ComeUnity at Home

COMEUNITY CAFÉ CHEFS ON COOKING FROM SCRATCH

BY AUSTIN L. BROWN

INTRO BY AUSTIN L. BROWN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARI GRIFFITH | STYLING BY MORGAN WALKER CARKUFF | PLATES BY MEGAN WINTER

Cooking at home should never be stressful or frustrating. Whether you’re throwing together a simple lunch or making dinner for the neighborhood, it should be a pleasant, relaxing experience. You also don’t need to be a classically trained chef or have a kitchen stocked with exotic ingredients to whip up something delicious. Anyone can do this.

Jesse Perkins and I have been chefs at the ComeUnity Café for six years now. Jesse has been there since day one, and I came on board about a year later. The Café’s menu changes daily, with items made from as many locally sourced ingredients as possible. To us, creative freedom coupled with helping the community makes cooking there a dream job. However, when people hear about our routine, their response is often how terrifying that sounds. Then sprinkle on the fact that most mornings we go into our kitchen with no idea what we’ll be making that day; I can see how that may sound intimidating to some. However, like I said, cooking should never be stressful.

The process of making our menus isn’t grandiose. Sometimes we plan

out a menu a day or two before, but most days everything you see was hastily thrown together from what we currently had in the fridge.

Our first step, after starting the coffee and tea, is usually Jesse and I shambling to the fridges, shouting “Soooo, what do we have” to each other in between quoting Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and 90’s Jim Carrey movies. We take a quick inventory of what’s available and plan accordingly. Often it’s Jesse’s latest haul from the Farmer’s Market, but not always. In fact, sizable portions of our ingredients are donations from people looking to help out, or from Grubb's Grocery, who we are not ashamed to admit have saved our skins more times than we can count. This menu, for instance, was purposefully composed of groceries you may already have sitting in your fridge. If not, that’s okay too, everything we use is quite affordable. We’re all about getting the most bang for your buck at the Café.

After we determine what the menu will be, depending on the obscurity of our ideas, we’ll check to see if any of it already exists on the internet. Most of the time it does, and we’ll take note of how someone like “Karen” makes her food on her blog, but we’ll use it more as a guide than anything else. We like to cook instinctually at the Café, and so should you. (Unless you’re baking. Then you better follow that recipe to the letter.) After the dust settles, we get to work, delegating the easier tasks to our volunteers and handling the more demanding prep work ourselves.

While our menus are a collective effort, Jesse usually takes point on the soups. Let me tell you, he is great at it. We’ve worked together for almost a decade, and he has never ceased to amaze me with his culinary creativity and ingenuity. What that man can do with random groceries, a kitchen knife, and a wooden spoon is like watching Rembrandt with his paintbrush or Mozart with his... music stick? My point is, the number of times I’ve witnessed Jesse pull a miracle from a toboggan would make your head spin.

Anyway, enough story time. If you read through this, good on you. I hope my introduction was slightly more entertaining than Karen’s casserole stories.

THINGS YOU WILL NEED: Heat source (oven, stove, the sun) Soup pot and wooden spoon Cutting utensil (kitchen knife, laser beam) Cutting surface (cutting board, chopping block for deserters of the Night’s Watch) Food processor/immersion blender (or a pestle & mortar if you want to be oletimey)

GROCERIES YOU WILL NEED: • Avocado • Bacon • Bunch green onion • Bunch parsley • Butter • Chicken broth • Crusty bread (we prefer sourdough) • Feta crumbles • Fresh dill • Good mayo (we prefer Duke’s) • Garlic • • • • • • • • • • • Heavy cream Heirloom tomato Lemons Olive oil Parmesan Rose Creek lettuce Plain Greek yogurt Radish Red wine vinegar Sprig rosemary Yellow onion

C R E A M Y F E T A D I L L DRESSING: 1 C plain yogurt 1 T good mayo 2 cloves garlic (minced) Juice of 1 lemon Salt & pepper to taste ½ C feta crumbles 1 T fresh dill 1 T red wine vinegar

In a large bowl, combine everything thoroughly.

R O S E C R E E K G A R D E N SALAD: Avocado (sliced or diced) Radish (sliced super-duper thin) Green onion (chopped) Heirloom tomato (if the tomato is large, dice. If not, quarter it) Rose Creek lettuce

Toss everything in a salad bowl and add the desired amount of creamy dressing.

WINTER GARLIC SOUP

10-12 cloves garlic Olive oil 2 T butter 1 yellow onion 1 sprig rosemary 1 qt chicken broth ½ loaf stale crusty bread (perhaps the leftover sourdough) 1 C heavy cream

Preheat soup pot to 350. Toss garlic in olive oil and roast until golden brown. Sauté onion and garlic in butter. Add chicken broth, simmer. Add cream and bread, simmer (I’m going to be honest with you, at this stage, the soup won’t look pretty. But worry not, this frog will turn into a prince soon enough. Trust me.) Blend thoroughly with immersion or food processor. Enjoy!

BLT

Marmilu Farms bacon (If you want to get a little crazy, sprinkle ~1 T brown sugar over the bacon halfway through cooking. Candied bacon is a true unsung hero) Pesto Heirloom tomato (sliced) Rose Creek lettuce Crusty sourdough

Cook bacon (Technically, you can cook the bacon however you want. At the Café, we prefer to preheat the oven at 400 and cook the bacon on an oven-safe wire rack over a tray. Helps drain the grease and gives it an excellent crisp.) Toast sourdough and spread on pesto. Stack the sandwich to your liking, adding as much bacon, tomato, or lettuce as you desire. Nothing has to be even. It’s your BLT, after all.

PESTO

4 oz Rose Creek basil Bunch green onion Bunch parsley 4 cloves garlic Salt & pepper Squeeze of lemon ¼ C Parmesan Olive oil

Combine all except olive oil in the food processor. Pulse, gradually adding olive oil, until reaching desired smoothness.