Roof Food Garden at Sixpoint Craft Ales Brewery in New York

Container for gardening on the roof, an antique enameled cast-iron bathtub. Photo by Cathy Erway.

Cathy grows lunch from the roof

By Cathy Erway
Lunch at Six Point

Excerpt:

Hi, I’m Cathy. I wrote the blog Not Eating Out in New York for four years. Two of them were spent not eating out as a strict rule within the city where I live in. I wrote a memoir about those experiences, called The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, and host a weekly podcast called Let’s Eat In on Heritage Radio Network. I still enjoy cooking more than eating out, and have gone on to try growing my own food, too.

These are the stories, the characters, and the food of my life now, making lunch at Sixpoint Craft Ales. I cook healthy, family-style meals for the staff that brews the beer here, and friends. We grow a lot of it on the roof — vegetables, fruits, herbs and chickens who lay eggs. For a small company, it provides enough to make some kind of lunch throughout the harvest months, and it’s a fun challenge figuring out what that is.

See Cathy and her roof garden in this video.

I think “lunch” could be more prioritized in our working class culture, and I’m interested in the efficiency and nurturing power of the communal meal. Throughout the recipes on this blog, I’ll be trying to make the most nutritious, accessible and likeable dishes that folks can really fuel up with for a long afternoon of work. The working man’s lunch, revisited. They often work well for large groups, but can be adapted for single servings. I’ll try to explore foods like this from all sorts of cuisines and time periods, which have perfected the art of “lunching.” In addition to homegrown produce, these may involve other artifacts from the brewery, like beer and spent grains. And just like all the recipes on Not Eating Out in New York, practicality and frugality is key.

Link to Cathy’s wonderful Lunch at Six Point website here.