July Newsletter

Welcome to the July newsletter for Sustainable Table & The Meatrix! Please feel free to send any feedback or ideas for future newsletters to info@sustainabletable.org.

• Feature Article – More Outdoor Cooking, the Sustainable Table Way
• Featured Event – Slow Food Nation, Aug 29^th – Sept 1^st
• Special Guest Blogger – Stacey Ornstein
• Recipe of the Month – Stacey’s Clotted Cream
• Take Action – From OCA: Fair Trade Coffee Wanted at Starbucks
• Send Sustainability to Friends
• Stay in Touch with Sustainable Table!

Feature Article – Outdoor Cooking, the Sustainable Table Way

With a few good months still ahead for outdoor cooking, it seems a shame to put away our Outdoor Cooking feature article so quickly! We are going to keep it up for another month for you to get good use out of it. We will even continue to add new recipes to our special grilling and camping section, so check it out and give us some feedback. And don’t forget to send your favorite outdoor recipes our way!

Featured Event – Slow Food Nation

We will be at Slow Food Nation in San Francisco at the end of August – hope to see you there!

Slow Food Nation, the largest celebration of food in America, will take place in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend (August 29 to September 1, 2008). An unprecedented event, Slow Food Nation will bring together tens of thousands to experience an extraordinary range of activities highlighting the connection between plate and planet. Participants will savor food from across the U.S. at Taste, a 50,000 square foot pavilion; meet farmers and producers at a marketplace surrounding a 10,000 square foot newly-planted urban garden in the heart of the city; learn from visionary speakers; and engage in political discourse to shape a more sustainable food system. Slow Food Nation will also feature a music festival, workshops, films, dinners, hikes and journeys. The majority of events will be free and open to the public; certain events are ticketed. Tickets are on sale at www.slowfoodnation.org.

Special Guest Blogger – Stacey Ornstein

Stacey Ornstein is a freelance food and sustainable living writer in New York City. She is currently working with New York Times food writer Mark Bittman, developing, testing and researching recipes for his upcoming cookbook. She has written for a number of publications, including Chile Pepper Magazine, Time Out Chicago and Specialty Food Magazine, and writes a regular food column for the Queens Chronicle. Stacey is proud to be one of the core organizers who formed her local Community Supported Agriculture program. For tasty homemade and seasonal recipes, see her blog Just Braise at www.justbraise.com.

Check out her Daily Table blogs too – Urban Chickens and Gardens & Vermicomposting 101.

Recipe of the Month – Clotted Cream, by our multitalented blogger, Stacey!

Clotted cream, or Devonshire Cream, is an all time favorite in my household. Forget a simple scone (and tea time for that matter); we’ll smear it onto cinnamon raisin toast, a hearty whole wheat soda bread, and just about any cracker-like formation at anytime of the day. The biggest problem I have finding it, even in New York City, is that the good stuff (i.e., that imported from Devon, England) is hard to come by and fairly expensive for a mere 1 ounce. While high quality heavy cream isn’t that much cheaper, the taste of this homemade version is worlds better than any clotted cream I have been able to get my hands on State-side.

Clotted cream is similar to butter in that the fat content of the cream clots (hence clotted cream), but varies in that it is heated low and slow for several hours to bring the clots to the surface. The result is a slightly sweet and luxuriously smooth butter-like cream substance, or simply, clotted cream.

This super rich version is made with raw jersey heavy cream (the cow breed, not the state). Many believe the higher the fat content of the cream you start with, the better your results. Do not attempt to make this with low-fat or ultra-pasteurized creams (remember: you need fat for this product) . Although a good quality organic full fat heavy cream (or whipping cream) will do, pasture-fed cows will produce the best quality clotted cream with a taste that will change with the seasons.

The Brits will tell you clotted cream is best on scones at high tea, but I recommend you try it whenever the mood fits.

NOTE: Don’t let the long cook time throw you from making this recipe. It’s all undisturbed low-heat cooking followed by a night in the fridge.

Clotted Cream

Makes about 1.5 cups. Active time = about 10 minutes. Inactive time = 10 hours plus overnight.

Ingredients:

2 cups heavy cream (raw cream or a good quality full-fat organic)

1) Preheat oven to 180 F. (This might just be a setting called “warm.”)

2) Place heavy cream in a heavy bottom ceramic, cast iron or enamel pot, about 8 inches by 13 inches. (You want to keep the cream shallow, but not so shallow it burns; 1-3 inches up the side is good.) Cover the pot and place on the center rack of the oven. Leave undisturbed 8-10 hours, until a dark yellow crust has formed on top of the cream.

3) Uncover and allow the cream to cool. Recover and place in the refrigerator overnight.

4) Using a spatula, pull the clotted cream from the dish and transfer to a storage container. Use leftover cream in baking applications.

Use clotted cream in 4-5 days.

Take Action

Did you know that only 6% of Starbucks coffee is purchased from Fair Trade Certified sellers? Did you know that “instead of committing to an accountable and respected third-party certifying system, Starbucks has created an internal ‘corporate responsibility’ model that is expensive for coffee farmers, non-transparent and strictly voluntary?”

Go to the Organic Consumers Association website (http://organicconsumers.org/Starbucks/index.cfm) for more details and actions to take!

Send sustainability to friends!

Help us spread the word about sustainable food and what we’re doing here at Sustainable Table and The Meatrix. Please pass this newsletter to your friends and encourage them to get involved on our site. The only way we’re going to save family farms and be able to provide local, sustainable food for everyone is if we all join in and work together.

Stay in touch with Sustainable Table & The Meatrix!

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Keep up-to-date on our blog, The Daily Table

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