The Slow Food Applesauce of Autumn.

Every year at this time, I like to make a ceremonial batch of elevated applesauce. I call it Yankee Ambrosia. It has little resemblance to that one finds in conventional supermarkets. I pick a random batch of apples for flavor add local sweeteners like maple syrup or honey, some raisins and walnuts for complement flavor and plenty of cinnamon and nutmeg. I usually don't peel the apples, I just core them and cut them into fairly good sized chunks.

Then I add a quarter inch or so of water to the bottom of the kettle and let the steam gradually reduce the whole thing to a point where there is still some solid texture to the apple chunks. It is a scratch recipe I learned from my great grandmother and strikes me as quintessence of the slow food concept, a cuisine based on the realities of place.

The NYT recently covered a Slow Food event in San Francisco and I thought it would be a good time to invite my old colleague, Todd Preston to weigh in on his sense of Slow Food and how it changes when filtered through the American outlook.

"It is difficult to describe the "right" way that food production should go. Given world population it is simply implausible to go "organic". Massive tractors and chemical fertilizers have their place.....have you put ketchup on anything lately? Most folks would love to live in a world where the calloused hand of the farmer hands you each onion....this is nice but largely a magazine page dream....I love the farmers market too and this is important....but we love our avocados in January just as much....South America comes through as the planet tilts...at huge expense...Slow Food basically says rediscover your love of pickles and forget about asparagus in November... the dim have hi-jacked this noble effort of course...turned it into their normal yuppie one-upmanship tard parade instead of a bunch of folks recognizing something wrong and coming together in honest grass root partnership and then getting to taste and be nourished by the delicious results..."

" "Canning....a once home based necessity for survival...has become corporate...a loss of fundamental knowledge....I'm just starting to deal in barrels of tomatoes...but my old school Grandpa tomato jockey knows the scene...Ed Flemming...and we are on the cusp of the San Fernando valley....he has had his thumb on Heinz and others for a generation or two...it just becomes fun after a while....but anyways...with specialization comes knowledge loss...we are not equipped to suffer a large scale power loss....India or China could figure things out in a way we could never fathom...they are closer to shit...if you catch my drift...get hip to the 3rd world vibe."

Slow Food International and Slow Food USA are good start points to learn about a word of heirloom food restoration, agricultural diversity and a sense of place.