Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper
By Cate Hennessey
Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper, by C. Marina Marchese. Black Dog and Leventhal: 2009. 256 pages.
My first memory of honey comes from my father. Saturday mornings, he liked to spoon the golden sweet onto buttered toast and then fold the toast in half. Before bringing it to his mouth, he murmured, “The food of the gods!”
I agreed with him and ate my toast exactly the same way. I still do.
The other constant about honey in my life has been that it comes from the grocery store in a squeezable plastic container – sometimes bear-shaped, sometimes vase-shaped. It’s found in the aisle with the peanut butter and jelly, and then, once purchased, sits in the pantry with baking supplies.
C. Marina Marchese’s Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper has made me whisk that honey from the pantry and examine it – as well as the honeybees that produced it — in a whole new light.
At first blush, the book may seem like it belongs on the city-person-turned-agricultural-pioneer bookshelf. Certainly, Marchese chronicles the first year of her journey from bee neophyte to beekeeper extraordinaire. (She eventually leaves her “real world” job as a designer to begin her own bee business, Red Bee.)
But the book’s center is not Marchese at all. Rather, it focuses on the creatures that provide her livelihood. As a result, the pages delve into the intricacies of the honeybee — its anatomy, sociology, lifecycle, and vital role in agriculture. In short, the honeybees make fruit and vegetable production possible; without the honeybee, our food supply would collapse.
If the importance of the honeybee to agriculture isn’t impressive enough, Marchese details the role of honey, beeswax, and the honeybee in history, covering countries as (more…)
A Taste of Heaven
By Cate Hennessey, Guest Contributor
A Taste of Heaven: A Guide to Food and Drink Made by Monks and Nuns, by Madeline Scherb
After the holidays, as the cold sharpens, even the kitchen can take on a gray cast. I’m restless. I want something new. I want to travel.
This year I found a perfect antidote for deep winter blues: Madeline Scherb’s A Taste of Heaven: A Guide to Food and Drink Made by Monks and Nuns. Much more than a recipe collection, the book acts as a doorway into the sustainable world of monastic communities, as well as the beer, wine, cheeses, breads, chocolates, cheesecakes, and other delicacies produced by them.
The book’s four sections, Celestial Spirits, Holy Cheese, Sweet Temptations, and Other Edifying Edibles, provide historical context on individual monasteries, the labor that sustains them, and the products that result from the labor.
Recipes then follow, and each includes at least one of the ingredients discussed in the section. For example, the Holy Cheese section includes a profile of Gethsemani Abbey in Genesee, New York; the accompanying recipe for Spinach Crepes calls for Gethsemani Abbey cheese. (The crepes, by the way, are creamy and delicious; the cheese is very mild, and the nutmeg in the cream sauce completes the dish.)
the book acts as a doorway into the sustainable world of monastic communities, as well as the beer, wine, cheeses, breads, chocolates, cheesecakes, and other delicacies produced by them.
Just as exciting as the recipes and the history are the suggested travel itineraries for those interested in visiting the monasteries in person. Some of the foods featured in the book (like olive oil from Ganagobie Abbey in Provence) can only be purchased by visiting the monastic community that produce them, and Scherb writes about these places and products with such reverence that I am more than tempted to book a plane ticket to Europe. (more…)
Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life
By Margaret Gilmour
Be sure to go: Lucid Food Book Signing and Tasting
Terrain at Styers, Glen Mills
Saturday, January 16, 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Learn tips and techniques for making easy and affordable eco-friendly food choices while sampling a few Louisa Shafia’s selections. Free and open to the public.
Has eating fresh food become complicated?
It doesn’t need to be. As food writer and cookbook author Louisa Shafia points out in her new cookbook Lucid Food, Cooking For An Eco-Conscious Life, without too much effort we can integrate affordable, local, earth-friendly food choices into our daily lives to cook up delicious, healthy meals.
This just-published (November, 2009) cookbook is filled with mouth-watering photographs and simple, tasty meals, and features a lengthy section on eco-kitchen basics you’ll want to curl up and read.
If you’ve seen FRESH or Food, Inc. you know there are options to an industrialized food system, and you’re not eating fast food burgers anymore. And with all the books about 100-mile diets and the life of a locavore (Plenty + Animal, Vegetable Miracle + Food Rules), much of the information Louisa shares is not new. So, with an ample supply of cookbooks emphasizing seasonal menus, do we really need another?
Louisa’s Lucid Food shows us that we do.
What’ gives Lucid Food new life is Louisa’s approach to important details, like the simple reasoning behind the choices she makes, and a few eco-terms and definitions you may not have picked up yet. Thrown into each section is a little surprise, such as an introduction to an ingredient you may have passed by in the past but become inspired to try. Examples: Dungeness Crab, a sustainable seafood choice, or the many alternatives to white sugar.
Then, of course, there are the spicy flavors and multi-cultural recipes all made with ingredients you can actually find locally throughout the year.
Louisa grew up near Germantown, PA before relocating to New York City to pursue an acting career. After five years in the city and one grueling on-stage tour around the country, she switched gears, choosing to slow down and purse her other passion: cooking.
She began by cooking vegetarian meals for a summer in Maine at a yoga retreat, then completed a five-month cooking school program before interning in San Francisco. “California being the local food mecca,” she says, “exposed me to using seasonal, local ingredients I now use in all my meals.”
Back in New York City, she cooked in a variety of restaurants, including Aquavit, where she went from relaxed California-style, to a more precise method of food prep and presentation. By 2004 Louisa started her own catering company combining all the styles she experienced, but never swayed from using fresh, local ingredients.
I talked with her this week about her new book:
What is your favorite book about environmental issues or any food/industrial agriculture?
Anything by Michael Pollan.
How do you stay connected to the food issues?
I read the New York Times daily, especially the Wednesday dining section. It’s the best way for me to keep up with the world of food.
What’s the one thing you would suggest that someone do if they want to make a change and begin eating more healthy food?
I recommend investing in a high-speed blender, a food processor, or a Crockpot. Any of these 3 items will drastically reduce cooking and prep time, and vastly increase the variety of dishes that you can make. (more…)
Chester County’s Sweet & Spicy Holiday Wines
By Roger Morris, Guest Contributor
There are 10 wineries within a few minutes of Route 1, which bisects the county, and two of them–Kreutz Creek Vineyards and Chaddsford Winery-–specialize in sweet wines guaranteed to bring holiday cheer.
Fog is hanging in the nearby woods, and there is a heavy, cold drizzle when I step inside the tasting room at Kreutz Creek Vineyards south of West Grove. A smell of baking spices is in the air.
Jim and Carole Kirkpatrick, owners of Kreutz Creek, are at the tasting bar, and Jim, the winemaker, says that before I follow my nose toward what’s warming up in the Crockpot, I should first try his Ruby K.
True Port is made along the Douro River in Portugal, and international trade laws won’t let Kirkpatrick calls his fortified wine (18 percent alcohol) “Port,” but Ruby K truly in the Port mold – fresh, rich, dark blackberry and figgy flavors with strong hints of rich chocolate with fresh acidity in the finish. It certainly gets my naughty and nice award.
The Kirkpatricks think that Ruby K ($15 per half-bottle) is a true dessert wine – sip it in front of the fire, pour it over ice cream as a sauce or use it as a component in fondue.
fresh, rich, dark blackberry and figgy flavors with strong hints of rich chocolate with fresh acidity in the finish
“Last weekend, we made fondue with it in the tasting room,” Carole says. “We mixed a half-bottle of Ruby K in the fondue pot with two boxes of Bevans chocolate from Media – about 6 ounces each – and then dipped pieces of pound cake, strawberries and shortbread in it.”
Meanwhile, Jim dips a ladle into the Crockpot. “This is Holiday Wassail,” he says. “I use a base of white Niagara wine and mix with it pumpkin, apples, cinnamon and cloves.” The result is surprisingly light and refreshing – only 11 percent alcohol – mixing the fresh “grapiness” of Niagara with festive spices dominating the finish. It sells for $14 a bottle.
Kreutz Creek also makes a Cabernet Franc ice wine that sells for $45 a bottle. Traditionally, ice wine is made from grapes left to freeze on the vine and usually picked in the late night hours with the first big freeze. Freezing concentrates the sugar in the grapes, leaving behind a wine with flavors of honey and dried fruits. Increasingly, winemakers are simply freezing the grapes in cold lockers instead.
At Chaddsford Winery just up Route 1 from the Brandywine River Museum, winery manager Greg Kuhn lines up four wines made by Chaddsford owner and winemaker Eric Miller that fly off the shelves like Santa’s reindeer every holiday season:
• Sangri-La Sangria ($13),
• Holiday Spirits ($14), and
• Spiced Apple ($13), which all have spices added to the wines before bottling, and
• vintage 2008 Niagara ($13).
ripe berry flavors and aromas, a touch of grape juiciness and citrus spiciness with good acidity
“Of course, sangria is usually a summer wine,” Kuhn says, “but we’ve found a lot of people like to use it to make a seasonal punch.” It’s a very nicely balanced specialty wine – fresh ripe berry flavors and aromas, a touch of grape juiciness and citrus spiciness with good acidity.
The Holiday Spirit features “warmer” baking spices and rounded fruitiness – a touch on the cheery side – and Kuhn says it comes out the first of November and is usually sold out by the time the New Year gets under way.
Spiced Apple, of course, is apple-flavored, but the flavors are in two layers – baked apple aromas and tastes with a tart-apple finish. The 2008 Niagara is for those people who love the pungent aromas of fresh grape juice – heavier on the palate, but still nicely made.
While I was in the tasting room, two customers chatting among themselves debated on whether the wines tasted better chilled, heated or at room temperature. It sounds to me like an experiment that needs testing on a cold winter’s evening.
Roger Morris is a freelance writer and author of The Brandywine Book of Food.
Taste Test: ROOT
By Margaret Gilmour
If you like the taste of root beer, there is no question that you will like the taste of ROOT, a novel root-beer liqueur made from an 18th-century Pennsylvania folk recipe and 100% organic ingredients.
Just how much you sip of this potent spirit, though, naturally depends on what you’re used to drinking.
I mostly drink beer or wine, for example. Occasionally after dinner, I’ll have small taste of Port or Hungarian Tokai (Tokaji).
Leslie primarily drinks wine, and like me, maybe a small glass of Port later on a weekend evening. But she also enjoys a whiskey here and there.
Which gets us back to our taste test of ROOT.
Because I don’t usually drink hard alcohol, I thought one sip, over ice, would be enough for me. But that one sip provoked one other before I reached back for my beer.
What I liked: the blend of spices and smoky flavors lingering along with the root beer essence. I was relieved that it wasn’t syrupy sweet in the least, and was fascinated by the coolness––almost minty effect––it left in my mouth. But, most of all, I loved the aroma. (more…)
Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese
R E V I E W
By Cate Hennessey, Guest Contributor
Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese, by Brad Kessler. Scribner: 2009.
As someone who dreams of moving to a farm, I’ve thought a bit about the livestock I’d like to raise. Chickens, turkeys, a steer, and a few horses seem reasonable.
In all my musings, though, I’ve never thought about goats. They’re petting-zoo critters, or odd pets kept by rather odd people. And as far as functionality and sustainability, what do goats offer? Don’t they just climb ramps, eat weeds, and head-butt each other?
Finally, as someone who has read too many memoirs that try to encompass everything but the kitchen sink, I appreciated Kessler’s ability to focus on goats and leave the rest to the manure pile.
Essential Eating Sprouted Baking
By Margaret Gilmour
Unlike Leslie, I am not much of a baker.
And, honestly, in my house I prep, clean up and take over only when the menu is comprised of all things green.
So when a friend of mine, knowing I require cookbooks with inviting photographs to trigger any desire for meal preparation, left Janie Quinn’s Essential Eating, Sprouted Baking at my house, I opened the pages just to admire its pictures.
But I ended up reading the entire introduction.
The author, Janie Quinn, explains how she discovered the health benefits of eating sprouted wheat years ago. Interested in creating high-quality sprouted flours with only the finest grains, she teamed up with a manufacturer and a milling engineer, to produce Essential Eating Spouted Whole Grain Flours.
This endeavor spiraled into a successful family of green companies, including Essential Eating Lifestyle and Cooking School, Essential Eating Sprouted Foods and Essential Environments. (more…)
Ellen April Handcrafted Soaps & Body Treats
By Margaret Gilmour
Not all luxury items need to cost a lot, or be exclusive and hard-to-find.
Ellen April handcrafted soap, for example, is a slice of bliss Leslie discovered at the West Chester Growers Market last summer.
It was a bar of Northwoods, in fact, that captured her attention. One whiff of the forested scent took Leslie back to Santa Fe, NM, where she originally got hooked on handmade soap. 
Six years ago, Ellen Watson, the creator of Ellen April Handcrafted Soap and Body Treats, got hooked on handcrafted soaps too; so much so that she began mixing her own delicious suds in her backyard in Downingtown. (more…)
A Taste of Summer Vinaigrette
By Margaret Gilmour
With warm days ahead, simple salads that include crisp, local greens in all varieties can become a healthy, one-dish meal.
We believe that you should select your lettuce as you would design your garden bed: use interesting textures, play with combinations, but nothing you place should overwhelm the others.
Then, after focusing on the leaves, the other main ingredient becomes the dressing.
Leslie has tried many combinations, ultimately creating a dressing she loves and uses almost nightly in the summertime.
So, I thought I’d give her thoughtfully seasoned vinaigrette a try, reviewing it for you to let you know what I think. After all, my main staple is salad, so I can be, at times, a merciless critic.
Leslie presented me with a large, wide bowl tossed with Belgian endive, Bibb lettuce, arugula, and watercress, all just-kissed with her vinaigrette.
I chose a small plate for my tasting, and sat alongside a round cutting board imparting a few black olives, some crusty bread, a wedge of aged parmesan and one or two halved cherry tomatoes. A perfect complement to my salad.
My first, small morsel of greens was delicious. The splash of vinegar did not overpower any of the other ingredients, and the hint of garlic added just enough zip to the creamy combination of mustard and mayonnaise that had the leaves clinging to the mixture.
I was in heaven. I finished every bite before dragging a slice of bread across my plate.
If she ever bottles it, I’ll let you know. For now, here’s the recipe, which gets five stars and tastes like summertime.
Leslie’s Simple Summer Vinaigrette
Adapted from The Barefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like Family
Ina suggests putting the dressing in the bottom of the bowl before adding leaves, then toss when ready. Serve in a wide bowl rather than in a deep one.
Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets
By Margaret Gilmour
We can’t think of a better way to celebrate eating locally and the soon-to-open farmer’s markets (officially 5 weeks from today), than to review Deborah Madison’s cookbook about her journey exploring farmer’s markets across the country.
Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets
By Deborah Madison
Some credit cookbook author Deborah Madison for adding “lacavore” to our vocabulary since she’s been writing about cooking with local flavors found in foods plucked straight from the earth for more than two decades.
She’s also supported for the Slow-Food movement for years, is on the board of the Seed Savers Exchange and The Southwest Grassfed Livestock Association, and stays involved with a school garden project near her home.
Madison’s cookbook, winner of a James Beard award, was released last May in paperback featuring melt-in-your mouth photographs of seasonal dishes, and reach-out-and-touch images of succulent produce.
It’s also filled with shots of farmer’s markets and farms you want to step into and visit for a day. Top off the visually spectacular spreads with side bar notes and stories detailing Madison’s stopovers at farmer’s markets near and far, and you won’t be able to put the book down.
But it’s also a cookbook, of course, driven by Madison’s market expeditions and seasonal ingredients.
The contents are ideally organized by season, a helpful guide for anyone inspired by cooking with what’s fresh and available each day. And it’s not entirely vegetarian, Madison also includes dishes made with organic meat.
The recipes are a creative, delicious mix of year-round temptations. Most are simple, some need close following, but all of them are worth trying at least once.
A favorite recipe: Asparagus and Wild Mushroom Bread Pudding
A favorite section: Greens Wild and Domestic
Most helpful chapter: The Foods That Keep
Buy it here: Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets
Books that Inspire Simple Living
We’ve handpicked a few books filled with inspiring and entertaining stories, helpful resources and stunning images. Between the two of us, we either have a copy of the text on our bookshelf, or we have read it in the past.
Some of the books are mentioned in REVIEW, where we discuss good reading or products we’d recommend. So, be sure and check out the section to see if the book you’re considering is featured. It might help you decide which one’s for you. Personally, we love them all.
You can purchase any from the list at your local bookstore, or right here on our site through IndieBound, a community-oriented movement begun by the independent bookseller members of the American Booksellers Association. Click here Learn more about IndieBound.
Also check out 12 of Our Favorite Eat In-Season Cookbooks: A great cookbook should ignite conversations, as well as spark appetites. All of these compilations do both and much more.
Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper
El Farol Tapas and Spanish Quisine
A Taste of Heaven: A Guide to Food and Drink Made by Monks and Nuns
Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
Flowers and Herbs of Early America
Essential Eating Sprouted Baking: With Whole Grain Flours That Digest as Vegetables
GoatSong: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle & Plenty
By Margaret Gilmour
With the food movement in high gear, and planting season so close that you can take in the scent of hay and earth, we thought we’d take a look at two books helping to bring “Buy Local” center stage. 
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food life
By Barbara Kingsolver, with Stephen L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
Published in 2007, Kingsolver’s Best Seller tells the story of her family’s move from Tucson, Arizona, to their rural farm in southern Appalachia, where they vow to become exclusively “locavores”—those who eat only locally grown foods—for one year.
Harvesting their own produce isn’t new to Kingsolver, her husband and two daughters, but they welcome the idea of relying on seeds sown from their own garden or from animals they raise. An important part of their plan includes supporting local farmers by purchasing ingredients that are difficult or impossible to grow or produce themselves.
The novel is an eye-opener for those new to the disconnected logic of industrial agriculture and the plight of the struggling farming industry. It is also an entertaining introduction to the concept of living on a “Buy Local” in-season diet.
Kingsolver reminds us that local, seasonal fare is not only healthier for us, but is also environmentally responsible, reducing the energy required for transporting food from its origin to where it is consumed.
Even if you are an experienced gardener or a accomplished chef who allows the seasons to determine what you cook, the chapters on canning and cheese making, the side notes on ecology, the quick-and-easy recipes and the stories about turkey-breeding are memorable.
Ultimately, the book is about reviving the celebration of food, family and connectedness which has been in slow decline in these fast-food, fast-paced times.
A favorite paragraph:
Barbara Kingsolver celebrates her 50th birthday by inviting a huge crowd of friends and families but requesting no gifts.
“To make everyone comfortable, we had to make a suggestion. Camille made the call, and it was inspired: a plant. The tiniest posy, anything would serve. And truthfully, while we’d put prodigious efforts into our vegetable garden and orchards, our front yard lay sorry and neglected. Anything people might bring to set into that ground would improve it. Thus began the plan for my half-century Birth Garden: higgledy-piggledy, florescent and spontaneous, like friendship itself.”
Buy it here: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle A Year of Food and Life
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet
By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
This isn’t just another book about the connections between community, earth and the food we eat—it’s a absorbing story about a Canadian couple who chose to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their city apartment for one year.
It was also published in 2007 and came out just after Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Unlike Kingsolver’s experience, these urban pioneers grow very little of their own food and instead rely on a small community garden and goods available from producers and markets within a 100-miles of their home.
Almost overnight authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, both journalists, go from grocery-store dependants to self-reliant consumers. The story is personalized with the down and dirty details of their survival—from spats over who gets the last spoonful of cocoa, to details on separating chaff from the rat-infested wheat a farmer offers them.
As the year evolves, so does their relationship. Through playful dialogue and daily events Smith and MacKinnon show us how sticking to a 100-mile diet is an ambitious task. They mourn their loss of wheat (which means no bread, crackers or pancakes), but find a myriad of new uses for potatoes. Simple, pure ingredients are included in their menus that tempt us all to try something new.
The authors discuss in detail how we’ve lost touch with the natural web of farming, and how we can change all that, not by struggling through a year of a 100-mile diet, but by simply supporting farmers’ markets, the Slow Food movement and area restaurants supplied by local farms. If you’re not convinced that buying locally is a smart choice, you will be by the last page of this book.
A favorite paragraph:
“The history of markets is wide-ranging, of course. Mexico’s open-air markets really are as ancient as its cultures. Britain, despite a profound cultural bond to its ‘green and pleasant land,’ only opened its first market in Bath, in 1997. Deborah Madison, the local-eating pioneer who founded Greens restaurant in San Francisco, has said that a farmer’s market makes a small town of a big one. It also opens a timeless space in the relentless here and now.”
Buy it here: Plenty Eating Locally On The 100 Mile Diet
The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough
By Margaret Gilmour
Just after we decided to make Chester County Dwell a reality, Leslie discovered this beautiful book. And its pictures and philosophy inspired us both as they seemed to echo ccdwell’s mission statement that we’d just about finished writing.
Inside its pages 21 houses are featured with six different approaches to creating a path to a simple home:
1. Simple is Enough
2. Simple is Thrifty
3. Simple is Flexible
4. Simple is Timeless
5. Simple is Sustainable
6. Simple is Refined
The concept is illustrated through full-color spreads of gorgeous photographs and through the lives and choices made by homeowners living in places ranging from small apartments to larger country homes. The author explains that simple doesn’t have to do with size, or style, rather it’s an attitude you take on and choose to embrace.
Even if you only look at the pictures, you’ll soon find yourself with an urge to de-clutter and scale back a bit. All the images are clean, spare and filled with ideas you can try right away, or use when planning future renovations. And the section on sustainable living is a great guide to living a greener, more responsible life.
The Simple Home will definitely inspire you toward a simpler 2009.
Buy it here: Good Reads
