cooking skills

(French) Food Revolution Day 2014 – Part 1

~ Teresa ~ 12 Comments

salad

Last year, the Doristas participated in Food Revolution Day for the first time. As you may remember, I got my partner to cook and write about a French Fridays recipe. This year’s theme was getting kids excited about food, so we were tasked with choosing one or more recipes from Around My French Table that we thought kids should know how to make. It was a tough task.

I finally decided that a healthy salad was my first choice. Making Wheat Berry and Tuna Salad would involve some ingredients that are familiar to a lot of kids, while introducing some that were likely to be new to them. It’s also one that gives kids some practice with knife skills. And it’s a recipe that’s not too hard, even for a beginning cook.

My second choice was Salted Butter Break-Ups. These cookies have been a hit with everyone I’ve made them for, young or old. Not only is this giant break-apart cookie fun to make, it also introduces many baking fundamentals and is a good first step for a young baker to move on to other doughs like pâte brisée.

The young cook I’ll be working with is my downstairs neighbour, but we can’t get together until the end of this weekend. So, there will be a Part 2 to this Food Revolution Day post, once we’ve made the dishes.

In the meantime, find out what the rest of the French Fridays crew chose to cook with kids: (French) Food Revolution Day 2014.

There is also a wealth of posts across the internet today, celebrating cooking with kids and healthy food. Here are some of the channels where you can find these stories:

Food Revolution Day: http://www.foodrevolutionday.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/foodrevolutioncommunity
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/foodrev (#FRD2014)
Google+: http://www.google.com/+foodrevolutioncommunity
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/foodrevolution
Instagram: @foodrev (#FRD2014)

Much thanks to Mardi Michels for organizing this for us again this year!

FFWD – French Food Revolution Friday with Dorie (Warm Weather Vegetable Pot au Feu)

~ Teresa ~ 28 Comments
http://foodrevolutionday.com/
http://foodrevolutionday.com/

We’re doing something a little different for this week’s French Friday. The group is participating in Food Revolution Day, which was started by Jamie Oliver to get people into the kitchen and around the table together.

Warm Weather Vegetable Pot au Feu

I decided to do something a little different this week, too. Since this year’s Food Revolution Day theme is Cook It, Share It, I thought I’d ask my partner to take the lead on this week’s recipe and share his thoughts with all of you. I chose one of the recipes I’d missed when the rest of the group posted about it, Warm Weather Vegetable Pot au Feu, because it seemed like a perfect match for the ethos of Food Revolution Day. I also thought it was a good fit for my partner. I helped a little with the chopping and pot-watching, but Kevin made the dish. Here’s what he had to say:

I thought that the Warm Weather Vegetable Pot Au Feu was excellent, though I would have preferred it without so much of the vegetable broth. While the veggies tasted good with the broth flavouring, I didn’t finish all of the leftover broth in the bowl. In fact, it was almost better the second night when my partner made quinoa, which soaked up the broth nicely. I think my partner Teresa chose this meal for me to make because, although I was once a vegetarian for about eight years, I’m no longer one and would like to get back to eating this way the majority of the time. Not only was the dish tasty, but it was also cheap and easy to make, which I appreciated. This will inspire me to cook vegetarian more often.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading about agriculture and food lately and I hope to do more in the kitchen and garden soon.

It’s been wonderful watching Teresa take part in the French Fridays with Dorie group. We have tried so many dishes that were new to us. If my memory serves me correctly, I’ve loved all the dishes but one. For the last few years, I always know we are likely trying something new on Friday and that element of surprise has been neat. It was great to finally make a dish. My partner Teresa does most of the cooking in the house, but I do cook occasionally – I have my usual dishes. For the most part, we cook separately. It was nice for Teresa to guide me though this recipe, as we keep talking about sharing more of the cooking, along with cooking more vegetarian meals. This dish accomplished both of those things for us. I hope we will do more of it together.

Food Revolution Day sounds amazing. I think we need a food revolution on a number of levels, but Cook it, Share It is a fantastic start.

Spinach, asparagus, carrots, potatoes, and slices of hard boiled eggs arranged over a bowl of broth.

For my part, I thought this dish was delicious, on the first night when we ate it as a pot au feu; on the second when we used the leftover broth to cook more vegetables, which we served over quinoa; and on the third when we used the remainder of the broth to gently heat up some lamb burgers I’d made. The broth made a very good gravy in the end.

You can find the rest of the Doristas’ posts for FFRFwD here: French Food Revolution Friday with Dorie.

You can participate in Food Revolution Day too, by contributing posts or pictures, or by commenting on those of others. Here’s how, as outlined by our own Mardi Michels, one of Food Revolution Day’s Toronto ambassadors and instigator of our French Food Revolution Friday with Dorie:

“Follow the Food Revolution
Make sure you’re following #FRD2013 online for up to the minute news, updates and messages to share, re-post and re-pin to your followers.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/foodrevolutioncommunity
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/foodrev (use #FRD2013)
Google+: http://www.google.com/+foodrevolutioncommunity
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/foodrevolution
Instagram: @foodrev (add your photos using #FRD2013)”