Buying stuff is out. Doing stuff is in. Everybody loves food and it seems like these days you can’t walk down the street without tripping over a self-identified “foodie.” No question, as we change the way we think about food, it’s taking on a new importance in our culture. Now it’s time to change the way we think about holiday food gifts.

This year, let’s lose the plastic wrapped gift baskets of packaged “gourmet” food items that are shipped from far away, gathered up together and then flung across the country in trains, trucks, and planes. All that petroleum and packaging just so some foodie can have yet another bottle of flavored vinegar or sickly sweet jam. What a waste!

Likewise, it’s time to lay off single use, gimmicky food utensils that exist solely to provide stumped gift givers with something to spend money on.

Experiences are more meaningful and memorable than things. They’re also more thoughtful, environmentally responsible, and supportive of local businesses. Some are even free.

Here are our best ideas for bringing the joy of real food to your family, friends, and community this holiday season.

1. Host a Canning Party You supply the jars and a case or two of something seasonal like apples, pears or citrus. Your friends bring the snacks and their willingness to work. Spend the afternoon eating and socializing while you all work together to produce apple or pear butter or orange marmalade. It’s a fun party and everyone gets to go home with a homemade party favor.

2. Host a Baking or Jam Exchange You supply the food and drink (or make it a potluck) and your friends bring a batch of either jam they’ve canned or a batch of goodies they’ve baked. Everybody trades. Everybody wins.

3. Host a Skill Share Poll your friends to see what skills they’d like to learn, and what skills they’d like to share. Ideas include yogurt making, sprouting, sourdough bread baking, sauerkraut making, meat curing, coffee roasting, beer brewing, jamming, or pickling. Match up learners with teachers over a series of Saturdays.

4. Give the Gift of Knowledge There’s been an explosion of affordable and interesting homesteading and eco-cooking classes and talks. Check into gift certificates for the DIY types on your list. Urban Kitchen SF hosts hands-on classes on butchering, fermenting, and more with local experts. The Institute for Urban Homesteading teaches cheesemaking, brewing, and beekeeping. 18 Reasons hosts talks, educational dinners, and a variety of creative food events. Look around in your local area for similar programs. Lest you think this is only applicable to the San Francisco Bay Area, note that The University of Utah offers classes in Urban Homesteading, and there’s also an organization in Denver.

5. Hold a Bake Sale for a Local Food Charity Want to help out a local food bank or soup kitchen? Why not get your friends together for a bake sale? What a great excuse to talk to passers-by and one another while raising money to help make sure everyone gets enough to eat.

6. Host a Potluck Movie Night Looking for a gentle way to get friends and relatives more engaged in food issues without being preachy? Host a potluck movie night and show one of the many excellent food documentaries that have come out over the past few years. If Food Inc. is a little too hard-hitting, try Fresh or Nourish.

7. Host a Potluck of Local or Foraged Foods Even if your local farmers’ market shuts down for the winter, you can still find local foods. Look for local dairy, egg, or meat producers. Also invite your foraging friends and ask everyone to bring a dish whose main ingredient is from within 20 miles away. The idea is for participants to be exposed to local goodies they wouldn’t otherwise know about.

8. Visiting family? Hit up a Farmers’ market or Farmstand You’d really like to get your family off the packaged food, but don’t want to nag. Remember that lots of people eat packaged food because they don’t know how to prepare fresh stuff or because what’s available in the grocery store fresh just doesn’t taste that good. Introduce them to the amazing difference in flavor between fresh from the farm produce and the grocery store offerings by visiting a farmers’ market or farm stand and cooking together.

9. Bake or Cook with a Child We’re doomed if we don’t teach our children to cook. So let go a little of your need for perfect food or a clean kitchen and get those kids in there with you. And keep it light and fun. Enough said.

10. Support a Local Farmer or Fisher for your Holiday Meal Want to directly support a small farmer or fisher? Consider special-ordering a heritage turkey or goose from a local farm or, if you live near the coast, buy some fish right off the boat from a fisherman. Maybe you can’t afford it every day, but for a special occasion, it’s a great way to make a direct connection with your food producers.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: L. Marie

The post The Green Plate: 10 Seasonal Experiential Food Gifts for Foodies appeared first on EcoSalon.

Homemade food tastes better. It’s cheaper and uses less packaging. Still, while we may want to pickle those cute, little Persian cucumbers straight off the farm at the market, it turns out we might not know how. As such, Vanessa Barrington’s new cookbook, D.I.Y. Delicious comes to us in a timely manner. Vanessa’s cookbook explores recipes for many basic food staples you may have only recently considered making yourself. No time like the present!

For example, I never thought I’d find myself so excited to make porridge (boring), yogurt (too hard), or kimchi (really?)! However, after picking up D.I.Y. Delicious, my mind is spinning with all sorts of new staples I could make from scratch.

The first page of the cookbook starts with a dedication- -¦to every eater and cook who has ever asked the question, “˜Why can’t I make this myself?’” Now you can. The cookbook includes recipes of varying complexity from simple salad dressings and salsas to more involved projects such as making tortillas and crackers to fermenting and brewing sodas and tonics. Let the kitchen adventures begin! Plus, as a veteran chef in the Bay Area, Vanessa adds her own twist to basic recipes – fig jam becomes Fig-Rosemary Jam, sourdough bread becomes Sourdough Cornmeal-Pumpkin Seed Bread and aioli becomes Meyer Lemon and Parsley Aioli.

If you are in any way a D.I.Y kitchen type or have been aspiring to outfit your from-scratch pantry, this cookbook is definitely one you’ll want to have on your shelf for inspiration and reference. I know that I’m jumping on the crème fraiche bandwagon. And fresh tortillas? I’m in! And yes, I even can’t wait to make porridge.

The book sells as a hardcover with wonderful photographs by Sara Remington, designed by Suzanne LaGasa with a modern day homespun feel, and retails at Chronicle Books for $24.95.

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The markets are full of every kind of produce imaginable. At the same time, backyard gardens burst with bounty, and the feral fruit trees in my neighborhood litter the sidewalks with juicy bombs. The harvest is upon us.

The cooks that I know are in a rush to preserve what is so abundant now for those days of kale, cabbage and rutabaga that we all know are ahead. So here’s a little inspiration from around the web.

Before you start, here’s an overview of helpful canning tips and recipes from Simple Bites.

Sour Cherries are a super short season crop so if you see any in your market, take them home and try this recipe for preserved sour cherries from Doris and Jilly Cook. They’ll taste mighty good in December.

From Put up or Shut up, there’s an interesting sounding Mexican Strawberry Jam recipe with candied hibiscus.

I love Japanese pickles. They always showcase the best qualities of the vegetables and aromatics used without overpowering with vinegar. And they’re great alongside just about anything from rice to noodles to meats to sandwiches. I’m trying this recipe from Japanese Food Report next time I have a bounty of cukes.

Image: Vanessa Barrington

The post Get Canning! 3 Recipes Plus Preserving Around the Web appeared first on EcoSalon.

As healthy food and eating locally have gained more traction, pickling is no longer an old-fashioned past-time of our grandmothers. Eco-friendly folks are aiming to re-gain control of the food supply, and many of us are looking at ways to preserve local, organic food while it’s in season. What better method than pickling?

Brooklyn is particularly known for embracing the locavore movement, which I read in a NY Times article over a year ago. Case in point, when I last visited, I checked out a flea market in Fort Greene, and was amazed at the number of people selling their home-pickled wares. I was notably impressed with the number of pickled beets on the scene. I’ve since learned that you can pickle just about anything!

Not surprising then, to discover a plethora of pickling activity in San Francisco. For example, I found the Happy Girl Kitchen Co. at the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market a couple weekends ago. The Happy Girl Kitchen Co., based in Oakland and certified organic, is known for its highly refined preserving techniques and sells pickled beets, carrots and dill pickles, as well as sauerkraut and kombucha. (And fruit preserves. And canned tomatoes. And, and.)

I’ve been meaning to try pickling myself after tasting a friend’s pickled beans that were inspiring. But where to start? Happy Girl Kitchen Co. offers a variety of workshops. Classes are a bit pricey, but then again, you’re paying for a lifetime of knowledge. I also heard from a friend that the Joy of Cooking has a great recipe, and I noticed that Alice Waters included a recipe in her most recent book, In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn By Heart. With all the Persian pickles and tiny, fresh carrots at the farmers’ markets right now, I’d say it’s high time to start pickling!

Image: rachel is coconut lime

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