At times the restaurant business is all consuming. In 1974, while in
college, I applied to cook at this little hippie restaurant upstairs
in an old building on the corner of Locust and Vine in the "student
ghetto" as it was and is fondly referred to. The Troubadour restaurant
was a very warm space that has been left pretty much unchanged all
these years under the watchful eye of Kim Kavanaugh owner/chef of
Cosmos Cusina/O'Duffy's .

That was the beginning of some overlap of my career choices and Kim's.
Kim and I were not close friends but women committed to running
restaurants focused on working with fresh local foods within our
"neighborhoods".

Time seems so precious these days as I watch many of my close friends
go through cancer, care for their aging parents and begin the empty
nest phase of life. One begins to ask if what they spend 70 +hrs a
week doing makes life worth it?

I know for Kim she gave a large piece of her life to Cosmos/O'Duffys
and her neighborhood. She both loved and tired of the business I
sensed. I only hope she was able to find some peace in the realization
that she brought joy to so many people with such a warm comfortable
place to gather and eat great food. I celebrate her life and I will
miss her.

Julie

I thought the best part of breaking down a couple of hogs in my kitchen would be… well breaking down a couple of hogs in my kitchen. If any kitchen in Kalamazoo is set-up to butcher two whole hogs at once, it's ours. With sheer size, equipment, and staff experience we were able to butcher them in four hours down to the usable cut. It's been a long time for me, at least six years, but that’s pretty impressive for 450lbs of porky goodness. The best part turned out to be my staff’s enthusiasm, knowledge, and overall love of learning the lost craft of butchery.

 

Most of us were on the back end of a long week, a couple of our staff came down with illness but like sand, we always fill the cracks. By the end of Sunday’s brunch, the anticipation started to give us the energy the long week had stripped from us. Zach had worked seven days with no break, and by the start of the second pig we had to stop him. He was shaking with exhaustion. At this point where most people would have gone home and slept, he grabbed himself a milk crate and granola bar and watched till the last chop was cut. He even then helped clean up.

            

Tony “Slasher” (not “Big Tone”) saved us with the chine bone. Pork Chine is a square shaped area across the backbone between the shoulder blades that holds tender meat, which can be sort of a bear without a bandsaw. As we struggled to saw it with our large bone saw, Tony suggested a method that included a cleaver and a meat mallet. We blew him off the first couple of times, because tony is a super ambitious kid but lacks a lot of knowledge due to the fact that he is 21 and is very much in the learning stage of his early career. Little did I know that Bistro Rio, where Tony previously had worked, they had done this and he remembered it all pretty well. Pat and Ryan both served 600 guests for brunch this day and stayed ‘til the end, peeling skin and washing down the butcher blocks. I’m not sure what I did to deserve such an amazing and dedicated staff but I got one.

-Robb "Chef" Hammond

 

            

        

            

The list of items we are making with the two hogs are:

BBQ Pulled Pork

Pork Chops

Breakfast Sausage for Biscuits and gravy

Chorizo

Pancetta

Coppa

Lardo

Guanciale

Ribs for staff meal

Jagdwurst (Hunter Sausage)

Sopressata

 

I will update each one of these as they come out of the salt, or go into the casings.

Our pork chops are now on the menu, look for the rest in the coming weeks.

On December 16th, the gloves come off at 6pm. Reserve's own Chef Matthew Millar & Sommelier Peter Marantette take on Food Dance Café’s Robb Hammond & New Holland Brewing Beervangelist Fred Bueltman in a battle of beer vrs. wine. The Reserve team will pair wine with the French classic, Beef Bourguignon, while Robb and Fred will pair beer with Carbonnade, the Belgian stew of beef, onions, and beer. Two beverages, two beef stews, tons of fun. Vote for your favorite and resolve the age old debate.

For more information and to purchase tickets in advance please visit...
http://www.reservegr.com/news/read/beer-vs.-wine

Last Easter I attended a great concert in Ann Arbor that featured Laura Gibson and Damien Jurardo. I was struck by the craft in which both performers moved through their sets, as though they where at work. Not showing off or over performing , just entertaining with an earnest appreciation of the fact they get to do what they love and we were there to enjoy. As I watched one of the performers play a saw (yes the cutting tool) like a haunting violin, I started to realize the correlation between the approach they took to their work, and what I was trying to build at Food Dance. The idea that food doesn't need to be all show and described and presented like art. What we do has more in common with a blacksmith, then a gallery artist. This blog will be dedicated to the American Craftsmen and women whom work day in and day out to produce fine food, and drink and what we do with it here at Food Dance. Cheese producers to brewers, farmers, wine makers, and caretakers of great humanely raised meat, and fish.

Chef— Robb Hammond

December Art Hop featuring food photography by Susan Andress. "My work is an exploration of the connection between nature and decorative art. I combine decorative motifs and patterns with the inspiration for them based in nature. I rearrange them to come up with something new mixing cultures and eras."







http://www.susanandress.com/

Chefs from 15 of the area's finest restaurants and caterers will each prepare a unique "small plate" dish using the best late-harvest local ingredients. All event participants will have the chance to vote for their favorite dish, and the winning chef will be presented with this year's Golden Ladle Award.

Saturday, November 20, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

314 South Park Street, Kalamazoo
Tickets are $35 in advance (or $40 at the door)
Proceeds will benefit Fair Food Matters.

We have so much fun creating seasonal full flavored cocktails using classic mixology techniques with fresh ingredients. Before the sugared infused alcohol craze, cocktails were more balanced. We strive to put that back into our cocktails by using great ingredients not sugared alcohol. We just got a fabulous commercial juice machine and, besides making amazingly fresh orange juice, we are offering fresh squeezed lemonade. We think you can really taste the freshness and attention to detail in our cocktails. We’re particularly fond of our Mojito — muddled fresh mint, lime, a little sugar and it just gets better when you add the rum! We’ve also been experimenting with all the fresh fruit coming in this season — try our fresh peach Mojito we just created — really refreshing.

Confinement raised animals are not called farm raised for a reason. They are from factories. I want to have relationships with the people who raise the food I eat. — and the food we make for you. Artificially cheap food is a fundamental problem in American Society — it allows us not to face reality. In the quest for modernization we have created factories that pollute, treat our resources with little respect and eliminate the very farms that have provided our society with clean fresh food for centuries. In the restaurant industry finding great tasting yet humanely raised meat in cuts people would buy was scarce to none. Finding Niman (Nye-man) Ranch as a source about 6 years back changed our options. Niman Ranch contracts with small family farms to raise animals with a strict set of rules: grassed on open pasture, clean water, no antibiotics or growth hormones, stewardship of the land, organic feed and humane treatment. The Niman family of farms are dedicated to sustainable husbandry.

Pigs in Decatur

We pulled up behind Dave Warkentien, at Young Earth Farm, in his bright baby blue truck loaded with 5 gallon buckets of corn meal as these beautiful happy hogs came running, yes really running at 350 lbs, up to the fence. Dave hops over and spreads out the feed, corn and soybean, on a patch of cement while we watch them go to town. Well, I am not sure if you would ever guess this is a hog farm, at least none that I have ever seen. There aren’t even any pig huts, that we saw. The pigs forage from the land eating alfalfa, clover, grubs, some acorns and when they want to cool down, they saunter on over to the woods in the shade. Dave tells us he knew the moment he was sitting in his high school drafting class — the windows open, a nice cool breeze coming in and birds chirping — that he couldn’t sit inside for the rest of his life. He was going to raise hogs just like his father. Dave wouldn’t have it any other way but to care for his pigs with respect while letting them live naturally in the elements. Dave says you can taste the difference in animals that are cared for and I agree. It costs more to raise animals this way but it is definitely worth it.

Take Norm Carlson, of Carlson Farms,

he and his wife deliver eggs and pastured chickens to us each week from their farm outside of Decatur, Michigan. Their farm is just like the Norman Rockwell pictures of the 50’s, clean, rolling hills, woods and lots of open pasture. Their chickens just strut around and look happy. Running into Norm on his weekly delivery to us always brings out some great stories about the farm and his flock.

Norm backs his truck into our loading area, grabs one of our handcarts, loads the 6-8 cases of eggs (that’s about 240 dozen) and stacks them in one of our coolers. Now that’s great service! “Pastured” means just that — the chickens run around on the farm in the fresh air pecking there way across the fields, eating and doing what comes natural to chickens. Those grubs they come by have lots of beta-carotene that gives the yolks and their fat a beautiful rich golden hue, with great taste and healthy benefits. Pastured chickens are also so busy exercising, their meat becomes naturally dark from the increased blood flow which also yields a more old fashion chicken flavor. You might compare it to the difference between a garden fresh tomato and a hothouse tomato. Both have good flavor but the one grown in the earth, with nature’s elements, will taste more “tomatoey”. Pasture raised chicken has a slightly firmer meat texture (not tough) and is never mushy. In addition to eating as they please Norm gives them certified organic feed just to make sure they’re happy.

Anson Mills Polenta Located in South Carolina.

Glenn Roberts is committed to growing heirloom varieties of  rice, corn and wheat using certified organic practices and milling the grains at the time of ordering. They mill using a traditional method called cold milling, keeping the damaging heat away from the grain produces a much more full flavored product. Taste our polenta and you might not want to eat any other.

Sustainable fishing practices

Wild Alaskan salmon tastes totally different than farmed raised salmon. This fish is pretty lean, dark orange in color and tastes sweet not “fishy.” We buy fresh when we can or frozen-on-the-boats, when the salmon stop running. The scallops we use are “dry packed.” What does this mean you might ask? Most scallops are pumped full of salt water to add more weight to them, thus yielding a better price. But we use just-picked whole scallops that are packed right after they are caught. When you pan sear a scallop that isn’t dry packed it never gets a great-caramelized crust on it because the water keeps steaming out. But, searing a dry packed scallop yields a sweet tender morsel that melts in your mouth. We definitely can taste the difference.