Prepared with love, prepared for life

As you look around, you see do-gooders everywhere. But then you meet someone like Liesel Flashenberg, founding executive chef and chief executive officer of a community food-related group, Through The Kitchen Door, which has gained not only nationwide recognition, but also has helped hundreds of people achieve a career by walking through the kitchen door.
 

Flashenberg exemplifies what doing good for others can mean: teaching life skills for survival.

A Detroit native, Flashenberg says her passion for food comes naturally.

“All you have to say is ‘Jewish’ and ‘Hungarian’,” she said, “and you know that good cooking goes to my soul’s roots. … My Hungarian grandmother was an amazing cook and a fine baker with a good palate. And my mother, besides having that tradition since she was a little girl, was interested in everything and had a sense of adventure.”

Her mother’s curiosity translated into discovering every facet of the food world, a particular benefit for those hard times when food budgets were small.

“We didn’t have the money to go to a fancy grocery store to buy imported items,” Flashenberg said of her childhood. “So my mother found every ethnic market and every wholesale food purveyor and every farmers market, because these were the least expensive ways to food shop. … She took us kids along, and we thought this was a great adventure.”

Fast-forward several decades, and you find Flashenberg has translated this particular culinary heritage — the lessons learned about bargain food shopping, her innate sense of cooking adventure and her natural empathy for helping others — into Through The Kitchen Door. A nonprofit training and advocacy organization that began when she and her family lived in Costa Rica for 10 years, it’s based on the premise that low-income women and disadvantaged youth can learn life skills and gain entry into a meaningful career by getting a handle on basic cooking skills — and then go on to get jobs in the restaurant and food service industry.

“In Costa Rica, we put our politics to work and hired women who had not received professional training and trained them from the ground up to run a business, from catering to a gourmet food center, a cooking school and a market for local/artisanal food products,” she said. “I wanted to give them something for their lives, homes, selves and ways to think about food that would make them want to know more.”

That Flashenberg revived Through The Kitchen Door back in the States owes much to a chance conversation with her mother in a store checkout line.

“We had just done one program,” she said, “and I was talking in line when someone said, ‘I work with a group in Maryland that works with families of at-risk children,’ ” she said. Flashenberg discussed her fledgling group and volunteered her services.

That was back in 2003, and what started out as a mom-and-pop enterprise — Flashenberg and her husband often did the shopping and transport — has emerged as a vibrant nonprofit, with a training program and a catering service that started in borrowed church and school kitchens all over the city. A year and half ago, with the help of a prominent local educator, it now has permanent quarters at St. Paul’s Center in upper Northwest. From there, the organization runs its training programs and its increasingly busy catering business, one that gives its trainees real hands-on polish for their future kitchen careers.

“Catering varies from week to week, but on average we do events three to four times a week,” she said. Although Through The Kitchen Door’s catering business does not have a typical menu, Flashenberg said the cooking was all about flavor.

“We make homemade granola and muffins for breakfast,” she said, “but we’ve done elegant sit-down dinners with a five-course menu.”

Although Flashenberg spends little time these days doing the actual cooking — in the beginning, she did all the training and food prep — she said the basic recipes were hers and she still held the title of president and founding executive chef.

And, she said, her real satisfaction comes from having trained about 2,500 people through her direct programs, and many thousands more through participation in health fairs and cooking demonstrations.

Q&A with chef Liesel Flashenberg
What is your comfort food?

When I need comfort food, I usually crave Chinese — a deeply flavored shrimp dumpling soup with noodles and seafood and vegetables; lobster, Cantonese style or shrimp in lobster sauce; and eggplant in XO sauce. Also, I really do always keep homemade chicken soup in the freezer. It cures blues and colds, especially filled with very thin egg noodles, a la my grandmother.

Where is your favorite place in the world?

La Frateria di Padre Eligio, a project of Mondo X in Cetona, Italy, has to be at the top of my list of favorite places. Now a small hotel and restaurant, it was only a restaurant when I visited 24 years ago. A model of sustainable social service combined with beauty, taste and elegance, it was an inspiration for the development many years later of Through The Kitchen Door.

What is your luckiest moment?

Not immediately saying no — my first reaction — when my husband, who was then a very close and completely platonic friend, asked me to marry him.

Where/which is your favorite restaurant?

See La Frateria, but also the late, great Joe’s, a restaurant that specialized in mushrooms, in Reading, Pa. The stuffed morels and creamy wild mushroom soup were heaven. Hollywood East Cafe in Wheaton and Restaurant Eve in Alexandria.

What’s in your fridge?

Lots of seasonal farm market fruit and vegetables, an assortment of cheese, a couple of grilled loin lamb chops and some roasted purple cauliflower from last night’s dinner; an ersatz baba ganoush I made with roasted eggplant, peppers, garlic, olives, anchovies, capers, parsley and smoked paprika to use up some leftovers; assorted condiments and wine, beer, Vintage seltzer water, Diet Barq’s root beer, Coke Zero, orange juice. … Oh, yes. Smoked scallops, smoked salmon and some assorted salami and sausages. Too much … but we do not go out a lot and often entertain. Also, I forgot to mention one thing always in my refrigerator — every refrigerator I have ever had anywhere in the last 40 years — a good sparkling wine (champagne, Cava, brut rose), often more than one kind.

From the chef’s kitchen
Fresh Cranberry Sauce with Port Wine

1 (12-oz.) package fresh cranberries

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup honey

1 cup port wine

1 cinnamon stick, about 3 inches long

Grated rind (orange part only) and juice from 2 oranges

Place all ingredients in a heavy pot and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Reduce the heat to medium-low and let cranberries simmer until all the berries have popped, about 15 minutes.

The sauce is ready at this point, but it will be somewhat runny. You can cook it down, simmering gently until thickened, about 15 to 20 minutes more. This longer, gentle cooking also intensifies the flavors. Add more sugar if desired. (Sometimes I use a quarter-cup of brown sugar, which gives a caramel-ish complexity to the sauce.)

When the sauce is completely cool, store in well-sealed glass jars in the refrigerator. Sauce keeps for several weeks and is better after several days of storage.