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Oct 26, 2010 [Note: This piece is nominated for a 2011 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award]

Green Goddess: Why We Love Collard Greens

Life-sustaining and delicious, collard greens are a cause for celebration. By Lonne Hamilton Source: Saveur

Photo: Todd Coleman There were some soul food dishes that my family did not eat. Chitlins were spoken of in hushed, horrified tones. Pig's feet? No, thank you. We left those back at the plantation. But collard greens were different. Stewed in a cauldron, the big, tough-looking leaves become wonderful and delicious, tender and emotional. When I was growing up in Pasadena, California, my mother cooked collard greens once a month 2

Lonne Hamilton Portfolio or so. The dish was a departure from our mainstream American diet, which consisted largely of the convenience foods that so many people ate in the 1970s: Tater Tots, frozen vegetables, and Chung Kingbrand Chinese food. But collards were a family recipe. My grandparents had left Louisiana in the 1930s to escape segregation and Jim Crow, and while they didn't talk much about life the South, we did hear a lot about the food. My Nana told me that back when she was a little girl in Minden, Louisiana, a small town outside of Shreveport, her aunt Athelene had a big farm. They would go out and pick vegetables from the field for their dinner, including what Nana called "tree collards." "Most people, you would go to their house and you'd see these big stalks of greens," she told me recently. "The stalk would be about six feet tall." When I was young, Mom showed me how to clean the leaveswhich wasn't a delicate activity; they held a good deal of sand and grit. Then she would braise them in a stockpot over low heat, and the broad, leathery greens would take on a silky, sleek texture. When they were ready, I would break up corn bread into pieces and mix it in. The bitterness of the greens and the sweetness of the bread combined to make an earthy, fragrant stew. After I left home, collards followed me. In my college days at Berkeley, I worked as a waitress at the Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant, where one of the most requested dishes was ye'abesha gomen (see Recipe), collard greens stewed with a spiced butter called nit'r qibe, eaten with tornoff pieces of injera flat bread. A stint in a Brazilian restaurant introduced me to that country's staple collard dish: sopa de fub (see Recipe), a savory porridge threaded with collards and thick with cornmeal and sausage. Once I had my own family, I started to cook collards for my children. I learned that the robust leaves were just as delicious chopped into ribbons and quickly sauted with olive oil, yielding a dish that was as crisp and brightly colored as my mother's was soft and subdued (see Recipe: Lonne's Collards). The versatility of the greens, and the many preparations I'd encountered, led me to wonder about collards' origins. I'd always considered them the birthright of the American South, but where had they actually come from? Some say the connection to collards is hardwired in black people because the plant helped us survive slavery times. For slaves, meat was often a luxury, rationed out in stingy portions by their owners. Greens, when cooked with a smoked ham hock, took on the richness of the meat. The pork would fall off the bone, its taste imparted to the potlikkerthe nutritious broth created by stewing the collards that replenished the body after a long day of labor in the fields. From deprivation came something delicious. The humble profile of collard greens in America and the affinity slaves had for them have led to a misconception that Africans brought them to the New World. The plant, a non-heading cabbagewhich means that its leaves are loosely gathered, rather than tightly boundis most likely native to southern Europe, where it has been cultivated for thousands of years. Genetically, it is more closely related to cabbage than it is to kale, though all are part of the vegetable species known as Brassica oleracea, which also includes cauliflower, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts. The ancient Greeks and Romans grew kale and collards, making no distinction between the two. The term that described them both, "coles," appeared in European writing as far back as the first century. In the Americas, the earliest reference to "coleworts," the Anglo-Saxon word for cabbage plants that was the precursor to collards, dates to 1669.

Lonne Hamilton Portfolio While Africans did not introduce collards to the New World, they did bring the technique that produces the potlikker. "It's the drinking of the potlikker that is African in origin," explains Jessica B. Harris, author of the cookbook Iron Pots & Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gift to New World Cooking. I spoke to my grandmother, who remembers the practice from her own childhood. "In the olden days, they used to get the juice from the greens and give it to the babies," she told me. "They'd say that all your vitamins were in the potlikker." I'd known the term when I was young, but it had seemed outdated and quaint. I hadn't realized its importance. Back in the days of slavery, and again during the Great Depression, many families made it through tough times by eating greens grown in a backyard collard patch. Collards' hardscrabble hardiness probably explains why they are associated with good luck. Southern tradition holds that a New Year's Day meal of collard greens and black-eyed peas will bring prosperity throughout the year. The green leaves are said to represent dollar bills, and the peas coins. Of course, in the South, collards are revered by blacks and whites alike, and the plant is one of the most widely grown crops in the region. It's there that you find a good assortment of collards, too, as many farmers grow and sell heirloom varieties, some with thinner ribs, others with moreruffled leaves. Many collards lovers believe that the best time to eat them is in winter, right after the first frost, when the leaves are at their sweetest. Nowadays, I use collards every which way at home: I make salads out of the baby leaves (see Recipe: Collard Greens Salad with Peanut Vinaigrette), when I can find them; I saut them; I cook them in soups and stews. It's mostly on the holidays that we cook them the traditional Southern way. At Thanksgiving, my family congregates in the Las Vegas house owned by Nana and my aunt Carol. Collards cooking duty alternates between my relatives. Each person's recipe is slightly different, but no matter who is responsible, the greens are always tender, with a bit of smoked ham hock and some onion. Thanksgiving in Las Vegas seemed unusual to me at first, but the combination of family, good food, and Wheel of Fortune slots at the Suncoast is hard to beat. After all, collards are supposed to bring good luck. I think I'll have another bowl.

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Feb 9, 2010

From Louisiana to LA
For African-American transplants to LA, fish fries were the glue that held them together. By Lonne Hamilton Source: Saveur

Photo: Todd Coleman I grew up in Pasadena in the 1970s, in a house my grandfather built. Saturday mornings for me and other African-American kids meant Soul Train, sponsored by Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen cosmetics. My parents were the hippest parents I knew. Dad had a fluffy 'fro, and I remember him wearing a certain white one-piece jumpsuit with platform shoes and a man purse. My mother was, quite simply, gorgeous. She worked at the Santa Anita Park racetrack, where she was a hostess; her job was to look cute, dress up in white boots and a miniskirt, give tours, and hobnob with celebrities like Sammy Davis, Jr. She liked her job. Can you blame her? My parents had a rocky marriage, but they were able to ride the wave of opportunity of the post civil rights era, acquiring a home with a pool, a Mercedes, and scholarships to an all-girls school for my sister and me. My paternal grandfather Liney Hamilton, a k a Dobbie, had come to LA 5

Lonne Hamilton Portfolio from New Orleans in the 1930s with my grandmother, whom we called Dear. They, along with large numbers of other New Orleans Creoles, came West to escape segregation and to find jobs, a migration sometimes called "from La. to LA." After a couple of years of renting, my grandfather settled in Pasadena on the northwest side, the black side, a stone's throw from the Rose Bowl stadium. One of the things folks from Louisiana brought with them to Los Angeles was a love for seafood. Shrimp and oysters survived the journey; crawfish, not so much. There were also traditional Creole dishes like gumbo and red beans and rice, along with the Southern standards: collard greens, corn bread, sweet potato pie. And there was fried fish. My great-grandmother on my mother's side, Minnie Mullenwe called her Mother Dearwas a fishing fanatic. She was in her late 60s, but she had a boyfriend, a man we knew only as Ollie. To the best of my knowledge, the entirety of their relationship consisted of fishing. Toting their aluminum beach chairs and a tackle box, she and Ollie would leave early in the morning in his dented pickup truck to head out to Lake Puddingstone in San Dimas, 30 miles east of LA. Lake Puddingstone was stocked with bluegill, a small, flat sunfish with delicious, delicate-tasting white meat. I remember Ollie and Mother Dear returning with coolers filled with the day's catch, which they dumped in our driveway, ice and all. One or two fish would still be clinging to life, gasping, eyes glazed. It was the first time I'd seen something that would become food die. As soon as the fish arrived, Mom hit the phones, inviting folks to come over for a fish fry. My mother wasn't one to do much cooking. It cramped her style. But when we were putting on a fish fry, she was all in and got the family assembly line prepared. I helped Dobbie clean the fish. We never cut off the heads; we just used a little knife to scale and gut the fish. My next job was to shake a few fish at a time in a paper bag containing cornmeal, flour, and Lawry's Seasoned Salt. Then I'd pass each fish by its tail to Mom, who dropped it in the oil, which was flavored with a big spoonful of bacon grease from the coffee can we kept on the stove. The grease added a smoky taste to the crust. Once the fish were crisp, they were plucked from the skillet and laid out on brown paper grocery bags to drain. Potatoes fried with onions and bell peppers were the side dish. Tartar sauce mixed with Tabasco added tang and spice. Fish fries were casual, a mingling of family and close friends. There was my mom's friend Jimmie, a jockey at the track who had just bought his own horse; there was Vannie of the wellrespected Valentines, who owned the local mortuary; there were the strivers, Carol and Ken Ellison, the first local black owners of a McDonald's franchise; and there was Daddy Howard, my mother's stepfather, who owned a prizefighting gym downtown. With the end of the '70s came the collapse of my parents' marriage, and after that our family didn't have the organizational wherewithal to pull off a fish fry. We also came to learn about things like saturated fats, and that can of bacon greasea vestige from the South and poverty and the plantationdisappeared from the stovetop. But while it was there, it made that fish taste real good. (See Creole-Style Fried Fish.) Lonne Hamilton, a freelance writer and editor who lives in Los Angeles

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A Slice of Vermont
Artisanal cheese is no longer strictly an imported affair; the hills of Yankee America are alive will small-scale farmers creating award-winning cheeses. By Nathalie Jordi Photographs by Andrew Hetherington Illustration by Steven Noble April 2011

Jasper Hill Farm

It takes about an hour of driving through Vermont before the penny drops and what's been bugging me about its beauty finally clicks: There are no billboards. This is as much a metaphor illustrating Vermonters' penchant for quality of life over commerce as the state Senate's having voted not to relicense its nuclear power plant next year in favor of renewable energy. If New Hampshire's motto is "Live Free or Die," Vermont's might be "Live Well and Compost." 8

Lonne Hamilton Portfolio This attitudinal foundation has made Vermont the proudly beating heart of the American artisanal cheese revolution. The state is believed to have the country's highest number of rawmilk cheesemakersindeed, more cheesemakers per capita than any other U.S. state. Half of them weren't even making cheese before the year 2000. So what, in a country whose most famous cheese isn't even cheese, is causing people to choose a lifestyle that most farmers midcentury and since have happily rejected? I took a week's trip there in springtime to find out. My visit began at the bucolic vision known as Twig Farm in West Cornwall, run by Michael Lee and Emily Sunderman. On their 30 brushy acres, complete with a pared-down modern farmhouse with rooftop solar panels, 40 fancifully named goats browsed through buckthorn, goldenrod, and dandelion, slowly alchemizing these flavors into milk as they munched. Michael, a bike messenger- turned-cheesemonger, now spends his days turning the complexly flavored milk the goats produce into haunting, floral cheeses like Square Cheese and Goat Tomme. Twig Farm looked fully like an agrarian utopia. I was all ready to sign myself upuntil I confronted the off-puttingly matinal, backbreakingly Sisyphean cheesemaking part of the lifestyle. "I've never had the desire to have a big business," said Michael, in his patient way. "I just like the process." The quiet cohort of Vermont back-to-the-landers who lasted past the 1970s (Lazy Lady Farm's Laini Fondiller, for example, or Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery's Bob Reese) seeded the soil for a new generation of people like Michael Lee. Its memberseducated, urbane, and market- savvymake up for their lack of agricultural familiarity with plenty of eagerness and research. "We were so naive," said Fondiller. "Nobody's naive anymore." Many of Vermont's new cheesemakers studied something other than agriculture and worked professionally before they turned to cheesemaking; some, in fact, still do, like architect Russell Glover and book agent Angela Miller of Consider Bardwell Farm. Dan and Sebastian von Trapp hope to turn their grandparents' small dairy farm in the Mad River Valley into a profitable cheesemaking business that doesn't depend on the vagaries of commodity milk prices. "On a 40-cow conventional farm like ours, most of the time it costs more to make milk than we would ever make selling it," said Sebastian. "We knew that we would have to make a change if we wanted to stay on the farm." Through huge windows in their milk house, you can see massive Scrag Mountain, the namesake of one of their cheeses that's under development. Jam-band music lilts out of powerful speakers. Another of their cheeses, called Oma after their grandmother (who married one of the von Trapp siblings made famous in The Sound of Music), is a washed-rind, raw-milk revelation of buttery, earthy flavors. Passers-by can stop in at the farm's milk house and buy either of theseplus any other experimental cheeses in the works by dropping money in an honor box next to the fridge. One reason the von Trapp brothersand some other small-scale Vermont cheesemakershave been able to make the transition from struggling dairy farm to upwardly mobile cheese facility is Jasper Hill Farm, another 40-cow dairy that initially made its name with a line of extraordinary raw-milk cheeses that have graced tables everywhere from the French Laundry to the Playboy Mansion. Down a winding country lane and past a grocery filled with taxidermied animals is an

Lonne Hamilton Portfolio unassuming red barn. Inside, some of Vermont's finest business minds are hard at work. (Or drinking beer.) In 2003, brothers Andy and Mateo Kehler, who run the farm, collaborated with Cabot Creamerya cooperative that buys milk from more than 275 Vermont dairy farmers on a Clothbound Cheddar that won the American Cheese Society's Best of Show prize in 2006. Leveraging the cash flow generated by maturing vast amounts of this cheese, Andy and Mateo built The Cellars at Jasper Hill, a $3 million 22,000-square-foot set of climate-controlled cheese caves, with the goal of aging, marketing, selling, and distributing the cheese of other small Vermont cheesemakers, so that the cheesemakers can just focus on making a really good product. Although Mateo and his family still live above the cheese house, the brothers' vision of capitalism is anything but anachronistic. "Sustainability begins and ends with economic viability," said Mateo. "We don't have the guilt that the previous generation of back-to-thelanders had about money. As social entrepreneurs, we see profitability as a means by which we can achieve a greater common good." They're fortunate to operate in a context like Vermont, whose state government is rife with agricultural and other agencies that still understand, encourage, and support small-scale farming. Vermont's bounty extends beyond cheese; the state as a whole bursts with artisanal food, from the wood-fired micro-bakery in backcountry Elmore to the nearly year-old Hill Farmstead Brewery, which does for beer what T.S. Eliot does for language. (Imagine re-fermented honey saison, spiked with dandelions, and aged in Pinot Noir barrels for six months.) It seems unfair that a state with a population half the size of San Diego should have restaurants as fine as James Beard Award-nominated Hen of the Wood in Waterbury, or the Bluebird Tavern in Burlington, where you can order a lamb burger with maple-cured bacon and goat's-milk yogurt, and woodroasted poussin with leeks and pickled garlic. Of course, snares counterbalance the lures in this way of life. There's the ongoing disincentive of Vermont's average daily temperature, comparable to pre-Aslan Narnia for four months of the year. And recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has completed a review of the safety of raw-milk cheeses that may yield new guidelines forcing cheesemakers to discontinue selling certain cheeses, or to drastically change their production methods. But for now, Vermont's hardy cheesemakers and their wares are thankfully widespread. For proof positive of Vermont's culinary ascendance, next time you're near a good cheese counter, look for, say, Jasper Hill Farm's Winnimere, produced only in winter. Made from buttery Ayrshire milk and washed with a wild-yeast beer, the cheese represents an edible distillation of the soil, the cows, the love, and the labor. It never ceases to amaze me that, if you live in an American city with a good cheese shop and have good timing, you can, for a mere $27.50 a pound, enjoy this cheese with dinner tonight. It is a superlative example of what pundit Clifton Fadiman once called "milk's leap toward immortality" and evidence of the miracle of modern distribution. Get thee to it, or better yet, to Vermont, to its quiescent lakes and wooded dells and little red dairies and wildflower-speckled pastures, where the coming of the artisanal cheeses makes perfect sense. Vive la rvolution. 10

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The Milky Way A short list of must-visit farms, dairies, and restaurants BLUEBIRD TAVERN, BURLINGTON College kids from UVM and their parents feast on comfort food such as poutine with Vermont cheddar curd, entres including fallow deer and pastured pork chops, and artisanal cocktails such as the Sugar on Snow (Dickel whiskey, smoked maple syrup, maple liquor, and maple bitters). 317 Riverside Avenue; 802-540-1786; bluebirdvermont.com TWIG FARM, WEST CORNWALL This small-scale farm is worth visiting to ogle goats with names like Crabcake. Reservations are required. 2575 South Bingham Street, 802- 462-3363; twigfarm.com VON TRAPP FARMSTEAD, WAITSFIELD This family-run farm produces cheese from the butterfat-rich organic milk of its small herd of Jersey cows. 251 Common Road; 802-496-6100 HEN OF THE WOOD, WATERBURY With an emphasis on the regional (smoked La Belle Farm duck breast with mustard spaetzle, steamed Maine mussels) and the foraged (the eponymous wild mushroom made into a tartine), executive chef Eric Warnstedt serves acclaimed fare from a converted 19th-century grist mill. 92 Stowe Street; 802-244-7300; henofthewood.com HILL FARMSTEAD BREWERY, NORTH GREENSBORO On the site of a former dairy farm, eighth- generation Vermonter Shaun Hill makes limitededition, award- winning craft beers in what looks like a big garage. A retail store operates Wednesday through Saturday. 403 Hill Road; 802-533-7450; hillfarmstead.com 11

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Pasta with Zucchini, Zucchini Blossoms, and Caramelized Onion

Penne, a tubular, pointed pasta, looks great alongside the zucchini blossoms. 4 servings Recipe by Lora Zarubin Photograph by Misha Gravenor August 2008

Ingredients

20 zucchini blossoms, stems removed (about 3 ounces) 2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter 1 large onion, thinly sliced 8 ounces penne pasta 3 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided 3 cups 1/4-inch cubes zucchini (about 3 medium) 1 1/4 pounds tomatoes, seeded, coarsely chopped 1 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh Italian parsley

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Lonne Hamilton Portfolio Preparation

Gently rinse and dry zucchini blossoms. Melt butter in large skillet over medium heat. Add onion, sprinkle with salt, and saut until deep golden, about 20 minutes; set aside. Cook penne in large pot of boiling salted water until just tender but firm to bite, stirring occasionally. Drain pasta, reserving 1/2 cup cooking liquid. Return pasta to pot. Meanwhile, heat 1 1/2 tablespoons oil in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add zucchini blossoms and saut until wilted, turning, about 1 minute. Transfer to paper towels and gently blot. Heat remaining 2 tablespoons oil in same skillet over medium-high heat. Add zucchini cubes; sprinkle with salt and saut until crisp-tender, about 3 minutes. Add tomatoes, caramelized onion, and crushed red pepper to zucchini mixture; saut 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add vegetable mixture and 1/4 cup reserved pasta cooking liquid to pasta and toss to coat, adding more liquid if dry. Stir in cheese. Transfer pasta to large serving bowl; top with blossoms and sprinkle with parsley

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Business Calls
Posted December 2nd, 2009 at 4pm by lhamilton Nowadays, we mostly take our cell phones for granted. They're just part of how we function. Its hard to remember life that didn't include hearing someone's ringtone going off at an inopportune moment. They are a convenience that enable us to work more effectively, keep tabs on family members and our social activities. But in developing countries, cell phones are even more dynamic, and are creating fundamental societal and economic change. The Economist honed in on cellphones as change agents in its emerging telecom markets package. In the developing world, cell phone usage has exploded. Households spend more on cell phones than they do on anything else, and that includes survival basics like water and energy. "The reason why mobile phones are so valuable to people in the poor world is that they are providing access to telecommunications for the very first time, rather than just being portable adjuncts to existing fixed-line phones, as in the rich world. For you it was incrementalhere its revolutionary, says Isaac Nsereko of MTN, Africas biggest operator. According to a recent study, adding an extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points." This presents a lucrative opportunity for telecom producers and investors. And for social entrepreneurs and microcreditors, the idea that wealth can be generated by increasing the number of cell phones should be intriguing. This begs some thought. Could our tax dollars for foreign aid be channeled more efficiently? What if we had a program dedicated toward making sure every adult in the developing world had access to a mobile phone? How would that affect issues like hunger, health and supporting local businesses? Perhaps assisting a communications infrastructure, whether it be cell phone or Internet, presents the swiftest way to enable people to fight poverty. More questions than answers, to be sure. But the possibilities of mobile money are exciting. From The Economist:

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Lonne Hamilton Portfolio "With such phones now so commonplace, a new opportunity beckons: mobile money, which allows cash to travel as quickly as a text message. Across the developing world, corner shops are where people buy vouchers to top up their calling credit. Mobile-money services allow these small retailers to act rather like bank branches. They can take your cash, and (by sending a special kind of text message) credit it to your mobile-money account. You can then transfer money (again, via text message) to other registered users, who can withdraw it by visiting their own local corner shops. You can even send money to people who are not registered users; they receive a text message with a code that can be redeemed for cash." A microeconomy can be created via text message. And this microeconomy bypasses governments. With corruption and political instability being the hallmark of too many developing economies, what does it mean for political power when citizens start creating their own currency that governments cannot control? The United Nations has instituted a program aimed at Iraqi refugees living in Syria, where the refugees can receive a text message food voucher, which they can use to purchase food. "People will no longer need to queue at food distribution points or travel long distances to distribution centres, according to WFP [World Food Program] Syria Country Director Muhannad Hadi. They will also be able to have a more diversified diet, based on their own personal choices and preferences. The challenge is out there to think in forward-looking ways about how to fight poverty and hunger. Coders and programmers might find their roles pivotal, by creating cell phone applications that will not just entertain, but that empower and transform lives.

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State Dept to Spend $28 Million to Avoid Internet Crackdowns

April 20th, 2011 in Foreign Policy / Social Media and Social Change From Bloomberg: The U.S. State Department is set to announce $28 million in grants to help Internet activists, particularly in countries where the governments restrict e-mail and social networks such as those offered by Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google Inc. (GOOG) The program, which has drawn Republican criticism and budget cuts, has produced software that is spreading widely in Iran and Syria, helping pro-democracy activists avoid detection, said Dan Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. [In February, Secretary of State Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University declaring "free and open Internet" as U.S. foreign policy.] One must proceed with wisdom and caution when outside influences try to help grassroots communication. The Internet is one of the most powerful tools given to political organizers, but there are risks involved as well. Each one of us who participates in any online interaction is giving away some aspect of our privacy as well. Though I consider myself to be a fan of social media as a means of social change, there can be a downside. This interview I did with NATO Review explores some of the dangers of social media to social movements. As some have noted, social change and political activism existed before long social media came on the scene. Social media cant take credit for what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt, but in my opinion, it has served as a catalyst that speeds up the process and brings events to the worlds attention faster.

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Pasadena Area United Democratic Headquarters Pasadenademocrats.com Built using Wordpress theme.

LonneeHamilton.com Built using Wordpress theme.

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Lonne Hamilton Portfolio Steve Madison for Pasadena City Council madisonforcitycouncil.com

Councilmember Chris Holden chrisholdenblog.com

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