Friday February 3rd, 2012
Just because
January 2, 2012
by JJ Gonson
1 Comment
Calling all vegetarians- we are here for you!
Hi everyone! Happy 2012!
We are all really excited over here in the Cuisine en Locale kitchen, because this month represents the first anniversary of our beloved ONCE a Week program. We were thinking of buying it something pretty, but we felt like it had everything already, and that anything we got it would get returned, so we decided that there was really no better gift we could give it than a brand new baby sister…
And with that, we have invented ONCE a Week Vegevore,
TAH DAH!!!
$125 gets you a big bag of vegetarian food, all ready to heat and eat. That’s enough food for one person to eat for a week, two people to enjoy four meals, or for a family to take a couple nights off from cooking and eat together. It’s a great alternative to those times you might have ordered something really salty or fatty.
Or maybe you have vegetarian friends coming to visit? Boy, have we got you covered!
To get things off the ground we are offering a very special special, especially for you special folks.
We are calling it, “Put our money where you mouth is”, and it goes a little something like this:
Tell your all of your friends about our brand spanking new Vegevore program and anyone who signs up and gives us your name is also giving you a $10 credit towards your next food share. Pretty nifty, eh? Yeah, that’s what we thought too.
The farmers are loving the ONCE a Week program. We are buying a whole lot of local food at a time when they need to keep it moving, and they thank you for joining in the fun. For more information you can check out the FAQ on the ONCE a Week page on our blog…
or just ask, I love answering questions.
Thanks for helping to spread the word. We all have malnourished vegetarian friends just waiting for such a program. They thank you too!
Hope your new year is off to a great start, now, we want to feed you!
Come on!
Big love, JJ
ONCE in Valhalla- January 21st
On the 21st of January we return to Odin’s mighty hall (aka the Armory in Somerville) to dine among the Aesir gods, while being tended to by Valkyries
Join us! $75 a person for endless feating and glorious festivities.
Tickets from Brown Paper Tickets, or cuisine@enlocale.com for more info
December 27, 2011
by JJ Gonson
2 Comments
ONCE a Week
12.26.11 Omnivore Menu
Happy Holidays, Omnivores! With this, our last share of 2011, we think back on a full year of meals: through growing cycles, highs and lows, and everything else that goes along with locavore-dom – especially gorgeous, tasty, fresh food. Now we’re hitting our stride with winter’s crops, tastily roasted, creatively spiced and full of immune-boosting nutrients to get you through the sneezy season unscathed. So thanks 2011 for the yumminess, and we look forward to feeding you all in 2012!
Red Flannel Hash~ our corned beef brisket became the tasty treat it is today via our special homemade brine. It’s nice and savory, and just a little sweet thanks to the beets
Corned Cabbage ~said corned beef brine was too way too flavorful to throw out, so we braised quartered cabbage in it – making the most of what we’ve got
Creamy Broccoli~ these pretty florets are roasted for sweet depth and topped with a rich nutmeggy béchamel
3x Turnip Fries~ Gilfeather, hakuri & purple-tops get the royal treatment with a light glaze of honey-juniper-thyme infusion
Mc-less Egg Muffins~ sausage, mushroom, leeks and eggs – JJ calls it a Fratine: a contraction she invented that combines the egginess of a frittata with the rich meatiness of a terrine
Roasted Sunshine Squash~ with maple cider butter – cut in wedges and roasted to perfection. A great straight-out-of-the-fridge snack
Carrot Ginger Soup~ like baby food for grown ups. So smooth and creamy but shockingly dairy-free. Topped with a sprig of fried sage
Turkey Verde~ Southwestern-style turkey by way of the Northeast. Our Stillman heritage bird is slow-cooked and pulled, with a savory tomatillo sauce. Everyone think taco.
Keilbasa Kraut Bake~ Ken’s Eastern European, sausage-slinging ways come through with this spicy kraut and onion dish
Lamb Tajine~ Moroccan-style lamb, braised with tomatoes, carrots, sweet potaoes, butternut squashes and gorgeously exotic spices
Plain Grains~ she may be the girl next door, but she’s also a brick house: mighty mighty and full of stick-to-your-ribs goodness. The perfect foil to our saucy tajine, or turkey verde . Spelt, barley and triticale.
December 4, 2011
by JJ Gonson
5 Comments
ONCE a Week FAQ
What is ONCE a Week?
ONCE a Week is a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share style distribution of cooked food, prepared in one day by a team of chefs, from locally grown ingredients, and delivered to you to support your meal needs throughout the week.
It makes a great alternative to dining on take out a few times a week, and is an excellent solution for new parents, busy professionals and slammed students. Regular members have reported that they feel better and even lose unwanted weight when eating our food.
Where do you cook?
We rent a commercial kitchen in Somerville MA.
Cuisine en Locale is a licensed caterer and our chefs hold managerial level ServSafe Certification.
We carry the insurances and licenses required to cook food and sell it – personal chef to you.
Who is actually cooking my food?
There is a solid team of people who cook regularly, once a week, just for this program.
The members remain fairly consistent, and on any given week we are made up of a couple of experienced chefs, accompanied by a few excellent pairs of prep hands.
What does one share look like?
A share is usually in one brown paper, grocery sized bag, and contains 7-10 containers, including pints, quarts and aluminum trays.
The average share weighs in at 8.5 lbs.
But how much food is that?
We have found one share to be enough food for eight average sized meals when used with fresh salad, rice, vegetables etc…
That could mean a lot of lunches and a few dinners, or vice versa, for one person.
Or it could mean 2 meals for a family, or a pot luck dinner party for eight!
It is up to you to use the food however it works best for you.
Is all the food savory?
Most of the food is savory, but we do include the occasional baked item, when it makes sense to us, just to mix it up. Since we use honey and maple to sweeten food, it is never as sweet as a typical dessert.
Why can’t you accommodate dietary restrictions?
Our price point is startlingly low for locavore fare specifically because we cook all the food together.
If we start to break shares apart we run into problems. We hope you will share with friends if a dish does not suit your tastes one week.
Why don’t you offer the vegetarian option for less than the meat one?
Meat is expensive, but so are vegetables when you are buying them in season from local farmers. Cooking vegetarian food is complex, often more so than cooking omnivore, and adding the cost of the food, it should probably cost even more to offer a vegetarian program.
We absolutely recognize a desire for a vegetarian share, and take that very seriously, and we hope that the vegetarians who enjoy our food understand how much time and effort we put into it.
It seems like a lot of work, why do you do this?
We believe that healthy food should be an easy thing to find, ready for you when you want it, and that it should not be exclusively people with the time or inclination to cook who can eat fresh, local food, that isn’t full of preservatives, fats and salts. We hope that you enjoy the Shared Food Program in the eating, as much as we do in the cooking.
If it isn’t fun, it’s not worth doing, and we find it very, very fun indeed!
Can you explain the pricing?
We sell individual shares for $125 a week, packaging and delivery within Metro Pedal Power’s area included.
If you are going to order four shares, we recommend signing up for a ‘month’, for $450, including delivery.
We also offer a buy 12 get one free plan for $1350
Delivery outside of the bicycle area is usually $20. Please contact us for details.
Our packaging is reusable, and it is BPA free.
Where do you deliver to?
Metro Pedal Power deliver most of our food within their delivery area, which includes Cambridge, Somerville and parts of the surrounding area, including Brookline. Beyond that we do deliveries in our van, and we are happy to deliver to you if you are within the metro area.
Where can I see some past menus?
Right here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ONCE-a-Week/189034597798481
Can I try it once to see if I like it?
Yes, absolutely. We always offer single shares.
How can I sign up?
Please feel out this form at Metro Pedal Power, and we will contact you to make payment and delivery arrangements. Thank you!
Omnivore, locavore… vegevore!
In the Cuisine en Locale kitchen, we like to make up words. Who doesn’t? Sometimes you just can’t find the word to say something the way you want to say it, and the remarkable computer that is the brain can twist an idea you already recognize and rebuild it. Such is locavore, not that we made it up, it’s just a good example. It’s a real word, you know, in the dictionary and everything. It tells you what it is, even though it is rather odd sounding. In the kitchen, on Weds night, we decided to call our brand new vegetarian ONCE a Week offering “Vegevore”. We like it. It is sort of like Omnivore, which is what we call the meat inclusive share. I hope it sticks.
I don’t know if the way our kitchen works would be right for anyone but us, but we really like it, and I often think that I wish I could share a fly-on-the-wall spot with you. When we start on Monday (ONCE a Week Omnivore day) we pull out all the food we have gathered over the weekend, and then we menu plan. That means a couple of experienced cooks standing about and pulling amazing dish ideas out of the sky. It’s really lovely sometimes, one person throws out an idea, another grabs on and bends it, and the third garnishes, and in the end it is a unique dish, probably one we have never done before and most likely won’t do again. We continue, building and adjusting. Each menu grows, organically, over the first hour we are together, before we pick up knives and lay down cutting boards, until we feel that there are enough choices to make for an interesting and nutritionally well balanced week’s worth of food. Only then do we don our aprons and crank up the tunes.
In the next couple of hours, several pairs of hands wash, chop and peel. Ingredients are broken down, heated up and generally prepped, until we are ready to get to the heart of the matter. And then we cook. And cook. And cook.
The result, as you can imagine, is a LOT of food. That food is cooled, and portioned and put into the walk in refrigerator overnight, all per health code requirements, before it is brought to the week’s members the next day. Each share of that food contain 8-12 different dishes and weigh an average of 9lbs, and those shares are works of art to us. In the time we have spent together prepping and cooking, we have given each dish a piece of experience, care and devotion and when we bring it to the place where it will be enjoyed we leave it with a blessing- for health, and happiness.
After almost a year of going through this process every week, in three different (commercially certified) kitchens, last week we moved to a new home. It is a shared kitchen, and we have a roommate, a lovely guy making Bar-Be-Que, and for the very first time ever we feel like we have a home of our own. This is huge. After crouching under the watching eyes of other kitchens, squeezing in time where we can, we now have the ability to spread our wings and grow. This is the reason we have finally felt like it was possible to start a whole other program, with a whole other cooking team and a whole other pile of ingredients. ONCE a Week Veg is not just another cooking day, it is a whole other entity- a whole new child to love.
Because there is only one farmers market available to us for picking up essential ingredients, we need to plan as far ahead as possible. And because it is a better deal for you, if you are interested in eating our food this winter, we do encourage you to sign up for our multiple share packages of 4 or 13 shares. This is a process that requires cooperation among the cooks and diners, and we are thrilled to be feeding you. I mean, what could possibly be more important than that?
Thank you for allowing us to grow. Thank you for supporting local food. Thank you for caring about what we do and for continuing to read my endlessly long emails. You can give ONCE a Week shares as gifts, to be scheduled. If you would like to do so, just drop me a line and I’ll help you to set it up.
Actually, just in general, if you want to sign up you can do it through me. Please feel free to pass this along, share the love, spread the word, etc, and so forth. If we are gonna do this, we need to grow is, and your help remains key.
Again, and again, and again- Thank you!
X JJ, Cuisine en Locale and our fave farmers, the Stillman Family
Thanksgiving crunch? We’re going to make this so easy
Last night we realized, in my always-just-a-little-late household, that Thanksgiving is a mere two weeks away.
Does that require an exclamation mark? Personally, I find the thought alone startling enough!
If you are running a little late, too, I think we might be just the solution you don’t even know yet that you are looking for…
Kate Stillman (of Stillman Farms in central MA) and I have concocted a scheme to help you with this, the first of the endless string of holidays to come ~
• Kate is taking orders now for her free running turkeys. I have cooked a lot of turkeys in my time, they happen to be one of the things I like most to roast, and these birds are really, truly, crazy yummy.
• In addition, when you pick up your Stillman bird you can also pick up some already made, yummy side dishes, made with all locally grown ingredients in our ONCE a Week kitchen. Turkey pickup times are posted on Stillmans site, sides will be available for delivery on Tuesday (with our ONCE a Week shares) or pick up in Jamaica Plain at Stillman’s table. There is a simple order form attached below, please feel free to email me or Kate with your requests and we will get back to you to confirm the deets
• An even better pick up option for everything we are offering is at the Stillman’s New Braintree farm, where we are hoping you will join us for a good ol’ farm supper, on Sunday November 20th. You can come out a little early, stroll and check out the farm as it goes to bed, and then enjoy a hearty repast before packing up your turkey and sides and heading back into town. If you would care to join us we sure would love to have you, and you can let me know and I’ll tally you, just so as we know how much food to cook. This is not going to be Thanksgiving dinner, mind you. We are going to roast up a few other things that aren’t turkey, so you don’t burn out on the big bird too soon!
So, check out this here order form and let us know what we can do to help you and yours enjoy the most at the best dinner table of the year (in my opinion, mind. I did say I love to roast them turkeys!!!)
Before I let you go, entirely, I am also going to add that the ONCE a Week, shared food program, is doing great and there are lots of menus you can check out on our Facebook page, if you are curious about what we have been doing. The plan is to get the vegetarian share going as soon as possible, which is looking like right around Thanksgiving, or just after. Vegetarian will be delivered on Thursdays, and will slot in nicely for those folks who might want to consider getting the omnivore share on Tuesday as well as the vegetarian share on Thursday. I know, the possibilities for simplicity are endless!
We are going to be launching a new ordering system just before the vegetarian share kicks off, so stay tuned to this channel for soon-to-come-instructions.
Right then, enough of my babble, check out Kate’s form below – there are plenty of delicious turkeys to go around, but don’t wait too long, because when you suddenly realize you forgot to order the bird on the 20th…. well, let’s just say we will do what we can for you.
Gobble gobble!!
xxJJ, Kate and co.
Thanksgiving Order Form PDF download here!
October 29, 2011
by JJ Gonson
2 Comments
ONCE de los Muertos!
Reservations are suggested, and can be made by emailing cuisine@enlocale.com or phoning 617-285-0167
OR buy your tickets online here!
(no! it’s not just for kids!) Last year we dined with Virgil in the Inferno,
and the year before that we supplied you with an ample tasting of bugs and offal,
but this year we are going to throw a party to wake the dead!
Ladies and gents, mesdames et messieurs…..
señoras y señores!
ONCE de Los Muertos: locavore Day of the Dead fiesta!
November 2nd, 20116:30pm – 9:30
at the Somerville Center for Arts at the Armory ~ 191 Highland Ave, Somerville MA.
All-local endless dining from Cuisine en Locale, Mass/Mex style ~ $75/pp (or $65/pp for groups of four or more)
• Stillman Farm Pulled Pork Verde
• Mole Poblano Chicken
• Fresh Tortillas
• Corn Ice Cream from Toscanini,
• El Mariachi beer from Cambridge Brewing Co*
and a whole host of other deliciousities to delight you from skull to toe-bone
* cost of dinner does not include beverages or gratuity, just a whole lot of food and a whole lot of fun
New York, New York! We are coming for your cheese!!
Yes, it’s true. I would not lie to you, honey, we are New York bound.
Who? We! The gypsy ONCE cooks of Cuisine en Locale, tra la
Contact us to reserve your space, we cannot wait to take a whole lot of local cheese and make some wonderful food magic with it, for you!
cuisine@enlocale.com
617-285-0167
Rock
And now, a few words from Maine
There are a lot of really smart people saying really smart things about local food, and some of the smartest are the Cook sisters, who organize the deliveries that come from Maine farmers through the Crown O Maine Cooperative.
I loved this last email so much that I asked permission to share it with you. I hope you love it too xJJ
Get yer victuals!
I (Leah of Crown O Maine Organic Coop) think about generations a lot. Not necessarily for weight of it, but for the gift of perspective. On Tuesday as I bleached the loading dock where we keep the trash, one of the high school kids who helps us out asked, “Won’t that make deformed frogs?”
I looked at him blankly, until I remembered last week when I sent them to pull weeds from the cracks in the pavement to keep the yard clear, and they wondered why they couldn’t spray it with something. I, unlike so many of my peers, had an opportunity to put my college degree to work as I explained the effects of Round-up, etc., on the development and nervous systems in amphibians, and why amphibians are the early warning system for chemical contamination. Okay, maybe it was like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, BUT he remembered chemicals and deformed frogs, and didn’t need to call it endocrine disruption to make his point.
At lunch today we were talking about a cartoon we (by which I mean I) found online about a young girl fishing with her father, which led to a conversation of our own experiences with fathers and fishing. In a town which shall go un-named, at a mill that will likewise stay anonymous, you used to be able to tell what color they were dying products by looking at the river. Deformed frogs and funky fish? Check.
But this is by no means unusual for the era we were discussing. I think we all can remember living or hearing, depending on our generations, about life at camp when hair and laundry was washed in lakes and rivers, which is where the sewage was also drained, unfiltered. My studies in biology showed me study after study chronicling ecological crisis and loss of habitat, except in New England, which was virtually the only ecosystem to be regaining forested land as acreage came out of historical agricultural production. I admit, this fact is a red herring, because the conclusions one draws from reforestation rates vs. loss of farmland vs. land usage patterns is an entire discussion unto itself.
While my prose about chemicals, deformed frogs, and suspect fish may not whet your appetite for delicious fresh healthy food, my point is this: can anyone my age and younger even imagine being sprayed with DDT and chasing the spray truck? Likewise, does anyone think a river changing colors more than once or twice a summer (due to algae, tannins, or run-off) would go unnoticed? Does anyone bury their trash in the backyard regularly any more?
We stand upon the shoulders of our mothers and fathers, all of them, and our children stand upon ours. The exciting part is that within that span we can change the ground upon which we stand.
Once again, I thank you for participating in that change, in the small shifts that mean maybe our children won’t even be able to imagine driving through a window to eat a ‘chicken product’ of dubious origin. Maybe our kids will think labeling is anachronistic and silly, because it’s patently obvious where their food is from. Maybe Common Ground Fair won’t be trendy because of its novelty, but will be replicated because of its truth.
Leah Cook