The Kitchen Sisters

Kitchen Sisters Workshop

2011-10-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

WHAT: Kitchen Sisters Recording, Interviewing & "Sound Doctor" Workshop
WHEN: Thursday, October 27, 2011. 10 AM—1 PM
WHERE: La Selva Beach, CA (Near Santa Cruz)
COST: $115 (payable to Kitchen Sisters Productions)

Dear Friends,

Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters, award winning producers for NPR, is conducting a recording, interviewing, and "sound doctor" workshop on Thursday, October 27 in La Selva Beach (at the commune where she lives) just south of Santa Cruz. This three-hour session is designed for people who want to acquire and hone their skills for radio, online storytelling, oral histories, audio slide shows, family histories, museum exhibits, news, documentaries, podcasts, and other multimedia platforms.

The workshop will cover miking techniques, sound gathering, use of archival audio, field recording techniques, how to make interviewees comfortable, how to frame evocative questions that make for compelling storytelling, how to listen (which is harder than it sounds) and more. We'll talk about creating audio and multimedia content for the web, and self-publishing projects. Nikki will also give a quick tour of her studio and ProTools editing set-up.

The workshop will be customized to fit your project and interests. People who attend come from many mediums and work worlds (from radio stations to detective agencies and beyond). The groups are lively and good contacts are made.
You are invited to bring a work-in-progress, a past work, or an idea you'd like to brainstorm during the "audio doctor" part of the session. Nikki will play excerpts from a few Kitchen Sisters stories that are illustrative of various problem-solving techniques.

The session will be limited in size so that everyone can fully participate around the table at La Selva. A snack will be provided.

If you, or someone you know is interested, email kitchen@kitchensisters.org. Please pass this along to a friend.

See you there,
The Kitchen Sisters

Updates

2011-04-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

For updates about The Hidden World of Girls, visit: hiddenworldofgirls.org or facebook.com/hiddenworldofgirls

For updates about The Kitchen Sisters visit: facebook.com/kitchensisters or twitter.com/kitchensisters

A look inside Bay Area's YOUTH RADIO

2010-04-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

We love Youth Radio and are thrilled to see this new book emerge that takes you inside and behind the scenes of this dynamic youth-driven production company based in Oakland, California.

Drop That Knowledge is written by Elizabeth Soep and former Youth Radio participant Vivian Chavez (now a professor at San Francisco State University), Drop That Knowledge is the first book to go inside Youth Radio.

Read more and buy a book and then tune into Bay Area's own Youth Radio!

Here is Elizabeth Soeps Blog

Listen to a conversation about the book interwoven with entertaining Youth Radio stories on KALW at kalwnews.org!

Hidden World of Girls Launches!

2010-03-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

Today on NPR's Morning Edition and this evening on All Things Considered the first stories of our new series Hidden World of Girls airs.

We'd love you to call the NPR message line with your story ideas—202-408-9576.

We're also looking for photos, videos, audio. Find out how to participate at hiddenworldofgirls.org

Women In the World

2010-03-12T16:26:00.000-08:00

This weekend we are attending Women in the World: Stories and Solutions, a summit sponsored by The Daily Beast, showcasing dozens of powerful women and activists from around the world.

The Daily Beast is streaming the entire conference live on their website. You can watch the events as they happen here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/womenintheworldlivevideo

Lois DeDomenico

2010-01-28T15:18:00.000-08:00

We were just sent a blog post about Lois DeDomenico, who we interviewed for our Hidden Kitchens story, Rice-A-Roni. Lois will be a judge at Ultimate Chef America, "Iron Chef for the senior set." Read the post here (which includes Lois' Crunchy Granola recipe).

And listen to the Hidden Kitchens story with Lois here.

Christina Kim Installation at the Brandenburg Gate

2010-01-28T14:40:00.000-08:00

Designer Christina Kim, one of the artists we are following for our new series about girls around the world, sent us this photo from Berlin of the epic curtain she is creating using recycled movie posters hanging at the Brandenburg Gate for the 60th Berlin Film Festival.

Charo on Latino USA

2010-01-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

Maria Hinojosa, one our favorite people at KUT Austin has an extended, intimate conversation with the incomparable Charo on her show NPR's Latino USA. Listen here.

"Women Taking to the Streets" , another series of moving stories aired last week, includes interviews with ‘Just Associates,’ a pro-feminist organization active in Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa and a moving piece on Esther Chavez Chano, one of the leading voices against the femicide in Juarez.

Since 1993, NPR’s Latino USA has been documenting one of the most incredible transformations of American life and reality—the exploding Latino population and its integration in the a changing America.

Title Contest Submissions

2009-12-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

Recently we sent out a call for stories and a contest to name our new series about the secret life of girls around the world, girls and the women they become. So far we have received hundreds of title submissions and we wanted to share some of them. Here is The List:

The Permanent Rose Project
Our Stories, Our Truth
Our Shared and Common Destiny
Hear Our Voices
Listen, Over Here
Over Here
Congratulations, it's a girl! (Or just: It's a girl!)
Spinning Straw into Gold (Or just: Straw into Gold)
And Jill came tumbling after
Let the girl do it
That's what girls do
The Shape of a Women
Sister Songs
Sister Secrets
Girlhood
unrealistic expectations
the girl nextdoor
Secret Spaces
The Secret Lives of Babes
The women they became
Sister's Garden
Girlstuff
Dolls, Damsels and Darlings: a journey to becoming a woman.
The Unsilencing of Girl Voices
Girls To Women
Who Are Girls
Spotlight On Girls
The Story of Girls
Girl Time
Girls Ave
Time for Girls
Ladies First
In their Words: girls and the women they've become
In our words
From Our Worlds, In Our Words
Wise Word
High Heels to Bare Feet or (Foot) Chronicles
Bare Feet or (Foot) to High Heels Chronicles
SisterSpeak
FemaleFactor
Shattered Ceilings or The Shattered Ceiling(s) Stories
This is My Story
Mountain High Valley Low
Girl Meets
World Meets Girl
The Global Diaries
The Chatter Bible
Girls Spill
Storied Endings
The Reflective Raconteur
All Ears Storytelling
Every Girl Has a Story
Global Gossip
Now Hear This
Storytelling Unleashed
Babble
Tracking the Truth
Operation Story
Tracking the Truth
Global Reflections
Every Life Tells/Has a Story
Daisy Chains
The Forget-me-knot Chronicles
Our Stories, Ourselves
She, the People
Ophelia's Tales
Ophelia's Dreams
Ophelia's Secrets
Wendy's Neverland
The Bridge to Neverland
Purple Nightshade Diaries
Under the Purple Nightshade
Cherry Pits
Cherries: Pits and Blossoms
Sugar and Spice
Silent Keepers
Hush
Muse
Ain't I a Woman
Marienetta
Celine
All about Eve
Just like a Woman
Hear her Sing
Her Secret Story
The Jill Project
In Her Words
Fertile Voices
Tracing Emily
The Amiga Project
Inheriting the secrets of women's lives
The inheritance of women's secret lives
The secret inheritance of women's lives
Heirlooms of stories by women and girls
The secret heirlooms of our fair sex (sexist context?)
The secret inheritance of fair young maidens (sexist context?)
Heirlooms of women's secret lives
Hidden heirlooms of women's lives
Heirlooms of Secret Lives:
Heirlooms of women and girls, Lost and Found
Secret heirlooms lost and found: revelations of women and girls
Buried heirlooms of women and girls: found throughout the world
Buried heirlooms unearthed by women and girls around the world
More and more
Beneath the Veil
Turn the Stone
Beneath the Stone
Hearing Athena
The Quiet & Wild Roads of Girls
Becoming Ourselves: Stories of Trailblazing Ladies
Growing Inside Out
Secrets Out Loud
The Life & Times of Girl Dreams
Limelight Moments
Girl Stories
Growing Up a Girl
Grown-up Girl Stories
The Dreams of Ladies
Trails We Blaze
Blazing Girls
What girls have to say
Boys Drool and Girls Rule
Go Girls
Queen for a day
Great yarns
The Complexity of Girls
Don't Know Much About Her-story
The Double X Files
The XX Files
The XX Project
XX no Ys
XX
XX World
Table Fables
Table Talk
Chewing the Fat
Table Tales
Tales from the Table
From Tale to Table
The Daily Bread
New Wives Tales
Girl Talk
Brown Bag Talk
Women Catching Fire
Women Stir the Pots
Wise Maria’s Kitchen Tales
Shall We Gather in the Kitchen?
Cooking Up Her Story
Kitchen Wisdom
Stirring Up Stories
Women’s Kitchens, Women’s Lives
Growing Up in the Kitchen
In Memory’s Kitchen
Stories from the Soul Kitchen
Rattling Our Pots and Pans
Recipes for Memory
Speaking from the Hearth
Hidden Women
Girls in the Mist
Bivouac
The Two Muses
The Muse Project
The Calliope Chronicles
The Hidden Life of Girls
Not So Tall Tales
Short Tales
Girl Tales
The Girl Chronicles
Girl Talk
Mothers, Daughters, Sisters & Friends
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something You
She said/She said
Speak for Yourself
Sister Speak
True Fables
True Tales
What You Said
Outskirts
I Have No Country
My Country
Sheroes
Untold Story Inside
Gadiola Light
Sprung From Memory
Her Voice
Thy Name is Woman
Pandora's Box
Pandora's Vox
All About Eve
Just Like a Woman
Hear Her Song
Her Secret Story
The Jill Project
In Her Words
Fertile Voices
Tracing Emily
The Amiga Project
True North
Period Piece
Girls Undone
The Girls Network
Being a Girl
The Sister Next Door
Girl Culture
Who's That Girl?
On Becoming Women
Finding Her Voice
This One's for the Girl
Girls World
Girl Life
Let's Hear it for the Girl
Girls, Girls, Girls
Just Like a Woman
GirlView
1001 Kitchen Secrets
Stories Rising
Cook Until Tender
Voices from the Kitchen
Kitchen Voices
Secret Servings
The Story Feast
The Story Banquet
Steeped in Story (Stories)
The Kitchen Table Project
1001 Ways to Cook a Secret
Sisters at the Table
Feast of Secrets
Story Sisters
Story Sirens
Scheherazade Tells All
Every Daughter Has (or Tells) a Story
Mother Tongue
The Global Muse
Project Muse
Sister to Sister
Secret Sisters
Sisters of Secrets
The Secret Lives of Global Girls
The Secret Truths of Global Girls
My Name is Scheherazade
What She Said
Girls Gone Candid
Real Girls to Real Women
Girls Just Wanna Grow Up
I Enjoy Being a Girl
Evolution--from Girl to Woman in Non-Easy Steps
Becoming Real--Girls Grow Up
More than Lipgloss--What It Means to Become a Woman in the Twenty-First Century
Womanhood Defined--Girls Coming of Age
The Unveiling Project
The Blossom Project
Amelia's Secret
Life on Venus
Womanhood Confidential
she will tell you: stories from girls & women around the world
WOMYN
Women Underground
A Girl’s Story
Women of Influence
She, Me, Her
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Women: Lost & Found
Secrets and Lives: The Incredible True Stories of Women and Girls
The Lost Girls: True Stories of Hidden Heroines and Everyday Warriors
The Secret Society of Hidden Heroines
Forgotten Girls Found
The World Girls Club: The Secret Society of Hidden Heroines and Underground Rituals

Thank you to the following for their submissions: Deborah Pardes, Marsha Weiner, Eve Epstein, David Wilson Burnham, Kate Jessup, Mina Kim, Sara Blumenstein, Eliza Hotchkiss, Venus Brown, Kate Blood, Chris Altwegg, Michelle Ito, Jolene Ketzenberger, Mika Gans, Malaika Horne, Catherine Gund, Sasha Vasilyuk, Brooke Miller, Carla Eckels, Catherine Price, Mark Bell, Sheryl Kraft, Jan Bell, Emelie Gunnison, Liza Mock, Andi McDaniel, Summer Brenner, Julie Bien, Judy O'Shea, Amy Tan, Bettina Birch, Rachel Vandagriff, Catherine Dauer, Lisa Busch, Laurie Fabiano, Catherine Pantsios, Chris Strachwitz, Henry Cordova, Mark Bell, Larry Corwin, Jenny Tonks, Jennifer Morla, Tracy Alverson Euler, Ahri Golden, Catherine Stifter, Susan Freinkel, Allison Barlett, Denise Emanuel Clemen, Carolyn Krause, Karen H. Phillips, Catherine Haley Epstein, Mae Maracek, Robert Seibert, Eloise Melzer, Rae Umsted

If you have a title idea you would like to submit, send it to kitchen [at] kitchensisters.org

The Futurist Cookbook

2009-12-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

A new Hidden Kitchens story airs tonight on KALW 91.7 in San Francisco at 5:00 during Crosscurrents. You can listen live online at kalw.org.

The story, produced with Roman Mars takes a look at F.T. Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook, first published in 1932, and how a group of contemporary chefs and artists are realigning "the movement's arguably fascist palate with a more sustainable approach to life."

Los Angeles Times Feature

2009-12-15T10:58:00.000-08:00

The Kitchen Sisters were featured in the Los Angeles Times Food Section. Take a look here.

Help Support The Kitchen Sisters

2009-12-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

"People need stories in hard times. They go to storytellers when times are hard like these." - Bruce Springsteen

Dear Friends,

We've always said our microphone is a stethoscope listening to the complicated heart of the nation. Recently, we sent out a call for stories to our email list for our upcoming NPR series about girls and the women they become, and the stories started pouring in:

“I received your email about your new series about girls around the world…who doesn’t have a story to be told? Take my Aunt Sally for example..." “My friend Shakundala is a painter of women. Most of the women she paints are prostitutes in India…” “You need to go to the all-female firehouse inside the California Women’s Prison and talk to the inmate/firefighters…” “I've passed this call on to our 14 year old daughter. Thank you for making this series for her, for all of us.” “My 3 sisters and I each adopted girls from Haiti and have developed a new family with the 22 girls that are their orphanage sisters. We invite you to Haiti to document these girls yourselves…”

Our new NPR series goes on air in March 2010 in honor of the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day. We'll be opening up an NPR Phone Line on Morning Edition this January inviting listeners to call in with more stories and ideas.

Donate now to support our new international multimedia collaboration that will be heard by millions.

Your donation will directly support our work for the next year: creating on-air and online stories about women and girls around the world; developing a new series of international stories for Hidden Kitchens World; developing WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts, the Broadway musical; producing the Cabrillo Music Festival multimedia project based on our women and girls series; teaching audio workshops (over 100 people took part last year) and mentoring young interns and emerging producers.

We are independent producers, not on NPR's payroll. No doubt you have heard of the steep cutbacks and layoffs at NPR. It is even harder to make it as an independent in these tight times. When our community supports us, granting agencies and corporations are far more likely to give significant funds to make our work possible.

In a world that needs education, health care, housing, good food, justice and peace, it's hard to come asking for money for storytelling. But storytelling has the transformative power to illuminate and address serious issues in ways that seep into the soul, that find the common threads of our humanity, that stir people to action. That is our mission, and what we can accomplish with your support.

No amount is too big. No amount is too small. Your donation is tax-deductible.
Thank you for supporting our efforts to chronicle little-known stories of our community, culture and history—stories filled with possibility. Think of all we can do together in the coming year.

We thank you for being part of The Kitchen Sisterhood.

Peace,

Davia & Nikki
The Kitchen Sisters

To contribute by check please make payable to: The Kitchen Sisters Productions, 916 Kearny St., San Francisco, CA 94113

The Kitchens Sisters Productions is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) media organization. All contributions are tax-deductible

Aminatou Haidar

2009-11-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

The story of Aminatou Haidar just recently come to our attention. We hope you will take a moment and see what is happening with her right now. This message came from Sairica Rose who we are working with on our upcoming series about girls around the world.

Aminatou Haidar is a peaceful non-violent activist known as the Saharawi people's Gandhi. She is a former political prisoner, human rights defender and recipient of the 2009 Civil Courage Prize, for championing non-violent resistance and the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

Today, November 24th, 2009 marks Aminatou’s 10th day on hunger strike, confined to Lanzarote Airport in Spain’s Canary Islands after Morocco forcefully expelled her from her home in the Western Sahara Occupied Territories on November 14th.

She is in a wheelchair and doctors fear for her health as she suffers a stomach ulcer. Aminatou will not abandon her demonstration until the Moroccan and Spanish Governments allow her to return to her home in El Aaiun, the capital of the Saharawi Territories.

The Western Sahara was the last Spanish colony, under Franco. It was abandoned by Spain in 1975, as the dictator lay dying and simultaneously invaded by Morocco, violating United Nations resolutions and international law.

From that day to this, The Saharawi people have been waiting for a referendum on self-determination. They’ve been waiting for 24 years.

Aminatou has tirelessly, peacefully demonstrated for the return of this land to her people via referendum and the creation of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Since 1975, the Saharawi people have lived with terror, torture and kidnappings in the occupied territories. In the 2000’s, secret prisons and torture houses and mass graves were discovered in the occupied territories, including El Aaiun. Hundreds more Saharawis have simply “disappeared.”

When Morocco invaded, Algeria allowed the Saharawis that fled into Tindouf. The Refugee Camp that stands there now is home to 150,000 refugees, separated from their family members by The Moroccan Wall.

This monstrous 2700km structure is the world’s longest wall after the Great Wall of China. It is heavily guarded by Moroccan troops and mines and has divided the Saharawi population for over 30 years. They live in two separate territories, in equally horrific conditions, united by their cause.

So how come we’ve never heard about all this?

Because nobody talks about it.

The Moroccan government is “sensitive” about letting journalists in; The UN has had a “ceasefire”, in effect (ineffectively) since 1991. Not surprisingly there’s been a strategic reluctance from France or Spain to ruffle Morocco’s feathers.

All Amanitou wants to do is go home and continue passively demonstrating for what she believes in. Please help her, and help us to help her by raising awareness and persuading the Spanish and Moroccan governments to let her go home to her family, her people and her cause.

“I am very grateful to all the kindness and affection signs. I am receiving calls and messages from all over the world. I believe firmly that the Saharawi peaceful struggle is a fair cause and, as Gandhi did. I have absolute faith in non-violence for a better world and for a real peace.”
–Aminatou Haidar November 22nd, 2009.

A Call for Stories and a Contest

2009-10-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Kitchen Sisters are looking for stories and images and videos and writings.

We're launching a new multimedia series on NPR this January, a listener collaboration in the tradition of Hidden Kitchens, Lost & Found Sound, and The Sonic Memorial Project. This one's about girls. Girls and the women they become. Stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities. Of women who crossed a line, broke a trail, changed the tide.

Small everyday stories, dramatic life and death stories. Stories from the middle of the city, to the middle of nowhere.

What women should we know about? What girl's story should we tell? The famous, the infamous, the unknown, the untold. Women with public lives. Women with secret lives.

Call our NPR Storyline at 202-408-9576 and tell us your story, or the story of someone we need to chronicle. Or email us at kitchen [at] kitchensisters.org

And here's The Contest. We want you to help us name this new NPR series. We've called it The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, The Scheherazade Project, 1001 Stories, all names we like but can't go with for one reason or another. So, we turn to you to join our brainstorming sessions. You can call or email us with your suggestions. Whoever picks the title will be featured on our website, get the full line of Kitchen Sisters products and productions, a wild boar dinner with forager, Angelo Garro, and the deep satisfaction of hearing the title you came up with on NPR throughout the year.

This soon-to-be-titled project will be full of richly layered sound and striking images, created by people around the world who help capture these stories of eccentric, trailblazing women and ground-breaking girls.

Join The Kitchen Sisterhood and help launch this new multimedia collaboration.

Operation Frontline's Mobile Classroom Kitchen

2009-10-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

We met Catherine Luu of Operation Frontline at our recent Hidden Kitchens event at the California Endowment in Los Angeles, "Who Glues Your Community Together through Food?" We thought we'd share the information Catherine sent us about what she and Operation Frontline are up to in the Los Angeles area:

Operation Frontline (OFL) is a national, volunteer-based program of Share Our Strength, which provides hands-on healthy cooking and nutrition education classes to low-income families. OFL trains and mobilizes local culinary and nutrition professionals to volunteer their time to lead these courses.
Our class kitchen is “mobile” and travels to various cities throughout Lost Angeles—Glendale, Hollywood and Long Beach—offering courses to low-income adults, teens and children. This means that every week, I pack my car with groceries and several crates of cooking supplies and head to various agencies, churches, and clinics to get cooking! It has been a fascinating experience to gather participants from many different cultures and traditions into the same kitchen.

Since our official program launch in May, we have graduated six Operation Frontline classes, four for adults, and two for children ages 8-12. With the help of our team of volunteers, we have directly impacted over 75 families with our hands-on healthy cooking and nutrition classes. Our wonderful volunteers are the heart of our program, and our healthy cooking classes would not be possible without them.

We are always looking for new volunteers! Cooking supplies, groceries and monetary contributions also help in our efforts to reach more families throughout Los Angeles County.

For information, you can visit our website www.ccafs.org/operationfrontline or email Catherine.luu@ccafs.org.

Two New Recording & Interviewing Workshops this Fall

2009-10-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

Davia is conducting two basic recording and interviewing workshops in San Francisco. Thursday, October 29 and Thursday, November 5 from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. The three hour workshop is for people who want to acquire and hone their skills for an array of projects--radio, online storytelling, oral histories, audio slide shows, family histories, and other multimedia endeavors.

We will cover miking techniques, sound gathering, use of archival audio, how to make interviewees comfortable, how to frame evocative questions that make for compelling storytelling, how to listen (which is harder than it looks), how to use interviews in conjunction with images, field recording techniques, recording equipment and more. The workshops are customized to fit the projects you are working on.

People who attend come from radio, newspapers, photography, oral history, historical societies, farms, music, writing, libraries, web design and beyond. The groups are always lively and good contacts are made.

The fee is $115. Of course, there will be a snack. The workshops are held in Francis Coppola's historic Zoetrope building in North Beach.

If you, or someone you know is interested, email kitchen@kitchensisters.org and let us know which of the two workshops you would like to attend.

See you there.

Biscuit Tour 2009—Birmingham

2009-10-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

Just returned from Birmingham, Alabama where we presented an oral history and audio production workshop as part of the series Dialogue on Food at Birmingham-Southern College. During this year-long cross-disciplinary discussion, students will be reading, writing, and creating multi-media projects about what we eat and why. Opening the series was Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet the book published in 1971 that is considered the "blueprint for eating with a small carbon footprint."

Jones Valley Urban Farm, Birmingham

Our visit coincided with an Outstanding in the Field dinner at Jones Valley Urban Farm, an unlikely secret garden tucked into a square city block surrounded by freeways, railroad tracks and public housing in Birmingham. Jones Valley Urban Farm—three acres of arugula, sunflowers, hericot vert, waxy red peppers, sweat and possibility.

The farm grows food enough for an after-work farm stand during the summer, a food box CSA program, and fresh, seasonal vegetables for a handful of local restaurants. It has community garden plots for the neighborhood and a program for school kids to plant, harvest and learn about how gardens can change their community.

The mastermind behind the Jones Valley project is Edwin Marty (left), an Alabama native, who studied organic farming at University of Calfornia Santa Cruz. All roads seem to lead back to UCSC's visionary agroecology program. It’s been going on for 40 years and has graduated an army of disciples who have become the base of today’s organic farming and food movement. Edwin had visions of moving to China to teach organic farming until a friend pointed out that his home state might be a better place to start. Alabama has the second highest rate of obesity in the country. (Luckily, there’s Mississippi who comes in ahead of us, Frank Stitt told us).

Frank Stitt, chef and owner of Birmingham's Highlands Bar and Grill, Bottega and Bottega Cafe, and Chez Fonfon, was the chef for our meal in the field. He worked with farmers throughout the region who provided the food.

Here's the menu:

McEwen & Sons deviled eggs (Helen & Frank McEwen)

Jones Valley Urban Farm sweet and spicy peppers, roast eggplant craklin' cornbread & Snow's Bend snap peas

Lady Pea Pilau with Snow's Bend butternut squash, Soul's Food Organic's cherry tomatoes (Linda & Michael Dean), okra & basil (David Snow and Margaret Ann Tooey)

Porchetta with Sequatchie Cove Farms pork (Bill & Miriam Keener), McEwen & Son's stone ground grits & JVUF collard greens & turnips

Petals from the Past apple cake with rum creme angalise

Davia interviews Chef Frank Stitt and Farmer Bill Keener of Sequatchie Cove Organic Farm & Dairy, TN. Bill (far right) and his wife Miriam raised the pig roasted for our meal.

Would love to hear about other urban farm projects and farm to table community dinners. What's happening in your part of the world?

Tour of the La Selva Commune

2009-09-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

A few months back Vanessa Bertozzi, our colleague and friend who worked with us on The Sonic Memorial Project, wrote us with a "little bit of a crazy proposal." She's now working for Etsy, an online marketplace for things handmade, and wanted to know if we'd take part in a series they're creating for their blog about peoples' homes and collections. So videographer Eric Beug spent the day at La Selva with Kitchen Sister Silva creating this piece for their series "There's No Place Like Here."

July Notes from The Kitchen Sisterhood

2009-07-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

So much crosses our desks and our microphones. Only so much of it makes it to the air. Here are some collaborations and projects that have recently caught our attention we thought you'd want to know about.

Keep the faith,

The Kitchen Sisters

Archives we're visiting

Free Music Archive. "It's not just free music, it's good music."

Rock'n'Roll Public Library: A five-week free archival "civic endeavor" of The Clash's Mick Jones. "These 10,000 items are relics of the last century. A part of British musical history." London, July 16-August 25

Books in our pile

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around by Cheryl Wagner

Farm City by Novella Carpenter

I-5 by Summer Brenner

Hunger for Freedom: The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela by Anna Trapido

Elizabeth Street by Laurie Fabiano

How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons by Sam Barry

Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano

Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

Events on our Calendar

Puckerbrush Potluck, Iowa State Fair, August 19

Eat Real Festival in downtown Oakland, August 28-30. A tribal gathering of taco trucks, hot dog stands, and mobile food vendors all using locally sourced sustainable ingredients.

Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Santa Cruz, CA, August 2-16. Marin Alsop conducts.

Movies to see

Tetro

Corner Store: A work-in-progress documentary feature

Away We Go, written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida of 826 Valencia

Websites we're browsing

Obama Foodorama

Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles

Mapping Main Street: A collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets.

Yes, We Can: A community canning project

Music on our turntable

Lura, a singer from Portugal and Cape Verde

Orquestra Imperial from Brazil. A Samba big band fronted by Caetano Veloso's son Moreno and his friends Alexandre Kassin and Domênico Lancelotti

High Wide and Handsome. Loudon Wainwright III's tribute to Charlie Poole

Darling Just Walk by Tess Dunn

Dai Lam Linh. Our friend Nguyen Qui Duc sent us this startling new music from Vietnam.

Organizations we're tracking

Share Our Strength's Operation Frontline in Los Angeles

Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment

Carecen: Central American Resource Center Cuerpo Sano/Healthy Bodies Program

CCROPP: Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Program

Music National Service Initiative, a new social enterprise that supports and expands the use of music to meet important civic and social goals.

Rest In Peace

Artist, David Ireland

Activist, Luke Cole

Actor, Luis Saguar

"People need stories in hard times. We’ve had an enormous moral, spiritual, and economic collapse. People go to storytellers when times are like that." -Bruce Springsteen

"The Kitchen Sisters have done some of the best radio stories ever broadcast" -Ira Glass

Radio producers we hope you'll support

The Kitchen Sisters. Click here to donate.

Mark Arax

2009-07-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

For our most recent Hidden Kitchens piece, The Breadbasket Blues: A Central Valley Kitchen Story, we interviewed former Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, author of the new book West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State. Take a listen to this web exclusive audio clip of Mark talking about family, food, and farms of the Central Valley: Listen.

The Breadbasket Blues: A Central Valley Kitchen Story

2009-07-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

In this latest Hidden Kitchens story, we travel to California's Central Valley, the nation's breadbasket, to look at what is feeding the epidemic of juvenile obesity and type 2 diabetes, and talk to some of the local kitchen visionaries grappling with these issues. The story looks at some of the unexpected factors that impact the health of a community: no sidewalks, no streetlights, drugs, gangs, wild dogs, lack of local grocery stores with fresh produce, and fast food. It was the wild dogs that got the Kitchen Sisters thinking Hidden Kitchens. Listen to the story here.

America Eats

2009-06-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration hired writers to document the food traditions and rituals of America, a sort of Hidden Kitchens of the 1930s. Out-of-work authors--Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, along with artists, anthropologists, librarians, and housewives fanned across the country to gather "an account of group eating as an important American social institution; its part in development of American cookery as an authentic art and the preservation of that art in the face of mass production of foodstuffs...."

The Kitchen Sisters chronicled this vast archive of American eating in the Hidden Kitchens series, in a story called "America Eats" that includes an interview with Mark Kurlansky, author of the new and fascinating book, "Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--before the national highway system, before chain restaurants and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional--from the lost WPA files."

You can listen to our story, "America Eats," here.

Kitchen Sisters Interviewing & Recording Workshop

2009-06-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

Davia is conducting a 3-hour basic recording and interviewing workshop on Thursday, June 25 at 10:00 AM in San Francisco.

It is intended not just for people in radio, but those interested in oral history and others who would like to learn interviewing skills for the projects that they do. We will cover miking technique, sound gathering, use of archival audio, how to make interviewees comfortable, how to frame your questions, and how to listen (which is harder than it looks).

The fee is $100. Of course, there will be a snack.

If you'd like to attend or would like more information, please send us an email at kitchen@kitchensisters.org

News from Salt Part 5, from Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

2009-05-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

Hello Blog: this will be short. We're in the final week. The six day count down. All work is due, in it's finality, next Wednesday at 5pm.
Next Thursday is our show of student work, Friday's the "graduation".
I am and will be more so, a zombie-- which is so painfully when it's the most beautiful sunshine summer weather outside.
I will emerge like some mole creature once all this radio work is fully-edited and bounced to an mp3 and done.

May in Maine for those who get to go outside

Spring Notes from The Kitchen Sisterhood

2009-05-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Here are some projects and endeavors that have caught our attention and we want to pass along.

Keep it rolling,

The Kitchen Sisters

Archives we're trolling

Prelinger Library: Outsider librarians, Rick & Megan Prelinger have a mission to convene community around a collection. It is a free offering, an installation, a workshop, an extension of their living room, that seeks to foster discovery and serendipity and to experiment with new forms of access to information.

Southern Folklife Collection & Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Books/Articles we're reading

Hawaiian Son: The Life and Music of Eddie Kamae by James Houston

Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol by Archie Green

West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders and Killers in the Golden State by Mark Arax

The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky. A portrait of American food--before the national highway system, before chain restaurants and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional--from the lost WPA files.

Mark Danner's articles on torture in The New York Review of Books and The Washington Post

Hidden Kitchens Texas by The Kitchen Sisters

Manifestos & Presentations

Peter Sellars: Art in the Age of Obama

Forage Oakland

The Eat-In Manifesto

Movies we're watching

The Garden. The story of the 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles, started as a form of healing after the 1992 LA riots. An urban farm in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. The film chroncles the fight to save this 14-acre community oasis from development.

Ferlinghetti. A documentary portrait of poet and City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes. A newly restored print by the Film Foundation and UCLA has just been completed.

Crude. A new documentary about the shifting course of a lawsuit by 30,000 Ecuadoreans against Chevron over contaminated waters of the Amazon.

Music on our turntable

The Burka Band. We are chronicling this story for our upcoming series exploring the secret life of girls around the world.

Chicano Zen by Charanga Cakewalk

Events

May 8 - The Kitchen Sisters at the Food Matters series of Interdisciplinary Humanitaries Center at UC Santa Barbara. 4 PM.

May 12 - "Who Glues Your Community Together Through Food?" A Night of California Hidden Kitchens. The Kitchen Sisters and guests at the California Endowment in Downtown LA, including food from Homegirl Cafe, Let's Be Frank hot dog cart, and the Kogi Korean BBQ truck. RSVP here.

The Kitchen Sisters Manifesto: We are a non-profit, independent, public radio collaboration dedicated to creating documentaries that chronicle the untold stories of American culture and tradition, to keeping the nation's airwaves vibrant, imaginative and accessible, and to training young people and others with a passion to be involved in public radio.. You can help support our work with a tax-deductible contribution: www.kitchensisters.org/support

News from Salt Part 4, from Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

2009-05-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

Hi Blog: At Salt, for one of our classes, at the mid-point, we write what's called a Taking Stock Paper. In this paper, we address for 6 pages what we've come through since the beginning, in terms of learning documentary work and our personal experiences. I wanted to share my paper. I had joy in writing it. It's a good practice to be forced to reflect on where you started, where you've gone, and what's next. I'm going to break it into parts so it doesn't look (hopefully) overwhelming in the blog space. (*you'll see I end the paper with those two quotes I love, Cather & Ondaatje, that I posted in an early blog entry here)

PART ONE: For me, (re-)reading Telling True Stories has become a part of my night habits—brush teeth, get into bed, open random page in Telling True Stories and feel reassured that I’m not alone in the work I’m doing, that I fit into a line of many, many people that have done this work before me and struggled as I do now. I keep the book on my bedside table (which is actually an old suitcase standing on end). I have sentences throughout the book underlined in a thick blue marker and sometimes, over those underlines, circles around the words: curiosity is the beginning (Gay Talese), warn your subjects of your separateness (Anne Hull), don’t just feel relieved that someone is talking to you (Victor Merina), and especially, to do this work well you must find your own way and make your own mistakes (Adrian Nicole Leblanc).
The beginning of this audio documentary work. It felt like an enormous thing to arrive in a place that you have no ties to and to feel urgency to find a story, though you are a stranger. And you want the story to be really, really good. I think of all the expectations I have carried with me from the very start of what I want(ed) the story to be. How do you go forward when anything and everything is a possible story? I struggled with this a lot in the beginning. Everyone I knew in any way, I asked them for stories. The way other people may ask neighbors to borrow sugar or eggs, I asked for stories. At dinner with new acquaintances, I asked for stories. I collected them. I spent hours on Google and Craigslist and all the Maine newspaper websites and then read those same newspapers in coffee shops, hoping there would be a secret, amazing story that I had missed in the first reading.

PART TWO: I began with three stories in the early weeks. I made interviews and took the time to do careful transcriptions. Each story had its own, very valid reasons for not working out as a radio story. I resisted giving up each story for a long time, probably too long. I had already put so much energy into them, and time, and emotional investment. I got to a point where the thought of starting over completely yet again seemed impossible. And with that, a fear. I was very scared, if I had invested so much (and so many weeks) into these three stories, and they didn’t work out, what guarantee did I have that the next one would.

I’ll say now, how grateful I am that those stories didn’t work out because I have learned so much by those losses. Those three falling through taught me to understand why they wouldn’t be strong stories and the absence of material that would have made for a weak story, had I pursued them anyway. It was very hard for me to give them up, but a very necessary learning.

There I was, about the fifth week into Salt with three stories I had invested in and had to let go of. At that point, I emailed a friend of a friend of a friend, who works with a fishery association. I literally asked her if she knew any stories with interesting characters, perhaps somewhere outside of Portland (I wanted to explore more of Maine), perhaps something to do with the ocean. This is another point to mention, that I have learned, oh the kindness of strangers, to want to help me tell a story for some reason! The friend of a friend of a friend responded about a lady who is a periwinkle harvester. Great! I thought, I don’t even know what that is. So from there, I decided to do a story about a periwinkle harvester, a simple profile story of a person and their work. Oh, little did I know how it would unfold into something so much larger. And little did I know how very far away Lubec is, seemingly the ends of the earth, so very different from Portland, indeed.

PART THREE: The middle of this audio documentary work. Since Lubec is a ten hour round-trip drive, and with the necessity to organize my recording around the people who are part of my story, I’ve gone up to Lubec twice, staying for up to six days at a time. Just as my periwinkle harvester’s work depends on the tides and the weather, my audio recording is now linked to this as well, since, of course, I cannot record her working if she’s not out on the water working. I like thinking that, because of this, my audio recording is, in a small way, linked to the cycles of the moon just as the tides are.

My plan was to tell the story of a periwinkle harvester yet almost immediately from talking with the harvester, I learned that that was only a small part of what was happening. At the moment of writing this paper, I have hours and hours of transcription and only a very rough outline of what the audio story will be. It is a story of a town desperate for jobs, the collapse of the fisheries there, a political battleground that could potentially change Maine’s constitution,and one woman’s fight to protect her bay… and it all started with snails. And it needs to fit into eight minutes.

PART FOUR: What I have learned from this (and again, I’m still just at the beginning of unfolding all the pieces of the story, with still more recording to do, let alone begin a second audio story!) is the immense need for flexibility as one works on their documentary. The story I have now is not the story I thought I would collect.

There are times it is very hard to be doing this—due to the circumstances of distance— without a break. Two days ago, when I returned from the six days in Lubec, I felt raw. I had spent on average ten hours a day, no breaks, recording and talking to people. It’s a great deal of mental work to be constantly anticipating questions and engaging in the most attentive listening. I felt raw and heavy with information and people’s emotions. I went to have dinner with friends in Portland and found I couldn’t engage at all. This has taught me that, at least for myself, when doing documentary work, it is so important to create space to process everything that is gathered and take a break. I also happen to be a “comforter” personality and it is hard for me to maintain a certain, necessary distance when my subject is clearly emotionally upset and feeling hopeless. There’s been a lot of hopelessness and desperation expressed by the people I’ve talked to, and I have often felt overwhelmed by it.

PART FIVE: Some of the many things I have learned so far. I have learned to be more aggressive in guiding interviews. I think it is helpful for the person you're interviewing too, to have a map of where the conversation needs to go. This is one thing I’ve struggled with before in terms of being just so grateful that someone is willing to talk to me, I’ve shied away from asking more directly what I’m seeking to understand. I have greatly appreciated leaving the microphone on even after the official interview is done. I’ve learned to be more discerning with the sounds I collect, in order to anticipate the time I will need on transcription later. There is a fear that you have to collect everything or you might miss something. And of course, there will be things you miss. In a way though, I find this very “Zen”, it’s a good teacher in letting go. I think it’s similar in photography. The moment comes and goes, you might miss it, but you can’t dwell on it, and hopefully you’ll learn to be ready for the next time something comes that you’d like to document.

Coming to Salt, I had worked in producing audio stories before, but I had always gathered stories from people I knew or had connection to. This was my first time, as a total stranger, asking people to tell me their stories. I have learned to be much less afraid of calling strangers. Still, I hate cold calls. I hate them, and though I have more confidence now to do them, I still hate the two minutes you have when you must explain yourself and convince someone to want to talk to you. Several times now, I’ve filled answering machines in explaining myself and have had to call back just to leave my number.

One thing that has been on my mind, in this work, is several times now I’ve been thanked by subjects—thanking me for listening, for showing interest in their lives. And even without this, I feel a certain weight to do justice to their story. To honor their voices and sometimes (all the time), I am terrified I won’t be able to, that it won’t be good enough.

There are two quotes I have copied into my Salt notebook, that I often call upon in this work as inspiration. One, Willa Cather: he had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. And the other, Michael Ondaatje: everything is a collage, even genetics. There is a hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

And so, while I’m still very much in the middle of my work at Salt, with hours and hours and hours of transcription ahead of me, I already know this: that the people I have talked with, I will carry them with me. I hope I am able to honor their stories in this work, in this time, for now.

News from Salt Institute Part 3 from Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

2009-04-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

Friday night now (April 24th). The last two days have been the school-wide critique for every Salt student & their work thus far in the semester. Everyone has about 20 minutes to present their work and receive praise/critique. I fluxed between feeling like, "this is okay, I don't care, it's just a draft" ... to nervous butterflies, because clearly I care a lot about what people think of my work. The teachers chose the students randomly with no previous announcement-- that is, you never knew when it would be your turn. Thursday passed without my turn and this morning, Friday, I commented to my friend, "I bet I'll be last"... sure enough (should have bet money!) I was last. It definitely made me anxious all day, just wanting to get it over with.

I felt especially nervous because unlike most all of the radio students, I was behind in my work (thanks to the 20-30 hours of audio I had collected) to the point I had not yet shared any audio version with anybody. So I had not yet had any feedback, whereas most folks had already shared their stories several days earlier to other radio students. The way Salt teaches, you focus first on perfecting your script, your paper version, before you get to work in Protools-- essentially your story's laid out before you and your next steps are to make your audio clips, record narration, and mix it together (oh, so easy-- please read the intense sarcasm)

I started my ProTools session at 8am on Wednesday morning (I had already lined up my audio & made my cuts), so started the piece at 8am and finished (the draft that I shared today) at 3am the next morning.

A word about narration-- a misguided radio class T.A. in 2004 told me I sounded like a British robot (??? I know!) when I did narration. Though five years older (wiser?) now, I still dread, and I mean DREAD narration. (That TA, like a mean boy you once liked-- you never forget what they said and they, to this day, have no idea you still carry those words with you).

Narration: I read my entire narration three times. I put up the photographs of two friends (who are looking at the camera when the photo was taken) at my eye level, so when I read my narration, I was looking at them, to try to help me feel natural, like I was talking to them on the phone. Ira Glass spoke at the Merrill Auditorium in Portland a few days ago and said your narration should sound like you're talking to your best friend late at night in bed on the phone-- that kind of intimacy given to the radio listener. The first time, I just read my words straight through (I had already obsessed on trying to make my word choice sound conversational). The second time, I read "over the top", smiling the whole time, and even outloud pretending to be my friend asking me the question that my narration was trying to answer. And for the third time, the time that would be the most successful (no one called me a British robot, actually I was complemented on my voicing). I listened to my favorite Lil Wayne song and danced and sang it out as loud as I could. As soon as the song finished, I went straight into my third read.

Actually, in one of Davia's workshops she referenced the brilliant Brian Eno http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/57/freestyling/ and his article about the power of singing in our lives. I have a terrible voice (once I was booed while singing kareoke) but Lil Wayne definitely helped with my narration as a radio producer.

And so out of those 20-30 hours of recorded tape, I came in just under 10 minutes (including my host intro)

One of my favorite sounds is my recording of hundreds of periwinkle snails spitting out ocean water (my story has a lot to do with periwinkle snails)
The voice of snails! Who knew!

Tomorrow, early, early morning (Saturday April 25th) to Boston for the Megapolis (Audio) Festival.
with love, Alix

This is me at 8:30 in the morning after going to bed at 3:30, from working on my audio story until 3 am.
I am very tired!!

More News from the Salt Institute by Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

2009-04-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

Here is Alix's second dispatch from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. (Her first post can be read here).

We talk about finding and directing the EMOTIONAL CENTER of our story, how is it best if-- instead of in one sentence--you should be able to sum up your story in ONE WORD and most often, that is your emotional center and the direction you should craft your story in.

It looks like one of my two stories for Salt's radio program will take place in Lubec, Maine. It is the eastern most area of the United States and a ten-hour roundtrip drive from Portland! Recently driving the 5 hour return, I had the good fortune to hear Soundprint's Treasure Isle story which I fell in love with.

It's funny & shocking how much finding an audio story is like falling in love. You live it so much in your head before the first meeting. You invent conversations and scenes and expectations. You create the imaginary future and its brilliance. You spend hours fretting over the phone, wondering why they don't call you back. Did you say the wrong thing? Did you scare them away? Finally you meet the real thing.You learn it's not at all what you had in mind, you have to let go of certain preconceived ideas for the story. The story is different than you created. You must be open to all the new things that unfold and yet keep a map of the places you believed in--what brought you originally to the story in the first place.

Flowers in my tiny apartment, only a few blocks to walk to Salt.
They are a healthy reminder that there's life outside of hours and hours of transcription!

Here's some of what we're listening to (a mishmash selection of the past several weeks.) We usually start our Tuesday and Friday radio classes with 2-3 listenings and discussion of radio pieces, most often produced by past students. These are some of my favorites.

"No Praise, No Blame, Just So" Jessica Alpert.
Kitchen Sisters Tupperware Party
"Bringing the work into you" Megan Martin.
"Just another fish story" Molly Menschel--this one we listened to as before-Salt "homework." I love this story so much.
"World's Longest Diary" Dave Isay

We're reading Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer's Guide compiled by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call. I love this book. I LOVE THIS BOOK! It is so helpful, such a diversity of voices talking about documentary work. I am inspired by it. I re-read it all the time, certain passages that give me guidance. This book is wonderful.

Here are two quotes I collected that inspire me in this world of radio documentary work. Not related at all to Salt, but I have the quotes on scraps of paper pasted into my Salt notebook:

"He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind." Willa Cather

"Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross." Michael Ondaatje.

Alix tries to stay warm in the cold Maine air and blend in with the locals!

Hidden Kitchens Texas

2009-03-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the publication of our new book, HIDDEN KITCHENS TEXAS—Stories, Recipes and More from the Lone Star State.

Blurb, a new print-on-demand publishing company, invited us to create a book based on our Hidden Kitchens Texas radio special narrated by Willie Nelson. The book is a colorful, action-packed road trip exploring Texas through food—told by people who find it, grow it, cook it, eat it, sell it, talk about it, and celebrate with it. It's available now at Blurb.com.

We'd love to see you at the book launch festivities at South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Festival in Austin this week. Here are the details:

Monday, March 16, 2009, 8PM—The Tap Room/Six Lounge, Austin, TX
Blurb Publishing is hosting a bash as part of the South by Southwest. They'll be featuring their new publishing technology including The Kitchen Sisters' new book Hidden Kitchens Texas.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 5PM—Ranch 616, Austin, TX
Hidden Kitchens Texas Launch Party

Wednesday, March 18, 2009, Noon—BBQ the Texas Way, SXSW panel featuring The Kitchen Sisters, Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski, and Texas cookbook writer and author Robb Walsh.

News from Salt Institute - Alix Blair/ Guest Blogger

2009-03-11T22:29:00.001-07:00

Alix Blair, our former intern, is currently attending the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. We thought it would be fun to have her report in from time to time and give us an idea of what goes on at Salt. Here's her first report.

Alix Blair recording in Bhutan on Bhutan National Day

My name is Alix Blair. In 2004 I was an intern with The Kitchen Sisters, helping with the Hidden Kitchens Project. When I was growing up, I never thought working in radio was something just anyone could do. I thought it was like farming or lobster-fishing--you were somehow magically born into. In college, thanks to a marvelous teacher (Beth Taylor!) who began to offer a radio nonfiction class, I started learning about radio, hanging out around the student radio station, and my life was transformed the moment Joe Richman and Jay Allison came to speak to the class. It was an email some years later to Jay Allison when I asked if he could point in me in the direction of the Kitchen Sisters.

From the Kitchen Sisters, my radio adoration took me to the Center for Documentary Studies in North Carolina. A most incredible place with incredible week-long summer workshops in audio production for beginners and for advanced radio producers. I had the tremendous privilege and great joy of working with audio guru John Biewen. The last two years I have worked with CDS, most recently in a non-audio role-- as a photographer with the Five Farms Project. But in all this time, and with the audio pieces I've created, I've never had the "luxury" to dedicate for the long-term to a story, to have intense and constant teacher and peer review, to solely commit weeks to audio work and navigate all the amazing and scary places documentary work can take you. Hence I find myself in Maine in the winter at Salt.

We're here in the end of week three at Salt. Portland, Maine is covered in ice and crunchy snow. Last night Rob Rosenthal, one of the two radio teachers and director of the radio program, in collaboration with the photography teacher Kate Philbrick, had the opening of their show, "Malaga Island: A story best left untold." It was incredible how many people came. Salt's main room had every chair taken and people sat on the floor, lining the hallway on either side. I am always so in love with people coming together as a community around sound. We're all so used to watching TV and movies, or going to an art gallery for a photography show, but coming together to sit with strangers to just listen!

The story at the center, like an onion, all the layers around it.

Back to Salt... we have a mix of classes, each "track" (writing, photography, radio) meets with its own students twice a week and then we all have a class, on Thursdays, to discuss the general ins and outs of documentary work--the ethics, the challenges, learning to be brave when asking a stranger for their intimate story, making very sure not to fall in love with the person you're documenting and not having them fall for you (it compromises the work!). We are about thirty students, with a mix of ages, though most in their mid-twenties. Some have had radio experience before, some have had none at all. In the radio program, we have two assignments before our feature stories--one is doing a promo for a show of our creation, one is a Vox Pop of a question of our choosing. For my Vox Pop, I want to ask people what is the moment they remember feeling like they were an adult, that invisible line that you cross. (My friend Kavanah says it's when you never run out of toilet paper! that's grown-up responsibleness).

So, the end of week three. On Tuesday we are pitching our first stories (we create two) to Andrea DeLeon, NPR Northeast Bureau Chief. I will be doing my first interview tomorrow for a potential story. I have about five ideas for stories collecting in my head. Not sure where they will lead. It's part of the desperation, adventure, falling in love-ness of this radio documentary work.

Reporting in - Radio Workshop, Interns & Oscar Nominated Films

2009-02-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

WORKSHOP
We have 2 openings left in our Recording and Interviewing Workshop next week, Tuesday, February 24 in San Francisco. If you would like attend or be notified when the next workshop is scheduled please send us an email kitchen@kitchensisters.org or subscribe to our email list.

This 3-hour workshop is intended not just for people working in radio, but also for those interested in recording oral histories, web audio, podcasts and others who would like to learn interviewing, documenting, and radio and online broadcasting skills for the projects that they do. In the past we have had a freelance photographer for the New York Times, an archivist from UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, oral historians as well as many independent journalists. The group is kept to a small size so everyone has a chance to be involved. The fee is $100. A snack is provided.

SALT - THE ART OF DOCUMENTARY STORYTELLING

If you are looking to emerse yourself in the art of documentary storytelling you might also want to look into SALT Institute in Maine which trains aspiring writers, radio producers, and photographers in the art of documentary storytelling. A number of our interns have attended SALT. Eloise Melzer just returned and former intern, Alix Blair, is on her way to SALT next week. We invited Alix to report in from time to time here as a guest blogger.

Interns Eloise Melzer, Catherine Kastleman, Allie Wollner & Lisa Morehouse

Listen Up - Interns Past & Present

Independent journalist and KS intern Lisa Morehouse's story Hunters Up Their Game With Camouflaged Trucks aired on NPR's Day to Day recently. Visit her blog to read and hear more of her work. "We're all about the camos, says Gary Linman, who's had a multiple hunting vehicles, like this Jeep, painted in custom camouflage to blend in with the Alabama woods."

Ruxandra Guidi worked with us in 2002 and then left for Austin, Texas where she did production and reporting work for NPR's weekly show, Latino USA as well as freelancing for other radio programs. She dropped by our office recently on her way through town after living in Bolivia. Awarded a five-week IRP Fellowship from John Hopkins University Ruxandra traveled to Haiti to examine the effects of foreing aid on human rights, violence and poverty. Her piece, “South-South” on the effort to overhaul Haiti's' state trash collection system aired on NPR. Rux has been collaborating with her husband, photographer Roberto "Bear" Guerra, and their latest collaboration is a multimedia story which can be seen and heard on the International Reporting Project website of John Hopkins University.
photo /Roberto Guerra

Alison Budner is producing stories for KPFA in Berkeley after completing an apprenticeship at KPFA's First Voice Media Action Program. Her most recent radio show was focused on the Victory Gardens -- with one piece on the historical gardens from WWI and WWII and another on the present day Victory Gardens program in San Francisco. It is a wonderful piece that goes hand-in-hand with our Hidden Kitchens story - Garden Allotments - A London Kitchen Vision.

OSCAR NOMINATIONS
THE GARDEN
Director Scott Hamilton's Oscar nominated documentary The Garden is a portrait of the fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles - one of the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. Learn more online and spread the word.

Robert Lloyd, LA Times Television critic, writes about another powerful, Oscar-nominated short film premiering tonight on HBO. The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306,” The film is focused mainly on the memories of Memphis preacher Samuel “Billy” Kyles, who was the only other person on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when King was shot. Read his review here.

Photo / Samuel "Billy" Kyles at the Lorraine Motel

Thinking of this period of time again, about the sanitation workers strike that brought King to Memphis and the movement organized around the slogan “I Am a Man” made us think about about some audio clips from our story WHER 1000 Beautiful Watts, a two part story that we produced as part of our NPR series Lost & Found Sound in 1999, about the first all girl radio station. Sam Phillips started the station with his wife Becky Phillips and from 1955 through 1971, a team of women ran the station; working in almost every position from on-air disc jockey to copywriter to sales manager. It was an "easy listening" music format but along with starting the first call-in radio show, they covered the local news as well - including the sanitation workers strike.

It was on the talk show, "Open Mike" that on air host Marge Thrasher announced the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. That was a memorable moment for the women of WHER.

Donna Barlett: "I remember standing at the news machine and watching the news tap out that Martin Luther King had just been shot. Marge was on the air and I took her the paper and I could not talk and tell her what I had in my hands...I couldn't talk."

Our story on WHER is available online - Part 2 which includes the section on King is here lostandfoundsound. Take a listen.

And ah yes ! If you're interested in joining our internship program visit our site for more information.

2009-02-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

Today is the birthday of Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and most recently, In Defense of Food.

Michael has been a good friend and adviser to The Kitchen Sisters and when we were producing our story, Deep-Fried Fuel, about biodiesel made from farm crops and recycled restaurant grease, we spoke with Michael and asked him to weigh in on the rise of biofuels. Take a listen to this Kitchen Conversation with Michael Pollan.

Mozart's Hidden Kitchen

2009-01-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

It's Mozart's 253rd birthday today.

That got us thinking about a Hidden Kitchen story we did two years ago when impresario and activist Peter Sellars created the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna to commemorate the 250th Anniversary of Mozart's birth. Peter agreed to produce this Festival as long as there was not a note of Mozart in it. Instead, he wanted to present people from around the world who are creating art in the revolutionary spirit of Mozart -- musicians, dancers, filmmakers, sculptors, installation artists, farmers, chefs, school lunch ladies...

It was the part about the farmers, chefs and school lunch ladies that made us travel to Vienna to see how culture and agriculture link to each other and to the beauty and vision of Mozart.

"Mozart's Hidden Kitchen & The Tables of New Crowned Hope"

Have a listen

Inauguration Day Potluck

2009-01-21T11:06:00.001-08:00

We are full. Full of hope and wonderful food from our OBAMA Inaugural celebration potluck dinner last night. This Obama Jello American Flag was one of the many great dishes that arrived. If you had a potluck too - send us your photos and tell us your story. We'd love to hear from you.

What do you hope for? What's the change you wish to see in the world? Kiss the Paper is gathering your hopes and dreams.

Too Full To Eat

2009-01-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

We recorded this story in Washington, D.C. on the eve of the inauguration and wanted to share it. Listen to Martha's story.

Alice Waters' Vision for Obama

2009-01-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

LISTEN to Alice Waters talk about her vision of an organic victory garden on the White House lawn.

2009-01-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

The Kitchen Sisters Interview

Poet C. D. Wright

For those of you in the Bay Area, poet C.D. Wright is speaking at City Arts & Lecture series at the Herbst Theatre, in San Francisco, Wednesday evening January 7, 2009 at 8PM.

We'll be interviewing Wright as part of a story we're producing about photographer Deborah Luster for our series about the secret lives of girls.

Luster and Wright collaborated on One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, a book featuring a collection of haunting, sepia tinted photographs taken by Luster of Louisiana's incarcerated men and women. Wright's poems accompany the self-posed portraits to "ward off forgetting."

This photo was taken
by Luster at a women's
prison in Louisiana.

Here's one of Wright's poems from One Big Self.

Dear Prisoner,

I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference

Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing

You could use. In a court of law. I found.

That sickly sweet ambrosia of hope. Unmendable

Seine of sadness. Experience taken away.

From you. I would open. The mystery

Of your birth. To you. I know. We can

Change. Knowing. Full well. Knowing.

It is not enough.

Poetry Time Space Death

I thought. I could write. An exculpatory note.

I cannot. Yes it is bitter. Every bit of it, bitter.

The course taken by blood. All thinking

Deceives us. Lead (kindly) light.

Notwithstanding this grave. Your garden.

This cell. Your dwelling. Who is unaccountably free.

Photographer Deborah Luster describes her her collection of inmate photographs in video by Doug MacCash, Times Picayune Art Critic.

A Sonic Stocking Stuffer

2008-12-23T10:24:00.000-08:00

As we begin gathering for our new NPR series about the secret life of girls around the world we thought we'd share a work in progress.
Pat Cadigan, a science fiction writer, heard about our project and sent us this short story memory inspired by the original 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Listen to Pat's story

As the tide turns on 2008, we thank you for making a tax-deductible contribution to The Kitchen Sisters Productions. Your gifts and support have helped create our Peabody Award winning series. If you haven't had a chance to contribute this year you can do so now here.

With a little help from our friends...

2008-12-14T16:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

The other day we were forwarded this entry that Jake recently wrote on his blog:

“I have always given during food drives but it didn’t become my cause until October 8, 2004 when I heard The Kitchen Sisters’ story "An Unexpected Kitchen the George Foreman Grill" on NPR. I was crying by the end of this story. I have never looked at George Foreman, his grill — or hunger — the same way again.” — Jake

We don’t know Jake, but he was sharing his passion to end hunger with his online community. What had inspired him? A Kitchen Sisters story that aired on NPR four years ago and that continues to have a vast, grass roots, ever-expanding life online.

We are writing because we need your help to continue creating stories that reach out and inspire this kind of action and understanding.

As independent producers, not NPR staff, we support our work through grants and donations from listeners like you. Many of you have heard about the recent layoffs at NPR. We too are being hit hard by this financial crisis that has severely impacted our fundraising efforts. Only with your help, can we continue creating in-depth, documentary stories that reach 14 million people on-air and countless people online.

If every person who receives this email donates just $25,
it would greatly support our work through the next year. Your donation is tax-deductible.

This year, every penny you give is matched by the NEA, which has given a grant to launch our new series exploring the secret lives of girls around the world — girls and the women they become.

We are also working on a rich new collection of Hidden Kitchens including a look at Inauguration Day communal potlucks where Americans will come together over casseroles and onion dip to begin a new era in American politics.

We are in the midst of working to produce a Broadway musical based on our story about the first all girl radio station in the nation, WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts. And we are collaborating with the Cabrillo Music Festival and conductor Marin Alsop on a multi-media project based on our secret life of girls series to premiere in 2012.

We are also continuing our successful internship and mentoring program for young people and workshops for emerging producers. Your donations make this work possible.

We would like to take this moment at year’s end to thank you for being part of our community. However you have participated, as a donor, interviewee, advisor, collaborator, listener ... we're grateful. We cannot do this work without your ongoing support.

We hope you will give what you can this year to help us in our efforts to build community through storytelling and to keep the media vital, relevant and human.

High Hopes and Peace in the New Year,

Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson
The Kitchen Sisters

The Kidney Party

2008-12-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

Tonight, our friends in Cedar Park, Texas are gathering at the home of Jim and Carole Wallace for the 11th Annual Kidney Party, held every December 8th to celebrate Jim's kidney transplant. Jim sent us an invitation along with a brief history of the party:

"The Kidney Party began on the first anniversary as a gathering and party to thank all of the people that were so considerate and helpful during my transplant and recovery. Carole, of German ancestry, was raised in a small German community in Wisconsin and had grown up eating organ meats which she learned to prepare from her mother and grandmother. When we were married she introduced me to beef tongue, beef heart, steak tartar and souse (meat jelly). So naturally, we thought it was appropriate to serve organ meats at that first celebration. We serve steak and kidney pie and beef tongue. And, because the kidney I receive has two ureters, the connection between the kidney and the bladder, we decided to serve split-pea soup. We also served chili with kidney beans, dirty rice and kidney beans, three-bean salad and marinated vegetables with hearts of palm and artichoke hearts. The Kidney Party has become an annual event where we can gather with friends and give thanks for another year of life. "

Notes from The Sisterhood

2008-12-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

Events on our Radar
Kitchen Sisters Interviewing & Recording Workshop in San Francisco. Tuesday, December 16th. Contact us if you'd like to hear about future workshops.

Hidden Kitchens Works in Progress:

Inauguration Night potluck meals across the nation.
Tell us about your's Call 202-408-9576.

Atomic Wine: Testing the age of wine through nuclear fallout residue.

Radio We’re hearing:
Brian Eno's essay for This I Believe on NPR's Weekend Edition, Sunday, November 23. Recorded by The Kitchen Sisters in Brian Eno’s studio in London. Brian's essay is based on his article, Freestyling.

Books We're reading:

Edges of Bounty by William Emery and Scott Squire.
Edges of Bounty is...a kind of road map. An invitation, a set of possibilities. It beckons. Find a friend, grab your camera and notebook. Hit the road and look for something. More information available at Heyday Books.

From the Bottom of the Heap by Robert H. King.
We chronicled King's story in our Hidden Kitchens piece, King's Candy. Babylon Falling, an independent bookstore in San Francisco, recently hosted a reading with King. Visit their site to see more. You can order his book published by PM press here. Or visit Babylon Falling.

Websites & Blogs We're Viewing:

Kiss the Paper by Kate & Molly Prentiss

The Girl Project

Music We're Listening to:

Les Amazones De Guinee, an all-police-woman band from the
Republic of Guinea.
Albert Kuvezin & Yat-Kha, the "Tuvan throat-singing punk band"
Cimarrón, a Llanero band from Colombia.

Georgia Gilmore & The Club from Nowhere

2008-12-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Rosa Parks & Martin Luther King

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

Georgia Gilmore cooking

During the bus boycott that Rosa Parks triggered, a group of Montgomery, Ala., women baked and sold pies, cookies and cakes in beauty salons and on street corners to raise money to buy gas and station wagons to haul people to work The Club from Nowhere, as the group was known, was the brainchild of Georgia Gilmore, a cafeteria worker fired for her organizing efforts.

Georgia is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era.
Listen to our Hidden Kitchens radio story from 2005 - Georgia Gilmore & The Club from Nowhere.
For recipe and photos - visit the Hidden Kitchens web site. You can find Georgia Gilmore's recipes in our Hidden Kitchens Book.

Read an interview with Georgia from the Washington Film and Video Archive

NPR's Susan Stamberg Hosts The Kitchen Sisters in Washington, D.C.

2008-11-18T16:37:00.000-08:00

NPR's Susan Stamberg will be interviewing The Kitchen Sisters on stage tonight at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. for a night of radio, readings, and Hidden Kitchen conversation.

Studs Terkel

2008-11-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

We celebrate the life
and work of

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

Third Coast Winners Star & Melissa

2008-10-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Shirley "Star" Diaz of Radio Rookies for her story "Growing Up in The System," produced with Melissa Robbins (former project manager and associate producer here at The Kitchen Sisters). They received the silver award at the Third Coast Audio Festival, 2008.

We've joined Twitter

2008-10-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

Radio Workshops

2008-10-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

We've started an audio workshop program at our San Francisco office. The sessions run three hours and the group size is small. This is a great opportunity for people interested in radio production, oral history, journalism -- almost anything that has to do with interviewing and close listening.

Davia covers miking techniques, sound gathering, use of archival audio, how to make interviewees comfortable, how to frame your questions, how to listen (which is harder than it looks), and more.

The fee is $100. The November sessions are full but if you're interested send us and email and we'll keep you posted about upcoming sessions in San Francisco and Santa Cruz.

The Kitchen Sisters Come Out Swingin

2008-09-30T14:14:00.001-07:00

Events On
Our Radar

The 2008 Presidential Election,
Tuesday,
November 4.
VOTE.

Public Radio Fund Drives happening nationwide this month. Support your local station. Keep the airwaves public and vibrant.

The Naked Truth: The Katie Lee Exhibit
at the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University.
Katie is one of the pioneering river activists we chronicled in “Cry Me a River.” She fought the
damming of Glen Canyon in the 1950's and at 88
still works unrelentingly for the environment.

Books We're Reading:

Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits by Jenny,
Laura & Martha McPhee. Three of John McPhee's daughters create a collection
of photographs and life stories.
A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis. When we first began the Hidden Kitchens series we ate at a secret, twelve-seat, one-table, one-night-of-the-month restaurant tucked into an apartment in Paris. That elusive ritual dinner that David Tanis & Randal Breski created helped inspire our NPR series. This is a collection of some of David's recipes and stories. David is also the chef at Chez Panisse.
Eve ning is the Whole Day by Preeta Samrasan
Our intern Deena Prichep recommends this lovely novel.

Alabama Stitch Book by Natalie Chanin. We have been following the saga of Project Alabama for years now. Natalie is a clothing designer from Florence, Alabama, home of Sam and Becky Phillips of Sun Studios and WHER fame. Her commitment to hand-made textiles and local artisans is part of what we are watching as we explore the secret life of girls around the world.

Radio We're Making:

Chocolate Town: A Hidden Kitchens story-in-progress about the chocolate company towns and the candy factory “sweetie towns” of England.

Kitchen Sisters Recording & Interviewing Workshop - Friday, September 26, San Francisco.

The Blonde in the Village: We travel to the mountains of Korea near the DMZ for the secret saga of an outcast girl.

Favorite Things: The Kitchen Sisters session at the Third Coast International Audio Festival - October 11, Chicago.

Music We're Spinning:

WWOZ FM in New Orleans, "Guardians of the Groove."

Sincerely Jane by Janelle Monae. We heard this song on KCRW when we were in LA for the gathering of Public Radio Program Directors from all over the nation. We're looking for music for our new girls series and something about this song stuck.

Papa Was a Rollin' Stone by The Temptations, co-written by Norman Whitfield, who died last week. He also co-wrote Ain't Too Proud To Beg, Just My Imagination and I Heard it Through the Grapevine and so much more.

Earl Palmer's drumming. A beautiful lost and found sound. Palmer, who also died last week, played drums on La Bamba, Lucille, Donna, Tutti Frutti and so many songs with a rhythm that lives. He worked with Fats Domino, Little Richard, Frank Sinatra, Tom Waits and on and on. Beat in peace.

Paintings We're Admiring:

Kitchen Brother, Charles Prentiss (Nikki's husband) exhibits his paintings at Open Studios in Santa Cruz the 1st and 3rd weekend in October. You're invited to visit the commune where Nikki and Charles live, tour his studio and take a behind-the-scenes look at The Kitchen Sisters' production studio there. October 4-5 & 18-19, 11am - 6 pm. See some of Charles' artwork and get directions at charlesprentiss.com.

The Birth of Rice A Roni

2008-06-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

Nikki sat down next to this story at an NPR event where we played our Hidden Kitchen episode "The Birth of the Frito," about the origin of the iconic corn chip. At the dinner, Lois DeDemenico, 80, told Nikki that she had been part of the birth of Rice-A-Roni.

Lois began to tell a story about San Francisco in the 1940s and the convergence of a Canadian immigrant bride, an Italian-American pasta family, and a survivor of the Armenian genocide – all of which led to the creation of "The San Francisco Treat."

We followed Lois, a philanthropist and widow of Tom DeDomenico, one of the founders of Golden Grain Macaroni Co., to her home in Oakland, Calif., to chronicle this hidden kitchen.
Listen to the radio story and listen, read, and see more on our story page.

Pancake Breakfasts

2008-06-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve been obsessed with them for years. I look for road signs during the week— especially if I’m passing through towns smaller than the one I live in. Where the firehouses of Occidental are raising their money.

It’s not the pancakes so much as the collective act of pancakes. This moment, eternal, frozen in time. Some candidate or marching band or firehouse needs the dough.

Pancakes seem the way to do it. The carwash fundraiser of food. Low overhead—syrup, batter, spatulas, butter, flour, grill. Long tables. Paper plates. It smells so good. So warm, cozy. So life affirming.

You’re not going to raise a million for the capital campaign. But you aren’t risking the fate of non-profit either — hiring that pricey band from and the fifties and hoping for a big sentimental turnout.

It obsessed. I note them. I imagine myself driving to work. Who I’ll meet. The grange halls and fire stations I’ll see. The causes I could support. The candidates I could catch.

Nikki and I are ever on the lookout as we travel cross-country on our sonic expeditions. Way before our quest for Hidden Kitchens began.

I think I’ve been to 3 pancake breakfasts in the last 20 years. With Pancake Breakfast, a little goes a long way. It’s a great way to launch a Sunday— pray the syrup is real maple. The pancakes made from scratch. The butter local and from a cow, not chemistry.

You takes your chances. But you’re part of something. You’re giving to somebody. You left your house and met some part of a community that needs a hand. Maybe you woke up alone and needed a place to go.

The last one we went to was in Canastota, NY. We were covering the boxing match between Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier, the daughters of Mohammad and Joe, when they fought at a casino the Oneida Reservation in upstate New York. Listen to that story here

Sunday morning we were on our way to the Boxing Hall of Fame to meet Sugar Ray Leonard and Felix Trinidad when it appeared. Like a vision. Pancake Breakfast. Firehouse. Every boxer known to man was there. And every fireman for a hundred mile radius. Not to mention granddad and grandma from Ithaca and their grandkids.

Tall men in tall hats flipped flapjacks in an endless line and playfully traded punches. The fire engines gleamed, and so did the bacon.

We lay down the microphones, found our places in line, and ate.

Weenie Royale: The Impact of the Internment on Japanese American Cooking

2007-12-20T19:59:00.000-08:00

Weenie Royale: The Impact of the Internment on Japanese American Cooking
Morning Edition -Dec. 20, 2007
Web Extra: Recipes, Internment Camp Remembrances

This historical Hidden Kitchen comes from the memories and kitchens of the Japanese Americans uprooted from the west coast and forcibly relocated inland after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In camps like Manzanar, Topaz, Tule Lake some 120,000 internees lived for four years in remote and desolate locations — their traditional food replaced by US government commodities and war surplus — hotdogs, ketchup,spam, potatoes — erasing the traditional Japanese diet and family table.

I (Davia) was getting my hair cut by Akemi Tamaribuchi. Imagine Audrey Hepburn if she had a Japanese-American father. That's Akemi. It was the first time we met, and we were in the midst of getting-to-know-you questions. She asked what I did, what I was working on. I told her about The Kitchen Sisters and the "Hidden Kitchens" series — secret, underground, below-the-radar cooking in America, contemporary and historic. She kept cutting, but didn't miss a beat. "Weenie Royale," she said. "Weenie Royale?" "We eat Weenie Royale because of the internment."

She began to tell me the story of her grandparents' four-year incarceration in the camp at Tule Lake during World War II. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, about 120,000 Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast, their homes and land taken from them, and put into one of 10 remote and desolate locations until the war's end.

They lived in barrack-like conditions, standing in long lines for little food, eating off tin pie plates in big mess halls. They were fed government commodity foods and castoff meat from Army surplus — hot dogs, ketchup, kidneys, Spam and potatoes. The Japanese diet and family table were erased.

In the early years of the incarceration, grizzled old Army cooks, used to feeding armies of men, now fed women and children. It was wartime, with strict rationing for everyone. At the Topaz Internment Camp in central Utah, it was decided that no one except children under 12 would receive milk — 6 ounces a day. Pregnant women, because their children were unborn, were not allowed any milk. Tami Tomoye Takahashi, who gave birth to two babies at Topaz, found a Sears, Roebuck catalog and ordered calcium tablets to benefit her unborn babies.

In the chaos of the dining hall, families no longer ate together. Teenagers wanted to be with other teenagers. Old people, who had once sat at the extended family table, were isolated. Grandparents, parents and children broke apart in the face of mess hall dining. Mothers no longer could cook for their children. The family table, with its traditions and conversations, began to fade.

Akemi said that during this time her grandparents and parents — her father was a little boy then — began to acquire the taste for hot dogs. Weenies began to make their way into their postwar cooking. Weenies in eggs (the aforementioned "Weenie Royale"), hot dog sushi, Spam sushi. Ketchup crept into the cooking.

Akemi's story sparked this Hidden Kitchen story. It made us ask — What was the food in the camps? How did it impact the culture and cooking of Japanese Americans in the following years?

Millions of people live in refugee camps around the world now, being fed commodities and surplus. It made us think about the impact on so many cultures within so many nations when they are denied their own food and traditions, when they are forcibly displaced and their land and homes taken from them.

Jimi Yamaichi, director and curator of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, says the internment camps became a world unto themselves. Tule Lake, a camp in northern California, had chickens and a slaughterhouse where hogs were butchered for meat and rendered to make soap. About 3,800 acres were farmed by the internees. And the food grown there was sent to many of the other camps across California and the West.

Artist Howard Ikemoto said his father had owned grocery stores before the war and lost them all when the family was interned in Tule Lake. After the war, his father (whose given name was Ito and who later took the name Ed) became a gardener in the Sacramento area as did many of the other men who returned from the camps. At lunchtime, the men would meet to eat together either in a park or on a lawn they had just mowed. They would eat rice with a plum in the middle, a slice of Spam and corned beef hash in a tin.

Hot Dogs for Days

Yamaichi, a retired contractor, recently returned to Tule Lake with a group of former prisoners. It was their first visit since their incarceration during the war.

"Here's where the slaughterhouse was where we rendered the hogs. Here's the chicken coops," Yamaichi said. "They would bring carloads of hot dogs in by the tons — we'd eat hot dogs for days."

Takahashi, 92, grew up in San Francisco and attended U.C. Berkeley in the depth of the Depression. As World War II broke out, she worked at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, helping translate Japanese radio messages for the U.S. Army. Takahashi, along with her husband and parents, spent six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor interned in San Francisco at the hastily converted "Tanforan Race Track Assembly Center," living in a stable that held a horse. Then they spent four years incarcerated at Topaz Internment Camp in the Utah desert, where temperatures averaged about 125 degrees. After the war, Takahashi and her husband, Henri, went on to form the Takahashi Co., which sold furniture, home design items, and arts and crafts to major department stores and fine art museums.

Shousei Hanayama, the priest at the Buddhist Temple in Watsonville, Calif., remembered that after the war, American soldiers in Okinawa brought hot dogs and introduced them into the island culture.

Hanayama noted that hot dogs are still a part of the Japanese culture, pointing to the story of Takeru Kobayashi, who can eat 63 hot dogs in under 12 minutes. The winner of six consecutive Nathan's Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contests, Kobayashi revolutionized and popularized competitive eating with a technique called "Japanesing," separating hot dog from bun as he crams to victory.

Rice, the Soul Food of Japanese Americans

Within this hidden world of internment camp cooking was another hidden-kitchen tradition: the clandestine making of sake from leftover rice from the mess halls. Tamaribuchi's great-grandmother would dig a hole in the dirt floor of the barracks where they lived and bury rice in a pot and let it ferment. Old, burnt rice was saved and brought to ferment in any number of contraptions — keeping the forbidden tradition of sake alive in places like Tule Lake, Yamaichi said.

In the early years of the internment, prisoners were fed potatoes instead of rice. People in the camps rebelled, and slowly rice was added to the mess hall menus, though it was often prepared badly, served nearly raw or burnt. Ikemoto said his parents ate rice every day of their lives. He calls rice the soul food of Japanese Americans. —Davia Nelson

The Archives

In putting together this story we drew on an astonishing collection of archives, oral histories and images of the internment. Some were gathered by historians, anthropologists and remarkable photographers, like the legendary Dorothea Lange. Others were collected by the internees themselves. We hope you will explore some of the links we've gathered below and learn more about this under-chronicled aspect of our nation's history. - The Kitchen Sisters

The Kitchens Sisters on the Road for Hidden Kitchens Texas

2007-11-03T00:50:00.001-07:00

Along the road...

The Birth of the Frito - Another Texas Hidden Kitchen

2007-11-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

Morning Edition, October 18, 2007 · When we produced our 1999 NPR series, "Lost & Found Sound," we said we were chronicling people possessed by sound. With "Hidden Kitchens," perhaps you could say we are chronicling people possessed by food.

Charles Elmer Doolin is one such man. Possessed by a vision. By corn. By creating snack food. Doolin was obsessed with Fritos, his daughter Kaleta said.

During the Depression in the 1930s, Doolin had a confectionery in San Antonio. Always an innovator, he got a bug to put some kind of corn snack on his counters. Tortillas staled, so Doolin went on a mission. At a gas station, Doolin found a Mexican man making an extruded corn chip out of masa, frying it and selling little bags of the fried corn chips. They were fritos, "little fried things" — the beach food of Mexico.

Doolin bought the patent and 14 customers from the man and began to make the chips in his own kitchen at home, with his mother perfecting his recipe.

"His life was one big hidden kitchen," his son-in-law Alan Govenar said. Doolin had kitchens in his factory, kitchens in his lab, kitchens with test tubes and beakers in his house.

Kaleta Doolin said his kids were his guinea pigs — helping him test new recipes and flavors. Through these kitchen experiments, C.E. Doolin also invented the Cheeto.

Along the way, Doolin started hybridizing his own corn. The secret ingredient in Fritos, Kaleta Doolin says, is her father's own, special corn. He hired farmers throughout Texas to plant his varieties until he found the taste he was looking for.

Doolin and his brother Earl were modern, can-do innovative tinkerers. Soon they were taking Henry Ford's idea of the assembly line and conveyor belt and applying it to the manufacture of the Frito.

C.E. Doolin had big plans for this chip. He opened a Casa de Frito restaurant in Disneyland in 1955, and another one in Dallas. The restaurants were a sort of precursor to fast food, a hybrid between hamburgers and Mexican food.

When he invented the Frito, C.E. Doolin imagined them as a side dish, a handful to be served with soup and salad to complement a meal. He never imagined anyone would consume an entire king-size bag. He rarely ate them.

And if he brought them home, he would have grabbed them off the conveyor belt before they were salted. The Doolins were vegetarians, and barely touched salt. Kaleta Doolin took figs and yogurt in her lunch to school, not Fritos.

In fact, C.E. Doolin was a follower of Dr. Herbert Shelton, a San Antonio vegetarian and healer whose innovative theories on nutrition and fasting permeated the Doolin home. C.E. Doolin, who was overweight and unhealthy and had a bad heart, went to Shelton's clinics several times for 30-day fasts. Doolin ate no meat, no fat, no salt. Shelton, in his heyday, ran for president on the vegetarian ticket in 1956.

C.E. Doolin was an early franchiser and soon began distributing Fritos nationwide. One photo shows a "Frito Fleet" rolling through the streets of San Antonio, accompanied by a local marching band.

Doolin's wife, Katherine, was known for her social work and good relationships with the workers at the company. It was a strong, family feeling that made Fritos a legendary Texas business. Mrs. Doolin developed all kinds of recipes using Fritos, including Frito pie and Frito jets (Fritos dipped in chocolate and laid out on a cookie sheet — "fat on top of fat," Kaleta Doolin says). These recipes were printed on the backs of Fritos packages.

By the time of his death in 1959, C.E. Doolin had partnered with Herman Lay, and the Frito-Lay brand had gone global. But the company lost that family feeling. We now eat our weight in snack foods instead of the modest portions Doolin had in mind.

Kaleta Doolin is busy making a film and writing a book based on the history of her father's groundbreaking work.

We thank all in the Doolin Family who helped us tell this story, and Frito-Lay, which so generously shared its sound and images with The Kitchen Sisters and "Hidden Kitchens."

Next month on "Hidden Kitchens": The story of a kitchen tradition that goes back more than 1,000 years — Banging the Branch, the olive oil harvest on the West Bank.

Space Food: Beyond Tang - NASA's Hidden Kitchen

2007-11-03T00:29:00.000-07:00

Morning Edition, June 7, 2007 · NASA's Johnson Space Center invited The Kitchen Sisters to visit its "hidden kitchen." On the eve of NASA's scheduled launch of space shuttle Atlantis, The Kitchen Sisters present a brief history of space food.

"This is Tiffany Travis calling from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. We'd like to invite The Sisters to come to our space food lab where our food scientists create meals for our astronauts on board the shuttle and the space station. I thought you might be interested in what astronauts are eating 220 miles above the earth. Bread is the number one enemy in space. You do not want crumbs floating around in microgravity getting into the electronics. Come take a look." — Hidden Kitchens Hotline Message #2203

We took Travis up on her invitation and set off traveling to Houston. Along the way, we followed the trails of some of the many Hidden Kitchens Texas calls that we had received over the year. Calls about oil barrel barbeques, cowboy kitchens, oystermen on Galveston Bay, the tamale lady at Fuel City in Dallas, a restaurant tucked down a driveway in Fort Worth, a car wash kitchen in El Paso, the garage kitchens of Vietnamese residents in Houston, and the space food kitchens of NASA. — The Kitchen Sisters

This week at the Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas

2007-11-03T00:19:00.000-07:00

SATURDAY, NOV. 3 AND SUNDAY, NOV. 4

Texas Book Festival. Highlights at this year's literary celebration include 'Hecho en Tejas: A Celebration of Texas Mexican Literature' at 10 a.m. Saturday and appearances by authors Robert Draper, Kristin Gore, Lynne Cheney, Jenna Bush (above), Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Toobin, Douglas Brinkley and The Kitchen Sisters from NPR. Sessions are free and first-come, first-served. Saturday and Sunday, with many sessions at the Capitol. For a complete schedule and list of venues, go to texasbookfestival.org.

Stories from the Heart of the Land

2007-09-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

A New Public Radio Series
Sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and VISA

Ask some of the country's best radio producers to tell their favorite stories about people and nature...and what do you get?

Stories from the Heart of the Land, a six-part radio series featuring intimate stories from around the world about the human connection to land and landscape. Jay Allison hosts this new series that ranges across the world — from Australia to Newfoundland, Mexico to Tibet, now airing nationwide on Public Radio nationwide.

The Kitchen Sisters present CRY ME A RIVER a portrait of three pioneering river activists — Mark DuBois, Ken Sleight and Katie Lee, and the daming of wild rivers in the west. The story explores some of the dramatic efforts to save wild rivers, the rise of the environmental movement, and the power of individuals to make a difference. Produced by Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva with Martha Ham and mixed by Jim McKee.

Also in the series
- Elizabeth Arnold went to the woods with grizzly bears.
- Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister stalked coqui frogs in Hawaii.
- Barrett Golding jumped on his bike.
- Scott Carrier walked with pilgrims around a mountain in Tibet.
- Jonathan Goldstein packed a tent and went camping, reluctantly.
- Sean Cole turned on his TV. Don't worry, it was a nature show.

In addition to the producers mentioned above, the series features contributions from Charles Bowden, Chris Brookes, Neenah Ellis, Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler, Kelly McEvers, Bill McKibben, Jon Miller, Dean Olsher, Sandy Tolan and many others.

Links to listen
Learn more
Web exculsive interviews and images

Hidden Kitchens Texas Hour-long Special with Willie Nelson

2007-09-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

An hour-long radio Special narrated by Willie Nelson, chronicles the Texas experience through food and the stories of people who find it, grow it, cook it, sell it, celebrate with it, and write about it. Check your local public radio station for broadcast times in your area or listen to Hidden Kitchens Texas online at

2007-03-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

"AHOY FROM THE SISTERS"
Come join us at The Hammer Museum
Thursday, March 29, 8:00pm
An evening of radio, readings, special guests and some LA hidden kitchens cooking.
A free event.
For details visit our website at www.kitchensisters.org

We’re still collecting LA hidden kitchen stories. Got one? Who’s cooking on your street corner,in your family? Who glues your community together through food? What LA cooking traditions do we need to know about? The event is the 29th, so point us towards your unusual, little known and clandestine kitchens soon. E-mail us at kitchen@kitchensisters.org.