Thankful 🦃 | Mailbag Leftovers | Recipe: Pizza Sauce(s)
Issue No. 20
In this week’s Sunshine + Microbes, some Thanksgiving thank you’s for the women doing amazing work in the kitchen, fresh links on immigration and dining in the South, and we get lost in da (pizza) sauce.
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Note: There will not be a newsletter next Thursday. Sunshine + Microbes returns December 5. Enjoy the turkey or tofurkey!
As Thanksgiving approaches, I want to share my love for the women who have done the hard, often thankless work of feeding me — stomach and soul. Alina comforted me with cream of wheat and apple juice. Csilla put a big chef’s knife in my hand and coached me until I could mince with the best of them. The scent of Anita’s tomato sauce is my own Proust’s madeleine. Donna tutored me in the art of a properly fried egg. Jenn shared innumerable life lessons during so many early morning cheese making shifts. Micah introduced me to a salad dressing that’s so divine I eat 300 percent more greens now it’s in my life. Rhiana showed me how to calm the f*** down in the kitchen.
I’m not really in the mood to unpack the politics of gender in the kitchen, but it will certainly be on my mind over the holidays. For the first time in many years, I won’t be with my family for Thanksgiving. Next Thursday, I’ll be cooking up a feast for the newly arrived group of artists here at the residency. As I cook, clean, and do my best to build community through this shared meal, I’ll be thinking about the women in my own family -- my mother Marian, my sister Leah, and my sister-in-law Ashley, who succeed at the herculean task of feeding my gigantic family (and many randos) at every major holiday.
We won’t be putting out a newsletter next week, so Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. This year, as always, I’m thankful for so much, but particularly for the immense satisfaction that comes from getting to do what I love: feeding people. So many women have taught me so much about living through food. I hope that I can pass along to others the nurturing that was showered upon me in the kitchen by so many joyful, powerful, and wise women.
love,
Jackie
Sunshine + Microbes’ Holiday Gift Guide
Thank you everyone who already sent in their recommendations for our first annual Sunshine + Microbes Holiday Gift Guide (coming in December!). If you haven’t shared anything yet, there’s still time!
🎁What’s the shiny, new kitchen thingamabob that you can’t imagine cooking without these days? Do you have a beloved cookbook with vegetarian and vegan recipes that blow away even your most carnivorous friends? Is there an awesome eco-friendly product that we should know about?
Send your best gift suggestions sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com. We’ll of course credit you for whatever we use in the guide.
Mailbag Leftovers 2019
Sunshine + Microbes mailbag items sent in by some of our wonderful readers. We always love to hear from y’all! Send in your comments, questions, cooking tips, or whatever the hell else we might find interesting to sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com.
More Tasty Podcast Recs
Stewart Kerrigan suggests a few more food podcast episodes to satisfy your ears:
Fuhmentaboutit: Episode 240: Natto in Brooklyn? Fuhmentaboudit! with Ann Yonetani
A fermenting podcast! This episode goes into how natto is made, why it has it’s unique texture and how to get more Americans to eat it.
Japan Eats!: Episode 163: Born to Preserve the Koji Culture
Japan Eats!: Episode 161: The Charm of Mochi Ice Cream & Amazake
Forbidden Fruit
Chesley Hendry Simmons shares this rad fortune (and she says go see The Lighthouse, a movie about steak and beans and arguing men in moldy, beautiful sweaters).
Forget “Live, Laugh, Love.” Wouldn’t you like to hang this phrase on a slab of wood in your house?:
Fresh Links
Our favorite food and environment reads from around the internet. Give’em a click👇
🦃 Immigrant families in Florida share the dishes on their Thanksgiving table | Tampa Bay Times
Pad thai, egg rolls and of course turkey. Fried or roasted. That’s how Top Kachornpoo’s family celebrates the Thanksgiving holiday in St. Petersburg. Kachornpoo moved from Thailand to Florida three decades ago, now turkey is a dinner staple at the end of every November along with Thai fare like spicy papaya salad.
The Tampa Bay Times interviewed immigrant families about the multicultural dinners they eat during this time of year. Gaze at the photos of these divine dishes. The meals feature Colombian arepas and ajiaco stew, Filipino lechon or Lebanese sfeeha (meat pies) and stuffed grape leaves — alongside traditional Thanksgiving foods like stuffing, cranberry sauce and a sweet pumpkin pie for dessert.
Do you want to try these recipes for yourself? Here’s a link to them:
☄️A Comet Called Raji | Southern Foodways
Southern Foodways, the same publication that makes the lovely foodie podcast Gravy, chronicles the rise and far-too-soon passing of James Beard Award nominated chef Raji Jallepalli.
She moved from the microbiology lab to her own Indian-Franco “thirty-seat, reservation-only Memphis restaurant meant to be her husband Panduranga Jallepalli’s tax shelter” in 1989. Raji Jallepalli had no formal culinary training and would be cooking Indian food in the American South long before that cuisine had caught on in the region. She played a significant role in Indian food’s rise in the area by putting it on equal footing with French dishes on the menu. Restaurant Raji became a phenomenon. The items on her mouth-watering prix fixe menu ranged from tamarind consommé to “corn compote in bowls made from papadums” to “pan-seared scallops on zucchini perfumed with garlic and ajwain.”
Jallepalli died in January 2002 at age 52, and her short but luminous career deserves all the accolades. Her pioneering influence lives on in other chefs who were inspired by her and who would follow in her steps by introducing blended cuisines into the American South.
Vishwesh Bhatt, a chef in Oxford, Miss., told Southern Foodways that Jallepalli was the first to show “you can do elevated Indian food and people will come to eat it.” Meherwan Irani, an Asheville, N.C.-based chef recently found a copy of Jallepalli’s out-of-print cookbook, and the recipes inside were revelatory.
There’s a couple of restaurants, I’m not going to name names, with chefs that think they’re groundbreaking with Indian cuisine,” says Irani. “I’m flipping through a book and I’m like, Dude, this was done twenty years ago by this woman and nobody’s giving her recognition.”
🌯Taking on the Tortilla Industry | NY Times
Ricardo Ortega wants to show the United States that the traditional way of making tortillas in Mexico, using nixtamalized corn, is the best way. He’ll hand you one of his tortillas right off his production line to prove how great they taste.
His business Kernel of Truth Organics, opened in 2014, is fighting back against mass-produced tortillas. While cumbia music plays in the backdrop, the small operation makes some 15,000 tortillas a night the old-fashioned way.
The process of nixtamalization starts with heating and soaking dried corn with cal, or calcium hydroxide (also known as slaked lime). It involves time and labor. But the industrialization of tortillas that began in the 1980s and made them ubiquitous in supermarkets changed that, and put thousands of tortillerias out of business.
Pizza Sauces: Tomato Sauce and Pesto
We’ve arrived at the third and final act of our pizza making epic. What you are about to read will change everything:
When making pizza, don’t cook your tomato sauce.
That’s right. A can of uncooked, doctored-up crushed tomatoes makes the best pizza. Don’t trust me? I learned this trick from America’s Pizza Daddy Chris Bianco. It ensures a bright acidity that makes for a much more vibrant pie than cooked tomato sauce.
Since my recipe for pizza sauce just involves mixing stuff together, I’m throwing in a bonus pesto recipe, which is lovely on pizza, pasta, a hunk of toast, or just spooned straight in ya mouth.
Tomato Sauce
Ingredients
1 can nice crushed tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoon salt
Pinch of pepper
1/2 teaspoon honey
Step-by-step
Mix ingredients thoroughly. Taste to see what else it needs. Doctor it up and set aside. The tomato sauce will keep covered in the fridge for at least a week.
Pesto Sauce
Ingredients and tools
2 cups fresh basil or other fresh herbs
2 tablespoons nuts or seeds (I like walnuts and pumpkin seeds)
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup strong, dry aged cheese like parmesan
Pinch of pepper
1/2 cup olive oil
Salt & pepper to taste'
Step-by-step
Blend all ingredients except for oil in food processor until smooth.
Taste for flavor and consistency and adjust as needed. Don’t be afraid if it’s slightly salty, as the oil will mellow it out. Now add oil and blend. Serve fresh or store it in the fridge for a couple of days, smooshing some parchment paper into the top so that it doesn’t turn brown from contact with the air. The pesto also freezes well.
For a vegan pesto, substitute cheese for nutritional yeast.
For Thanksgiving this year, don’t forget to bring the Kranch???
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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