Ms. Manning took a few minutes off from working on her new, still untitled cookbook, which sometime next summer will answer the question of what to cook for the vegetarians when you invite them over for dinner, to talk to me on the phone about Farm to Table, the rigors of professional cooking and the upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday.
Manning grew up in the great Midwest, fed by a 70s mom, which meant getting meals from cans and the Crock-Pot. The difference in her culinary life came on the weekends when her g-ma, Helen Zalubowski, the family cook, would let young Ivy play with pizza dough and hang out in the kitchen from the time she “eye level to the counter.”
From her early apprenticeship with her grandmother, travel and work shaped the role of food in her life. Through a study abroad program, that was either chance or fate, Manning ended up spending her junior year of high school boarding with a retired pastry – the lack of a common spoken language wasn’t a barrier to learning - hanging out in the kitchen fueled her love of food. In college there were restaurant jobs and more study abroad; this time to Florence, Italy, which isn’t food crazy in the ‘foodie’ sense, as much is good food is in the DNA of the local culture. Post college life brought her to Portland, culinary school and working in local restaurants.
Cooking professionally is a lot different from hanging out in the kitchen or loving to cook or bake at home. Odd hours, physically demanding labor, toiling beside people who use ‘pork’ as a verb; restaurants can wear a person out. After 15 years of restaurant work, Manning explained how food, which can be so boundless in terms of possibilities, isn’t quite the same when you are cooking off a menu, “If you work in a professional kitchen, there is a lot of repetitive boring work. You aren’t standing there creating things, you are making the same 5 salads, the same 5 entrées, over and over and over again…I’m not cut out for professional cooking, ”
Fortunately, Manning had an English degree and writing as her ‘plan b’. First there were restaurant reviews on Citysearch, which led to a gig at the weekly alt paper, which in turn landed her a biweekly column on ‘Vegetarian Flavors’ in the Oregonian. Along with steady work in Sunset and Cooking Light Magazines, Manning’s first cookbook was published by Sasquatch Books earlier this year.
Manning explains the concept behind, Farm to Table, The Art of Eating Locally, “The idea was, if I am a trained cook, and I go to farmers market and buy to much crap – this beautiful produce actually, not crap - and I don’t know have an idea with what to do with all this stuff - how is the average person at the market going to [cook] it?” Manning continued, “So the idea was to enlist the help of restaurant friends who also cook seasonally… and learn how to eat through the seasons, how to embrace the seasons and maybe cook things in different way and get out of the vegetable rut that people are in”. Learning to cook and eat seasonally isn’t just for rookies at farmers markets, in the course of writing Farm to Table, Manning discovered what to do with kohlrabi.
Kohlrabi, according to Manning, looks “A little bit like sputnik”. The veg is a member of the brassica/cabbage family is about the size of a golf ball on the small end, though you're more apt to find them as big a tennis ball at this time of year. Sometimes called the 'cabbage turnip' or 'German turnip', the cooked root’s taste is reminiscent of broccoli - more of the milder tasting stem than the florets. True to the plant’s heritage, Manning likes a recipe featured in the book - provided by Fearn Smith of The Farm Café - for Kohlrabi Coleslaw. It is a dish Manning noticed guys like (including her husband and the book’s photographer, Gregor Torrence), despite their preconceived notions about the taste of broccoli.With Thanksgiving approaching, I asked what cooks of varying skill levels could make for the holiday table, Manning replied, novices or pros could easily prepare two recipes from her book: The first, is a dish Manning is now obligated to make each Thanksgiving, the “Mashed potatoes with celery root; every year that one has to be on the table”. The other dish for a novice cook is the Cranberry Chutney. “Add liquid, put in a pot in boil it. It can be made days ahead of time and it is a different take on cranberries. It features Indian spices…with all the other rich foods, the flavor cuts right through.”
Manning’s own holiday plans are possibly not what you would expect from a cookbook author, instead of trying to recreate a Marthaesque holiday, instead she will be in the Wisconsin, "hopefully on the couch watching the Packer game". Before she leaves for the motherland, you can catch her this Sunday at Wordstock. For other information on appearances and activates, check out chefivy.com.
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