Melissa Pasanen

Delicious Ways to Cook with Lemons

Sarah Hoff — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:41:03 +0000

When Life Gives You Lemons

I know what to do with bushels of zucchini and a cellar full of turnips, but when life gave me loads of lemons I was almost overcome by the riches. I’ve always coveted the lemon trees that grow in my sister’s backyard in California, the state that produces about 90 percent of the U.S. crop. When I visit her, I am baffled by how she seems to take those sunny fruits for granted.

Melissa Pasanen

Recipes for winter's brightest fruit.

January/February 2011

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3 Champions of Sustainable Food

Sarah Hoff — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:32:39 +0000

3 Cheers for Sustainability

Founded in Boston in 1993, Chefs Collaborative was one of the first national chef organizations to “steer the conversation around the local sustainable food movement,” explains executive director Melissa Kogut. This year marks the non-profit’s inaugural Sustainability Awards, which honor trailblazers who bring to life Chefs Collaborative’s mission of educating chefs about sustainability and building connections among chefs and food producers. Meet the winners below.

Melissa Pasanen

Sustainability awards honor trailblazing chefs and food producers.

November/December 2010

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Picnicing at an Urban Farm

Penelope Wall-Web Producer/Writer — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:15:14 +0000

Farm-Fresh Picnic

Traffic across the railroad tracks in Burlington, Vermont is brisk on summer Thursday afternoons as cyclists, walkers and cars head to the Intervale. Many come with baskets filled with picnic-ready dishes like our Grilled Shrimp Skewers over White Bean Salad. A band plays by the historic farmhouse and barn, picnic blankets patchwork the grass as farmers walk from their fields to set up heirloom-tomato tastings and women in colorful African clothing sell food made with vegetables they grew nearby.

Melissa Pasanen

Escape summer in the city with a farm-fresh picnic.

July/August 2010

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Grilled Shrimp Skewers over White Bean Salad

Zucchini Salad with Shaved Parmesan

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Raspberry Limeade

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Nutrition? Duh.

Penelope Wall-Web Producer/Writer — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:52:22 +0000

Melissa Pasanen

Frontline gets skeptics into the kitchen to make food and health palatable.

“So, who’s eaten protein today?” asks Connal McCullough of a group of intent preteens gathered at the Jordan Boys and Girls Club in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

“I had chicken,” says Juan Lopez, 12. “Kentucky Fried—but that’s still chicken.”

It was the perfect opening for the evening’s subject: making a healthier alternative to Juan’s deep-fried lunch. Instructors McCullough, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, and Tony Rosenfeld, chef and co-owner of b.good restaurant, are teaching hands-on cooking and health as part of a six-week course created by Operation Frontline, a program of Share Our Strength, the national antihunger and antipoverty organization.

“You hear about a nutrition class and you roll your eyes,” says Erica Vogelei, former program manager for Operation Frontline in Massachusetts, “but a cooking class with a real chef—that’s exciting.”

Since 1993, Operation Frontline courses have reached more than 31,000 people in 15 states, including low-income adults, children and teens, and people living with HIV and AIDS. The in-kitchen classes are led by volunteer teaching teams—usually a professional chef paired with a nutrition educator. In most cases, students leave with a bag of groceries so they can recreate what they’ve just learned at home.

Tonight’s project—low-fat baked chicken—emerged from the oven crisp and juicy. “Is it better than KFC?” asks Rosenfeld. “Sure. It’s homemade,” says Jerricka Rodas, 12. “We should have put some spice on it,” volunteers a classmate. The final verdict comes when another voice asks, “Is there any more?”

A Vermont Picnic

Paula Joslin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:32:31 +0000

A Vermont Picnic

In early spring, I stood in northern Vermont under a bright blue sky watching a teenager tap a sugar maple while his parents and grandparents looked on proudly. “Sugaring is just as much a part of me as the color of my hair,” the young fourth-generation sugarmaker said later over maple-crumb muffins in the farmhouse kitchen. “Every family has its own stories. For me, growing up sugaring is a big part of our story.”

Melissa Pasanen

A Meal to Celebrate Local Bounty.

July/August 2008

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Maple syrup is part of many Vermonters’ stories but, like other longstanding food traditions across North America, it is threatened by both environmental and societal factors and has been labeled “at risk” by the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) project. Maple Syrup nation—one of 13 “foodsheds” outlined by RAFT—stretches from eastern Quebec and inland Maine to the northwest corner of Indiana, with the entire state of Vermont and most of New York State and Pennsylvania at its heart. It is named in honor of the sugar maple, which has shared its sap since native peoples first discovered the lightly sweet, clear liquid and simmered it down into syrup and sugar. Unfortunately, climate change, acid rain, creeping development and invasive species have threatened the sugar maple.

Veteran sugarmaker Burr Morse, 60, of East Montpelier, Vermont, has been sugaring since he was a boy. The last 20 years have been a struggle: “Weather just stopped happening right,” he explains. “If sugaring goes away, then I go away,” he says simply. “It’s not only important to the economy, it’s important to the temperament of the people here.”

Most of Maple Syrup nation was settled by homesteaders who had to diversify to survive. They grew their own vegetables, dry beans and grains; planted fruit and nut trees; raised chickens, pigs and sheep for wool and meat; and always had a milking cow. They hunted game and gathered berries, grapes, dandelion leaves and fiddleheads. To sustain themselves through the long winters, they canned summer’s bounty and stored apples, potatoes and other root vegetables and cured pork in root cellars, attics and barns.

The growing season was full of hard work, but dishes like some of the following recipes might well have been spread out for all to share at a community barn-raising or a church picnic. Picture a hearty bean and tomato salad made, perhaps, with Vermont Cranberry beans and sun-warmed orange Oxheart tomatoes. Or an earthenware bowl of freshly dug and boiled new Early Rose potatoes tossed with cob-smoked ham and the buttermilk left after butter-churning. You might find a platter of crisp-crumbed chicken and a basket of warm Cheddar-cornmeal biscuits made with stone-ground flint corn grown since the time of the Abenaki Indians, who lived in what is now northern New England and southern Quebec. There would be pie and giant jugs of ginger-spiked switchel—the preferred drink for hot, dusty summer work—chilling in a nearby stream.

The heirloom varieties of beans, tomatoes, potatoes and corn that would have been on the table are among the foods RAFT has deemed worth reinvigorating for their unique contributions to both our culinary and broader cultural heritage. “We, as humans, have not been given roots as obvious as those of plants,” says RAFT founder Gary Paul Nabhan. “The surest way we have to lodge ourselves within this blessed earth is to know where our food comes from.”

Anyone can play a role by searching out RAFT foods to grow or eat. Soon after Tom Stearns, 33, first started saving and growing heirloom seeds as a hobby in 1995, he was given some flint corn, which he named Roy’s Calais after the man and town from which it came. The next year his passion became his profession when Stearns established High Mowing Organic Seeds in northern Vermont, now a national mail-order organic seed company with over $1 million in annual sales. “Preservation is not just keeping something in a seed bank somewhere,” Stearns says. “Having someone actively farming it is the best way to preserve it.”

Farther south in Rutland, Vermont, Donald Heleba, 69, still works the land his family has farmed since 1926, growing about 35 different potatoes on eight acres without herbicides or mechanical harvesting. “I handsort 10,000 potatoes by myself,” Heleba says with quiet pride. “I’m not bragging, but I’m very particular.” His stock changes each year, but includes varieties like Green Mountain and Makah Ozette. Some don’t sell too well, but “I keep growing them just so I don’t lose the seed,” he says. Back when his father grew potatoes, Heleba recalls, “People bought them by the bushel. Now they buy them by the pound.” But other things are different too. “When I was in school, people used to make fun of you if you were a farmer,” he says. “It’s changed. Now they treat you like you’re special.”

—Melissa Pasanen is an award-winning freelance writer with a focus on food and farming. She co-authored Cooking with Shelburne Farms: Food and Stories from Vermont (Viking, 2007), a New York Times “notable cookbook.”