Kensignton Community Co-Op Seeks Members

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Begun as a buying club, the Kensington Community Co-Op is in the middle of an ambitious membership campaign to expand the Co-Op and bring fresh, local, and healthy food to the Kensington community. If you live in Kensington, please consider joining up, and remember that creating safe, healthy and sustainable food stores not only help you and your family, but your neighbors, as well!

From the site:

“Looking ahead”

The year ahead will be to raise enough funds through member investments, donations, grants and loans to purchase equipment, to buy a building, finance construction and hire a general manager.  Once our funds are secured we will begin to narrow down our options for a location.

“Local Ownership Means a More Secure Future.”

Since KCFC is owned and operated by its members, it is their needs that the co-op most cares about, rather than the needs of corporate investors whose interest are often strictly the bottom line.  Become a member of KCFC and your bottom line becomes our bottom line. Invest in your community today!

Follow FarmtoPhilly.com on Twitter

Thursday, August 05, 2010

That’s right, folks! We’re finally on twitter, if you’re into that kind of thing. Follow us at Farm2Philly and receive up-to-the-moment updates about events, local food, breaking news, and new posts. We promise not to bombard you, but some things are best expressed in a tweet!

Great Recycling News for Philadelphians

Feeling depressed every time you check the bottom of a plastic container, only to not see the approved #1 or #2. Wipe that plastic-guilt tear from your eye, Philadelphians, for a better recycling system is finally here. Today the Street department announced:

STARTING AUGUST 1: Recycle All Plastic Containers!
You’ve been recycling plastic containers marked:
#1: Soda, water bottles
#2: Milk jugs, detergents, shampoo bottles

Now you can add:
#3: Rigid plastic containers and juice bottles
#4: Plastic tubs and lids from butter, margarine or similar products
#5: Yogurt containers and deli trays
#6: Plastic cups, plates and to-go containers
#7: Many mixed plastic containers and plastic products

In the past few years we’ve gone from bi-monthly to weekly recycling, from separating to single stream. And now we finallyhave expanded plastic recycling. Send Mayor Nutter, and the Office of Susatainability a BIG thank-you at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Of course, you should be reducing as much (or more! more!) than you are recycling. But here’s a reminder of what else you can throw in the blue bucket:

Metal:
Tin and aluminum cans, empty aerosol cans, empty paint cans
Glass:
Jars and bottles
Mixed Paper:
Newspaper, magazines, mail (junk and personal), phone books, food boxes (remove plastic liner), computer paper, flyers, wrapping paper (no foil or plastic wrap), soda and beer cartons (no food-soiled paper, please!)

Still aren’t getting your Recycling Rewards? Sign-up HERE!

What the World Eats

Sunday, March 21, 2010

I love the “What the World Eats,” the photo essay on Time magazines online site. The essay, by Peter Menzel, is part of his book “Hungry Planet.” Food can tell us so much about culture, lifestyle, and economics - it’s fascinating to see these family portraits in the kitchen, tables piled high with all of the food the family eats in a week. Most obviously, family’s in wealthier countries consume significantly more processed food while producing more food-related waste. In less wealthy countries, diets are filled with grains and local produce. They also spend significantly less money on food every week. It’s not exactly pair to directly compare economies, but it seems obvious that if family’s in countries like the United States and Great Britian spent more of their food dollars supporting local farmers, they’d be both healthier, less wasteful, and spend less money.

New Year-Round Farmers Market at the Piazza and other Winter Markets

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

A new YEAR-ROUND Farmers Market featuring locally produced items will launch on 1/16 at the Piazza at Schmidts’ (North 2Nd Street And Germantown Avenue) and continue every Saturday from 10:00am-2:00pm. Grass Fed Beef, Naturally-Raised Pork and Duck, Free Range Chicken, Naturally-Raised Lamb, Cage Free-Pastured Eggs, Artisan Cheese, Breads and Baked Goods, Organic Vegetables/Produce, Honey, Preserves, Fair Trade Coffee and even all natural Dog Treats! Over 20 vendors to choose from and FREE PARKING in the designated lot across from the Piazza.

There are other local farmer’s markets open throughout the Winter at:

Fitler Square Farmers’ Market
23rd St. & Pine St.
Saturdays 9 am - 2 pm; Year round

Rittenhouse Farmers’ Market
Walnut St. at 18th St.
Saturdays 9:30 am to 3 pm; Year round

Clark Park Farmers’ Market (accepts SNAP cards)
43rd St. & Baltimore Ave.
Saturdays 10 am - 2 pm; Year round

December GRID hits the shelves!

Friday, December 04, 2009

Hey everyone! Our favorite magazine about sustainability in Philadelphia hits the stands today! Check out my recipe for butternut squash and mushroom lasagna (pictured below) in the print addition or online.

GRID Cover December 2009 And join us to celebrate its release:
WHERE: The Abbaye (3rd and Fairmount)
WHEN: 5-8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 9
$3 drafts and ½ price appetizers!

See you there!

November GRID is out

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

The new GRID magazine is hitting the shelves at local coffee-shops, co-ops and businesses near you. Check out the issue for more bicycling articles, how to cook dried beans, just what is a green roof, local fashion designers, community garden, a green event calendar, and much more. Or, read it online HERE.

FLOTUS Shops at DC Farmers’ Market!

Friday, September 18, 2009

Hooray! Read the story on the New York Times website.

Indian Valley Farmers’ Market Opens in One Week!

Friday, June 26, 2009

The Indian Valley Farmers’ Market will open at the Telford Train Station on Penn and Main Streets on Saturday, July 4 at 8:30am for the 2009 season. 

Rumor has it that this year, we can expect the best selection of vendors ever featured at the market!  Locally grown fruits and vegetables, locally produced wine and locally roasted coffee will all be available, making it a great place to start weekend grocery shopping.  Additionally, each week, the volunteers of the market’s Promotions Committee have special events planned, the first of which will be on July 11, the 2009 Field To Table Food Festival:

“The purpose of the Field to Table Festival is to help promote the Indian Valley Farmers’ Market, Pennsylvania agriculture, local businesses and service organizations as well as to have a fun day with our families.  In addition to the Farmers’ Market, we will have exhibits from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, 4-H, the Searching for “Berried” Treasure Contest, music, menu samples from local restaurants and activities for children.”

Keep an eye on their website for all upcoming events:  http://www.ivfm.org/  See you July 4!

Farm to Philly in the June-July GRID magazine!

Friday, June 19, 2009

We were pleased a couple of months ago to have been asked by GRID, a new and really quite excellent magazine about sustainable living in Greater Philadelphia, to contribute a few recipes to the June-July issue. It’s now out and available online (free!) and in independent retailers around the region (also free!). And you can try out more recipes in the August issue available in, well, August. A big hand to our ringleader Nicole for making this all happen!

Kensington’s Greensgrow in the Inquirer

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Co-founder Mary Seton Corboy at Greensgrow Farm in Kensington. (April Saul / Inquirer)

Friends are used to me going on and on about Greensgrow Farm, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, like I invented the place. I love it that much. You might, too, after you read today’s piece by Ginny Smith in the Inquirer.

Pedal Co-op: a model of sustainability

Sunday, April 05, 2009

Michael Dollich of Four Worlds Bakery just sent out a link for the following National Geographic video. The video features West Philly’s own Pedal Co-op and makes reference to various sustainable businesses and organizations in Philly. Check it out!

March? Winter Squash Three Ways and a Quiche!

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

How can it possibly be the last day of March? March 31, 2009! Does anyone else have the feeling that March was stolen from under their very eyes? It was a funny month. It began with a snow storm. Temperatures varied from the teens to the 70s. Just this past Sunday I got caught by a flash hailstorm whilst strolling through Washington Square. At my university there were weekly (or multiple in a week) conferences, colloquia and symposia to add to regular graduate student demands. Luckily, for my sanity, I continued to pick up my weekly CSA share from Keystone Farm, shopped at Mariposa, picked up my weekly bread order from Four Worlds Bakery and cooked any number of local and eco meals. Cooking really is meditative and good food provides the best comfort. Let me catch you up a bit on some of the highlights of this month’s eating!

Inspired by Naomi’s delicious post on butternut squash pasta sauce, I thought I’d put up a few things I did with the puree from a kabocha squash I had gotten in my CSA share. The squash sat prettily on my counter for months, before I finally decided what best to do with it. I knew that I would be committing myself to intensive solitary squash eating, so I needed time to consider how exactly I wanted to address the dear kabocha. Finally I chose to halve it, poke holes in the outside and roast it. I then pureed the roasted squash, and that is where the fun began. Kabocha is a sweeter squash with a delicate flavor and firm, brightly orange flesh.

I have a true love of apple butter and cheddar cheese sandwiches (on the spelt levain from Four Worlds). The squash puree, however, beckoned and I found that equally delightful is a sandwich of this sweet kabocha puree and the sharp cheddar cheese I regularly receive in my share.  I have mentioned before too, that I often make variations of Alice Waters’ soup of many vegetables. The addition of pumpkin puree to the vegetable soup not only gave it a beautiful color (which, for some sad reason is not apparent in this photo), but also added the most subtle pumpkin-y flavor to the broth.

Longing for pancakes one weekend morning, I decided to use the last bit of kabocha puree to make, what turned out to be, the best pancakes I have ever made. Really incredible - if I may say so myself! They were light, fluffy and unbelievably tasty. I long for the fall to make these pancakes again!

Soup of Many Vegetables
adapted from Alice Waters The Art of Simple Food

2 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
3 carrots, sliced evenly
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp thyme
2 tsp salt
1 bay leaf
1 cup white wine
4 cups water
3 potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 cup winter squash puree
Half of small head of cabbage (green), shredded
2 cups prepared cranberry beans (cooked in water—3 inches above beans—with a bay leaf and garlic clove, allowing them to simmer after five minutes of a hard boil for about an hour, reserving the cooking water)

In a soup pot over medium-high heat, sautee the onion and carrot until soft—about 10 minutes. Add garlic, bay leaf, salt and thyme. Cook another 5 minutes. Add 1 cup of wine and allow to boil for 2-3 minutes, add 4 cups water and bring to a boil. Add in potatoes, allowing to simmer/boil gently. Stir in squash puree. After 5 minutes add cabbage (you could cook cabbage ahead of time and add at the end with the beans). Cook another 10 minutes and add beans and reserved water. All the while stirring occasionally. Salt and pepper to taste. Once everything is cooked (potatoes are tender) serve.

Best Pumpkin Pancakes
adapted from many sources

1 cup flour (I used a local PA white pastry flour)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
3/4 cup plain whole milk yogurt (you could use buttermilk or a mixture of milk and yogurt)
1/2 cup squash puree

Mix dry ingredients. In a separate bowl mix together egg, yogurt and puree. Add the wet ingredients to the dry until just mixed (don’t over beat). Then cook them up in a pan with butter and enjoy with a drizzle of maple syrup or just as they are!

On another note. Spring is creeping in and spinach is starting to show up in my CSA share. Keystone Farm has experimented for the first time with greenhouses this winter, and lettuces have been making their way into my box. The spinach, however, is a great treat. In a sea of potatoes and onions, there is nothing quite like some local organic spinach! For the first time ever, I decided to make a quiche. The picture will reveal that I make funny pie crusts. I use (again) a recipe from Alice Waters, and this dough does not shrink at all! I always forget to take this into consideration, which is why my pies and now quiches tend to have wavy crusts hanging over the sides of the pie dish….

Spinach Quiche

Crust:
1 cup flour (again, local white PA pastry flour)
3/4 cup cold butter in 1/4 inch cubes
1/4 cold water

I used my food processor and cut the butter into the flour and slowly added the water until the dough formed a ball. You could also use the more conventional way of cutting the butter into the flour with either knives, a pastry cutter or your fingers and then add the water. Form a loose disc with the dough and refrigerate for at least an hour. Roll out the dough and prebake for in a 375˚ oven for 15 minutes.

(my pie dish is 10”)

Filling:
1 small onion, diced
1 large bag spinach (I don’t actually know how many cups this is, but it is the size bag I got from the farmer’s market!)
6 eggs, 3/4 cup plain yogurt
ca 1/2 cup shredded cheese (I used cheddar)
Salt and pepper to taste

Sautee onion in olive oil. Add spinach and sautee until just wilted. In a separate bowl mix together 6 eggs, yogurt and salt. Sprinkle 1/3 of cheese over crust, add layer of spinach/onion mixture. Sprinkle more cheese and add rest of spinach and onion. Sprinkle rest of cheese and then carefully pour over the egg mixture. Bake for 45 minutes in an oven preheated to 375˚. Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes.

On another note: The other posters have been doing an excellent job of keeping Farm to Philly readers up-to-date on all the fantastic coverage that the slow/local/eco food movement has been getting. It is a really exciting time to be a food activist (or a conscientious eater). For further inspiration and information, “The Garden” will be showed at the Rotunda this coming Thursday (4/2 7pm).

“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.

100 Mile Challenge on Food TV

Thursday, March 26, 2009

The first episode of Food Network Canada’s 100 Mile Challenge starts April 5th. Based on “The 100-Mile Diet” by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon and hosted by the authors, the show challenges the citizens of Mission, BC to live for 100 days eating only foods that originate within 100 miles of their home.

Episodes will be available online the day after they air in Canada (which is good for me because 1. we don’t have cable and 2. even if we did, I don’t think Food TV Canada airs in Philadelphia). I’m curious to see how the show plays out and if the network shows that eating locally is not only possible, but pleasurable. Because it is reality television, not reality, the six families that sign on for the challenge are forbidden from eating household staples like beer, coffee, tea, chocolate, olive oil, pepper and most spices. (Notice where my priorities are- no beer!) While that makes for great television, I hope that at some point it’s made clear that eating locally isn’t an all or nothing proposition. Supporting the local economy and local farmers is ideal, but it is not necessary to deprive your family of coffee or bananas simply because they don’t grow in a 100-mile radius of your home.

In addition to bits about the 100 Mile Challenge show, the show’s blog features recipes and tips as well as information about different vegetables.