Current Events

Carlisle Area Local Producer Tour & Lunch

The Carlisle & Newville areas have exploded with local producers selling fresh organic vegetables, free-range chickens and eggs, artisan cheese and handmade crafts. The area also boasts two vibrant farmers markets. Food writer and Slow Food Harrisburg member Kay Graham has put together a great program for Saturday, Aug. 9.

At 9am, assemble at Piatto, 22 West Pomfret Street, for coffee and pastries. The group will tour the two Carlisle Farms Markets, then carpool to explore the local farm stands, including Otterbein Farms. Kay will distribute a map to help with navigation.

The group will return to Piatto’s garden for lunch. Either bring a dish to share made with local ingredients or sample some dishes made specially for us by Piatto and California Cafe. Then around 4pm, the garden hosts a free concert, the Gabjo Playboys specializing in Parisian-style jazz.

9:00 – Meet at Piatto for coffee and artisan pastries.

9:30 – Tour of the two Carlisle Farmers Markets

11:00 – Tour of local producers

2:00 – Lunch at Piatto

4:00 – Jazz in the park

Slow Supper Celebrating Heirloom Apples & Pork

Date: Friday, October 3, 2008

Time: 6:30 pm

Place: Wildwood Conference Center, HACC

Endangered foods

Endangered species have come out of the woods and onto the table.

No, people aren’t eating piping plovers or eastern pumas. At least no one I know. But people also aren’t eating a lot of the vegetables our grandparents ate … because they don’t exist any more. Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland and the rest of Big Food have eliminated hundreds of thousands of heirloom seeds and plants.

Factory farms select their vegetable varieties based on one thing: shipability.  Say, the ability of a tasteless tomato to look good at Giant after it’s traveled 3,000 miles.

Working to reverse that are

eating local

While the first Slow Food Harrisburg dinner later this month is almost sold out, there’s a lot you can do to get ready for the local harvest that will start in April.

Here are some links to the good eats:

A Southcentral Pennsylvania Harvest Schedule organized by earliest likely harvest — when to start checking for what foods.

A Pick Your Own Produce guide to central Pennsylvania, and a really good page …

Chef Showdown

Bame left, Wallace right

Curiel Bame, the chef who helped bring ceviche to Pittsburgh, will go against Chef Richard Wallace, executive chef at the Old Corner Hotel in Williamsport, on Thursday at 11 a.m. in the Best Chef of Pennsylvania semifinals.

Bame, exec chef at Pittsburgh’s Seviche, told the Pittsburgh Tribune Review that his signature dish, popular in Miami’s South Beach area, is one he’s always enjoyed. “I ate it for lunch when I was a kid,” Bame said. “My mother was Mexican, so I grew up with it.”

Ceviche is a way of sort of cooking raw fish in acidic lemon or lime juice — making for a light citrus flavor, as opposed to sushi’s sometimes soy-sauce laden wrapping.

Wallace, who defeated Stock’s on 2nd executive chef James Woltman in the quarterfinals, originally won his regional competition by impressing the judges “with his creative use of flavor and attention to detail.”

At 1:30 …

Rock Stars of the Farm Show

Wherever you’ve got Dawson Flinchbaugh, you’ve got food. Flinchy is just one of the guest chefs at this year’s Pennsylvania Farm Show, being covered with grace and style by the amazing Mary Klaus.

The Rock Stars thing …

Best Chefs

Executive Chef James Woltman of Stock’s on 2nd will challenge for the Best Chef in PA title next week, along with regional winners from across the state at the Pennsylvania Farm Show.

Last year’s winner, Chef Michael Adams of the Farmhouse Restaurant in Emmaus, will defend in competition that begins Wednesday, January 9. Random pairings of the eight chefs who won regional competitions in 2007 will kick off the cooking at 11 a.m. Three more rounds will follow at 90-minute intervals, all on the Culinary Connection Stage.

The Semi-Final rounds will be …

HACC Culinary Gala

Wondering what to do for dinner Wednesday night?

There are some tickets left for the Senior Culinary Students’ Reception at HACC, a Global Cuisine Gala. The students did everything from menu design to ordering to receiving to — tomorrow night — cooking and serving. Tickets are $20 at the door, or from faculty secretary Ragin El-Shater, rlelshat@hacc.edu, 780-3248.

Butlered appetizers start the evening at 6:30:

* Creamy Mushroom Phyllo Pockets with Red Pepper Sauce
* Black Olive Tapenade in Grape Tomatoes
* Crab and Avocado Tostadas
* Prosciutto with Melon on Wheat
* New Potatoes with Gorgonzola and Walnuts

Meat and Heat

If you have not read Bill Buford’s “Heat,” an account of the writer as budding culinarian, you should remedy that. The guy can write.

Here, for instance, is a paragraph from his review in the New Yorker of three carnivorous

The Chocolate Show

The depth and variety of people who live around this small city has always amazed me, from ultra-marathoners to world-class sopranos to very intense foodies.

So it is with Curtis Vreeland, who tracks emerging trends in the confectionery industry. Just before Thanksgiving, he presented this year’s research at the 10th annual New York Chocolate Show. It’s part of Le Salon du Chocolat, which starts in Paris, passes through New York, then hops to Beijing and six locations in Japan.

 

Attendance in New York is about 30,000 — impressive, until you consider the size of the Paris and Tokyo shows, which each draw 150,000.

 

Here’s this year’s Chocolate Show review from Curtis:

 

Want to eat some opium?

A strange offer, considering that opium was traditionally eaten by Chinese women as a fatal exit plan from unhappy arranged marriages.

But an Opium bonbon was just one example of many sweet gems waiting for chocolate connoisseurs at the tenth annual New York Chocolate Show. Considering that the item in question was a dark chocolate truffle, it brought new meaning to the term “chocolate to die for.” An addictive truffle with blood orange, smokey lapsang souchong and Chinese five spice, it was conjured up by Oliver Kita, an innovative chocolatier from Rhinebeck, NY.

It can serve as an indicator of how creative contemporary nouvelle American chocolatiers have become, scouring the globe for inspiration and packing a multiplex of flavors, textures and sensorial stimulation into each sweet bite. Hello to multicultural, racy spice bazaar tastes …

Happy Giving of Thanks

This week, my mother-in-in-law is in town – but the amazing Velma got off the plane at noon in a wheelchair and we had to camp in the Emergency Room at Hbg Hospital all evening, following by a 4 a.m. surgery.

She’s okay, and I want to tell you about the two terrific Thanksgiving dinners she almost had.

But first, I’m reanimating a Thanksgiving column I wrote about her a few years ago.

VEGGIES UNLIKELY TO BEAT SPREAD

Unlike the holidays of spring and summer, which require charcoal lugging or propane lighting – and sometimes keg tapping and cherry-bomb throwing – Thanksgiving is leisurely.

It asks for only the energy to fall away from the dinner table …