SONOMA INDEPENDENT May, 2000
Eating For One
....Culinary educator Laurel Miller
says that everyone should have good, home-cooked meals once in a while.
"You might as well learn to cook and learn to enjoy it," says
Miller, herself a busy single woman. "Life’s too short to eat Lean
Cuisine every day.
Much of what Miller teaches in her
(Cooking for Singles) classes works for anybody, but a few strategies
are essential for the smaller household. Make extra and freeze it, for
example. Blanch large batches of vegetables and set them aside for the
week’s stir-fry and side dishes.
Plan ahead, using a written or mental
menu.
A well-stocked pantry is key, says
Miller. "You have to have some things prepared ahead so that you
can come home and just throw them together." The green olive tapenade
she’ll prepare (with pan-seared swordfish) for her class at Ramekins is
just one example of this well-prepared approach. It takes barely more
time than a sandwich, and it make the difference between just plain fuel
and really good food. Miller has a refreshingly relaxed attitude about
cooking: she admits to sometimes eating cereal for dinner (current favorite:
maple-pecan crunch from Trader Joe’s) and thinks that’s OK.
"Give yourself permission to
not cook dinner every night," she advises. "Don’t beat yourself
up."
E LUXURY.COM
June 29, 2000
Cooking Schools: The Trends
by Matt and Ted Lee
Kid’s Menu
....At The Sustainable Kitchen® in
Berkeley, chef Laurel Miller teaches children ages 8 and up, and these
aren’t lessons in PB & Js. For the Yucatan menu, Miller’s students
make tortillas from scratch. She may adjust dishes to the spice-and skill-level
of particularly young students, but Miller claims kids are often more
adventurous about food than adults.
BAY AREA BUSINESS WOMAN
April, 2000
Sustaining the Land, Sustaining Our
Lives
by L A Duffy
Kids in the Kitchen
....Laurel Miller is (teaching) children
and adults about organic farming. Her cooking school, The Sustainable
Kitchen, is based in Berkeley, but she teaches all over the Bay Area.
Her classroom is not only the kitchen but the farmer’s market, the organic
farm, and the sustainable livestock ranches. She believes that the hands-on
method, from milking a cow to examining soil, is the way the reach kids.
"What I try to get across is
that we only have one body and one planet. We need to take care of both,"
Miller explains.
She had worked with different school
districts, the organization Girls, Inc., and Draeger’s Culinary Center.
She currently offers cooking classes for children and adults.
One common complain about organic
produce is the expense. Miller points out that what most people don’t
realize is the "hidden costs" of conventional farming. We may
not be paying at the check-out stand but since the farming industry is
heavily subsidized by the government, we’re paying for it through taxes.
"There are human and environmental
costs- the chemical burns on the farm workers hands, genetic deformities
in children from pesticides (DDT particularly) in Latin America- that
need to be considered. We’ve been spoiled, to a degree, by the availability
of out-of-season produce.
Food for Thought.
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
September, 1999
Deborah Byrd, Food Editor
School Lunch doesn’t have to be the
pits
...I’ve just talked to a couple of
women who specialize in cooking with kids, and it seems I’ve been looking
at it (school lunches) all wrong, focusing on the limitations rather than
the possibilities.
"I think it’s just the general
assumption- and food professionals make this assumption too," said
Berkeley cooking teacher Laurel Miller.
Kids are much less closed off to culinary
exploration than we think, Miller believes. One secret she’s discovered:
Get them involved.
She’s taken students to a goat farm
where they helped make cheese. And she participated in the Edible Schoolyard
project at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley- where she
sees 12-and 13-year-olds happily munching raw broccoli that they’d grown.
In a Thai cooking class, (Miller’s
students) learned about the country’s culture and climate- and topped
it off by making and eating a green papaya salad.
"It’s very rare I’ve ever had
a kid flat-out refuse to eat something," Miller said.
(For school lunches) Miller is a fan
of pizza, even if it can’t be heated. "Cold pizza is pretty universal,
it’s not something to shy away from," she says. "It can be really
healthy if you’re not overdoing it on the cheese, not overdoing fatty
processed meat like pepperoni."
For a slightly different take, she
suggests, try sending couscous with vegetables and feta cheese or olives,
or cold pasta salads.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
WEEKEND PREVIEW,
Friday, September 24, 1999
Peninsula Kids Can Go Organic With
Hands-on Program
by Carolyne Zinko
Chronicle Staff Writer
Laurel Miller teaches children, but
you won’t find her lessons in traditional textbooks this fall.
Berkeley-based Miller is spicing up
Peninsula kids’ studies with classes in cooking and organic farming for
children ages 8 and up at John Bentley’s restaurant (2991 Woodside Road,
Woodside; 650-851-4988).
Kids spend time in the kitchen and
outdoors, with field trips to organic farms, dairies and farmers’ markets
to help kids understand how food gets from the ground to the grocer.
Kids experiment with hand-picked
produce and spices like cardamom or a recado, a cooked chili paste from
Mexico, to learn about foods of the world as well as nutrition. Nutrition
is important in fighting juvenile obesity and malnutrition, Miller said.
Students also learn not to waste food.
"It’s vital we educate children
where food comes from. As a nation, people have really lost touch with
agriculture," Miller said. "It’s really one of the most important
things there is. If we don’t have farms, we don’t have food."
At a recent field trip to Harley Farms
in Pescadero, where Sea Stars goat cheese is made, students toured the
130-goat dairy and milked a goat by hand.
They made a 3-ounce round of Monet
chevre, with edible flowers, and incorporated feta and chevre in roasted
beet salad and a fig dessert.
(Harley Farms won first place in the
flavored cheese category in the American Cheese Society Competition in
Vermont last month, said Dee Harley, owner of the farm. The farms products
are available in gourmet grocery stores in the Bay Area.
#
#
#
|