Dancing Cooks
BalletMet on good eats, nutrition and bringing creativity to the kitchen.
dancing cooks
BalletMet’s Top Picks & Seasonal Eats
Edwaard Liang, artistic director of BalletMet, loves good food. We talked cooking and diets for our spring article Dancing Cooks, and he shared the restaurants in Columbus he enjoys when he’s at home. Here are Edwaard’s top picks:
Lindey’s
Barcelona
Fox in the Snow Café
Akai Hana
Mr. Pot
Hong Kong House
The Keep
The Pearl
The Joseph
Melt (the Tofu Buffalo Wings)
And Ambre Emory-Maier, director of education at BalletMet and associate director of BalletMet 2, shared stories with me about growing up on her family’s farm. Both Edwaard and Ambre are no strangers to soil.
“That’s always been a fantastic thing, to experiment with different herbs and have fresh lettuces and kale and arugula that we can just cut, clean and throw into a salad,” says Edwaard. “You know exactly what you’re putting into it. It’s such a live food.”
Edwaard has grown herbs, tomato, kale, Swiss chard and different lettuces. And while Ambre remembers growing up on what she calls her father’s “gentleman’s farm,” along Lake Ontario, (“My mom and grandmother cooked from scratch, and my dad would go to a farmers market and sell our eggs that our hens laid…”), and she grows cucumbers with aplomb; she sighs when she admits that she can’t grow pumpkins. “It’s really disappointing.”
What does Ambre crave come springtime? Dandelion greens but with leaves that are little and not over-sized like what you find at the store. And a bread called makovnjača (Ukraine/Slovak), if one is using poppy seeds.
The poppy seed mixture is made with poppy seeds, foamed egg whites and sugar. The dough consists of flour, yeast cakes (packets), butter, eggs, sugar, salt and a bit of vanilla. The mixture is rolled into the dough after it is kneaded. It is baked for about 35–40 minutes. One can add walnuts or other nuts to the poppy seed mixture. It is usually made around spring and Easter. The prettier the spirals of poppy seed mixture in the bread, the better. You can also buy these breads locally at the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Farmers Market.”
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