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Local St. Paddy’s

Mar 17th, 2013
by sophie.
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While I know that real Irish people (in Ireland) don’t eat corned beef, I have these culinary adventures on my list and today seemed like the right day to make my As-Local-As-It-Could-Be Reuben Sandwich.

rueben

The corned beef began as a brisket from Eagle Wood Farms. I followed Alton Brown’s recipe for corning, except instead of his spice list from faraway places, I got a pre-made mix of faraway spices from Penzey’s in Norwalk. I added salt and potassium nitrate (yes), not local. I brined it for 10 days, turning it every morning and evening. I cooked it with:

corned_beef

The sauerkraut began as cabbage from Sport Hill Farm, fermented per Sandor Katz‘s instructions. This would have been a great entry in the Westport Market’s cabbage contest, but there wasn’t enough time for the fermentation. It’s been fermenting for several weeks now. This is not my first attempt, but it is my first attempt that worked!

fermenting_sauerkraut

I made the rye bread following Martha Stewart’s recipe (mostly).

  • bread flour – red hard spring wheat from Wild Hive
  • rye flour from Wild Hive
  • honey from Swords and Plowshares
  • butter from Smyth’s Trinity Farm
  • yeast and salt: not local. I didn’t use caraway seeds.

Color me delightfully surprised when the loaf really did “tip out” of the loaf pan!

rye_bread

The Swiss cheese is Cry Baby from Arethusa Farm Dairy. (Thank you, Lisa from New Morning! I owe you big time.)

The dressing. Sigh. Should it be Thousand Island or Russian? What constitutes an authentic recipe of either? Here’s what I made:

dressing

Served with a dill pickle, fermented right here. Original cucumbers from Daffodil Hill Growers.

And that’s my sandwich. I hope you had a happy St. Paddy’s Day!

 

Peas be with you

Mar 17th, 2013
by sophie.
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The cooperative event between Debra Tyler’s Motherhouse and Bluestone Farm Living Arts Center was billed as such:

Women’s Wisdom: Sacred Agriculture

Mar 16,2013  -  Time:  9:00 am – 4:00 pm

Motherhouse and Bluestone Farm invite all women to join in a full day celebration of our connection to the earth through sacred agriculture. We’ll share our farming herstories, rituals, pea planting, pot-luck lunch, earth blessing way of the council, drumming circle and more.

In case you’ve never thought of sacred and agriculture together, here’s a good short read on the spirituality of farming. In case you don’t readily picture women when you think of farming, consider that the first farmers some 8-10,000 years ago were likely women and that the fastest growing group of those entering farming today are women.

My apologies for the pictures below. I used a phone (which is not a camera, despite what they say) and I was so caught up in the event, I forgot all about an illustrative progression. There are much better shots over at the Bluestone Farm Fans Facebook page and at Motherhouse’s blog.

We began with a fire and some food, mostly homemade from scratch. When I say from scratch, I mean the cheese spread was made from cream from their own cows. From scratch.

We blessed and sorted the dry peas, which are both food and seeds. These peas are not your garden variety peas, but a pea that’s more like a bean (whose name I should have written down but didn’t). Although much smaller, they have culinary attributes similar to a garbanzo, yet thrive in our climes. We were sorting through them to find the best specimens to plant—those that would produce the best plants. We prepared the beds, put up fences for the plants to climb, and planted the pea seeds in the still-frozen Earth.

planting_2 planting_1

We visited with the cows.

cows_1 cows_2

We ate a fabulous pot luck lunch.

eating

We smudged with sage, we drummed, we spoke.

drumming_2 drumming_1

While I left exhausted, it was a most excellent day. This was the inaugural event of the space that had previously been a school, which is now something new. It was a pleasure to be part of the energy transfer.

The Good Stuff is Worth It

Mar 9th, 2013
by sophie.
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At one of the sessions at the CT NOFA Winter Conference 2013, the topic of the high price of good food came up. It turns out that when people know what they are getting and why, they accept the premium on high-value foods. High-values foods are those that were raised and processed in a clean and sustainable manner, where nutrition and taste are the priorities.

CAFO

Unhappy Cows

For over 50 years, Americans have been the lab rats in the great processed food and high-volume farming experiment. If you look at our health record in that same time, you’d have to conclude the experiment was a failure. We now have an unnatural relationship with food, know next to nothing about where it comes from, or even what qualifies as food. As it happens, animals raised in close confinement are bad for you and fat obtained from these animals is bad for you too. Animals slaughtered in facilities that process thousands of animals a day have a statistical probablility of introducing a food-borne pathogens into the line so they take remediation measures (such as washing the meat in ammonia) that may not be good for us either. When you factor in the health and environmental costs of cheap food, it’s significantly more expensive than the expensive food!

For over 50 years, we let corporate shills dressed as scientists tell us:

  • Fat is bad. Animal fats are especially bad and vegetable fats (like Canola oil) are better.
  • Cholesterol is bad.
  • Skim milk is good.
  • Light anything is good; Full-fat anything is bad.
  • Lard is bad. Crisco and margarine are good.
Pastured

Happy Cows

People are starting to challenge these assumptions. Many are returning to the methods that sustained humankind for over 10,000 years. These methods contradict the current food and nutritional “wisdom.”

Little by little, we are finding our way back to the foods and food plans that nurtured us. People are putting by (canning, freezing, dehydrating) their own provisions from known sources. People are returning to bone broths and rendered animal fats. People are returning to foods they can make in their own homes. People are buying chickens from farmers whose practices they know so that they don’t have to do an anti-nuke anti-backterial lockdown afterwards. The home town butcher is returning! (Check out Saugatuck Craft Butchery in Westport, CT and Butchers Best Market in Newtown, CT.)

There’s so much to know and it can be daunting trying to figure out where to get started. Here are a few links to the front runners of traditional foods. These people and organizations advocate making bone broths, and rendering their own animal fats for use in cooking, and using the whole animal.

  • The Weston A. Price Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt nutrition education foundation. Of special note is this article, The Oiling of America.
  • Sally Fallon is the President of Weston Price Foundation. Her cookbook on traditional, nutrient-dense foods is worth a read, even if you don’t cook! She also made a video discussing the oiling of America.
  • Cheeseslave is an advocate of healthy traditional foods, full fat dairy, and against the anti-cholesterol hype. Her site has recipes, tips, and news for people who want to eat real food.

I believe it’s the modern pseudo-foods like margarine and soy milk and convenience foods full of additives, pesticides, and MSG that are making us sick. Full-fat dairy and other traditional foods have been sustaining humans for millennia. And that’s good enough for me.

  • Food Renegade is an advocate of healthy traditional foods. Her site has recipes, tips, and news for people who want to eat real food as well.

I am a rebel. I like to eat red meat. I think butter is good for me. I drink my milk raw. I avoid pre-packaged foods like the plague. I don’t believe the health claims on food labels. And, I like my food to be fresh, wholesome, and traditional.

This list is by no means exhaustive—it’s meant to be a starting point. Feel free to share other sources in the comment section.

Happy reading and happy eating!

Cabbage Forage

Jan 19th, 2013
by sophie.
1 comment

In honor of the Westport Farmers Market‘s Cabbage Recipe contest, I adapted this Crock Pot Cabbage and Pork Soup recipe with a cabbage head from Sport Hill Farm.

cabbage_pork_soup

I changed it up to keep it local and also used a Dutch oven instead of a crock pot.

Food Sources:

I cooked it in the oven in a covered Dutch oven for one hour at 325ºF and six more hours at 200ºF.

The sweet and heat give it a unique flavor depth, but you can still taste the individual ingredients. Even if I don’t win the contest, I still win because this is a healthy soup made from excellent ingredients from exceptional farms.

 

Chocolate Chili

Jan 6th, 2013
by sophie.
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I really like this chili recipe! It’s a great winter meal and the flavors are incredible. I like that it’s so easily adaptable to local sources and it’s perfect for using up the foods I put by for the winter. (I really do need an upright freezer!) It’s also an easy and fun recipe to change up a bit each time, based on my mood and what’s on hand.

This time, I swapped out the jalapenos for a poblano pepper and added a bell pepper and swapped out the maple syrup for honey. I left out the beans. Last week, I got chipotle bacon at the farmer’s market and that worked out excellently in this dish.

Sources:

I wasn’t in the mood to bake the corn bread, so I just had corn instead. I really do prefer having my corn in the winter! It seems like there’s so much of it and I take it for granted in the summer, but nothing brings back the bounty of summer like hot buttered corn in January!

This is not a “challenge meal.” For the first time since I became a locavore, I’m not participating in a Dark Days Eat Local Challenge. The regular challenge isn’t running this year (though there is a small group from another region doing their own thing). I will still be eating locally throughout the dark days but actually, finding local food in the winter no longer the challenge it once was. I am lucky to have many nearby farms and farmers markets that go through the winter. Meat and dairy are easy to come by in these parts. And I collected and put by enough veggies and those “ancillary items” you need to make soups, stews, one pot slow-and-low meals (like tomatoes, onions, garlic, and herbs). The challenge remains cooking from scratch while living and working in the 21st century!

I did come across the Pantry Challenge, which is about using what you have before you go out and buy more stuff. I like the idea of using up the things I put by and clearing out the freezer to make space for the new season. Truth be told, I still have a lot of food from last year in there. (Cut me some slack—it’s a chest freezer and I have to empty it out to find anything! It’s not like I haven’t been pining for an upright freezer for like forever.) Since I found this challenge a bit late and it isn’t exactly what I’m looking to achieve, I’ll be doing my own little “use up my stuff” challenge.

In fact, the corn, tomatoes, and poblano pepper I used in tonight’s chili are from my 2011 collection!

Southern Region Eat Local Challenge

Dec 29th, 2012
by sophie.
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The folks formerly known as the Southern Region in previous Dark Days Eat Local Challenges are keeping the challenge going this year! AnnieRie Unplugged has a post up about it.

Generally in these challenges, you prepare one local meal per week and post about it on your blog, citing your food sources. Usually, participants declare their “exceptions” at the outset, for example spices, sugar and other things that don’t grow in their region.

While it’s no longer a challenge for me to eat locally (daily, even), I think it’s fabulous that people are keeping the challenge going to show the folks just starting out that it can be done and how.

The secret to a successful Dark Days Challenge is putting by (preserving foods) in season. (Okay, that’s not really a secret—our forebears did it for generations!) Meat and dairy are generally available through the winter and ingredients like herbs, garlic, onions, and tomatoes go a long way for soups, stews, pot roasts, and many other winter dishes. When that summer CSA is inundating you with greens and other veggies, cook them up and freeze them. There’s nothing like buttered corn in the middle of January to make you feel summery all over again!

Still, if you didn’t plan in advance (like I didn’t my first year, since it just sort of came up), you may be surprised at all of the foods you can find in your local foodshed and just how resourceful you really are.

Good luck to all the challenge-takers!

Local Thanksgiving 2012

Nov 24th, 2012
by sophie.
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A happy tradition of a Thanksgiving of local food continues at my house…

Appetizers

A number of these items were put by in season to be enjoyed now.

Soup

Chicken soup with bowtie pasta or brown rice. Chicken from Sankow’s Beaver Brook, onions and carrots from Newtown Cedar Hill Farm, celeriac from Riverbank Farm, and leeks and garlic from Sport Hill Farm. Parsnips, pasta and rice: not local.

Main Course

Dessert

Beverages

Thanks to all of my farmers—I hope your holiday was as fabulous as mine. Thank you to my family for your help and a great day.

2012 CSA, Week 21

Nov 24th, 2012
by sophie.
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The grand finale from my Sport Hill Farm 2012 CSA. Patti’s back!!!

Week 21 – 10/18

  • 2 acorn squash
  • 2 spaghetti squash
  • 2 Delicata squash
  • 2 butternut squash
  • 2 fennel bulbs
  • 1 bunch scallions
  • 2 heads of broccoli
  • 1 head of escarole
  • 2 heads of lettuce: green and red

This has been another wonderful year of a CSA. I highly recommend this model to anyone who is interested. Choose your farmer well! Thank you Patti, Al, and the Popp family!

2012 CSA, Weeks 18-20

Nov 24th, 2012
by sophie.
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Lot’s more food from my Sport Hill Farm 2012 CSA.

Week 18 – 9/27

  • 1 spaghetti squash
  • 1 Delicata squash
  • 1 acorn squash
  • 4 eggplant
  • 1 bag of beans
  • 2 bell peppers
  • 1 bag tomatillos
  • 1 bag edamame
  • 3 tomatoes
  • 1 fennel bulb

Week 19 – 10/4

  • 1 spaghetti squash
  • 1 Delicata squash
  • 1 acorn squash
  • 6 ears of corn
  • 2 Asian eggplant
  • 1 bag green beans
  • 1 bunch Tuscan kale
  • 1 bag bok choy
  • 1 bunch scallions

 Week 20 – 10/11

  • 1 butternut squash
  • 1 spaghetti squash
  • 1 buttercup squash
  • 1 bunch kale
  • 1 bunch collards
  • 1 bunch beets
  • 1 bunch of Swiss chard
  • 2 heads of broccoli

 

 

2012 CSA, Weeks 14-17

Sep 23rd, 2012
by sophie.
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I have a few weeks of CSA bounty in the queue. The food has been fabulous and I have a good amount saved up for the dark days and have enjoyed quite a bit “live.”

Week 14 – August 30, 2012

  • 1 bag of potatoes (with a garlic bulb)
  • 6 ears of sweet corn
  • 2 bell peppers
  • tomatoes: 3 red slicing, 6 heirloom
  • 2 bok choy
  • 1 cantaloupe
  • 2 heads of lettuce
  • 1 bunch of kale
  • 1 bunch of collard greens

my cart runneth over…

Week 15 – September 6, 2012

  • 2 heads of lettuce
  • 1 bunch of collard greens
  • 1 bunch of kale
  • 1 watermelon
  • 6 ears of sweet corn
  • 1 eggplant of choice (Asian/Italian)
  • 1 bag of string beans
  • 1 bag of edamame
  • 2 bell peppers
  • 4 slicing tomatoes
Week 16 – September 13, 2012

  • 2 heads of lettuce
  • 1 bunch of collard greens
  • 1 bunch of kale
  • 1 bag of edamame
  • 1 bag of tomatillos
  • 1 bunch of carrots
  • 1 bag of sweet peppers
  • 1 bag of mixed tomatoes
  • 1 watermelon
  • 1 bag of eggplant
 Week 17 – September 20, 2012

  • 1 watermelon
  • 2 Italian eggplant
  • 1 bunch of beets
  • 2 peppers
  • 1 bag of string beans
  • 2 slicing tomatoes
  • 1 bag of edamame
  • 1 bunch of kale
  • 1 bunch of collard greens

 

 

 

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