Zach Gorman and Kevin Doubleday are our defending champions from Eclipse Restaurant as they won the best appetizer, best entree and over all champion awards in 2011. Even though Kevin is no longer working at Eclipse we are hopeful that the team will reunite to defend their title. Please go to our post on this blog which shows a wonderful video about Eclipse winning last year’s event by film maker Molly Koch.

Alex Washut and Chris Ware have revamped Jake’s Restaurant with bright food that is fresh, fun and fabulous. These guys put the local in local food and local economy as they both are home spun boys who grew up together here in Northampton and have been best buds since they started kindergarten up at Ryan Road School. They are using locally produced foods in their delightful cuisine and are hoping to grow more relationships with local farmers and wild food gatherers as they just opened this past winter.

Daniel and Elizabeth Martinez from Bistro Les Gras, the French gourmet restaurant on West Street in Northampton across from Forbes Library, has at its core philosophy the tenets of 12 Mile Meal’s vision and purpose. This husband and wife team has been serving wonderful locally produced French fine dining with much of their cuisine coming from within a 12 mile radius, keeping dollars in the local economy. And, those foods that are coming in from longer distances aren’t far beyond as you would be hard pressed to find an ingredient produced more than 100 miles from their West Street kitchen. They have also recently opened a lovely sandwich shop on Pleasant street in Northampton called Grub to glowing reviews.

Obviously we have an exciting match-up this year that will match the talent and power of our first 12 Mile Meal Chef Battle at Jazz Fest 2011 when Eclipse, Fitzwilly’s and Spoleto Restaurants went head to head in a great display of skill. We thank our last year’s contestants for their participation and sponsorship. We look forward to their continued support and to the Chef Battle this September 15th at Jazz Fest between Eclipse, Jake’s and Bistro Les Gras. Mark your calendars and we will see you there.

Starting in just a few short weeks, Jake’s will be adding a dinner menu on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from 6 – 10pm to their already busy schedule of breakfast, lunch and weekend late night menus.

With a concise offering of local foods prepared by local boyhood friends, chefs Alex and Chris, the new dinner menu will change often and reflect the growing seasons as they unfold. We who are Jake’s fans already for breakfast, lunch and late night are very excited to expand our dining experience into the evening hours.

With their recent addition of beer and wine offerings, dinner at Jake’s will still be informal but will add another important layer to the cuisine landscape that will bring more dining options at a reasonable price range to our fine city.

We here at 12 Mile Meal would like anyone who has not found the joy that is the new Jake’s to give it a try in the very near future and to those of us who know the delicious and pleasant dining experience we’ve come to expect at Jake’s, we look forward to the new dabbling in dinner on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 6 – 10pm.

You can love yourself first by eating healthy, locally  grown foods that you make at home or go out to enjoy. You can love your community by shopping locally  at locally owned stores and restaurants that will keep  the love  and the dollars flowing in our vibrant local economy.

You can love the beauty of your surroundings and insist on vital and artful architecture, free and beautiful public spaces and robust cultural arts events. You can love the  health of your local environment by supporting local agriculture  while maintaining wild public lands and their essential ecosystems.

Love is in the air this spring and we here at 12 Mile Meal want you all to know how much we love you and your commitment to local farms , local food and the local economy. Good luck with your gardening projects and with your farm shares this growing season. And remember to build your next 12 Mile Meal and spread the love.  It’s for you to do.

As the spring season heats up we can see the landscape changing with flowers poking up in our flower beds. We can see it too with events like the St. Patrick’s Day Road Race in Holyoke, the Smith College Bulb Show at the Lyman Green House and in the eyes of friends and neighbors enjoying the startlingly balmy weather for this time of year.

And it is this startling warmth that concerns thinking people who know that it is a good strong winter, with cold temperatures and blankets of snow that lead to a healthy crop growing season at this latitude. It is that very cold air that many of us loath in the darkness of winter that will deliver to our region the bounty of bumper crops that were not ravaged by insects that had been killed off by the cold of a proper winter. But a proper winter we did not have and our growing season may be deeply effected by our enjoyable but unusually warm winter.

It is this duality that concerns me about our American culture today. We revel in the glory of a perfect spring day and ignore the fact that it is happening in winter. We hear some people bragging about having the best health care system in the world but overlooking the fact that the United States leads the industrialized world in the production of toxic, hazardous and radio active wastes, which in turn gives our country some of the highest rates of cancer and disease.

It is the same kind of disconnect that happens every time there is a new fundraiser for cancer causes, which are admirable in their efforts to attend to the afflicted who are suffering and in need of treatments but invariably neglect to mention the environmental crisis in connection to cancer.

The recent one year anniversary of the Fukeshima Nuclear Disaster following the tsunami in Japan last March came and went with hardly a second thought to what it would mean for us here in the Connecticut Valley if our own Vermont Yankee Power Plant, identical to the construction of the failed plant in Japan, melted down.

What kind of 12 Mile Meal would you want to eat with foods produced within 12, 50 or even 100 miles of the destroyed Fukeshima Diaichi Power Plant? What kind of chance is there in America for finding a cure for cancer when the money raised goes to research treatments and pharmaceutical therapies? How can a cure for cancer be a priority when so much money is being made to treat it in a capitalist, health insurance paradigm? And how are we going to grow foods in an environment crippled by climate change that is blazing a new weather pattern that may or may not sustain the human population in the future?

It’s time to realize that there are not enough miles in a road race for all of us to run away from danger, that there are not enough flowers in a green house to match the beauty and bounty of nature and that there is a real connection between cancer rates and the levels of toxic, hazardous and radio active wastes in the air, water and ground.

We need to come to terms with the fact that our lifestyles and policies here in America are at the core of what is causing the environmental crisis we are presently in and the suffering that is pending world wide if we as a democratic country deny the effects of our over blown consumerism and short term economic interests. It’s time to build your next 12 Mile Meal with a keen eye toward the future, yours and those futures of the generations to come. Make the connection between your health and a vital environment. It’s for all of us to do.