Local Organic Passover and Easter

Feast days are great days to show your friends and family how simply you can incorporate local, seasonal and organic foods into your routine (and not-so-routine) eating.  If you aren’t so confident, especially in these winter-into-spring days, here’s some inspiration for your Passover and Holy Week gatherings.

Eggs and certain meats play heavily into a lot of these celebrations.  Luckily for you and your farmer, eggs are often available (thanks to the hens) year round, and provide some valuable income for those farmers who don’t have an abundance of vegetable and fruit crops.  For this and plenty of other reasons (note: we can’t verify how scientific the linked studies are, but seem to be well-accepted; we do notice a real taste and quality difference at the table, though), we urge you to buy your eggs from a farmer!  With eggs, you can make food for your suddenly-vegetarian cousin, nephew, whomever.  These dishes help stretch out your food dollar as well.  Try your hand at a frittata, a quiche, a savory bread pudding, or a Spanish tortilla filled with NY cheese, herbs, onion, any spring greens you’re fortunate to find locally-grown, and of course our workhorse, the potato.  And as for the meat (and dairy if you’re using it this holiday), we urge you to research how hormones and pesticides accumulate in animal tissues.  When making something like schmaltz, do you want to be concentrating untold contaminants into this rendered fat?  Besides, that chicken probably cost you a bit more than the supermarket chicken, don’t let the extra bits go to waste, make that schmaltz! The simple recipe for rendered chicken fat (schmaltz) from an NPR article tells you all you need to know.  How proud would you be if your schmaltz was local and organic schmaltz?

Spring means still-chilly weather and a feeling like we need to take a little of the heaviness out of our diet.  Perfect for broth-y spring soups that could care less that the long-stored veggies look a little less pristine and plump these days.  The classic Matzoh ball soup is locavore makeover-ready.  Find as many of the ingredients local and organic, (chicken, garlic, herbs, carrots, perhaps some other veggies too) and you’ve done a great thing without overriding your traditions.  If you’re not tied to a particular holiday soup, work with any local vegetables you can find, add plenty of chopped or crushed herbs for brightness, and you’re mostly there!  Dice up that last butternut squash or bag of potatoes and add them into the soup pot for a dainty treatment of these hefty winter staple vegetables.

Fresh recipes aside, did you preserve anything this summer or fall?  If spring holidays aren’t the right time to open those jars, is there any hope for this world?  Even I, stingy and apocalypse-ready, will be opening some jars preserves and pickles at this time of year, and cooking down the last of the frozen strawberries into something heavenly.

Honey also plays into a lot of our recipes this time of year.  While it’s definitely too cold for any new honey, there’s often a farmer or beekeeper who still has some honey from the last year.  Just like eggs, this is a crucial economic helper for the farmer in this season of transition from storage foods to fresh growth.  Of course, there are plenty of food-safety and -quality issues that would also drive you to find local honey (not to mention eggs and meats).  Can you make your charoset with local apples and honey?  We bet you can!

If you’re more flexible on your celebration dishes, may we suggest:

Carrot and beet salad with honey dressing–more beautiful than easter eggs!

Roasted carrots (instead of baby carrots in the linked recipe, just cut down regular carrots into uniform sticks or spears); find some local butter and herbs to enhance!

Dilled potato gratin (ok, the opposite of the spring broth soup idea, but filling for a crowd!)

Egg bread can use local flour and eggs (I just realized it may seem strange that I’m used to eating a Jewish traditional celebration bread for celebrations during the time of year when my Jewish friends can’t eat flour…sorry guys!)

NY wines!  Don’t forget (if you don’t need Kosher for Passover wine) to drink local if you drink with your celebrations.

Organic Matzoh? Easter chocolate/candy?  Probably can’t get these locally, but you KNOW there are fair-trade, organic options that are mighty tasty, right?  Check a natural foods store for that sort of thing.

 

Regional, Local and Traditional

Rachel here!  Recently we sent our loyal Locavore Challenge registrants (still time–click here to say, “I’m a Locavore, too!”) a tip of the day that encouraged them to interview friends and family about their food traditions.  While I didn’t do that on the particular day, and I’m late in writing this essay (which is what it’s turned into), I DO think traditional food is so interesting. I’ve written about my grandfather’s insistence on simple but classic food.  He was the one that once, in the manner that a drug pusher might, opened up the fridge and pulled out a mysterious jar of dark goo.  He said it was the darkest maple syrup, the really good stuff.  We kept Aunt Jemima on the table for my grandmother, but some of us dared to spoon (no, SCOOP) some dark, probably-meant-as-cooking-grade syrup onto our own pancakes.  He knew real food.  My dear mother (who reads these posts faithfully, and thinks I write them all–mom, hi, this one IS me) fed her two young athletic vegetarian children lots of pasta with sauce and alternated it with chips and cheese and rice and beans and veggies piled in the middle.  We had to try everything we were given, and I don’t remember refusing veggies except for salad.  Obviously that changed.  I somehow became addicted to veggies and to cooking elaborate food and she patiently (maybe eventually gratefully) stepped aside to let me run the kitchen–messes and delayed dinner times included.  The first week of September I was able to cook many meals for her using Maine-grown produce while we were on vacation there.  We ate lots of corn (still in season up there) and cole slaw and seafood and pies and treats of all sorts.  Not all local ingredients, but strongly rooted in tradition.  Cole slaw, for instance.  It COULD have all been local, and probably started out as a regional food in the Northeast because cabbage is such a champion grower, eggs for mayonnaise could be easily found, and because it’s such a great flavor pair for fish.  I think that’s the point of this post as I set out to write it.

Regional Downeast Maine food–lobster, mussels, cole slaw, corn, cornbread, potato salad. All local-able and in this case, likely it was actually locally sourced down to the veggies.

When thinking about a food that’s tied to a place by people, local ingredients are an obvious choice–a lot to do with convenience, a lot to do with flavor, a lot to do with knowing the farmer, and a lot to do with nothing else being available at a good quality or price, until recent strange product-chain “developments” changed that.  The recipes remain, and it’s up to the cook or chef to find the ingredient–we, as locavores, can seek out the local foods that make those recipes what they used to be!  I remember some fancy NY Italian restaurant getting a lot of press for not importing Italian ingredients.  The chefs put it plainly that REAL Italian food uses mostly what’s local because it tastes the best.  Things like olive oil and particular spices and ingredients were still imported.

That’s why I (and so many of us) love traveling–the first thing I do, often before I even reach my destination, is look for a farm stand or market, regardless of country or county.  (New York, by the way, is a minefield.  My work trips usually end up with a backseat full of produce rolling around.  It’s not that different from my Rochester produce, but I love to find the early crops in the Hudson Valley or the late ones up north.)  To learn about other food traditions when I can’t travel, I spend a LOT of time reading cookbooks as if they were textbooks.  I’m not talking about the cookbooks that don’t seem to feel uncomfortable putting a mid-winter storage crop with a tender summer herb, page after page.  I’m talking about cookbooks that generally call out a country or region of the US, or region of the world, and then use that “regional” descriptor.  We’re in a great age when a lot of these reference materials (cookbooks, if you must) are available to us.  My public library is full of gems.  The best ones have long descriptions of the region’s climate, and recipes that make you nod your head thinking, oh I could get most of those ingredients at one time.  Many recipes seem stupid-simple, but they’re included because that’s the traditional way.  There are nuances in the techniques that tie that list of ingredients to that tradition.  A basket of green peppers, tomatoes, onions and carrots means something to different cooks in different cultures.   A hard thing for me, personally, is to stick to recipes that seem to simple.  To actually measure things.  I know the traditional cooks don’t do that, but clearly someone studied what a grandma or grandpa did and tried to record it for all time, and for a reason…so I try to follow a recipe closely when I’m world-eating.

I happened to be working my way through a Turkish regional cookbook recently.  Turkey must be amping its tourism efforts lately as everyone but me seems to be going there.  When I go, I’ll be ready to find all those interesting ingredients and foods I’ve read about.  Reading this book, I kept nodding my head to the ingredient lists and simple recipes.  Everything seemed to fit with seasons in New York (except lentils, which need a long dry summer that NY just doesn’t guarantee).  I wondered, is Turkey like New York, growing-conditions wise?  I am a plant scientist, after all.  So then I looked up this map of world climates:

Seems like if you eliminate the fact that New York is a “snow” region, we aren’t too far different from the climate around the Black Sea.  While I love to learn about food traditions around the world and sometimes get lucky with a recipe that uses co-seasonal ingredients (I made that term up), I don’t anticipate such an exact match up.  I didn’t realize that this cuisine, regardless of region within the country, would be so vegetable-grain-legume heavy.  I could source and cook these recipes with the greatest of ease!  Turkey, where had you been all my life?  Right there, I suppose, changing your name from Constantinople to Istanbul…but still.  It was cool to find out that the Black Sea region is heavily cornmeal-focused, even down to their standard bread.  Now, as a Pennsylvania girl, I can get behind corn and cornmeal!  Great that we also have several organic NY grain corn (not sweet corn…which also is amazing) growers and millers.  I learned that many of the soups from that region, including those that use now-abundant chard and leafy greens, have this added step of toasting cornmeal in a dry skillet and adding the nutty thickener to the soup right at the end.  I tried this right away-definitely a new trick for my arsenal.  A cool thing about New York is that we have all four seasons.  In winter, we can learn about Russian food traditions and get into beet-y borschts.  In summer, we can use our plates to travel to South America and Asia, with a few spices thrown in, thanks to Marco Polo rules of Locavorism.

United Noshes is a great blog for this sort of experiment, as is Global Table Adventure.  These blogs are starting points and interesting, but I think cookbooks do more thorough work due to the nature of the medium.  Perennial Plate does some very honest and captivating work, and they toured through New York last year!

Upcoming: Potluck at Glenwood Church (Long Island)

Sustainable Sea Cliff Cooperative along with Glenwood Arts and Slow Food Huntington are excited to host NOFA-NY’s 3rd Annual Locavore Challenge
and Potluck Across NY

Sunday September 30th –  5:30 PM
@ Glenwood Church
70 Grove Street, Glenwood Landing, NY 11547

Please join us for an evening of conviviality and lively discussion.
Topics will include our industrialized food system, GMO’s, fracking, our own community garden and how we can create and support a healthy, local food system.

For more information, please visit: www.seacliffcoop.org

Honey, you’re so versatile.

Here at NOFA-NY HQ, we’ve discovered the joys of maple and honey in more than traditional oatmeal-sweetening or cookie-enhancing applications.  Last year, Rachel posted a bit about the ways to convert recipes to use just these local sweeteners.  Today, in honor of Rosh Hashana (and all that honey you might have left over from celebrations) and our food of the day (along with maple syrup) being honey, we wanted to pass along our secrets for honey and maple syrup.

First off, use honey (and maple) as more than replacements for sugar–use them as a recipe “wow” factors.  It’s true, honey goes with vegetables.  Stephanie, our Admin Assistant, is known at staff potlucks for her eggplant fritters drizzled with honey.  Rachel, Beginning Farmer Program Coordinator, loves to add some honey into tomato sauces and soups.  The stronger the honey (go for buckwheat or a dark fall flower varietal, with their robust undertones).  Salad dressings and mustardy sandwich spreads are certainly enhanced by lighter honeys.  Honey and pungent herbs are also fantastic teamed up as a root vegetable glaze.  Try this: chop thick chunks of carrots and beets, then add them to enough simmering water to cover the bottom of a saucepan.  Steam/simmer the veggies until about halfway softened, then add in sprigs of thyme, rosemary or sage and a spoon or two of honey.  Stir to dissolve the honey and heat on low for a bit until the water and honey have created a glaze over the vegetables.  Remove the herbs before serving, and dish up hot, room temp or chilled!

Buckwheat, the nectar of which creates some really potent honey, thanks to bees.

Since we can’t totally leave out a maple syrup secret, we’ll remind you of the virtue of a maple-dairy-bitter/salty combination.  Here are two: a maple cafe au lait or salty maple morning cereal.  For the coffee, just add a teaspoon of good local 100% pure maple syrup into a 3/4-full cup of hot coffee, add warmed milk and stir up for a decadent treat.  If you think salted caramel is just fantastic, apply the sweet-salt principle with maple.  Drizzle some syrup over ice cream with a pinch of sea or flake salt.  OR do what Rachel does: add extra salt to your morning hot cereal and stir in some maple syrup and plain yogurt–homemade if you’re into that sort of thing.  For anyone who exercises regularly and doesn’t get enough salt, this is a great way to help with that electrolyte balance.  The salty-sweet creamy porridge seems like dessert, though it’s actually a high-fiber, whole-grain and highly filling breakfast.  The thing to remember with maple syrup is that a little goes a long way–so you may end up consuming fewer grams of sugar for a bigger flavor/sweet payout.

Maple sugaring taps. It’s a long journey from tree to coffee, but there just is no shortcut or substitute for the amber-colored perfection.

Reports from Local-Food Celebrations this past Weekend

Nancy, our Finance and HR Manager, had a great time working at the NOFA-NY table at last weekend’s Greentopia EcoFest here in Rochester.  Here’s her summary:

We had a great day speaking to many Greentopia folks – and many people were interested in our support of organic farmers.  We handed out many of our fall newsletters and discussed the Locavore challenge to promote the purchase of locally grown food – yet another way to support New York state farmers and producers!

Speaking of Locavore- –the “food court” for Greentopia was filled with LOCAL foodies.  All of the food provided through these vendors met the Locavore Challenge – plus had to provide biodegradeable packaging to help lower the trash footprint left by the event.  Greentopia EcoFest integrated many industries focused on sustainable practices, so it went beyond food.  Information ranged from utilizing recycled or upcycled materials, alternative energy vehicles, methods for heating and cooling, as well as overall focus on biodegradable or no-waste generating products.

Megan, who came to EcoFest with Nancy, took a break in the middle of the food court to hula hoop. Looks like that potato farmer was entertained.

Rachel was able to be a guest at a farmer-forward event in Branchport, NY.  Stacey and John Grabski have been hosting their “Big Cook” event for 14 years now, and in the past few years they’ve held a dessert contest that benefits NOFA-NY.  Entrants paid a small amount and had their desserts judged (this year Rachel was one of four expert judges, and she used her vote to sway towards Locavore or seasonal-inspired entries).  Winners received a NOFA-NY Locavore goodie bag (thanks to many of our sponsors who donated their products), but NOFA-NY really won this one, receiving a generous donation from all the entrants plus the chance to expose even more people to their work and the Locavore lifestyle.  Aside from dessert, there was a very long buffet line that featured so many different local meats (including bison), corn and potatoes.  Wine and beer from the region were also served, and clearly this was the place to be if you were at all connected to farming at the northern end of Keuka lake.  The event also supports the local FFA with an auction–it got pretty rowdy.  It’s truly amazing how a single family with a great idea can effect change in their local farming scene.

In the moment

Do you not drink the local milk in your fridge because “that’s for yogurt”?

Do you look at a beautiful basket of CSA tomatoes and sigh because “canning gets so stressful”?

Essentially, do you forget to enjoy the now-ness of seasonal, local eating because you’ve been at it so long that you’ve formed (admittedly well-intentioned) food preservation habits that override the spirit of Locavorism?

If so, you might be me.

That’s why I love being on NOFA-NY staff during the Locavore Challenge.  It’s a lot of work, on our end, to be present at events, publish daily e-mails, remember to post sponsor information on the website, mail out calendars and materials to our generous (and patient) regional partners and helpers.  But it’s so fun to get to see all the new people discovering delicious local foods.  It’s like they’ve been let into a secret club (though obviously our goal is to make it a very un-secret club).  It’s a club I’ve been in a long time, and the newbies remind me about my first bite of a fresh farm tomato.

Have I ever told that story?  If you follow this blog, you’d assume I was always queen of the tomato-eaters.  I was only crowned such about 5 years ago.  I was working on my friend’s farm and I thought I didn’t like tomatoes.  I was 22.  My dad had grown tomatoes (his thing was the yellow pear tomatoes) in our garden, as I’m sure my grandfather had as well.  Yet I never liked them fresh (cooked, sure).  But something about that first-adult-tomato-still-warm-from-the-sun combined with a heck of a lot of not-wanting-to-offend-my-friend-and-employer had me hooked.  I LOVE tomatoes.  Even after picking them in hot plastic high tunnels til I turned yellow-green with sap…I loved them since that summer.

So why am I lately more stressed than happy over an abundance of tomatoes (no offense to my CSA farmers, who are totally rocking it this year)?  It’s because I have, on occasion, forgotten to actually just eat them.  Not eat whatever’s left over from canning.  Not eat because they’ll go bad (they will).  Just eat because I now love tomatoes.  A lot of this is my personality–I tend to want to postpone my enjoyment or finishing something until just the right time.  I don’t want the season, happiness, etc. to end.  Generally, I like this policy.  I eat divine local food year-round (though less during certain months).  But that survival mentality can be problematic if I don’t keep it in check.  I ought not worry so much if I have one less jar of preserved tomatoes this winter, or if I don’t buy extra greens to freeze.  I’m still an okay person doing my best to eat local!  It’s not as if I’ve abandoned eating local by putting a little less food away…I doubt I’ll be relying on fast food or anything like THAT this winter.

My furry friend says, “No canning tonight, Rachel! Stay out of this pantry and go enjoy life!”

Some people might say “carpe diem.”  We locavores might say “carpe solanum lycopersicum.”  A favorite poet of mine would say “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”  In any case, this is my thank you for giving new-to-you local, seasonal foods a try and showing your enthusiasm for the Locavore Challenge.  This afternoon I barely bought anything at the farmer’s market–I just went to say hi and get a few salad-bound items.  I love the market because it’s full of newbies and old hands with local eating.  We all come there and form this funky community through a common desire to know our farmers and eat the freshest food we can (and that wasn’t intended to be clever, but I guess I do mean eating the freshest food possible, tonight; but also, preserving the fresh food through canning and eating it later).  I tasted some heirloom tomatoes from a friend/farmer’s table and grinned at the guy tasting next to me, who was trying very hard to remember which sample corresponded to which tomato, testing them all multiple times to decide which he’d buy.  My guess is he’d only buy one or two tomatoes, but take them home and truly savor them.  He might try to get a spouse or child to taste one, and he might be successful.  But in that moment, he was enjoying what seemed a new thing for him, all those colors of glittery goodness on the end of toothpicks. He inspired me.  Instead of feeling like a loser for not buying a bulk quantity of something to put away for winter, I made a different play: I indulged in locally-made ice cream with my food dollars, and saved the rest of that for another day’s canning, pickling or drying adventures.  Today was about today.  I enjoyed every luscious lick of that ice cream, it was truly the perfect mid-fall hot afternoon treat. Tonight I’m canning nothing, but I’ll be drinking an ice-cold glass of tomato juice from what I have here at home–not enough to make sauce or salsa, but just right for juice.  Or I might make gazpacho.  It doesn’t matter, it’s going to be simple, it’s going to rock my world and there won’t be anything but a memory come January!

A word from Harris Seeds, Sponsor-of-the-Day for Sept. 11, 2012

Since today is the day for Planting an Herb or Window Garden, it’s only fitting that our sponsors are Harris Seeds.  NOFA-NY thanks Harris Seeds for their generous sponsorship and donation of a Worm Power fertilizer kit, which will be one of our raffled-off prizes at the Greentopia festival Ecofest event this weekend.

“Harris Seeds proudly sponsors “Challenge of the Day” this September 11, 2012. Today, participants across New York are challenged to plant an organic herb or window garden. Raising herbs indoors is a simple way to add aroma and flavor to wintertime cooking, and it’s a manageable project for beginner gardeners.

To get started, gardeners can find a wide selection of untreated herb seeds, organic herb seeds, and organic fertilizers at www.harrisseeds.com. Harris Seeds also offers organic vegetable seeds, untreated vegetable seeds, untreated cut flower seeds, organic vegetable and herb plugs, and OMRI listed supplies for organic growers and gardeners alike.”

Photo Credit: Joshua Levine, 2010