Nourish the roots: Whidbey chef to teach class

Eating healthily doesn’t have to be difficult, as one South Whidbey resident hopes to teach people.

Renée Blair’s passion for scratch-made cooking stems from her love for local ingredients which continually inspire her, whether from the farmers market, a specialty grocery store or her own garden.

Recently foraged chanterelle mushrooms sizzled on the stovetop as she told a story about her summertime patch of asparagus.

“That’s the beauty of seasonal eating,” she said. “For me, I get so excited about an ingredient, and I enjoy that ingredient while it’s here, and then it’s gone, and I wait until it comes back next year.”

Aspiring cooks can join Blair at an upcoming class on Sunday, Sept. 22 at the Crawford House in Langley, a venue with an expansive kitchen fit for any chef. More details and registration will be available on her website, nourishtheroots.com. Attendees can expect to learn about cooking late summer and early fall foods with an Italian flair.

“That’s always been a love of mine, teaching people that they can make really simple, nourishing food with really good ingredients,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

Blair, who is of Italian heritage, has a special place in her heart for the boot-shaped country on the Mediterranean. Earlier this year, she took a two-month sojourn to Sicily for a farm-to-table cooking school experience that immersed her in the local food culture.

“Besides my time in Italy, I am fully self-taught in cooking,” she said. “My first job was at a restaurant when I was 13.”

Blair grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York and originally planned to be a registered nurse with the goal of keeping people healthy. But the schooling made her miserable, she said, because she felt the conventional health care system didn’t focus on true health.

“It was all about putting a Band-Aid on these health issues, and my true love was food and nutrition,” she said. “What helped me get through nursing school was actually creating a food blog and taking pictures in my kitchen in college, and that is what I pursued after graduation.”

Blair has created over a hundred of her own recipes, some of which can be viewed on her website, including zucchini pie, homemade kombucha, nettle soup, various salads and desserts.

Of course, she also has an extensive collection of cookbooks lined up on her kitchen countertop.

“I like to read cookbooks as if they’re novels,” she said. “I get a lot of inspiration.”

Besides teaching, she hopes to offer her services as a holistic private chef, whether it’s for an intimate event or retreat or on a regular basis in someone’s home. She’s done plenty of the former work, mostly by word of mouth, but is interested in branching out and doing some of the latter. She can accommodate dietary restrictions, food allergies and personal preferences, though the right clients must value the use of fresh ingredients just as much as she does.

For a reporter who normally avoids consuming fungi of any type, it was an eye-opening experience to eat Blair’s sautéed chanterelle mushrooms with goat cheese on sourdough bread she’d just baked that morning.

Blair is looking to expand her work to include postpartum nourishment. A decade ago, when she gave birth to her daughter on a separate coast from the rest of her family, she struggled to keep herself fed while home alone with the baby.

“I knew that I wasn’t getting nourished right,” she said. “Between that and the sleep deprivation, I couldn’t cook the way that I would have wanted to because, you know, you have a new baby. I became super passionate about nourishing new moms.”

The first 40 days after birth are a critical time, she added, and mothers should be eating warm, easy-to-digest foods that help support the supply of breast milk.

“In different cultures there’s very traditional foods that are given to new moms, and so the foods that I would prepare are just very nutrient-dense,” she said.

Some of these could include dishes with bone broth, different stews and congee, which is a savory rice porridge.

This time of year, her large outdoor garden still produces a copious amount of tomatoes, zucchini, string beans and fresh herbs, among other things. Her flock of 11 chickens bob through the yard.

“My whole thing is eating good, local, nourishing food and I’d like to share that with more of South Whidbey,” she said.