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I recently was in the area around Penn Station in New York and came across an unassuming restaurant with a smiling Budda logo. I had over an hour to kill before I was supposed to meet friends at a different location. I was hungry at 4:30 but didn’t want to eat a meal but also didn’t just want to have a cup of coffee or tea. I walked into the place,  which looks sort of “hip, Lower East Side Chinese take-out” and was pleasantly surprised to see a menu with items ranging from $2.50 to $8.00, small plates, interesting ingredients, many vegetarian, with an eye toward freshness.  This review in New York Magazine writes glowingly of their menu, although the writers ate at the sister Mooncake Restaurant located in Soho.

If you’re in New York for the holidays and don’t want to drop a wallet on food, I highly recommend the walk to 263 W 30th Street, right off of 8th Avenue, where you’ll find a great nosh at an affordable price. http://newyork.citysearch.com/profile/47188394

For a taste of true Italian fare, walk a  block south to 29th and 8th Avenue to gem of a deli, Salumeria Biellese. This third generation, two family-owned business still makes cured meats with the recipes handed down from former generations. Their incredible cured meats can be found at restaurants across the country including central New Jersey’s very own Eno Terra  and Tre Piani. And if you’re looking to get out of the cold and sit down to a delightful meal, walk around the corner to their warm and inviting Restaurant Birichino, where freshly made pastas and sausages made by hand are the norm.

Knowing where to eat in New York is always worth the research. These are sure bets to help you withstand the crowds and to make sure your day in the city is pleasurable beyond your expectations.

Join Slow Food Central New Jersey and over a dozen local food vendors on December 13th from 10am til 2pm at the D&R Greenway Land Trust Johnson Education Center in Princeton. Farms and food vendors selling cheese, eggs, bread, mushrooms, meat, poultry, wine, pies, winter produce, cider, greens, organic teas, as well as holly and Christmas trees for your holiday decorating will be for sale to celebrate the winter bounty of the region.

Visit www.slowfoodcentralnj.org/Winter_Farmers_Markets.html for directions and a list of vendors. Call   609 577-5113   for more information. Suggested $2 donation at door to benefit Slow Food Central New Jersey. Cooking demos on the hour starting at 10:30am.

Legislation to Table

Next week I will have the privilege of speaking along side Congressman Rush Holt for the Greenway Trust for Farmland Preservation in Princeton. Of course my talk will be about Slow Food and why our food supply needs to be “Good, Clean and Fair.” In New Jersey this topic is especially contentious as we have everything from bucolic organic food producers, large scale commercial farming and not so savory food laboratories and unfair food distribution systems.

If we truly are “The Garden State” should we not take even greater strides to protect our natural resources? If we “Are what we eat” do we want to know where our food comes from and know that those sources are clean? 

One of the main reasons I became involved in Slow Food many years ago was that I was tired of having to buy anonymous products from out of state markets when there are so many farms all around me. As a chef one of my most important responsibilities is to source the best products that I can find. How can I know if I don’t even know where the products come from?

The problem is the system. This system is less than 100 years old, but it has effectively robbed us all from local tastes and food traditions. It has poisoned our lands, has been blamed for many chronic illnesses and created poverty where there was none before. This is a global problem and New Jersey is in the forefront.

Legislators have the power to change this system that is not sustainable.

To find out more about this program and to find out more about these issues I offer you a couple of websites.

www.drgreenway.org and www.slowfoodusa.org

A recent NY Times article about food to be served at the new Yankee Stadium shares a quote by owner George Steinbrenner:

“You can never stop giving back to the fans. They count the most. The fans count for everything. The more you do for them, the better you’re off.”

Thanks, George. That’s big of you.

Let’s see who’s better off when the new menu for stadium fans is unveiled and at what price. The touted new and improved stadium is host to seats now worth thousands of dollars, making beer that costs close to $10 a pop appear to be chump change. For Yankee fans, many of whom live in the Princeton area and enjoy going to a game at Yankee Stadium, there will be little benevolence shown to their pocketbooks when this new menu is revealed.

Cynicism aside, will there be any type of “slow food” offered–healthy, locally grown produced perhaps—when the fast balls are flying? If the culture of ballpark food ever changes for the better, we will be a bit closer to feeding the masses an improved menu for health. Let’s hope the new Yankee Stadium has it in them to lead off with this in mind.

I would assume that anyone that is reading this enjoys a good meal. But what exactly makes a meal good can be taken to great lengths. In Carlo Petrini’s book “Slow Food Nation” he argues that gastronomy is a science and that food should be good, clean and fair. Meaning that all food should be produced in a way that is good to the environment, leave as little of a carbon footprint as possible, support the people that produce it properly, is produced locally, organically, sustainably and maintain biodiversity. Obviously the book goes into much greater depths on this subject, but I hope you get the idea. Eco-gastronomy is a word that Slow Food coined years ago to help convey our message.

In the world today it is almost impossible to achieve the ideals, but it is extremely important that we try. Many people think that a good meal is simply a dinner out or a meal at home with family or friends. Others think that a good meal is one that they can afford. Still others, the few that can afford it, think that a good meal can only be found at four star restaurants prepared by celebrity chefs.

The bottom line is that quality food ingredients are expensive, more so today than ever before. If you want to cook a good meal at home it is going to take time. These days many people have little time or money, is it fair that they cannot have a good meal?
What’s your opinion?

If you haven’t heard the words “colony collapse disorder”, it is worth looking up online to see what all the “buzz” is about. This life-threatening phenomena, understood to be devestating the world’s bee population, is occuring at such a rapid rate that the disappearance of bees is a mystery to scientists and beekeepers alike. When I mentioned this as being one of the world’s gravest problems in a conversation with some friends, they laughed and said that bees were hardly one of the biggest “problems” facing the globe.

I beg to differ. Without bees, the natural process of pollination in nature cannot occur and can alter the chain of events that would normally take place on their own without much interference from man into a state of dysfunction. Learn more about beekeepers in the Garden State and see what is being done at Rutgers to research this worldwide crisis. Visit the Central Jersey Beekeepers Association website to learn more at http://cjba.njbeekeepers.org/ .

The food supply survives on the good will of bees to help plants grow. We need to be concerned about this and to learn more about what is causing the bees to disappear. Check out this 2007 Fortune Magazine article at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/09/03/100202647/index.htm?cnn=yes

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To understand the food supply, one must go backwards in time to another era and see where we have come from. Where better to do that, than at the New Jersey Museum of Agriculture, located at Rutgers Cook Campus, just off Rte 1 South in Middelsex County. This gem of a museum is a walk through the ever-changing landscape of agriculture and is charmingly displayed to educate, inform and enlighten all who visit.

The museum hosts tours and is open to school groups Tuesdays through Saturdays, but the general pubic can visit as well to see how plows have evolved, corn has been husked, milk has been churned and eggs have been sorted. The modern day grocery experience has obscurred the work that goes into food production so a visit to this museum takes one back to a time when food was actually prepared by human beings and less by machines.

The trend toward “eating locally” makes this museum so pertinent to where we are today, as the food supply is reconfigured and carbon footprints make their impact on costs. Eating closer to home is increasingly becoming the sought-after way to try to eat.

Visit the New Jersey Museum of Agriculture for a special treat that honors farming and the communities and people surrounding this important industry. You’ll be surpised, I’m sure.

Visit the museum on the web at http://www.agriculturemuseum.org/ or call (732) 249-2077 for more information.