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advice from the US poet laureate, Charles Simic

In an interview with the New York Times,

What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy? For starters, learn how to cook.

celebrate February 2nd.

Advice from the best pizza/calzone maker in town, Frank of Savario's:
eat sausage on Ground Hog Day

Finally, a holiday made just for me.

(for the slow: ground . . . hog . . . = sausage)

Status report

sooooo . . . . .

things are slow here. They are always slow during the full-time work/grad school season, but summer usually tends to pick up. It hasn't yet, and it may not. Readers of the folkfood blog are from all over the place, but what I really want to write about is hyperlocal - local eating with a whole lotta links to sources of local food. Not super useful or even entertaining for people not from the Seacoast of NH/ME.

A few other folks requested a Seacoast Eat Local blog. This has come to be, and will be a group blog, authored by many folks with different vantage points in the Seacoast (we're actively recruiting contributors if you want to nominate yourself or someone you know). So - that's where I've been blogging of late.

Things that don't fit over there - and these days, that isn't a whole lot since most of my eating is local eating - will still appear here. Not a wholesale abadonment, just an explanation.

making ice cream . . .

I have a new post up over at Eat Local Challenge.

Fundraiser for Farmland

The Great Works Regional Land Trust is having a fund raiser to help preserve a large dairy farm in Berwick. It is very easy to participate - just eat flatbread from Flatbread on Tuesday, May 29th between 4 and 9pm. They will also be having an awesome raffle!

That night we will be raffling off a lobster bake for 10 to be served at beautiful Beach Plum Farm in Ogunquit and accompanied by the Great Works Ramblers. (Redeemable Sept. 29th or 30th).Tickets are $5 each.

The Amateur Gourmet gets serious for a minute . . .

The AG posted an American Food Manifesto, an excellent, thoughtful piece bringing together ideas of how what is wrong with American culture (focus on winning, focus on competition) has influenced American food culture in negative ways. And my favorite part, in which AG makes an interesting point about our extreme desire for anonymity and privacy (all the while becoming less anonymous and less private in online forums, a very very different sort of community that has a lot less responsibility built in) while paying proper homage to Julia:

I'm a recent convert to Julia Child and I am convinced--after only a few DVDs--that she is the best thing that ever happened to food in America. Why? Because she brought her spirit, her energy, her intelligence into American homes and tried to elevate us. She tried to show us that for a dinner to be successful, it needn't be expensive, it needn't be pretentious. It need only capture the chef's enthusiasm, the chef's love.

Americans don't know how to engage with their food anymore. We see boxes in cases and take them home and put them in another box and ZAP dinner is ready. We pick up the phone and punch in numbers and a brown bag arrives. We deal with food in the 21st century the way we deal with people--faceless messages on a computer screen--and with further advances in technology, we retreat further and further into ourselves. For most Americans in the 21st century, a successful dinner is a dinner that requires the least amount of engagement with the outside world. We don't want to know our grocers, our butchers, our bakers. We don't even want to know our delivery boys. We want our privacy, thank you, and that means a lonely dinner in front of the TV is preferred to a party with friends who we'd have to shop for, cook for, and clean up after. We have our Tivos, computers, iPods, and DVD players to keep us company.

America: learn from Julia. Wake up. Engage. Care.

That's the formula for success. We've lowered our standards because we're afraid of failure. Julia's not afraid because she knows it doesn't matter if her Pommes Anna collapses--what matters is that she took the time to make a Pommes Anna. So should you.