Aka weeks 6-12, during which I was lost in a haze of crazy.  Here are the missing weeks of the CSA share.  I love how you can kind of see summer progress – the first tomato, carrots, and potatoes of the year; the changes in color; the changes in berries.

It kind of reminds me of a much smaller version of the guy who took a picture of himself every day for six years.  Only more vegetables.  And a lot less time elapsed.  (I always wish he was smiling for the pictures – he seems so melancholy.  Not like vegetables, which are decidedly cheerful.)

All this food!  Where did the summer go?

Related posts:

1. Our CSA Share – Week 13
2. Our CSA Share – Week 4
3. Our CSA Share – A Weekly

For the last week or so, I’ve been working on getting back on track in my kitchen.  What does that mean?  Digging around in the back of my freezer and my pantry and finishing eating things up!  I’m a little bit of a food hoarder, and while it is comforting to have a couple of jars of tomatoes left “just in case I need them,” preserving season means it’s time to start fresh and new for the coming winter.

But that doesn’t mean the CSA veggies stop coming in and that doesn’t mean the garden stops producing.  Good thing I have a few extra bodies around the house to help me eat up the bounty .

The Share

Potatoes
Green beans
Kohlrabi
Beets
Carrots
Kale
Onion
Summer squash
Blackberries

The Garden

The garden is doing fantastic, in spite of my naiveté in planning it.  (Certainly the squash won’t get big enough to take over the carrots.  I’m sure they’ll be fine wedged in right there.)

This week we have beets, radishes, green and dragon tongue bush beans, rainbow and swiss chard, kale, bok choy, and… no carrots.  The fig tree is also in full fruit, and we’ve been eating fresh figs every day.  We also have a couple of tomatoes just about ready to go.  Yay summer!

The Meal Plan

Eating from the garden has been a new and deeply enjoyable experience for me.  I love that when I make a meal, if it doesn’t look quite green enough, I can just pop outside and bring in anything that looks good.  We’ve been having lots of salads, squashes, and greens along with my random pantry creations.

• Chicken, tomatoes & garlic
• Baked oatmeal
• Homemade yogurt, granola & berries
• Breakfast burritos with sautéed greens
• Salmon, wild rice & garden veggies
• Burgers & cajun fries
• Fig newtons

What’s in your box this week?  Anyone have a good recipe for pickled cherry peppers?  Are you starting to preserve anything for the winter?

Related posts:

1. Our CSA Share – Week 5
2. Our CSA Share – Week 4
3. CSA Share – Week 2

I spoke too soon.  After last week’s declaration that summer weather was finally here, we had an unseasonably rainy July week.  The greens in my garden loved it.  My lawn loved it.  My tomatoes?  Not so much.  No more talking about the weather.

In spite of the rain, we got a great CSA share from the Pigmans this week.  I was excited to see some new flavors – raspberries, cabbage, carrots and sweet onion.  Stir fry is one of my husband’s favorite meals (and mine – so easy to make!).  It’s nice to see some of our usual stir fry ingredients finally turning up.  I’m missing the asparagus this week though.

The Share

Beets
Broccoli
Carrots
Kale
Walla Walla Sweet Onion
Cabbage
Shelling Peas
Raspberries

The Garden

Strawberries (lots!)
Various sprouts

The Meal Plan

I anticipate pulling a bunch of baby greens from the garden this week, as we still need to do a bit of thinning so that everything has room to grow.  I’m really excited about that – this will be the first week where our garden supplements our meals significantly!

• Mixed green salads
• Curried braised cabbage and egg
• Veggie egg rolls
• Baked oatmeal and berries
• Homemade yogurt, granola and berries
• Sourdough pancakes
• Cheeseburgers
• Shredded beef burritos

I’ll probably use the extra garden greens to make a bunch of bird food.  Since we got carrots in our share this week, I don’t anticipate having to pick up any additional veggies from the market or the co-op for that or for our own meals.  I may go to the market and see if there is any asparagus though.  I suspect we’re reaching the end of the season on that, and I still haven’t preserved any of it!

What’s in your box, cart, or bag?  What’s on the menu for the week?

Related posts:

1. Our CSA Share – Week 3
2. Our CSA Share – Week 4
3. CSA Share – Week 2

Summer finally appears to be here!  I’ve gotten so many great comment entries on the permaculture book giveaway – if you haven’t entered yet, go check it out.

Our CSA share was much larger this week, thanks to the warm, sunny days.  When I piled it up on my counter, it almost completely eclipsed the toaster & toaster oven (yes, redundant appliances).

It was great to see the first broccoli of the season.  I’m excited about munching on that, especially since the broccoli plants in our garden are only about 3” tall right now.

However, with all these greens, I’m running out of creative salad ideas.  If you have any good ones (or any other great way to prepare greens), please share with us!

The Share

Asparagus
Broccoli
Lettuce
Beets
Spinach
Strawberry

The Garden

Strawberries, more every day!

The Meal Plan

Taco Salad
Other salads? Time to get creative.
Baked eggs on asparagus
Baked eggs on other veggies?
Kefir-strawberry vanilla smoothies
Berries with homemade yogurt & granola
Carbonara
Pizza

What’s in your box, bag or basket this week?  What’s on the menu?

Related posts:

1. CSA Share – Week 2
2. Our CSA Share – Week 3
3. Our CSA Share – A Weekly

What a great CSA bag this week!  Tons of spinach, delicious strawberries, chard, and a bounty of asparagus.  I made some yogurt to go with the strawberries, and I’m really looking forward to eating all the amazing greens this week.

The Share

Not pictured, a huge bunch of lettuce – we ate it!  Also, that box of strawberries was overflowing, but only for about a minute.

Asparagus
Chard
Garlic
Lettuce
Spinach
Strawberry

The Garden

5 strawberries
Bunch of garlic scapes

The Meals

Again with a fridge still full of leftovers.  This is one of the disadvantages to having a CSA share – you get vegetables every week, no matter what the state of your fridge.  I know, really something to complain about, huh?

• Taco salads
• Regular salads on the side of things
• Creamy baked eggs with asparagus
• Spinach & greens quiche
• Carbonara with asparagus
• Veggie egg bowls (quinoa or wild rice, veggies, fried egg & one of a variety of homemade dressings – I like eating things in bowls)
• Curried braised cabbage & egg (I thought this sounded gross, but it is actually delicious)
• Bird food

I doubt we’ll need anything additional from the market this week, except maybe some carrots or sweet potatoes for the parrot’s food.  (He needs one orange vegetable in his daily veggie mix.)

Also, I may actually end up preserving or fermenting some of the asparagus, as we still have some leftover from last week and that is one vegetable I didn’t try preserving last year.  I’m thinking asparagus season is almost over, so I may go to the market and buy a big bunch and give it a shot.  Anyone have a good recipe to share for preserving asparagus?

(P.S.  Joining up with some fantastic bloggers for a permaculture book giveaway this weekend, so be sure to stop by and enter to win some great books!)

Related posts:

1. CSA Share – Week 2
2. Our CSA Share – A Weekly
3. My CSA Share – A Breakdown

This week’s share was much the same as last week’s – it will probably continue this way until the weather changes. (Come on sun – it’s almost July here!)

This week I was excited to open our bag and find kale!  Kale is a big favorite in my household because my husband absolutely loves Olive Garden’s Zuppa Toscana.  We eat out more than we should, but we eat at Olive Garden very rarely.  However, I found this great recipe for the soup, and with a few alterations it becomes a fantastically nourishing meal – I substitute homemade chicken bone broth or stock for bouillon cubes, whole raw milk for heavy cream, and make sure to used pastured bacon and sausage.

It’s a great winter soup – there is kale available late into the fall and it starts showing up as soon as the markets open in the spring (this year I’ll be trying to grow my own!), potatoes store well, and we keep a stock of the sausage in the freezer.  I honestly wouldn’t have imagined I’d still be eating it in late June!  That’s ok by me though .

The Share

Strawberries
Mint (many herbs, choice was ours)
Green onions
Kale
Lettuce
Asparagus
Beets

The Garden

One (1!) strawberry.  Hah!

The Meals

We ended up with a lot of leftovers from family and derby shenanigans over the weekend, so there’s lots of eating of those to come.  Otherwise…

• Zuppa Toscana!
• Roast lamb with asparagus and beets (not a repeat, we didn’t end up eating it last week)
• Burrito bowls with veggies
• Salad with veggies & quinoa
• Baked oatmeal and strawberries

I’ll probably also try a shredded beet salad.  Anyone have a good recipe?  Not anticipating any co-op or farmers market supplementary purchases this week – the fridge is packed full!

What’s in your box or garden this week?  What’s on your menu?

Related posts:

1. Our CSA Share – A Weekly
2. My CSA Share – A Breakdown
3. Checking Out Your CSA

This is our second year in a row signing up for a CSA share with Pigman’s Organic Produce Patch.  We signed up for a half share last year, and I was blown away by the quality and value, not to mention the ease that it brought to my weekly shopping and meal planning.

What the heck is a CSA?

A CSA, or community supported agriculture, is basically an easy way to buy farm-direct during the growing season.  With a CSA, you pay an up front fee, usually at the start of the season or some time before the season begins.  The farmers use your share to pay their bills and keep the farm running.  In return, you receive a weekly share of the farm’s product once the season begins.

There are many forms of CSA.  Some (like ours) are single-farm. Some are small farm co-ops that allow a group of farms to offer consumers a wider variety of foods than they can grow themselves.  Some do only vegetables, while others include fruit, herbs and flowers.  There are even meat and dairy CSAs in some areas.  Being a part of a CSA is an affordable and easy way to know where your food comes from.

Our Share

I wrote a bit about our CSA share towards the end of the season last year, and got a lot of questions which were harder to answer than they should have been.  I decided that this year I would do a weekly report of our share with meal lists and photos, to give people an idea of what having a CSA share can be like.  Except we’re starting with Week 3, because that’s where we’re at.

Writing a weekly update might also hold me accountable for using everything, so I don’t end up with things like mustard greens (*cough Week 1 cough*) hanging out in my fridge until they go bad because I haven’t bothered to spend the five minutes it would take on the internet figuring out something to do with them.  My bad.

As the garden comes along, I will probably also include what we pulled from our garden for the week.  It will be interesting to see how the two sources complement each other as the season continues.

Week 3 – The Share

Asparagus
Lettuce
Green Onions
Radish
Sugar Snap Peas
Strawberries (!!)
Garlic Scapes

This is a mid-week picture – we’ve eaten a ton already.  The container of strawberries was full & overflowing.  We’ve eaten all the sugar snap peas, half the asparagus, most of the lettuce, and the radishes (you can see the greens they were attached to in the upper right – the bird and I will eat those this week).  Next week = picture of our whole share before we eat most of it!

Week 3 – The Meals

So excited to see the strawberries this week – the first of the season!  I still have rhubarb from last week’s share, and I might make strawberry rhubarb pie or cobbler, but more likely I will just eat the strawberries and make a plain rhubarb cobbler.

We’re still eating up the freezer veggies from last season, and we have the tail end of canned tomatoes, veggies, salsa, jams, and jalapenos in the pantry.  I ordered half a lamb last season that needs to be eaten soon.  And I just discovered I have two open jars of last season’s salsa in my fridge and I don’t know which one is older, so we do burritos and finish off both of them.

Most likely the plan will look like:

• Spinach (last week’s share)/ lettuce salad with radishes, green onions and quinoa for lunches and on the side of meals
• Snap peas in salads & for snacks
• Roast lamb (garlic scapes) with asparagus & roasted freezer beets
• Burrito bowls – ground beef, last season’s salsa, bell peppers & other last season freezer veggies, lettuce, rice
• Garlic scape pesto pasta
• Rabbit stew or pot pies
• Egg rolls

I’ll probably supplement our CSA share with the following veggies from the farmer’s market or, if the pickings are slim (it’s been a terrible season here), the co-op:

Potatoes (stew)
Sweet potatoes (I’m addicted & the bird eats them)
Carrots
Cabbage

Are you part of a CSA?  If so, what was in your bag/box/crate this week?  Or what are you eating from your garden?

Related posts:

1. My CSA Share – A Breakdown
2. Goodbye, CSA
3. Checking Out Your CSA

I’ve been working on reordering some of my categories this week, sort of a “spring cleaning” for the blog moment.  (My office got it too – no more iguanas hiding in piles, maybe?)  In the process, I discovered that I write about food.  A ton.  More, probably, than I write about any one other thing.

Instantly I jumped on myself, “You should write about food less.  I bet people are getting bored about reading about food.”  But I’m working on cultivating this radical self-kindness habit right now.  It’s not going super-amazingly, but I’m working on it anyways.  So instead of continuing to jump down my own throat, I thought about why so many of my posts seem to end up being about food.  I came up with a few good reasons.

Food Matters

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again – food really matters.  In terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s right there on the first level.  (Some other things that start with F and aren’t on the first level: Furbies, felt, Facebook, forensic science.)  If things melted down, we’d be okay without Facebook.  We wouldn’t be okay without food.

From a societal standpoint, this means we need to figure out food production and food safety.  Of course, these aren’t necessarily easy issues.  But as the human population continues to increase, these issues are becoming more and more urgent.  In the wake of natural disasters, social or political upheaval, and economic difficulty food (and access to fresh water – big one!) is paramount.  Many other things can fall by the wayside, but we need to get food right.

Food = Health

Disease – food. Obesity, diabetes, cancer.  Hormonal imbalances, thyroid, early puberty.  Behavioral issues and developmental disabilities.  It seems like every week new studies are being released that show that what we eat (and how much of it) is the root of many of our “modern epidemics.”

Photo CC || http://www.flickr.com/photos/nexus_icon

And who would be surprised?  Why wouldn’t our diseases be a reflection of what we’re eating?  While my husband was deployed, I mixed motor oil in with the gasoline in our weed eater.  (I totally thought it was the same thing as whatever you’re supposed to put in there.)  That… did not go so well.  That kind of substitution doesn’t go so well for our bodies either.  We’re made to run on salads, not soda.

Photo CC || http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo

How can we think what we choose to put in our bodies won’t have a cost?  Personal, social, economic…cost.

Food = The Environment

In addition to affecting our health, food is one of the major ways in which we are connected to the health of the planet.  The more people there are, the more apparent this connection is becoming, as we are stretching the natural systems that we depend on to their limits.  If we (humans as a species) are going to make it, we need to find a way to produce our food that sustains and renews the world we all share.

Food is also a metric for where things stand.  When we moved into our house, we had a gorgeous tree called a madrona tree.  They’re fairly common up here.  Unfortunately, our madrona was in the process of dying as we were moving in.  We eventually had to call someone to remove it so it wouldn’t end up falling on our house.  When the tree guy came to remove it, he told me that the madronas are sensitive trees.  They are the first to succumb to environmental pressure, and are a canary in a coal mine for the ecosystem.  He’s been taking out a lot of dead madronas lately.  But most people don’t notice that these trees are slowly dying.

Food, however, is a metric we could notice, if the feedback loops were corrected so that price accurately reflected the state of supply.  If a can of tuna were more expensive now that we’ve decimated the tuna populations.  People can be responsive, but we have to be attuned to the metric and the metric has to be working.

Food = Your Life

All this being said, it’s ok if a) this is all too overwhelming or b) you’re left not really caring that much about the big picture issues.  For me, the me reasons actually ended up mattering more.

Initially I changed the way I eat to reduce packaging and tread more lightly on the planet.  But I don’t honestly know if I would have kept it up just for those reasons.  I don’t know because what I discovered was that changing the way I eat changed my life.

It’s like every teacher who ever told me “You get out what you put in” while I rolled my eyes at them held a reunion in my kitchen just to make their point.  With your body, you get out what you put in.  It needs fuel – good, clean, whole, healthy fuel – to get you through the day and keep you going.  And the difference between okay or just getting by and being truly nourished by your food was bigger than I ever imagined it could be.

Food connects you with community, with your family, with your body, with the planet, with your life.  This, I think, is why I really write so much about food.

Food matters.  (And, bonus, you get to eat it!)

Related posts:

1. Real Food Challenge Recap – Week 1
2. Five Real Food Failures

On my last post on CSAs, one of you mentioned in the comments that a breakdown of money-paid/food-received in my CSA share would be helpful.  As I mentioned before, I didn’t do a weight/cost thing each week, which would have been particularly useful for this post.  However, part of the reason I never did this was because the amount of food we received was a) above and beyond what was expected and b) easily exceeded the amount of food we would have gotten for the same dollar figure at the farmers market.  That missing data aside, here’s what we’re left with for this year’s CSA share.

How Much Did It Cost?

There were several options for our CSA share this year:

Regular and extended FarmShare – $600

Regular season FarmShare – $500

Regular and extended HalfShare – $360

Regular season HalfShare – $300

If you signed up and paid your bill before April 18th (we did), you got a $10 discount.  We signed up for a HalfShare – according to the brochure a HalfShare is a good fit for 1-2 people while a FarmShare will feed three or more.  We will definitely stick with a HalfShare next year.  However, based on our selection of food this year, I do plan to plant certain things to supplement the selection (peas, beans, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro, basil, and dill, in case anyone is wondering).

How Long Does It Last?

The answer to this question will most certainly depend on your individual farm and certainly on your region and growing season.  We signed up for the Extended HalfShare this year.  Regular season ran for 20 weeks, beginning the first week in June.  The Extended option continued on for several more weeks, and the last week was a double share with a large selection of storage vegetables.

What Do You Get?

Again, this is going to vary depending on your farm, your area, and how the season goes.  This was a weird year for Western Washington, and our CSA share was a little weird as a result.  So was the farmers market and my backyard, so there’s not much to be said about that.  We were heavy on slicing cucumbers, light on tomatoes and peppers.  To be honest, I never want to see a cucumber again (until next year, I guess).

Photo CC || http://www.flickr.com/photos/chickenthistlefarm – Not mine, but easily could have been.

Our weekly shares this year included asparagus, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, artichokes, chard, lettuce, spinach, carrots, rhubarb, peas, beans, strawberries, raspberries, marion berries, blueberries (omg they were so good), melon, cabbage, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, onions, kohlrabi, garlic, brussel sprouts, corn, potatoes and a variety of herbs.  I’m sure I missed something – there were so many veggies!

Each week we got approximately one brown grocery bag full of veggies.  Typically, there was an assortment of five or so different veggies and a choice of one type of berry and herb.  The quantities and typed varied depending on the month.  For example, at the beginning of the season, we typically got two bunches of lettuce per bag.  There was no lettuce at all in our last bag.  At the beginning of the corn season, we got two ears.  This last bag, we got six!  It’s kind of like Christmas – every bag is a surprise .

Cost / Time = Worth It?

Dividing total cost by week comes out to $14.50 a week for our CSA share.  That is almost certainly less than I would have spent for the same veggies at the farmers market.  Not reflected in the price is the time and gas saved because I didn’t have to go to the farmers market every week.  In fact, I would say I only went to the market on average once or twice a month.  Our CSA share also included a 5% discount at the farm’s booth at the market, so I saved a little bit of money that way as well.

While there were some fruits and veggies I missed and some I felt like I had in excess, the convenience of having everything right there in the bag more than made up for the selection.  The variety encouraged me to try new things, learn new recipes, and eat more broadly than I would under ordinary circumstances.

The Verdict

Saving money + sustainably grown + healthy food + support local farmers = win + win + win + win.

CSA = win.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye, CSA
2. Checking Out Your CSA

My CSA share will be ending in a few weeks and I never got around to writing my “just joined a CSA” post.  But this is goodbye, at least until next year when it picks back up again.  We have a couple more loads of storage vegetables and then we’re hunkering down for the winter.  Which is good, because it’s getting cold here!

My CSA

This year I was a CSA member with Pigman’s Organic Produce Patch.  A mere six miles from my house, it definitely fits the criteria for local.  The certified organic is a bonus, but wouldn’t have been a requirement for me.  FDA organic certification is an expensive process, and many small farmers simply cannot afford it.  A common phrase in the sustainable agriculture circle is “beyond organic,”  and that is the kind of farm the Pigman’s run.

But the main reason I went with the Pigman’s was word of mouth recommendation – my neighbors have had a CSA share with them for several years running and love it.  That was enough for me.  (There is much to be said for minimizing time and research by connecting with people you trust.  Community > going it alone.)

So. Much. Food.

This was a terrible season for western Washington.  Everyone agrees on that.  That being said, my CSA share was incredible.  I got way more food than I imagined I would and some weeks was hard pressed to eat it all.  And although I never tracked it, I know that the monthly breakdown of cost was far less than if I had bought the same food at the farmers market.

I also ended up with an incredible variety of food that I simply never would have selected if left to my own devices.  Kohlrabi, anyone?  Beets and beet greens?  Who knew that these things could be so tasty!  Having them show up in my farmshare meant learning new recipes and trying new things.  While some people might view that as one of the downsides of a CSA share, for me it was a real bonus.  I like not having to pick my vegetables each week, and I like being forced to try new things.

Photo CC || http://www.flickr.com/photos/galant

Saves Time, Saves Gas

Did I mention the farm is just six miles from my house?  Did I mention that my neighbors are also members of this CSA share?  Hurray for carpooling veggies!

I could go to the market each week and pick out my fruits and vegetables, and I would most likely come home with a wider selection.  But I would spend so much more time, money and gas in the process.  And on the rare occasion that I do head to the market for something specific, I am always surprised to discover that I really don’t want to pick out produce, compare prices, and make decisions.

What can I say – I like things easy.  And a CSA share is produce made easy.

Find A CSA

We’re heading into winter now, but that means it’s the perfect time to locate a CSA near you for next year.  The bulk payment is a deterrent for some people, but if you start now, you have time to start squirreling away that chunk of money.  You can also look for a farm that is willing to work out a payment system.

Check at your local farmers market and with your foodie friends.  They might have a recommendation for a great CSA.  Otherwise, you can always look online on sites like Local Harvest, Ecovian, Green People, etc.  Just start Googling and see what you can find!

As for me, I’m sticking with the Pigmans next year.  How many days until spring?  Anyone?

Related posts:

1. Checking Out Your CSA

I ended up skipping one of the weeks of this challenge (preserving in vinegar), because I’m super disorganized these days.  I didn’t have vinegar, my basil went bad, I ended up eating all my cilantro, etc. etc.  The timing never ended up working out.  But just so all of you know, you can preserve things in vinegar!  Things like herbs (think salad dressing) and other veggies as well.  I may end up getting to it later or I may not.  I moved on to the next challenge: preserving in booze.

One of the super fun things about living in the Pacific Northwest is that once a year, free food grows everywhere.  More experienced foragers may argue that this is true anywhere, almost any time.  But I’m a novice and I need my wild-grown bounty to be pretty obvious.  In the Pacific Northwest, blackberries are easily recognizable.  And boy are they IN YOUR FACE.  Just my kind foraged fare.

Photo: CC || http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/

For the last few weeks I’ve been munching the occasional ripe blackberry while I walk the dogs.  It’s a little guilty pleasure to come home with my fingers stained purple and with yet another snag in my jeans.  But the berries are finally starting to ripen en masse around our usual route, so I went out collecting in earnest last week.  And since I can’t possibly eat that many blackberries right here, right now, preserving it is.

So far I’ve frozen blackberry pie filling packs for winter and blackberry preserves are still on the list to make once I pick another batch.  But those seem fairly run of the mill compared to the blackberries in booze.

Blackberries In Booze

I made two different types of blackberries in booze.  Decadent, I know, but in February whose house will you want to have dessert at?  Huh?  Huh?

A little googling turned up this recipe for blackberries in rum (I’m also probably going to try her recipe for jam).  While not technically meeting the criteria for this challenge – it requires freezing – this recipe for blackberry-sangiovese coulis sounded too good to pass up.  I wish I knew more about canning, as freezer space is still at a premium in my house, but I wasn’t willing to risk canning this one.  Maybe next year.

Summer is winding to a close and I’m not even remotely ready (food-wise) for winter.  But I’m a lot closer than I was last year.  It’s all about making progress, one step at a time, and continuing to strengthen and support our local food systems.

Happy September, everyone!

Related posts:

1. Preserving The Bounty – Artichokes in Oil
2. Preserving The Bounty – Week… Um…

I’m so far behind on this challenge it’s not even funny.  We’re in week four right now – preserving in booze - and I just completed the second task: preserving in fat.  I could say that I preserved two different things using the first method, but that’s a pathetic excuse for an excuse.  (Sour pickles and sauerkraut, btw.)

Preserving In Fat

I know, it doesn’t sound great, but we actually eat things that have been preserved in fat all the time.  Have you ever used a pepper out of one of those olive oil jars with peppers floating in them?  Or eaten artichoke hearts canned in oil?  That’s what preserving in fat is, not to mention apple butter, garlic butter, or pretty much any other fresh ingredient you could picture combining with butter.

For this week’s challenge, I decided to preserve artichokes in olive oil.  We had a bunch of baby artichokes left from our CSA share.  I love them steamed with sauces for dipping, but find them to be fairly rich and filling prepared that way.  I also have a hard time disengaging from the, “Artichokes are a luxury” mentality.  The idea of eating three in a week… I just couldn’t do it.

Artichokes In Oil

A little bit of searching the internet turned up many recipes for artichokes in oil.  Unfortunately, most of them required sealing which a) I don’t know how to do yet and b) isn’t a part of this challenge.  I was about to give up when I stumbled on a Google Books page view of a recipe for artichokes in oil, taken from Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning.  The recipe was exactly what I needed and I’m considering buying the book.  It would be nice to have a whole book of resources to pull from on this.  The internet is fantastic, but you have to filter through all the canning recipes in search of what you’re really looking for.

This recipe was easy.  It only took me about 30 minutes, and 20 of that was cooking time where I worked on other kitchen projects.  The one thing I might do differently next time is to trim the artichokes before I cook them.  They were hot and mushy and a little bit hard to handle once they were cooked.  I’m definitely looking forward to eating them on pizza some time this winter!

Root Cellars

The one thing I really wish we had is a root cellar.  I’ve actually never had a root cellar.  But my fridge is filling up with jars of pickles and artichokes and I’m running out of space.

Before we all had home theaters, extra bedrooms, and miscellaneous junk in our basements, everyone had root cellars.  I have gone from thinking they were useless, bug-filled and kind of creepy to wanting one desperately.  I’ve actually been pondering how I might build one in our yard.  I doubt I’ll be able to pull that one off – our basement isn’t below ground and digging up the yard probably isn’t an option at this point.  It makes me kind of sad, because it’s just another example of what we’ve forgotten and how much of what was sensible, common knowledge a few generations ago seems foreign to us now.

Did anyone else try an interesting new trick for preserving food this summer?  How did it turn out?

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When I first moved to Washington last year, I was thrilled to discover that you can buy raw milk here.  From the store.  For those of you who don’t know about the war over raw milk being waged all over the country, or if you are lucky enough to have lived your life in a state where selling raw milk is legal, this might not seem like a very big deal to you.  But some of you will totally understand my joy at walking into the Olympia Food Co-op and seeing raw cow and goat milk on the shelf.

Raw Milk Is Different

There are tons of resources online talking about the health benefits of raw milk.  There’s a lot of science and research and all that good stuff. I honestly don’t care about that, and all of that is not the reason that I use raw milk.  I use raw milk because for my entire life, I’ve been dairy-intolerant.  I’m not sure if it’s the lactose or what, but milk has been pretty much out for me.

But I can drink raw milk.  I can eat raw milk cheese to my heart’s content and I can consume pudding made from raw milk with abandon.  For whatever reason, raw milk works for me.  Plus it just tastes so much better than the other stuff.  So when I got the chance to join a local milk-share program and get a weekly supply of raw milk for far less than I was paying at the store, I didn’t even hesitate to say yes.

Happy Milk From Happy Cows

Part of the milk share deal is that we rotate picking up milk for everyone.  Once every couple of months it is my turn to pick up the empty bottles at our drop point, drive out to the farm, swap out empty bottles for full bottles and bring them back to the drop point.  Last Friday it was my first turn for pickup, which means I got to meet the cows!  Okay, so maybe meet is a strong word, but I did make DH take this blurry cell phone picture (I forgot to bring the good camera) of a cow laying in a sprinkler being a cow.  We got to say hi to the chickens (the farm also does eggs) who were happily wandering around the property pecking things and being chickens.

The whole thing made me feel great about where we get our milk.  Really great because it was so… not what you see in the horrible PETA videos.  It was basically the opposite of that.  It also seemed totally doable for people to eat like this.  There are quite a few families involved in our milk share and not that many cows, not that much land, not a big operation.  I understand that there are problems with scaling, particularly where food production for cities is concerned.  But the more I see, the more I think it can be done, and that it won’t be that hard if the paradigm would just shift.

It’s fascinating to me that something as small as going to the farm to take a turn picking up milk can make you feel like a part of something larger.  It’s a continuation of the blur between small actions and big changes and writing new stories that touch other people’s lives.  It’s something about building community and nurturing the people around you.

But mostly it tastes really good.

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I know I’ve been gone forever.  More on that on Wednesday, because there are words, but there are far too many of them to include in a post about PICKLES!

Pickles, pickles, pickles.

I’ve been riddled with guilt about the fact that I’ve done… what’s the opposite of something?  Oh right, nothing!  I’ve done nothing to preserve any food so far this summer, which means I am setting myself up for a long and cranky winter if I want to be eating mostly local food.  Fortunately, Jenny at Nourished Kitchen started a Preserve The Bounty challenge for us for the month of August.  It was time to raid my local farmers market (which is wonderful, by the way), pull out my jars and my salt, and start tucking things away.

I’m a little disappointed that the challenge doesn’t include hot water bath canning.  I get the energy efficiency and nutrient-rich side of these preservation methods, but right now I’m filling up my fridge and freezer and space is at a premium.  (My husband is also giving me skeptical looks about the jars of pickles and sauerkraut accumulating in our fridge.)  I also have never canned before and am scared and want someone to hold my hand!  Guess I’ll have to find that elsewhere .  I’ll keep working on catching up so that we have a variety of delicious, local foods stocked up this winter.

Week… Um…

Ok, so I’m behind.  But this week I made sauerkraut from one of my heads of CSA cabbage and five jars of sour pickles from pickling cucumbers at the farmers market.  We also ate some of the purple sauerkraut that I made back in February during Jenny’s Real Food Challenge with local pastured pork bratwurst.  It was so delicious!  So yes, this method really does work and does preserve food for a very long time!

Sour pickles, sauerkraut and grains and lentils sprouting on the left.

How has your summer been?  What’s going on in your kitchens?  Anyone have any good preserving recipes and methods to share?

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2. Real Food Challenge Recap – Week 3
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Do you ever get discouraged reading food blogs?  Real food, gorgeous pictures, amazing meals… I know I can’t be the only one.  They just have it so together.  I am never that together.

In case you’ve been spending too much time perusing the blogs of more competent individuals, I am here to make you feel better about what actually goes on in your kitchen.  I know I’ve shared some successful moments in the past, but rest assured that for as many good meals as I’ve produced, my food experiments have produced just as many strange, ugly and just plain inedible results.

#5 – Kombucha Explosion

Once upon a time, I made kombucha.  And it went really well.  It brewed, it had flavrz.  And it carbonated really nicely.  Too nicely, in fact.  Which was apparent when I opened a bottle and it shot kombucha-infused raspberry mush all over my kitchen.  My sliding glass doors, my cabinets, my windows, my vaulted ceilings.

Definitely one of those moments I was glad the hubs wasn’t home to see it.  If you’ve ever seen the Big Bang Theory, his face would have done that twitchy thing that Sheldon’s does when his brain is about to explode.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*twitch twitch*  But he also probably would have cleaned it up for me…

#4 – Tortillas x Two

I also tried to make tortillas with cornmeal.  Why?  Because I didn’t know any better.  Those were… gross.  Just really gross.  Sort of weird, fried, dried corn pancake things.

So I went and got corn flour.  If you’re in the know, you’re already laughing at me.  If you’re not in the know, FYI – you can’t make tortillas with corn flour.  Masa, my friends, you need masa.

An hour later (10 PM), piles of half-cooked, crumpled, broken, weird, dry, ruined tortillas in a pile on my counter, I gave up and ate a salad for dinner.

#3 – Impatient Ghee

Then there was the 10 PM ghee.  (You may notice a theme here with the starting of food projects in the middle of the night.  I should probably stop doing this.)

I thought ghee would be fast.  You know, simmer butter, skim milk fats off the top, the end.  Easy, right?

I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  Nothing…

Finally, about 45 minutes later, I got impatient and cranked up the heat.  And it was awesome!  There was boiling.  There was separating.  I win at ghee!  And then… it turned brown, black… dead.  Burned the whole damn batch.  Cranky, cranky, cranky Jess.

I must confess that I haven’t tried to make ghee again.  Every time I think about it, I get a little twitchy.  Like Sheldon.

#2 – Lacto-Fermented Marmalade

Lacto-fermented marmalade.  If you take a look at the comments, you will see how Annette saved me from near-death or at least extreme discomfort by informing me that my whey was NOT ALIVE and therefore would not be lacto-fermenting anything.  I proceeded to leave the marmalade on my counter for over a week for fear of being attacked by scary mold monsters when I attempted to discard it.  In the end there were no scary mold monsters.  Just lots of very strong-smelling carbonated orange weirdness.

#1 – The Worm

I really don’t have a good explanation for this one.  A picture will have to suffice.  Sourdough fail + leftover jam = The Worm.  Yes, I did eat some of it.  No, it was not good.

How about you?  Real food failures?  Real food successes?  Any worms in your culinary closet?

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I almost didn’t write a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle because 1) it’s so last year, and 2) you should just blow off reading this review and go get the book.  But it also feels odd to not review what, for me, has become a foundation of my understanding of local food, even if a ton of other people have already said what I’m about to say.  So I’ll be brief and at least try to say something a little bit new about this wonderful book .

What’s It About?

This book is a lovely mosaic of anecdote, humor, education and commentary about one family’s year-long attempt to eat local food, much of which they grew themselves.  Beginning in March, it follows the Kingsolver family through the seasons, narrating their journey as well as their reasons for embarking on this adventure in the first place.  The book also features contributions by Kingsolver’s husband and older daughter, which allow the reader to follow the family’s adventure through different eyes.

As you might imagine, the bits about industrial agriculture are both fascinating and horrifying.  But through Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver offers us a glimpse of a different future; one in which we are consciously and sustainably connected to our communities and the planet through the food that we eat.  Her vision is one that I can (and did, and DO) buy into and believe in.

Read This Book

Seriously, if you are at all interested in sustainable agriculture, local food systems, or just plain good food, you should read this book.  Or if you don’t know anything about turkey sex, but feel like your life would be infinitely better if you did.  If you like adventures in the unconventional and the unknown, if you find yourself vegging out in front of the Food Network, if you need a nudge to pursue a bizarre and difficult dream, if you’re a fan of Kingsolver’s other work, or if you just love good writing, read this book.

Finally – maybe this is going a bit far, maybe it’s not – if you consumer of food in the US, you should read this book.  There are things we should know about the food we eat.  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an accessible and, most importantly, fundamentally enjoyable exploration of some of the food issues we face as a country.

But Don’t Get Discouraged

I know it’s easy to get discouraged when you read about a project of this magnitude.  It’s a big undertaking, and not all of us are starting with the same advantages.  The Kingsolver family owned a piece of property that was perfectly suited for this experiment.  They also had jobs that were flexible enough that they could continue to support themselves throughout the project.  And they had kids who were old enough to be engaged in the project as active (and helpful) participants.

But remember that an experiment such as this doesn’t come about all at once.  Innumerable steps, small changes, research and groundwork laid the path for the first sentence, when the journey begins.  And time… it takes time.  (But time is usually less interesting than the actual journey, so guess what ends up in the book?)

At its heart, this is a story about priorities, and pursuing what the things that are important to you.  It probably would have been easier for them to stay in Arizona.  It definitely would have been easier for all of them to stay within their comfort zones.  But they didn’t.  And we don’t have to either.  The first step is just as important as the one that follows, and each of us can start stepping outside of our own comfort zones, bit by bit, one day at a time.

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Whey, whey, whey coming out of my ears.  The second thought I had after making cheese was, “Wow… this is a lot of whey.  Wonder what I do with it.”  (The first was something along the lines of, “Omg… OMG!  I MADE CHEESE!”)

Electronics + food = how I roll.

I stuck the whey in my fridge, then I moved the whey (and the fridge), and back into the fridge it went.  And there it sat.  I did a little bit of cursory googling, but most of what I came up with were suggestions to soak oatmeal or flour with it.  A tablespoon at a time.  I was never going to get rid of all this whey.  In fact, the only suggestion that I could find for using a ton of it was to use it in soup.  Now, I am decidedly anti-filler.  I don’t believe in hiding food in other food just for nutritional value.  Whey in soup kind of seemed like filler to me, and I really wanted to find a recipe in which the whey got to live a life of purposeful whey-ness.  (Yes, I know I’m weird with my existential food thing.)

I have to confess that I was mildly grossed out by the Sustainable Eats lacto-fermented blog carnival.  I’m still working on getting over my aversion to letting food sit on the counter for days on end.  But I was sold on the idea when I discovered that lacto-fermenting is all about whey.  No WHEY!  I gotta find a way to use all this whey…

Could my toaster oven be more grimy?

I decided to try out Annette’s recipe for lacto-fermented marmalade.  Not only do I love marmalade, but having a ton of marmalade on hand gives me an excuse to eat another food I love: English breakfast sausages.  Yum.  Serious yum.  It also gives me a reason to try to make Irish soda bread, which I believe calls for clabbered milk.  (Clabbered milk also ends up in my fridge pondering for the meaning of life.)

Watch me melt my laptop on accident...

Marmalade it is.  Fun new thing: learned about scalding jars.  I scalded the jar.  And my counter.  And the stove.  And almost myself.  Apart from the scalding issue, which was definitely a user-error, this marmalade was a snap!  I can’t wait to try it in a few days.  But here’s what I really want to know.  Rapadura – the sweetener in the recipe – is brown.  That is why my marmalade is kinda brown.  So why isn’t Annette’s marmalade brown??

In other food news, last night my kombucha completed its second ferment.  I know this because when I opened a bottle to do a taste test, it exploded all over my counter.  Sufficiently carbonated, VERY tasty.  Kombucha rules!

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