No mud for us!

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Happy New Year!

New Year’s Day has always been the same at my house, from the time I was born until now.  Well, in terms of food, anyway.  Our family tradition revolves around pork, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes.  My grandmother once told me that pork is eaten so you don’t wallow in the mud like a pig in the coming year (I’ve also heard that the tradition has something to do with the belief that pigs root backwards) and the kraut has something to do with money luck.  The potatoes, well…they just taste good with the pork and kraut.

I grew up in upstate Pennsylvania, but the main tradition in the Philadelphia area seems to be eating either lentils or black-eyed peas with some sort of greens.  The lentils, peas, and greens all represent money.  Whatever the case, it’s no coincidence that typical New Years Day traditions involve food that can easily be harvested locally right now - it only makes sense that traditions passed down generation to generation would have roots during a time when the only food you could get was what was seasonal.  I’ve never heard of a New Years Day tradition that involved strawberries and asparagus.

Our New Years Day traditional food is, unsurprisingly, all locally grown.  Our potatoes are from Landisdale Farm Fresh, mashed with some local milk and butter.  The pork roast is from Country Time Farm (it was fantastic!) that we roasted overnight in a crockpot.  And the sauerkraut is the fantastic kraut that I made this Summer from the cabbage in my CSA share.  My husband picked up rolls from Le Bus to serve with it.

We’d love to hear about your own family food traditions on New Years Day!

Tunis wool roving

Monday, December 31, 2007

In addition to cooking, my primary leisure activities are knitting and spinning yarn, so, when I heard a few weeks ago that Farm to City had started listing Tunis wool roving from a local farm, I was quite curious.  Farm to City contacted me, and we arranged for them to deliver a sample for me to try.  It took me a couple of weeks to get to it, what with the holidays and all, but I sat down at my spinning wheel this weekend to play with local wool.  First of all, it’s very soft.  It’s wool from the first shearing of these lambs, and the roving is nowhere near as compacted as most commercial rovings.  It does contain more vegetable matter than I’m used to seeing, but it’s astonishingly soft for bits of grass.  Upon spinning it, I noticed that it’s a bit neppy (there are shorter fibers left in that will tend to form round inclusions in the yarn), but it would probably be great for felting with and was a good reminder to try to make the yarn fluffier.  It’s not ideal for my preferred spinning (tightly spun laceweight), but it’s great to see more local fibers available, and it is quite soft.

The roving is from Lindenhof Farm, in Kirkwood, PA, processed at Ohio Valley Natural Fibers, and it’s available in 8-oz batches.

Summer Meets Winter

What better way to usher in 2008 than with a memory of the sweetest fruit of 2007? I broke into my frozen stash of plump blackberries from our garden to make one of my favorite winter dishes: bread pudding.  I’ve used the basic recipe for sweet and savory bread puddings of all kinds: winter squash, carmelized onion, cranberry, blueberry and, now, blackberry. This last variation is sure to be a favorite and, while so simple to make, seems to be worthy of using the precious summer berries from the freezer.

Blackberry Bread Pudding

1 loaf of challah bread cut into chunks
1 1/2 c. (or more!) of blackberries
6 eggs
1/2 c. sugar
3 c. milk
1/4 c. melted butter
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
freshly ground nutmeg

Put half of bread into greased 13x9 baking dish.  Layer berries on top and cover with remaining bread.

In large bowl, whisk eggs with sugar. Gradually whisk in milk, butter and spices. Pour over bread and push down gently. Cover and refrigerate. Overnight is best but an hour will work.

Preheat oven to 350.  Remove covering and bake pudding for 1 hour until puffed and golden.

Happy New Year!

Good food tastes good

This is going to sound weird coming from someone who is constantly talking about food, but I don’t think about what eat that much.  I mean, yes, I’m fixated on food, but I don’t think about the nutritional benefits other than very general things like “an apple is good for you” or “a Twinkie is bad for you”.  I’m more focused on making sure food tastes good.  I’m more than willing to eat full fat milk, butter, eggs, etc….as long as it’s good quality food that tastes good.

Carol Hart, Ph.D. - a local writer from Chester County - recently wrote a book advocating that premise.  Good Food Tastes Good takes the attitude that being too focused on the nutritional content of food can rob you of the joy of eating…and it can also lead you to make some bad food choices.  Is better living through science - food enhanced with nutraceuticals and genetically modified foods - really better living?  Or is it really just making us second guess ourselves when it comes to making the right food decisions?  Since I’m focused on eating locally grown food for various reasons, I read this book as an argument to eat locally grown foods, even though Dr. Hart does mention that she doesn’t find eating locally necessarily a better option if the available produce is substandard (an issue I’ve never really run into).

When I first started reading Dr. Hart’s book, I felt it was an amalgam of information otherwise available in What To Eat by Marion Nestle and various other food books I’ve been reading over the last year.  And the idea of listening to your own common sense and allowing yourself to enjoy good quality, good tasting food seems to be a popular topic lately - even Michael Pollan’s upcoming book, In Defense of Food seems to take on the topic.

Of course, after I got past the first chapter I ended up really liking the book.  Dr. Hart gives a really good breakdown of various animals’ lives on corporate farms (which, to me, is the best argument for buying local - knowing who you’re buying your meat from and how the animals are raised is incredibly important to me), and talks about the different ways in which industry lobby groups have an impact on what the government and what the studies say is healthy for you.  The arbitrary egg and milk recommendations, for instance.  But what I liked best about Good Food Tastes Good are the little bits of trivia that I didn’t know.  A random sampling:

1. The typical food product (from a factory farm) is handled 33 times before you buy it at the grocery store.
2. The pound of ground beef you find in a grocery store typically contains beef parts from about 1,000 cows.
3. The most common commercially grown broccoli variety is 28% less nutritious than it was in the 1950s.  This is as a result of tinkering to make the broccoli grow faster and higher yielding.
4. Chick peas contain tiny quantities of nerve toxins called lathyrogens that can cause partial paralysis if you eat a ton of chick peas over a long period of time.

Even thought Dr. Hart doesn’t particularly advocate for locally grown food (she talks about it being a social cause that doesn’t “stir many appetities”...and she talks about how disappointed she’s been by locally made cheese), she sort of does.  To combat the loss of quality in vegetables that have to be trucked in and then dispersed to grocery stores at a central location and then sit on the shelf, Dr. Hart does admit that “buying local produce brings a realization of just how much quality and taste have been sacrificed to breed varieties hardy enough to withstand machine harvesting and packing and long-distance shipping.”  But she does warn that buying produce at a ‘farmer’s market’ doesn’t necessarily mean that the person you’re buying from grew it.  Obviously, if you’ve been down to the Italian Market, much of the produce available is not even remotely locally grown.  The real issue at hand, though, for Dr. Hart seems to be this: it doesn’t matter if lettuce is organic, locally grown, or commercially grown - eat the lettuce that looks the best.  Of course, chances are that the locally grown lettuce is going to look the best since it hasn’t been traveling.

This is where being a smart consumer comes in.  Shopping at places where you know the farmers or know exactly where the produce is coming from, asking questions, and just generally being more educated about food and how it’s grown makes a big difference in getting the best quality for your dollars.  Like Dr. Hart, I would rather eat something that tastes good then something the food companies say is good for me.

However, I would urge Dr. Hart to give locally made cheese another try.  The Shellbark Hollow sharp goat and Green Meadows Farm raw milk cheddar, in particular, are delicious!

Mushrooms a-gogo

Sunday, December 30, 2007

One thing that never seems to be out of season around Philadelphia is mushrooms.  Granted, if you’re foraging for mushrooms in the wild, that’s a different story.  Spring and Fall are the usual times for that (although certainly, there are Winter and Summer mushrooms).  But cultivated mushrooms can be grown both indoors and outdoors.  And sometimes even underground, in the case of Creekside Mushrooms Ltd..  Mushrooms are Pennsylvania’s largest cash crop, and a quarter of all the mushrooms grown in the U.S. come from the Kennett Square area.

The chances are good that if you go into any grocery store, the mushrooms you find there will have been grown locally.  They won’t be organic, however.  Considering how easily mushrooms absorb water, it might be worth it to go out of your way to find organically grown mushrooms.  There are several local farms who use sustainable farming methods and raise mushrooms organically.  The two that I normally run into are Mother Earth Organic Mushrooms and Oley Valley Mushrooms.

Even now at the end of December, it’s not difficult to find locally grown and organic white button, cremini, yellow and gray oyster, shiitake, portobello, even trumpet mushrooms.

On a related note, I’m still trying to track down a local mycologist or mushroom-hunting tour.  The idea of foraging for mushrooms is appealing to me, but I don’t relish the idea of getting sick or dying because I misidentified a mushroom.

(Photo taken yesterday morning at the Fair Food Farmstand, Reading Terminal Market)

Grilled Ham, Cheese, and Apples

Friday, December 28, 2007

In the lovely holiday lull between Christmas and New Year’s, we’ve been looking to use our time off to tackle a few cooking-related items.  First, either eat or dispose of the leftovers from the multitude of family meals.  Second, prepare some lunches for our inevitable return to work next week.  Third, convert some of the fresh produce in our bursting refrigerator into something more immediately useful during the workweek (e.g., carmelized onions).  Finally, have some experimenting with any and all of the above.

Today’s lunch was no different - bread, apples, butter, cheese and left-over ham served with with a side of lightly dressed baby greens.  It isn’t necessary to use smoked cheddar, but the interplay of it’s smokiness, the salinity of the ham, and sweetness of the apples is really enjoyable.  Also, there is a nice blending of contrasting textures in the crunch of the toasted bread, the creaminess of the melted cheese, the chewiness of the ham, and the crunch of the apples.  It’s a simple addition or two to a classic recipe for something different.

With the exception of the ham, which was leftover from my mother’s Christmas dinner, all items were purchased from Farm to City’s Philadelphia Winter Harvest. 

Grilled Ham, Cheese, and Apples

4 slices, Metropolitan Bakery multigrain loaf, thinly sliced
3 oz., Misty Creek Dairy smoked goat cheddar, thinly sliced
1/2 apple, Kauffman’s Fruit Farm Gold Rush apples, thinly sliced
2 oz., ham, cooked (in the future, I would probably use Meadow Run Farm bacon instead, but I had the ham and needed space in the fridge)
butter, Maplehofe Dairy

Note:  The thinly slices are important for allowing a quick cooking time without burning the bread

Heat a cast-iron pan and cast-iron press (we use Lodge, but any combination of a pan and heated weight is fine - even if it is just a brick wrapped in aluminum foil).  As the pan is heating, assemble the sandwiches.  Butter the outside of each slice of bread (i.e., the surface that will come in contact with the pan or press).  Layer in the bacon, trim to fit if necessary.  Next, add the apples and then the cheese.  Finally, add the the second slice of bread.  By this point, your pan should be sufficiently heated to make the first sandwich.  Lay the sandwich in the pan, cover the press and cook for a few minutes.  Flip and cook for an additional few minutes.  Repeat for the second sandwich.

Let them eat kale

Thursday, December 27, 2007

I’ve been singing the praises of Lacinato kale this week. When I made the kale and lamb sausage on Sunday, I was so excited by its excellent, fresh taste and the fantastic texture…and I plan to use the rest of what I purchased this past weekend to make soup tonight.  It’s really in season right now, and there’s so much you can do with it.

Admittedly, I was anti-kale for a long time.  When I thought of kale, I thought of those stupid looking ornamental kale heads that local office buildings plant in the Winter to give their garden spaces a bit of color in January.  It just didn’t occur to me that kale might be good.

The CSA program I bought into this past Summer included baby kale in a few shares and I tried it.  It was good, but not something I was crazy about.  The cold weather really transforms the taste of kale, though, and right now it’s just amazing!  Better yet, kale is one of the most nutritious vegetables available - it’s high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C, lutein and zeaxanthin and reasonably rich in calcium.  It’s also an anti-inflammatory, which might be good for those of us with joint issues.  And it’s super easy to grow because it’s generally not bothered by normal cabbage family garden pests.

I’ve been seeing Lacinato kale at lots of farmer’s markets lately.  Sometimes Lacinato kale is called ‘Dinosaur kale’ or ‘Italian heirloom kale’.  In Tuscany, it’s called ‘black kale’.  It has a richer flavor and is more tender than many kale varieties.  It’s delicious!

Not surprisingly, Lacinato kale is super versatile.  You can eat it raw in a salad, and it makes excellent soups and stews.  It can be cooked simply, just sauteed with olive oil…or it can be part of a more complicated dish.  While I plan to make soup out of the kale I have at home right now, I’ll continue purchasing it while I can this Winter.  I’ve been having a hankering for handmade pasta, so I’m thinking it might be a good time to try some kale ravioli.  I haven’t made cheese lately, either, but this recipe for crostini with Lacinato kale and fromage blanc is inspiring me to make a batch!

A little poo is good for the soul

One of our readers recently requested a list of local resources by county.  The other contributors and I are working to put that together, but while I was doing a little bit of Google research I ran into the latest newsletter from the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau.  I found a link of potential value to all of us home gardeners - Pennsylvania Manure Trader.

When I excitedly ran into the other room last night to tell my husband, he stared at me like I had grown horns.  I guess it’s a little strange to be excited about manure.

I compost, but my kitchen scraps can’t possibly supply all the nutrients I need for my little garden.  Oftentimes I end up purchasing manure to dig in, and then I wish I could find someone from whom I could buy it.  Some of the manure listed on the site is purchase-able, but much of it is free.  And it seems like nearly all the manure listed is horse manure.

This is the time of year I start daydreaming about next year’s garden, so this is a great resource to have on hand.

On a related note, have you checked out the Seed Savers Exchange catalog that Allison wrote about?  The variety of tomatoes has got me drooling!

Dark Days: A well-balanced meal

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

I recently discovered the wonders of vegetarian caviar - it’s called Cavi-Art.  In no way is Cavi-Art local, but ever since my order arrived, I’ve been looking for ways to use it.  And that’s how I ended up building a meal around a baked potato - simply so I could top the potato with a spoonful of sour cream and a dollop of the not-caviar.

It ended up being my Chriskwanzakah Eve meal (my second Dark Days Challenge meal of the week!) and it was scrumptious!  A baked potato with the aforementioned fixings (not local: sour cream and the Cavi-Art), along with a Natural Acres Porterhouse steak with a bit of olive oil and rubbed with salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme (not local: olive oil, salt, and pepper), balsamic roasted cauliflower with parmesan (not local: balsamic vinegar, salt), and spinach in lime juice and olive oil (not local: lime juice, oil).

Even though I was fixated on the potato, it was the cauliflower and spinach that stole the show.  I used a Romanesco cauliflower from the Fair Food Farmstand and the spinach was from Livengood’s.  The cauliflower is so pretty, and the spinach was just amazing - so sweet and fresh-tasting.  It has convinced me to try growing some spinach next Winter.

Christmas Dinner

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

My family also celebrates a secular Christmas holiday, and when there are no kids around (such as my nephew, who is Jewish), we are more minimalist still.  With just my parents and M and me, we had a lovely quiet Christmas dinner (about 1 p.m.), pictured below.  You can see a leftover from my mother’s British upbringing—the Christmas cracker.  We have them every year, and they make a loud POP! and provide bad jokes, a toy, and a paper crown.  (Hit joke this year?  Why is an elephant big, wrinkly, and grey?  Because if it were small, smooth, and white it would be an aspirin…  Groan…)

Dinner was local lamb chops, bought through our Farmto City Wintershares program; another version of my crazy what-local-foods-do-we-have-in-the-freezer dish that included local mushrooms, lima beans, cranberries, and corn; non-local potatoes (we brought local ones for my folks to use, but my Dad had already started cooking the non-local ones).  On the right is a glass of sparkling cider.  Yum.

A side note about meat:  For the last two years, M and I have been vegetarians at home, and starting in March of this year became full-time veggies (or Cranks, as they are known as in England).  However, we were left with two holidays that seemed unimaginable without meat—Thanksgiving and Christmas.  For Thanksgiving, of course, there was turkey, and while neither of us had a serving at dinner, we both had a pinch (literally) afterwards.  But Christmas has always meant lamb in my family (oddly, my relatives who own an organic sheep farm in Wales told us they were having turkey today!).  So we told my parents we would eat lamb if we could get it from the Wintershares program.

In the end, however, I was amazed at how little I really needed it today.  I was a pretty respectable meat-eater up until two years ago (partly due to a high premium being placed on protein when you have cystic fibrosis), and when I decided to go (forgive me) whole hog this March, I never thought Christmas could be Christmas without lamb.  I’m not opposed to eating meat on principle.  I think I have a moral obligation to know the animal had a good life (closest to what it likes best—i.e. grass for cows) before it died, and I believe I have a moral obligation to think of meat as a rare treat, and not an every week, let alone every day, event.  However, I guess I’ve just lost my interest.  Ah, well.  I wonder what other people have thought about this?

Merry Whatever You Celebrate!

Seasons greetings!

From all of us at Farm to Philly to all of you: Merry Christmas, Happy Festivus, Happy Boxing Day, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Winter Solstice….whatever holiday you celebrate this week, we wish you an excellent holiday season.  And if you don’t celebrate anything at all, happy Tuesday!

I refer to my own holiday this week as Chriskwanzakah, a secular holiday that demands a tree with lights, a gift exchange, feats of strength, and celebrating the return of the light.  Yep, I get to horn in on all the good stuff!  This week the Fair Food Farmstand had a Chriskwanzkah gift for all of us: citrus.

Don’t get your hopes up - this is not locally grown citrus.  While we do have an abundance of greenhouses in the area, I’m not sure such a thing actually exists!  But this citrus really is the next best thing.  The Tuscarora Organic Growers Co-op, which is based in Hustontown, PA, makes organic citrus from family farms in Florida available to local sellers.  I’m sure there are other places these babies are available in the area, the Fair Food Farmstand is carrying navel oranges, Cara Caras, Hamlin Juice oranges, Nova Tangelos, and red seedless grapefruits.  I tried a Tangelo during my volunteer shift at the Farmstand this past Saturday - they’re outstanding!

At this time of year when a lot of us start craving citrus, this is as close to ‘no guilt’ as it gets.  If you can’t support a local citrus farmer here, at least we can support a small grower on the East Coast.

Happy Chriskwanzakah to us all!

Lapsing Locavoritude

Monday, December 24, 2007

Although I have not lost locavoraciousness, this time of year—lacking time and wheels and a taste for root vegetables—it’s tough not to skid off the runway of locally grown. I still have a few farmers market apples in the fridge, but that’s about it at the moment. Except for these herbs—the last scraggly tarragon from outside, some sage from a patch in the nabe, and some oregano I brought inside that’s hanging on—that I’ll mince and combine with butter and lemon zest (uh-oh) to slip under the skin of tomorrow’s Christmas turkey breast. (Don’t ask about the turkey part’s provenance, ok?)

Soy Bonanza

Sunday, December 23, 2007

I was asked some time back how M and I make soy milk.  Like a magician’s audience, you may be disappointed by the mundane truth.  Here it is, (don’t say I didn’t warn you): we went online and bought a Soya Power soy milk maker.  I know.  Dullsville. 

It cost $120 and came with a little recipe book and some “magic” cleaning stuff that we’ve replicated since its demise with a little soap, water, and elbow grease.  We bought it for two reasons, both of which have proved satisfying.  First, I was reading about how difficult it is to recycle those three-ply, aluminum insides boxes of store-bought soy milk.  We take them to Pottstown’s recycling center once in awhile, but we wanted to go a step further, and not use the things at all.  The second reason was because using one ingredient (soy beans) that was not local seemed simpler than using several ingredients coming from everywhere to some processing plant and then coming to us.

We’ve really liked the soy milk it makes, and if you add a little salt and a little sweetener (could be local maple syrup, though we usually use brown rice syrup), it tastes the same as the store stuff.  There are a couple of drawbacks—(a) you have to soak the soy beans/rice/barley/almonds (whatever kind of milk you want) a day ahead, which we sometimes forget (we keep a supply of store-bought just in case); (b) with or without the “magic” (that’s what they call it) cleaner, it’s a bit of a pain to clean.  The cup that holds the beans has mesh that really has to be clear of gunk before the next use because it clogs up otherwise and doesn’t produce as creamy a milk.

You fill the pitcher with water.  The beans go in the shute at the top to slide down to the cup, and are tamped down if necessary.  Then the whole thing gets plugged in and left.  It takes about 15 or 20 minutes.  At the end you have a steaming hot pitcher of soy milk, and, as an extra treat, a cup filled with okara—basically the beans without the juice.  M eats this okara as a cream of wheat-like breakfast for a couple of days and loves it.  I’ve also put it in muffins.

I have never been much of a straight-up milk fan, even when I wasn’t lactose-intolerant, so I will quote M here on the joys of fresh soy milk: “The best is right after it’s done, and there’s all this foam.”  She drinks “a hot mug of nice, foamy soy milk,” says M. “It’s like a latte.”

Dark Days: Kale and Sausage with Wine-Cooked Lentils

There’s been a package of Eliza’s Lamb Sausage from Jamison Farm in my freezer for about a month or so now.  I’ve been hemming and hawing over what to use it for and after seeing some tempting Lacinato kale (also known as Dinosaur kale) yesterday at the Fair Food Farmstand, I decided on skillet dinner of sausage and kale with some of my precious Margerum’s lentils and some local onions cooked in red wine.  I just cooked it up for lunch with some Hendricks parmesan shaved over the top and, despite the fact that it is unseasonably (and kind of creepily) warm outside today, it was the perfect Winter weekend lunch - hearty and warming and delicious!

Everything in my lunch was local except the red wine and salt. 

Yes, it’s December and the choices (at least in fresh produce) aren’t as plentiful as the choices in, say, July…but for all of that, I’ve been having some really great local meals lately.  The grits I had a few days ago were excellent, and the soups have been wonderful.  I have a dinner for tomorrow night planned that is going to be great.  Initially, when Farm to Philly started, some of the writers were concerned they wouldn’t have much to post about - I haven’t found that to be the case at all!  I’m sure that come April I’ll be craving a decent tomato, but the range of locally grown foods available fresh right now and the all the foods that many of us have put up for the Winter…well, I feel really lucky.

On a related note, I highly recommend the Lacinato kale - I bought enough so that I’d have enough for my lunch and for a big old pot of soup.  The taste is outstanding!

Dark Days: Hominy grits with leeks and butternut

Friday, December 21, 2007

I got home from work last night and was all alone - my husband was finishing his holiday shopping.  The idea of making anything I wanted was almost too much for me.  In the kitchen I weighed my options.  And then my eyes fell on that bag of locally grown grits I bought a few weeks ago.  Well…why not?

Having never cooked grits before in my entire life, I winged it - I boiled up a few cups of water and a cup of milk, threw in some salt and parsley, then a cup of grits and waited to see what happened while I stirred like a maniac.  Miraculously, it all cooked up rather nicely.  And while it was, I sauteed up some sliced leeks and cubed, roasted butternut squash in butter.  As a last minute addition to the grits, I stirred in some sharp goat cheese. 

It turned out to be a delicious combination - goat cheese grits topped with sauteed leeks and butternut squash and finished with a couple curls of parmesan and a splash of balsamic vinegar.  Best yet, aside from the salt and vinegar it was all local and in season.  The grits were from Lancaster County (purchased at Kauffmann’s at Reading Terminal Market); the leeks, butter, and milk were from the Fair Food Farmstand; the butternut is a leftover from my last CSA share, the parsley was dried from my garden, the parmesan from Hendricks Farms, and the goat cheese from Shellbark Hollow.