- Tracy sautees kale
- Tracy compares cooked and raw kale
- Tracy berates dull knives
- Tracy demos “rocking” cutting
Check out these little videos! Thanks to Lane Rapp of Growing West Side, here I am captured for all eternity at last Sat’s cooking demonstration at their “Bean Summit”.
It was a terrifically educational session, starting with a show-and-tell of many kinds of heirloom beans, followed by growing tips from heirloom bean farmer Paula Foreman of Encore Farms, and lastly, my demo, where I made 3 different organic bean dishes (all vegan and gluten-free, no added sugars and no soy, of course).
- Jacob’s Cattle Bean & Veg Salad in Smoked Paprika Vinaigrette
- Cassoulet of Black Beans, Green Kale & Cherry Tomatoes in Red Pepper Sauce
- Smashed Garlicky Black-eyed Peas with Spinach & Sage (great as bruschetta topping or sandwich filler)
Growing West Side’s mission is “Building community by supporting local gardening and sustaining a healthy neighborhood” in St Paul’s funky West Side. Among its many activities, it
- runs a small Sat morn Farmers Market in the Icy Cup parking lot at corner of George and Stryker Sts, so you can buy veg and eat ice cream simultaneously (very smart);
- offers free Scarlet Runner bean seeds for “Beans on the Boulevard”, a program to beautify the ‘hood;
- offers classes on topics from Growing Small Fruit Orchards to Chickens 101;
- has established a free Seed Library at the Riverside Library on George St.
Another fab organization that offers similar programs & resources in St Paul is Frogtown Gardens in the Frogtown neighborhood that stretches north of University Ave between Lexington and Western Aves.