All posts by sophie

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Sprouts

My partner has been sprouting seeds on the kitchen counter. We have an alfalfa, radish sprout mix and a chick pea, pea, lentil mix going. The sprouts are delicious and nutritious.

I read that sprouts contain an enormous amount of vitamins and nutrients and that you could give up taking vitamin pills if you eat sprouts daily. The idea appeals to me because I don’t believe in vitamin pills. How can we be sure that the chemists who formulated the vitamins took into account the associated food factors that make the vitamins actually work in human bodies. What’s the point of taking something that your body can’t absorb? What good is taking something that requires something else to be effective if the something else is missing? So, sprouts seemed like a great idea. It’s a living food!

It turns out there’s lots of disagreement on just how nutritious sprouts are. It seems some claims may have been overstated. So, I don’t know. (Can anyone point me to some authoritative information?)

Funny thing, I have been feeling better since I’ve been eating them (could be the placebo effect, and I’ll take it if it means feeling better!).

The bottom line: we grow them on our kitchen counter and you can’t get any more local than that!

Delicious nutritious sandwich:
Spread tahini on 2 lightly toasted slices of bread (I like the sprouted wheat kind from Alvarado Street Bakery*. Pile sprouts on each slice. Place two thick slices of local heirloom tomatoes on one pile of sprouts and cover with the other. Enjoy!

*Yeah, I know–the bread traveled 3000 miles to get to me; I’m hoping it averages out since the sprouts came from my kitchen and the tomato came from my back yard.
Anyone know a local baker that can bake sprouted wheat bread like the Alvarado Street Bakery?

farms

Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner

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Deciding to eat locally and sustainably does not (for me) preclude meat. I am an omnivore and make no apologies about it.

Meat gets a bad rap in the organic food community because of the methods used in raising animals and bringing them to market. For example, to quickly fatten cows (and increase profitability), conventional commercial operations feed them corn and grains and give them growth hormones. Corn and grain-fed cows gain about 5 pounds a day versus the 1.5-2 pounds a day a grass-fed cow gains. Since cows don’t naturally eat corn and grains and live in very tight quarters, they also need antibiotics, which get passed on to the consumer.

Since those cows are not eating grass (their natural diet), there are nutrients they aren’t getting and therefore, nutrients they aren’t producing. Grass-fed beef is higher in vitamin E and Omega-3 Fatty acids as well as beta-carotene and conjugated linoleic acids. It is also lower in calories and fat than conventional grain or corn-fed beef.

The question is, where can I find locally raised and humanely produced meat products?

In a previous post, I mentioned that a natural foods store carried locally raised beef from Stuart Family Farm in Bridgewater, CT. I bought some to perform some cooking and palate experiments.

The price was high (a rib eye steak was about $20 a pound). You can get it significantly cheaper by going to the farm yourself, but even then, it’s more expensive than supermarket beef. The high price is due to the additional land required to rotate grass fed beef and the quality of that land. Also, it takes seven months longer for a cow to come to weight naturally.

In the end, it comes down to taste. And as promised, I’m ready to share my results. We cooked the rib eye on the grill and the steak was fantastic! It was not gamey or strange tasting. There was less fat on the steak and it tasted less greasy. But it was tender and juicy. It was delicious. I would definitely do this again.

Now, where can I find chicken and pork?

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Like Peapod, but not

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In a previous post, I expressed envy that a particular supermarket has a delivery service. You order groceries from their Web site and they bring it to your door. That’s one of the perqs of living in the 21st century. Oh that local, sustainably-grown foods came with the same convenience.

As it happens, there are a few such services:
My Personal Farmers works with a number of local NY farms and will deliver anywhere in Westchester County, NY. Since I don’t live in Westchester County, I cannot use the service and am therefore unable to provide a review or any guidance whatsoever. It does seem like a very cool thing. I invite anyone with any experience with this service to share their experiences in the comments.

Organic Connection in Brewster, NY delivers to Westchester and Putnam counties in NY and Fairfield County in CT. How excited am I?!
More on this service once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

farms, foraging

Another Foraging Adventure

Our second (deliberate) adventure in foraging brought us to New Morning Natural and Organic Store in Woodbury, CT., about 10 miles away.

It’s a fairly large store (as natural foods stores go), but they carry so many items, the place seems small. This is a good thing since they are building a new store with lots more space!
They have a wide variety of products: organic/local produce, dairy products, meat products, prepared foods, boxed and frozen foods, household items, hygiene and heath care products, baked goods, coffee, and more.

I thought the produce section was rather small (comparing it only to the size of the farmer’s market). And I wish their signs would have been more specific about the food origin–Connecticut Grown seems rather generic to me. For a small state, it’s pretty big. (Happily, the entire state fits into our 100-mile local radius.)

The staff is friendly and knowledgeable, answering all kinds of scientific and sociological questions about their products.

Among many other items, we bought some locally raised beef from Stuart Family Farm in Bridgewater, CT. This is an experiment. Long ago, I bought some free-range beef from elsewhere to check it out and found it to be tough, gamey, and generally not tasty. I feared my palate had been socialized into corruption over the (many) years of my life. This is another chance. I bought a rib-eye steak and some ground beef. I plan to do the steak up on the grill and to make my much-loved meatballs out of the ground beef. (I’m having visions of chasing free-range meatballs around the kitchen.) I promise more information on this beef once we cook and taste it.

We bought Hautboy Hill Farm creamline milk, but I can’t find a Web site to link to.

And finally, the sweet potatoes we bought were the sweetest sweet potatoes I have ever eaten.