WalkingElephant

We are what we eat...

...and that ain't good.

I was shocked to learn from one of our beneficiaries recently that a significant percentage of Boston's public schools have no kitchens. But, they do serve lunch. It's just that their school lunches aren't made on the premises. Instead, they're prepared airplane/TV-dinner-style, in individual portions on flash-frozen, shrink-wrapped trays, in some factory in Philadelphia. 

No, I've got nothing against Philly - honest! But I DO find it appalling and alarming that we have made our peace with this choice to serve the lowest possible cost, pre-fab food to our children. And this fact is just one of myriad indicators that the health and welfare of our public school children is not truly important to the majority of us. Only more money flowing into public school systems will make it possible for a course change in a healthier direction. 

Meanwhile, the French definitely have different priorities, as I just learned from this story at grist.com, which includes this video:

 

Dropping in on City Year Boston

The first time we present a check to one of our Beneficiary-Nonprofits I like to deliver it personally. Usually this is my first face-time with someone in the organization, and for them with someone from our side. Good feelings abound. And the first tangible currency that is the product of all the hard work people representing both entities put in is finally exchanged. Yes, we give them money, oxygen to all nonprofits. But, they give me inspiration. To be honest, I think I get more than equal value!

It happens every time: I think I understand an organization, their mission, and how they work by reading about it and watching a few videos. Then I meet them, on their turf, and realize that I had no idea... Dropping off our check at City Year last Friday [$3,679.52 - our biggest so far!] did it to me again. 

The grand tour of City Year Boston's headquarters as it turns out includes a tour of City Year's national/global Headquarters [yes, global: City Year is active in the UK and South Africa now]. 

Pictured above, left to right: Renaldo Mili, Kayla Faust, Jenna Hadley, Matt Parks, me, Nicole Kfoury, Stephen Mondach, and Emily Hildreth

I don’t have any experience with City Year out on the streets of in the schools, but a visit to their offices on Columbus Avenue is the organizational version of a group hug.

Big Citizenship is the new book by Alan Khazei, City Year’s co-founder on the subject of what he calls “pragmatic idealism,” which he first made manifest through City Year. I’m glad I’m reading the book AFTER my September 24, 1010 City Year visit; I witnessed in 90 short minutes so many of the concepts, values and traditions implemented in the organization’s early days, and described in the book’s early chapters. No executive or development office hand-holding: Young, 20-something corps members gave me an amazing tour of the four-floor headquarters building, including national/international headquarters’ offices, the Boston offices, the workshops and a variety of meeting spaces with whiteboard-paint walls full of ad-hoc dry-erase bullet lists and mind-maps.

What followed was a sit-down in a conference room with two new second-year corps members and now team leaders who were so inspired by their first-year experience that they decided that there was nothing they’d rather do than re-up. – And there they were: the whole lot of them, every new first-year Boston City Year corps member – in their signature red jackets and Timberland boots– in the large meeting room taking part in a spirited Friday Leadership Development Day training session together just off the first floor lobby… just like it says in the book, just as theyve done sinve the earliest days in the late 1980s. Everyone, and I mean each and every person I saw looked genuinely happy to be there, and fully-engaged in what they were doing.  And what they are doing at City Year – fighting the epidemic school drop-out rate in our country – is critical to the future of America.

The corps members’ personal stories are uplifiting and highly-motivating for me.  Not that I needed incentive to continue developing The Benefit Restaurant™ Project, but when I am afforded an insider’s perspective on the amazing systems, traditions, and people that  our funding is supporting, my resolve to keep tuning and to figure out how to propagate the system we’ve implemented at our pilot restaurant, The Elephant Walk in Waltham, is refreshed and re-doubled.

So, this is a public thank you to City Year Boston – and specifically Elliot Haney who gave me the tour, [and took the picture in this post], Jenna Hadley and Nicole Kfoury the second-year corps members and team leaders who shared with me their personal stories, and Matt Parks, the Corporate Relations Manager who spent time with us and presented me with a copy of Mr. Khazei’s book [which I am half-way through and highly recommend!]. I am awed by your service and moved by your spirit.

Note: Alan Khazei will be speaking about his new book, Big Citizenship, at More Than Words, the Moody Street, Waltham bookstore-café [that – coincidentally, I promise! – is also one of our Beneficiaries] this Wednesday, October 6 at 7:00pm. I hope to see you there!

More Than [at a loss for] Words

Yesterday I went over to More Than Words on Moody Street in Waltham to present them with their $3,144.14 Benefit Restaurant Donation check as our July beneficiary. I'd been in as a customer a couple of times before, but this time I got the Royal Tour. It blew me away.

From the customer's viewpoint, More Than Words [MTW] is a casual, urban bookstore/café - complete with a full-service to-order beverage counter, a rich selection of used books and music for sale, comfy couches, and free wi-fi. Staffed by earnest, friendly young adult baristas and booksellers, the experience is akin to a compact, well-loved Barnes and Noble.

But my tour guide, the very impressive MTW Associate Marceline Josile [pictured below with the equally impressive MTW Founder and Executive Director Jodi Rosenbaum, and me], by ushering me down the back stairs, lifted the veil on the sophisticated and finely-tuned machine occupying the enormous basement below.

More Than Words' business is books. Made up of row-upon-row of bookcases loaded with painstakingly catalogued books for sale - some openly sorted, others in plastic bins - shelves packed with a hundred or more boxes of un-sorted fresh donations from individuals and businesses, and the enormous commercial laundry basket-fulls of rejects, the MTW "warehouse operation" is a model of data-driven efficiency.

Have you ever wondered what happens to a book you donate to a used book reseller? Well - after thanking you - the smart ones [like More Than Words] enter your books' ISBN numbers into a deep database of current statistics on the popularity and pricing of titles available from myriad online used book resellers.

Hey, it's nothing personal, but you can bet that a significant percentage of that beloved library you painstakingly collected and that you finally screwed up the courage to edit simply won't make the cut.  - More Than Words is a business. And one that's outgrowing its space. They simply can't accommodate dead inventory. So they are forced to cull, and they do so with ruthless precision.

But it's not just their organized workflow or their scientific methodology that impressed me. They post up-to-yesterday sales data parsed against sales-forecasts-by-profit-center [yup - they track seriously granular data] for the entire staff to see. They've got personal performance objectives quantified and posted for every co-worker to see. [Their level of transparency would - and should - embarrass the Obama Administration] Their level of operational efficiency and business savvy and acumen embarrassed me, quite frankly. I was so stunned and impressed by all Marceline and Jodi were showing me that it was easy to forget for a while that...

The REAL mission of More Than Words is to help shape and direct the precious lives of all the challenged young people they can. To quote from their excellent website, " Youth at MTW are in teh foster care system, court involved, homeless, or have dropped out of school. These subsets of the youth population face tremendous barriers to employment and there are few training programs that are designed to empower youth to develop the skills, experience and self-efficacy critical for a safe, meaningful and successful transition to adulthood."

I've seen it first-hand: More Than Words sells coffee and books to the public; but far more importantly, More Than Words delivers the goods to challenged young people when it comes to building self-respect, self-confidence and character, teaching real-world job skills, and an awareness of what it takes to make it in the working world. I met about a dozen of their current associates and graduates yesterday and have never been more impressed with the confidence, carriage, and professionalism of young people growing into their grown-up shoes.

I can't believe I did it...

...all by myself! - I've been in the restaurant business nearly 19 years, and the food business over 27 years, including my ice cream daze... But I really don't cook very much. Such is the blessing of living with women all my life who have been gifted with superb palates and a love of indulging them!

But of all the amazing things my mother or my wife have ever prepared in our home, none has ever been cereal. I'm cereal obsessed, frankly. I have it for breakfast 5-6 days a week [over my wife's protestations that I ought to better balance my diet]. No one other than my father - an equally marginal cook - has ever enjoyed cereal even close to as much as I do. And yet, all my life I've treated cereal as more-or-less a commodity that comes in a box - or a bag - and that I was locked into what "Megacorp" or "Micrograin" might decide was worthy of taking to market.

In fact, it never occurred to me until a couple of weeks ago that I could make my own cereal if I wanted... But an outstanding brunch at Craigie on Main opened my mind to that very possibility. 

With all the delicious choices on their eye-opening menu, never did I think I would choose to order granola... but I did. What made me do it? Coriander. "Coriander and cashew granola." I get a lot of coriander - seeds, stems, and leaves [think cilantro] - in my diet eating Cambodian food several days a week. Never did I think it would or could be an ingredient in my breakfast cereal. But it was. And it was sublime. 

Realizing they made it themselves, I Googled granola when I got home and up popped some recipes that looked shockingly easy, even for me. A week later, shopping at Bread and Circus [I know, it's been Whole Foods for years, but Bread and Circus has to be the best supermarket name ever killed; I won't let it die] I bought a half dozen dry organic ingredients, determined to try to make my own. 

One Sunday passed. Then another... Why so tentative? Was I nervous?... Finally this afternoon I printed out a recipe and got to work. Oats, sunflower seeds and wheat germ as a traditional foundation. Then a little improvisation, omitting coconut and substituting pistachios for almonds. 

The wet ingredients were built on the amazing Wood's Cider Mill's Grade B maple syrup [when did the world become convinced that Grade A maple syrup was best; if you've never tried Grade B, you owe it to yourself to make the effort to find some Grade B and tasted the difference: It's more rustic, earthier, with more "mapley" flavor]. My reading convinced me that most people felt the recipes as-is yielded results too sweet, so I cut the dark brown sugar in half. Then a little salt and a little canola oil and a basic granola was coming together...

But wait: What about that coriander?... I couldn't believe it: The jar was empty! I thought about cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, even ginger... but no, too trite. So in the end I reached for Garam Masala - and got an unexpectedly tasty result. So, late this cloudy afternoon, under a sprinkle of golden raisins and dried mango , cranberries, blueberries, and cherries [hey, what do you expect when you grab a bag of mixed, dried fruit from Trader Joe's?] I treated my wife to my first of what I am convinced is the first of many homemade cereals at my one hand... Now, if I can only figure out how to make wheat flakes and corn checks, then I'll really be on to something!

I can't wait for breakfast tomorrow morning! - Want to make your own? A simple Google search'll turn up a recipe like this. Consider a few tweaks to make it your own, and you're on your way!

Collaborate, cooperate, celebrate...

Food sanity in Mad River Valley - Part 3

Too rich to go into in this post, and far too interesting for you NOT to explore further on your own, The Cellars at Jasper Hill is a twenty-two thousand square foot underground cooperative cheese aging facility and an organization with a powerful cooperative marketing arm, storing and selling some damn fine cheeses! Most of the restaurants we'd visited featured Vermont cheeses very prominently, which we definitely appreciated, and when I started writing this post and pulling together the web addresses for you it became apparent that The Cellars at Jasper Hill was one of their principal providers. Like the Vermont Fresh Network, they are another strong connector of producers, preparers, and consumers, bringing together and bringing to market - and thereby sustaining - healthful and delicious, high quality food products and businesses. 

At breakfast on our last morning at The Inn at Round Barn Farm, we were talking with innkeeper Tim Piper about all the great food and food culture in the area. After hearing us out a bit on cheese, he told us that they were hosting a three-day cheesemaking class in late to be taught by the highly accomplished and decorated artisanal cheesemakers at Three Shepherds' Cheese Company located just down the road in Warren. - And wouldn't you know, it also turns out that the Vermont Fresh Network annual meeting was just hosted at Round Barn Farm as well. Integrating, churning, connecting, learning. Impressive.

I can't help but feel that the food community in Vermont is showing us all the way to organize and operate a sustainable, high-quality, healthful food chain. What they're doing in the Mad River Valley, at least, creates and preserves jobs, respects the environment, celebrates the full spectrum of food arts, and - as far as we could tell - really enhances the quality of life for visitors and year-rounders alike. It was a little jarring to return to the big city from a getaway in the country and realize that suddenly my perspective had reversed: Notwithstanding the number of great, progressive restaurants we do have in the Greater Boston area, I realize now how far AHEAD of us city-folk they can be in the country when it comes to collectively embracing and integrating the local, the seasonal, the natural - and the people, both local and "flatlanders."

It's good to be served a slice of humble pie every once in a while - especially when it's delicious!

They get it in Vermont...

Food Sanity in the Mad River Valley, Part 2...

They get it in Vermont: Organic. Local. Seasonal. Hand-crafted. Small, artisanal producers, celebrating, supporting, feeding each other. It's impressive and profoundly satisfying to plunge into their world for a while. I don't feel like I have yet completely figured out why the commitment to quality and purity felt so pervasive, but I do think that the Vermont Fresh Network has a lot to do with it. Self-described as "dedicated to connecting farmers, food producers, and chefs to support Vermont agriculture and bring fresh, flavorful, high-quality food to all Vermonters and [their] guests," nearly every place we visited happened to be a member of the Network.

Yes, there is an evident, active commitment among so many of the local chefs to using high-quality local, seasonal, and organic ingredients. But just as satisfying was discovering that they take risks with their recipes as well, with wild boar, squab, even rabbit confit could be found at Hen of the Wood in Waterbury, The Black Door in Montpelier, The Pitcher Inn in Warren, and The Green Cup back in Waitsfield. Even our favorite place to stay in the area, The Inn at The Round Barn Farm, with an organic garden of their own, is very well aware of and closely connected with the burgeoning high-quality local food world around them. One morning they found a way to use local yak sausage as part of a delicious breakfast. - But, perhaps the most pleasant surprise was a brand-new vegetarian restaurant that grew out of a tea shop we remembered from our last visit to the area last March: Mint, in the heart of downtown Waitsfield, where I found their "Tempeh Bowl" to be one of the best lunch dishes I've ever had. 

One of the most refreshing aspects of this visit was realizing how selflessly they promote one-another. All our servers and proprietors seemed eager to share with us their local favorites, actively referring us to other good places in the area. Otherwise we may not have discovered Mint, nor The Black Door. However, it was the chef at our inn, Charlie Menard, who connected us in a new way with perhaps Vermont's best known culinary commodity: cheese. We were looking for a mid-afternoon snack and so he pointed us toward the East Warren Community Market - a new local cooperative market - where he said we'd find a great selection of local, artisanal food products, including cheese. He was right. 

Although the Market had sold out of fresh bread by the time we got there, we left with two great cheeses: Von Trapp [yes, those Von Trapps] Farmstead "Oma" and "Cabot Clothbound," an aged English-style cheddar that is nothing like your typical sharp Vermont or Wisconsin aged cheddar, nor anything like the more mainstream Cabot cheeses we commonly find in our local supermarkets. What most surprised me was the fact that, although the two cheeses were from altogether different producers, they shared nearly identical labels, prompting us to take a closer look. In so doing, we discovered yet another inspiring, community-building concept: The Cellars at Jasper Hill.

Next: Collaboration

Getting an education... on Education!

Like many of you, I recently finished reading the 2006 bestseller Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin - an astonishing and ongoing story of a man [Mortenson] who, climbing down K2 after a failed summitting attempt, stumbled into a Pakistani village and a new life building schools where there aren't any in northern Pakistan and now Afghanistan.

Working similar magic, but from a somewhat different perspective is John Wood, founder of the remarkable foundation Room to Read, which builds libraries, schools and computer labs in Southeast and Central Asia, and now Africa. I also just finished Mr. Wood's book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, a no less inspiring story of an overworked corporate executive who stumbled upon a cavernous need for better education in the developing world and dropped everything to commit to help build libraries and schools for people who don't have them. - The Boston Chapter of Room to Read held a sold out findraiser at The Elephant Walk in Cambridge last November in pursuit of their goal of building 10 libraries in Cambodia.

It was Heather Faris, Cambridge resident and mother of two students who educated all of us at The Elephant Walk as to what American journalist Bernie Krisher is doing with his non-profit organization, American Assistance for Cambodia [AAfC}- you guessed it: building schools in Cambodia [more than 400 so far] and more. Ms. Faris brought us up to speed early last year on the Cambridge School for Cambodia [CambCamb] project, a grass roots Cambridge organization she was helping run that included many students and was raising money to fund a school through the AAfC. [We hosted a fundraiser in support of their effort at our Cambridge restaurant last April that raised over $5,000. - We're also hosting a follow-up buffet luncheon this coming May 9 - spearheaded by Cambridge high school student Lucy Flamm - to help further the CambCamb mission - (Tickets are still available!)]

Frankly, until recently, I had no idea how many people are making extraordinary commitments of time and money, sometimes even risking their lives let alone their life savings to help bring the opportunity of education to people whose governments and community resources cannot provide it. Their efforts and achievements are amazing and inspiring.