Channels and The Burg

The February issue of The Burg is on racks around town today, and it has some very good feature writing. It also has my piece on Channels Food Rescue.

I got interested in Channels while I was working in the Hilton kitchen because there were so many guys whose last known address was jail.  The Kitchen School at Channels is specifically for recently released prisoners and for the homeless, offering them a way back into the  work world.

When I went to do interviews for the story, I found out the whole project was moving into a warehouse up on Sixth Street, near WHP, and the school was on hold while they build a new kitchen. So I did an umbrella story about all the food rescue projects Channels has going on, including the new culinary classes Chef Beth Jackson runs at Harrisburg High.

From left, Janel Morton, Johanna Solomon and Alicia Miller are doing prep work at Harrisburg's Career Academy

Working Through the Channels

By PAT CARROLL

Kitchen work is so labor-intensive most of us avoid it. So the idea of taking in people who haven’t worked for years – the poor, the homeless, recent graduates of the state prison system – and teaching them the ways of professional chefs is something only a pretty quirky food bank would do.

That’s Channels.

“Basically it’s a 2-year education in culinary arts in 12 weeks, 8:30 to 5:30, Monday to Friday,” said Channels executive chef Michael DeMarco. “Three months of schooling is very difficult for some of them. A lot of the students haven’t been in school in 20 years. They’re in their 40s so they haven’t used their basic adding, subtracting or reading.  It’s a challenge to get them up to speed again on just the simplest things.”

Challenge is what this organization does well. Channels Food Rescue has been on the road less traveled for 20 years, serving just four counties with an intensity that sparkles beside the dull public image of food banks.

“A lot of times when you think of hunger relief you think of canned goods or things that are prepackaged,” said Channels’ new executive director Frances Seeger. “You don’t think of giving people produce and helping them learn about nutritional value.”

While the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank handles 28 counties and the bulk of prepared product distribution, Channels concentrates on the Harrisburg metro area and the hard work of food rescue. Jean Beatty of New Cumberland founded the non-profit to go into hotel and institutional kitchens and pick up leftovers, then deliver them to soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

Beatty retired at the end of 2008, leaving a legacy of programs beyond food rescue.

– Plant a Row for the Hungry garnered 1,418 pounds of fresh produce from local gardeners over the growing season last year, and delivered it to more than 60 shelters and soup kitchens in Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry and York counties.

– Kids Café feeds 600 poor children daily after school, and during the summer it offers breakfast, lunch and dinner.

– Food for the Future is a new partnership with Harrisburg School District, in which Channels is developing the curriculum, writing lesson plans and promoting the fundamentals of knife skills, kitchen safety and recipe development.

And, as Chef Beth Jackson says, Food for the Future means at least one good meal a day for the culinary students. She runs the kitchen classes at Harrisburg Career and Technology Academy. “When I came here there was no kitchen, it was just an empty room,” she said. “I had two little stoves in the back that they called culinary arts.”

Now she teaches two classes and runs a small café at the William Penn campus of Harrisburg High.

The kids work in groups, all making part of the same dish. “That way, they’re not all doing the same thing and I don’t have 18 kids saying ‘Chef …Chef … Chef … Chef…’ And we can compare, too. What’s the difference, what tastes better?”

She just hit her one-year mark at Career & Tech, and likes the intensity. “It’s definitely different, teaching. I’m getting it. I’m a chef, but this is very challenging. I’m going to Penn State at the same time to get my teaching degree.”

Voiage Moore slices chicken in Chef Jackson's class

Just hi

Consumed by Food: Like the Continuum Transfunctioner, its mystery is exceeded only by its power.

Hey, I’m not reliable. Lately I’ve been writing for money and it kinda crowds out writing for fun. I’ll be back.

Meantime, here’s my requisite Facebook 25 things.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because a) I am nosy and b) it’s fun. Fun is good.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. I like winter more than summer.

2. I write to find out what I think. People who don’t write think it’s a linear process, like you start at the beginning and go to the end. It’s not, it’s a lot of back and forth, fixing and sliding and moving words around. In the process, I almost always have an Aha Moment – that’s what I mean!

3. I can’t type. That’s helped me, actually. I go slowly anyway at the keyboard, because I say the words in my head as I type. I like words to fit together in harmony, with stresses that have power and transitions shifting noiselessly.

4. My wife has always been beautiful. When we go to her mother’s house in Indiana, I’m startled by the pictures of this hearty little girl, heartbreaking teenage chick, gorgeous college sorority girl. A couple months ago, we left the newspaper where we worked and old photos came out of the file cabinets of Dee as a young professional. Wow.

5. I like the NFL, but I like rugby more: no helmets, no pads, no stopping play every 30 seconds to call a meeting about what to do next. Everybody gets to handle the ball. Nobody gets to whine about a ref’s decision. It’s more of a game.

6. Cooking overtook journalism as my main interest about 10 years ago. I like the physicality as much as the mental challenge of turning a bag of groceries into dinner. And I like to learn, which is where culinary has the edge … there is so much to know. Thanks to TV, journalism has become all about what the “average reader” feels and wants, not what the editor knows to be news.

7. I miss sailing. When we owned a sailboat, we went down to the Bay as many weekends as we could. We drove down Friday night and got up at 4 a.m. on Monday to get back to work on time. We crewed on racing boats, we sailed with friends, we ran aground a lot and had not nearly enough vodka tonics sitting in the cockpit on moonlit nights.

8. My daughter called up eight years ago and said “Dad, I’m pregnant.” I had no idea we’d come to have two grandkids and a son-in-law. I would not have worried so much if I had known how well Megan would handle herself, what a good guy she would marry, and what wonderful children she’d have, and we’d have to enjoy.

9. My ex, Karen Carroll, comes to our house for Thanksgiving dinner every year with Megan, Nate, Conor and Kaci. We have been friends for a long time.

10. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. We have it on the Saturday after, originally because Megan (a nurse) and I (a reporter) often worked the holiday, now so the kids get to see all their grandparents at their different houses. On the official holiday, Dee and I go for dinner at the Hilton.

11. About 20 years ago, I conned my wife into rowing on the Susquehanna River. She was intimidated by the shell – 26′ long, 12″ wide, no initial stability – but encouraged by the fact that her awkward husband did it. Me, I just liked flying across the water in so elegant a craft. We raced our double for several summers. On a lake in northern Pennsylvania we were matched against a couple of college rowing coaches in a crushing rainstorm. We swamped just before the finish and had to be hauled out by the water rescue guys, who were great except they tried to pull me into the boat at the stern, where the outboard was. Going.

12. I don’t care for once-in-a-lifetime experiences. If it’s so great, I know I’m gonna want to repeat it.

13. Expensive things put me off. (See # 12.) I like good cigars, red wine and dark, dark chocolate but have no interest in “the best,” except for the best cheap stuff — Van Winkle’s Special Reserve Bourbon, for instance, or Chilean Cabernet. On Friday evenings at the weekly philosophy seminar held at RAE’s Tobacco, my friend George from the State Library will often offer me a wee glass of Lagavulin Single Malt aged in sherry casks. I don’t turn it down. I know he’ll still like me next week.

14. I have too much stuff. I’m fixing that, but it’s a struggle.

15. Last year, I interned in the kitchen at the Hilton Harrisburg and blogged about it at ConsumedByFood.wordpress.com. It was a hell of a lot of fun. I miss it. Hard, hot, relentless work reveals a lot about the people who do it. Even the managers did actual work, a new thing in my employment experience.

16. Some days at the Hilton I wondered what my life would be like if I’d chosen cooking instead of journalism, and worked in restaurants. But I saw myself standing in front of a grill one day thinking, “I wonder if I could have been a writer …”

Now I use my blog (http://tinyurl.com/5a3rw6) as a cooking journal, and if it interests other people, okay. The thing is I let it go for weeks at a time, then get enthusiastic about blogging again. Something tells me to make up my mind and do it or don’t, but then I say “Why?”

17. Women are my favorite people.

18. I love opera. When we lived in the city we used to rent operas on video at Blockbuster and have Sunday morning Opera Breakfasts – eggs and pancakes and bacon and coffee and fruit. I am an absolute sucker for Italian opera. Dee liked to play the Traviata banquet music on the piano. The great and beautiful conductor Victoria Bond challenged me to be in Harrisburg Opera’s production of Tosca – as a spear-carrier – and it was a hoot. Got a good column out of it, too.

19. Entropy, abandonment and neglect have a weird, powerful attraction for me. Old barns, vacant shopping centers, seven used cars on an abandoned sales lot can really get me. Bleak-R-Us. Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth turned out to be big faves, once I put aside my early fascination with Chagall.

20. Until spinning, I never liked exercise classes. I did a spinning class for a feature story, went back the next week and did it again, and then I stumbled into the best class ever at noon at the downtown Y. Ever. It is still really hard, but it’s with a roomful of occasional friends and an instructor who lifts people up, way past their perceived limits of exertion. I’d never work this hard on my own.

21. Hmmm. Friends. About 10 years ago, it occurred to me that I had all the friends I’d ever have. I’m not social by nature, I don’t have any small talk and I’m not fond of people who do. One day I happened to walk into the cigar store in Strawberry Square and got into a conversation with a woman named Joan, who was behind the counter. She was smart and serious and funny. Her husband Al turned out to be all that and a war hero, and an advocate for handicapped people. Through them I entered the Friday night gathering at RAE’s, which reminds me a lot of my wife’s Army reunion group, BALTA. Ya never know.

22. Two things I waited until retirement to try are golf and fly fishing – to me, old guy stuff. The cigar store crew dragged me onto the golf course two years ago. I liked it. Bought clubs on eBay last year. I’ve got two writing gigs set up so I have money to feed my golf addiction, should I develop one. We’ll see what happens.

23. Paris is my favorite city. Bonjouring the corner newsstand guy in the morning, jamming into a busy bistro for a prix fixe lunch, standing in line at a bakery at sunset for a dinner baguette – I like it. Second favorite: New Orleans.

24. Not working has given us the time to take our large goofy dog to the park a lot. He is a Lab/Newfie mix, black, and his name is Rugby. He doesn’t like other dogs, but he did sorta fall in love with a three-legged mutt on the beach at Duck last month. We take Rugby to Pinchot and walk a trail that takes us about 50 minutes when it’s pleasant weather but 75 minutes the other day on the ice. (Note to winter walkers: YakTrax http://tinyurl.com/62fh3a)

25. After 17 years of Catholic school, I lost all interest and belief in The Church. A decade later, I met my first Buddha. His name was Barker, a minister who became a reporter. Yeah, funny name. Funny guy. Later I met Dave, an old farmer turned minister, and Mary, a reporter who became a nurse to fly into bleak, dangerous civilizations and help sick people. All my Buddhas help people as a way of life. I have about a dozen now. They don’t hand out religious tracts or solicit donations for their new cathedral or say, “You can sit down and eat dinner here, homeless guy, if you pray with us.” They just help.

Although I have affection for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Martina Navratilova and Lance Armstrong, it is the Buddhas who became my heroes. They live the immortal words of Bill and Ted: “Be excellent to each other!”

Pippa’s hot tonight

Chef Pippa Calland of Newville will be cooking tonight on the Food Network.

It’s a new show called “Chopped,” in which contestants compete in three 30-minute rounds to prepare appetizers, entrees and desserts with surprise ingredients.

Calland trained in New York City, Northern Italy and Beringer vineyards in the Napa Valley, where she worked under legendary culinary educator Madeleine Kamman. She moved to the Harrisburg area a few years ago, and has been a Second Street restaurant consultant.

Fry, baby

There are few things that improve on Troy Polamalu. Deep-frying is one. We made sweet potato chips for the Steelers-Cardinals game, dipped them in garlic hummus and eased their path with Anchor Steam porter while Polamalu disassembled the Baltimore Ravens. Sweet.

The Cool Daddy fryer was a Christmas present. I didn’t exactly ask Santa for it, but I’ve talked enough about frying off chips and fritters at the Hilton and the extraordinary taste that the need (?) was obvious. Okay, the want(!).

Meanwhile, inside my brain, my inner Nutrition Nun had a hissy fit.

So imagine my surprise when I started googling deep-frying and nutrition and all I got back was bloviation about How Awful and No Nay Never, with not much data. Then when I was finished frying the chips, there was as much oil in the pot as I put there in the beginning. So the sweet potatoes did not absorb vast quantities. Huh.

Making chips is about as simple as it gets with frying, but even so we checked some recipe sites … and found weirdness about breading the vegetables. Breading is exactly my objection to deep-frying, because I want to taste the food, not the bread crumbs.

La Tartine Gourmande cleared it up with a quick discussion of Root Vegetable Chips.

Now, you might find the whole deep frying project messy, and hard, but it really isn’t. Not only making chips is easy, but it requires next to nothing – and this is coming from someone who does not do it often. You need a pot deep enough to fry (of course, a deep fryer is always good to have, but not necessary), frying oil, and a good Chef’s knife (or a mandoline, or a turning vegetable slicer). The rest is just fun, especially the eating part as you go along. Impossible to resist nibbling on chips while you are making them.

Exactly.

The Cool Daddy fryer is not at all like the open basket fryers you see in a commercial kitchen. It’s a closed system. That’s good because you don’t get splashed with hot oil, bad because you can’t see or sense the cooking as well or turn the food as easily. What made me like it for home use is that a typical commercial open fryer is built in at hip height — in your house, it would sit on top of a counter and you’d have to stand on a chair to get the right angle.

I fryed off four batches of chips at different cooking times because I couldn’t see the color well enough through the window on the machine. The 8-minute batch was pretty well  burned, the 7-minute batch was a bit lighter, and the best came at 5-6  minutes. Once they’re out of the oil, dusted with salt and resting on a paper towel, they crisp up nicely.

Hard to resist? Yeah.

Beets?

Whatever growing up means — getting a job, getting married, saving money, watching your kid graduate from college  — I think that some where at the bottom is a large NOT: not knowing. Even more, being comfortable with not knowing.  Not needing to be the smartest guy in the room.

So it is with me and beets.

I started from a childhood of encountering beets at other people’s houses, not expecting it, and really not wanting to walk into a wall of seriously troubling aroma. So it took me decades to even consider beets as edible. And then it was more about philosophy than taste: as in, you really should eat more root vegetables. They are so good for you.

That was back in the Whole Foods phase, which succumbed to Natural Foods, followed by Slow Food and Locavoring. All that helped bring me to a post-modern Don’t Knowing, because as much as I vote with my thoughts and dollars for local, sustainable food, local food is not appealing in the winter in the Northeast and I’ve lost my appetite for faith-based Shoulds and Shouldn’ts.

And no winery in Pennsylvania makes a decent Cab and I’m not buying a plane ticket to Hawaii when I want to eat a pineapple.

So with all my food catechisms in shreds around me, I looked again at beets. I began by shredding raw beets into salads, which was not bad. Good sweetness (like good quickness in a running back), a nice textural element, and not smelly.

Next, I threw in beets when I roasted vegetables in the winter. Sitting happily among the  squash and yams and asparagus, mushrooms and carrots, the beets were homey.

Now comes a terrific idea in the NYT about dicing and caramelizing that just looks scrumptious.

It’s a roasted beet salad with bitter greens to balance the sweetness, and goat cheese, because everything’s better with goat cheese. I’m happy to say I will make this salad without knowing if I’ll like it.

“When we are able to be here without saying, ‘I certainly agree with this’ or ‘I definitely don’t agree with that,’ but just be here very directly, then we find fundamental richness everywhere,” as Pema Chodron says.

Desperation, part deux

As registered contrarians, we consistently use things in ways they were not meant to be used. By we I mean people in our family and our extended family. By not meant I don’t just not mean the excellent cold cure involving Nyquil and Single-Malt Scotch.

For instance? We frequently use our ipods for non-music purposes, like scavenged/ borrowed Teaching Company lectures.  Dee got blown away by a 382-talk series about ancient Egypt. I was utterly seduced by Elizabeth Vandiver’s commentary on the Iliad. None of this was easily accomplished, because iTunes wants only to rub up against Christina Aguilera’s shiny lyrics.

iTunes firmly resists importing unregistered uncommercial audio unless you copy it onto your hard drive and slide it into a pre-existing file, drag that into iTunes and hold your nose and turn around three times stamping your feet in Birkenstocks.  By now we’re almost used to it.

Other examples? We have our Turkey Day on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, so our daughter and son-in-law and their kids don’t have to choose among various relative dinners on Thursday. Plus many of us had to work on the day, in the past — me as a journalist, Megan as a chemo nurse, Nate as a paramilitary nuclear defense guy. Turkey Saturday has become so traditional with us I felt I had to give it a name. I call it Givethanksing.

So there was an attractive contrariness to vacation on the Outer Banks in the winter. Neither of us care for crowds or sunbathing on the beach or shopping for pricey crap to fill up knick-knack shelves we don’t have at home. We like walking on the sand beside the sea, sitting on the couch reading, writing and Twittering — and grilling fresh fish for dinner. December seemed as good a time as July for that. So we rented this house:

If you look at the center of the photo and notice the staircase line, there’s a standing grill right behind it, which became The Problem.

Fish, definitely not the problem. Even though the main market in Duck is closed until April or so, there’s plenty of fish. I steered past the tiny, creepy plywood FISH 4 SALE shack awkwardly nailed onto the gas station in Southern Shores, went to Food Lion on the main drag for staples and then hit the small fish market on the south side of Rt. 158. Bought some salmon and a bunch of oysters and headed back to the beach house.

It was windy. I planned ahead. The sun would be way down by dinner time, I realized (for me, that was a real Duh Moment.)  The charcoal I bought at Food Lion was pre-lighter-fluided, because I didn’t want to be fooling with explosive liquids in what I was realizing would soon be total dark.  I put some newspaper on the bottom of the grill pan, covered it with a pile of charcoal and went inside.

Hours later, I returned with a pair of tongs, the salmon, a pile of oysters, a book of matches and a Yeungling Black and Tan. I am addicted to grilled oysters. They have a strange buttery succulence that goes way beyond anything else in shellfish land. I planned to eat as many of them as I could while the fish was cooking and serve the rest as an appetizer at table. (See, I can share.)

I put down everything but the beer and the matches and prepared to light the fire. The first match blew out before I could get it near the charcoal. So did the second one. I put the beer down. I huddled over the grill and lit the third match, managing to touch it to the charcoal pile before it blew out.

The wind was from the west, coming off the Sound straight at the open section of the grill. I smothered the charcoal pile with my body and somehow managed to wedge my arm, with the matches, inside the small open area between the front of my jacket and the pile of charcoal.  If the fire suddenly exploded into being I would be toastified. Didn’t care. Must light fire with remaining matches. Knew just how Neanderthals would have felt if they had matches.

Arrrgggh.

I climbed the stairs to the cottage realizing any sensible person would call for pizza now.  Got more matches.

This time, I slouched my body over the grill, wedged the matches into the opening and lit the whole pack at once. They flared and whooshed as I tucked them under a corner of the charcoal pile and waited happily as the fire sought out the lighter fluid, tempting it toward fiery magnificence.

But while I was waiting, I wondered when the bag of charcoal got put on the shelf at the Food Lion. End of season? Maybe August. Or maybe the store manager was really aggressive and laid in a couple skids during July, figuring they’d sell. Before, you know, December. Would the light fluid have evaporated in the intervening six months?  (I’m not a chem major.)

Possibly, because the next three packs of matches had no effect either. I climbed the stairs being very grateful that I’d bought a package of chicken at Food Lion.

After I told Dee about the non-fire, we had a moderately good if slighlty tension-filled laugh. It was getting late. I opened the cabinet to grab the the olive oil.  No olive oil. Opened the fridge. No chicken. Sensing some spousal stress arising from my stomach, I asked Dee where she’d put the chicken and the olive oil.  “What chicken?” she said.

What chicken, FFS?!? I looked in the cupboard and there was also no salt and pepper, no red pepper flakes, no trash bags — all things I remember we put in the cart. I called Food Lion but they didn’t have an extra bag of groceries sitting around. We looked at the receipt. None of the stuff we were missing was on it.

Hmmm. There had been a weird moment at the grocery when our cart went missing. I am seriously not making this up. After we both looked in several other aisles a woman came along with a chuckle in her voice asking, “Did someone lose a grocery cart?” and pointed to one back near the produce section. It was ours.

That seemed so odd. If she had taken our cart by mistake, wouldn’t she have said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I took your cart by mistake. There it is.” But we were in the South. Southern humor? Southern hospitality? We got the cart and finished shopping. We thought.

But back at the house facing a chickenless fridge, I wondered if this odd woman had raided our cart for things she was too shy to acquire by the normal public process. Didn’t really matter. I wasn’t driving back to Food Lion now to buy more chicken.

Plan C: call for pizza.

No answer.

WTF? The pizza place A. wasn’t answering the phone, or B. had closed. It was 8:15. I got in the car and drove to the pizza place in Duck, which had taken Option B. I kept driving until I found my self past Southern Shores at Cosmo’s, next to the Food Lion. Ordered. Waited 2o minutes. Drove back to the house.

We ate. We drank beer. I wondered at the wondrous complexity of a contrary life, and decided we usually have more fun than other people, if not more pizza.

Desperation, part one

That our first meal in southern France was at McDonald’s always gets a laugh. Like a great New Yorker cartoon, it immediately balances the warmth and beauty of life by the Mediterranean.

I’ll make this short, so I can get to why we’re eating pizza tonight in the seafood capital of the Outer Banks, N.C.

We got off the train from Paris on a Sunday afternoon, had to take a taxi to the airport to pick up our rental car, managed to lose ourselves on the way out of Nimes and finally found our cottage in St. Mamert du Gard after some confusing encounters with people who speak the language a hell of a lot faster and better than anybody in our car.

Saint Mamert du Gard

This photo shows the square. Our gite was on a street nearby, under olive trees. The landlady was away, but we found the key to the front door above the lintel.

Note the closed shutters in the square. Since we’d driven through town, we already knew the grocery was closed. So was the tiny bistro we saw, and the boulangerie. Small town, sleepy Sunday. Sun going down. Hunger coming full on.

Back to the car, but to go where? We headed for the highway and went north. (South to Montpellier would have been a better choice, but who knew?) Tried a few exits and found nothing but houses. Hunger had become a third voice in the car, an unpleasant finger-pointing WTF-Were-You-Thinking snarky voice that didn’t sound like calming down soon.

About an hour into our search, with only headlights and moonlight around us, a soft reddish-yellow glow appeared on the right side of the roadway, miles ahead. It looked M-ish.

HFS — it was an M. It was a McDoubleCheeseBurger M, a McFries With That M, a Where’s The Damn Exit M that pulled us clean off the highway and into a long line of Peugeots and Renaults.

It’s called McDo en francais, and done with full French efficiency and courtesy. Uniformed servers walked the lines of cars, taking orders and taking money, so that when we got to the takeout window all we had to do was grab our hot bag of holy junk food and find a place to park.

And give thanks.

FWIW

Okay, I had a chicken breast defrosting and some roasted veg leftovers. Dinner? Hmm. Seemed like it needed a platform, a vessel.  Pasta. I filleted the chicken and marinated in olive oil, salt and pepper and white wine. Seared it and then roasted it.

Cooked bowtie pasta, heated some marinara, nuked the roasted veg.

Pasta, veg, sauce, chicken. Out-standing.

Great grilled cheese

This is an outstanding grilled cheese, except I’d go for an apple slaw instead of the cole slaw

Texas BBQ

Word envy is not a big problem for me, except when Calvin Trillin bothers to write. Here is his latest on Texas BBQ.