When you're handed lemons.

This was not the post I wanted to write. In fact, this is not the food I wanted to cook but that's beside the point.

It has been increasingly popular for chef's to craft their menus around the concept of what food must have looked like "pre-refrigeration". Curing, canning, pickling, and fermenting to name a few of the techniques employed. I was one of those chefs and that was my culinary focus as well until I was forced to look at food in a whole new light.

Now instead of pondering a time without the ice box I was pondering a time without food (or at least the money to frivolously spend on food) and as a chef I felt compelled to not just feed my family ramen and mac & cheese but to find a completely new way to cook using what was cheap but in season and nutritious. Small bits of affordable meats and whole grains coupled with copious amounts of fresh vegetables. A whole new way to look at cooking.

That was when it hit me. I wasn't inventing a new way to eat I was simply joining the rest of the world (or a least the majority of it). Chefs are a tad bit full of themselves by nature but to think that I somehow invented eating like a poor person was taking it to a whole new level of arrogant.

All I was doing was rediscovering American peasant food at it's best. Its how most of the world has eaten for thousands of years and how we should eat now. Lots of vegetables and fruits in season, whole grains and beans, and small portions of meats and cheese raised humanly.

I have been humbly lead to
see food differently and it's likely in the near future others will as well. Large hunks of meat with small bits of vegetables served out of season is not sustainable financially or ecologically.

How about it? Lets turn lemons into lemonade.