Ham Sandwich Indicted!

So, this past weekend (Feb 13-14) was the annual Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) conference in Granville, OH. OEFFA defines itself as "a membership-based, grassroots organization, dedicated to promoting and supporting sustainable, ecological, and healthful food systems." Members include farmers, farm markets coordinators, educators, political activists, chefs, educators, and people like myself, who are just interested in finding healthier ways to feed ourselves and our local agricultural community. This was the first year I attended the conference, and was able to go on a discount in exchange for volunteering four hours of my time over the course of the weekend. The volunteering was an interesting experience in and of itself, but first, I want to share a bit about what I did. First up: Cheesemaking!! Saturday morning started off with a class on how to make fresh mozzarella and ricotta in your home--in less than an hour! The class was taught by Angel King of

I had my first paying baking gig in a while last night. 50+ mini cupcakes, chocolate and vanilla. They were for my former law school prof's class on patent and copyright, the focus for this particular class being the issues surrounding the copyrighting of recipes. Food and the law!!!! What a delightful combination! Someone should start a blog..... Anyway, after a long day of keeping criminals behind bars, baking some cupcakes would be a welcome reprieve. The vanilla cupcakes were basically the strawberry cupcake recipe from this past summer, sans strawberries. The chocolate ones were a new recipe from the fine folks at Cook's Illustrated. The cake batter itself turned out OK , but I'm a little concerned about it's moisture level--in that there's not enough. It's deeply chocolaty though, which is excellent. The bigger concern I had was the icing--basically processing hot cream with bittersweet chocolate chips in a food processor, then adding some powdered sugar,

Earlier this week, Mark Bittman had a recipe for Coconut-Braised Beef on his blog. Maybe I was hungry because I had nothing for lunch on Friday but a sweet potato, but when I saw that recipe, I made the executive decision that I would make it this weekend. I had pretty much everything I needed except coconut milk, and being obsessed, I of course went to the grocery at 9:30 on a Friday night in the middle of a snowstorm after drinking Miller Lites all evening at happy hour. Then, when I got home I realized that I did not have a beef chuck roast in my freezer, I had a pork shoulder. Since I was not about to venture back into the not-quite Class 3 killstorm for some beef, I decided pork would have to do. And let me tell you, it did just fine. In fact, it was pretty spectacular, and was a delicious dish on a cold, snowy night. Coconut Braised Pork Shoulder a la Mark Bittman 2-3 hot dried red chilies (remove some of the seeds to lessen the heat) 4 garlic cloves, peeled 2 inch piece o