Our 1st Anniversary 🎊 | Fermentation Workshops | Recipe: Peach Cobbler
Issue No. 48
Sunshine + Microbes turns 1! 💜
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Happy first birthday to Sunshine + Microbes! 🎂
Please deliver homemade baked goods in person.
Just kidding! I should be baking cakes for all of you, dear readers. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for reading each week, or even just occasionally!
Over the last year, we threw a virtual fermentation festival that some folks in Australia pulled an all-nighter to watch. So many of you have started baking bread, and I’ve trouble-shooted many sourdough starter queries via email. I’ve gotten to do a ton of recipe testing and creation, and the kosho, peanut sauce, and orange and olive oil cake have developed loyal followings. We’ve made zero-waste toolkits, food bucket lists, and shared quarantine kitchen tips. We’ve gotten to read so many incredible stories about the challenging, fascinating, and inspiring corners of food culture. I’ve gabbed about what’s on my mind and in my belly, I hope with a bit of insight and a good joke or two.
When we first started the newsletter, the idea was to serve as a sort of antidote to the more insidious aspects of the wellness industry. While food can be an empowering tool for healing and transformation, thinking of food simply as it relates to our own bodies can turn dark (and boring!) fast. As my niece Olivia said to me last night as I fretted about my newly widened belly — a product of my near-daily pandemic ritual of cookies for breakfast— “Stop! That’s just the patriarchy robbing you of energy you could be using to topple systems of oppression!” When you’re right, you’re right 🤷♀️
Here’s how I put it way back in issue number one:
When we see what we eat only as a tool to control or fix our bodies or our health, we are ignoring the vast majority of our eating experience. Sure, food is carbs and fat and sugar and vitamins, but it is also pleasure and connection and history and metaphor and identity[…]
Instead of focusing on how food and diet impacts us as individuals, I want to explore how it connects us to the world around us. How our food choices define our history and identity, how they illustrate important social, political, and economic policies and trends, and how our food production and consumption choices are impacting our planet, and contributing to its changing climate.
The chaos of 2020 has made it a lot harder for me to be overly self-involved. That means it’s even more important to stop thinking about food simply as it relates to and impacts my own body, and instead widening that lens to examine how my food choices impact the planet and my fellow humans, for better or worse.
It’s my party, so I’m going to indulge my inner hippie: I want the next year to be transformative. I don’t want to go back to normal. I believe we have it in us to do much better than that. I’m praying for a revolution- one built on love, care, and responsibility for the precarious and infinitely exquisite web of creation. From my perspective, that will mean acknowledging our blind spots and failures, making hard choices, building bridges, taking action, and most importantly, truly taking care of each other. I want to see humanity grow towards each other, not further retreat and divide. And what better way is there to bring people together than food?
Thank you so much for being a part of this. We’ll be sending out a short survey next week and we hope you’ll take a moment to fill it out. Your Guidance will help shape the newsletter as we head into year two.
love,
Jackie
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(Virtual) Workshops
Donate and then join any/all of these sweet workshops
Thanks to everyone who’s participated in the Grow Roots Miami Give. It’s not too late to donate to this great cause. Grow Roots Miami builds free home gardens for marginalized community members with a goal of fighting food insecurity. Give $25 to their GoFundMe campaign, forward us the receipt or a screenshot of your donation, and you’re guaranteed a seat at any and all of these upcoming virtual fermentation workshops.
And now we’re ready to announce our workshops dates:
WORKSHOPS
Yaupon Jun with Jennifer Holmes of Hani Honey Company | Saturday, July 25 at 3 p.m. ET
Yogurt with Jackie Vitale of Sunshine + Microbes | Saturday, August 8 at 3 p.m. ET
Koji at Home with chef Alex Henao | Sunday, August 16 at 4 p.m. ET
Wicked Jack Hot Sauce with Sarah Arrazola of St Pete Ferments | Monday, September 7 at 10 a.m. ET
Fermenting Veggies with Susan Cartiglia of Radiate Kombucha | Saturday, September 12 at 10 a.m.
Any questions, please email us at sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com.
Fresh Links
⏳Who Will Save the Food Timeline? | Eater
There’s an incredible online foodie resource called the Food Timeline. Created by librarian Lynne Olver in 1999 — two years before Wikipedia existed — the site meticulously cites countless resources, creating a compendium on the history of food.
The timeline begins with water and ice and salt and then seafood and millennia later it ends with cronuts and test tube burgers (in 2013). Just click on any item to learn more about that food or drink. Throughout the timeline, Olver includes recipes from history. Flour, bread and soup recipes first arrive around 10,000 B.C. Later on there’s challah (1st Century), kimchi (7th Century), baklava (11th Century), doughnuts (15th Century) and finally more contemporary foods like Turducken (1980) and cake pops (2007).
Sadly, Olver died of leukemia in 2015, which is why the website has gone so long without any updates. In the Eater article, Dayna Evans speaks with friends and family members about Olver’s two decade long obsession — while also asking if anyone is willing to continue the work (which does come with Olver’s book collection that’s worth ten of thousands of dollars … if you’re interested).
🍔🦐🥗Welcome to the new buffet, which isn’t a buffet anymore | Washington Post
The WaPo’s new series of stories ponders experiences that have been threatened by the pandemic and might never be the same again. Here, Tim Carman tackles the buffet. Who’s ready to eat at one of those again? 😬
From salad bars to continental breakfasts to condiment stations, self-serve practices at restaurants have vanished. And the doors have shut at buffets ranging from Golden Corrals to family-owned Indian restaurants. The article explores the ways post-pandemic buffets want to make it possible to get your snow crab legs, cheeseburger sliders, and General Tso’s chicken all in one place again. Those changes will feature the usual stuff (masked staff) and other adjustments like more pre-portioned servings and “endless entrees” delivered to the table. Still, Carman observes, a buffet is only as sanitary as its customers and that means in the U.S. we might be passing on the all-you-can-eat option for a long time.
🇳🇬The Problems with Palm Oil Don’t Start with my Recipes | Medium’s Heated
While trying to introduce customers to her favorite West African dishes, professional chef Yewande Komolafe runs into people with a bit of a white savior complex. They’ll “inform” her that palm oil is bad for the environment. There’s a big difference between the palm oil production that threatens the Earth, and the red palm oil that’s so essential to Nigerian cooking.
Let’s start by acknowledging that one culture’s local and sustainable production of an ingredient does not make it complicit in the destructive profit motives of multinational corporations. Suggesting that West African cuisine reconsider an ingredient that corporations have come to produce and exploit is like arguing a fonio farmer in Senegal should not water her crops because somewhere else in the world water is sold in plastic bottles.
It’s not just unfair but also ridiculous to tie a culture’s favorite ingredient to the exploitative colonial system that places palm oil in so many products around the world. Komolafe says that unrefined red palm oil always has been a healthy, cultural staple in West African cooking. The palm oil in your soap and shampoo… not so much. But it’s not on her to explain that difference about how systems work.
Jesseka’s Peach Cobbler
Jesseka Rivera is the dessert queen of my heart. She worked in the kitchen at Ground Floor Farm, and now works in the craft kitchen at Colab Farms. She’s a trained pastry chef, and boy oh boy can this lady make a cake. Her desserts are incredibly special, without ever veering into fussiness or over-indulgence. It’s peach season for our neighbors in Georgia, and I recently treated myself to a couple crates of perfectly ripe fruit from Costco. My first move was to make Jesseka’s excellent peach cobbler. She agreed to share the recipe with us.
Makes one 9x13 pan
Ingredients
For peaches:
7 peaches (or 5 peaches plus a cup or two of berries), cut in chunks
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
For cobbler mixture:
85 g butter
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup milk or mylk of choice
2 teaspoons cinnamon
step-by-step
In a large sauté pan, toss peaches with sugar and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring often, until sugar has dissolved and peaches are soft, 10-15 minutes. A good amount of syrup with form in the pan.
Preheat oven to 350°F. Add butter to 9 x 13 pan and melt in the preheating oven. Remove pan from oven once the butter has melted.
In a bowl, mix both flours, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Add milk and whisk until smooth.
Pour mixture on top of melted butter in pan. Add peaches and sprinkle with cinnamon.
Bake for 40 minutes.
For optimum results, serve with vanilla ice cream 🍨
Did you know that everything is cake? Everything is cake. Nothing is not cake.
Talk to Us
Send in your comments, mailbag questions, recipe mishaps, or cooking tips: sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com. Also do us a favor and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Visit our website and cook yourself something nice.
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.