Holidays

Spending your holidays on the farm. It hasn't always been fun, as the pics of Lewis W. Hine show. 

I don’t know how you feel like at this moment, but I look forward to the holidays. It is not specifically the low temperatures, because combined with clear blue skies and a wintery sun, I really love it. It is just that it seems like everyone is getting ready for Christmas and so should I. With only a week of work left, I thought I might as well dedicate a blog to the topic.

What holidays have to do with food? A lot. Starting with the Christmas holidays, which usually are centered around food as most of us enjoy big Christmas breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Even though the main reason for this break is a religious one, however forgotten by many that let themselves overwhelm by commercial and eating activities. Actually not something I really look forward to. In unlucky cases, you go from one family to another, the host insisting you to eat well. Do they not understand that eating too much three times a day isn’t healthy anymore? At some point you start to feel like a goose which liver will become foie gras in the very near future.

Anyways, I will try not to overeat myself, prepare some less unhealthy dishes as well and hope to be able to do some exercises, to digest everything and get some air. After Christmas follows New Year with the traditional dishes (sweet deepfried dough-balls in the Netherlands, grapes in Spain, lentils in Italy) and Epiphany, in many countries another reason to sit around the table and eat. From where do we actually get all the food?

Well, here is the connection between food and holidays I wanted to talk about. Have you ever realized why children can stay away from school almost all summer? Off-course this has to do with the heat, which makes it impossible to keep the kids concentrated for long. Besides that, the long holidays have to do with a very old profession: the farmer.

Many of our ancestors where farmers, even though it is difficult to imagine now. They were hired by a landlord which made them grow food. U

sually for his staff, his army or the citizens of the village or town he reigned and some for the farmers family. It was an insecure life as it was not possible to avoid diseases in crops and animals, and weather circumstances could never be controlled. As there were no machines, everything had to be done by hand. And this is where the holidays are explained.

When farmers kids where lucky enough to go to school, their parents did not refrain from keeping them home every now and then. The kids who were old enough to help on the land became workers at times of seeding and harvest. You might understand when this was about to happen.

At the moment most of us are so lucky that during the weeks we are not expected at school or in the office, we can really take a break, forget about the daily rhythms and do what we feel like to do. I hope you enjoy it. See you back in the next year.

After you enjoyed some good food, I hope.

Dining in secret

An intimate atmosphere made us all feel welcome and comfortable which gave a fun night for all of us

In Milan, dinners in private homes seem to be the order of the day. As you might remember, earlier this year I participated in a delicious breakfast on a rainy spring Sunday. As the experience there was very interesting, I did not hesitate at all when an invitation for a similar kind of event arrived in my mailbox.

It is already for a few years that new kinds of dining-out are invented. For smartphones there are many apps available which enable people to share leftovers on a kind of ‘marketplace’. The so-called Restaurant Day gives amateur cooks the possibility to expose their kitchen skills every three months. To me, it all suits to the trend in which bottom-up initiatives are more appreciated than the traditional economic activities.

Tour the Forks’ history started with the inventions of ‘secret dinners’. Secret in different ways: you never know where you are expected and whom you can expect. It offers the participants (I think you cannot use the word guest here) another way of having a fun night out.

After almost two years of ‘secret dinner silence’, the move to a new studio and many interesting food-related activities, Tour de Fork decided it was time to re-vive the successful event. The first hint was given about a month up front followed by the invitation a few weeks later. This didn’t say more than the date and time and, off-course, the theme of the dinner. With accepting the invitation we said yes to a dinner centred around bread, which was prepared by a be-friended cook.

Bread does not seem the most exiting topic for a dinner. I mean, we are in Italy. The bread here is usually not that outstanding, even though things are changing. But maybe the choice for this topic made me even more curious, as a bread-loving Dutch girl like me. Besides that the published menu already showed that we would travel around the world following the historical discovery of the baker. As at this moment when food and history are daily matters for me, I could not wait to start the journey.

To stop the first hunger, we were welcomed with a good glass of gin-tonic accompanied by Indian papadums and a yoghurt mint-dip. It might have been the way the drinks were served, but within a few minutes, people were chatting with each other. Since it was the first ‘secret dinner’ in the new series, Tour de Fork decided to only invite friends. Which made that we at least had one thing in common, namely knowing the hosts. It felt a bit like we arrived all from the same family but that somehow we never got to meet each other. This dinner was a good opportunity to make up for that!

When the drinks started to do its’ job, we were invited to sit-down at the big table hosting all the 18 guests. I know the studio from an earlier collaboration. At that time it had a cold feeling, literally as well as figurative. But the way it was decorated now, made me completely forget about that. It felt like being hosted in someone’s warm living room instead of sitting in a sober basement.

While chatting with a fellow ‘stranger’ we enjoyed the one and only Italian dish of the night: the ribollita, a Tuscan stile soup with different kind of vegetables and beans. Completely in line with the farm-style dish it was sided by two big pieces of heavy bread. One of them included garlic, the other made out of rye. Here it would have been great if the pater familias had asked us a moment of silence and used this to explain about the choice of the theme and made us all aware of the story it has. Later it was explained that it was a choice not to take this role as it was also an opportunity for the hosts to have a relaxing evening among friends. Next time though, I hope they will do it to give the event also a more educative side.

I think the third course was the most exotic dish for every-one, even though it was based on the northern kitchen of the cold Sweden. Six small pieces of self-made rye bread where topped with different spreads and toppings; homemade mayonnaise, smoked mackerel, boiled eggs and pickled cucumber. Flavours all unfamiliar to us and therefore more exciting to talk about. Whether it was this or the shots of vodka that traditionally help the Swedish to digest their heavy meals, we all had fun and the ‘family members’ started to feel more related and chatted along like they’ve never done else.

Before we knew, midnight was long behind us and it was time for the last part of the dinner. The dessert (bread pudding) another shot of vodka (there was a lot to digest) and the envelop, meant for the payments which were announced already on the invitation. Although this might be the most undesired part of the evening, (you feel like staying at your friends and then they ask you to pay…) in this case they made it part of the whole concept which avoided possible embarrassing moments.

The next ‘secretdinner’ is planned for January. So if you got curious while reading this blog (you should) I suggest you start to follow the studio and make sure that you are between the next run of invitees.  

Fire

A fire doen't only warm-up the people, but also relations (thanks to ateliermob for the picture)

Sometimes complicated things become a lot easier when food and drinks come in. It is a mean way to relax people (not only because of the alcohol…) and gives them something in common to talk about. I had this experience only a few days ago.

Just before the weekend I started a three day workshop. It was for and by architects, which was a whole new experience for me. Even though I studied architecture for almost seven years. The goal of the workshop was to collaborate on the creation of a community by building something.

As all the participants and the mentors were architects, we started to talk about the current state of our location. A few years ago the former fabric was turned into a beautiful location were creative persons can work and expose themselves. We - outsiders - found out that it is inhabited by these different communities which all have one thing in common (their profession) but that they hardly exchange anything. We call it a lack of public domain.

The building itself encloses a huge square which is sometimes turned into an event location, some more regular than others. A square with a lot of potential as well for its size as its’ relative safety in an area with a lot of traffic and movements. However, it does not invite at all. And that is where we decided to focus on.

Our main objective was to make people enter the square and to give them a place where they can entertain themselves, meet friends or strangers, spend some time during one of the many activities in the former fabric or have lunch on a workday. We designed a very open structure to make it inviting and multi-usable. Off course, the designing process was not as easy as it sounds. As I said, we were all architects which meant we all had our own ideas of what it should look like. But we managed to create an object with different lines coming together in one centre which was to host a fireplace.

The closing party of the festival was also the inauguration of the object we created. As the festival lacked real social activities so far, we decided that we were going to organize them ourselves. With fifty euros, we headed to the supermarket and bought some spirits (‘to get the fire inside’) and marshmallows. As soon as the serious part of the festival was over we projected a film of the fire which was just outside the building. Within a few minutes everyone understood that the real party was there.

After a toast talks burst out. But the real fun things were the marshmallows as only half of the people around the fire knew what to do with them. They became a reason to talk to strangers and the more experienced marshmallow eaters offered suggestions about how to heat them.  From this small talk people continued to less superficial subjects and this was the start of the so desired exchange between strangers.

We worked so hard to make the best design and finish the object even during snow and rainfall. But in the end all that mattered was the warm fire, some drinks and food. This I why I like my Food in the Streets that much. It can be so simple!