Food Farmer Earth: Teaching From the Source

"We're two generations removed from stay-at-home moms. We don't have home economics in schools any more. Where do people learn to cook?" Kathryn LaSusa-Yeomans asks.

Her answer, as she explains in my interview with her for Food Farmer Earth, was to start a business she calls The Farmer's Feast, teaching free cooking classes at area farmers' markets.

Watch part one of the interview, Anatomy of a Pop-up Restaurant. In this week's kitchen segment, Kathryn shows how incredibly simple it is to make a basic risotto. To get regular updates on local producers featured on Food Farmer Earth, consider a free subscription.

Food Farmer Earth: Anatomy of a Pop-up Restaurant

In this interview for Food Farmer Earth, I talk with Kathryn LaSusa-Yeomans of The Farmer's Feast, who dissects the elements that go into making her incredibly successful pop-up restaurant experiences.

“What’s a pop-up?”

It’s the question that Kathryn LaSusa Yeomans gets asked the most about her recent venture. A seasoned chef who early in her career trained with the likes of Lidia Bastianich and Diana Kennedy, Yeomans worked in restaurants in her home state of New York and in her adopted home in Portland, Oregon.

At a certain point, though, she needed to break free of the constraints of restaurant kitchens to pursue her dream of teaching people to cook using market-fresh, seasonal ingredients. With the birth of her own company, The Farmer’s Feast, she started doing cooking classes at area farmers’ markets, as well as for Roger Konka’s Springwater Farm, demonstrating how to cook with his foraged greens and mushrooms.

It was Konka who first suggested selling food as well as doing demonstrations, and it wasn’t long before there was talk of holding dinners for their growing throng of fans. They’d been renting space in a local restaurant for their commissary kitchen, and the owner was enthusiastic about having them use the place for dinners on nights when the restaurant was closed.

Read the rest of the article.

Watch part two of the interview with Kathryn, Teaching From the Source. In this week's kitchen segment, Kathryn shows how incredibly simple it is to make a basic risotto. To get regular updates on local producers featured on Food Farmer Earth, consider a free subscription.

Truffle Haiku: The People's Turn to Choose!

Diamonds? Meh. Couture gown? Sigh. A little red sports car? I dunno. But give me an Oregon truffle, particularly shaved over pasta or a rich risotto, and I'm all yours, baby.

My friend Kathryn LaSusa Yeomans, chef and mistress of the markets at Roger Konka and Norma Cravens' Springwater Farm, loves the subterranean fungal fruit as much as I do, and runs a truffle haiku contest on Valentine's Day every year for those moved to poetry over the subject. This year's winner was announced yesterday on her blog, The Farmer's Feast, and now is your chance to pick the People's Choice award for the 17 syllables that best describe the euphoria brought on by Oregon's native truffle.

So scan, analyze or just close your eyes and point at the screen to pick your favorite. Leave your name (or pseudonym) and the number of your choice in the Comments below. The haiku with the most votes will win a prize for the writer, and a winner will be drawn (and a prize awarded) from those who voted for it. Both will be announced at noon on Monday, Feb. 21, so pick your winner now and check back on Monday!

1:
Hidden Dame Truffles
Black and White Knobs of Pleasure
How My Mouth Waters

2:
First befriend a swine
Next profess your Truffle wish:
“Bejewel my pasta”

3:
Rooted from the damp earth
a little bit of heaven
sautéed for dinner

4:
Black or white delight
on all my favorite dishes
so trufflicious

5:
A kiss on her lips
A trifle for a truffle
A heart on a sleeve

6:
They lie underground
Waiting to be discovered
Heaven in the dirt

7:
Truffles, you grow in the ground
Pigs love you.
We love you also

8:
Some may dare call you
ascomycetous fungus
But truffles, you’re loved.

9:
I’m the hunter pig.
I am going to find you.
Truffles, you are MINE!

10:
Trufficulteurs find
some bumpy, wrinkled masses.
Thankful evermore.

11:

Underneath the duff
There lies most marvelous stuff
Treasures of Truffles

12:
Oh! Dew Drop Riches
Forested in your niches
Take me there again

13:
The foragers gaze
Only broken by smiles
In bountiful woods

14:
Black and white are tight
on all my favorite dishes,
so trufflicious!

15:
Dirt worm chance
My pig’s nose
Found it and an arrowhead.

16:
Truffle dance,
melt sensuously in
to the void I fear.

17:
It was our first time
You and I unearthed much more
Now we search as one

18:
How best to woo you?
Shaved lightly over pasta
Fragrant lumps of love

Photos above by Kathryn LaSusa Yeomans.

Fantastic Fungus

Picture this: a sauce that's as black as black bean soup, with an earthy aroma wafting up from it that's part truffle, part corn. It can be chunky or smooth. And, like mushrooms, it has that quality of umami that brings out the flavors of anything its served with, whether cheese, meat or vegetables.

In Mexican cuisine it's called huitlacoche and is a prized delicacy, especially when fresh.

Here in America, however, it's called corn smut or corn blight and has been targeted by the USDA as a disease of the corn plant that must be eradicated. Thus it is very hard to find in it's fresh state. And you know it's trouble when even an organization as revered as the James Beard Foundation, which hosted an all-huitlacoche dinner in 1989, couldn't raise the fungus's status. Sigh.

I'd had chunks of it in empanadas and as a smooth black sauce on steak when we were in Mazatlan a few years ago, but hadn't run across any since. So when I heard that my friend Kathryn LaSusa Yeomans of The Farmer's Feast had managed to cadge some from a local farmer who was wise enough not to plow under his field when he discovered it, I had to have some.

At the Portland Farmers' Market in Pioneer Courthouse Square on Monday she was spooning it into a steaming bowl of mushroom corn chowder. She had me taste the chowder alone, a lovely, rich broth with fresh corn and sliced mushrooms, perfectly fine by itself. But with just a small spoonful of the huitlacoche it was transformed into a blast of flavors, each one bigger and richer than it was by itself. Wow!

We can only hope that some enterprising farmer will take the smut challenge and realize that a field of huitlacoche will bring chefs and their customers flocking and throwing cash in his or her direction. Anyone willing to take this one on?