The Food Voice

Last night, had the pleasure of attending ‘The Communal Table’, a participatory dinner event in Soho created by artists Deena Lebow and Ame Gilbert. The theme ‘Pickles and Roots’ was a jumping off point for Nancy Ralph of the NY Food Museum to speak about the wonderful history of International Pickle Day, an event that she started in 2001 and is now anticipated with excitement every Fall on the Lower East Side. Between delicious and warming dinner courses that followed a wintry thread of preservation prepared by Deena and Ame, Deena led a workshop where we kneaded salt and chili into shredded napa cabbage, cut in scallions and turnips and packed all in to Mason jars for a take-home kimchi. Before dessert, I spoke about Polish family kapusta-making traditions and practices, related it to the multi-layered kapusta dish that I cooked up at the start of the event. I showed how Alana has been making kapusta in Brooklyn since she was 9 years old. I then read Gastropolis excerpts from ‘My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl’s Food Voice‘ that touched on some gathered, preserved and re-generated foods in Brooklyn. A salon followed with poetry readings.

It was a wonderful gathering of lovely, interesting people (many of them fellow dedicated composters) Abundant thanks to Deena and Ame for their creativity and hard work and congratulations to them on such a successful event.

My husband Danny wrote a haiku for me to read there. Here it is:

                                Green, yet brinely aged

                         Barrel, jar or vacuum-wrapped

                                Escape to sour crunch