Kitty Banks runs the kitchen at InterAct, a shelter for domestic violence victims. Photo by Jeremy M. Lange.

A piece on hunger runs the risk of feeling stoic or redundant, full of statistics and absent of hope. I struggled with this as I researched and spoke to numerous people involved in local hunger relief projects. Then I  met Ms. Kitty Banks, who gave me the honor of telling me her compelling story.

“Not only am I doing what I want to do,” Banks says, “but it’s part of my dream to have my own kitchen. This is as close to mine for now.”

Thirteen years ago, this wasn’t the case. Banks says she was a “functioning drug addict, trying to hang on” as a single mom working two jobs to support her kids and her habit. Though smiling, she still can’t avoid the tears welling in her eyes when she recalls an incident that happened many years ago: She sat at her kitchen table and ignored her children’s pleas for breakfast.

“They knew mama was hung over, that she started her day with a BC [powder] and a Sunkist.”

Read the article here.

Ben Horner cools freshly roasted beans at Counter Culture. The local company works directly with farms to ensure the coffee is fairly traded under economically and environmentally sustainable conditions. Photo by Jeremy M. Lange

Fair Trade USA has changed its standards for fair trade coffee certification, pulling from the Fair Trade International model. Among the changes: expanding the criteria to include farms that are not part of a cooperative. My story’s focus explores the local perspective via Counter Culture and Carrboro Coffee Co. These two prominent Triangle, North Carolina roasters apply their own ethos, methods and certification to their product, with varying opinions on both the former and new certification standards. The issue itself, as well as other issues surrounding the coffee economy, is extremely complex. An interesting debate follows in the comments, so be sure to read them.

Read the story here.

Frappe cupcake. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis

I have a very long way to go before I can actually say I know how to bake. I’ve got the phyllo bases covered – baklava, spanakopita – and have dabbled in bread making for a couple month-long stints on farms. But I leave cakes and pastries to professionals, including a few favorite cupcake nooks I like to visit when travelling. That was until I got this incessant hankering to make a dessert flavored like frappe, the sugar-saturated Nescafe drink that Greeks gulp down with a side of cigarettes at least three times a day.

Frappe. Cigarettes. Typical Greece. Mykonos 2009.

Frappe cupcakes finally debuted on our family’s Christmas table this year. I’m kind of effin’ proud of myself. It’s a Christmas miracle! They’re not perfect—Nescafe dehydrated the batter a bit. But the result was a very tasty, caffeine-potent dessert. I altered a coconut cupcake Ina Garten recipe from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. My attempt to mimic the frappe’s frothy topping was to make a marshmallow crème icing. I think I could have gotten a better stacked height with regular frosting, but the extra sweetness complemented the coffee flavoring pretty well. And I got the idea to plop a straw on top from Hello Cupcake in D.C., where the root beer float cupcake is adorned with a cute, hunched-over straw for kitsch effect.

This may be best as a breakfast cupcake. Nescafe keeps you wired, and you may catch yourself trying to smash a plate on your kitchen floor if you eat too many. Opa!

Recipe below.

Frappe cupcakes

Makes 24 cupcakes.

¾ lb. unsalted butter at room temperature
2 cups sugar
5 extra-large eggs at room temperature
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
1 cup buttermilk
½ cup or more of Nescafe Classic grounds (this is a ballpark figure. I didn’t technically measure it.)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

In the bowl of an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. With the mixer running on low, add the eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl with a spatula after each addition. Add the vanilla extract and mix well.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a separate smaller bowl, whisk the Nescafe in with the buttermilk.

In three parts, alternately add the dry ingredients and the buttermilk to the batter, beginning and ending with the dry. Mix until just combined.

Line a muffin pan with paper liners. Fill each cup to the top with batter. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are brown and a toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 15 minutes. Remove to a baking rack and cool completely.

Marshmallow crème frosting

½ cup sugar
2 tbs. water
2 large egg whites
about 10 oz. marshmallow crème
½ tsp. vanilla extract

Place sugar, water and egg whites in a medium-size heavy saucepan. Cook over low heat, beating continuously with an electric hand mixer on high speed until soft peaks form, 2 to 3 minutes. Make sure to keep cord away from the burner.

Remove the pan from the heat. Add the marshmallow crème and beat on high speed until stiff peaks form, 2 or so minutes more.

Use at once.

An embarrassing picture of my sister.

*NSYNC's Joey Fatone chows on Chirba Chirba juicy buns. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis

It slipped my mind to post this on the site. How could I have forgotten about my day with a former boy-bander turned food personality? Thanks to Chirba Chirba, the Triangle’s official dumpling raid on wheels, I spent some time hanging out with the Chirba crew and Joey while he filmed for his new show, My Family Recipe Rocks, to air on the Live Well Network in January. Read my Indy Big Bite blog post about it!

From bean to bar at Escazu Chocolates in Raleigh. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

Chocolate has a convoluted history tantamount to the saga and intrigue of a tragic heroine. Powerful men throughout time, be it Aztec kings or Spanish emperors, pursued her with vigor–an elusive object deemed precious, indulgent. European conquerors claimed to discover cacao in a world they assumed to be new, cheapening her title as “food of the gods” and stripping her sacred seeds from indigenous hands.

Now, many local chocolatiers honor these roots of cacao, creating a historic, delicious tribute to what is now a globally revered staple beyond just the dessert plate.

Read the story, featuring Cocoa Cinnamon, Escazu Artisan Chocolates and Elemental Chocolate, plus a list of more local purveyors.

Porcino and its gorgeous pasta colors. Photo by Jeremy M. Lange.

The latest DISH issue focuses on food made by hand. One of my contributions was a look at the homemade pasta artisans here in the Triangle. The allure of fresh pasta features Porcino of Carrboro, Dur’m Pasta Co. of Durham and Melina’s Fresh Pasta of Raleigh. Each purveyor had a passionate story to tell, including Carmella Alvaro of Melina’s, who confessed many joys of being raised by immigrant parents obsessed with good food, including the following: “I was a vegetarian for five years because I went to get the laundry one day and there was a lamb hanging from the ceiling.”

Great cover shot, too, with the help of Porcino’s delicious curry macaroni!

TROSA Grocery file photo by Jeremy M. Lange.

More than 20,000 residents live in the 300 blocks of Northeast Central Durham. It’s also an area that has been labeled a food desert, with many of its residents lacking access to fresh food. This week’s story, Hungry for choices: Fresh food finds its way to Northeast Central Durham, details plans made by the community to bring more choices to the area, especially within walking distance of most residents’ homes.

“I think it’s a really important moment right now,” says Sam Hummel of Everlaughter Farms. “There are still many adults in the Northeast Central Durham neighborhood who have a food tradition that involves fresh local vegetables. We don’t have to import a food culture from foodie West Durham. There’s already a food culture in Northeast Durham that knows what to do with fresh ingredients, but the ingredients haven’t been there for it to be practiced and passed on.”

“Why can’t I have the same options as Southpoint, Brier Creek, Trinity Park? Why can’t I have that same quality of food and freshness as everybody else?” Dawn Hill-Alston asks. “Just because we live here doesn’t mean we’re going to settle. Because we know we’re worth more than that.”

Please also read this related story by Maggie Smith: N.C. ranks 11th in child food insecurity.

BURLAP. Portraits of Piedmont Farmers by Raymond Goodman

I’ve posted a couple of dispatches on Indy’s Big Bite blog from last weekend’s Carolina Farm Stewardship Association‘s 26th Sustainable Agriculture Conference, held in Durham.

BURLAP. Portraits of Piedmont Farmers opens with a reception tomorrow at Bull City Arts Collective and Piedmont restaurant. Read why local photographer Raymond Goodman sought inspiration from the personas of local farmers.

And why did Watts Grocery chef Amy Tornquist tell a crowd “I need people to drink more at breakfast?” Read the post on a panel discussing farmer to chef to consumer relationships, moderated by Lantern chef/owner Andrea Reusing.

Children of farmworkers play in the dusty backyard of a Wilson County labor camp, where their family lives in bunks with other workers. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis.

One hundred and three farmworkers were interviewed last year for a report released in September by OxFam America and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). The report, “A state of fear: Human rights abuses in North Carolina’s tobacco industry,” brings an adamant argument to the table that human rights abuses exist in NC’s top industry. The result is an eye-opening awareness of exploited labor as the backbone of a direct consumer product—tobacco. Read the Independent Weekly story.

These collard green tamales have me intrigued. Photo by Sandra A. Gutierrez (sandraskitchenstudio.com)

My lunch interview with Sandra A. Gutierrez unleashed an intriguing history lesson peppered with cooking tips.

For the food-obsessed, snuggling up to The New Southern-Latino Tablecookbook is akin to a new love affair. It comes with all the warmth of tender familiarity while simultaneously sparking an impassioned interest in what is more compatible than imagined.

As a chef, culinary instructor, food writer and historian, Guatemalan-American Sandra A. Gutierrez has documented what she describes as “a natural marriage” of the culinary similarities that our South and 21 Latin American countries have shared all along. She noticed the trend in the 1990s while dishing out columns on the topic at The Cary News for eight years. Her book unleashes 150 original recipes, from country ham drizzled with chimichurri sauce to collard green tamales and chocolate chili brownies, plumped up by hefty chunks of information detailing the Mayan legend of corn or the history of the casserole.

Her cookbook explores the “natural marriage” of Southern and Latin American cuisines. Click here for the full Indy interview.