What Are You Having/Teaching for Lunch or Dinner at the Lebanon Co-op, Lindsay Smith?

Feb 1

The Co-op Food Store in Lebanon, New Hampshire is not your mother’s co-op. Sure, you can always wander the aisles, free-style or grocery list in hand, filling a cart with your weekly comestibles. But you can also learn to cook, and even dine, there.

Lindsay Smith, Food Education Specialist, makes it all happen. She organizes and teaches a myriad of public and private classes. This winter’s schedule includes skills classes where you can learn how to handle a knife, a wok, or a cast iron skillet. A series called Global Celebrations could transport you (culinarily) to places around the planet—to Korea, for example, for Classic Korean Bibimbap or to New Orleans for Shrimp and Grits. You become the hands-on chef and after, the satisfied diner. If you’d rather just watch and taste, try Lunch ‘n’ Learn for one-hour cooking demonstrations: Scallion Pancakes with Vegetables, Mandarin Hot and Sour Soup, and yes, beignets.

Lindsay stepped into her current role after having worked in unconventional classrooms such as environmental centers, outdoor adventure programs, and internationally with the Peace Corps. She holds a master’s degree in Rural Sociology, focused on small sustainable farming and women farming. She spent almost a decade running farmer’s markets in North Carolina and here in the Upper Valley, “so that also really influenced my relationship with food. And honestly, I have found that I have a knack for cooking!”

Asked what advice she might give to those learning to cook, Lindsay says that recipes are fine, but don’t necessarily stick to them. “This does require one to cook from their senses. Listen to what is happening. Smell what is happening. Watch what is happening. Engage in the process. Moreover, taste your food. Trust your taste buds. And when you are in doubt, add a touch of salt and add some acid!” And for an even more specific piece of advice, she adds: “Please stop sautéing your onions and garlic at the same time; these are two different steps often written as one. Onions take 3-5 minutes, garlic 30 seconds. You're welcome.”

Is all home cooking all of the time the goal? She thinks not, saying it isn’t realistic even for her. She calls a rotisserie chicken a “game changer.”

I love to roast a chicken (my preferred way is spatchcocked, smothered in herb butter, on a bed of root vegetables), but I do not always have the time or bandwidth. However, a rotisserie chicken . . . I can eat cut up on salad, shred and make tacos, or just eat with my fingers standing over the kitchen sink.
In the end, I want to honor that we all are in different places, so let’s take off the pressure of what “home cooking” is and should look like. Do what you can. Try to build a pantry. Shop the perimeter of the store (or a farmer’s market), but don’t go overboard. Start small.

Glancing over the menus for the next few months of cooking and eating in the Co-op classes, Lindsay was asked to choose what she herself would most prefer to eat. After exclaiming about the difficulty of choosing, she acknowledged that “dishes like Shrimp ‘n’ Grits or Gumbo are sentimental favorites . . . However, the meal that I most like and prefer to eat would be the Buddha Bowls. I gravitate towards dishes where I can mix and match to construct different bites all in the same meal. Where there is protein, lots of veggies, some sort of sauce. And if I can eat it with my hands – bonus! (I’m a sucker for a taco or hummus platter anytime.) What I also like about Buddha bowls, they are more of an idea rather than a straight recipe, so they can really including anything you like and the veggies can change to reflect what is in season.

Feeling inspired? Check out what numerous culinary adventures await by clicking here.

A post-script: Lindsay Smith plans to continue her pop-up restaurant of last year in Enfield NH this coming summer. Called {las vive}, it will offer a prix fixe meal, sourced as locally as possible. Lindsay notes that last year almost all her vendors/ farmers were women. Dates not yet determined. You can learn more and join a mailing list here.

(This is another post in a collaboration between Daybreak and Artful on local restaurants. Photo of Lindsay Smith courtesy of Lindsay Smith, photo of beignets, top, courtesy of pburka via wikicommons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beignets_and_Café_au_Lait_at_Café_du_Monde,_New_Orleans.jpg)

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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.