Kitchen Jam

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Yesterday I went to the Regional Market, Syracuse’s year-round farmer’s market. Kale, cabbages, nuts, some apples and pears, hard-shelled winter squashes, potatoes, yams, honey, eggs, cheese, pork, coffee, spices, crafts – these are the things that make up a January farmer’s market in central New York.

Today, after three efforts to shovel a place for the dogs to exercise and a path to the sidewalk – efforts doomed by the continuous drift of big fluffly white flakes that added up to six inches of new snow – I settled in with a cup of locally roasted coffee, a brand new copy of Anna Thomas‘s latest cookbook Love Soup, and the tube, ready to enjoy a night of FoodTV. A two-hour Battle of the Iron Chefs (Batali-Legasse vs. Flay-Comerford) has been teased since Thanksgiving. It was gonna be a fun night.

The secret ingredient in the epic Battle of the Iron Chefs turned out to be Mrs. Obama’s famous White House garden – and the challenge was to spotlight the garden’s fresh local produce in ways that would ‘inspire America.’ When the teams got back to kitchen stadium for their battle, they found tables of locally raised and sustainably produced meats, eggs and seafood. Chef Flay called the White House garden a ‘beautiful representation of fall and winter produce.’

Beautiful, it was – and I applaud the sentiment of focusing on seasonal, locally-based, sustainable eating. But – it’s January. I also commend the iron chefs to the CNY Regional Market, where the dark season’s bounty is substantially less varied. Of course, it is January here in the far northeast – and this TV show was filmed in late September or October, using the most security-conscious ‘farmer’s market’ in the country. Did I mention that the White House garden, located in relatively temperate Washington, D.C., was at the height of early fall harvest?

A local foods Iron Chef challenge on the same day I begin reading Love Soup is fortuitous…not unlike the New Year’s blue moon lining up on the same night that the date turned to 01022010. I expected good things from both – and neither the Iron Chefs nor Anna Thomas disappointed. Thomas’s recipes have emphasized fresh and local foods since the 70s, when I read her first book Vegetarian Epicure cover to cover. But then the coincidences started to stack up. Today I also discovered a relatively local canning and preserving group called IthaCan in – you guessed it – Ithaca, about an hour away. I had spent some time this morning looking for a community-supported-agriculture (CSA) farm share for the summer of 2010. And as I watched the chefs working to make the garden produce the stars of their dishes, as I dove more deeply into Love Soup, as I reached out hands to a local group of people committed to preserving, I realized that somehow I’ve gotten away from the foundations on which I’d always run my kitchen. Time for a course correction.

It’s a new year. And it’s time to edit in my tiny kitchen – go through the cupboards and the shelves and the freezer and make sure they contain the foods I really want to eat.

When was the last time you edited your kitchen cupboards? If I opened one of them, what would I find? Would it be representative of the kitchen you want to enjoy?

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