The next steps

As most of you know, I took some months off to explore the world of food and to figure out whether there's a space for me in there, professionally. And I came to the conclusion that there is. It will be a long way, many obstacles, I believe quite some opportunities and a lot of fun.

I don't plan to become a cook. I believe for the same reasons I never had the slightest intend to become a DJ, even though I started my own radio years back and played some songs. I find it boring to entertain people, it's basically not for me. I don't want to serve people something and even worse try to please them, I want to enable them to do their own thing. 

My goal is to get people into home cooking. Not to cook fancy dishes, but to make food for themselves, their friends and families. Every day. Simple dishes, with seasonal and regional produce that are well affordable.

With this motivation I started Good Food. For Everybody. Now well into the seventh edition I'm currently working on getting away from the very simple Squarespace page. It worked well in the beginning, but now I simply need more flexibility and possibilities. I hope for it to become a space where people find inspiration regarding food and cooking and some helpful tips. There's a lot of work to do, but I believe it's worthwhile!

But I'm even more excited about another next step: kwiri. kwiri will be basically a highly connected database around food. It will power the website, but hopefully much more in the future. One first step is going to be a very first iOS application, which will hopefully find it's way into the app store in the not too far future. (Thanks Ullrich for helping me build it and thanks Johannes for making already a first start some months ago!)

There are so many things to do and to be figured out in terms of what to build, not even mentioning on how to finance the project. But I'm super excited and made already a 5 year plan :)

The next update will be about the launch of kwiri. And if you are interested in food, capable of coding, designing, cooking, writing, taking pictures or anything else and have too much time, ping me!  

Close to be send: Good Food for Everybody

All photos are taken, words almost written, soon the very first version of Good Food for Everybody goes out. 

I was surprised how much effort it took. The pictures, the setting up of a website, the recipes. I'm mildly over rhubarb, which is the star of the first mail. It's far from perfect, but there's time and space to improve. Most important is that it will go out.

I'm super curious how the whole project develops. Whether I'll manage to continue, how people perceive it and how the next ones will look like.

Big thanks go out to Tara Deacon who illustrated things so nicely!

If you haven't yet, go out to https://www.goodfoodforeverybody.com/ and sign up for the newsletter. Looking forward to your feedback!

Lets start!

At least the last year I'm constantly thinking that I really want to work in the field of food. I'm thinking and thinking, thinking about how I could possibly make money doing that. Sometimes I'm thinking as well that I should skip the city and work very literally in food, trying to be self sufficient on my own farm. 

But I'm going circles, and I don't progress. Let's change gears a bit. 

When I say I want to work in food, I don't mean that I want to become a chef. I don't want to produce food and then sell it to people. I actually want the exact opposite. I want that people rediscover their kitchens, in a very down to earth way. I don't believe in super foods and health fads, but in vegetables, proper meat and being proud when you enjoy the food you've prepared. I want to get people into homecooking, that they nourish themselves and don't let big corporations do that for them. I'm fully aware that many people are pushing that topic already, but I don't believe that that is as reason not to join them. There's a lot to do.

I will work on my mission statement, but the previous words are a first version. What now?

Thinking about that, I was always starting to dream. I would love to have a place in Berlin, with a garden, an office space and a proper kitchen for several people, plus a space to eat. A place where people can meet, where people from all ways of life can get together and cook, and learn, and teach. It should be a very beautiful place. And ideally it would be coupled up with a little farm where produce is grown, and people could spend some time to experience the life of a farmer. It should be a very beautiful place. And we really need to act locally, so we would need to have several of these places all over the world. All very unique to their area, but in partnership and exchange with all other places. Rich people could go on vacation and learn how to regionally cook and paying at the same time for food education for local kids that might not be able to get that education otherwise. It should be many very beautiful places. And it would be so much fun setting them all up.

But unfortunately I don't have a fortune to make that reality and no investor who's in her right mind would give me the money with me having zero expertise in that field. Plus, there's no business model.

So I need to start small, learn, meet other people, talk with other people and take it from there. Slow but steady. 

The whole endeavour is called: Good Food. For Everybody. It will start as a bi-weekly newsletter. You can sign up here: http://goodfoodforeverybody.com/

Es wird auch eine deutsche Version geben: Gutes Essen. Für Alle. Hier kann man sich für den Newsletter anmelden: http://gutesessenfueralle.de/

And, always ping me! :)

A write up.

At the beginning of 2017 I wrote a quick write up of my travels in food so far for Hey Woman, you can read that here: http://hey-woman.com/2017/selfmade-experts-katharina-birkenbach-food-medicine/

I really hope and work on intensifying the journey. It might get interesting.

Do not waste. Make ACV.

So, basically my attempt to regularly blog failed big time. But it's never too late to continue.

While I was not writing anything, I was doing and trying so much with food, specially trying to preserve food. And it was October, the great apple month. I was making apple tarte, dehydrating them to have some healthy snacks and I did this: I made my own apple cider vinegar. I never even considered making my own ACV, but stumbled upon it in Vinegar Socks, a nice little book about home remedies and in Alice Waters pantry book. 

It's super easy:

1 - Get some apples

That's actually the fascinating part. You can buy some apples and just chop them up. Or you can save your apple leftovers (peels and cores) in the fridge and once you have enough start making your vinegar. That tip was in the book by Alice Waters and is now how I start my vinegar. Less waste!

2 - Add water and honey

Here as with the Kvass earlier, I don't measure too much. A spoon and some water, if it's a lot of apples I use the big jar, if not the small one. Cover it with a cheese cloth.

3 - Wait in the dark

For good two weeks, actually. Make sure that the environment is indeed dark. Until the apples are sinking and a bit of foam is building, it should smell a bit like alcohol. After that strain the fluid in a bottle and let it sit another 6 to 8 weeks. The alcohol should go away and the smell is more vinegary. After 6 weeks start testing until you like the taste, than remove the cheese cloth and close it properly.

Super simple, and ACV is really good for you. 

Almost finished ACV

Making beet kvass

Kvass was the first thing that I actually produced with fermentation. I nowadays set up every week two large Weck jars full of it and drink it every morning as breakfast. 

But what is kvass? It's a ferment where actually the brine is the main ingredient, you could nearly imagine it as a vegetable infusion. When you make for example kimchi, the solid pieces are the main thing, the reason why you are doing it. With kvass it's the fluid, the brine. The most common kvass is actually not done with vegetables, but with bread. Personally I have never tasted it, or tried to make it. So I'm only describing how to make beet kvass, at least for now.

It is said that beet kvass is highly beneficial for your health:

“This drink is valuable for its medicinal qualities and as a digestive aid. Beets are just loaded with nutrients. One 4-ounce glass, morning and night, is an excellent blood tonic, promotes regularity, aids digestion, alkalizes the blood, cleanses the liver and is a good treatment for kidney stones and other ailments.”

— Sally Fallon in Nourishing Traditions

It can't be unhealthy in any case, plus when I drink it in the morning it feels like it's cleaning me up from the inside, but I'm decently sure that it might be excellent with vodka. 

Step 1 - Get the ingredients

You can use just normal beets, but you might as well try to get some that look a bit more interesting, e.g. golden or candy beets. Candy beets are less strong than the regular ones and they give a nice pink color. Try to get them from an organic source. You won't peel them and I personally never clean them too well. 

You need as well an organic orange, an organic lemon, some ginger and some fresh turmeric (if you can't find that you can use the powder as well, did that once and it wasn't too bad). Sea salt and water is needed as well. The recipes that I've seen talk about not using tap water. They are all from american sources where I never had any tap water either because it was so full of chloride. The tap water in Germany is afaic really good and doesn't have any chloride in it, so I just use that. I tried it with spring water once and it didn't really make a difference.

I'm using a big Weck jar as container.

Ingredients for a good liter of kvass

• Roughly 5 to 6 organic beets, depends on size. Should fill two thirds of the container
• 1 organic orange
• 1 organic lemon
• some ginger, maybe 3cm
• some turmeric, same amount as ginger
• a teaspoon unrefined sea salt 
• water

You should wash everything.

Step 2 - Cut and grate

Chopped ingredients for two big jars, one with golden beets, the other one with candy beets.

Cut the beets, not too small, not too big. I usually cut a normal sized beet in 12 pieces. Quarter the orange and the lemon. Grate the ginger and turmeric.

Step 3 - Assemble and squeeze

Add the beet chunks to the container. Squeeze the orange quarters over the beets, put the quarters in the container. Do the same with the lemon quarters. Add the ginger and turmeric.

Step 4 - Add water

Dissolve the sea salt in the water and pour it in the container. Leave a bit of space. Cover the container.

The resulting colors here are already nice, but are much more spectacular when you get green lemons and normal beets.

Step 5 - Wait and see

Let the kvass do it's thing for 4 to 5 days, maybe stir it gently every day. I'm not always doing that. After that time strain the liquid from the beets and store it in bottles in the fridge. There will be a bit of carbonation building up. Ideally let it sit for a bit more time before drinking.

And that's basically it. When I make my kvass all things usually vary a bit. I don't believe that's disastrous, so far they all tasted good. I'm going to experiment a bit more, specifically varying the ingredients. I read that kvass can be made as well with fruit and salad, will give it a try.

And then, there was fermentation

I'm spending currently a lot of time with fermentation. It's super fascinating to see vegetables transform over time in something boldly beautiful and nourishing. 

In the beginning of the year I went on a little road trip to Point Arena. Spontaneously I decided to not drive up the coastal highway, but take a little detour via Healdsburg to visit SHED. SHED is an absolutely beautiful place completely dedicated to food. There's a restaurant, there's a small market with fresh and selected produce, a shop for kitchen ware and garden utensils. (I'm not going to lie, it's certainly not on the cheap side of things). I actually looked for seeds when I stumbled upon a Kombucha making set, a huge jar, some cheese cloth, some printed out instructions and a SCOBY. The whole thing looked so unpretentious and actually fun to try out, that I got the set. 

That is basically how fermentation started for me. In the coming weeks I'm going to post some HowTos here. Specifically looking forward to the (beet) Kvass, it makes the most pretty colors.

So many uncertainties

I quit my decently perfect job for no other reason than me not seeing myself in that position and context in five years. Plus, I came to realize that I'm not going to live forever. It was a well planned and reflected decision. Mainly based on my gut.

I'm giving myself the next few months to dive deeper into the topic I'm most interested in. Food. From all different perspectives, production, health, cultural and social impact. I thought about getting into a completely different profession, to become a gardener, butcher, farmer. But in the end I have a great profession that is quite stretchable and allows me to work within areas of interest, I'm a designer.

If you know somebody who's doing something interesting in this area, or if you are doing or want to do something yourself, if you know a good article, book, movie, blog, please let me know! Just drop me a mail. I'm going to publish something here every day, sometimes it might be just a collection of links, sometimes a text or images. Let's see what's out there!