Betty's Beef Kabobs
When Judy Wicks first started the White Dog Cafe, she wanted to serve the foods she relished as a child. Her mother, Betty Wicks, a great cook and renowned hostess, gave her this old family recipe for...
cookshelf
Judy Wicks, Founder, White Dog Café
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN COOKING OVER A FIRE was the only kind of cooking Judy Wicks would do. “I thought indoor cooking was for sissies—the type who got an A in home ec,” she says.
She learned primal food preparation from her mother, Betty, who pulled off meals for 13 during the Canadian backcountry camping trips of Wicks’s youth. “She told me I’d have to learn to cook indoors when I had a family,” Wicks says.
Avoiding time in the kitchen was part of her motivation for getting into the restaurant business.
In 1983, when her kids were 2 and 4 years old, Wicks opened the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia. Motivated by flavor and freshness, Wicks and her first head chef, Aliza Green, began sourcing from local farms. Over the years, the restaurant became known for engaging community events, sustainable practices, and helping to build Philly’s local food movement. Instead of turning the farm-to-table concept into a market niche, Wicks shared her network of area growers with her competitors and began her life’s work of building local economies centered on reciprocity.
It’s a battle she’s been fighting ever since, increasingly so since selling the White Dog to new owners in 2009. Organizations founded by Wicks include Fair Food; the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia; and her current project, All Together Now Pennsylvania (ATN), focused on uniting urban and rural communities to build self-reliant regional economies. “The challenge of climate change can best be addressed by creating a localized, carbon-reduced economy,” Wicks says.
Wicks, now 75, laughs at the idea of retirement; we’re facing too many pressing problems. She does manage to spend more time at her cabin in the Poconos— the “Wicky Wacky Woods,” as she calls it—cooking at her firepit on late summer nights. For her mom’s beef kabob recipe, published in the White Dog Cafe Cookbook by Judy Wicks and Kevin Von Klause (Running Press, 1998), Wicks recommends using beef from Primal Supply Meats—always local and pasture-raised.
RELATED RECIPE:
Communities Near You
Related Stories & Recipes