Love Your Leftovers

By guest blogger Kathy Chavez

Hopefully your Thanksgiving was filled with fun, food and happy times. Now comes the leftover debate. Some people love them, while others vehemently avoid them. Many people argue that nothing tastes better than a cold turkey sandwich and a slice of leftover pie. Others vow that they will never eat leftovers. My favorite part of holiday meals are all the savory dishes prepared using all the leftover food, so I'd like to share my favorite ways to use leftovers.











First, here are some good safety tips:

• Before handling any food, cooked or raw, you need to wash your hands. Many food-born illnesses are passed from dirty hands and improper storage. 
• Cut meats off the bone and be sure to store any stuffing in separate containers. 
• Always reheat liquids such as gravy and red chile by bringing them to a boil.

The most basic post-holiday meal includes the famous sandwich. Just cut your meat and place it between leftover buns or bread. You can add mashed potatoes, stuffing, green chile, or lettuce from the salad. The list of what to put in your sandwich is limited only by what’s in your imagination and your refrigerator. Make turkey or ham salad by dicing up onions and celery, then sprinkle in your favorite spices and spoon in either mayonnaise or plain yogurt. Eat with bread, crackers or scoop it onto a bed of lettuce or your leftover salad.

Try eating mashed potatoes for breakfast. Make them into round patties and brown them in a skillet with a bit of olive or any oil. They make delicious hash browns. Or make a yummy spicy shepherd’s pie. Gather your meat, greens such as spinach, green beans, corn, and any vegetables you have on hand. Mix them in a skillet then add gravy and red or green chile. Scoop your mashed potatoes over the top and brown in the oven. This meal can be made vegan if you skip the meat part and make your mashed potatoes without any butter or milk.

Many of my friends make enchiladas and tacos using their turkey. Just make the enchiladas and tacos as usual but using your turkey. Packing your lunch, whether you’re going to work or on a day hike, can save you money and calories. If you just have too much leftover food to handle you can take that pie to work, give the cookies to a friend, host a leftover party and ask your friends to only bring their appetites.


Have a happy winter season and may your days be filled with love, joy, and lots of local eating and shopping.

Edited by Jasmine McBeath

Eat Locally While Traveling

By guest blogger Kathy Chavez

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Eating locally can be a challenge when at home, while eating locally on vacation may seem impossible.   But it's worth the effort. Whether deciding to splurge on a nice meal out on vacation or at  home, keeping it local feeds both the economy and your body well.

Local dining is eating at an establishment that is owned and run by someone that lives in the community, and preferably the food served comes from local growers and ranchers too.  Regional is usually defined as farmers and ranchers within one hundred miles of the establishment.

The benefits of eating locally are numerous, both environmentally and health-wise.  The most important reason for me is taste, as very few things beat the flavor of fresh picked food.  Produce consumed within hours of ripening tastes best and provides better nutrition than food that matures in the truck.

While traveling the same methods of finding local restaurants can be used as when you’re at home.  They include word of mouth, the internet, and local magazines.  If time and season allow attend a growers market.  Local markets frequently serve prepared food and they will also know the best places that serve their produce.  Just ask them where they eat.

The online search for local dining can be time consuming, overwhelming and frustrating. After doing several online searches for Albuquerque, Chicago, Santa Fe, and San Francisco the most helpful for me were Yelp, Dinegreen, and Citysearch. Yelp and Citysearch are good for reading personal reviews and tips about restaurant atmosphere and what to order.  Dinegreen is through the Green Restaurant Association, a national non-profit working towards a more sustainable restaurant industry. For the consumer, dine green.com shows restaurants' scores according to seven categories including water efficiency, energy, waste reduction, and sustainable building materials. It's an important effort, considering "the restaurant industry consumes a third of all U.S. energy used by the retail sector and the average food service faculty uses 300,000 gallons of water per year." 

So, whether you're eating here in New Mexico or out of state this holiday season, don't forget to celebrate local.

Edited by Jasmine McBeath

Celebrating as a Community

 

The time to vote has come and gone, right? Not true, according to Foodology star Greg Gould, who claims we vote three times a day, probably more. That’s because you’re making an economic, political, and social justice choice every time you raise a fork to your mouth. 

For instance, if Americans in urban areas bought two fair trade chocolate bars a month, it could benefit 30,000 small-scale farmers. Or, if we were to join families in the Philippines, India, Brazil, Spain, and the UK in cooking more efficiently, the benefit would be the same as planting 540 million trees and letting them grow for 10 years. 

My favorite part about this worldwide GROW movement is that it’s not overwhelming. The idea is to think global, act local. It’s not hard to save food, cook smart, or eat a little less meat. It’s also reasonable to expect us to eat seasonally and support small-scale farmers.

Oxfam’s been talking a lot about the GROW Method this fall, so we decided to practice what we preach in a big way. Two weekends ago, we celebrated our first World Food Day Community Dinner. We partnered with six different nonprofits, received donations from a dozen farms, and put twenty volunteers to work in shifts from 10am to 10pm. Everyone came away saying how wonderful the food tasted and with a greater understanding of how eating locally can make a global impact. 

Kalen and I were lucky enough to see it through from beginning to end. The day started with picking up produce at the Downtown Growers Market. Our community chef Kathy met me there and we visited each booth from 11am-1pm requesting leftovers. The farmers were incredibly generous and helpful, offering what they didn’t think other growers would have and making sure we came out with what we needed to pull off the meal. We left with watermelons wedged below the seats, baguettes leaned against the doors, and greens draped across the seats. Boxes of cauliflower, squash, and tomatoes called shotgun, paper bags full of potatoes and apples filled the truck, and mini pumpkins spilled out the back.

I have to admit it was a little overwhelming when we laid all the food out on the counter in the church. Then something magical happened. Our community chef Kathy transformed into a contestant on one of those cooking show competitions. Challenge: make food for 100 people using the ingredients in the kitchen with only 6 helpers in under 5 hours. But unlike the people on those shows, everyone seemed to maintain their composition. Every time I glanced over, I saw people hard at work, but smiling.

And then, suddenly, it was dinnertime. Volunteers set out frothy watermelon juice in a glass punch bowl next to pitchers of sun tea. The produce from the counter (plus the donation from the Co-opt) became spicy pumpkin soup, chicken stew, bruschetta, shepherd’s pie, beans with tortillas, squash and greens, green chile bread, baguettes, and half a dozen different salads. The dessert table screamed fall with its peach squares, apple brown betties, dark chocolate covered apple slices and pumpkin pudding.

As I walked around, I heard great things about the food, and was happy to see people using the food icebreaker questions. There’s nothing like food to get strangers talking. 

        

When it came time to pledge GROW, some people said they will try Meatless Mondays, others vowed to chop vegetables and meat into smaller pieces for shorter cook times, and still others promised to buy CSAs and shop at the farmers market. Keynote speaker Greg Gould shared insight into fixing the food system by improving our personal quality of life and health. I liked how Greg acknowledged that each person is an expert as far as their own personal food preferences. We already know what we like to eat, now we just have to think about the best way to go about it. Greg’s talk tied in family food traditions, teaching children to cook, and what we can learn from planting trees. He’s a very engaging speaker, so I recommend hearing his speech, recorded by Peter Gallo at Kimchi Farms.  

At the end of the night the cleaning crew came to the rescue. Right in line with the GROW Method, we didn’t have to throw anything away. With hoards of hungry guests, there weren’t many leftovers. Anything extra was split between volunteers while the kitchen scraps went to the pigs at Kimchi Farms.

I really couldn't have wished for a better event! I owe a great deal to so many people and groups, but I'd especially like to recognize Kalen Olson, who took charge and was a fantastic event director, and Kathy Chavez, our awe-inspiring head chef.

By Jasmine McBeath

THANK YOU!

Donors

Bosque Baking Company

Brown's Family Farm

Clay Trafton Farm

Frost Hill Organics

Granja Para Mañana

Harvest Gifts

La Montanita Co-opt

La Quiche

Macias Farm

Magos Farm

Majestic Valley Farm

Moore Family Farm

St. Thomas of Canterbury Church

Collaborators

Amnesty International

Bread for the World

Community Bricolage

Food Corps

Foodology

Nourish International

Oxfam Action Corps

Community Chef

Kathy Chavez

Guest Speaker

Greg Gould

Photographer

Rene Ronquillo