The Bluegrass and Beyond

A seed leaf is the first sign that a plant might take root and flourish. It seemed like an appropriate metaphor for what Ryan Koch hoped to do in Lexington.

Koch’s idea began germinating in 2007, when a farmer donated a garden plot to Communality, a small Christian faith community to which Koch and his wife, Jodie, belonged.

The experience led Koch and others to form Seedleaf, a non-profit organization with this goal: “Nourish communities by growing, cooking, sharing and recycling food.”

Seedleaf now sponsors eight community gardens in the East End and north side neighborhoods, plus one in Gainesway and another at Sayre School. The organization works with 16 restaurants and caterers to collect pre-consumer waste food to turn into compost to nourish those gardens.

Seedleaf also partners with other non-profits to do educational programs aimed at restoring local food culture, especially in low-income neighborhoods.

“I want us to serve as a reminder,” said Koch, a Californian who came to Kentucky to study at Asbury Theological Seminary. “There was a time when we wouldn’t have needed a Seedleaf because people knew how to grow and cook their own food.”

Seedleaf celebrated the end of its fourth growing season last weekend with a picnic Saturday to thank volunteers. Koch estimated that 1,200 volunteers — many of them college students — have helped with gardens and programs.

“We’ve come to be trusted in Lexington as a place where volunteers can come in and be well-used,” he said.

On Sunday, there was another picnic for six young people who completed this summer’s SEEDS program. Service Education and Entrepreneurship in Downtown Spaces is a training program for fifth- through eighth-graders, sponsored by Blue Grass Community Foundation.

Each student spent more than 70 hours working in the gardens and taking classes, said Rebecca Self, Seedleaf’s education director and only other employee. After asking neighbors what kind of produce they would buy, the students planted, raised and harvested vegetables and sold them at the William Wells Brown Community Center. The most popular items: tomatoes, collard greens and green beans.

What the students enjoyed most, though, was learning to cook and eat what they grew. They were taught cooking skills by Self and chef Ouita Michel, who owns the Holly Hill Inn, Wallace Station and Windy Corner restaurants.

Twin sisters Rosa and Petra Navarro, 15, said they like fresh vegetables a lot more than they did before their work with SEEDS. So does Jawuan Walker-Brown, 12.

“I really enjoyed myself,” he said “I got to cook and eat — I really like to eat.”

The largest of Seedleaf’s spaces is the London Ferrell Community Garden on East Third Street, between Lexington’s main fire station and the Old Episcopal Burying Ground. The garden is named for a prominent minister in the early 1800s who is the only black person buried in the all-white cemetery next door.

The London Ferrell garden includes 40 plots that neighborhood families can rent for $5 a year. Plus, there are plots for SEEDS participants and a community plot with produce for anyone who helped tend it.

Seedleaf provides meals to Kid’s Café at the East Seventh Street Center, using its produce and food from God’s Pantry.

The organization also teaches cooking classes at the Florence Crittenton Home on West Fourth Street, one of the nation’s oldest shelters for pregnant girls.

“They’re going to have to feed themselves and a baby, and this points them toward independent living,” Koch said.

Koch and Self are pleased with how their seed leaf has flourished, but they have bigger ambitions.

Seedleaf’s annual budget of about $70,000 comes equally from grants, donations and money earned from composting and other services. Koch said he would like to add another staff member or two to help manage the growing corps of volunteers.

In addition to making people healthier and more self-sufficient, learning how to grow and prepare food can promote generosity and neighborliness, Koch said.

“We want to grow more gardens,” he said. “But more than that, we want to grow more gardeners and teach people how to cook. We see a lot of opportunities to partner with people and organizations that are doing good things in Lexington.”

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Lesme Romero and Reinaldo Gonzalez became good friends as college students in Cleveland. They had grown up in South America with Spanish fathers and Italian mothers, and both loved good food.

They shared an apartment in the Little Italy neighborhood and worked four years as cooks in some of Cleveland’s best Italian restaurants, where they learned to make fresh pasta.

Romero, 33, earned business degrees and eventually moved to Florida to work in finance. Gonzalez, 37, became an industrial engineer and took a corporate job in Lexington.

During a visit several years ago, Gonzalez took Romero to the Lexington Farmers Market to buy fresh produce. They went back to Gonzalez’s home, made fresh pasta and cooked a delicious meal.

“I remember saying to him, ‘I wish I could do this for a living,’” Romero said after making the pasta. “And his wife, Heather, said, ‘Well, why not?’”

So, in 2009, they started Lexington Pasta. Using a countertop pasta machine, they made samples and took them to restaurants. Bellini’s gave them their first order, for 20 pounds. “It took us 20 hours to make on that little machine,” Romero said. “But we were just excited to have an order.”

Now, the company has more than $50,000 worth of pasta equipment and makes 600 pounds a week. Some of it goes to the best restaurants in Central Kentucky. The rest is sold in specialty stores, at farmers markets and at Lexington Pasta’s tiny downtown shop in a converted two-car garage for $2 for a 4-ounce serving.

Romero manages the company, which has three employees. He makes daily deliveries downtown on a bright red scooter, and he has become a fixture at the farmers market at Cheapside on Saturdays and Southland on Sundays. “I used to have a name,” he said with a laugh. “Now I’m ‘The Pasta Guy.’”

Why eat fresh pasta instead of cheaper stuff that comes dried in a box? Because it tastes better, Romero said.

“It’s the subtle part of the dish that makes the difference,” said Debbie Long, owner of Dudley’s on Short, which uses Lexington Pasta in several dishes. “They have a wonderful product. They are very customer-oriented and they are easy to work with. I think they’re a great addition to our food community.”

Lexington Pasta is made with semolina flour, eggs and flavorings from fresh ingredients, many of which are locally grown, Romero said. The pasta, which keeps in a refrigerator for about 10 days, comes in 10 cuts and 10 flavors, including spinach, cilantro, portobello and chipotle. Fresh egg ravioli comes stuffed with spinach or Parmesan, ricotta and mozzarella cheese.

The company takes orders for gluten-free, whole grain, spicy diablo, lobster and Spanish saffron pasta. Some restaurant chefs have worked with Romero to create specialty pastas for signature dishes.

One way Romero cultivates customers is by offering “Pasta 101″ classes for six to eight people once a week. At the two-hour class, which costs $45, students learn to make pasta and then use it to fix a gourmet dinner. The evening includes Kentucky wines, cheeses and an Italian dessert. The classes are booked up through early September, said Romero, who plans to add a ravioli-making “Pasta 102″ class.

Because of his business education and background, Romero said he is always thinking about ways to grow the company. He has his eye on a pasta machine that would produce 70 pounds an hour, up from his current machine’s 40 pounds.

But Romero said he doesn’t want Lexington Pasta to grow too fast or too big. He likes the feel of his tiny downtown shop, where he knows many of his customers.

“I have felt so welcomed by this neighborhood,” Romero said. “I love what I do. When people come back in the shop and say, ‘That’s the best pasta I’ve had in my life,’ that’s the best reward for me.”

Lexington Pasta

Products: Sold at markets including Shorty’s, Good Foods Coop, The Mouse Trap, and Lexington Farmers Market.

On the menu: Served at Central Kentucky restaurants including Bellini’s, Portofino, Dudley’s, Nick Ryan’s, Azur, Holly Hill Inn, Windy Corner, Alfalfa, Boone Tavern, Columbia’s, Varden’s and Le Deauville.

Where: 227 N. Limestone

Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat.

Learn more: (859) 421-1764 or LexingtonPasta.com

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LOUISVILLE — Stephen Lee was explaining the intricacies of the Kentucky State Fair’s culinary competition when a judge interrupted us with an urgent matter: she suspected an apple pie of having a store-bought crust.

This would be a disqualifying offense. Lee, the fair’s culinary superintendent, needed to make a ruling.

“It doesn’t look hand-pinched, let’s put it that way,” judge Barb Veigel told him.

“Either that,” judge Dan Poset added, “or this person worked for Sara Lee.”

Lee (no relation to Sara) agreed that the edges seemed too uniform. “It does look store-bought,” he said. Then he turned the pie over in his hand, so it fell out of the tin plate, and carefully examined the bottom. Finally, he said, “I’m going to take her at her word that it’s homemade, because the bottom looks pushed together.”

The pie didn’t taste good enough to be a winner, anyway, so the judges moved on. After all, Lee’s two dozen volunteer judges had only two days to taste and decide among 4,312 entries in 328 food categories — everything from pies to pickles, cakes to candy, bread and preserves and canned vegetables.

That is because the 106th Kentucky State Fair opens Thursday in Louisville for an 11-day run that is expected to attract more than 620,000 visitors. Some of the first people through the doors will be those who entered the food, art and crafts competitions, and they can’t wait to see if they won a ribbon.

“People take this very seriously, and the emotions run high sometimes,” Lee said of the cooks, bakers and canners who enter each year. “My personal goal is to showcase Kentucky and the talents of its people, and to improve the quality of our food.”

Lee, who has supervised the culinary competition for seven years, ran a Louisville cooking school before retirement. Each year, he and chief judge Valerie Holland assemble a judging panel of food experts: home economists, chefs, dieticians, restaurateurs and caterers.

Three days before the fair opens, the freshly arrived entries are spread out on long rows of tables covered with butcher paper. With knives and forks in hand, the judges work in pairs, tasting their way from one category to the next. Labels hide the contestants’ identities until winners are chosen. Nobody is allowed in the room except judges, staff and the occasional hungry newspaper columnist.

The first day’s judging included pickles, relishes, jellies, jams and canned fruit and vegetables. I was savvy enough to attend the second day, which included candy, bread, 21 categories of cakes and 16 categories of pies. I spent a couple of hours shadowing the cake and pie judges, asking questions and shooting photos. I kept a plastic fork in my shirt pocket, figuring that once the judges’ sugar highs kicked in, they would start saying, “Wow! You should try this!”

In addition to taste, the judges were evaluating each entry on appearance and texture — the flakiness of a pie crust, the complimentary qualities of a cake icing. Did a bourbon cake taste like bourbon without being overpowering? Was a pie filling fresh and firm?

No commercially prepared ingredients, such as store-bought pie crusts, are allowed except in a category for competitors younger than 15. “The idea there is to get kids cooking, even if they have to use a box mix,” Lee said.

Women make most of the cakes and pies, but men bake most of the bread, Lee said. Canning and preserving had been on the wane, but young women are now taking up the tradition.

Lee spends time in the off-season refining the food criteria that appears in the fair’s inch-thick rule book. But people don’t read instructions or follow rules very well — and sometimes they like to cheat. “I had a man enter a sponge cake once and it still had the Kroger label on the bottom,” Lee said. “I think he was testing us.”

When winning entries are chosen, their recipes are scrutinized to make sure they followed the rules. Judges told me that picking the best in each category is often easier than choosing second- and third-place.

Each entry is then prepared for display in long rows of glass cases in the Culinary Hall of the Fairgrounds’ East Wing. Visitors can look, but not taste. “If we could sell this stuff during the fair, we would be millionaires,” Lee said. “Everybody wants a piece.”

Only about two-thirds of each pie and cake, and about four pieces of each batch of cookies, are put on display. The rest are wrapped and taken to the Cathedral of the Assumption’s soup kitchen, which serves 150 lunches to poor people every day.

“That helps everybody feel better about” so much food going uneaten, said Lee, who runs the soup kitchen when he is not on State Fair duty. The baked goods are a treat for soup kitchen clients, who usually are served a lot of bologna. But I wonder if they, too, sometimes grimace the way the culinary judges do.

“I always tell people,” Lee cautioned, “that just because a cake’s in the state fair doesn’t mean it’s good.”

If you go

Kentucky State Fair
When: Aug. 19-29
Where: Fairgrounds, I-65 at I-264, Louisville
Admission: $8, $4 for children 3-12 and seniors 55 and older. Infants free.
Parking: $8
More information: Kystatefair.org

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