Scenes from a Breakfast Club

Our good friend Phara Charmchi brought her camera out for Breakfast Club earlier this month. Here is of what she saw and had that morning.

First we had pancakes with maple syrup, strawberries and banana. And some good coffee.

Ingredients: Brown rice flour, coconut flour, buckwheat flour, white rice flour, flax, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, evaporated cane sugar, soy milk, sea salt, filtered water. Cooked in coconut oil.

The main plate was fried beets (marinated in the leftover brine from next dinner’s pickled beets), steamed kale with ginger and lime dressing, millet with green onion tahini sauce, and toasted dulse and sunflower seeds on kimchi roots: Daikon and western cabbage kimchi from Oh Kimchi Austin with added steamed rutabaga, purple top turnips, celery root and carrots.

While the last dishes were cooking, our friend Holly from Celiac Chronicles helped juice a mountain of organic oranges (from the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas) and make some very fresh OJ.

If you want to join us for an organic, gluten-free, whole food, plant-based, homemade-from-scratch-with-local-produce meal, click here for upcoming dates. Alternating between Saturdays and Sundays, breakfast is served between 9 and 11pm, at our house in East Austin. Limited seats, so RSVP.  $10 per person.

Follow us on FACEBOOK for updates on dinners, breakfasts and more. If you want to find out how all this got started, how the food gets made, take a trip down Commerce Street.

I think the oven was on, too.

Meals coming together.

Pancakes going out.

Pre-boiled beets, marinated in the brine from the pickled beets we made for that months dinner, quickly fried up on the pan.

Millet & Tea-hini Sauce, root vegetables with Oh Kimchi daikon and western cabbage and pumpkin dulse sprinkled on top, pan-fried beets, steamed kale.

Spooning out millet with a measuring cup.

Oranges, after juicer.

Oranges, before juicer.

A Trip Down Commerce Street

We started the supper club in January last year because we wanted to share the food that had changed our lives. In the year leading up to that first dinner, several revolutions had taken place in our kitchen. First of all, I had learned to cook. We had gone from being unhealthy vegetarians to becoming healthy vegans. From blind consumers to aware human beings.

In December 2011 our neighbor Dennis, a retired cook and pastry chef, invited us over for homemade pizza. It was powerfully delicious and unlike anything I had ever tasted before. You could feel it in your body and soul. That pizza woke me up. I spent the next many months in his kitchen learning from him. He had celiac disease so everything we cooked and baked was gluten-free. He also avoided genetically modified foods, which is most of the non-organic food you find in stores and restaurants here in the US. He provided us with enough information to never want to use a microwave for food again. He made us look at the ingredient label on the products in our fridge and pantry, and then go read about what toxic chemicals we were eating and drinking. We soon went all organic.

Change starts in the kitchen, and Dennis was a revolution. But we knew he eventually had to leave us. He flew to Thailand one day to live his life under a palm tree on the beach. We went vegan shortly after and our cooking became even more exciting and healthy. Then came a need to share all this incredible food with other people. But how?

In January 2013 we found a cookbook at Casa de Luz that said “cooking for large gatherings” on the cover and immediately bought it. The book completely changed my way of cooking once again. The authors, Priscilla Timberlake and Lewis Freedman, have been hosting weekly dinners for 19 years up in Ithaca, New York, and they have around 50 people come out every Friday night.

“Family, friends and food have been a combination that has worked for thousands of years to bring comfort, peace and joy to humanity. This book is unique in that it provides a comprehensive guide for making nutritionally complete seasonal, whole food, plant-based, macrobiotic, vegan and gluten-free meals for groups of 20 to 24. The Great Life Cookbook also tells the story of how one family, for over a decade and a half, has been providing this service to their community.”

There was our answer. We jumped right into it and within ten days of getting the book, we had invited 12 people over for our first dinner. One day of shopping and going to the farmer’s markets. Two full days of chopping, soaking, sautéing, roasting, toasting, steaming, baking, blanching, boiling, juicing and gelling. I roasted sesame seeds to make tahini and simmered brown rice for hours to make rice milk for the dessert. After all that, it was an incredible experience having everyone sit around a long dinner table and enjoy the food and each other’s company for two hours. There were friends, co-workers and people we had never met before, but it felt like family.

We wanted to do it again and for more people. Our friend Jay hosted the dinner in March when our apartment finally got too small. That was the first time we cooked for 24 people. The month after that we held it at our friends Elizabeth and Liam’s farm house outside East Austin. Then we scaled down a bit and had some cozy and sometimes chaotic dinners at home, for as many people as we could squeeze into our one-room apartment. We needed to move to a bigger place.

Last fall we moved to a house in East Austin. It took us a few months to get settled in and to scrape up the money to fund another dinner. In the meantime we had met Gene, a washtub bass player with experience in the restaurant business. He used to smuggle beer from Texarkana to the thirsty people in Atlanta in the seventies. In the eighties he and his friend Dee helped David Byrne make the film True Stories right here in Texas. Years later he offered to help us with our dinners, and in December 2013 we were up and running again. Every month we get better and more organized thanks to him. We even have time and energy to get up and play a few tunes for our fellow diners before dessert, with our other new friend, Kim, on the fiddle. Last time there was even dancing between the tables.

We serve soup, a main plate of 5-6 dishes, tea and dessert. You don’t have to bring anything. It’s all organic, plant-based and gluten-free. Homemade from scratch with local and seasonal produce. You are supporting local farms and businesses. You will meet some great people. The Commerce Street Ramblers will play for you. Hell, we’ll even let you give us hand with the dishes!

Why not join us for the next dinner?

Disclaimer: Gene did not smuggle beer in the seventies.