Alix Wall began cooking when she was 13 years old. After working 15 years as a journalist for Jewish newspapers, she decided to attend Bauman College and was certified as a natural foods chef. She lives in Oakland with her computer geek husband Paulie about two miles from the Berkeley Bowl. She now cooks for several families as a personal chef. In addition, she volunteers with Berkeley's Tuv Ha'Aretz chapter at Chochmat HaLev, and is on the executive committee of Hazon's 2008 food conference. Some of her weaknesses include dark chocolate, sag paneer, Humboldt Fog cheese, seared ahi tuna, dark leafy greens and a really good Port, though not necessarily in that order.
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One thing I used to hate about the Bay Area is how its population is so smug in its assuredness that we live in the best place in the world.
I don’t hate that about it anymore, I’ve just accepted that it’s true. Things happen all the time that make me so grateful that I live here (and more than that, that I am able to afford to), but recently there were two – and both of them pertain to this blog.
While I can’t claim a San Francisco residency, I am proud that recently, my neighboring city supervisors voted to ban plastic shopping bags from major grocery chains in the next six months. Of course this made us a laughing stock in other parts of the country, as if the city supervisors don’t have anything more pressing to do than this. But I think it sets an excellent example of raising awareness.
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This Pesach, rather than waxing philosophical about what narrow places I’ve been hiding out in lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about food. Specifically, why is it that when it comes to Jewish food, Sephardic cuisine beats Ashkenazi cuisine almost every time.
Don’t get me wrong. I am 100 percent Ashkenazi. Before I became a vegetarian, I was raised on a steady diet of my grandmother’s kreplach, chopped liver, and stuffed cabbage. I still love a good matzah ball, and that goes for gefilte fish as well (my vegetarianism includes fish).
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I look forward to Pesach for a lot of reasons, but one of them is my cousin-in-law Rebecca’s famous charoset pyramid.
For many years now, my aunt Diane has made Egyptian charoset along with the Ashkenazi one, even though our family is 100 percent Ashkenazi. One year, Rebecca realized the dense matter looked a lot like…mortar. She started sculpting it, and voila, the pyramid was born.
Each year since, it has gotten more and more complicated. One year, she added plastic palm trees. Another, she managed to find a Pharoah action figure, which perfectly complimented the one I found of Moses. In this photo, from our seder at my home in Oakland in 2003, she fashioned sand out of brown sugar.
I wonder what it will be this year.
In an article that is launching an occasional series in the San Francisco Chronicle’s dining section about food consciousness, it was reported yesterday that Alice Waters is jumping on the anti-bottled water bandwagon. Some of our fine dining establishments, it seems, have found alternative ways to offer sparkling water that does not have to be flown here from Italy. Of course we have many local brands, like Calistoga, but the article reports that California brands tend to be more carbonated than their European sisters.
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Many, many years ago, my father and mother took their first ever trip to Las Vegas. They were returning to their room after breakfast, and a waiter was in the elevator, with a room service cart…and on the tray with their food was a bottle of Scotch.
My mom, never one to keep things to herself, exclaimed “Scotch for breakfast?”
Without missing a beat, the waiter looked up, and said, “Lady…first time in Vegas?”
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Leah’s recent post about organic kosher wine made me think back to my visit to Four Gates Kosher Winery, which was now six and a half years ago.
In July of 2000, I spontaneously left New York City after living there some eight years, to try California (where I grew up) for a year. I immediately went to work at the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California – now called j. weekly.
After three months on the job, we got a call from a guy named Benyamin Cantz; he told my editor that he ran what he believed was the only kosher organic winery in the country, and the recent spell of hot weather was causing his grapes to ripen more quickly than usual. I think he was hoping that we would put a notice in the paper to recruit volunteers to help him pick that Sunday. They did no such thing. They sent me instead.
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Was it just me, or did the “debate” between Michael Pollan and John Mackey last night hardly seem like a debate? My friends and I all agreed afterwards that it was more like a mutual admiration society between “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” author and the CEO of Whole Foods.
Even the Berkeley audience, which swelled to 2,000 people to fill the largest auditorium on campus, was uncharacteristically polite, hissing only once when Mackey suggested that most Americans were doing better economically than in previous years.
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This is the Shabbos meal I will prepare on Friday:
- Canapes of white bean spread with carmelized spring onions with a minty Meyer lemon spritzer
- Passed hors d’oeuvres: Fresh spring rolls and Smoked salmon with lemon-scented goat cheese and dill
- Creamy celery root and parsnip soup
- Salad of frisee, blood oranges, oro blanco (a fancy type of grapefruit), avocado and fennel in citrus vinaigrette
- Vegetable terrine of greens, millet and sweet potatoes, with pea shoots and crisp shiitake mushrooms on a bed of mushroom masala sauce
- Rose geranium sorbet
- Port-poached pear parfait (say that one five times fast)
And I will make this Shabbos meal for almost 40 people. Really, I will. I’m not kidding.
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Let’s face it – a chef is not a career most Jewish parents want their children to pursue. I heard someone say that at the Lattes to Latkes conference, and could relate all too well. When I decided last spring that it was time for me to make a career change after 15 years of being a journalist, I knew it was the right thing – for me. My husband-to-be and friends all knew it, too. The hard part was telling my dad and my 96-year-old grandpa.
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Not too long ago, my culinary program took us on a field trip to Three Stone Hearth. The place calls itself a Community Supported Kitchen, and is a model of what I think could be the CSA of the future. Think CSK in addition to CSA.
Three Stone was founded about six months ago by four women and one man — the man is the only Jew among them, and it says in his bio that he grew up in the North Bronx’s Amalgamated Cooperatives, where “socialized medicine, cooperative daycare, nursery schools and union organizing were all part of his original view of the world. Chicken soup and other wonderful Jewish Eastern European smells permeated the hallways and apartments” — all of whom had worked in the food industry for many years. They envisioned a new business model, where they do the cooking, and customers pay in advance for their food, just as with the CSA.
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When people ask me what I’ve gotten out of spending the past five months in a natural foods chef program at Berkeley’s Bauman College, I tend to get really excited about beets and Brussel sprouts. That question has been coming up a lot lately, as I prepare to graduate in about three weeks.
When we first began, I liked neither of the above-mentioned vegetables, and probably wouldn’t have believed that I would like them five months later. I am of Russian stock, after all. I grew up with some form of borscht on our table all the time, first made by my Russian grandmother, and then my mother, both winter and summer versions. The summer one, especially, looked radioactive to me. Even though it was so colorful, with its dollop of sour cream making such a beautiful contrast, and a sprinkle of lively dill, I could never bring myself to eat it. And this followed me into adulthood.
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Fascinating that on the same day as Michael Pollan’s cover story in the NYTimes magazine, was this article about the “Wal-Marting of organics” in the SF Chronicle’s magazine.
Although many of us tend to associate Wal-Mart with all that’s evil in corporate America, and wonder about it and other mega-supermarkets diluting the organic label, this woman believes otherwise:
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Among my Chanukah presents last year from my husband’s family was an almost pocket-sized book called “Chef’s Secrets: Insider Techniques from Today’s Culinary Masters.” When I randomly opened a page, to see what kind of tips it offered, I found this gem from Chef J. Bryce Whittlesly (a New England name if I’ve ever heard one…) and read it out loud: “How to peel a tomato with a blowtorch.”
Paulie’s family likes to eat, but they are hardly food-obsessed like I am. They all found this hilarious. Actually, so did I. While I had not yet decided to go to culinary school then, I was already a foodie and cook. I had been dropping tomatoes in hot water for a minute or two to peel them my whole cooking life. Crème Brulee wasn’t among my favorite desserts, so a culinary blowtorch was hardly something I needed.
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Alix gives a recap of Bravo’s Top Chef finale, part 1:
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