Tag Archives: local food

A recipe for cooking

Karen is taking a summer break. This column on a remarkable business incubator appeared last January.

Take one old hot dog factory. Add two big kitchens, eight convection ovens, 12 food truck spaces, several 15-gallon mixers, a frying pan logo, a 1,800 square-foot refrigerator and 45 start-ups. Stir in $15 million of public money, tax credits and donations. Cook for seven years while raising money, renovating the factory, and getting up to speed. Top it off with an executive director who knows her stuff.
Serve it to Bostonians at the Boston Public Market, the Greenway and commercial outlets all over the city.
Enjoy, as waiters say. You’ve just gotten the recipe for the CommonWealth Kitchen, a non-profit company in an old Pearl Hot Dog facility that nurtures start-up food businesses and also cooks for bigger but still personal food businesses that are so successful they can’t do it by themselves.
My friend Sally and I drove out to Dorchester, where the facility is, to see what was happening. I’d heard about this place from people at the Boston Public Market, since CWK, as is it known, prepares pasta for Nella Pasta and foods for other Boston Public Market vendors.
It helps to have the equivalent of a world-class chef managing the kitchens. That’s Jen Faigel. People like her are both commonplace and extraordinary. On the one hand, they’ve done what everyone is supposed to do. They’ve found their niche, educated themselves, gotten experience, grabbed an idea and made a success of themselves and their passion. On the other hand, when you find people like that, they seem rare.
Jen had worked in affordable housing, real estate development and economic development. The Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation was planning to tear down the decrepit factory and build affordable housing. Neighbors said no. “We want to keep jobs here,” they said. “What good is affordable housing if people can’t work?”
That was in 2009. By 2010, Jen, who’d been on the board of the former CropCircle Kitchen in JP, was brought in as a consultant by the Dorchester EDC to help create a food incubator that took advantage of the special conditions the 1910 factory offered. In 2014, Jen became the executive director of CWK, which absorbed CropCircle, and it opened with two kitchens.
One is for folks who have an idea for a food product, but don’t have the facilities or the know-how to make their favorite sauce, pickles or cake into a real business. Those budding entrepreneurs sign up at $35 an hour to use the large equipment CWK provides. Along with the space, they get instruction on crafting a business plan, getting the proper permits, scaling recipes, packaging their product, maintaining food safety, and handling finances, insurance and all the other nuts and bolts of running a small business.
So far, 45 businesses, including the Clover Food Lab, Roxy’s Grilled Cheese and McCrea’s Candies, have gone through the program and grown to the point where they’re on their own.
Forty-five small businesses are now sharing the large kitchen. They include Sweet Teez Bakery, whose owner, Teresa Thompson Maynard, arrived while we were visiting to make her cookies, cakes and cupcakes. “I left corporate on January 16,” she said. “CWK really helped me know what I’m doing.”
She needed the help, she said, since she admitted burning the first cake she baked in the large convection oven.
Grace Connor, aged 17, was also in the kitchen while we were visiting. This tall, thin South End girl was making cookie dough ice cream for Little G, her nascent ice cream venture.
Jen said a Boston police officer makes chutney at CWK, but we didn’t meet her.
On the other side of CWK’s entrance is the second kitchen, devoted to cooking for outside vendors whose facilities can’t handle the volume they need. While we were there, three women were baking cookies and also preparing a bloody Mary mix for Alex’s Ugly Sauce. Owner Alex Bourgeois now has his sauce in every Whole Foods on the East Coast, so he is experimenting with new products.
CWK also makes sauce for Mei Mei Street Kitchen and pumpkin puree for Harvard’s dining services. In the fridge were fifty pounds of cilantro, which shows the volume CWK can handle. Nearly 60 percent of the fresh ingredients are local, Jen said proudly.
CWK has relationships that connects its businesses to lenders when the start-ups need investment to expand. It constantly cleans the fans, floors, drains and equipment. It creates a community of cooks who can keep in touch after they disperse.
CWK has 14 staff members and a $1.6 million budget, with 50 percent from earned income, matched with grants and fund-raising. Within five years, Jen projects earned income will cover 85 percent of CWK’s costs. She has space for more start-ups.
So if you are intent on creating your own culinary sensation and offering it to the world, contact Jen. Everything you need to sign up is at www.commowealthkitchen.org.

Spring cooking

Our dinner last night was typical for us in the spring. We sat down to fava beans, fiddleheads and morel mushrooms sent for my birthday from my sister-in-law. Last week we had soft shell crabs two nights in a row because they are so good, and their season is short. I haven’t found ramps this year, but finally shad roe appeared at our small, local grocery store.

While these foods are touted in magazines and cookbooks as part of the local food movement, I am surprised at how many people are unfamiliar with them, don’t like their taste or find them too difficult to deal with.

So, dear readers, this column is about spring recipes.

My husband and I think we hunt down foods like this because we grew up on farms, foraged in the woods, knew at an early age where food comes from and got over any squeamishness that might have lurked about.

When I was a young, inexperienced cook, I served Julia Child’s braised tongue in madeira sauce to dinner guests who exclaimed how good it was. One person asked what we were eating.

When I answered, most stopped.

Later, my father-in-law packed up in dry ice several pheasants he had shot and shipped them to us. Having learned from the tongue experience, we invited only friends who we knew could handle wild birds.

One spring when that same father-in-law sent a mess of morels from his Midwestern woods, we invited a sophisticated couple who had never heard of them for brunch where they featured prominently. Our friends looked as if we were going to poison them, but they gamely tried them. They were as hooked on morels as we were. A couple of years later, when mushrooms sprang from new mulch they had had delivered to their courtyard a couple of weeks before, they recognized them, invited us over to pick, and we all had a morel feast.

One summer we spent a vacation with several friends in Westport, MA. At the beach my Midwestern husband and I picked a bucketful of blue-black mussels off the rocks, steamed them with lemon and herbs and served them to our New England city-raised friends, who had never heard of them. After that, everyone picked them off the rocks and we had them about every night until we left.

That was then – before eating local, seasonal and even historical food like tongue was trendy and popular. Even now it isn’t easy to find these foods. Whole Foods doesn’t regularly carry tongue. Soft shell crab makes it to some restaurants menus, but it is only at Boston’s private clubs that you can regularly find shad roe. Nobody serves fava beans. Like quinces, another historical food, they take too long to prepare, I guess.

You can find recipes for all these foods online easily so I won’t bore you. But I’ll give you a few tips.

Morels. They are easily the best tasting mushrooms in the world. Few shops carry them, and when they do they’re usually dried out and expensive. My sister, who still lives in the Midwest, finds them for free in the woods. My sister-in-law orders them from Wisconsin. When they arrive, split them in half, wash and clean them because you’ll find a few bugs. Use them in pasta, over toast or flour them lightly and cook them in butter until crisp.

Fava beans. Remove them from the pod. Slip them into boiling water for a minute or two. Plunge them into ice to stop the cooking. When they are cool, slip off the skins to reveal bright green beans with a lovely taste. A bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper and a dash of olive oil is all they need. In English grocery stores, where they are sometimes called broad beans, you can get them already out of the pod. I don’t know why the American food-industrial complex hasn’t figured out how to do that here.

Shad roe. Cook bacon, drain most of the fat, then cook the roe in the same pan. This is easy.

Fiddleheads. Trim them, blanch them for a minute or two in boiling water and then sauté with garlic or shallots.

Soft shell crabs. Have the butcher trim them, roll them in corn meal and then sauté. I never do this as well as a couple of restaurants I know. So we usually order them at those restaurants.

Tongue. Go to Julia Child’s recipes. She’ll teach you everything you need to know. But I imagine you won’t bother.

 

Leslie Adam goes shopping

Downtown Boston residents have embraced the Boston Public Market. It arrived along the Greenway at the right time. Food-lovers were tired of the agriculture-industrial complex and wanted their food to be real, local, maybe organic. They were repelled by the whipped-petroleum products lining the shelves in traditional supermarkets.

I’ve been to the market many times. The smoked fish and the lettuce are favorites, but I had never shopped there seriously, thinking it wouldn’t be possible. Then I talked to Beacon Hill resident Leslie Adam, who said she and a Back Bay friend do almost all their grocery shopping for their families weekly at the Boston Public Market.

So I went with Leslie on a recent Wednesday to see how she does it. First, she drives. She usually goes first thing in the morning. This time, however, we left about 11 a.m. and the parking garage was full. After waiting in a short line for cars to leave, we drove in, parked and were off. Leslie said Sunday mornings at 8 a.m. is her favorite time to go. With few other shoppers, she has the run of the place. In the summer, she often bikes over.

Leslie has two children, a husband and sometimes friends to feed. We headed for the back of the market because she likes to buy her bread, located near the main entrance, as she leaves so it won’t be crushed at the bottom of the bags she carries with her.

Sometimes Leslie brings along a list or recipes, but at other times she lets what is available speak to her.

On the way to the back, we stopped at two pop-up shops that spoke to her. Leslie bought popovers from The Popover Lady, based in Melrose, because she knew her kids would like them. She also stopped at ParTea, where owner Sarah Wasser told us she had combined her experience as a bartender with her love for tea and created natural infusions in tea-bag like packets for booze. Leslie decided such drinks might be a conversation starter for guests so she bought a ginger infusion. Like most of the vendors, the women running the pop-up shops ran Leslie’s credit card through Square on their phones or iPads.

Red’s Best was next. The counter man suggested redfish, caught on a Gloucester fishing boat, for good fish tacos. Leslie decided tacos would be tonight’s dinner. She also got salmon raised in the Bay of Fundy.

She pointed out the Spindrift bottles, filled with berries and sparkling water, in a refrigerated case in front of Red’s Best. She has met Bill Creelman, the Charlestown resident who created them.

Leslie bought eggs and both fresh and frozen meats—pork loin, chicken breasts and ground beef—from Stillman Quality Meats and Chestnut Farms. Her kids like the frozen pulled pork from Lilac Hedge, which she heats and piles in buns for lunches. Today, however, because the children’s schedules during the coming week meant lunch would be elsewhere, she went on to choose New Braintree-based Stillman Farms’ fresh spinach, sweet potatoes and squash, already peeled.

She bought roasted red pepper ravioli at Nella’s and smoked haddock for kedgeree—Leslie’s husband is British— and salmon belly at Boston Smoked Fish Company. She got Hardwick Stone cheese at Appleton Farms so her daughter could make the cheese sandwiches she has begun grilling for breakfast.

Around the corner we admired the dramatic tulips, the cider syrup—good on pork, said Leslie—honey and smoked maple syrup and caramels. Leslie didn’t buy any of those on our trip, but she said they were all were fabulous.

We ended our shop with a Harbison cheese from Vermont’s Jasper Hill Farm, salad greens from Corner Stalk Farm in East Boston and two loaves of bread from Mamadou’s Artisan Bakery in Winchester.

Leslie had most of the food she will need for the week. She’ll have to stop elsewhere for such staples as bananas, avocados and oranges, but it takes only a short time, she said, to fill in the blanks.

Leslie admits it is usually more expensive to shop at the Boston Public Market, but she does not want her children eating produce sprayed with who-knows-what. She also likes her money going into the local economy.

We paid only a dollar for parking since we had been there less than an hour and had validated the ticket. A bike delivery service is available for those who don’t want to schlep bags home.

One way to shop at the Boston Public Market in a more frugal way is to buy at the market the products that you really can’t live without and then go out the door. On Fridays and Saturdays, the traditional Haymarket carts and vendors are right outside with the best prices anywhere. You’ll get the best of both worlds.

Local wins every time

If corporations are people, they can be just as infuriating, illogical and unhelpful as people can be—you know, people like Boston drivers and some acquaintances that one keeps at arms’ length.

Corporations are hard to keep at arm’s length. A friend of mine has a landline. It rang repeatedly for no reason. The choices the Verizon customer service number provided had no category for a ringing phone and no way to speak to an actual person. Verizon, a phone company, apparently does not want to talk on the phone.

Orbitz got one young man in its clutches and wouldn’t let him go. His is a common name. Obitz emailed him confirmations of plane tickets someone with the same name had bought. He explained the problem to actual people in a 90-minute conversation. The next day he got another confirmation of the same tickets the other man had bought. More 90-minute conversations. As I write this, the matter is still unsolved. Continue reading →