Canning: Gold Tomato Sauce

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

My CSA arrived on Monday, but on Tuesday I was leaving for Alaska for 10 days. What to do? Blanch and freeze the greens and can everything else. Much like Marissa from the local canning blog “Food in Jars,” I enjoy small batch canning. It’s an easy evening project and lets you use up all kinds of odds and ends before they pass their ripeness. This golden tomato sauce is based on a recipe I saw recently on 101 recipes, but I added just a few red cherry tomatoes, languishing on the counter, for a little variation.

DIY Sauerkraut

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Hello!  My name is Erica and I’m excited to join the Farm to Philly team!  I’m a community garden organizer and local food lover from West Philadelphia, check out my bio for more info on the gardens I tend in Philadelphia and Camden, NJ.

For my first post I decided to go with a tried-and-true recipe that I am constantly making in my kitchen; sauerkraut.  Cabbage is a great winter staple, I get mine at Mariposa Food Co-op where they’ve recently been selling small cabbages that are perfect for a mini batch of kraut.

The first step is to assemble your equipment:  a ceramic crock or (food-grade) plastic bucket and a dish that fits snugly into it.  I found my crock at a second-hand store, but you can sometimes buy them at housewares stores.  You’ll also need a cutting board, a glass mason jar with lid, a knife, a dish cloth and a large bowl.

Your ingredients are one small cabbage, sea salt, and water.  The amounts depend on the size of your crock, but I use one small head of cabbage, ½ cup of water, and 3 or 4 Tbs of salt in my ½ gallon crock.

Thinly shred the cabbage.  I find that the best way to do this is to cut it in half and slice thinly from the cut side.  When you’ve cut off a handful of cabbage, put it in the bowl and sprinkle it with salt.  Keep doing this until you’ve shredded the entire cabbage, layering the cabbage and salt as you go.  Put the cabbage in the crock and mash it down with your fist to get it tightly packed.  Mix together one teaspoon of salt in a cup of water and pour it over the cabbage until the cabbage is submerged.  Put the dish into the crock and put it down so the cabbage is under the salt water.  Fill the mason jar with water and use it to weigh the plate down.  Cover the entire thing with a dish cloth to keep away flies and dust, and place it in a dark corner of your kitchen.

Taste the sauerkraut daily to observe the fermentation process.  When it has reached the perfect amount of “sourness,” take it out of the crock and place it in a mason jar in the fridge.  For me, it takes between 1.5 and 2.5 weeks in the winter to reach the perfect point (less time in the summer).  To see the original recipe I used and more fermented food recipes, check out wildfermentation.com.  Enjoy!

“Traceability”: Friend or Foe to Locavores?

Monday, March 30, 2009

There’s an article in today’s NY Times that leaves me with ambiguous feelings. The concept is “Traceability” and it’s meant to, as the name suggests, give consumers the ability to “trace” their food to it’s producer. What leaves me with a sour taste is that when I quickly perused the Find The Farmer site, I saw what I had feared was coming — namely, that Big Business would attempt to co-opt some of the finer points of the Buy Local movement.

The article states that the “Stone-Buhr flour company, a 100-year-old brand based in San Francisco, is giving the buy-local food movement its latest upgrade.” (My emphasis). The internet is a wonderful tool and I push it whole-heartedly on local farmers. But how is this “buy local”? The Find The Farmer website has all the trimmings of a gosh-golly earnest site. But on closer inspection, you see the bread trail of a much larger marketing effort. A look at the footer of the site reveals the copyright is held by JOG Distribution. Google that name and you see that they recently acquired “the venerable Stone-Buhr Flour brand...” (My emphasis). Notice that they say “brand”. Not “company”. Not “product”. “Brand”. That’s telling because that states that for these companies, it’s the name of the product and all that name conjures up in the consumers mind. That’s what they are paying for. But here’s the best part: JOG didn’t purchase it from the original owners of Stone-Buhr. Read the article and you’ll see that they purchased the “brand” in 2002 from Unilever/Bestfoods!

This is not mom-and-pop farmers organizing to let consumers know where their food comes from. This is marketing departments realizing that there is a.) a Trend (“Buy Local”) and b.) problems with the public’s perception of food safety. They aren’t really changing the way they do business, they’re simply changing the appearance by piggy-backing on a genuine movement. This is why marketing is important to small scale farmer’s and local business people. These are the tools that your fearsome competition welds.

Think of it like this: people are trusting. That’s a good thing. So when they see a NY Times article; when they see an earnest-looking website; when they see smiling pictures of commodity farmers and their families; when the sites state explicitly things like “Direct Seeding” to imply that their entire farming methods are more friendly (Direct Seeding seems innocuous enough, but it’s prominently name-dropped as a way to intimate that the farm is environmentally sound); when they see all of this, they think “Oh, in addition to the Farmer’s Market, I’ll shop online. Their prices may be better, maybe I’ll forgo the Market this week…”  Or, perhaps, “I really want to connect with how my food is produced, I’ll just go to this website…” It begins to chip away at your business, whether it’s what you currently have or any potential business that’s down the line.

I need to stress that being able to trace your food is a good thing. Not only does it make producers and companies more accountable, but it also appears to pave the way for single-producer products. If there’s traceablilty, then that means you can’t mix several suppliers in a huge grain bin. And that’s good for people. What I don’t think is good is the sneaky way that businesses are hinting that they, too, are “local” (or have any of the ideals of the people who would Buy Local) when it’s still business as usual. They see the desire in the public’s mind and they act in the most cost-effective way. And that is by keeping the mechanism’s in place but using marketing and promotional tools to control the “message”.

People are ready for local, sustainable foods. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be interest in co-opting the terms and the ideals, by large corporations. If there ever was a time to invest in keeping your message relevant and making the case for the real differences, now is the time. It really is a sound investment because the desire for information is there.

Apple heaven

Sunday, October 05, 2008

While not a website about supporting local farmers and eating seasonally, A Food Coma is a new blog devoted to New Jersey.  And hey, we gotta support Jersey, right?

A Food Coma is a group blog devoted to restaurant reviews, recipes…there’s even a podcast!  Their lead story is pretty timely - a recipe for apple pie.  We are awash in locally grown apples right now.  Linvilla currently has nearly 25 varieties available for picking.  The Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal has dozens of varieties from various area farms. 

Other local orchards for apple picking:

Weaver’s Orchard, Berks County Shadybrook Farm, Bucks County Styer Orchard, Bucks County Highland Orchards, Chester County Johnson Farm, Jersey Terhune Orchards, Jersey

Rate a CSA program!

Friday, May 30, 2008

Many of us at Farm to Philly count on Local Harvest to find out about CSA programs and markets, but the site is really expanding its user friendliness!  One of the newest features is a star rating system and user reviews for farms and CSA programs, etc.  This is really a great step in the right direction for those of us flying blindly to pick CSA programs.  I’ve been trying to put in reviews wherever possible, and I hope you will, too!

Local Harvest also has a really great newsletter, and an interesting blog.  Be sure to check those out!