Lucid Food_ Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life - Louisa Shafia [16]
fall
As the weather gets colder, a warm room filled with people, food, and drink takes on a novel allure, and social events fill the calendar with increasing frequency until they reach their holiday peak. All of this makes fall a perfect time to try out innovative ways of entertaining and sharing meals. In this chapter, you’ll find ideas for organizing inexpensive, eco-friendly gatherings with an emphasis on bringing people together around simple, seasonal food. During harvest season, the beautiful produce of summer bursts forth one last time with a fierce blast of flavor before going dormant for the winter. Traditionally, people living in temperate climates have used fall days to preserve fresh fruits and vegetables. (See the chapter on Accompaniments for easy recipes for savoring the harvest flavors after the temperature drops.)
In the fall, nature demonstrates how composting works; leaves fall to the ground to form a nourishing layer as we enter the period of decay that allows the earth to replenish itself and bloom anew in the spring. Happily, we can follow this example all year round. In this chapter, you’ll learn how the simple act of saving vegetable scraps can help to abate our landfill crisis, and you’ll find practical tips for setting up your own compost.
No-Waste Entertaining
My New York City catering company, Lucid Food, first gained attention for our no-waste approach to catering and entertaining. We were asked to cater a picnic for the United States Green Buildings Council, the architects’ association that sets “green” building and construction standards. They wanted to hold a gathering that conformed to their mission statement of sustainability, and they were dedicated to making the idea work.
Together we produced an event that surprised and delighted the guests, and not a single item went into a landfill afterward. The lovingly handcrafted food included mulberries shaken from trees in Hudson River Park, scapes (young garlic shoots) picked on a friend’s farm in Chappaqua, and hawthorn berries from northern Pennsylvania. The event was a great success and earned considerable attention from the press. Following are the guidelines we used to make the event completely waste-free.
All of the suggestions from the Eco-Kitchen Basics section can be applied here, too. If you use even a few of these suggestions, not only will you avoid creating garbage that ends up in a landfill, but you’ll save on the amount of energy and fossil fuels used to produce the event. Most of these approaches are suited to home entertaining, but many can be applied to full-scale catered events as well.
MENU
• Buy organic when it’s local and in season. See Five Habits for Eco-Friendly Food Shopping for more about eco-friendly food shopping.
• Serve mini fruits. There are many local fruits that are only big enough for a few bites, like Seckel pears, lady apples, kumquats, and small plums. These can be served whole for a fruit dessert. Cut fruit turns brown after a short time and leftovers are usually thrown away, but beautiful intact fruits can be served later or taken home by guests.
• Serve homemade drinks like lemonade and iced tea instead of buying them in containers that will later be disposed of or recycled.
AMBIENCE
• Serve food using real plates, glasses, napkins, and utensils, not disposables. If you’re throwing a big event and it’s in your budget, rent these items from a party rental company, which can drop off the clean equipment and then pick it up the next day. Some companies will let you pick up and drop off equipment yourself in exchange for a reduced price. You don’t even have to wash anything; just put everything back in their crates. If it’s impossible to use real plates, use biodegradable materials instead