If you are a Farm Table member and received a box yesterday, you learned that today is Food Revolution Day, a global day of action focusing on good food, and keeping cooking skills alive.

Now this is something we can get behind!

We had the opportunity to visit the students at Linwood-Holton Elementary school in North Richmond today, where program staff were engaging a group of students who visited Holton’s outdoor garden and learning classroom.

Students were able to tour the garden, learn about composting and growing their own food, and worked together to make lunch from scratch using basic ingredients from the garden. The results were delicious!

Schools and organizations across the globe are participating in activities today, in an effort to promote cooking traditions by preparing good food, and teach children the importance of passing those traditions on. We were pleased to see these traditions taught in our own backyard, and were proud sponsors of the Food Revolution Day‘s Junior Chef Cooking Contest held at Kitchen Thyme and West Broad Street yesterday. To learn more about Food Revolution Day check out Jamie Oliver’s website where you will find recipes to share with your children.

What sorts of things are you doing to get the young people in your life cooking and eating fresh, whole food that is good for them? What kind of traditions are you passing down to them? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below, or on our Facebook page! Please share!

We recently hosted an evening of beautness (this word will be found on a lot of our posts when describing anything that makes you say, ‘mmmm’!) for a birthday meal and our canapés were the perfect start to the night.

We served a secret family special recipe of chicken liver parfait served on buttered french bread with home-made red onion marmalade…wow oh wow and some mushroom, goats cheese and walnut, sour dough crostinis topped with apple and fresh parsley.  Little bite-size mouthfuls of deliciousness!

Both very simply recipes and look and taste impressive.  Luckily we had the pleasure of eating some of the extras ourselves.  It would be rude not to try them!

The mushroom and goats cheeses crostinis took around 10 minutes to make, perfect when having guests round for dinner and they taste just as yummy cold as they do warm. You could also serve both as a starter option, but you cant beat being greeted by a plate of enticing goodies.

Inspiration for our mushroom crostinis was taken from a Jamie Oliver recipe, where he served mushroom and stilton croute alongside mushroom soup and we adapted the recipe to serve as a canape with goats cheese instead of stilton.

Recipe to make 8 mushroom and goats cheese sourdough crostinis:

Reblogged from Sundays at Lark:

For a while now I have been a bit of a lover of the Jamie Oliver brand – and for a while now I have thought my dream job would be designing for the Jamie Oliver magazine (combining my two loves – food and design!) anyway I took this photo a while ago of some of the Jamie Oliver products on sale. Got to love that hand drawn typography. I promise you this post has not been sponsored by Jamie. Hope you all have great weekends! I am going to be being a good wife and cleaning the bathroom and doing some hoovering. There will be fun stuff too though!

Posting some food revolution day love from my french brother @jr Respect and thank you were dping the whole street bro !! thanks to all the guys the street party will be amazing today all day come down 72 country’s involved today thousands of events and counting over 700 city’s its been amazing people all standing up to highlight global food issues and the importance of food education !!! :) thanks for everyone’s support by jamieoliver May 17, 2013 at 06:56PM

:-| 사진들이 너무 선명해서 사진을 찍고 다시 instagram으로 올리는걸까… 생각해봄

Today is Food Revolution Day!  This is the worldwide result of Jamie Oliver’s campaign to help people connect with their food, celebrate the diversity of food, and enjoy great, fresh food.  Events are widespread.  I will, in fact, be attending an event later today here with my employer!  The event is free to the public, but donations are accepted.  We’ll be there from 3pm – 6pm, so make sure to stop by and say “Hi!” and revolutionize your food!

Do you know how to cut fennel?  It’s not too difficult, but if you don’t know how to do it, you may never cook with it!  Let’s remove some of the mystery, shall we?

First, scrub the bulb to clean of any dirt.  Cut off the top (fronds).  These are edible, but typically not called for in recipes.  They make a nice garnish!

Next, cut the bulb in half.

Remove the core from each half.  This is tough and woody, so you don’t want to add it to your recipes.

Now, slice the bulb thin, or chop into even smaller pieces; whatever you need for your recipe!

Not too bad, right?  Now, let’s get cooking with it!  This recipe is a slightly different take on a pilaf.  Here, I used farro, which in an ancient form of wheat.  It is sometimes also called emmer wheat.  It is a whole grain that is grown in Italy.  You cook it just like you do brown rice, so if you don’t have farro, feel free to use that.  This pilaf is slightly sweet and licoricy because of the apple cider and fennel.  The fresh mint finishes the dish perfectly.  You will want to make this today!

APPLE FENNEL FARRO PILAF

Serves: 6

Ingredients

2 cups Apple Cider

1 cup Farro, uncooked

1 tsp Olive Oil

1 medium Onion, diced

1 medium Fennel Bulb, diced

1 Tbsp chopped, fresh Mint

Fresh Fennel Fronds to garnish if desired

Directions

1.  Bring apple cider to boil on high heat and add Farro.  Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until grain is done; about 45-60 minutes.

2.  Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a medium pan and sauté onions and fennel until onions are translucent and fennel is soft.

3.  Add farro to fennel mixture and combine.

4.  Turn off burner, and mix in mint.

5.  Serve hot, garnished with fennel fronds.

Happy, healthy eating!

Here’s the wonderful indoor food market in Chania (can’t wait to go back here).

I’ve tried this yummy Jamie Oliver
recipe here before. He adds almonds which makes the cake really moist. The poppy seeds give it a lovely texture too.

I love cooking with lemons – the flavour is awesome & the smell of freshly grated lemon zest is divine. In this recipe it’s important to use un-waxed organic lemons to avoid the nasties in the rind.

Here’s the ingredients:

I wish you could add the heavenly aroma wafting around the kitchen during these shots! Lemon zest is added to the cake batter.

Icing sugar is dissolved into warmed lemon juice for the drizzle. Then, for a triple lemony hit, more juice is added to icing sugar for the glaze.

Mix all the ingredients in a mixer then fold in the poppy seeds & almonds. Resist the temptation to eat the batter!

Pour the mixture into a greased & lined springform cake tin & smooth the top, making a little dip in the middle so that it rises more evenly.

Put it in the oven. Once cooked, while it is still warm, prick holes in the top with a skewer & pour the drizzle into the holes. Finally, pour the glaze over the top in the middle & spread it out over the top of the cake with a pallet knife, letting it dribble over the sides.

There weren’t any pictures of these final stages as Mabel woke early from her nap super grizzly (poor little thing is teething), so I had to finish the cake in a hurry, but here’s the slice I had with my cuppa.

Thanks for the poppy seeds Mum!

Bex
x

I bet few of you knew of this. I didn’t know until today, when I came across a post on Instagram about it.

Basically, this initiative wants to reincorporate traditional cooking in our pre-packaged food lifes.

Nowadays, if you walk into a supermarket, you would see A LOT of packages and labels saying “ready to eat”, “microwable”, “grab’n'go” … and if you dare to read the label, you must likely will give up after trying to read the first ingredients. Chemicals, colorants, artificial sweeteners … our bodies really don’t need that.

Our bodies need wholesome and natural food, not processed “food”. This industry is growing and growing everyday and they take advantage of our busy lifes to make pre-packaged food appealing by simply writing something like this: “ready in 5 minutes” . Really, who wouldn’t want that after a long day at work, university …? But the biggest secret here is that you can have that without all the chemicals and conservants. How?

• Preparing food in bulk and freezing or portioning the prepped food if you’re consuming it in the near future.
• The key here is planification.
• Maybe you’ve heard or see this quote before: If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.

We need to take some time to really think about our health and bodies, because if we don’t, we’ll need to find time to illness in the future. Being ill is no joke, and even if you don’t end up having a stroke, or being diabetic, you could most certainly use a reboot in your diet, don’t you?

So today, I invite you to really think about what’s on your fridge, your shopping cart or your table.

And finally, if you want to know more about this initiative, go here and take a look

I started cooking when I was five. My mother bought me my first cooking set, a toy one of course, and I would play masak masak (literally translated cooking cooking) with my neighbour’s daughter, while mother was at work. We would make meals out of leaves, weeds and mud (or whatever we could forage from our front yards) for Barbie and her friends.

However, I learned most of my cooking skills from helping out the ladies in my family – mother, grandma and my aunts, in the kitchen, and by watching Jamie on tele.

Short for time, I made an egg linguine in two cheese and shredded chicken for dinner tonight to celebrate #FRD2013, recipe bellow.

I hope you had a fabulous #FRD2013, and its never too late to get involve http://www.foodrevolutionday.com/about-the-day.html

Egg linguine in two cheese with twists

Egg linguine dry or fresh (got mine from the super market) enough for two

4 egg yolks

50g feta

1/2 cup grated cheddar

100g shredded chicken

salt and pepper to taste

Add linguine to boiling water with a pinch of salt. Let cook, then drain into a big glass bowl. Leave pasta sitting in colander. Meanwhile, let the pasta water sit in glass bowl for two minutes, pour water in sink, then dry bowl using paper towel.

Put pasta in the bowl along with egg yolks and cheese. Mix through thoroughly. Add chicken, salt and pepper and mix though everything again. Remember that this needs to be done swiftly.

The heat from the glass bowl acts as a catalyst that holds the ingredients together. I use this method to make my carbonara, instead of using cream.

Took me 10 minutes to make this.

Bon Appetito!

As the team from FRD2013 says on their website: “It’s a chance for people to come together within their homes, schools, workplaces and communities to cook and share their kitchen skills, food knowledge and resources”.

I`m not much of a cook. I can honestly say that I sometimes get wrong even an omlette or french fries. But…I love to eat. And had the opportunity to travel a lot and to share my life with someone who loves to cook.

Today, on the second Food Revolution Day, I want to share with you some of the amazing things that my wife, Raluca, cooks each day. If you need recipes, contact her. If you need an amateur food critic, contact me:).

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Jamie Oliver wants people to gather and share their culinary knowledge, cook together, eat and discuss the centrality of food in life.

So why does he want a Food Revolution Day? Well, he’s been on a mission, trying to change the way people relate to food, for years now. On the holiday’s website he explains; “Cooking skills used to be passed down from generation to generation, but now millions of people lack even the most basic cooking skills. We need to get back to basics; to cook and eat local produce; to share cooking skills and food knowledge; to join forces with communities and get as many people involved as possible. Food Revolution Day is our opportunity to get the world to focus on the importance of good food and essential cooking skills”. You can visit the website here; http://foodrevolutionday.com/

Read the full article on TED; http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/16/jamie-oliver-gears-up-for-food-revolution-day-on-may-17/