Munchers End Week with Visit to Arturo's in Maplewood

Fred and Dan bought Arturo's four years ago and have quickly established a great reputation for high quality food, grown locally, and cooked with brilliance.

The great dining experience began immediately as Alex, our waitress, greeted us at the door and got us seated and took our orders.  We explained to Alex about our camp and that we were excited to eat in a restaurant focussing on locally grown food.  She let Fred know we were there and later in the meal Fred came out to talk to us.

Micah seemed especially enthused.

 Grace, Hannah and Olivia finished off a traditional Margherita pizza.

 Woody and Gus discuss the awesomeness of their Tartufi pizza, made with sausage, mushrooms, and white truffle oil.  It was the first time Gus tried truffle oil, which he decided he liked a lot.  Good work Gus, following Michael Pollen's omnivore rule: try new foods.

 Hannah didn't want to leave the Farmer's pizza (fresh cheese, fennel, and vadallia onion) behind, but she couldn't eat any more.  Alex kindly boxed the pizza up for us to take home.

On the way out Fred gave each of us a fresh peach!

Please visit Arturo's.  Here is their web site

Arturo's

Read about their locally grown food and local farms on their blog.

Home-made Ice Cream More Cream Than Ice

Munchers shook all they could, but too little ice and too little salt meant the cream couldn't get cold enough to solidify when shook.  Despite the frustration, it was still a great weak of Munching!  Campers took home bread, pickles, and raspberry jam they made, and a wealth of knowledge about food and the food industry.  Munchers, Keep cooking!

Self-Portrait in Food

Munchers decided to illustrate how "you are what you eat" by making self-portraits with their favorite foods.  After viewing some of Guiseppe Arcimboldo's work (below) they started their drawings.

Avery and Sofia examine the food in their faces.

 Hannah and Micah are faced with the dilemma: fruit or vegetable?

 Hannah gets distracted from coloring the spaghetti hair by a camera.

 Sous-chef Eli's garden of a face.

Gus' pumpkin-headed, broccoli-haired portrait.

Hannah's spaghetti-haired, waffle-shirt-wearing, chocolate-covered pomegranate seed-eyed portrait.  Such a cute carrot nose!

Grace has some of the cutest donut cheeks around!

Micah's banana-mouthed smile.

Home-made Chicken Tenders

Sous-chefs Olivia and Eli help the Munchers prepare the seasoning for the chicken tenders.

Grace adding an ingredient to her chicken coating.

Avery writes down her recipe for the taste-testing contest at lunch.

Chicken tenders waiting for sous-chef Olivia to fry up.  Could these be Sofia's winning tenders?

Home-made Pickles

Grace examines the sterilized bottles for the pickling.

 These are the beautiful pickling cucumbers we got at Van Thun Farms.

 Chef Lisa has prepped the pickling jars with the dry ingredients.

 In one week we will have dill pickles to eat!

Home-made Rasperry Jam!

Munchers got to taste the fruits of their hard work picking raspberries and baking bread and making butter in a delicious Munch breakfast Friday.   Everyone enjoyed their food!

 Paitiently letting the hot raspberry jam cool on the bread.

 Hannah:  "Should I have some more?   Sure!"

 Gus: " mmm "

 "Can't talk.  Eating."

Munchers Make Home-made Butter

Gus takes his turn shaking while Isaiah looks on patiently.  It took about ten minutes of constantly shaking heavy whipping cream to make it.  One batch was salted and the other was not.  Salted butter tend to contain more water, so when the recipe asks for unsalted butter, it means unsalted butter!

Both salted and unsalted butter look the same, but they taste differently.  Munchers could identify which butter was which.

While turning dairy milk into butter, we samples the coconut we bought at Bravo earlier in the week to see what a vegetable milk tastes like.  We compared the fresh coconut milk with store bought coconut milk, and Munchers liked the fresh better.  Hannah explained to us how she saw a coconut opened once while on vacation, but since I didn't have a machete, I had to drive a nail in the spots at the end of the coconut and then let the milk drain out into a glass.  Next I covered the coconut with a towel and hammered the coconut open so we could try the meat too.

Gus' "Crapo" Song about a Fast Food Restaurant

We wanted to compare chicken McNuggets to home-made chicken tenders so, on the way home from Van Thun's Farm, we stopped by a McDonalds and bought nuggets.  The girls ate all of theirs, but the boys boycotted the "food" and instead wrote a song on the ride home.  This is just a teaser for the full number, to be finished later this summer.  Stay tuned for Animation week at the end of August.

An End-of-Munch-Week Visit and Donation to a Food Bank

 Munchers carried their donations to the Our Lady of Sorrows food bank Friday.  Despite complaining about how heavy the bags were, they were glad to be part of the solution to eating well for local families.  Like the Hispanic family we met in "Food, Inc." many local families are part of the working poor who lack the time and the money to eat well.  Food banks are a crucial part of the Food Economy for those families.

Our Lady of Sorrows food bank office left these notes on their door.

Remember that you can donate to food banks the good food that have been on your shelves that you are just not getting around to eating.  Sous-chef Eli explained how his church organizes food donations regularly and make it a part of their daily lives.  Good for Eli and his family!

Reactions to Watching Parts of "Food, Inc."

"Food, Inc." is an important film, but it can be hard to watch.  Sofia, Hannah, Olivia, and Grace each needed to curl up at moments when we saw what happens inside slaughterhouses.  Grace still managed to smile for the camera; such grace!

Munch Week Is about Taste

Chef Woody reviews the five (yes five) basic flavors the mouth recognizes: bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami, which can be translated as savory.  Umami is the flavor in MSG.  Chef Woody explained that Japanese scientists have shown that there are taste receptors for umami on the human tongue, but that Westerns tastes have mainly ignored the flavor, so we just don't realize it is there.  The slide on the right illustrates one of the many taste receptors that make up a taste bud, which is shaped like a moat around an island.  The "moat" allows the food molecules in the saliva to spread over the taste receptors, each of which lives for about a week, after which time a cell next to the receptor moves over to become the new receptor.

Munchers Bake Their Own Bread

Munchers often get their bread from expensive grocery stores like Whole Foods.  So we decided to continue to explore the idea that "To eat well one needs time or money."  We took the  time to bake bread: potato buttermilk bread and (the dreaded!) white bread.  We used unbleached bread flour and supplemented it with bleached all-purpose flour.  We used recipes from the Joy of Cooking.  While I riced the potatoes, Sous-Chefs Olivia and Eli helped the chefs-in-training taste test buttermilk, 2%, half and half, and heavy whipping cream.  Munchers loved the half and half, but didn't like the heavy whipping cream or the buttermilk.

 Each Muncher got a chance to knead each bread.

 Sous-chef Olivia made sure the surface was well-floured.

 It was important to gently knead the bread and to make sure we incorporated all the flour into the dough.

Isaiah checks the temperature for activating the yeast for the white bread.  The warm potatoes activated the yeast for the potato buttermilk bread.  Isaiah wanted warm water between 105 and 115° F to activate the yeast.  Everyone loved the smell of the yeast!

Kneading the white bread.

We made two loaves of each bread.  One for tasting immediately, and the other for Friday's breakfast, with home-made butter and raspberry jam asa spreads.  The white bread didn't rise as much as the potato bread, but tasted great.  Every Muncher liked white bread!  That is, home-made white bread!  We taste tested the home-made and store-bought breads at the breakfast, and home-made won, butter-side up!

 We made enough bread for each Muncher to take home a couple slices of each loaf.