Food Subculture Club visits a raw food (un)cooking workshop
November 13, 2005
When cooking with meat or dairy, it’s always easy to create foods that are delicious, rich and complex in flavour. By combining processed grain flours with an oven, or brown rice and a rice maker, it’s simple enough to make comfort food. But I have always been curious as to whether a diet of raw food could fulfill the very normal culinary hunkerings for diversity and satisfaction. By this I mean, the potential nutritional benefits of eating a raw food diet aside, is it possible to make an interesting raw food repetoire that is well-suited to the Northern European winter?
On my cookbook shelves there are two cookbooks about raw food cuisine; Roxanne Klein & Charlie Trotter’s R A W, and Juliano Brotman’s Raw, the UNcookbook. I had tried several recipes from R A W, but found that I always had to ‘pump up the volume’ to make them palatable. I found it difficult to incorporate these recipes into a dinner in which the other dishes required cooking. Some dear friends of mine had given me Juliano’s Uncookbook, but I had never used it for anything other than looking up soaking times for nuts. The amount of ingredients for any given recipe just seemed too long to be feasible. When I heard that raw food chefs Juliano Brotman and Ariel from Santa Monica’s Planet Raw were coming to give a week of workshops I was most enthuasiastic to be able to participate.
Just from a culinary prespective…
The workshop, held in an anti-squat in exceedingly picturesque Broek in Waterland just north of Amsterdam, ended up having a lot in common with one of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, except that I’m nowhere near as charming as Louis is/was and the workshop was in the middle of the week. During the introductions I inadvertently started things off on the wrong foot by not giving the correct answer to the question, ‘how raw are you?’ My answer, ‘Pretty dang raw, but I’m not a vegetarian’ caused more than a few of the other participants to gasp audibly. I could have known that by trying to explain my omnivorous culinary bend that I would become the pisspole of raw food guru-ji Juliano.
Personal affinities aside, it is only fair to mention that I found all of the food that we prepared in the workshop to be ‘rock my world’ delicious and most of my prejudices with regard to this subculture’s cuisine were quickly dispelled. The food wasn’t all wet and cold, it didn’t taste like ‘health food’, it didn’t taste like vegan food, it was neither bland nor monotonous. In fact, at the end of the workshop, I really started getting cravings for something SIMPLE, like a piece of undressed lettuce. Juliano prepares foods like a parfumier makes a scent. He composes flavours and textures out of his ingredients. His knowledge of the flavour characteristics and textures of the ingredients he uses is impressive. Were it not for this fact, I would have been so out of there, having very little tolerance for statements like ‘cooked food is pure poison’, and ‘I know someone that has been raw for six hundred years’. There was an unspeakable culture clash, but boy can this guy (un)cook.
One of the things I appreciated most about the workshop is that due to Juliano’s conviction that everyone in the entire world should become ‘raw’ immediately, he was eager to explain a feasible methodology for running a raw food kitchen and/or household. I had reported earlier that raw cuisine is labour intensive, and compared to throwing ingredients into a rice maker or grilling up some flesh, it is, but Juliano explained how to make some basic ingredients that could be worked into meals over a period of a week that made the idea of raw food meal preparation less daunting.
Please click ‘please read more’ to see an interview that I conducted with Juliano and Ariel that will probably answer some of your burning (sorry) raw food questions.
(Please read more… )
debra at 20:31 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
A garden in absentia
November 8, 2005
These are images of my kitchen garden in Occitania. Although I’ve been away for more than two months, it hasn’t been left to it’s own devices. My garden allotment neighbour Al Gouche, and my dear friend KvR have both been kind enough to water it. This amazing growth (I can’t even see the fig tree, the plants are so high) is the result of lovingkindness and very inexpensive water.
Before leaving in September, I asked all my neighbours to eat whatever edible produce they could find from this garden.That’s lots of leafy greens, probably too many eighteen-day radishes, and lots of green tomatoes for pickling. My garden has become a hangout zone for the middle-aged, a communal garden and a platform for Jewish guilt. Which is a nice thing, ultimately.
Thank you, KvR for these photographs that are making me so very, very homesick! Would you please tell Al Gouche that I’ll start slashing and burning in the middle of December.
debra at 11:28 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Culiblog dot org is one year young
November 5, 2005
Museum Night 2005 marks the one year anniversary of the domain culiblog dot org and the ladies were there to celebrate with me at the restaurant that incorporates this domain name the most into its interior design. For the time being this is could only mean Food Facility, but lord only knows what the future will bring! The Ladies Debra, Julie, Renée, Helena, Quirine, Klazien and Aya especially enjoyed our bubbles with croquetas d’amour, presented in an inside joke of absorbant Dutch design.
(Please read more… )
debra at 23:31 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
