Category: Food

United Way helps Food Bank

According to the New Hampshire Food Bank, one out of every 10 New Hampshire residents struggle to find a dependable source of food. The number for children is one in seven. Michael Apfelberg finds those numbers unacceptable.

Apfelberg is the President of the United Way of Greater Nashua, an independent nonprofit organization controlled by local donors to address problems in southern New Hampshire. Each year it focuses on addressing a particular set of persistent problems. This year the focus is on hunger and food insecurity.

Apfelberg said that in recent years more and more people in southern New Hampshire have started to go hungry.

“In our community,” he said, “we see a lot of people that we hear from all the time who are just struggling with basic needs. Inflation over the past couple of years has made a real impact on people’s bottom lines, but also, you know, things like child care and the cost of child care have really affected people. Wages have been sometimes a little stagnant at the lower end of the scale, so people do struggle with food and we see that in a lot of different ways, whether it be the need for increased access to free and reduced lunch programs, or the ability of people to actually get the food that they need.”

In order to help fund its anti-hunger programs, the Greater Nashua United Way has had to get creative in its fundraising. With the focus on food insecurity this year, many of the fundraisers have had themes tied to food and drink. For instance, this Saturday, March 22, the United Way will host a comedy-themed wine tasting at Fulchino Vineyard, with wine and performances by comedians. Apfelberg said that this is a recurring event that has evolved over the years.

“This is our third year working with Fulchino Vineyard,” he said. “The first year, it was a wine and food pairing event with a sommelier who taught everybody about wine and its properties. The second year it was a little bit more about the history of wine and winemaking and wine culture with a sort of a lecture by the owner of the vineyard, who’s an aficionado. This year we decided to evolve it again to make it a comedy night. [There will still be] wine at the vineyard with food — in this case more pizza and hors d’oeuvres and a little buffet — but with a comedy night spin to it. We have a lot of the same people who come back year after year, and we want to give them a little something different this year.”

One of last year’s most successful fundraisers for the United Way was a poker hand pub crawl, where teams of participants would travel from tavern to tavern in downtown Nashua, collecting a playing card at each bar, trying to build a winning poker hand. “It was very popular,” Apfelberg said. “People loved the poker hand pub crawl theme, so we’re going to do a repeat on that.” One of the best aspects of the event, he said, was the involvement of local businesses: “That was really our biggest involvement with restaurants and bars.” Because all the money the United Way raises stays in the community, Apfelberg explained, it is especially fitting when businesses in that community can play such an active role.

Other dramatic fundraisers this year will include the United Way’s “Over the Edge” event in June, where more than 100 participants will rappel down 24 stories of the Brady Sullivan Building in Manchester, and two separate skydiving events.

“Our first one,” Apfelberg said, “which is May 17, is raising money to support our food initiatives, food security-related initiatives that I’ve talked about. The second one in the fall is actually designed to raise funds [for] our educational supports. Our first event will be when families face going into the summer months. Summer is a time of year when food pantries typically struggle to get food.” It’s also a time when kids can’t access lunch programs at school, he said.

The second skydiving event takes place in the fall to address needs brought up by students returning to school.

Cheers to the Community Night of Wine and Comedy
When: Saturday, March 22, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Where: Fulchino Vineyards, 187 Pine Hill Road, Hollis, 438-5984, fulchinovineyard.com.
Tickets: $100 each through the United Way of Greater Nashua’s website, unitedwaynashua.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

News from the local food scene

• Shaw’s to close: As reported by the Boston Globe in a March 12 online story, the Shaw’s supermarket chain has announced that it plans to close its Fort Eddy Road store “as the chain seeks to cut some of its underperforming locations.” Another Concord Shaw’s location, on D’Amante Drive, will remain open, the company said.

• New chicken fingers: After months of anticipation Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers (782 S. Willow St., Manchester, 263-3787, raisingcanes.com) has opened. As reported by Manchester InkLink, the chicken finger chain’s first location in New Hampshire opened Tuesday, March 11, with a line of more than 100 customers waiting to place an order. ”

• Maple syrup is delicious in any language: The Franco-American Centre [Le Centre franco-américain] (100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester, 204-7680, facnh.com) will hold its annual Soirée Cabane à sucre, a traditional sugaring-off party, on Saturday, March 22, from 6 to 10 p.m. at The Oscar Barn Wedding Venue (191 W. River Road, Hooksett). The Centre describes this event on its website as “an evening of homestyle family fun [with] food, fun and traditional music.” Tickets are $55 for members, $65 for nonmembers, and $25 for children, through the Centre’s website.

• Tequila y comida: The Alamo Texas BBQ & Tequila Bar (99 Route 13, Brookline, 721-5500, alamobarbecue.com) will host a Casamigos Dinner Wednesday, March 26, at 6 p.m. All four courses of this specially curated meal will be paired with a different Casamigos tequila. Call to reserve your place.

• Planning ahead for wine: It’s time to buy tickets for WineNot Boutique’s (25 Main St., Nashua, 204-5569, winenotboutique.com) Flavors of Spring: Five-Course Wine Dinner to be held Friday, April 11, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Courtyard Nashua (2200 Southwood Drive, Nashua, 880-9100). Join guest speaker Tom Simpson, founder of Pearl Lake Distributors, for an evening of great wines, stories and a six-course wine-paired dinner. Tickets are $135 each through eventbrite.com and are expected to sell out quickly.

It’s a New England thing

By John Fladd

[email protected]

According to James Malik, the first thing you need to know about corned beef is that it’s not particularly Irish.

“[Corning beef] was a traditional means of preservation,” he said. “We associate it with St. Patrick’s Day here. It is an Irish-American thing, an Irish New England thing. But corned beef is not what’s traditionally eaten on St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland. This is very much Irish-American and very, very popular here in New England. It’s a boiled dinner, usually served with cabbage, carrots, rutabaga and onion.”

Malik, who describes himself as “an old-school butcher,” has been working with premium meat for more than 21 years. He is one of the managers and butchers at Wicked Good Butchah in Bedford. And he takes his corned beef very seriously.

“So corned beef, typically,” he said, “when we’re talking about corned beef for a boiled dinner, it is a brisket, and it is corned or brined in a salt solution. Now there’s two styles. There’s the famous red style that everybody gets in the grocery store. And then there’s the gray style, which is a very traditional New England style — the real corned beef. The difference is they’re both brined in a salt water solution, but the gray has just salt and water, where the red uses sodium nitrate or something called Instacure No. 1, which contains sodium nitrate. It keeps the red color on the external layer of the meat as well as the interior. But the gray is the traditional New England style. That’s what we do here in-house.”

One reason why corned beef is associated with Irish and Jewish immigrants is that it usually is made with brisket, a very tough and therefore traditionally inexpensive cut of beef. How tender or tough a cut of meat is is largely determined by how much work those muscles had to do during an animal’s lifetime. More exercise results in more connective tissue, which has to be broken down with long, slow cooking.

“The brisket is from the chest,” said Rick Lemay from Lemay & Sons in Goffstown, a beef processing house and butcher shop. “It’s right front-and-center. It’s what we call the front plate, and right behind that ends up being your short ribs.” He said that corned short ribs are delicious. “You don’t hear about it very often,” he said, “but it’s a pretty neat item. I’ve actually tried it with a chuck roast too.The corning process really is just a curing method.”

Because a brisket has so much connective tissue holding it together, the corning process involves soaking it in brine for anywhere from 10 to 21 days.

“We take the full 21 days,” James Malik said. “After that 21 days, we then take out the briskets from that brining solution and then we soak them for 24 hours in clean cold water to draw out any excess salt. And you’re still left with a wonderfully brined piece of meat that has that nice traditional corned beef flavor. The biggest step in all this is when you’re brining. To know that your salt solution is the correct amount of salt, you put a potato in your bucket, and when the potato floats, you have the correct amount of salt to begin brining your corned beef.”

Jay Beland is in charge of brining the corned beef at Lemay and Sons. He adds spices to the salt in his brining solution. “For a 10- to 15-pound brisket,” he said, “I’ll use two gallons of water, two tablespoons of pink curing salt, and a cup of whole black peppercorns.” He adds an additonal cup of cracked — but not powdered — peppercorns, two cups of coriander seeds — one whole and one cracked, and the same with yellow mustard seeds, and a cup of pickling spice. “That’s my water,” he said. “That is my brine.

Beland brines his brisket for about 10 days, then smokes it at 225 degrees, until it reaches an internal temperature of 180 degrees. James Malik, on the other hand, is a great believer in braising his corned beef.

“When people hear ‘boiled dinner’,” Malik said, “their first thought is to go ahead and put it in a pot of water and boil the ever-loving Jesus out of it. I would tell you that the best way to do this is to do more of like a braise in the oven. Believe it or not, you can dry it out by over-boiling it for too long. I put it in my big lobster pot and I time it out. You’ll find you get a much better piece of meat that way, much more enjoyable.”

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.