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Raw beet salad an easy way to use lovely roots

June 17th, 2009 · local food, recipes

It’s beet time again, and I say hooray. I love beets. This year’s beet recipe is a joy due to its versatility and simplicity.

But first, a look at the beauteous root (partially peeled):

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How could anyone not want to eat something so beautiful?

Anyway, this recipe is based on one in How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman. In these parts, all the fresh ingredients except the orange are available now from local farmers. Yum!

Raw beet salad with Napa and orange

  • 1 pound beets
  • 1 pound Napa cabbage (probably 1/4 to 1/2 head)
  • 2 large shallots (I used 1 shallot and 1 smallish leek), minced
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper, or to taste
  • 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard (but I wish I’d used 1 teaspoon)
  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • 3 tablespoons vinegar (Bittman suggested sherry vinegar, which I didn’t have; I used balsamic)
  • 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley leaves
  • 2 oranges, peeled and roughly chopped (including juice)
  1. Peel and shred the beets. Thinly slice cabbage crosswise. Place beets, cabbage and shallots in bowl.
  2. In a jar with tight-fitting lid, add salt, pepper, mustard, olive oil and vinegar. Shake well, and pour over vegetables. Toss. If desired, marinate an hour or so.
  3. Add parsley and oranges. Toss to combine, and serve. Makes about 8 servings.

The final product (with a little orange zest on top):

Variations

The recipe above, which you can halve, is the variation I made. Bittman proposes several variations:

Basic: Use all beets (beets replace cabbage) and add a sprig or two of minced fresh tarragon if desired.

With fennel: Replace cabbage with thinly sliced fennel, and make a dressing that omits the mustard and uses lemon juice instead of vinegar.

With carrots and ginger: Use shredded carrots instead of cabbage and cilantro instead of parsley and add a couple tablespoons minced fresh ginger. For the dressing, use peanut (instead of olive) oil and lime juice (instead of the vinegar).

I happen to have some beets left. We’ll see whether I’ll try one of these or another variation altogether. Wish I had some fennel…

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Heartland Harvest Garden worth a trip

June 15th, 2009 · General

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If the whole “edible landscape” notion has seemed unrealistic to you, the Heartland Harvest Garden at Powell Gardens in Missouri just might make you reconsider. Heartland Harvest Garden, which officially opened Sunday (June 14, 2009) is 12 acres of edible landscape, which garden officials claim make it the biggest such garden in the country.

Timely gardens

It’s a timely spectacle, opening as interest in food gardening surges. The Heartland Harvest Garden has numerous spaces both educational and beautiful: home-style kitchen gardens, fruit and vegetable parterres with designs based on quilt patterns, a vineyard, fruit tree plazas and the children’s Fun Food Farm. It is a feast for the eyes as well as the appetite. (Click below for larger images of, from left, a portion of parterre, vineyard and Fun Food Farm sign.)

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In addition, the “Missouri barn” will house Fresh: A Garden Café, which will use produce from the garden; an interpretive center; and a silo/overlook of the parterres inspired by the gardens at the French chateau, Villandry. Although visitors aren’t supposed to eat the landscape as they browse, “tasting stations” offer bites of what’s ripe.

Particularly appealing is the garden’s identification labels: Not only is virtually every plant labeled, but the labels include comments about the plant’s use.

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Growing impressions

My visit left me with a couple of impressions regarding growing food:

  • powell5Container gardening can mean far more than a patio tomato in a plastic pot, which is how I’ve tended to regard it. The garden is awash in large, beautiful containers filled with a variety of edible plants. Now, I admit I’m curious as to how well some of these will do when, for instance, vines get big and herbs bolt. But even if they become unwieldy, it’s clear that if you have only a tiny spot in the sun (such as my back porch) you can still have something both ornamental and good to eat.
  • There are many ways to go vertical when gardening in a confined space. Besides trellises, simple wire fences can be used to carry the load of squash, beans, tomatoes and other vining food plants, at least if you choose the right varieties.
  • Inclusion of edible flowers, from nasturtiums to roses and many more, adds gorgeous splashes of color.

Star attractions

Powell Gardens brought in two big-name authors to design gardens. Rosalind Creasy, an early edible garden promoter, designed one, and Barbara Damrosch, Washington Post columnist and author of The Garden Primer
created another. Creasy’s books include The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping published in 1982 and most recently, Recipes from the Garden. This spring’s cool, damp weather has put their gardens behind where we might expect them to be at this late date, but it’s still valuable to see what the pros do.

I’ll be very interested to see how the gardens fare as summer’s heat sets in. For those not from this part of the world, let me tell you that the weather can and does assault crops in all sorts of ways. Will those potted plants need five-a-day watering? Will heat radiating off paving cook herbs?

And if the plants do survive, even thrive, will climbing tomatoes fall down when laden with fruit? Will pests beset the squash and melon vines? What happens when all that Swiss chard bolts? I guess I’ll have to go back and find out.

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Unfinished business

The biggest disappointment about the garden is simply that it isn’t entirely ready. Any garden is inevitably a work in progress, but the silo overlook and Fresh: A Garden Café weren’t yet open (and, yes, I was visiting for the food!); there was no interpretative guide or map to the edible gardens (yet, anyway); and the children’s area was far from complete. I wanted to see the berry-bush maze in action! So far I’ve been unable to confirm whether the entire Heartland Harvest garden is being grown with organic methods, although Damrosch, who was on hand Sunday, said her garden there was organic.

The bright side of those shortcomings: I’ll have to visit again. Alas, it’s unlikely there will be another such mild day to visit in the next month or two.

For an overview of the Heartland Harvest Garden, check out Jill Silva’s story in the Kansas City Star or Garden Fest page (which you might not think to look at) on the Powell Gardens web site. The gardens provide a map and hours.

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Vote for your favorite farmers market

June 13th, 2009 · Farmers markets

America’s Favorite Farmers MarketsLove your local farmers market? Well, tell everybody so by voting at the American Farmland Trust. When you get to the site, click on the map or zoom in to find markets to vote for. (I do wish they had a simple list by state, along with votes, but that’s a quibble.)

As I write this, the Lawrence Farmers Market has just three votes, but that’s more than they have in Topeka or Merriam. Lots of markets haven’t signed up yet to participate, and if yours hasn’t you can find information on the site to give to the market manager and to promote voting for your market.

The vote, of course, draws attention to the American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit that works for farmland preservation and a worthy outfit for your attention. Now, go vote!

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Local food pioneers in Lawrence spotlight

June 12th, 2009 · local food

pioneerIf you don’t have it on your calendar, put in there now: the Pioneers of Local and Organic Foods event at 7-9 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24, at Liberty Hall (7th & Massachusetts). (Click on the image to see a larger image of the promotional poster.)

I don’t know how they’re going to fit everything in that night, but it’s a great program:

  • Organizers will recognize and honor several local and organic food pioneers. Those who, according to Local Burger founder Hilary Brown, were “working hard for sustainable food before sustainable food was the thing.” I don’t have an exact count of the honorees, but know who a few of them are, and they more than deserve applause. Planners aren’t saying the names in advance (except to the honorees) so as to build interest, I guess.
  • Noted agricultural economist Ken Meter will give a presentation, “Embracing Local Food to Feed Our Economy.” Meter, who has spoken here twice in the past year, has a new show to present. His talk is being translated into Japanese, as Japanese visitors who are taking part in an exchange with Kansas growers, will be in town for the event.
  • Attendees will dine on food supplied by Local Burger and the Community Mercantile and listen to music, both before and after the awards and presentation.

That’s a lot for the $5 cost of admission—and a lot to cram into two hours. You can buy tickets in advance at the Merc and Local Burger.

The event is sponsored by Global Partners for Local Organic Foods, The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, Elizabeth Schultz Environmental Fund of Douglas County, The Kansas Rural Center, The Merc, and Local Burger.

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Children find food excitement in their cherry tree

June 10th, 2009 · General, local food

Anyone who doubts the power of seeing food grow should witness my neighbor boys. These guys learned last year that their new house came with a cherry tree, and they were passingly interested. They weren’t that crazy about the cherry pie I made, but something must have clicked in their young brains such that they associated the tree with food and excitement.

cherries

The results revealed themselves this year. Their mother commented a couple of weeks ago that the two older boys, ages 4 and 6 (I think), had spotted the little green cherries in the tree. She reported that “they are so excited” and wanted to know when they’d be ready.

Well, last week they were ready. On Friday, the two guys rang my doorbell (repeatedly) and held up a stainless steel bowl with a couple dozen cherries in the bottom.

“Look! The cherries are ready!” they said. These guys are delights. They are big-eyed, wiry bundles of energy, with the oldest in particular having an astonishingly sunny disposition, and this day they burst with happy energy.

I told them I’d be down to pick some the next day. They said “great!” and ran off.

Ripe for eating

The next day, I saw their dad at the Farmers Market with their equally engaging 1 1/2-year-old brother. Andy said I wouldn’t believe how excited those boys were, adding that all three boys and a neighbor girl, who’s 2 or 3, had spent a lot of time sitting under the tree and eating the cherries straight up.

Amazing, I thought. These are sour cherries, not Bing cherries, and I’m betting they’d have declined to eat them if they hadn’t come from their very own tree.

Later that day I picked cherries with help from Hillary with the plan to bake a pie on Sunday. Before I got to it, though, the door bell rang again. Repeatedly. There at the door was the oldest boy. He held out his hand and opened it. Four bright-red cherries, one slightly squished, lay in the palm of his hand.

“See, the cherries are ready,” he said.

“I know,” I said, “I picked some this morning!”

He continued to hold out his hand.

“Are those for me?” I said. He nodded and placed them into my hand. “Would you like some pie when I get it baked?”

“No thanks,” he said. “Bye!”

And off he scampered.

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Pie for sharing

Sunday morning Gordon and Eileen helped me pit the cherries, and I got the pie in the oven before the house heated up. That evening, they and another couple came over for pie. I saved a piece for Hillary and took the last two pieces to an older couple down the alley. Health problems have ended their pie-baking days.

Thanks to that cherry tree, we have four kids excited about a healthy food and the memory of one delicious pie that fed eight adult neighbors, half who had a hand in its creation.

Isn’t it cool how good food brings people together? And isn’t it cool that seeing food grow on a tree has gotten those kids excited?

I think it is. And, hmm, I couldn’t help but notice this morning that more cherries are in that tree, waiting to be picked if the birds don’t get them first. Maybe another community effort is called for. I feel certain I could get some help.

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Fresh a lesson in fresh food, complex system

June 8th, 2009 · Books

FreshThe lust for fresh food, it turns out, in many ways is responsible for today’s world food economy. Those railcars full of California lettuce headed to New York in winter? They’ve been traveling that path for nearly 100 years. Feedlots for fattening cattle? They got their start in the late 1800s. All because people wanted the crunch and taste of food that hadn’t been dried or canned.

Susanne Freidberg, in her fascinating and meticulously documented book Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap Press), details these and numerous other examples of the human hunger for fresh food, even the debate over what qualifies as “fresh.” Is aged meat fresh? What about pasteurized milk? Fruit two weeks from the tree? Six-month-old eggs? It all depends on your point of view.

Refrigeration and labor

The advent of refrigeration including the ice trade, which Freidberg documents, created new possibilities for fresh food and promoted the worldwide food distribution system we now have. With refrigeration and transportation advances, fresh food was possible for the masses, not just for the landowner with his or her own fruit trees, greenhouse, dairy herd and chicken coop.

At the same time, however, today’s massive food distribution network relies on the poorly remunerated work of the world’s poorest laborers, just as the rich landowner once depended on servants to harvest and prepare his food. Thus, much agriculture and horticulture to feed us rich (by world standards) Americans and Europeans has been pushed to third-world countries. And those countries sometimes wind up growing cash-crop food for export rather than food they need to eat.

Even as the local-food movement has tried to reverse that trend, the fact that land is expensive near cities, where most people live, means that true local food often is very expensive (to cover the farmers’ high land costs) or not as local as it might be. And the labor of immigrants, often illegals, is almost a necessity to keep our food as cheap as we want it to be, even when the food is local.

Familiar issues

Meanwhile, many of the food issues we discuss today are as old as the feedlot. Freidberg quotes from M.J. Rosenau’s 1912 book, The Milk Question, with this familiar observation: “When the producer and consumer were near neighbors…the one had a personal interest in the product he furnished the other….the separation between the two has [now] lulled the conscience of the producer.” Hence, we’re more secure in buying ground beef from our local vendor at the farmers market than a frozen beef patty from the supermarket that could well have come from one of the companies involved in large-scale recalls. (Read the latest recalls at the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service.)

What about nutrition? Freidberg tells of the American Medical Association’s endorsement of canned vegetables’ being as nutritious as fresh, which we now know is not true. And taste? It’s tricky. Sometimes gorgeous fruit tastes like nothing, and flash-frozen fish may taste better than freshly killed fish that have suffered innumerable stresses as they get shipped thousands of miles to swim in retail vats in Hong Kong.

Freidberg writes, “We’ve all come to see freshness as a quality that exists independent of all the history, technology, and human handling that deliver it to our plates.” In her fine book, she explains that history and just how complex our food system is. By focusing on meat, eggs, milk, fruit, vegetables and fish she shows us that today’s food is based on “interdependencies and inequalities, forged through trade, conquest and politics… [and] sharp contradictions between marketed ideals and industrial realities.”

Much to ponder

Even as some of us beat a path to the farmers market or CSA, the history she describes affects the selections available and their path to our refrigerator. She gives us much to ponder and presents it in a highly readable volume largely devoid of value judgments. I learned a lot. Give it a read. It will indeed give you a fresh look at your food.

Fresh: A Perishable History
By Susanne Freidberg
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2009

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