Alimentary Cookbook

Cookbooks available for purchase! 

All proceeds go to support Kite's Nest programs, and cover the costs of printing at our local Publication Studio Hudson. You can buy the book at two locations in Hudson: Spotty Dog Books & Ale and Valley Variety, both located on Warren Street. Or, email us at hello@kitesnest.org to order your copy. Books are $30. 

From the introduction:

Each Wednesday throughout the winter of 2014, the children of Alimentary Café came together in the warmth of the Kite’s Nest kitchen to create and enjoy a shared meal with friends, family and guests. The children worked under the guidance of chef and food-educator Nicole LoBue and guest collaborator Tess Diamond.

Inspired by the winter’s cold, we considered questions of food preservation, basic nutrition, flavor profiles, fat, and more. What’s available to us right now? What types of food make us feel warm and fed during this season?  How might we explore, cook and feast, using the limited bounty of the wintery northeast?

Relishing the opportunity to gather around a table together, we turned our kitchen into a public café, inviting our families and neighbors to come taste the fruits of our explorations. In the end of this book, you’ll find the exact menus we made throughout the quarter; each week, we treated the public to a family-style feast. The Alimentary children stepped up not only as chefs, but as servers, educators and restaurateurs.

Throughout the Alimentary Café, we encouraged our students and apprentices to keep food journals, noticing and recording how they felt and documenting each of our meals. We learned to read recipes, and by the end of the quarter, we had also begun to alter the recipes, taking notes on the changes we had made. Why a book of recipes? This concurrent act of documentation, alongside our weekly culinary adventures, is one of the ways that we reflect on our experiences, learn from our process, and experiment in sharing and exchanging our work with the world.