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FOOD
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2009
Brought
to you by Kitchen Caravan
Click Here to visit the KC website & Subscribe
 It's
Time for Some Corn...
Corn
is in abundance right now, and we at Kitchen Caravan couldn't be happier.
Corn is a great ingredient because it's so versatile. It can
be eaten alone, boiled or off the grill, or in salads, soups, appetizers,
main dishes, and even desserts. Our favorite way to eat corn is just
right off the cob with a little bit of Herb
Oil drizzled over it. We also love to experiment
with the classic combination of corn and seafood. For late summer
evening dinner parties, we love to make Narragansett
Corn Fritters with Smoked Trout . For a more
relaxed dinner for two, our Zucchini
with Corn, Clams, and Scallops is
the perfect healthy recipe. There are many ways to
incorporate corn in to a variety of recipes, so visit your local farm or
farmers market and enjoy!
This
week's cocktail is the Provence
Princess, a dainty gin cocktail with fresh apricot
nectar, lavender, and rosewater.
Piquant
Preserved Lemon
 This
week we are having fun with Preserved
Lemons. Preserved lemon is a North African
preparation of preserving lemon in its own juice and salt. We love
cooking with this unique ingredient because there is no other flavor like
it. It is salty, bitter, and pungent all at the same time.
This week
we not only teach you how
to preserve your own lemons at home, but we also add
them to guacamole,
tuna
salad,
martinis,
and more. Check back often this week as we are cooking like crazy
with this Summer's must-have ingredient!
And don't
forget to visit us every week for Summer
Cocktail Fridays!
JULY-AUGUST 2009
Interview:
Emma
Piper-Burket & Sophia Brittan
Creators
of
Kitchen
Caravan first appeared two years ago, the brainchild of two young women
who went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., together.
ragazine.cc has been favored with their recipes and stories, so we finally
decided it was high time to find out where the Caravan came from, and what
culinary and cultural cravings drive Emma and Sophia from town to town and
country to country to bring such a diverse offering to those who not only
love food, but love living, as well.
Question.
Everybody has to eat, but not everyone likes to cook, let alone do a
program. What's that about?
Sophia: Everyone has
their own tastes and food habits. The most important thing is to
enjoy eating, and enjoy eating healthy foods. There should be no
rules once you are eating healthily.
Emma: One of the things we want to do with Kitchen Caravan is show people that
cooking isn’t just an activity for people who like to cook — it’s
part of daily life (or should be). Sometimes it takes a conscious
effort, but it’s worth it. Being able to feed ourselves and
knowing where our food comes from contributes to our well being in so many
ways.
Q. Emma and
Sophia seem to be ideal partners. What are your individual roles and are
there others who contribute to the program?
S: I develop the recipes for
the episodes, and host the show. Emma films and produces the videos.
We both manage the website together. We have an intern named Hartley
Casbon who does some writing for us and helps promote the site online.
E: The funny thing is we run a website but neither of us know any
programming or web design -- so we have a wonderful designer who has been
with us since really early on and we also work with some great web
developers who help make everything behind the scenes work.
Q. You both went to
Georgetown
, but I wasn't aware they have a culinary school. What did you study, and
how did that influence what you're doing today with KC?
S: I studied at the French Culinary Institute and then went to the
Institute
of
Integrative Nutrition
. I love to cook, but eating healthily is very important. We
combine technique with holistic health to create our recipes.
E: I double majored in Arabic and Classical studies — so I’m interested
in ancient history and the
Middle East
of course -- you can see glimpses of that throughout our programming.
Q. How did you come up with the
idea of KC? Whose baby is this, anyway?
S: Emma had just come back
from
Greece
, after having filmed her first feature film. I had just finished
culinary school and was looking for a job in a restaurant. I met
with a woman named Carmen Castillo who suggested that we combine our
talents to create a cooking show. Putting it online seemed like the
best way to get ourselves noticed. That was the beginning of Kitchen
Caravan.
E: That’s how it happened!
Q. I notice your programs
take you to many parts of the world. Was this part of the plan in the
beginning?
S: Yes. Both of us
wanted the episodes to bring attention to different parts of the world.
We also felt that we could learn a lot about health by observing the way
other cultures ate.
E: Since the beginning the idea of Kitchen Caravan was to travel the world
through food -- this started out by bringing these different ingredients
into our recipes and we have been fortunate enough lately to be able to do
more traveling.
Q. How do you decide what
you're going to feature? Are they all menus you get from friends or
acquaintances you meet when you travel?
S: The menus are inspired by
many different things. Sometimes it is the recreation of a dish we
ate somewhere else. Sometimes it is a vehicle to tell a story about
a different place. It depends on the episode. But the ingredients
and their seasons are always the base from which we start.
E: Each season is kind of like a snapshot of our recent interests and
experiences —following along the common theme of local, healthy,
seasonal, culturally significant food and food production.
E: I’ll defer the questions below to Sophia, since she’s our resident
chef.
Q. How many times do you make
a dish before you take it to the web?
S: Sometimes twice, sometimes
five times. It depends on how well it goes over with our guinea pigs
before hand, or if it makes sense for our audience. I wish that I
could test them 5-10 times, but we do not have the capacity for that yet.
Q. Do you 'work on' the
recipe if it doesn't taste just right, or if you think you can make it
better, or do you keep strictly to the recipes people give you?
S: I usually create the
recipes myself, they are rarely just given to us. I certainly work
on the taste if the recipe does not come out right at first. I
would love to be able to test each recipe with different brands of
ingredients, or tweaking them as much as possible, but because of the
volume of content we have, sometimes I have to let them just be. I
hope the viewers will make them, improve them, and then comment on the
recipes with suggestions. I love to find out that someone has made a
Kitchen Caravan recipe and has suggestions.
Q. If you had a restaurant,
what kind would it be?
S: That is a tough one! It
would either be a Mexican/Middle Eastern fusion place or an organic
soup/salad/sandwich cafe. I would like to have a comfortable place
that people can afford to eat at every day, and know that they are eating
a healthy meal. It would be what you would want to cook for yourself
every night.
Q.
You seem to like foods from around the world, but what's
your favorite?
S: There
are so many things that I love. But I think I would have to say that
toasted whole wheat bread with avocado is one of my favorite things.
E: I like little things, tea parties, finger foods, delicious Mediterranean
mezze…
Q. Did you get some traction
as a child helping your parent(s) or grandparent(s) cook, or did your love
of cooking come from something else?
S: Everyone
is really into food and cooking on both sides of my family. My
grandmothers were/are always in the kitchen cooking, and my mom still
cooks many of our meals. It has always a normal part of my every day
life. I think that definitely inspired me to pay attention to what I
eat and cook my own food.
E: I lived on a big farm for the first 5 years of my life, after that we
always had a garden and would eat whatever was in season. What we didn’t
grow, we would get from people nearby, I remember neighbors coming around
with baskets of freshly foraged mushrooms for sale, or people bringing
over their extra squash. I never paid much attention to it because
everyone in the community seemed to be eating in the same way- I just
thought it was the way things were done. When I moved out on my own, I
really felt the absence of all of this. In the process of building Kitchen
Caravan I feel like I have become a lot more connected to my roots and
gained a new appreciation for my upbringing.
Q. What are your long-term
goals for the program? Do you plan a book? Would you go mainstream if
someone from network TV asked you to bring the kitchen to their studios?
S: We
would definitely like to write a book when the time is right. We
would also be interested in a TV show; who knows what the future has in
store for us?
E: We just launched a sister site: Kitchen Caravan Travel; we hope to
broaden our audience base by providing practical travel advice for people
and talking about the cultural aspects of food. So many people act like
they are intimidated by cooking, so this is a way to try to bring those
people in.
We also talk a lot about ways of
expanding from the web. Books would be great, we talk about products
sometimes -- spices or teas, I would like to do another film. The internet
is a medium that is full of so many possibilities, but it also has its
limitations. I think the biggest problem is the sheer volume of content
that’s out there. How often do you actually read the whole article?
Watch the whole video? You’re sent something over email, you read the
first paragraph, and then click on to something else -- maybe if it’s
interesting you forward the email on to someone else first. I’m guilty
of this, everyone I know is guilty of this. There is a massive
transference of information and ideas -- it can be overwhelming at times
and valuable concepts can easily get lost. There has to be a way of taking
what we’re doing on the web, and giving it a tangible form somewhere
else.
Q. How difficult has it been
for you to keep the program both going and growing? Where do you think it
will be in 3 years? 5 years? Do you even have a timeline?
S: Maintaining
a website is a lot of work. It takes money, time, and dedication.
We would like to keep the program growing, but we also have to pay
attention to what is going on in the world right now, so we are making
sure our future goals are realistic to the present situation.
E: I’m still stuck on this volume of ideas theme from the last
question… but it’s all connected. It’s a vicious cycle --
because of how much content is out there, we feel a lot of pressure to be
constantly updating, creating, adding to our site in order to stay
competitive. The whole media industry is dealing with this same issue.
Newspapers now have bloggers. Television shows now have to create extra
short “webisodes” to go alongside their normal programs. Twitter! Is a
whole website dedicated to facilitating a constantly up-to-the-minute web
presence. It’s an interesting time to be involved with new media right
now. Things are changing so fast; I don’t think anyone has figured
out the magic formula yet -- I’m not even sure there can be a formula,
the very nature of the beast might resist it. For us it’s just really
important to maintain a pace that is sustainable and can adapt to the
changes of the medium.
Q. I you had an artist’s
statement to make about the culinary arts, what would it be?
S: I
say that you must always cook the things that you would like to eat, and
always keep your eyes open. You never know who or what you are going
to learn from.
E: Not a statement about the culinary arts per se, but about doing art with
a culinary theme: food is full of history- personal histories, world
histories, political histories, biological and scientific histories. There
is so much material to refer back to in each vegetable or spice. I want my
work to be a collision of art and politics and science, and food or food
production might just be the perfect encapsulation of these themes.
Q. Anything you'd like to add or
say to ragazine.cc
readers?
S: That
they should give us some creative tips and ideas-- we are always wanting
to learn from other artists!
E: Yes! We love hearing what others have to say…
Q. what's your favorite food/recipe/restaurant?
S: Food:
Simple combinations of contrasting textures are always delicious (I
mentioned toasted whole wheat bread with avocado before).
Recipe: I have two: a Summer lentil and eggplant stew by a famous Turkish chef
that I found in Food and Wine many years ago, and Kitchen Caravan's
Narragansett Corn Fritters with Smoked Trout
http://www.kitchencaravan.com/recipe/narragansett-corn-fritters-smoked-trout
Restaurant: Again, two. Zaytinya in Washington DC for a night on the town, and
El Arzal in Feraya, Lebanon for a cozy, local dinner by the fireplace.
E: I love Korean food. There is something about kimchi that cures any ill.
I also really like most diners that are only open for breakfast.
Q. What do you think
about eating dessert before the entre?
S: I
say there are no rules. Sometimes I eat dessert with no entree, but
I am a grown-up now, so no one can punish me. I don't like to finish
my meals with something salty, so I would not be one to eat dessert before
the entree. Emma does though.
E: It’s true. This is actually my preferred order. I like to end with
salty.
Q. What about wine.... does every
meal deserve a glass?
S: There are
definitely meals that call for a glass of wine, but I don't drink it with
every meal. I think it has more to do with the the mood that I am in
or the context of the meal. No one needs an excuse for a glass of wine,
but I think everyone should be able to do without every once in a while.
E: I hardly ever think about
wine -- I can enjoy it if it’s there, but never miss its absence.
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