is war.  A war against weeds, varments, pests, fungus and weather.
7. It’s hard to make weeding fun….although Rachel did spend 2 hours hacking and yanking at them one night.  So, maybe you can take some pent up aggression out on them.
8. The book “Second Nature” by Michael Pollan is a great essay on the challenges of  amateur gardening.
9. The most important crop I planted all year was the grape vines.  When they are ripe enough for producing wine in 3 years, I will really need the drink after a summer of battle against weeds.

And a few highlights:

• Seeing the first stem sprout up through dirt in our kitchen window in April.  This is especially welcome after a long Ithaca winter.
• Watching the different plants take shape.  It’s wild to see the range of plants take form from these little packets of seeds.
• Harvesting my first vegetable: A single green bean.  It was the only one the rabbit left me after shearing the rest of my plants in early June.  (see comment about war above).
• Sharing that single green bean with my family of four (dog included).
• Building a compost and dumping our first bin of waste outside instead of in our garbage can.
• The first pluck and taste of a sun gold tomato.  The most rewarding crop in our garden.
• I’m hooked.  It’s like golf.  You can spend a whole year sucking, but then you hit one great shot….or in gardening, you eat one sweet tomato, and you know you’ll be back next year.

Below are a few pictures from the first year of gardening.  (The massive harvest from August, the homemade compost, the young vineyard, and the skinny amateur garden plot.)

I took a trip to Milwaukee last weekend with my brother and a few friends, in advance of his wedding next month.

A few thoughts from the trip:

• Milwaukee:  My new favorite city in the midwest.  No hurt feelings, okay Chicago?  At least you have Carlos Boozer.  Overall, a nice-sized town, with waterfront, green spaces, great food, and a friendly people.
• Best Brunch:  Trocadero Gastro Bar – Great food, cool neighborhood and an awesome garden patio.
• Best Bar:  The Old German Beer Hall.  While you’re there, be sure to play a game of hammer-nail-into-stump.  It’s a pretty bizarre yet gratifying game.
• Cheese Tasting:  Wisconsin Cheese Mart. Conclusion? Wisconsin cheese good.  Very good.  German cheese bad.  Now I know why it was funny that my grandfather used to stick limburger cheese under my mom’s pillow as a kid.
• Frisbee Golf: We stumbled on a store after brunch called “Art Smart’s Dart Mart.” Obviously, we had to go in, and Art convinced us to take up the game of Frisbee Golf.  4 frisbee sales later, a city bus ride to the park, and we were on the first tee of an 18 hole frisbee golf course.  It was nearly as fun as regular golf, but much less frustrating-and free.
• Best Breweries:  Rock Bottom Brewery for best outdoor space on an inlet, Lakefront Brewery for best brewery tour and fish fry (so we’re told…we only tried the beer), Milwaukee Brewing Co. for waterfront patio and a real nice flight.
• My Brother: Could you really be getting married?  How can that be?  It feels like just last week that we were catching fireflies and playing GI-Joe football.  Natasha will have a life of fun and laughter living with you.  (Okay, there will be some headaches too).  But it was great to have a weekend to be kids again.  Congrats little brother.

We took a trip down to Cape Cod with my father’s side of the family.  It was my first visit to the area in 15 years and Eli’s first time to the Atlantic.  At a time when we’re living through the worst oil spill in our nation’s history, it seemed appropriate to bring him to some clean ocean water while we still have it.

While Eli is still only 7 months old, I’m beginning to understand what it means to live through your child’s eyes.  As I get older, and a trip to the beach gets a little less exciting, I now get to watch my own son go through all these experiences for the first time.  On top of that, we’re able to share his happiness with our parents and extended family.  And there was something about having him around that made everyone feel a bit closer.

Rachel and I took one afternoon for ourselves and a trip to a town called Wellfleet near the tip of the cape.  The town was recommended to us by a friend from the office where Rachel and I met each other.  Her family lives in the area runs a seafood business called Mac’s Seafood. Welfleet is a perfect little coastal town and Mac’s is a perfect little seafood shack.  We stuffed ourselves with fish tacos and fried clam strips.  Then we bought 4 pounds of scallops and cooked them up for the family meal that night.

All in all, a perfect break from the giant to-do list that keeps filling up at home and Rachel’s big work event in NYC coming up next week.  Eli- For the record, you hit a few milestones on this trip:  First toe in the Atlantic, first taste of watermelon, first meeting of the Clark family, and first 6 hour road trip.  You’re a blast to have around, little buddy.  Even after 6 hours in a car.

Dough

Bread

Thanks to our friends Matt and Genna, we received the book Artisan Bread in 5 minutes. We made our first loaf last weekend (a Deli Rye), and the results are to the right.  It took about 20 minutes to make the dough, plus 2 hours to rise, and then 30 minutes to bake.  You can keep the dough in your fridge for up to 15 days.  Then you just pull out a grapefruit-sized chunk anytime you want fresh oven-baked bread.   I sound like an infomercial.

One drawback of moving from Brooklyn to Ithaca was the drop in culinary choices.  (Although I did hear a stat that Ithaca has more restaurants per capita than NYC).  But while we’re not going to new restaurants every weekend, we are spending a lot more time in the kitchen.  And once you’ve worn through the recipes your mother passed down, you start to get creative.  And with that creativity, comes some gratifying evenings at the dinner table.  And at the end of the day, a great meal crafted from your own hands is more rewarding than one you paid someone else to put together.  I’m pretty sure that’s a universal law.  Like gravity.   I wonder if Newton baked his own bread?

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I was down in New Orleans for a work conference this week.  This was my third visit to the city in the last 7 years, and my second since Hurricane Katrina.  A few thoughts from the visit.

1.  There is something I love about New Orleans.  It was the first vacation I took with my then girlfriend and now wife.  The architecture, the music, and the smells coming out of the French Quarter, transport you to another time and place. Then there’s my favorite street and area of the city:  Frenchman Street & The Marigny.  An area with great food and live music…and a little sheltered from Bourbon Street.  My favorite music spot from this trip was The Spotted Cat.  Here’s a video I shot (on my new iPhone!) at the jazz club.

2.  The city feels more like it did on my first visit than my second.  The second visit was still relatively soon after Katrina, and while the French Quarter and Jazz Festival seemed ‘normal’, they seemed like props in an otherwise wrecked city.  This time, most people I spoke to sounded like they were moving on.   While some felt they should rebuild in the 9th ward, most felt like it was best to just let it return to nature.  Oh, and they love their Saints.

3.  While these medical conferences can be pretty stilted and textbook by nature, this was the most interesting meeting I’ve attended.   It was a conference for the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons.  40,000 doctors and industry professionals descended on New Orleans for 3 days.  It felt like they took over the city and the city seemed to appreciate the business.  But the interesting thing about this meeting was an exhibit open to the public at the conference center.  The exhibit was about the earthquake in Haiti and the response from volunteer surgeons.  The exhibit featured a series of pictures, quotes and thoughts from surgeons that volunteered their time to help the people in Haiti.  The pictures were pretty wrenching; raw images of the mass amputations, and the crude equipment used to perform them.  Many of the surgeons commented on the horror of the experience, and the comparison to working in a war.  They wrote about the destruction, the lack of resources, the anger, and the amputations.  But then they spoke of the one thing that kept them going.

This was a quote from one of the surgeons while in Haiti:  ”…and I saw it many times, a sight more emotionally charged than the destruction spreading for miles in every direction.  A child’s smile.  Sound a bit sentimental?  Maybe.  But the sight of such simplicity, the essential human ability to feel happiness in dire circumstances, and the unbelievable sound of laughter – here on the backdrop of all this misery, well it changed me. ”  -Daniel Ivankovich, MD

4.  With that quote and those images in the back of my mind, it sure felt good to come home and walk through the door to this…