Food Revolution Day 2014 is Coming!

May 16 is Food Revolution Day this year. What is Food Revolution Day? A day to celebrate real food, food education, and community. It's celebrated throughout the world, led by Ambassador volunteers like me. We put together local events to get people cooking. Last year, I participated in a "Chopped" like competition at the Boulder Whole Foods, which was a blast. This year, I'll be celebrating my daughter's graduation from college. I'll be cooking up an awesome BBQ for my family and friends on the shores of Lake Cayuga in upstate NY. If you are looking for an event near Boulder and you have children, I recommend you check out the Lafayette Ambassador's event. Carin Bertelle is leading a cooking demo for kids featuring Jamie Oliver's Rainbow Crunch Wrap. I'm sure it will be a fun and tasty time!

Food Revolution Day 2013 in Boulder Colorado

It was a fine day for a cooking competition at our local Whole Foods Market! What better way to celebrate Food Revolution Day then to try to whip up two dishes using seasonal ingredients in fifty minutes? It was intense but loads of fun. 

My competition, two very fine chefs: 

Brandy Dreibelbis, Boulder Valley School District Manager of The School Food Project 

Dana Villiers, Whole Foods Market Pearl Street Cooking Coach

Two rounds of twenty-five minutes each. Believe me when I say twenty-five minutes flies by in about thirty seconds!

The appetizer round: pork belly, asparagus, and polenta. Three very different results. Brandy put together a great looking breakfast with fresh herb polenta, fried egg, and pork belly. Dana made a Filipino pork belly with chiles and her secret ingredients, a 9 year old balsamic vinegar. I made honey-soy glazed with ginger grits and grilled asparagus.

The entree round: hanger steak, ramps, and gluten-free pancake mix. The pancake mix definitely was the wild card. Dana definitely was the crafty one with the pancake mix. She used it to make a crepe that she used instead of a pancake for her moo shu hanger steak. I think that's what sealed the win for her. :-)

Whole Foods presenting a big check to BVSD's School Food Project

Big thanks to our Pearl St. Whole Foods Market! We so appreciate their support of Food Revolution Day 2013, the School Food Project, and the Growe Foundation.

Cooking to Advance Community and Health for Everyone

On this Food Revolution Day 2013, the School of Eating Good would like to announce a new initiative: Cooking to Advance Community and Health for Everyone (CACHE).

Cooking is about sharing, as the tagline for FRD2013 says: Cook it. Share it. Live it. We cook for ourselves and we cook for others. It binds us together in a community. It's how we show we care.

And what better way to show how much we care, then by bringing people together to learn a few things about real food, cooking from scratch, and how these things can enhance our health. Then, we share some great food, building community.

In the past, our efforts for food education have focused on young adults - specifically college students - but we want to broaden this because we believe everyone enjoys sharing food with friends and everyone can discover the hidden "chef" within them to share their love with others. We're not talking fancy but we are talking cooking from scratch with real ingredients.

For the blog readers locally (local being the Denver/Boulder area), this means if you have a group of people that wants to learn about cooking delicious food quickly, we'll come up with a 2 hour class. We'll work together to find a good space. The number of people is up to you. For small groups, we can be very hands-on, like in our classes for college students. For bigger groups, we'll be cooking and you'll (mostly) be watching. But, no matter what, you'll get to try some delicious food at the end of it.

What about the cost? School of Eating Good was conceived as a not-for-profit school. We believe cooking is such an important skill, that everyone needs to know how to do it. We fully support efforts to bring food education back to schools but it's going to be an uphill battle. Until that happens, School of Eating Good is doing what we can in our community to teach everyone to cook, in a fun and friendly way and at a reasonable cost. We will work with anyone to arrive at a price that fits your needs. [And if you want to support our mission, get in touch. We've happy to take donations.*]

The significance of the acronym CACHE? A cache is a hidden treasure, a repository of wonderful things. That's what cooking skills are - a cache of knowledge that you can pull out everyday to make your life and the lives of the people you care about a little bit better.

Cook it! Share it! Live It! And have a tasty Food Revolution Day!

*School of Eating Good, Inc. is in the process of applying for recognition as a 501(c)(3) and is organized as a not-for-profit corporation in the State of Colorado.

Google+ Hangout with Jamie Oliver for Food Revolution Day

Tomorrow is officially Food Revolution Day! Events are taking place around the world. Our event is happening Saturday and it promises to be quite a good time. Hoping to see my local readers there and we can eat some great food provided by Whole Foods Markets, listen to some live music, and talk about food, cooking and food education.

In celebration of the day, Jamie Oliver is holding a Google+ Hangout to talk about all the great things happening for Food Revolution Day. There will be Jamie, who is hoot and so full of energy about real food and food education that you'll want to run to the kitchen to cook something right away. Special guests will include Lindsey Shifley, one of my fellow Ambassadors and the power behind The Mullies, a great blog about one mom's journey on the road to real food and cooking.

You can see the particulars and RSVP for the Hangout here or watch the event live-streaming on www.youtube.com/foodrevolution. I'll be watching so Jamie can fire me up for my Mystery Ingredient Cooking Competition on Saturday.

Cook it. Share it. Live it.

Countdown to Food Revolution Day 2013

I'm one of the chefs in the Cooking Competition. This is going to be fun! Excited to compete against chefs from my great partners for Food Revolution Day: Whole Foods Market, who is providing food, entertainment, and their awesome Pearl St. store's West Patio, and Boulder Valley School District's School Food Project. 

Come join in the fun! If you don't live near Boulder, check out the main Food Revolution Day site for listings of Food Revolution Day activities throughout the world. Or, have your own Food Revolution Day celebration: invite friends over and cook a meal using real ingredients.

Cook it. Share it. Live it.

Food Revolution Day 2013 - May 18 at Whole Foods, Pearl St.

We are holding our 2013 Food Revolution Day event on Saturday May 18 from 12-3 pm on the West Patio at the Whole Foods Pearl St. store in Boulder, Colorado.

Last year, we held a Food Improv event for Food Revolution Day. It was a pretty small affair but great fun. You can read about the event here. This year, we are involving the wider community by teaming up with Whole Foods and the Boulder Valley School District. Whole Foods is generously providing snacks. There will be kid activities and information about Whole Kids (the Whole Foods foundation for improving children's nutrition and wellness) and the wonderful work BVSD continues to do to improve school lunch in Boulder Valley. I'll be there to answer all your cooking questions and get you excited about cooking real food. As the poster says: Cook it. Share it.

For a bit of theater, we'll be holding a "Chopped" competition. I'll be competing against one of the BVSD chefs and someone selected by Whole Foods. We'll have 45 minutes to come up with a delicious dish using a secret market basket selected by Whole Foods. Judges from the Boulder community will taste and declare a winner. Come and cheer me on if you live in the Boulder area. It's going to be great fun!

If you can't make it to Whole Foods to see me cook up something wonderful, enter to win a cooking lesson with Jamie Oliver! I'd enter but I'll be busy cooking at Whole Foods that weekend. But, you can enter and I won't hold it against you if you win. :-) Make a donation to the Food Revolution to enter the drawing; all donations go to support food education in the US. You can enter here and below is the video invitation from the man himself.

Food Revolution Day 2013

Last May, the School of Eating Good, as part of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, was proud to host a Food Revolution Day event. You can read about our Food Improv Potluck and get excited about Food Revolution Day 2013, Friday May 17. We'll keep you posted on what we're cooking up. We're hoping we can join forces with our fantastic local Whole Foods on this; we'll be meeting with them early next year.

If you don't live near Boulder, Colorado, we urge you to find a local Food Revolution group so you can join in the fun and support the Food Revolution!

Food Revolution Day

Nancy and Cindy enjoying the bountiful offerings of delicious food

Saturday was Food Revolution Day, a day to celebrate real food,  cooking and eating it. It was an event held in 62 countries and 664 cities, promoted by Jamie Oliver through his Food Revolution Foundation. School of Eating Good (aka Boulder CO Food Revolution) held a Potluck/Food Improv. Everyone brought some delicious food - brie baked with blueberry preserves, a colorful fresh green bean salad from the Moosewood Cookbook, mashed potatoes and cauliflower with an onion gravy, prosciutto wrapped pears, little peppers stuffed with curried chicken salad, and more. All wonderful food!

Donna and Jim's contribution - how can you go wrong with prosciutto?

All the guests also brought an ingredient for the Food Improv. I didn't use everything, but I sure tried! We had eggplant, artichokes, fennel fronds, maple syrup, broccoli, and goat cheese. What did I make?

Braised artichokes. Meltingly tender and tasty.

• Thai eggplant in a spicy green curry. Didn't make the curry paste - canned green curry paste is good stuff and it packs quite a punch! No coconut milk in the house (shame on me!) but heavy cream works nearly as well.
• A very simple broccoli and lemon soup made with chicken stock.
• The most challenging ingredient, fresh artichokes were braised with the fennel fronds and some lemon, white wine, garlic, onions, and olive oil. I used the pressure cooker to speed up the cooking some.
• Another challenging ingredient was maple syrup. With mostly vegetables, I had a hard time figuring this one out. But, one more guest showed up with plain mild chevre and I knew there was something to work with. I spread the goat cheese on amaretti cookies, sprinkled on some toasted walnuts and drizzled with a little maple syrup. Really simple and a great way to end a meal packed with real food.

Amaretti cookies with chevre, walnuts, and real maple syrup from the Lehman sugarbush in W. NY State

School of Eating Good is proud to provide food education to young adults (and other folks too) as part of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and we hope that our guests learned a little something watching me frenetically put together something tasty from the ingredients that showed up. I know everyone enjoyed a delicious meal full of real food!