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The Total Catch
By Kelly Yandell
Photography of pier (below) by Kelly Yandell
Photography of fish, courtesy of P.J. Stoops, Louisiana Foods
I am a fishing kid. Or rather, I am a 40-year-old version of a fishing kid. My mother and father were both raised fishing, and they raised my brother and me to fish, as well. I knew how to pull out a backlash on a casting reel before I turned seven. I knew as a mere toddler that at 6:30 a.m., a Texas lake is prettier than almost any spot on earth. But my decent vocabulary of freshwater game fish—the various bass, crappie, catfish and bream to name a few—belies my landlocked ignorance.
Green Corn Project: Toni Rockwell
By Suzanne Hurley
Toni Rockwell believes in eating locally, and she walks the walk. The vegetables she grows commute 15 feet from her garden to her kitchen. For breakfast, she might harvest spinach, sauté it with olive oil and garlic, and scramble some eggs to put on top. She snacks on beans or cherry tomatoes right off the vine, and boils beets—her favorite vegetable—before tossing them with olive oil and garlic. And her son Carlos really looks forward to curly kale.
Two years ago, a bicycle/car accident left Carlos near death. He recovered from most of his other injuries, but healing from a traumatic brain injury is a long and difficult process. Taking care of her 29-year-old son is Toni’s around-the-clock job.
Looking for a way to add fresh vegetables to Carlos’s diet after months of medications and hospital food, Toni thought of starting a garden, but hadn’t had a plot to call her own since 2005.
Wildly Natural One
Ben Stevens, a wide-smiled and dreadlocked former bluesman, believes cooking should be easy, food should be fresh and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice time or flavor to eat well. But he also believes that one of the biggest obstacles to eating fresh, healthful food at home is the lure of the high levels of sodium and fat found in prepared foods and take-out. It’s his personal mission to get people back into their kitchens, cooking healthfully with friends and family, using his new line of seasoning blends called Wildly Natural One.
All natural, low sodium, gluten- and MSG-free, the seasoning blends come in four varieties (Original, Fiery, Salt-Free Select and Salt-Free Spicy) and can be used to enhance everything from fish and meats to quick salad dressings. “It’s like a rub, condiment and spice cabinet all in one jar,” says Stevens.
The power of spices and herbs was first revealed to Stevens when he was apprenticing under a Jamaican seasoning master years ago. “Once I started learning from him about all the colors of the spices and herb world, that’s when I learned how to make the blends I have now,” he says. Stevens studied the food science of various spices and herbs—trying to unlock one blend that would be extremely versatile.
Thinking Inside the Box
Ben Runkle recently purchased two Dorper lambs from Twin County Dorpers in Harper, a small town west of Fredericksburg. This is perhaps an unusual purchase for most shoppers, but Runkle is a butcher and founder of Salt & Time, which offers locally sourced, freshly butchered meats and artisanal salumi. After Runkle’s handiwork, a lucky few customers received the lamb as chops in their Butcher’s Box, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program-style offering created by Runkle and his business partner and master butcher Bryan Butler.
Never Too Old To Grow
Senior citizens prefer card games indoors; gardening is best suited to the young and physically fit; and older people can’t tolerate the Texas sun. These are some of the unfair assumptions that the City of Austin’s Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Community Gardens Program (SUACG) coordinator, Jake Stewart, tossed aside while helping to launch the Community Garden of Eatin’ pilot program last spring.
“I think that one of the lessons learned is: Don’t underestimate the senior population,” he says. “We were pleasantly surprised by how much interest there was and how quickly it caught on.”
Indeed, since the kickoff event, Stewart says that many older adults from the South Austin Senior Activity Center have taken ownership of the program by forming a steering committee, designing their own logo and T-shirts, hosting regular meetings, adding their own gardening beds and even working through the hottest days of the year. “I was most impressed with their toughness and their willingness to dive in,” says Stewart.
A Simple Thanksgiving Supper
By Jesse Griffiths
Photography by Jenna Noel
Shared Earth
Community garden space is a precious and scarce commodity all across the country. Many popular community gardens have waiting lists filled with anxious gardeners twiddling their green thumbs for months hoping for a plot to open up. At the same time, millions of acres of privately owned land either grows wild or turns into inedible, costly-to-maintain lawns. It was from the landowner’s point of view that Adam Dell’s vision for Shared Earth took root.
As an enterprising venture capitalist, Dell had neither the time nor the expertise to turn his yard into a garden.
Trip to Bountiful
Last spring, Oriental medicine practitioner Dr. Paddy Tawada had a butternut-squash moment. This very much resembled a lightbulb moment, except the vision that lit up her imagination involved vegetables. Like many of us, Dr. Tawada—also known to her patients as Dr. Pea—had acquired more seedlings than needed for her garden. She thought if she planted the extra zucchini and butternut squash near the driveway, passersby could share in the abundance and help themselves to the extras.
Easy accessibility would be the key, and she wondered if other growers might be inspired to take a trusting leap, follow her lead and invite neighbors—and even perfect strangers—to stop, drop and gather. Since then, she’s been toiling away, not only growing food, but nurturing an organized food-sharing system now lovingly called Accessible Vegetables.
To get the project moving, Dr. Pea started a blog announcing her vision to all comers. She spent the better part of the last year gathering feedback and contemplating the best ways to implement a plan for community building and sharing, as well as negotiating challenges like the risk of unwanted disruptions and privacy issues.
Snap Kitchen
Convenience is often a bad word when associated with food. Still, it’s challenging and not always practical, or even possible, for busy Austinites to make every meal at home from scratch—especially for those of us with certain dietary needs or restrictions. Enter Snap Kitchen, a new restaurant concept dedicated to giving convenience a better rap. The idea is simple, though not new: custom-prepared, packaged and ready-to-roll meals line a display case awaiting a trip home or a quick heat-and-eat on the spot. But this is only part of the story.
Joys of Pickling
By C. Jeanette Tyson
Illustrations by Matt Lynaugh
Aunt Frances said to pull one from the bottom, so I did—dove through the murky syrup, hooked one with my fork and ate it straight from the jar. Crisp as a cotton sheet snapping on a summer line, just-this-side-of-cloyingly sweet…good…though not exactly the pickled watermelon rinds I remembered from my youth. I said this out loud.
“Well now…I didn’t make these,” my aunt said, with her own sweet/tart blend of pride and indignation. And that may just be the essence of the new fuss about pickling.
My goal is to persuade Austinites to reinterpret the relationship between a landscape and a garden. By applying the principles of landscape design to include plants that produce fruits and veggies, I create thoughtfully designed, productive urban landscapes that are as beautiful as traditional landscapes conceived and installed purely for ornamental purposes.
Random Acts
By Bill Albrecht
Ingredients:
1 large beautiful Texas Hill Country backdrop
11 foodies excited about spending the day with other foodies from across the country for a culinary adventure
5 local spots offering fresh, locally produced fare
1 Sibby Barrett, Hill Country food guru and proprietor of
Onion Creek Kitchens’ cooking classes (juniperhillsfarm.com)
Food is Free
Photography By Dustin Fedako
The Food is Free Project started in November 2011 with a single four-by-four-foot raised bed of winter greens in John VanDeusen Edwards’s front yard and a whiteboard and marker inviting people to post contact information if they considered access to natural, fresh food a human right. “Within two weeks, we had to erase that board multiple times because it was so full of e-mail addresses,” says Edwards, the project’s cofounder. “This was something that was really resonating with people.”
About 25 percent of all households in the U.S. preserve foods—the majority of whom live in the country and do so for all sorts of reasons: necessity, pleasure, health (a serious canner friend of mine once overheard a mortician say that in the past people used to have to get a body into the earth real quick, but nowadays a human body will hold for two weeks due to all the commercial preservatives it contains).
Green Bucket Composting
Composting was a way of life for Katy Eakin, until she got married and moved into her husband’s Travis Heights condo. With no green space to compost in and reluctant to add biodegradable waste to a landfill, Eakin froze her compostables and drove them, on occasion, to her grandfather’s farm. With such fierce dedication to decomposition, it comes as no surprise that Eakin would launch Green Bucket Composting, a progressive solution to a growing urban need.
Far from being profit-motivated, though, Eakin’s pursuit was born of necessity. When she came up with the concept, she and her husband had taken over operations at a farm that’s been in her family for over 100 years. “The thing is…it’s a cattle ranch right now,” she says with a smile. “And I’m the hugest hypocrite; I’m a vegetarian. So I’m trying to get away from raising feed cattle.”
Eakin started a few large garden plots on the farm and quickly realized that she would need more compost than she could generate.
Roasted veggies are a party on a platter, delighting the senses in a medley of color, texture and flavor. They warm the kitchen as they cook, filling it with wafts of sweet and seductive scents, making perfect winter fare. Better yet, they’re versatile and easy to prepare. Good seasoning is the secret. Fresh and dried herbs, spices and zesty condiments provide many dimensions of flavor, while roasting concentrates and caramelizes the vegetables’ inherent flavors.
Flock and Roll
When Josh Hudgins was a kid, his family lived near North Lamar and Rundberg Lane—an area, at that time, considered outside the city limits of Austin. Things have changed a lot since then—the neighborhood is considered practically central now—but it was during his semirural childhood days that Hudgins first came to love both chickens and gardening.
“I planted my first garden when I was seven,” he says, “and built my first coop when I was thirteen. The two go hand in hand.”
The family moved to Indiana for a while, but Hudgins returned to Texas as a young man, working in his dad’s body shop. Still, he kept raising chickens and gardening as hobbies.
Cook Here and Now
Austin’s newest supper club never meets at a hip art gallery. No bucolic dinners are served on the premises of the very farm that supplied the local produce. No innovative young chef has been spotted in the kitchen.
“And no,” says the new club’s founder, Shannon Kimball, “No money is involved.” Cook Here and Now Austin is indeed something different—a group of foodies who meet every three months in a home kitchen to prepare and eat a collaboratively cooked seasonal meal.
The original Cook Here and Now started two years ago when Marco Flavio, a San Francisco–based food fanatic, began gathering farmers market fans for communal fine dining. Flavio announces his monthly food themes and issues invitations via his blog; dinners for 60 routinely fill to capacity in just a few hours and Travel + Leisure recently named Flavio’s Cook Here and Now one of its “10 Best Secret Dining Clubs in the World.”
Shannon Kimball decided to inaugurate the 11th.
Up on the Rooftop
Austin designers of all disciplines often get opportunities to color outside the lines for clients. Rarer, though, is the chance to disregard the lines altogether—to truly go a little wild. Such was the luck of Rain Lily Design, a design and landscape company, when a Westlake Hills client commissioned the company to build a 38’x16’ rooftop garden project.
Though ubiquitous in New York City, structure-topping foliage is rare in these parts. Kim Beal, co-owner of Rain Lily Design, says she enjoyed the learning process and the challenge of bringing the client’s vision to fruition.
“The client was very informed, and had a great architect,” says Beal. “This was an intricately designed space from the beginning.”
The project’s architect—award-winning visionary Murray Legge of LZT Architects—is known for his love of unusual projects. “It was a cool project,” Legge says. “The roof is kind of vaulted, so the garden is hill-like—it echoes the surrounding hills. And it’s next to the pool, so it sort of looks like a whale rising up.”
Stalking the Bean
The term vanilla is often used to describe something that is bland, or at least safe, and, well, pedestrian. The connotation is unfortunate, and more to the point, incorrect, because the story of vanilla—from its source to its history to the process that takes it from seed to sauce—is actually quite exotic.
Vanilla originated in Veracruz, Mexico, where it was cultivated by the Totonac Indians. Its production remained solely in Mexico until the mid-1800s when conquistadors, colonization and forced “globalization” led to the spread, exchange and export of the unassuming bean. Today, despite vanilla’s global travels and popularity, it’s still grown primarily in just four places: Mexico, Madagascar, Indonesia and Tahiti.