Cookbook Club

What’s cookin’ in community?

Come around our shared table to peruse, create, share, and choose new recipes surrounded by a curated collection of cookbooks with a diversity of recipes and food stories across kitchens—from locally-foraged to passed down in the diaspora. Artfully arrange your recipe to bring back to your own kitchen and share the stories that infuse these recipes with meaning. On the last Tuesday of the month, bring your newly learned recipe to share in a communal potluck.

When taking your seat at the table, what are the dishes that fill you with joy? Bring you back to childhood home? What are the dishes that turn you to a storyteller?

In this open-ended time, explore the cultural histories, origin stories, as well as the present day challenges and joys of eating and sharing a meal. Beyond a recipe share, this open-ended time invites participants to get curious about the histories of specific crops that make up their diet, where their food comes from and why, challenges and joys in our current foodways, the impact of our food choices, and more.

Cookbook Club will take place outside of the Greenhouse Education Center and in the event of rain will be cancelled.

Some of the cookbooks we are loving right now:

Spices and Seasons by Rinku Bhattarcharya

Heirloom Kitchen: Heritage Recipes and Family Stories from the Tables of Immigrant Women by Anna Francese Gass

An Evelasting Meal: To Cook With Economy and Grace: Tamar Adler

Eat Weeds: A Field Guide to Foraging by Diego Bonetto

The Kitchen Garden by Lucy Mora

My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi

Eat Your Flowers by Loria Stern

Milk Street: Cook What You Have Cookbook by Christopher Kimball

Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.

Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at mcraig@thehort.org.

When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.