ComeUnity at Home
Austin L. Brown
Jessie Perkins
BY AUSTIN L. BROWN
Photos BY CARI GRIFFITH
STYLING BY MORGAN WALKER CARKUFF
FEATURED IN VOL 6, ISSUE 1: Around the table
Cooking at home should never be stressful or frustrating. Whether you’re throwing together a simple lunch or making dinner for the neighborhood, it should be a pleasant, relaxing experience. You also don’t need to be a classically trained chef or have a kitchen stocked with exotic ingredients to whip up something delicious. Anyone can do this, and that’s what we’re going to show you.
Jesse Perkins and I have been chefs at ComeUnity Café for six years now. Jesse has been there since day one, and I came on board about a year later. The Café’s menu changes daily, with items made from as many locally sourced ingredients as possible. To us, creative freedom coupled with helping the community makes cooking there a dream job. However, when people hear about our routine, their response is often how terrifying that sounds. Then sprinkle on the fact that most mornings we go into our kitchen with no idea what we’ll be making that day; I can see how that may sound intimidating to some. However, like I said, cooking should never be stressful.
The process of making our menus isn’t grandiose. Sometimes we plan out a menu a day or two before, but most days everything you see was hastily thrown together from what we currently had in the fridge.
Our first step, after starting the coffee and tea, is usually Jesse and I shambling to the fridges, shouting “Soooo, what do we have” to each other in between quoting Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and 90’s Jim Carrey movies. We take a quick inventory of what’s available and plan accordingly. Often it’s Jesse’s latest haul from the Farmer’s Market, but not always. In fact, sizable portions of our ingredients are donations from people looking to help out, or from Grubb’s, who we are not ashamed to admit have saved our skins more times than we can count. This menu, for instance, was purposefully composed of groceries you may already have sitting in your fridge. If not, that’s okay too, everything we use is quite affordable. We’re all about getting the most bang for your buck at the Café.
After we determine what the menu will be, depending on the obscurity of our ideas, we’ll check to see if any of it already exists on the internet. Most of the time it does, and we’ll take note of how someone like “Karen” makes her food on her blog, but we’ll use it more as a guide than anything else. We like to cook instinctually at the Café, and so should you. (Unless you’re baking. Then you better follow that recipe to the letter.) After the dust settles, we get to work, delegating the easier tasks to our volunteers and handling the more demanding prep work ourselves.
While our menus are a collective effort, Jesse usually takes point on the soups. Let me tell you, he is great at it. We’ve worked together for almost a decade, and he has never ceased to amaze me with his culinary creativity and ingenuity. What that man can do with random groceries, a kitchen knife, and a wooden spoon is like watching Rembrandt with his paintbrush or Mozart with his...music stick? My point is, the number of times I’ve witnessed Jesse pull a miracle from a toboggan would make your head spin.
Anyway, enough story time. If you read through this, good on you. I hope my introduction was slightly more entertaining than Karen’s casserole stories. Now’s the time to wash your hands, glove up, and get to work. You can do it. I believe in you. Let’s go!
Things you will need:
Heat source (oven, stove, the sun)
Soup pot and wooden spoon
Cutting utensil (kitchen knife, laser beam)
Cutting surface (cutting board, chopping block for deserters of the Night’s Watch)
Food processor/immersion blender (or a pestle & mortar if you want to be ole-timey)
Groceries you will need:
Avocado
Bacon
Bunch green onion (pesto & salad)
Bunch parsley
Butter
Chicken broth
Crusty bread (sandy & soup; we prefer sourdough)
Feta crumbles
Fresh dill
Good mayo (we prefer Duke’s)
Garlic (soup & dressing)
Heavy cream
Heirloom tomato (salad & sandy)
Lemons (pesto & dressing)
Olive oil (pesto & soup)
Parmesan
Rose creek lettuce (salad & sandy)
Plain greek yogurt
Radish
Red wine vinegar
Sprig rosemary
Yellow onion
Pesto:
4 oz Rose Creek basil
Bunch green onion
Bunch parsley
4 cloves garlic
Salt & pepper
Squeeze of lemon
¼ C parmesan
Olive oil
Combine all except olive oil in the food processor. Pulse, gradually adding olive oil, until reaching desired smoothness.
BLT SANDWICH
Marmilu Farms bacon (If you want to get a little crazy, sprinkle ~1 T brown sugar over the bacon halfway through cooking. Candied bacon is a true unsung hero)
Pesto
Heirloom tomato (sliced)
Rose Creek lettuce
Crusty sourdough
Cook bacon (Technically, you can cook the bacon however you want. At the Café, we prefer to preheat the oven at 400 and cook the bacon on an oven-safe wire rack over a tray. Helps drain the grease and gives it an excellent crisp.)
Toast sourdough and spread on pesto.
Stack the sandwich to your liking, adding as much bacon, tomato, or lettuce as you desire. Nothing has to be even. It’s your BLT, after all.
Winter Garlic Soup:
10-12 cloves garlic
Olive oil
2 T butter
1 yellow onion
1 sprig rosemary
1 qt chicken broth
½ loaf stale crusty bread (perhaps the leftover sourdough)
1 C heavy cream
Preheat soup pot to 350.
Toss garlic in olive oil and roast until golden brown.
Sauté onion and garlic in butter.
Add chicken broth, simmer.
Add cream and bread, simmer (I’m going to be honest with you, at this stage, the soup won’t look pretty. But worry not, this frog will turn into a prince soon enough. Trust me.)
Blend thoroughly with immersion or food processor.
Enjoy!
Creamy Feta Dill Dressing
1 C plain yogurt
1 T good mayo
2 cloves garlic (minced)
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt & pepper to taste
½ C feta crumbles
1 T fresh dill
1 T red wine vinegar
In a large bowl, combine everything thoroughly.
Rose Creek Garden Salad:
Avocado (sliced or diced)
Radish (sliced super-duper thin)
Green onion (chopped)
Heirloom tomato (if the tomato is large, dice. If not, quarter it)
Rose Creek lettuce
Toss everything in a salad bowl and add the desired amount of creamy dressing.