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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Uber-Chef Alice Waters Comes To Washington: Inauguration Week's Best Dinner
  • Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:18:12 -0700


"Waters also knows that in tough economic times, people struggling to
pay the rent or stay employed might find organic food too costly. This is
why she thinks all our homes, including the White House, should have
vegetable gardens, why we should learn to can and pickle summer's bounty
for year-round eating, and why we should buy whole chickens rather than
pricey parts, and use even the necks, backs and bones."


Uber-Chef Alice Waters Comes To Washington: Inauguration Week's Best Dinner
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/14/uber-chef-alice-waters-co_n_157727.
html
Huffington Post | Annie Groer | January 14, 2009 12:02 AM

WASHINGTON--Uber-chef Alice Waters says "I never voted again" after her
great friend, journalist-activist Bob Scheer, lost his 1966 anti-Vietnam
primary challenge to the Democratic establishment's congressman. The man
whose campaign Waters ran from her Bay Area apartment, helped spawn a
movement to end the war.

She channeled her own considerable zeal into Chez Panisse, the world-class
Berkley restaurant she built by championing
local/organic/seasonal/sustainable food. In later years, she pushed for
home and schoolyard gardens, along with a national crash course in the
making of affordable, good-for-you meals.

Fast forward to 2008, when Waters, 64, returned to politics, raising big
bucks for Barack Obama and smaller bucks for Hillary Clinton. In November,
she cast her first presidential vote in 42 years.

Now she's heading east to celebrate, and to start prepping for what is
easily the Inauguration's hottest foodie fete: a dinner for 150 people
who've ponied up $500 each to sup on whatever she buys during her Sunday
morning visit to a local farmers' market.

Aided by a group of local culin-istas, Waters hopes the Monday night menu
will features Chesapeake Bay oysters and crostini; rockfish soup and a
confit of saffron-spiked tomatoes, though if the fish don't look so great,
she'll shift to winter vegetables; shoulder of local lamb with salsa verde,
and an apple tart.

There will no fussy wine pairings, "just a red and a white" from California
donated by friends. Yes, she knows the Veuve Cliquot Champagne, made in
France and provided by the vineyard for the toast to President-elect Obama,
is hardly carbon neutral.

"You try to eat as locally as possible but then you make exceptions" for
such long-distance staples as olive oil and good bubbly.

Waters also knows that in tough economic times, people struggling to pay
the rent or stay employed might find organic food too costly. This is why
she thinks all our homes, including the White House, should have vegetable
gardens, why we should learn to can and pickle summer's bounty for
year-round eating, and why we should buy whole chickens rather than pricey
parts, and use even the necks, backs and bones.

Waters--whose dinner is at the Phillips Collection, that temple of
Impressionist art near Dupont Circle--is one of a dozen famed chefs from
around the country preparing meals Monday night, though the other dinners
are in Washington-area homes.

Proceeds from these feasts ($350 of each $500 ticket) will go to two city
soup kitchens
and to FRESHFARM Markets, which oversees eight markets in DC and Maryland;
last year it gave more than eight tons of leftover crops gleaned farm
fields to anti-hunger groups.

"In Washington," she says, "we are trying to come back to the table, where
we gather friends and family, where we want to eat together because the
food is nourishing and tasty."

And--who are we kidding?--because Alice Waters is in the kitchen.







  • [Livingontheland] Uber-Chef Alice Waters Comes To Washington: Inauguration Week's Best Dinner, Tradingpost, 01/14/2009

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