…Beyond potluck

The Initiative

Members of community get together for a cooking demonstration using 80-90% local produce and then eat a Communal Platter!

1. Is a seasonal event - Spring, Summer, and Fall - given our short growing cycle.
2. Encourages slow food movement in the community.
3. Each community participant brings a locally-grown produce item from the local Farmer’s market, their garden, their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and/or Community Roots.
4. The chef of the day can plan ahead and decide on produce to be brought to the Communal Platter event OR be surprised and concoct meals based on the produce brought in by the event participants.
5. Each Communal Platter participant shall walk, bike, take public transport or, as last resort, car pool to the event.
6. Each Communal Platter has a minimum of 12 and maximum of 16 participants.
7. Bring your own place settings (BYOPS).

Food in the ‘Hood. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! And Real Local!

Organize your own Communal Platter.

 

 

Communal Platter Dinner:

A Heaping Serving of Environmental Activism

By

Cathy Conery

 On a crisp November evening about twenty people gathered at the home of Sanjay Rajan and Jala Pfaff to participate in Newlands’ first Communal Platter cooking party. As neighbors arrived, they couldn’t tell a party was in progress. Cars did not line the street. One of the tenets of Communal Platter dinners, a name coined by Sanjay for the nationwide slow food, local food movement, is that guests must arrive on foot, bicycle, public transportation or – as a last resort - carpool. Entering the newly remodeled home, part of which had originally been a chicken coop, new arrivals found pots and pans sizzling on the stove, all burners in use.

Food was provided by the participants, with three caveats. It had to be local, organic and, because the hosts ate no meat, vegetarian. In midsummer, with Boulder’s Farmers’ Market and produce stands operating and, even, grocery stores overflowing with local produce, this is not a problem.

 Mid-November, finding local produce can be a challenge. Sanjay assigned participants to food groups - vegetables, proteins or carbohydrates. He also planned the menu, incorporating the foods participants told him they were bringing and whatever food came through the door. First one, then two, then three neighbors arrived with fingerling potatoes, and the frying pan of minced local onions and garlic, spices from Sanjay’s floor-to-ceiling spice cupboard, almost overflowed with potatoes and more potatoes. Other ingredients brought included a butternut squash that was made into soup, a kabocha squash that was oven-roasted, kale sautéed with onions, garlic, and tomatoes, and tofu cooked with local vegetables. Sanjay, who is originally from Hyderabad, India, showed interested cooks how to squeeze the moisture from local tofu before cooking it in minimal oil.

 Participants moved easily from chopping and stirring to talking with neighbors they had never met or reconnecting with old friends, to sipping local beers and wines, and back again to cooking. In addition to BYOB, participants were asked to BYOPS, Bring Your Own Place Setting, reducing waste by avoiding paper and plastic dining products.

 Some diners arrived later, choosing to bring prepared dishes which included carrots, picked from their garden that day, and homemade applesauce. An earlier Communal Platter in September was hosted at the home of Deborah Yin and Leonard May. At that dinner, each participant brought a prepared dish made from local and organic ingredients.

 When the food was ready at Sanjay and Jala’s house, the group served themselves on dinnerware they had brought and moved into the open plan living room/dining room, sitting in a circle on a plethora of pillows or on the couch or at a small table as they ate. Conversations ranged from Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, the author’s story about a year of eating locally, to the difficulty of finding local grains, to getting shares in local dairies, to the option of raising your own chickens within Boulder city limits. One participant raved about the taste of fresh eggs. All agreed the dinner had raised their consciousness about the pleasures and challenges of becoming a locavore.

The word, locavore, was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius, thereby, reducing food’s carbon footprint. Locavore was voted 2007’s “Word of the Year” by Oxford University Press. Sunset magazine recently described Boulder as being at the forefront of this movement.

 Apples picked from a neighbor’s tree were sliced and baked for dessert. As the group divvied up the fragrant fruit, Michael Brownlee of Transition Boulder County talked about Transition Neighborhoods, an initiative based on getting neighborhoods to be more self-sufficient. The evening ended with a tour of the upstairs, including Jala’s orchid room, filled with dozens of prize-winning orchids and the ribbons to prove it.

 The temperature had dropped as participants walked home, dirty dishes in hand, but pleasantly sated with good food and stimulating conversation, excited about new directions for Newlands and already looking forward to the next Communal Platter. Clearly, these were citizens committed to doing what they could to help the planet one meal at a time.