A few tidbits that I noted during the lecture:

The Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts is one of the only plant-based professional chef training programs in the United States. [...]]]> “Alternative” diets are getting more popular, but it’s often hard to make the switch if you’re used to cooking based on the standard American diet. The Natural Epicurean is here to help!

The Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts is one of the only plant-based professional chef training programs in the United States. The program focuses on such culinary styles as vegetarian, vegan, raw, and macrobiotic. One of the cool things is that even if you’re not interested in enrolling in the 900-hour training program, you can try one of their public classes. There are introductory classes offered as well as 4-week sessions that meet once a week.

I attended their opening celebration in June, and I’m excited about taking some of the classes in the future. Booths were set up for us to learn about their chef training program and other classes, and we also were able to sample a few school recipes and watch a cooking demo with the incredibly entertaining Chef Marco.

Chef Marco told us it is important to make vegan food exciting – it doesn’t always have to be bland tofu and rice. He certainly had fun singing as he cooked up some curried tofu, tossing limes into the crowd. Once the tofu was seared, he added some yellow beet and a few spices, then mixed it all together with three kinds of onion. This mixture was then stuffed into half a fig and topped with onion sprouts. Despite the multiple onions, it didn’t taste overly of onion, and all the flavors were well-balanced. The tofu was surprisingly meaty, and makes me want to reconsider cooking with tofu!

A few recipe cards were available, but only one of them was for a dish we tasted: quinoa salad with pecans and cranberries. It was really good, and as soon as I can locate some umeboshi vinegar I’ll be re-creating it at home. I’m always on the lookout for yummy recipes with quinoa, and this cold salad is perfect for summer.

We also sampled some mango gazpacho, which was also fresh and clean. All the food reminded me of how I felt when I went on my 21-day vegan and gluten-free cleanse. Nothing was heavy, and it reminded me that I need to eat that way more often. NadaMoo was also there with their vegan ice cream, and Natural Epicurean gifted everyone with either granola cookies or a rosemary sprig for the garden. (Hopefully I won’t kill this one.)

What are the public courses? Well, to start there is Conscious Cooking, Ayurvedic Cooking, Macrobiotics, Sugar FREEdom, Healthy Foods Your Kids Will Love, and the one I’m most interested in taking next year: Happy, Healthy Pregnancy. The courses range from $45-$75 for single classes, and $125-$225 for multi-class courses.
For more info check out their website, www.naturalepicurean.com

Natural Epicurean
www.naturalepicurean.com
1701 S. Lamar
512-476-2276

http://www.stetted.com/index.php/2010/07/12/the-natural-epicurean/| © Megan Myers, stetted, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Austin, classes, cooking, macrobiotic, raw, vegan

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My challenge is still ongoing.

At [...]]]> The other day I realized I never posted a conclusion to my Eat Local Challenge I had in March. Although at the time I chalked it up to laziness busyness, the real reason smacked me right in the face as I was wandering around the farmer’s market on Saturday.

My challenge is still ongoing.

At the end of the month I didn’t really stop eating local and go back to eating beef chubs and apples imported from Argentina. Granted, my diet is still a work in progress as I attempt to overcome my addiction to refined sugars and carbs, but I’ve made leaps in my progress, and I have local food to thank. Not just for my diet itself, but for improving my life in multiple ways.

1) I’ve come to love things I assumed I would hate

In 2003 I had eggplant for the first time, served up in the traditional, “We’re vegetarians but we have meat-eating guests (that would be me) coming over” method of eggplant Parmesan. Let’s just say it did nothing to turn my favor toward eggplant. Which is why I was apprehensive about the eggplant we began receiving in our CSA box last year. With a CSA you are practically forced to cook what they give you. Turns out? I love eggplant!

Raw whole milk. It still freaks people out to hear those words. Except those of us in the know. I was a freaked person before I went to the Stryk Dairy and tasted their amazing milk. Now we only have raw milk at home.

OK, I never technically hated tomatoes, but I wasn’t a big fan. Maybe it was due to growing them in my own yard or just figuring out how to cook with them, but tomatoes are up there with eggplant. Once I learned how to cook a simple sauce with tomatoes, onions, and cream? Sold forever.

2) I feel healthier.

People who are trained on the Standard American Diet would be shocked that I feel healthier on a diet filled with whole milk, sausages, bacon, and eggs. I’ve actually always been rather healthy overall – chalk up good genes to not having problems with blood pressure or cholesterol despite a lifetime of junk food – but now that I’m eating less processed food it feels like a full body health. Even when I get sick I bounce back quickly.

3) My pantry is stocked.

Granted, this is partly due to my obsession with jam, but I think I wouldn’t have cultivated that obsession if I didn’t have such a bounty surrounding me. I don’t think I’ll ever have to buy jam or tomato sauce again.

4) I have a sense of connection

I might not know everyone I see at the farmers’ markets, but I feel connected to them. I recognize the farmer’s I buy my food from. I’ve been to a few of the farms. I know exactly where and to whom my money is going.

I’ve also met an incredible group of people whom I now consider my friends on account of local food. If you’ve never been to Austin, the food community here is incredibly warm, supportive, and fun. People don’t necessarily think of Austin as a food mecca, but I believe it is. If I ever leave, I’ll only try to replicate what we have here.

5) I see all my food through new eyes.

I can taste the difference between a local strawberry fresh picked, and a berry flown in from California. I know the beauty of a farm egg. When my friends left some big-name bacon at our house the other day, I was stunned by how different it tasted compared to the local bacon we buy. At this point I shouldn’t be, but perhaps the reason I’m stunned is because I know how truly good food can be, and what we get in the grocery stores is a pale shadow of that.

It’s not like I’m perfect in my food habits. I’m still a work in progress, like everyone else on this planet. Maybe what I’m saying is propaganda. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Michael Pollan. But I know my experience.

Do you eat local food? Why or why not? Do you think I’m crazy?

http://www.stetted.com/index.php/2010/06/25/what-local-food-has-done-for-me/| © Megan Myers, stetted, 2010. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: locavore

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I’ve started Couch to 5k a couple times, only to be stopped by sickness, bad weather, cozy beds, and other excuses. [...]]]> It’s no secret I like to eat. I mean, this is a food blog, right? Cooking and eating go hand in hand. Also, hand in stomach, which is patently obvious by my jiggly version.

I’ve started Couch to 5k a couple times, only to be stopped by sickness, bad weather, cozy beds, and other excuses. I need to get it going again. While I don’t think I’ll ever be a big runner, while I was doing C25k I enjoyed how I felt after the workout.

I need to start it up again. And I’m betting I’m not the only one who needs to get in shape.

You can read about the program here and then go to iTunes to download Robert Ullrey’s timed music mixes. While the music can get repetitive, I think having the times broken down for you really help, because you don’t have to worry about keeping a stopwatch or counting. You can also get it without music so you can add your own in Garage Band or similar program.

I’m starting on Monday. Are you in? Let me know, and we can keep each other motivated!

http://www.stetted.com/index.php/2010/05/26/couch-to-5k-blogger-challenge/| © Megan Myers, stetted, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Couch to 5k, fitblogging, running

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It has me freaked out a little because I’ll be turning 30 in a little under a month, and while I thought I wouldn’t care about that number, it turns out I am so unprepared to have it attached to me. Thank goodness for happy gardens that make me [...]]]> We’re halfway through April already. What?

It has me freaked out a little because I’ll be turning 30 in a little under a month, and while I thought I wouldn’t care about that number, it turns out I am so unprepared to have it attached to me. Thank goodness for happy gardens that make me appreciate the quick passage of time.

Overall I felt pretty good about last year’s summer garden, considering it was my first year. There were plenty of things I did wrong, but I suppose if I hadn’t done them wrong I wouldn’t have learned anything, right?

My first mistake this year might be double our garden’s size. Maybe even tripling, if I take up my husband’s offer to build a third raised bed. We’ll see how optimistic I am about my August work ethic. Darn Texas summers.

Here’s what’s in the garden right now:

What, you can’t read that? OK, here’s the list:

Tomatoes: Sheboygan, Cosmonaut Volkov, Sun Gold, San Marzano
Beaver Dam peppers
Boston Marrow winter squash
Waltham butternut squash
Watermelon
Zucchini
Onion
Bush bean
Peanut
Elephant garlic
Buttercrunch lettuce
Nasturtium
Marigold
Miragreen peas

I’m following the square foot gardening system, which is meant to fully utilize your garden space instead of planting things in wasteful rows. The book I have (All New Square Foot Gardening) gives a guide for how many plants to put in each square foot. For example, for peas it tells you to put eight in each square. And since I figured it would make the most sense to put a pea trellis up across an entire (short) row, I have four squares of peas. Um … yeah. It turns out the peas really like my garden and have climbed the whole height of my netting and put forth a gazillion flowers. Those flowers are quickly turning into pea pods. It’s going to be raining peas over here, y’all. And the only reason I planted them was for my pea-loving boys. I opened a pod up on Tuesday to check on how fat they need to be before picking, and well, I might a pea convert. They are so sweet and crunchy and fresh. If you’re like me and were afraid of peas because of years of the factory canned or frozen varieties forced down your throat, try growing peas in your yard. Really.

I’m most excited about the winter squashes. Last year I planted them too late and the tiny butternuts that were developing instantly withered away when we had a cold snap. I love butternut squash anything, so you can bet I’ll be using it up. At least, that’s what I’m saying now. But hey, I have a new-fangled pressure canner to use, so there will be jarred soup in my future. Along with jarred everything else, probably.

What are you growing this year?

http://www.stetted.com/index.php/2010/04/15/garden-update/| © Megan Myers, stetted, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: garden

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Raw milk has become [...]]]> The past few years have turned out to be an awakening for the American public about where our food comes from. Thanks to people like Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver, we’ve all been taking a closer look at what we’re putting into our bodies, and starting food movements across the country.

Raw milk has become one of those food movements. For this month’s Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24, I went along with Slow Food Austin to tour the Stryk Jersey Farm in Schulenberg, Texas, about 90 minutes from Austin.

About the Farm

Stryk Jersey Farm was begun in the 1940s as a standard milking farm, using Jersey cows as they are hardy, efficient, and produce a high-protein milk. In the 1980s Bob Stryk took over the farm from his father, and eventually decided to make the move to raw milk production.

Stryk is one of the only farms in Texas that has a Grade “A” Raw for Retail Milk permit, ensuring strict standards when it comes to making milk and cheese products. Raw milk is not available in stores (except in California and South Carolina) – you have to go directly to the dairy to get it, and oftentimes dairies have their status as a raw milk producer unknown to the general public, making it a sort of secret society to crack into.

The cows at Stryk are still all Jersey, which provide for some of best milk out there. The cows are grass fed, and the types of grasses the cows eat affect the taste of the raw milk. For example, in springtime when the cows are eating clover, the milk is sweeter than later on in the season.

The Stryk cows are milked twice a day for 20 minutes, and the rest of the time they are out on the pasture. Cows only produce milk when they have had calves, so at Stryk they keep track of when the cows are in heat (every 21 days) in order to do artificial insemination. The cows are able to produce milk as long as they are still able to have babies. At Stryk they also make sure to check the bacteria count of the milk produced. An otherwise healthy cow can produce milk with a high bacteria level, in which case the cow will be sold off to another farm.

What Does “Raw” Milk Mean?

Raw milk means that the milk isn’t heated, unlike the milk we’re used to from the grocery store. Raw milk is taken from the cow, filtered, and cooled rapidly to just above freezing. Standard milk is heated to high temperatures very quickly, and then brought down to chill. Usually raw milk also means that the cows are grass fed, although some raw-milk cows are fed partially on grains.

People often wonder about the freshness of raw milk, and assume it can’t last as long because it hasn’t been pasteurized. While that’s true when it comes to cumulative time, it turns out that all milk lasts the same amount of time once it has been opened – about 10 days. Pasteurized and UHT milks have longer shelf lives because they are shipped all over the country. Since you’re getting raw milk directly from the farmer, there’s none of the worry about how long the milk has been sitting in a warehouse cooler.

Another great thing about raw milk is that when it starts to go bad, it gets sour. Why is this great? Because you can still use it for certain things, like making cottage cheese. When pasteurized milk goes bad, it just gets rancid.

Tasting the Products

In addition to milk products Stryk also makes raw milk cheeses. We tasted a few different cheeses, as well as milk. We had plain cheddar curds, red pepper curds, cheddar, jalapeno cheddar, and caraway cheddar. I grew up in Wisconsin so I’m very familiar with cheese curds, but chances are you have either never come across them at all, or only in deep-fried form. The flavor is very mild, and the freshest curds will “squeak” when you bite it. This is because curds are the pre-pressed version of cheese, and the texture is fairly rubbery (not in a bad way!).

I’ve been eating raw milk cheddar for a while so of course I loved it. Raw milk cheddar is fairly pale in color, and the taste is creamy but still with a slight tang. Raw milk cheddar makers do not color their cheddar, as many factory-produced cheddars are. (Thankfully, it appears most companies use naturally-derived colorings for the cheeses, such as annatto and an oil made from paprika.) The jalapeno cheddar was full of dried jalapeno pieces, making it a great cheese for Tex-Mex or just snacking with crackers. The caraway cheddar was most interesting to me, as I don’t remember having such a combination before. Upon tasting it instantly reminded me of my grandfather’s Swedish rye bread.

Next up was the milk. Look at this bottle! I took great pains to get a photo where you could see the dividing line between the cream layer and the milk layer. If you could siphon off the cream, just one gallon would have about half a quart of cream! So: don’t forget to shake your jugs before pouring! The taste of the milk itself was wonderful. Some people say that raw milk is an acquired taste, but I can’t see why. If you already drink regular milk, you’ll notice right away how raw milk blows it out of the water. It’s creamy without being thick and is slightly sweet. I also noticed it didn’t have the strange aftertaste I usually notice with milk. Even my husband, who complained about the last batch of local, low-temperature pasteurized milk I brought home, liked it.

Along with our tour ticket was a sampler pack of Stryk products. The pack included a full pound of raw milk cheddar, a tub of cottage cheese, a pack of cheese curds, and a tub of sour cream. The sour cream is beautiful. Instead of the pure white stuff we buy at the grocery store, this has a lovely yellow tone similar to homemade mayonnaise, and is quite thick. When we got home I immediately put it to work in some biscuits, adding some of that raw milk cheddar, chives from my garden, and whole wheat flour from Richardson Farms. Yum!

Health Benefits of Raw Milk

Health benefits of any product over another are often debated, and raw milk is no exception. That being said, here’s some interesting information about raw milk versus pasteurized.

Raw milk on the left, 1% milk on the right

OK, How Do I Get Some?

The price of raw milk is astonishing to me. Here in central Texas, a gallon of big-brand organic milk is $6. A gallon of raw milk at Stryk is only $5. It might not sound like a big price break, but that adds up in the long term.

If you’re interested in finding raw milk for yourself, you might have some difficulties. As I said earlier, only two states allow it to be sold in stores. Keeping the milk cold is also a concern, so farmer’s don’t want to have to move it too far from the dairy to get it to their customers. Not to mention the pressure that comes from the big brand milk producers. They can easily threaten to pull their whole dairy product line from a store if just one raw milk farmer wants to sell milk there. Farmer Bob told us about this very thing happening to a farmer he knew. Raw milk producers can’t compete on this level, but they can have better ways to provide their product to their customers.

In Texas, legislation is being proposed for the 2011 session that will attempt to change how the sales of raw milk can be done. Raw milk producers would love to get into the farmer’s markets where their customer base shops already, but they currently can’t, as the Texas law as interpreted by the Department of Health says that raw milk can only be sold directly from the farmer to the customer at the farm. In theory this is to protect the consumer, but in practice ends up harming both the farmer and any potential customer who never gets the chance to hear about raw milk.

Unfortunately there has to be a fine line walked when working on this legislation. The farmers need to be careful about what changes they ask for in order to make sure they can continue doing business at all. Most of all they need the support from people who know the benefits of raw milk and want to keep the tradition of small farms, which are reducing in number every year, alive in the United States.

To find a producer of raw milk, check here for your area. Note that you might need to look at the smaller towns near your city, as of course most dairy farms aren’t located in metropolitan areas.

Resources

For more information on raw milk and other Real Food, and how you can support farmers, check out the following sites.

Slow Food USA
Weston A. Price Foundation
Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund
Nina Planck

http://www.stetted.com/index.php/2010/03/28/foodbuzz-24-24-24-raw-milk-revolution/| © Megan Myers, stetted, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: "foodbuzz", 24 24 24, locavore, raw milk

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