The Slow Food USA Blog

Time for Lunch*

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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.

Corn, Bacon and Scallion Rice:
(makes 4-6 servings)

• 3 cups corn stock (or water or broth)
• 1.5 cups basmati rice
• 2 strips thick cut bacon
• 3 scallions, sliced thinly, white/light green/dark green parts
• 1 ear corn, shucked, kernels cut off the cob
• salt & pepper to taste

1. Cook the rice according to instructions on the package, using corn stock in place of water
2. In the meantime, fry up the bacon to desired crispiness
3. Drain the bacon on paper towels and pour out half the bacon fat from the pan, into a little glass dish that goes in your fridge and someday gets used to fry up potatoes for breakfast. Or make turkey gumbo! Once I did that and it rocked.
4. When bacon is cool, cut it into chunks or strips
5. Saute the corn and the scallions in the bacon fat until corn is still tender but cooked through and scallions have brightened their green color.
6. Toss scallions, corn and bacon with the rice. Season to taste.

If you’d like to read more recipes and musings like this, check out my blog, Eat Here 2.

* It’s true. TFL is the name of the first big campaign SFUSA ever did (and one that I worked on!)