The Star recently joined Mark Bittman, Wayne Roberts, The Stop’s Nick Saul and Kathryn Scharf, and our very own Lulu Cohen-Farnell for a night to celebrate good, wholesome, thoughtfully made food.
Each guest shared what they last cooked, on the eve of the National Canadian Food Summit – where the national food policy debate was to take centre stage.
Mark Bittman believes cooking is essential, worthwhile and enjoyable. He’s just waiting impatiently (and loudly) for it to become hip.
The New York Times columnist and prolific cookbook author is eager for conversations about what we last cooked, not just idle chatter about what the people on Top Chef cooked.
The last thing Bittman cooked before flying to Toronto for a speech and debate at the Canadian Food Summit last week was vegetable soup. He started with olive oil, onion and habanero peppers, and then chopped up thyme, celery, carrots, potato, kale and chard. There was a bit of tomato paste, perhaps more oil, water and maybe one or two other things that he can’t remember.
“The whole process,” he reveals, “is random and simple and joyful and takes 20 minutes.”
The last thing I cooked before dining with Bittman at Enoteca Sociale was the vegetarian chili with white beans and frozen greens that he describes in narrative form in his new 35-page, $2.99 e-book Cooking Solves Everything.
I browned an onion and a couple of garlic cloves in olive oil and “Mexican” chili powder, added cans of diced tomatoes and white kidney beans, simmered everything for a bit and then threw in four handfuls of frozen chopped kale. I fed myself and four grateful co-workers a dead easy, nutritious and delicious lunch.
“Many women don’t feel enslaved by the need to cook and, in many circles, there’s no longer a stigma for men to cook,” Bittman happily reports. “It’s not a waster of time, as so much of what we do is. It is creative in many ways. It saves money, it’s healthy and all that. It may be a chore, but part of life is chores.
“It is clear that someone ought to be cooking.”
Why should we cook when there are restaurants, takeout shops and prepared meals like never before? To avoid the sugared cereals and snacks, shun the highly processed options, and say no to the Mountain Dews, Chicken McNuggets and potato chips out there.
“Cooking is a weapon in the arsenal against bad food,” declares Bittman. “If you buy raw ingredients and actual food and cook it, you will eat better than if you don’t.”
The 61-year-old New Yorker has been cooking since he was 18 and writing about food for 32 years. He can instantly morph from the Minimalist (the name of his recently retired weekly column) to the Times’ new Opinion page columnist with heavy thoughts on food security, the environment, sustainable agriculture and Big Food.
During dinner, he continues to wear his CIW ballcap. The Coalition of Immokalee Workersfights for low-wage Latino, Mayan Indian and Haitian immigrants in Florida. The cap is Bittman’s show of support for the rights of all agricultural workers to have better conditions.
Nick Saul, executive director of the Stop Community Food Centre, organized this dinner. He picked Enoteca Sociale because he supports co-owner Rocco Agostino and chef de cuisine Matthew DeMille. Grant van Gameren, who gained fame at the Black Hoof, is now the executive chef and sends out nine courses served family style. One highlight is a baked kale, persimmon, king mushroom, farro and pine nut salad.
The last thing Saul cooked was the spice-rubbed chicken from his group’s fundraising cookbook Good Food For All: Seasonal Recipes From a Community Garden. Chicken is coated with oil, garlic and dried spices and baked until crispy.
Joining us is food policy analyst/writer Wayne Roberts, who made his daily breakfast of yogurt, fruit and nuts. Lunch was a salad with smoked fish, Brazil nuts, pea sprouts and sunflower sprouts.
“I’m not a cook — I throw stuff in a bowl,” admits Roberts. But he’s wrong. Preparing food from scratch, with or without heat, is cooking.
Bittman isn’t a chef or formally trained cook, yet he has had a huge influence on ordinary people. Like me, he is a journalist who cooks. He has more than 227,000 Twitter followers. He considers “convenience” and “gourmet” the two worst food words in the English language. With the Minimalist column, he helped make home cooking more accessible.
In 2009, Bittman wrote Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating urging people to rethink the way they eat. Like American author Michael Pollan, who famously wrote “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” Bittman eats mostly plants, fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes.
Now 61, he’s a “vegan before 6” who avoids animal products until dinner, and then eats whatever he likes.
Roberts digs into Enoteca Sociale’s house-cured sausages, admitting he’s a “social vegan.”
“I’m the opposite — I’m a social omnivore,” replies Bittman, who dines out often and still does global restaurant roundups. When in New York City with his 50-sq.-ft. kitchen, he cooks about 10 meals a week.
He is fond of citing this 2010 statistic: Americans spend about 32 minutes a day preparing food, and 2 hours and 45 minutes watching TV.
Not Lulu Cohen-Farnell. She’s the “founding mom” of Real Food for Real Kids, a Toronto group that provides all-natural, palate-expanding catering for daycares, schools and camps.
“I love to cook and I love to spend time with ingredients and flavours and colours,” Cohen-Farnell enthuses. “I think that food and cooking in general is like music or painting. It’s about harmony. Smells make me happy. It’s about being creative and enjoying the moment of this creativity.”
The last thing she prepared before dinner with Bittman was a smoothie for her sick 4-year-old daughter. She combined frozen strawberries, coconut milk, coconut oil and stevia into something “creamy, pink and beautiful.”
Kathryn Scharf, the Stop’s program director and the final Bittman dinner guest, is a fan of recipes and likes “good enough food that’s wholesome and easy.”
She came to dinner after serving her 9-year-old son a pasta with cabbage, cauliflower, brown butter and parmesan made from a recipe in her weekly vegetable box from Front Door Organics.
“That’s the kind of thing that delights me,” Scharf says, adding that “in the old days we cooked selflessly and quietly. Now we all deserve awards for what we make.”
Loud and proud is how Bittman likes it.
“Good food has been under attack for 50 years or more, and people have to defend it,” he says after dinner with five of us who already do.
To read this article on the Toronto Star’s website, click here.