Aging in Action UWS . . . . . . . . Upper West Side Focus

Welcome to.... Sitting at Jane's Table

Sitting at Jane's Table

By Jane Weston Wilson

This month I begin my third year as a columnist on our blog, Aging in Action - UWS. I can’t believe it has been two years, 44 columns later, all of which I have enjoyed writing. My absolute love affair with food, this will not change at all, but I want to write from a larger perspective. So, in keeping with this philosophy, I invite you to join me as we leave Now You're Cooking! and begin our new adventure: Sitting at Jane's Table.

Food is our international language; it speaks to the very existence of life itself. The subject of food is spiritual, political, social and cultural. It is this wider view of the world where I would invite you to join me, to sit awhile in conversation, to think and talk about our connection to each other, to the earth, the sea, the air and our participation in our future and our children and grandchildren’s future.

M. F. K. Fisher, perhaps the most eloquent food writer of the 20th century, when asked why she only wrote about food as such a gifted writer, she replied, “Because food is about life and death.” Every day we become more fully aware of that statement.

My columns have featured the work of Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Frances Moore Lappe; gifted journalists who are also activists and teachers. With great passion, style and clarity they continue to exhort us to realize the full impact and importance of doing our part in caring for each other, our future and
ourselves. There is no doubt in my mind that Aging in Action members read about and have gone to documentaries about food, read the books and articles on the mishandling of it and how that effects all of us. We do Greenmarkets at least once a week from June to November and some of us belong to community-supported agriculture.

Most of us already have years of cooking experience, a good stash of  recipes along with favorite cookbooks. What there is an interest in, especially since we are now “Empty Nesters”, are ways to enjoy community. By getting together around food, shopping together, cooking together, eating together and just being together.

What I always enjoy is talking about members joining groups within our community. And to share and encourage readers to eat and shop in the small stores and restaurants within our own neighborhoods, as I will continue to do so as well.

What I’m doing here is simply switching hats from the usual kind of food column mainly involved with cooking and entertaining, ideas and recipes, to a larger canvas.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Sitting at Jane’s Table opens up a wider view, a bigger challenge for each of us to explore together many new ways to learn and to grow. To contribute to the welfare of the world, our community, and our families.

Here’s what I am thinking and planning:

• Interviews with well-known activists and writers, as well as local activists
• Interviews with our own Aging in Action readers

Some subject matters to research and explore:

• Where Does Your Plastic Bag Travel?
• Trading Places
•  Eating The Same Foods We Ate 10,000 Years Ago
• Future Food
• The Hijacking Of Water
• Pay As You Wish Restaurants
• The Lost Art of Shelling Peas
• The Dark Side of Milk
• Becoming A Vegan - Bill Clinton Has

 Now tell me: what would you like to learn more about and discuss when we're Sitting at Jane's Table?

Now You're Cooking! - How Community Works!

How Community Works!

By Jane Weston Wilson

"If we fight for justice of any kind, we change ourselves and those around us."

 - Doris "Granny D" Haddock

Here is a full circle story about how community works. It started this spring.

In the May 6 edition of The West Side Spirit, there was a story by reporter Dan Rioli about Anne Cottavoz, owner of Columbus Natural Food. She had organized support in her effort to save four small businesses on her block between 95th and 96th streets, coming under threat from the landlord’s proposal to increase commercial space at Columbus House.

Four-thousand customers signed petitions to save not only the already existing stores, but also to prevent the landlord from cutting into the spacious, wide sidewalks that add beauty to the neighborhood.

Something I could do was to write about it, which I did in my May 17 column called Where Have All the Stores Gone. This subject sadly gets frequent coverage. In all our neighborhoods from Columbus to Broadway, we have seen stores we love shuttered, depriving store-owners and their workers of their livelihoods and customers of their convenience and congeniality.

In E. B. White’s book Here in New York he described community as “every block where customers and storekeepers know each other’s names."

We were galvanized by Anne’s effort and conviction as well as local organizations to join in and fight for the humanity of our neighborhood.

What could we do?

The first step: Anne told us to attend Community Board 7's June 1 meeting and to speak to the issues we were defending. We did, and there were lots of us. The thirty-five members listened to the landlord’s company's proposal and then to our impassioned pleas for protecting our neighborhood. At the end of their 3-month deliberation, Community Board 7 voted down the landlord's company plan finding it “fundamentally flawed and could be a misuse of the new zoning laws.” However, Community Board 7 could only recommend its findings to the City Planning Commission, chaired by Amanda Burden, who would have the final say.

We were urged to write to her directly, and many of us wrote individual personal from-the-heart letters, which we believed could possibly make a difference in the outcome. Anne has a folder of these letters. As emails flew back and forth, many others showed up at every meeting where Gale Brewer or Scott Stringer were talking about neighborhood issues.

In the August 26 issue of The West Side Spirit in the Express Column the headline read, "Columbus Retail Plan Nixed."  We had come full circle.

As all of us at Aging in Action know so well, we must continue our fight to keep our city, this thriving metropolis, from turning into a new kind of ghost town of look-alike malls, and empty stores. 

"When we stand for justice we change ourselves and those around us," sometimes one street at a time.
 Instead of recipes, which usually follow here, I would like to encourage readers to shop at Columbus Natural Food at 725 Columbus Avenue.

When I talked to Anne, she told me that she grew up in France, on a farm near Toulouse, and that she knew at 18 she always wanted to be involved with food. She won Bachelor and Masters degrees in Agricultural Economics. She married and came to this country in 1984 where she continued to pursue knowledge in every aspect involving food and health. In 1994 she opened her store. In those early years Anne said, “I held seminars featuring herbalists and nutritionists often with as many as 80 people in attendance”

This interest in her customers, and how to help them make informed choices in a way that can support good health, has always been her passion.

The Columbus Natural Food store is both welcoming and orderly; in the way it is laid out, and how every single shelf has been setup for the ease and convenience of customers. The people who work with Anne share her interest in customers. When I’m in the check-out line, there are always animated conversations going on. Sometimes I’ll stand right on the spot and enjoy a fresh vegetable or fruit drink. I always take home Cascadian Farms Organic Frozen Cherries from Washington State. They make perfect little popsicles.

So tell us, what's your favorite neighborhood place? 

Now You're Cooking! - Complimentary Protein Way to Go

Complimentary Protein Way to Go

By Jane Weston Wilson

At summer’s end, entertaining can still be savored. Last weekend sitting around the porch table with my friends Virginia and Michael, we watched sparrows by the dozen and squawky blue jays at the large bird feeder, and two buttercup yellow finch at their own smaller feeder.

As Michael was scarfing down my black bean salad at our amply laid table he said, “I just love beans and rice, and they are so, so satisfying. I could eat them everyday.” When I was growing-up, beans and rice were rarely served together. After all, meat and dairy were the mainstays of the American diet and our central source of protein. The fact that rice and beans, which provide complimentary protein, deliver the same protein power as meat and dairy, somehow escaped our knowledge to connect the two.

Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe changed all that when it was published in1971 changed all that.  This 26 year old baby boomer, who described herself as "toiling away at The University of California Berkeley in their downstairs library and typing at home on her Corona," was writing what was to become the book that changed not only the way we would eat, but we would learn through her meticulous research and dedication that feeding the world was not the problem, but the distribution of food in what she called the "seven myths of scarcity." Over the next 30 years her foundation Food First has had global outreach.  She has also written 15 books while her first book sold 3 million copies.

Her daughter, Anna Lappe, at 26 told her mother that it was time to write a new diet for a small planet for her generation. Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet For a Small Planet, published in 2002 was the result. Together they visited five continents. “What they discovered were practical visionaries who were making a difference in world hunger for some one village at a time.”  There is also a splendid recipe section to cook from.

Anna Lappe has since followed in the path of her activist mother. She has written two books Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crises At The End Of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, and Grub: Ideas For An Urban Organic Kitchen. Her website is www.eatgrub.org. 

I would be happy to start up a version of Grub as a once a month supper club for our Aging in Action members where we can share our interest in the connection of food, politics and life or what a university in Austin, Texas calls their group. “Changing the world one potluck at a time."

To join Grub, send an email to: aginginactionuws@gmail.com.

Recipes for Red Lentil Dahl and Basmati Rice follow here.

Now You're Cooking! - Some Like it Hot!

Some Like it Hot!

By Jane Weston Wilson

Hot, Hot, Hot, everywhere, Russia, India, Australia, Southern California, Kansas, the Atlantic coast. If this is what we can expect even now at the end of the summer, should our food and drinks be hot as well? At least one discussion on NPR was about how Indians drink hot tea, as opposed to cold dea, in a country where the temperature soars for many months of the year.

Their food as we know so well is both hot and spicy. In fact there are very few things on most Indian restaurant menus that feature cold food. Raitas, Chutneys, their simple house salad usually with chickpeas, carrots, peas, cucumbers. I've never had a cold soup in an Indian Restaurant. Come to think about it, I've never had iced tea or cold soups in Chinese and Japanese restaurants either.

I remember walking along the crowded streets in Tokyo on one hot day in August, fans were in full flutter. I ducked into a small restaurant and sat down. The first thing to appear was an almost too hot to handle terry towel on a bamboo rest. I wiped my face with it and it felt wonderful. At the same time my pot of tea arrived. Perhaps opening up the pores serves us well on steamy summer days. 

I am also for take-out on these over 90 degree days when the kitchen is just something to pass through. My neighbor Liz and I really like Indian food and we'll order it when Liz gets home from work, as we settle into the couch around 7:00.

I am also for takeout on these over 90 days when the kitchen is just something to pass through. The best Indian movie, actually it was a TV series, one could ever watch is The Jewel in the Crownon DVD. Heat permeates and drives the story in many ways and the acting well, there is the heat of great passion. I for one can never forget Hari Kumar.

Enjoy varying cold, cool and hot or spicy food for these last few days of summer.

Following are recipes that favor each.

Now You're Cooking! - Entertaining Each Other!

Entertaining Each Other!

By Jane Weston Wilson

Summer is especially welcoming for outdoor entertainment. Our Westside Community Garden just finished a 6-week series of musical events on Sunday evenings and now we’re in the midst’s of a 5-week series of mini Shakespeare's Twelfth Night on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s a one-hour in length production and the kids can interact with the actors.

These kinds of events happily happen everywhere. But something else is going on as well. Online I read about how we are entertaining each other. A group of young standup comics have garage standup nights and invite neighbors, the whole family, from kids to grandparents, to come out for the show, and get to know each other through laughter. It is so successful they are now going to do front lawn standup nights as the word spreads.

Sounds a little like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, putting on a show in their barn and getting everyone into the act. The downturn in our economy, loss of jobs that effect all generations, have caused everyone to put the kibosh on spending.The up side is that turning to each other for entertainment is new again.

One of my favorite memories as a youngster was Friday night at the Johnson's across the street. There were seven kids, one of the older brothers, Dick Winslow, had a band, Mrs. Johnson sang beautifully and a song writer friend came on Friday nights when we all joined in around the piano to sing the hit parade songs of the day.

Shakespeare trips off the tongue of some of our favorite British, Australian and Irish actors with good reason. On Friday nights they gathered in each other’s homes to recite Shakespeare’s plays and the great English and Irish poets.

Another form of entertaining has a long history, too. A vegetarian nightclub is something cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman started 30 years ago in her apartment in Austin Texas to introduce vegetarian cooking to her friends. I’m sure the cost to invitees was not costly.

Just last week I was part of a Dinner Theatre Party to celebrate a friend’s retirement from teaching and her upcoming trip to Kenya. It coincided with two other friends of the hostess’s, Jessica, who were in town to do a Two-Woman Show. I was talked into doing Gazpacho for twenty people. The day before was the designated time to prepare it. Arriving to see the kitchen table overflowing with vegetables, I was told the refrigerator was on the blink but that we had a huge ice chest.

Well, of course it got done and by the next day the refrigerator was fixed, a big black bean salad made, appetizers and dessert as well. Arrival time 6:30, dinner, showtime 7:30. Terry and Carolyn did a version of their two woman show and invited questions for our celebrant, Suzanne, as part of the improv. A really delicious evening. For a mere $15.00. That’s just $5.00 more than a movie.

Write your ideas for how to entertain each other and send them to us, won’t you?  And keep reading, for a great recipe for Gazpacho.

Now You're Cooking! - What the Growing of Food Can Do!

What the Growing of Food Can Do!

By Jane Weston Wilson

“Why me, why there, and why discuss it here?" Marian Nestle says on her Food Politics blog, on June 18, 2010. She is talking about accepting the John Dewy Award for Distinguished Public Service from Bard College and to deliver a brief commencement address to incarcerated graduates of the Bard College Prison Initiative to New York State’s Woodbourne Correctional Facility.

Participants in this program started an organic garden and are growing food for the prison with surplus going to local food banks. This is exciting for two reasons: Dr. Marian Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor in the department of Nutrition, Food studies and Public Health at New York University, is one of the clarion voices in the effort to bring attention to the political, social and environmental effects of how we grow our food.

Her book Food Politics is also the name of her blog. Other books are What We Eat, Taking Sides, and Feed Your Pet Right.  She is prolific, passionate and fearless in taking on the industrial food combine. Her service and profession is that of a teacher, an educator, and the award she received is from the great educator John Dewey whose idea of education is “that it was not only important for the individual but that it also has an important social purpose - that of encouraging students to become active and effective members of a democratic society.” 

“In growing a garden and producing food for yourselves and for others under these particular and peculiar circumstances you are carrying out John Dewey’s ideas, better than he could ever have imagined,” Professor Marion Nestle told these graduates.

Bard College has awarded liberal arts associates’ and bachelors’ degrees to nearly 200 men and women inside three long-term maximum and medium security prisons. None of the graduates, not one, has returned to prison after being paroled.

No wonder Marion Nestle said “I was not kidding that no award has ever meant so much to me. It was a privilege to be here.”

More and more we see what can happen when food becomes a part of education whether it is in a schoolyard garden where children learn how to grow, cook and serve food in their schools or a prison where rehabilitation happens through starting an organic garden, cooking from it and sharing the food inside and outside.

Neighborhood youngsters from three schools are learning about organic gardening in our West Side Community Garden through grants that teach them how to start planting seeds in their classrooms, to planting seedlings in their plots in the garden and watching them grow; corn, cucumbers beans wild strawberries are favorites.

Keep reading for delicious, seasonal recipes.

Now You're Cooking! - Best Life After 60

Best Life After 60

By Jane Weston Wilson

Last week I was a member of a focus group for a website, Best After 60 started recently by a woman entrepreneur friend of mine, Dianne Morris. There were 10 of us ranging from age 45 to 84. We were West siders and East siders. Single, married, professionals, some of us were business owners some still working in corporate jobs, some looking to start a new business.

 

We were there to be queried. The site is what I think of as a magazine format, covering the subjects deemed of most interest - HOME, BEST LOOKS, RELATIONSHIPS, BEST HEALTH, MONEY, INSPIRATION AND ADVENTURE, MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

 

What came up again and again as we were asked questions from the list, was what would bring us back to a site. Information? How well it is covered? How easy it is to navigate the site?  Our response? "Yes, all of that!"

 

But what was even more discussed whether it was health, relationships, work or travel, fashion or home were personal stories, from personal experience. A sense of involvement and interaction learning from each other as peers; a real give and take. 

 

This has been the goal of our blog, now called Aging in Action, from the beginning. It is something that builds slowly with a great deal of dedication and perseverance. Community on or offline is a fitting together around mutual interests and concerns and that is what’s happening more and more now.

 

My friend Kathy F. has become a dedicated walker 3 times a week with the Bloomingdale walking group; another group has formed around eating out together. There is also a writers group.

 

Our blog will continue to grow as more and more viewers take steps to have a place and a say. By becoming contributors to the blog as columnists or opinion gatherers or starting a group that fits a need not yet met. Whether its politics or health, travel or relationships, adventure or making a difference, sharing what we know and asking for what we want is how to gain our own sense of living at the peak of our powers. Become more involved with our Aging in Action blog and do check out www.BestAfter60.com.

 

Now back to wearing my own hat. A great time for a get together is 4th of July weekend at home or away. Keep reading for two delicious salads that will pair well with whatever else you might be making for a holiday celebration.

Now You're Cooking! - Gourmet Dining at Age 3? Bien Sur!

Gourmet Dining at Age 3? Bien Sur!

By Jane Weston Wilson

In the March 15 issue of Time Magazine, writer Vivienne Wait sent her global dispatch Postcard: Paris! The photograph shows low oval tables for 10 with 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls sitting in small chairs, silverware in hand eating lunch and talking to each other. Her son is 3. Not only do all French school children have this 5-course midday meal at school, which includes a hors d’oeuvre, salad, main course, cheese plate and dessert course, the brochure given to parents includes suggestions for what the parents might serve for dinner.

"If he ate hake in Basque sauce, mashed; pumpkin cracked rice Edam cheese and organic fruit for lunch that means stuffed marrons and apples for dinner."

Ah. I see, as I approached my bookshelf to pull out my copy of Why French Women Don’t Get Fatby Mirelle Guiliano  KnopfBorzoi Books,which came out in 2005 and sold millions of copies. In Chapter 12 Life Stages the first from 0 to 7 we see that as early as the age of 3 “French women start shaping their children’s taste.”

Here indeed is the connection. While we are grinding our teeth as we watch the French eating fois gras, Beef Bourgogne, rich desserts, wine and cheese (how many French movies have we seen lunch or dinner ending over wine, cheese, pears to slice and good talk). And there is almost no chance of gaining weight because food is eaten in season, in portions that are small; there is variety and balance, all of which  French children start learning at 3.

Throughout her book Madame Guiliano with either wine or champagne at hand at lunch and at dinner, she exhort us, with humor and laugher, to stop thinking about the latest diet du jour, and instead consider the lifestyle where the pleasure of eating is paramount.  

Madame Guiliano came to America as an exchange student in Massachusetts where she learned to love chocolate chip cookies and brownies, and very quickly gained 20 pounds. When she returned to France "looking like a sack of potatoes", her father said, she had to return to the French culture centuries proven way of eating,

Her recovery came through her family’s physician, Dr. Meyer as he presented the French way; to build a rapprochement between our two selves, the one that wants to be slim and healthy and the one that wants something else; pleasures a plenty and now.  
  
Following Dr. Myer's advice she sets out her plan for not getting fat. It is not unlike the good advice we are continually urged to follow; eat in moderation, drink plenty of water, exercise. But she is after more than that.  She is for a lighter touch, a joie de vie approach. And she speaks to that in every phase of women’s lives right up to ages 55 to 77 and beyond.

Here are just a few of her two pages of principles: "French women drink water all day long, French women think that dining in is as sexy as dining out, French women will dress to take the garbage out,  French women avoid anything that demands too much effort for too little pleasure.”
Good advice?  Here are two recipes from her book, an appetizer and a dessert.

Now You're Cooking! - Where have all the stores gone?

Where have all the stores gone?

By Jane Weston Wilson

“It’s nice to have small convenient stores you don’t get lost in,” a repeat customer of Columbus Natural Food on 95th St. and Columbus Ave. told a reporter for the May 6 edition of The West Side Spirit. Anne Cotovaz, owner of the store for 17 years, is organizing support to save four businesses that may be victims of the landlord's expansion plan.

Those of us who live in this neighborhood know this particular area well. When the four blocks between 96th and 100th Streets were torn down to make room for box stores of mall proportions, store owners and their employees lost their livelihood. We in turn lost their diversity and convenience and friendliness.

We are being asked to save small businesses between 95th and 96th Streets by simply signing a petition of protest to Board 7’s land use committee. It’s worth the small effort. As we well know, owner run businesses know the names of their customers, what there needs are and how to fill them, I say to anyone who will listen. “You can’t have community if your only concern is to save a few dollars. They are mutually exclusive."

As a Westsider for 45 years, and for 18 years, 1969 to 1985, I was founder and co-owner of a food business called The Party Box on 86th St. and Columbus Ave. Rents were reasonable, and every kind of business could, and did, flourish.

Then Mayor “how am I doing" Koch removed all commercial rent control restrictions and ever since then all neighborhood small businesses everywhere in the city face an alarming escalation of rents. We can and do take part in sustaining the humanity of our neighborhoods every time we speak out, stand up and take action.

We have always been activists on the Upper West Side especially those of us who have lived here a long time and Aging In Action UWS, the new name for our blog, says it all.

Following are two favorite recipes from my Party Box files to start you thinking about a Memorial Day picnic. Enjoy Beet and Cucumber Soup and Fusilli Salad.

Now You're Cooking! - Mother Nature

Mother Nature
By Jane Weston Wilson

A description of the volcanic ash from the volcano in Iceland was described as in “the shape of a huge black cauliflower.” Many years ago I had the opportunity to visit Iceland as part of an exchange of cultures through learning more about each other’s food. It was a joint venture between the Iceland Tourist Bureau and the New York Technical College where I received my chef training.

During that visit a tour guide took us to the area of the volcano where volcanic ash covered the landscape. We were told that the astronauts who went to the moon trained there because it had the same landscape. It certainly had the eerie feeling of being on another planet. Today, April 22, we are celebrating Earth Day's 40th Anniversary. It’s significant in the light of what happened last week that the havoc nature is capable of causing should make us better stewards rather than plunderers of the earth which is our home.

Those of us lucky enough to be part of a community garden, ours is the West Side Community Garden, where once again we see the wonders of nature whether pushing up 13,000 bulbs, planted in the fall into full radiance this weekend or growing in our 6 by 4 vegetable plots, a variety of vegetables that truly connect us to the earth where earthworms and our hands work the soil.

In the Green Kitchen, Techniques To Learn By Heart is on sale now. In her interview on NPR, cookbook author Alice Waters talks about foregoing the many machines we have become used to, to become even more involved with what and how we eat, for example, a mortar and pestle puts us more in touch than a Cuisinart when preparing food. What she is after is giving you everything you need “to bring out the truest flavor that the best ingredients of the season has to offer.”

So growing our own or going to get the first greens at the Greenmarkets is the order of the day. Our West Side Community Garden has gotten wonderful attention for Earth Day with coverage in this week’s The New Yorker as well as a segment in the Live! With Regis and Kelly morning shows between 9 and 10 AM on Tuesday the 20th where they planted a herb garden, which they will visit throughout the summer as it grows.

Keep reading for great, green recipes.