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Winning Friends With Salad

It’s not often that I would say this, but Bart and Homer clearly had it wrong: you can win friends with salad.

Each Thursday at the Impact HUB in SoMa, our coworking space, we close our computers at 12.42pm and gather around to share a bowl of salad and actually talk (in that satisfyingly old-fashioned face-to-face kind of way). Somehow this weekly gathering became known as the Sexy Salad Society, and we like to think of it as the most exclusive inclusive sexiest salad society in San Francisco (try saying that three times).

It’s usually simple fare - garden salad, beans, rice - but I think that’s part of the attraction. At $2/head, and for an allocated time of 18 minutes, you can’t kid yourself that you could buy something cheaper, faster or healthier from the neighboring shops or food trucks. And while you’re helping yourself to a simple, healthy lunch, you may as well make friends with the people you pass in the corridors or see at the printer.

I kind of like the fact that the food is unfussy. I have previously had workplace potlucks escalate into semi-competitive events (which is fun in the short-term but hard to sustain when you’re up at 11pm the night before making shortcrust pastry for your rustic quiche that you brought along because that’s just the kind of casually impressive mid-week cook you happen to be). It also emphasises that a meal doesn’t have to be fancy in order to create a special experience.

SupperShare’s co-founder Kim leads the charge every week to serve salad to the hungry masses as they connect with each other between bites. For her, a dining experience doesn’t have to be an expensive, long-winded affair, but an opportunity to break bread and make new friends. Beyond Sexy Salad Society, each week, SupperShare hosts use simple food as a tool to connect with others in more meaningful ways and to give back.

I’m on a mission to consume my body weight in peaches this Summer, so this week I made a peach tabbouleh. It’s one of the recipes that I discovered when looking through Nigel Slater’s book Tender the other week and it’s currently on high rotation in my household. It takes all of about 10 minutes to prepare, fits the $2/head budget, and yet somehow still feels quite indulgent. I guess that’s the magic of perfectly ripe Summer peaches. Kim teamed it with a simple Greek salad and Gigantes, an herbed white bean and tomato dish.

Some of my (new) Sexy Salad Society friends asked for the tabbouleh recipe, so I thought I’d post it here for our SupperSharers. Maybe it will inspire you to make some new friends in your workplace ... or serve at your next Supper!

Peach tabbouleh (Nigel Slater)

1 ½ cups bulgur

6 slim spring onions

4 ripe peaches

a small, hot red chilli

1 bunch mint

1 bunch flat-leaf parsley

1 bunch cilantro

juice of a lemon

olive oil

Pour the bulgur into a bowl and just cover with boiling water, then set aside.

Finely chop the chilli, then roughly chop the spring onions, mint, parsley, and cilantro. Dice the peaches into bite-sized pieces.

Fluff the bulgur up with a fork, making sure it has absorbed all the water. Combine the chilli, herbs and bulgur in a bowl, stir in a glug or two of olive oil, lemon juice and loads of cracked pepper and salt. Scatter the peaches throughout, then serve.

#Peach tabbouleh #impacthub #suppershare #mealsharing #sexysaladsociety #sharingeconomy

Meet the team: Kim

It’s time to meet the team and it makes a lot of sense to start with Kim. Kim is not only one of SupperShare’s co-founders, she’s the kind of person who will jump in and fill that awkward silence when a group facilitator asks for volunteers to kick off an introductory exercise. So here we go ...

Where are you from?

I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where community dining and comfort food go hand-in-hand. Memories of Paw paw’s sweet cream corn and fried okra on a Sunday afternoon always brings a smile to my face.

Why SupperShare?

We started SupperShare to break the formal approach to eating out and to bring people together over a home-cooked meal that also supports a community cause.

I don’t really go out to restaurants, but love to host folks in my home for dinner for a relaxing evening filled with laughter. SupperShare provides the tools for anyone to host or attend an affordable meal with new and old friends.

What’s your take on all the “sharing economy” buzz?

I think it is wonderful that more people are sharing their resources and connecting in different ways then in the past. I would like to see the sharing economy grow and the buzz helps to spread awareness. As peer-to-peer companies grow, I believe it is important to maintain the special sense of community and authenticity that I feel makes this a social movement as much as an “economy.”

What makes you happy?

Bringing people together in meaningful ways makes me really happy! I also love laughing with joyful people, learning something new and sharing it with others, going on a bike ride and flying a kite at the beach, hosting SupperShare dinners with my slow cooker, and giving back with some hours at a community garden.

What do you eat when no one’s looking?

IT's IT ice cream sandwiches. I’m not a big sweet person, but for some reason, on my way home from a night out, the corner store will call my name for a sweet treat. I cannot keep a box in my freezer or I will eat them all in one night.

Cats or dogs? Tea or coffee?

I’m a fan of dogs, but don’t own either in my little studio - just a struggling basil plant and plans for a fire escape garden. Coffee calls my name in the morning with tea keeping me company throughout the day.

What is the weirdest meal you’ve shared?

Well, I spent about a year travelling around the developing world which came with quite a few interesting food experiences. Sharing a traditional Argentinian asado with a family in Mar de Plata, I dined on all the offal of a cow - and it was pretty awful. Give me steak and sausage, but the texture and taste of brains just don’t work for me.

You can always get to know Kim a little better by heading along to one of her slow-cooked SupperShares in her San Francisco studio. Follow her founder adventures on Twitter at @leapingintolife.

It's Friday. Eat your vegetables

I see no point in sharing recipes using figs. I just can’t understand how anyone can resist eating them long enough to cook them. In my household, they’re lucky if they even make it home, let alone under the broiler or into the oven. So even though it is the very exciting time of year when figs appear at the farmers’ markets, I will skip straight to the vegetable recipes.

When my fridge is heaving with more vegetables than I could possibly know what to do with, there are a few books that I know I can turn to for inspiration. As we head into the weekend, I thought I would quickly share a few of my favorites in case you have a bit of an incident at a local farmers’ market and suddenly need to find something to do with all those summer squash, watercress and tomatoes.

Tender - Nigel Slater. When this book came out a couple of years ago, I sat down and read it cover-to-cover like a novel. But Nigel Slater isn’t one of those chefs that uses self-indulgent stories or florid prose to hide bad recipes. Each vegetable featured in the book gets a little introduction, notes on how to grow it, and an explanation of its best culinary pairings before launching into some delightfully simple recipes that really make the vegetable the star. It’s just a great all-round reference.

Plenty - Yotam Ottolenghi. If you have even a passing interest in salads or vegetables and cook books, you will already be familiar with Ottolenghi. Or if you’re hooked on Orange is the New Black, you’ll recognize it from Piper’s book shelf. It was published a couple of years ago so I think it’s been long enough that I can declare this to be one of my favorite cookbooks ever without sounding like I’m still swept up in the early stage infatuation when you bring home a new cookbook. It will make you love salad.

River Cottage Veg - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Always pragmatic, and yet still quite inspiring. Even if most of the recipes are not exactly ground-breaking, this book is a good reminder of simple but interesting ways to cook vegetables (and won’t have you schlepping around the city looking for outlandish ingredients).

Vegetarian Everyday - David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl. it’s a shame that the title and cover of the US edition are kind of unappealing because once you open the cover, everything from there on in is gorgeous. It will not only inspire you to cook with vegetables in new and unusual ways, it will make you want to go out and buy millet. Now that’s a powerful book.

Food in Jars - Marisa McClellan. if you have a serious surplus of fruit or veges and decide you’re going to embrace your inner hipster, you need to get pickling. And this is a good book to get you started.

for the love of vegetables supper

Kate

Wild Soul and SupperShare: Supper-Buddies and Soul Mates in Meal-Sharing

One of the nice things about being part of SupperShare in the Bay Area is that you certainly don’t feel like Robinson Crusoe. You don’t have to look too far to find like-minded souls. More often than not, I don’t get too far into telling people about SupperShare before they’re nodding in agreement and telling me about how they’re involved in something that shares similar aims, or asking me how they can get involved in SupperShare. (Just FYI, the answer to the second part of that is quite simple – check out suppershare.com and just sign yourself up for one of the dinners that are going on across the city).

Anyway, when Kim and I were introduced to Leah from Wild Soul, we had one of those moments, where we realized that each of our projects come from shared values and have a lot in common. They’re both about bringing people together around food (but outside of the stodgy restaurant scene). They’re about finding new ways to build connections and create a sense of community.

I would love to be able to tell you about attending a Wild Soul breakfast club. Every month, Wild Soul holds a small breakfast event at a secret location that brings together an interesting crew of people over healthy, homemade food made by different guest chefs. But it seems it’s so popular that it’s booked out for the next couple of months. So maybe ask me about it in September.

In the meantime, I (or you) stand a fighting chance of being able to go to one of their regular farm-to-table events. These events combine yoga, food and farming in delightfully unusual settings. The idea is to allow us to open up and have the same kind of unexpected experiences that we have when we’re traveling, but closer to home. Just like SupperShare, Wild Souls is about challenging our ideas about what is public space and what is private space. When we disrupt those assumptions, we are more open to start sharing in different and more meaningful ways. It’s also just kind of interesting to change your scene and meet new people in unexpected surroundings.

So now that we’ve found each other, we’ll be thinking about ways in which to combine our energies. Until then, I’ll just be hanging out to make it into their breakfast club.

#suppershare #mealsharing #sharing #yoga #farmtotable #wildsoul

Food Lit Book Club: Meet the Farmers Behind "Epitaph for a Peach"

On Sunday afternoon, I walked out of 18 Reasons Food Lit Book Club ready to reimagine the relationship between farmer and consumer, reform agriculture, discover my literary voice and engage in a radical feminist cause. Of course, by mid-afternoon I was napping on the sofa. But over the next few days, I have continued to mull over some of the ideas that we shared and am still smiling at the memory of our conversations. It was a morning that brought together so many elements of community-building through food that I thought that I would share it with the SupperShare community.

Written in the early 90s (before farm-to-table was as de rigeur as homemade pickles and sourdough), Epitaph for a Peach is about a farmer’s battle to save an heirloom peach variety and, in the process, rediscover and reform his relationship with nature. David Mas Masumoto and his daughter, Nikiko, are such inspiring, immediately likeable personalities. In the middle of the busy harvest season on a morning when the mercury was already well on its way into the high 90s, they took the time to give our book club a virtual tour of their farm, read some passages from Epitaph and share their thoughts on modern farming and food culture. And what interesting thoughts they were too.

In response to my question about how consumers can best support farmers through their buying choices, David said a couple of things that struck me. Firstly, we need to stop thinking about ‘farmers’ and ‘consumers’ and instead start thinking of each other as partners. The concept of farm-to-table can too often seem like a one-way movement; farmers produce and consumers buy, without any more meaningful exchange (as an aside, I can’t wait to read Dan Barber’s book The Third Plate critiquing the farm-to-table idea). To build the concept of a partnership with farmers, the Masumoto family farm has been running their Elberta Peach Tree Adoption program since 2004. This scheme enables individuals to adopt a peach tree in the winter, and then harvest and share in that tree’s bounty in the summer. If the season is good, the adoptive parent shares the windfall. If the season is bad, they share the farmer’s disappointment. What an interesting idea about how to involve city-dwellers in the joys and setbacks of farming.

A second comment that David and Nikiko made was that we can’t buy our way into sustainable agriculture. This wasn’t the first time that I had heard this idea, but I think it’s the kind of idea that we need to keep hearing multiple times before it sinks in and takes root. Nikiko talked about the quest to find a ‘nose-to-tail’ approach to fruit. As part of this, they have launched their ‘O, U Fab’ initiative to find a market for visually imperfect but nonetheless delicious fruit that struggles to find a home in the traditional marketplace and it seems to have been a great success.

With such creative approaches and a swag of books to their names, it’s no surprise to find that the Masumoto family is quite the learned bunch, with multiple degrees to their names. In answer to the obvious question of how David lured his smart young daughter back from the city to take on the unglamorous labor of working the farm, Nikiko recounted her moment when she made the connection between peach farming and her major in gender studies. Building on her father’s beginnings with organic farming and retaining heirloom varietals, Nikiko saw the possibilities of farming as a feminist way of making the world. I’m intrigued to see the continued evolution of the farm as Nikiko puts her stamp on it.

So after inspiring us all with their enthusiasm and ideas, David and Nikiko signed off (no doubt to go back into the fields) and we chowed down on our peach tart, peach cobbler and peach shrub, the room buzzing with conversation and brimming with smiles.

How To Get the Most Out of Your Freezer...And Savory Corn Muffin Recipe!

Life feels much more manageable when the pantry is full, the clothes are clean and the apartment is orderly. Mind you, when this perfect trifecta comes together, it’s actually a pretty good indication that the rest of my life is careening out of control and I’ve taken shelter in the little things. Anyway, when life gets chaotic, it’s reassuring if you have a few meals at the ready in the freezer. That way you know that even when you come home late and you can’t face the grocery store (or another dodgy burrito), you won’t have to eat cereal for dinner.

The latest thing to prompt me to spend a Sunday afternoon cooking and freezing meals is that one of my dear friends is about to have a baby. I figure there’s no better time to have a stash of homemade meals in the freezer than when you’re sleep-deprived and trying to work out how to look after a brand new (and demanding) little person in your household.

First up, what can you make that will survive being frozen and reheated?

I tend to just make one pot meals, particularly slow-cooked stews, curries, or soups. Slow-cooked bolognese or tomato sauce are fantastic. I’m always happy to find a stash of Marcella Hazan’s lentil and pancetta soup in the freezer - it’s a satisfying meal in itself or you can cook it up with some arborio rice for an even heartier sort of lentil risotto. Stews are also very tolerant of some time in the freezer.

I always like to make cookie dough. Standard choc-chip cookie dough benefits from chilling in the fridge overnight so it also works just fine if you roll it up in cling wrap, store it in the freezer for a few weeks and then slice off ½ inch rounds to bake when you need a treat or something to share with guests (just try to resist eating it straight from the freezer…). It’s not really a meal, but it will make you feel like a domestic god/goddess if you can whip out a batch of fresh cookies when someone comes over.

Muffins are another hit for me. I like Green Kitchen Stories’ savory corn and millet muffins (recipe below) because they feel wholesome enough to pass for a decent breakfast (or even dinner at a pinch).

Next up, how are you going to store it?

However you choose to store your food, you’ll want to keep it nice and airtight so that freezer burn doesn’t suck the life out of it. Tupperware or pyrex containers work well, but these things are always in short supply in my cupboards. Ziplock bags work well, but there’s something off-putting to me about pulling a meal out of something that looks like a colostomy bag. So I choose to go the much more hipster-friendly route of mason jars. The wide-mouth jars are freezer-safe, but you’ll need to defrost them slowly before reheating (i.e. you can’t take them straight from freezer to microwave). I also like that they won’t stain (like plastic can when you reheat tomato-based foods) and they’re a little easier on the environment.

I haven’t found a better solution for the cookie dough or the muffins, so I just wrap them tightly in plastic wrap.

Now you just have to find a quiet Sunday afternoon to potter about the kitchen with pots and pans bubbling away on the stove. And while you’re at it, you may as well get a jump on doing that laundry.

Savory Corn and Millet Muffins (from Vegetarian Everyday by David Freniel and Luise Vindahl)

Makes 12 medium-sized muffins (gluten-free)

⅔ cup raw millet

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup rice flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp sea salt

3 large eggs, beaten

1 cup yogurt

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

around 25 kalamata olives, pitted and halved

1 ⅓ cups crumbled feta cheese

3 sprigs of oregano, leaves picked

Preheat the oven to 350⁰F. Line a muffin pan with muffin liners. Cover the millet with ½ cup boiling water and let sit for 5 minutes, then rinse in cold water. This is to extract the bitter taste from the Millet shell and to make it softer. Mix the millet with the cornmeal, rice flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In another bowl, beat the eggs until fluffy. Add the yogurt and olive oil and stir together. Add to the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until everything is incorporated. Add the olives, feta cheese and oregano and stir well.

Spoon about two heaped spoonfuls into each muffin cup. Bake for about 20 minutes, rotating the tin halfway through to make sure the muffins are evenly cooked. They are ready when golden and crusty on top. Best served warm.

Edible Futures: Supper+Tech

What makes SupperShare special (if we do say so ourselves) is how exceptionally well-balanced we are. We’re using peer-to-peer technologies to meet around wooden dinner tables. We’re creating small dinners at home, as well as facilitating large fundraising meals for community organizations. We’re looking for brand new gadgets as well as rediscovering and repurposing the things that we’ve always had. I guess it’s a little like whipping out the phone to capture the moment Right Now and then instagramming it to look like it all happened in the 80s.

Anyway, we are super-amped to partner with IFTF to organize an Edible Futures: Supper+Tech dinner, which is equal measure Jetsons-style future technology, and old school community farming and eating. We’ll be talking about the future of food and the role of technology, while sharing a meal that reflects the different directions that food is headed.

It’s an interesting time to be having this conversation. On the one hand, ever since Heston Blumenthal and El Bulli got us excited about molecular gastronomy, there’s been a lot of talk about the potential for science in the kitchen. Consumers are also flocking to technology-enabled ways in which to buy food, and VC investment in food tech is booming. On the other hand, urban-dwellers are increasingly wanting to make food from scratch and turn the soil in their own gardens. So this is a great time to meet some of the people who are shaping these movements. We’ll talk urban rooftop farming with Graze the Roof, future-thinking with the Institute for the Future, sous vide cooking at home with Nomiku, and dining-on-demand with Sprig.

Of course, a conversation is always better if conducted over a meal. So there will be a selection of seasonal produce from Graze the Roof, a main course from Sprig, and a dessert made with a Nomiku. And to make sure that the whole event leaves a sweet aftertaste in your mouth, proceeds will support local community organization, CHEF (Conquering Homelessness through Employment in Food Services).

This one is probably going to sell out quickly, so get yourself a seat at the table at http://www.suppershare.com/suppers/supper-plustech. If you miss out, we’ll bring you a doggie bag of highlights and musings from the event.

A Mojito To Start Your Monday

Here at SupperShare, we take our work very seriously. Zach is hosting an island-themed SupperShare next week and when I emailed him for a recipe, he replied from Tobago. Presumably, he’s researching from a beach-side bungalow.

I’m a total newbie at cocktail-making, so I asked Zach a couple of introductory questions about his signature mojito:

Why the mojito?

I like that the sugar (originally from sugar cane juice) adds a sense of place to any sugar growing culture, but particularly Cuba.

What can go wrong with a mojito? (ie any rookie errors to avoid)

Avoid too much sugar or lime juice beyond drinkers’ preference. Try to be careful with the mint, only to gently bruise it and not torture it (but it still tastes good either way).

Any mojito protocol? (ie controversies that the mojito novice might unwittingly stumble on)

Not sure - perhaps the name? I like thinking of it as giving you ‘mojo’.

Most memorable mojito?

Adding a nugget of cucumber, like the ones at my SupperShare ...

Inspired by Zach’s dedication to SupperShare, I decided to test out his mojito recipe. You’re welcome, SupperShare readers.

Zach’s Island Mojito

10 mint leaves

Ring of cucumber

Juice of 1 lime (about 1 tbsp)

1 tsp sugar (or sugar syrup)

2 oz rum

Soda water

Step 1: Muddle the mint leaves, cucumber, lime juice, and sugar.

Step 2: Add rum and stir (to dissolve the sugar)

Step 3: Shake with ice

Step 4: Top with soda water

The verdict? Delicious. I think that the main rookie error that I made was adding too much soda water. The mint leaves probably felt a little more tortured than Zach would have liked too. Oh, and I got distracted with the cocktail-making and totally omitted the cucumber.

So, basically, there are two take-home messages from my experience:

1. Even if you totally mess up the recipe, it’s still delicious; and

2. Practice makes perfect (and I fully intend to keep practicing until it’s perfect).

If you’d like to sample Zach’s mojito as it’s intended to be made, you’d best see if you can snaffle a seat at one of his SupperShare dinners at The Cristal home kitchen.

#mojito #cocktail recipe #suppershare #caseofthemondays

Summer: The Season For Foodie Fun

On those few San Francisco evenings when it’s honestly, genuinely warm, I like to take a glass of wine and some cheese up to our apartment’s rooftop. My husband nerdishly counts the number of rooftops where he could install solar panels and I scoff the cheese while he’s not looking. Win-win.

The Bay Area is always saturated with food-related events, but things kick up another notch as summer sets in (or at least the idea of summer, even if we don’t get to bust out the shorts and flip flops consistently until the autumn). In the spirit of Friday distractions, I thought it might be handy to include a quick list of useful resources for planning your food-inspired calendars. This way, you can make the Friday distractions take over the weekend...

Omnivore Books always has interesting book signings and events on the horizon.

You could pretty much spend every night in the week learning something new at the cute little community space at 18 Reasons.

Forage SF has some interesting foraging and food entrepreneur-related events.

Not to be overlooked, FunCheapSF often lists food-related events.

And then there’s always the usual suspects coming up over the next few months:

Eat Drink SF - an annual food, wine and spirits festival at the Fort Mason Center.

Street Food Festival - more food trucks than you can poke a stick at, take over Folsom Street in the Mission.

Soy and Tofu Festival - file under ‘only in the Bay Area’ - a whole event dedicated to soy and tofu.

Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival - Hoards of children and chocolate lovers combine with the usual tourist crowd at Ghirardelli Square.

Eat Real Festival - tons of food vendors, talks, and cooking demonstrations in Oakland.

Of course, we’d always suggest SupperShare as your distraction-of-choice. Next week Zach’s getting all tropical on us with his Island-themed dinner. I’m getting pumped to learn his mojito recipe. We have a few pretty exciting events in the works at the moment too, but Kim says I’m not allowed to spill the beans on them yet...

For the love of supper,

Kate

Oh, and since it’s Father’s Day on the weekend I thought I’d put a shout out to my dad and his signature dish; ‘boiling eggs’ with vegemite on toast. xo

#food #sfevents #Sharing #community

How To Make Fresh Strawberry Gelato

I have an exceptionally small apartment with a pocket-sized kitchen. It doesn’t have enough space for a stand mixer, rice cooker, slow cooker, food processor, blender, or juicer. Opening kitchen cupboards is always a hairy experience as bags of rice or jars of lentils or bottles of olive oil (ouch!) come hurtling out from wherever I jammed them in before hastily slamming the door. Any time I buy something, I know that something else has to be released in order to make room. It therefore makes no sense that I own an ice cream maker; it’s large and completely useless at doing anything other than churning ice cream. But since I have it, I figure that I have to use it.

There’s a lot of choices and controversies when it comes to ice cream making (including whether to use the traditional custard base, Philadelphia style base, or a cream cheese base). I’ll leave that debate for another day. Instead, I just want to take advantage of the peak of the strawberry season and make gelato.

The strawberry ice cream recipes that I have made in the past require cooking down the strawberries to remove some of the moisture. The idea is to create a more intense flavor and avoid any icy granules. While undeniably delicious, these recipes have always tasted of cooked strawberries to me, like strawberry jam. So I was curious to try Marcella Hazan’s recipe for strawberry gelato. It is just strawberries, sugar and cream. No baking, no eggs, no cream cheese, no balsamic vinegar, no booze. I was a little sceptical of the simplicity of the recipe and worried about the texture. If the recipe was anyone but Marcella’s, I wouldn’t have tried.

Because it doesn’t involve any cooking, this recipe is not only super-easy, but you also don’t have to wait around to chill the mixture before churning it (I have a habit of making ice cream on a whim or at the last minute, so this suits me to the tee). The mouth feel is certainly not as rich as the custard-based recipes, and the specks of strawberry are a little firmer in the mouth. If you want an all-out stunner of a recipe, I’d probably still go with this recipe or this one. However, Marcella’s gelato has that lovely, simple, fresh strawberry taste that I was after. This is the kind of ice cream recipe that is good to have up your sleeve; quick, super-easy, but still an impressive dessert to serve to your non-ice cream-making friends.

For the love of supper,

Kate

Strawberry gelato (from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking)

Serves 4*

½ pound fresh strawberries

¾ cup granulated sugar

¼ cup cold heavy whipping cream

1. Pull off the leaves and stems from the strawberries, and cut the berries in half, unless they are exceptionally small. Wash the berries in cold water.

2. Put the strawberries with all the sugar in the bowl of a food processor, process for a few moments, then add ¾ cup water and continue to process until liquefied.

3. Whip the cream until it thickens slightly, to the consistency of buttermilk. Put the cream and the pureed strawberries in a bowl, and mix thoroughly.

4. Freeze according to ice cream machine’s instructions.#

* I doubled the recipe in order to make a more standard quantity for 1 ¼ quart ice cream machines (seriously, who doesn’t want more gelato?).

# Lots of recipes include well-meaning tips about how to make ice cream without an ice cream machine. It involves lots of time spent freezing, beating, and then freezing again. Honestly, if you don’t have an ice cream machine, I probably wouldn’t bother (but you can probably work that out - that’s why the ice cream maker gets to occupy so much prime real estate in my kitchen!).

Friday Link Love: 6 Food Blogs To Make Your Friday Fly By

For me, it’s not Facebook that saps the productivity out of the mid-afternoon; it’s getting side-tracked with food blogs. One sneaky little click as I think about what to cook for dinner soon leads me down a trail of food anecdotes, seasonal recipes, aspirational kitchen photos, and stupidly pretty pictures of vegetables. Bliss.

So I present for your distraction and entertainment, five of my favorite food blogs. These are all well-known blogs, so it’s really just a starter set (‘food blog time-wasting for dummies’, if you will). Not only are these blogs very entertaining in their own right, they also share lots of interesting food blogs and articles. It’s like a little trail of sourdough whole wheat and millet bread crumbs that lead you little by little into the woods...

101 Cookbooks

Heidi Swanson is a master of the food blog. Her recipes are simple but interesting and her photography and layout are gorgeous. If you live in the Bay Area and find that you got a bit carried away buying something seasonal at the farmers’ markets (summer squash anyone??), she’ll likely have a blog post that will help you out.

Green Kitchen Stories

Oh goodness me, they’re Scandinavian, vegetarian, sweetly amusing and tres stylish. I’m sure that this is the family you’d love to hate if only they weren’t so damn nice. And their recipes are excellent – they’ll get you thinking differently about alternative grains and other ingredients without feeling confronted or deprived.

The Wednesday Chef

Luisa Weiss has nice recipes and pretty photos (of course), but what I really like about her blog is that she writes beautifully. Will I be picking elderflowers to make elderflower cordial or baking any of her yeasty German pastries? Not likely, but I still like reading about it.

The Year in Food

Many food blogs have lovely photos and thoughtful layouts, but Kimberley Hasselbrink’s professional photographer’s eye and skills make this blog visually stunning.

Thug Kitchen

‘Eat like you give a fuck’. Here’s a food blogger with strong principles and a sailor’s tongue. It’s a nice counterpoint to the sometimes saccharine-sweet (sorry, ‘date syrup and apple juice’ – sweet) world of food blogs.

David Lebovitz

Dang, that’s six. But I couldn’t do an introductory list of food blogs without including David Lebovitz. A Chez Panisse veteran, ex-Bay Area chef and long-term Paris resident, David’s blogs are chatty and entertaining and sometimes include great little recipes.

I challenge you not to get distracted by at least one of these blogs this weekend!

For the love of supper!

Kate

Connecting with Food

Well hello! I’m more than a little excited to join the SupperShare crew to write about everything food, sharing and community-building. I can’t imagine a combination of interests and values that rings more true for me. Whenever I move workplaces, cities or countries, food is always a way for me to connect with new colleagues, friends or strangers.

In my first job in Australia, managers who intimidated me from behind their desks became human in my eyes when I saw them scoffing a sneaky third slice of cake after a birthday celebration. When I later began to manage a team myself, I turned to food to connect with colleagues or boost our morale when the work was tough. We’d share a potluck lunch on Fridays or have a mid-morning macaron break to lighten things up and remind ourselves about things beyond work.

In Bangkok, I volunteered to teach English in the evenings to women who were mainly domestic cleaners, maids or sex workers. We were separated by so many linguistic, cultural and financial divides, but one evening they coyly invited me to join them for dinner from a local street food vendor after class. I was giddy with excitement that they were ready to connect with me as a person, not just a teacher.

In San Francisco, there have been so many food-related moments to help connect me to my adopted city: sunny weekends in the East Bay sharing my home-made ice cream with new friends; Sunday mornings discussing life and relationships at a food lit book club; a close friend making me the most beautiful of wedding cakes for our little wedding; and the peach farmer at the farmers’ markets greeting me like a long-lost friend when he made his return to the markets for the Summer. There’s never a single milestone that signals a point at which you really belong in your new home. Instead, it’s the things that happen as you’re going about your days and, little-by-little, you realize that you’ve really connected with a place and its people.

SupperShare sees the power of food to bring people together and build community. I can’t wait to share the comings and goings in the Bay Area food scene from our favorite foodies and farmer’s markets, as well as how tos and fun recipes to make the most of your time in kitchen! I can’t wait – let’s eat, let’s cook, let’s connect!

For the love of supper, Kate

Change-Makers Gather for SupperShare Club at ImpactHUB

Last Wednesday, SupperShare partnered with Tomato Sherpa and the ImpactHUB to gather local change makers for a monthly SupperShare Club which transformed the SOMA co-working space into a candle-lit shared dinner party with new friends.

Check out a short movie about the event on Tastemade.

Successful examples of the sharing economy have all come from individuals who saw an industry ripe for disruption. http://bit.ly/1gJxi05

#sharing #peer2peer #collaboration

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