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A quick jaunt through Headhouse Square
Monday, May 12, 2008
Over the weekend I accidentally ended up at the Headhouse Square farmer’s market with two friends. For a Spring market, the selection wasn’t bad at all! Some rhubarb, tons of salad greens of all varieties, bok choy, radishes, spinach...and herb and vegetable plants. Tons of them! So if you’re looking for herb plants, head over next weekend - I picked up some super healthy-looking parsley, dill, rosemary, and tarragon from one of the vendors. Yoder Heirlooms, in particular, had gorgeous looking produce.
Aside from produce, the market had at least two vendors of locally made bread, as well as cakes and quick breads, jam, honey, artisan sausage and pepperoni, and cheese. I saw a sign for boneless duck, and noticed two other meat vendors. There were lots of great eggs available, too.
The real star, though, was asparagus. Quite a few vendors had really gorgeous asparagus, and from what I’ve been hearing the asparagus crop is stellar this year and extra early. Last night I made asparagus risotto with the bunch I picked up yesterday at Headhouse Square market - it was delicious!
I really like asparagus, and am always disappointed by the crappy, tasteless commercially grown stuff available in the Winter, so my plan is to buy at least a dozen bunches or so while it’s in season and preserve it for later...in a few different ways.
My favorite method is freezing - it’s the preservation method that saves the most nutrients. Trim the asparagus ends, sort by thickness, and blanch them in boiling water - 2 minutes for thin spears, 3 minutes for medium, and 5 minutes for thick ones. And then give them an ice bath, let them dry, and freeze them. They can be frozen for eight or nine months.
Asparagus can also be canned in a pressure canner. The texture does suffer a bit, so I usually don’t can them. However, I do like the look of nice, canned asparagus spears. Blanch them for about three minutes after you’ve trimmed the ends, and pack them into canning jars while the asparagus is still hot. Add 1/2 to 1 tsp of salt and boiling water, leaving about 1 inch of headspace. Close up your jars and process at 10 pounds of pressure for 25-30 minutes.
I also plan on making some asparagus ravioli for a rainy day.
Freshly made ravioli freezes nicely - just don’t make huge and overstuff ravioli. Arrange them on a layer of wax paper on a cookie sheet covered in corn meal, freeze them, and then pack them into freezer bags. They can go right from the freezer into some boiling water when you’re ready to cook them.
Cowtipper cheese from Calkins Creamery
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Recently, the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market started carrying cheese from Calkins Creamery. Calkins Creamery is in Honesdale, which is a bit outside the 100 mile radius that many of us use to count as ‘local’. That said, I’m not considering this a cheat - it’s a farm worth supporting. The Bryant family has been farming in Wayne County for 125 years. The current Bryant farming family spent some time in California learning about artisan cheese before returning, and now produce cheese using hormone-free raw milk from their pampered herd of Holstein cows.
You know what they say: happy cows make happy cheese. Or something like that. It’s no joke. I picked up a piece of the Cowtipper cheese the other day and can’t say enough good things about it.
Cowtipper is Calkins’ version of a Gouda-style cheese. It’s soaked in Nevada Pale Ale for 48 hours, encased in wax, and then aged for sixty days or more. I’m pretty sure I must have looked really silly eating the cheese - before eating each slice I felt compelled to take a good long whiff. Because of the beer the cheese smells amazing. And it tastes good, too. It definitely has a Gouda-esque way about it.
I’m not as crazy about Calkins’ 4 Dog Dill, a Havarti-style cheese flavored with dill. The cheese is tasty and all, but I really never got any of the dill flavor.
There are many more Calkins Creamery cheeses to be tried, and they all look really interesting. But the Cowtipper is my early favorite!
Eat your weeds
Monday, April 28, 2008
Dandelions are popping up everywhere I look lately. They are the bane of my existence in the garden, mostly because they’re so hard to permanently get rid of. Maybe I shouldn’t try so hard and, instead, use the overabundance of weeds to my advantage. In terms of foraging, the dandelion is useful in a variety of ways - from the leaves to the blossoms.
The most common use of the dandelion are the greens. You’ll pay a small fortune for dandelion greens at the market - if you can even find them. They’re great in salads as a bitter green, or fantastic cooked down in a saute or soup or warm salad. Just walk out to your back yard or where ever dandelions are plentiful and pick the leaves off the plant!
I only recently discovered that you can eat the dandelion blossoms, as well! Try fried dandelion blossoms, dandelion jelly, or dandelion wine. You can even use dandelion root to make coffee.
Dandelions can even be used for home remedies - dandelion oil is used to treat rheumatism.
There’s treasure in those weeds you keep mowing over - be sure to pick those dandelion flowers and leaves before you mow next time!
Other dandelion recipes:
recipes for invasive plants
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Last week, a friend of mine showed me the APWG recipe page, called Eat Your Weedies. Some of the links there include recipes for garlic mustard soup, Japanese knotwood and apple pie, barberry jelly, and rose hip jam. I know some of us have talked about trying to learn to identify and hunt mushrooms, but most of these invasives are much easier to spot. And, hey, eating invasive plants gives the native plants just a little more of a chance, in addition to being relatively simple to find nearby.
(Lilac shown because I bought a branch of lilac blossoms at the farmers’ market this morning. I don’t recommend eating them.)
I spy…a farmers market!
Monday, April 21, 2008
It’s just about that time: time for outdoor farmer’s markets to reopen! Woohoo!
Here are the opening dates we know of. Have any to add? Leave us a comment!
Headhouse Square - May 4
South & Passyunk - May 6
Rittenhouse Square - May 13
City Hall - May 14
University Square - May 7
Oakmont Market - May 21
10th & Chestnut - May 22
Chestnut Hill Growers Market - May 10
Swarthmore Farmers Market - May 17
Lansdowne Farmers Market - May 24
Collingswood Farmers Market - May 3
Haddonfield Farmers Market - May 10
Something new every day!
Friday, April 18, 2008
This is really a fun time of year to eat locally. There’s not a ton of stuff that’s seasonal, but fresh things keep dribbling into the farmer’s markets and every day brings some new shoot in the garden. I have tons of chives already, and there’s some overwintered sorrel that looks ready to harvest! And did I mention the fig growing on my fig tree?
Every time I get the email about what’s coming in the next week at the Fair Food Farmstand, I can’t open it fast enough. This week there are wild garlic bulbs and spring scallions from Green Meadow Farm. There’s baby rainbow chard and beet greens. Spinach. There’s even a recipe included involving the garlic and the great, locally grown spelt berries sold at the farmstand.
I know what I’ll be eating this weekend!
What’s in season at your local market?
Eating local, Midwestern style
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
There are several restaurants in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas that feature locally grown ingredients - FARMiCia, White Dog Cafe, and many more. With the ‘locavore’ movement still in its infancy in many ways, I’m always curious to see what the restaurant culture around eating locally is like in other cities. I recently had a chance to find out - I was in St. Paul, Minnesota last week for a work conference and met up with some local friends for dinner.
We chose Heartland, a restaurant recently featured by the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmer. Not that Heartland really has a lot of bizarre food on the menu - it was featured because it endeavors to use all of an animal - from tail to snout. On the night I was there, there were no testicles in sight, alas.
Heartland bills itself as ‘contemporary Midwestern’ and sources many of its ingredients locally. It’s obvious from looking at the menu, which changes nightly, that it’s seriously thought out and very seasonal. There’s an a la carte menu, as well as a vegetarian and non-vegetarian prix fixe menus.
The amuse bouche the night we went to dinner at Heartland was a slice of venison prosciutto. I went with the non-vegetarian prix fixe, which was veal liver with mushroom and onion sauce, grassfed beef with cranberries and yams, and a butterscotch tart with peach coulis. The menu was more specific about ingredients, but when I think about the meal my eyes just gloss over and I remember how fantastic everything was. There wasn’t a speck of anything left on any of the plates. It was just....tremendous.
I was also able to steal bites of everyone else’s dinner. I have never had better onion soup - I actually don’t really like onion soup...until I tried Heartland’s onion soup. The beet salad was great, and don’t even get me started on the wild boar chop.
I understand that St. Paul and Minneapolis have quite a few restaurants devoted to locally grown ingredients, although I wasn’t able to get to any of them in the limited time I had in town. I can honestly say, though, that I’m jealous - totally jealous of anyone who lives in the vicinity of Heartland. Around here, Restaurant Alba comes closest to Heartland, but none of the restaurants here seems to do ‘eating local’ with the kind of daring and detail that Heartland does. Still, I have hope.
“Off” season
Friday, April 11, 2008
Although it’s not often, every time I visit the Fair Food Farmstand at the Reading Terminal Market during the winter, I am amazed by the quantity of fresh, local produce. Apparently, it’s not as “off” season as I thought! Tons of greens, apples, GIGANTIC sweet potatoes, cranberries, parsnips, herbs and jellies are just a small sampling of what I considered purchasing this week. After a couple rounds through the stand and some assistance by fabulous volunteers, Sarah and Kelly Ann, I finally settled on some gorgeous greens of the spinach variety, two kinds of apples, gourmet preserves and some soon-to-be-reviewed vegan scrapple, Vrapple.
I’ve been delighting in my stash all week, using apples with breakfast and spinach with dinners (such a nice addition to the freezer veggies I’ve grudgingly been using). As always seems the case however, simple is best when eating locally, and today I realized that the bulk of my lunch originated from the farm stand. This salad of spinach and diced apples was crispy, refreshing and, especially with this warm air, a titillating tease to the oodles of fresh Philly goodness just on the horizon.
Want to get giddy with me? Here are the Farmstand hours and contact info:
White Dog Community’s Fair Food Farmstand
Tuesday through Saturday, 8am – 6pm
Sunday, 9am – 4pm12th and Arch Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215-627-2029
The only thing that would’ve made my salad better are those cranberries I saw. I picked them up and put them down a couple times before finally deciding to pass. Too bad, as they would have added a perfect complimentary tart to the apple’s sweet.
Guess I’ll just have to make another trip to the market 
Miso Delight
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
M made a lovely eat-from-the-freezer dish last night. We’ve been trying to finish everything up, as our Lancaster Farm Fresh one and a half shares will be starting soon!
This is from the Moosewood Cooks at Home, which we find a useful book for quick eats and very adjustable recipes.
Miso Sauce
1/3 cup medium to light miso (M used yellow)
1/3 to 1/2 cup water
2 TB rice vinegar
1 tsp fresh grated ginger
Mix miso and 1/3 cup water until smooth. Add vinegar and ginger, mix well. Add a little more water if needed to make a saucelike consistency.
None of that (except the water--you must not forget the water, Best Beloved) was local, but M steamed yummy things from the freezer including kale, green beans, red and green peppers, and corn. I made a grain mix (lentils, brown and mixed rice, job’s tears), and the whole thing was very good. The sauce is quite sharp, but with frozen veg, zing can add summer zest.
p.s. this was our first experiment with the ginger that we had (as Mollie Katzen suggested) put in white wine and put in the fridge so it wouldn’t go off before we could get to it--roaring success!
Farmers Helpers wanted!
Saturday, April 05, 2008
And now for a much shorter entry on an event in the future…
FARMER HELPERS NEEDED TO WORK AT CITY MARKETS
Some of the farmers who will come to sell at Philadelphia’s outdoor markets this summer need help at their stands. If you like the food and excitement of the farmers’ market and need some cash, you should consider working for a farmer! There will be a two-hour training workshop in late April for anyone who is interested. Leave a comment on this entry, and I will be in touch via email. This training is supported by the Penn State Philadelphia Resource Center (Penn State Extension Service).
Ethnic food and small farms
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
A draft of this entry has been sitting on my hard drive for...oh, at least a month. I apologize that I didn’t post it in a more timely fashion after the PASA conference, but I still find myself thinking about this workshop session and referencing it in conversation, so I hope you’ll all still find this entry interesting.
So, in the middle of February I attended the PASA conference (Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture). It was my first visit to the conference, and—besides suffering from work-induced exhaustion and cold-induced aches—I was overwhelmed by all the organizations’ tables and circulating farmers and activists. Despite being intimidated, I still managed to learn a little about various subjects, but I won’t attempt to summarize everything. For now, I’d just like to talk about the workshop/lecture I enjoyed the most! It was the last one I attended, given by Sandra Miller of Painted Hand Farm near Carlisle, called ‘Feeding the World in Your Community: Capturing Ethnic Markets’. The Powerpoint presentation for this workshop (as well as other articles) is actually on her farm’s website, for further explanation.
She started by explaining why ethnic groups are an excellent customer-match for small farms. Recent immigrants understand seasonality, spend a higher percentage of their income on food than the average American, and are accustomed to shopping frequently for fresh food. Through modern shipping routes and the internet, these immigrants can maintain some of their identity through their food, but they want a local source for some ingredients. When they find a source, they are frequent and loyal customers who spread the word about a farm within their own community, which may rely heavily on word-of-mouth for places to source particular food varieties.
The presentation included various steps that farmers can take to research and prepare for these markets, which I won’t reiterate here. I just enjoyed hearing her entrepeneurial but respectful attitude! For instance, many of her customers have specific halal butchering requirements and want to slaughter the animal themselves. Instead of being intimidated or annoyed by this, she thought to herself, ‘I don’t need to pay for a device to de-horn the goat (and run the risk of occasionally killing one during the process), or a device to castrate the goat (and again, might occasionally lose an animal)—and hey, I don’t even need to pay anything to a butcher, so I come out ahead!’ She also emphasized the value of talking about the food with the customers, to discover how the meat or vegetables are going to be prepared; she gave an example of some squash seeds given to her by a Sicilian who wanted to prepare the squash when it was young and tender, but once she brought to market an example of the squash when it was hard and fully grown (a huge tan squash shaped like a ram’s horn!) and someone from a *different* part of Italy came up and asked if the squash could be allowed to grow even more hard!
Sandra Miller primarily raises meat goats, and the primary group of customers she mentioned were recent immigrants or visitors from Southeast Asia and Africa, many of them Muslims looking for goats for holiday meals—or just ethnic groups for whom goat meat is a staple part of their diet. One of the reasons to explore ethnic markets, that she mentioned repeatedly and that I found most exciting, is that these are people who may be relocating to or visiting in the States (e.g., families of academics teaching/studying at various educational institutions, like the American War College near her in Carlisle) who for *months* haven’t been able to find food (like goat meat) that they’re accustomed to consuming all the time—and they’re *so* happy to find a source for this food; she said interactions with these customers, overjoyed to find these staples, are very satisfying. She said she’s had adult Muslim men come to her farm and weep with joy that they can now enjoy a goat at a celebration, like the birth of a child or whatever. It made me want to have a goat farm! 
One other perspective of ethnic groups that I found especially compelling was the truly sustainable approach to consuming food. Between the variety of ethnic groups that buy food from her, everything is used—right down to the turkey feet a Chinese co-worker wanted from her during one year when she was sourcing Thanksgiving turkeys for coworkers. This co-worker wanted the feet for soup broth, a fundamental part of the holiday celebration in the co-worker’s family, and paid her $50 for a part of the animal that would’ve otherwise gone to waste. That’s so cool!
Gone fishing
Monday, March 31, 2008
I like to head down to the Italian Market sometimes and visit the fish mongers. Sometimes the fish look good and fresh, and sometimes they don’t. Whatever the case, it’s rare that the fish guys have a good sense of where exactly that fish came from...and chances are that it definitely isn’t local.
It is something of a sore point with me that we live so close to the Jersey shore and the waters of the Chesapeake, yet there’s no good mechanism in or around Philadelphia to find local fish. It’s simple to find locally grown produce and meat - farmers are proud of it and they advertise. Why that isn’t the case with locally grown/locally caught fish, I’ll never know.
But let it never be said we can’t take matters into our own hands, especially if you’ve got a husband who likes to fish!
For Philadelphians, fishing for your own food is problematic. I mean, the very idea of eating fish caught in the city limits parts of the Delaware or Schuylkill Rivers is unthinkable. Corporations routinely dump arsenic, untreated sewage, and all sorts of things into our waterways, and I’m on the water enough to know there are a plethora of dead bodies in both rivers. You can eat some of the fish caught in the river, but there’s a severe limit on what you can eat and how much of it you can eat.
The suburbs offer a better solution. In some cases, not much better. But at least you don’t have to worry too much about eating super contaminated three-eyed fish!
In Southeast Pennsylvania trout season started on March 29. Out here in Delaware County, there are a few good spots to fish trout. Saturday morning, my husband took his first fishing jaunt of the season and brought home a rainbow trout and a brown trout. My hero!
We did have a discussion, though, about whether or not you can call a trout caught just a few miles from the house but raised further away local. In this case, the trout that were stocked are from somewhere in Lancaster County and that means they’re probably within our 100 mile radius. But if the fish came from further away, I’m not sure if that would count. Thoughts on this?
After all my griping about not being able to find a reliable source for local fish, I was so happy to have these trout! You just can’t get any fresher than that. I pan-fried them in some butter I made last week, and served the fillets with some lightly cooked baby spinach from, I think, Green Meadow Farm and sauteed mushrooms from Mother Earth Mushrooms. It was fantastic, and I’m looking forward to more freshly caught trout this season!
Near Eastern Meatloaf (by way of Lancaster County)
Part 2 of my first order with the Meadow Run Farms buying club (see Tortilla Espanola for Part 1; see link at left under “meat” for information on the buying club) was ground beef and ground lamb for my favorite meatloaf. In fact, I joined the club practically on the basis of its having ground lamb because it can be hard to find, local or otherwise, in grocery stores.
The ground meat is packaged in flat pouches that make defrosting much faster than a brick-like package. I don’t know if that was intentional, but it works for me. What you’re looking at is a pound each of beef and lamb.
What makes this meatloaf “near eastern” is the kefte-like spice and other additions. I don’t measure when I make this, so amounts are approximate:
1/3C chopped parsley
1 small onion, minced (in this case it was 1/3 of a bermuda onion from Rineer Family Farms)
2 carrots, grated (on the big side of a box grater)
2T pomegranate molasses
1T Syrian kefte spice (a mixture that I buy at Kalustyan’s in NYC)
1/4C dried currants or zereshk (barberries, a Persian food that is slightly sour)
1t salt
(A handful of pinenuts is a nice addition, too.)
To this, you work the meats in with your hands. (If you want to check the seasoning before you bake the loaf, take a little and fry it in a pan for an approximation.)
Bake at 350 for about 1 hour 15 minutes. This meat yielded a nice juicey loaf (the carrots help with this, too) with a wonderful lamb flavor. Could you go 100% lamb? Absolutely. Enjoy!
With April come violets!
Friday, March 28, 2008
I’ve heard it said that April is the cruelest month here in Pennsylvania in terms of locally grown produce. But with April usually comes violets. Around my house we generally tend to start see them popping up around mid-April through the end of May. Most people don’t look at wild violets growing in the yard and think “Hey, I think I’ll eat those!” but foraging for wild violets is a sweet way to get in some early locally grown food.
Yeah, ‘sweet’. Get it? I make candied violets every Spring.
True, candied violets don’t taste like much except, well, sugar. But if you’re decorating a cake, they’re useful to have. Or they’re good just as a snack. And they last practically forever.
Here’s how you do it -
- First, go out into the yard or someone else’s yard or wherever violets are growing and pick a couple big handfuls. Whatever you do, make sure you pick them from places you know haven’t been treated with pesticides or herbicides or any other potentially dangerous chemicals.
- Wash the violets very gently. You can soak the flowers in cold water for a little while or gently swish them in water, as you prefer. Before you start candying the violets, though, you need to make sure the violets are completely dry...so be sure you give them enough time to air dry.
- Preheat your oven to 200 degrees.
- Make egg wash using egg whites from two room temperature eggs with a pinch of water. Whisk the egg white/water mixture until it’s just very lightly a little frothy.
- Crush a half cup of granulated sugar with a mortar and pestle. It doesn’t have to be like powder, but it should be smaller granules
- Grab a small paint brush and a violet. Dip the brush into the egg white and very gently but thoroughly coat the violet flower on all sides. This works best if you hold the violet by the stem.
- Spoon sugar very gently over the violet to coat it on all sides.
- Lay the violet on a cookie sheet and very gently remove the stem.
- Dry them in your 200 degree oven for 20 minutes. Remove from oven and let them cool completely, and then store in an air tight container.
smoked cheddar with hot peppers
Monday, March 24, 2008
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty picky about cheddars. This cheddar, which I picked up at the Highland Orchards stand at the Fitler Square market on Saturday, is definitely not the super-sharp cheddar that is my favorite, but it’s very tasty. The combination of smoky flavor and hot-pepper sharpness is quite a good alternative to standard cheddar.
