Written by Jerusha Klemperer, Director of Communications for FoodCorps & former Associate Director of Campaigns and Projects for Slow Food USA
As I’m writing this, I’m eating lunch. Lunch is a favorite meal of mine, because it’s almost always something I’ve cooked myself. I live in a city, and live the kind of life in which dinner out is a frequent occurrence. But lunch is my respite from all that.
When I worked at Slow Food USA I was part of a terrific lunch coop with some other staff members, which meant that I ate home cooked meals every day for 9 months: everything from pernil to cabbage dumplings to gazpacho. We got our recipes from old favorite cookbooks like Bloodroot, from terrific online recipe communities like Food52, from favorite food blogs like 101 Cookbooks, and from family recipes passed down from our parents. Sometimes we were just making stuff up. I loved it all because it made lunch special, which is something I am still trying to maintain, despite no longer being part of a coop.
I work at FoodCorps now (Slow Food USA is a founding partner), where our service members around the country spend their days trying to make school food—and school lunch in particular—healthier for children. What better example can I set than to make my lunch fresh, healthy and delicious, too?
So today it’ s day 3 of rice from a recipe I invented to use the corn and scallions from my CSA; and a crustless quiche with quinoa and kale, from a recipe that caught my eye on Food52 (and that could use up various bits and bobs languishing on my refrigerator shelves).
It’s worth mentioning (humblebrag alert!) that the corn stock I used was in my freezer from LAST SUMMER when I boiled all my used corncobs, made stock, and smugly stuck it in my freezer for “the long, hard winter.” It is now August. Ack.
