Tilt

As a person who has really not eaten many wheat-based products, or enjoyed much of anything typical as it relates to breakfast foods, finding a delicious recipe for vegan and gluten free pancakes has been awesome… especially in the cold, Ithaca winter. Here is my magical recipe.

Ingredients (just add to your liking, we are visual here and don’t take well to measuring):

• Make up wheat with a blend of Buckwheat, Rice Flour, Quinoa Flour
• Orange juice and almond milk (about half of each)
• Add a healthy splash of sparkling water, we recommend San Pellegrino
• A dash of vanilla goes a long way (not necessary)
• Salt and Sugar to your liking (not necessary)
• Add a little spoonful of veggie oil (we prefer sunflower oil, because most veggie oils have soy in them these days)
• Crushed pecans and blueberries or tiny chopped up apples

Then add it to the pan and see what happens. It is a bit of an experiment always, so sometimes we add in some baking soda or powder depending on what happens, but it is really not necessary.

We make a delicious pear butter, or you can use tahini with sliced almonds and agave to have a spread. Instead of maple syrup, we use an agave, and it is always served with a little fresh salad and fruit for a balanced meal.

Sunday, in the middle of an up and down weather day with winter and spring (high temps, low temps / snow, sun) we had a delicious Vegfest, complete with locally grown winter veggies, and a variety of other options.

A small and intimate group, this offered TILT the chance to try out a few new options and really relax into the day. What a wonderful moment.

On the Menu (Everything is GF, V, SF, LDF, WF, MF, with the exception of the Tangerine Pudding and the Veggie Pancakes which had 1 egg in each batch):

• Mushroom, Asparagus, Leek, Onion, Garlic and Brussels Sprout Scramble
• Marishya’s Veggie Soup w/ a Parsley Dusting
• Zucchini and Carrot Pancakes for Dipping
• Tomato, Pine Nut Italian Salad
• Fresh Green Salad w/ Mustard Seed Dressing
• Hummus and Veggie Crudites
• Broccolirabe Salad with Sesame Seeds
• Tangerine English Pudding Squares w/ Tahini Almond Butter

And for Dessert:

• TILT Raw Chocolates
• Dehydrated Honey Dipped Orange Slices
• Rosemary and Olive Oil Apple Chips
• Roasted Sweet and Savory Mixed Nuts

For any recipes, please contact us and we are happy to send your way.

Wow! What an amazing day. It was snowy and cold in January, but this incredible event jump-started the year for TILT’s Idea Igloo… our first proper Friends & Family Brunch Stateside in almost 2 years. The menu was a sensational blend of cooked and raw food. We had a TexMex themed Brunch that started at 12 and went most of the day and while we typically we have a hard stop time at 4pm, it just spilled over into the evening – a grand display of food, fun and laughter.

Can  you tell we have been busy? Just getting ’round to posting this almost two months later. Yikes! Please feel free to contact us if you want any of the recipes from below.

On the Menu:

• Vegan Mexican Casserole w/ layers of beans, veggies, eggs and corn tortillas (GF, DF, SF, WF, V)
• Tacos w/ Scrambled Farm Fresh Eggs from Baltimore (LF, SF, WF, GF) or Mushroom Nut ‘Meat’ (V, GF, DF, SF, CF, WF)
• Corn Bread (GF, V, DF, WF, SF)
• Fresh Fruit Plate
• Plantain Chips (V, GF, WF, CF, SF)
• 10 Delicious Salsas and Dips
• Fried Potatoes with Mixed Veggies and Peppers (V, GF, DF, SF, WF)
• Mexican Fried Coconut Ice Cream using Coconut Bliss Ice Cream (DF, SF, WF, GF, V) w/ tons of toppings

It was a great chance to also get to know some of the friends of our friends who are also in town. Food always brings people closer together. The Mexican Fried Ice Cream was a project for the whole group to enjoy together. It never would have happened without a team effort!

We are going on the obesity ride of our lives… bypassing some of the most important and key components nature has to offer just to get in the taste we crave, desire and want. We  keeping feeding our addictions and eating mindlessly in order to feel better about our stationary positions and already inflamed waistlines. We are literally a ‘growing’ nation…

In 2011, the USDA took a gigantic leap of faith with key figurehead Michelle Obama, creating the Choosemyplate.gov graphic and website to replace the very vintage and outdated MyPyramid graphic. MyPlate offers a lot of opportunity for interpretation, but does provide a very clear way of denoting the reimbursable meal requirements and proper National Nutrition Standards. While this is a very useful tool for the whole of the Nutritional Guidelines, it is not specific enough to focus on school food.

Why is that? Well, for starters school food often does not come on a plate. Tray’s remove the guesswork out of washing dishes and make it simple to place foods and then carry. The trays especially are ideal for young kids. Schools are changing and eventually we will get to a place where plates are more widely seen and used, but until that day comes we should embrace the existing circumstance.

Choosemytray.me is a response to the need to educate k-12 school students on proper nutrition. Choose 3, for Free! is the slogan we are going to lead with and the tray will be symbolic of the foods available on a normal lunch day. Through the TILT Foundation, we plan to build a website with interactive menus and the ability to create your own nutrition-filled plate which will support the initiatives of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and also the Nutrition Guidelines of the USDA. We also plan to host a design contest to interact specifically with design of the tray to create something which would be more student friendly. Activity sheets and marketing materials will also be available ondemand on our website through some of our partner companies.

If you have questions, thoughts or comments, please don’t hesitate to send them our way via email or phone (443-226-9143).

NOTE: Please take into account that this is all preliminary and strictly based on a visual shift for MyPlate. The opinions expressed in this blog post and website are that entirely of TILT and does not represent opinions of our clients or of the US Government.

Our Halloween Lunner is currently lacking photography to tell the story, but we will get them up shortly.

Set on the fabulous rooftop of our good friend and supporter Monica Björklund in West London, we had a great Sunday afternoon meal. We call this Lunner which is the time between Lunch and Dinner. In the States, depending on what we ate, we would still call this Brunch, but in the UK we had to come up with another word that would be appreciated by the patrons of the event.

Themed pumpkin style, we would call this a super sustainable meal – since some of the dishes played off the same ingredients and we removed waste from the pumpkin and made it into soup! We had a delicious pumpkin soup made from the inside of the pumpkins we carved and tiny orange pancakes made from a portion of the juice from baking the pumpkins.

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ON THE MENU (all recipes are always available, so send an email if you want one!)

We always try to incorporate a diverse menu of offerings and it is typically vegetarian at least since the majority of our friends & family try to eat a relatively healthy and animal-free diet.

• Apps – Fresh Salsa and Hummus with Crudites & Corn Chips: 1/2 R, V, GF, DF, WF, SF
• Main – Pumpkin & Root Veggie Soup (with Toasted Pumpkin Seeds and Kale Chips on Top): V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF
• Main – Baby Orange Pancakes: R, V, GF, LDF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Main – Fresh Apple Salad with a Balsamic Dressing: R, V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Main – Freshly Baked Rosemary, Olive, Sun Dried Tomatoes and Feta Whole Wheat Bread: VEG, SF, CF, SGF
• Drinks – Green Tea Sparkling Tea: V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Drinks – Virgin Mulled Apple Cider: V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Dessert – Apple Cobbler: VEG, GF, LDF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• After Dessert Drink – Local English Rose: V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF

Key – R: Raw, V: Vegan (overrides VEG), VEG: Vegetarian, GF: Gluten Free, DF: Dairy Free, LDF: Lactose Dairy Free (only cheese, milk, butter products), WF: Wheat Free, SF: Soya Free, SGF: Sugar Free, CF: Corn Free

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The TILT group of friends in London is strong and it was hard to keep this to a small group (knowing that not everyone could fit on the roof!). Oddly enough, we just had two English folk join us. We represented the world – America (of course), India, Denmark, Sweden, Egypt, Russia and Israel.

We had a great time snacking and talking and then moved in for dinner and pumpkin carving later on in the evening. There were talks of yoga and definitely some acupressure was involved at one point.

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EPILEPSY AT FRIENDS & FAMILY

One of our good friends who came to visit had a minor seizure right after dinner. An avid athlete who does triathlons on a regular basis, bikes everywhere he goes, rarely drinks and eats as healthy as he can, this is a recent issue that he had been having. Just 6 weeks strong, this was the 4th episode and it was a minor one at that. He came to us not feeling very well to start and it turns out dinner might have been something to put him over the edge and trigger an episode.

After doing a few hours of research into this, we had to admit we were really disappointed with the information found online in terms of how diet and exercise could help. It looks like the less you do the better… so we are going to do a little trial on our own. Here is the recommended diet called Ketogenic which I completely disagree with, although there were positive results with Epileptic seizures, it looks like the repercussions were not any better.

This was interesting… perhaps he could be eating something causing the seizures? Maybe a food allergy?  The first step is going to be testing. What is interesting is it happened right after we gave him soup and because  sodium intake was one of the named catalysts. In our soup while we used an organic Bouillon, it is obviously high in sodium, even though its the good kind. We are going to also monitor his wheat, dairy, corn and soy intake. Those are four main causes of triggers and on Sunday we thought back to what he had eaten and it was a ton of wheat (in the bread), corn chips and then the soup which was probably very dehydrating.

This is another interesting article about coeliac and epilepsy. (The researcher is a veterinarian, but she does research on kids).

For reference, if you have a friend who goes through this in front of you, there are ways that you can help… with a little prep work. WATCH THIS

Stay tuned on this…

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Brunch on the Farm has to be one of the better Friends & Family brunches we have had. Over the years, we try to do these monthly brunches to get to be with our friends around food. Typically there is a big table and a warm, inviting experience around it. 1 time a year we invite everyone, but typically we keep it a small and intimate affair. Our friends Holly & Jason and their little girl Magnolia (Maggie) had the suggestion to come the night before, so we got a chance to really catch up, hang out in the hot tub and grace ourselves under the magic of the October sky. That got Elaine and one of our other friends Geoff, and previous clients from Geoff Stack Coordination, interested in coming up… they were the only ambitious campers in the bunch!

On the Menu…

• Fresh Cut Organic Fruit
• Green Salad
• Sliced Rosemary Potatoes
• Gluten Free Organic Waffles
• Lactose Dairy and Gluten/Wheat Free Veggie Free Range and Organic Egg Pie
• Orange Juice and Sparkling Water
• Tea

Stay tuned for next Sundays Brunch in London!

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THEN WE WORKED IT OFF WITH A HIKE….

Pole Steeple at Laural Lake in the Michaux Forest of Central Pennsylvania is a brilliant 1 mile round trip  – TOTALLY VERTICAL –  hike. There is a nice rock climbing section and it runs into the historic Appalachian Trail. Holly and Jason definitely got a better workout in than the rest of us, carrying Ms. Maggie!

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AND HAULING WOOD!

Then in the afternoon, my dear friend Mercedes came up and we had lovely leftovers and spent the afternoon hauling and moving wood… so there was the total body experience. After all that food it was needed!

The first Insight NACS “innovation day” was on Monday 19th September and was hosted by yours truly. We didn’t have as much time as we had hoped for or the right format in the space, but we had a good time talking about products! Above you can see our defined equation for new product development. We feel like this is the most appropriate arrangement for how you should develop new products. Some ideas will stick, some won’t and with about a 30% long-term success rate of products that come out to market, you will see that developing products is an evolutionary experience…. ongoing.

While many of the products that we draw from are in the higher price bracket, we look to this category as some of the best innovators and then we find ways to reverse engineer the ideas out to be more efficient and ultimately more cost effective. So, have a look below at some of our favorites!

We followed up with a talk on Thursday on Generation Snack all about the things happening in the industry around snackfood.

Download the presentation… Click here.

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Here is the original write up:

We will look at the success of the UK multiple grocers from a product development perspective. The day will review tangible products and discuss how a successful brand works with examples and open discussion.

How have retailers like Marks & Spencer levered their dedicated supply chain and own brand production, research and innovation capabilities to establish clear blue water between themselves and the competition? We will see for ourselves – our first hosted visit on Monday will be to a dedicated M&S “Food to Go” production facility located in Northampton where we will have a chance to see how a product is developed and manufactured. Delegates will have time to ask questions and to see everything in motion. Then on the coach back, we will begin talking about innovation, pipeline and opportunity, discussing trends and upcoming channels for development and distribution; what’s hot, what’s coming and how you can affect your market with the right product?

Attendees will discuss products and think about how they work. Then we will close the day with several short videos on brands and trends. Partner companies involved in development include Sourced Market and M&S.

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How we would do it next time?

Getting everyone around a round table would be key. There was just not enough time or space to really make the experience full. We would break everyone into groups of 6 and give products in various stages of production so you could pull apart. Then we would practice our innovation THINK TANK workshop and get everyone inventing and drawing. Next time….

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CONTINUE READING

In August we put together some ideas for a cafe space in Atlanta Airport with a bid alongside PG Concessions. The current space is a Simply Books Store and a Starbucks. We proposed changing the space into a Destination Green Cafe featuring Mighty Leaf Tea and a TILT Pack food line. Our main focus was to provide customers with a fresh, healthy, functional, sustainable and allergen sensitive experience.

We took the current Destination Green logo and created packaging concepts and systems to function within the brand in order to see how the DG Cafe would come to life.

Andrew and I attended a very interesting seminar led by NESTA this week on how technology can work to help create sustainability in food and food production. Google reckons that for every challenge we face in our world technology can be used in some way to overcome it. There was a consensus amongst the panel and those who attended that we need to reconnect people with food.

One way Tilt is doing this is our Fresh Food Campaign and we have many other initiatives that we are working on.

There was a short intro by Hugh Knowles from Forum for The Future . They are a non profit group looking to transform food, energy and finance.
Their main goals are to

1. Re balance equity and power in the world
2. Work on getting sustainable food sources
3. Reconnect people with food
4. Build resilience back into the food system so it can cope with climate change and droughts

He gave some impressive stats

• 30% of greenhouse gases are produced by agriculture which is more than transport
• 1 billion people in the world are under nourished
• 1 billion people in the world are over weight or obese

Jon Alexander was the first speaker from the National Trust Project My Farm. This is a project where 10,000 people via the web get to vote on how a real life farm is run. All major decisions are voted for by the ‘farmers’ on the web. A real life farmville if you like! He sees food and the issue of sustainability as a human issue which we can use technology to help solve. He also believes in reconnecting people with food and the popularity of this project shows people are interested and there is a desire to know more about the food we eat. Just need to give people the opportunities, tools and in some cases the technology to connect with whats on their plate.
Its too late to influence people’s buying choices in the supermarket as they are disconnected by then. Only 32% of people actually enjoy food shopping.
A poll was taken of British mothers and only 8% of them felt confident to be able to teach their children where food comes from. (Arthur Potts Dawson stated that with the advent of the industrial revolution people lost that knowledge from passing down to generation to generation food information and how to grow things. After all who out of us can say when Asparagus is in season, how to grow certain types of vegetables.?? This was something once everyone in Britain knew as they grew their own food. We now rely totally on some else to grow all our food for us. Schools also need to start educating children about food). Jon would eventually like farms to be run like this all over the country

Next on the bill was Louise Campbell from Food Nation. She has created an app to connect people to local suppliers and producers via geo mapping. This will be released in Sept 2011. You will be able to see where local food can be bought where it was produced and call the producer directly. She would like us to reconnect with suppliers and cut out the supermarkets so to increase demand from local farmers and therefore making food costs go down instead of farmers having to sell food to supermarkets at a loss.

Mobile is now the biggest single global distribution channel. In 2009 there were 4 billion mobile subscribers by 2013 there are expected to be 5.5 billion.
However the government is not helping DEFRA will not release details of farms in the UK. Therefore she needs help in connecting with farmers and farm around the country. She believes technology can help sustainability issues if the revelvent data is released by governments so that people can create applications to solve the problems facing the food system. She also needs food product data. (She would love the TPS to help with this)
She is eventually looking at QR codes on posters on tubes etc where you can order your veg boxes via smart phones.

Finally came Arthur Potts Dawson. He believes in order to help the issue of sustainability in the cities you need to look at old technology first and understand this in order to make things better. So you need to understand how to farm the soil, dig out the crops quickly and get it to the shelves or plates efficiently and effectively. Also be able to pay the farmer a fair price and the consumer buy at a good price.
He has also utiltised new tech in his businesses dehydrators, advancements in food delivery, online communities and social media. Old and new tech need to be combined to give the best of both worlds and social technology is a vital cog in this wheel.

Disruptive Technology or projects such as the TPS are what the big companies are interested in and what they are looking for in terms of investment.
Think Glocal (Global and Local) We need to insure that other countries also have sustainable food systems so when we buy from them we don’t cause problems for them.

However in order to really create change we need to think on a mass scale and affect the mass market across social boundaries. Technology can help us to do this and involve the whole community.

Hope this gave us all some food for thought