Inspired by late wife, ‘tea sculptor’ and award-winning gardener comes to Hill Festival Sunday
By Jennifer Katz

Sternfels’ garden in his Mt. Airy home (seen above) won first place in the 2008 Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s 2008 large flower garden contest. This summer he will teach a course at Mt. Airy Learning Tree on creating a garden on a budget.

Eric Sternfels’ transformation from architect to artist and award-winning gardener has been a long and winding road. On Sunday, May 3, Sternfels will bring his passions to the Garden Festival in Chestnut Hill. On behalf of Friends of Ned Wolf Park, Sternfels is manning a booth at the festival to let people know that the small neighborhood park at Ellet and McCallum Streets is holding its third annual plant sale on May 16. He will also showcase his tea themed lighting fixtures, which are the culmination of a lifelong journey toward artistry that began with a love of form and structure that originally brought him to this area as an architecture graduate student.

Sternfels, 49, of West Mt. Airy, studied studio art as an undergrad at SUNY Binghamton in his home state of New York before he moved to Philadelphia to get his masters in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation he worked as an architect for six years, but in 1991, disillusioned with his chosen field and unsure of his next career step, Sternfels returned to Long Island to care for his ailing mother. Over the next four years, he was at his mother’s side surrounded by childhood memories.

Marie Kraft, lifelong resident of the Chestnut Hill area, demonstrates the many uses of her invention, the TofuXpress, which took five years to get to the marketplace. (Photo by Erin Vertreace)

Some folks would have just quit tofu.“It tastes horrible. It’s runny. I can’t deal with this.” That was Marie Kraft’s first impression of soybean curd, heralded as a high-protein, high-calcium food at a bargain-basement price. But it wouldn’t be her last.

Ultimately, “the cheese of Asia” would not only turn Kraft into a better eater; it would make her unique. Today, the Ambler woman (who declined to give her age) who was born at Chestnut Hill Hospital, raised in Broad Axe and graduated from Wissahickon High School is the inventor of the TofuXpress. The tool for squeezing water from tofu was introduced to the market on Black Friday last November.

Kraft designed the contraption after an Internet search failed to turn up a convenient way to get the water out of tofu, a necessary step in improving its texture and taste. “They’d tell you to put it between two plates,” she said, “and press gently.” A run through the Web chatter finds tofu devotees wrapping it in a lot of paper towels and then putting something heavy on top of it, even a cast-iron skillet, to squeeze the water out.

‘Super Supper’ a tasty treat in church Hill pastor spreading the gospel of vegetarianism
by Barbara Sherf

Chestnut Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church pastor Tara VinCross and her husband, Caleb, will celebrate their one-year anniversary at the church May 3, 5 p.m., with a “Smart Supper” vegetarian dinner, followed by a lecture titled “Eat, Move, Live: What our Furry Friends Teach Us About Diet, Exercise and Life.” To register, e-mail SmartSupper@chestnuthillsda.org or call 215-247-7022.

In May, Tara VinCross, senior pastor of the Chestnut Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church, and her husband, Caleb VinCross, the congregation’s unofficial associate pastor and techno-wizard, will celebrate their one-year anniversary at the church with a second “Smart Supper” dinner. 

The initial vegetarian dinner concept, held in January, came out of an informal brainstorming session The VinCrosses had with congregants Jennifer Schwirzer and her husband, Mike. Jennifer ran the Expressly Vegetarian Café in the lower level of the church for three years. She oversaw the menu and cooking and gave a talk titled “People Change…This is How.”

The next Smart Supper is Sunday, May 3, 5 p.m., in the church located at 8700 Germantown Ave. (at Rex Avenue). The topic will be “Eat, Move, Live: What Our Furry Friends Teach Us About Diet, Exercise and Life.”

“Everyone who came to the first dinner said they’d bring two or three people back next time, so we are hopeful of having a full house for the second dinner,” said pastor VinCross, who noted that dinner was “more of a friend-raiser and a way to connect to the community.

“We believe that what you eat affects how you think and how you relate to God and others around you. Everything is connected,” said the 29-year-old pastor.

Table 31 co-owner/chef Chris Scarduzio formerly cooked at Emilio’s in Overbrook, La Veranda at Penn’s Landing and Monte Carlo Living Room at 2nd and South Streets.

For years I wondered how it was possible for so many uber-expensive bellwether steakhouses — Palm, Prime Rib, Barclay Prime, Capital Grille, Morton’s and Davio’s, to name just a few — to do enough business to stay alive. Then came the huge Brazilian steakhouses, Fogo de Chao and Chima, which keep bringing out unlimited amounts of steak on skewers to your table until you collapse and have your heart shocked back to life in a hospital emergency room.

Then, last year came a whole new armada of steakhouses, despite the fact that many recession-battered families can barely afford a package of Lean Cuisine, even with a dollar-off coupon. (Of course, these new beef-o-restaurants were years in the planning, and their owners could not possibly have anticipated the nationwide economic meltdown.)

The first in last year’s new wave of steakhouses was Table 31 (they called it a “steakhouse bistro” at the time), owned by Le Bec Fin legend Georges Perrier and owner/chef Chris Scarduzio, formerly of Emilio’s in Overbrook, La Veranda at Penn’s Landing and Monte Carlo Living Room at 2nd and South Streets.