An informative video on YouTube: How To Butterfly A Chicken.
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The two main reasons this blog lapsed into disuse were: 1) We kept finding ourselves in food ruts where we were making the same handful of dishes over and over again, and 2) Joyce was doing the bulk of the work on putting posts together. We’ve been trying a lot of new recipes lately, including two in the list above. To get away from the rut problem, we’ve branched out into vegan recipes and discovered a goldmine of potential. I view this rut avoidance as a success, which takes care of the first reason I mentioned. As to the second, I can only promise to try harder. To that end, and being the technology fan that I am, we are now on Twitter and FriendFeed. This will make it easier for us to get content into the blog, which will be handy when we’re at the Curb Market or Deep Roots, and make it easier for our Twitter and FriendFeed using readers to follow us. It also helps that I am now armed with a Blackberry and can post from anywhere. Oh, and a quick recommendation for Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. It’s the best blog posting tool I’ve ever seen. Here’s a great overview with tips from Lifehacker.com: http://is.gd/ljTK. Hello all, My goodness, how life happens to you. Nothing bad on this end, just busy, with lots of changes. You know how it is. We have some new ideas for this blog. I’ve dusted the place out and spruced it up a bit. I hope you like it. More minor changes will follow in the next few days. The economy, of course, is on everyone’s mind. Things are bad, money is tight, and we’re not quite sure how to handle it. The biggest thing we want to do with LMF is to show people how to eat well - you won’t find any ramen here - for very little money. We’ll have recipes, cost breakdowns, and we’ll compare our fare to commonly available store-bought items - you know, TV dinners and such. Now is a prime time to make the point that cooking for yourself (and possibly eating locally grown food) is the perfect way to save money. And, it needn’t cause any hardship. So, watch this space. We’re jazzed, and we hope you will be too. So, a few years ago, Liz over at the now-defunct Pocket Farm started this thing called One Local Summer: a challenge designed to get people to make a meal with locally raised ingredients one meal a week. We’ve participated for the last two years, and this year, I’m coordinating for the Southern region. This year, updates are going to be over at Farm to Philly. The rules are pretty simple. Your challenge: prepare one meal each week using only locally grown ingredients - the exceptions are oil, salt and pepper, and spices. Everyone defines local differently - a lot of folks are working to stick to a 100 mile radius, and that’s pretty awesome. My definition for local is pretty much North Carolina (or southern Virginia, as we’re pretty close to the state line) grown. Our exception to the North Carolina grown foods is our cheese. It comes from Ohio, but it’s sold at our farmer’s market. We know the people (the Molners) that we’re buying from, and we know we can trust them when they tell us that the milk used in making the cheese is sustainably raised. Ohio isn’t so far away, and I know that this cheese isn’t made in a large, unsustainable factory. That’s good enough for me. (There is North Carolina cheese available at our market and our co-op; Goat Lady Dairy makes some incredible cheese that is normally right out of our budget; perhaps, for a splurge this summer…) I’m a bad, bad person and forgot to take pictures this week; I haven’t gotten back into the OLS mindset yet. Quiche: eggs from the Wards, cheese from the Molners, bulk sausage from Rocking F Farm, milk from Homeland Creamery, and Southern Biscuit flour, along with a touch of non-local oil and salt and pepper and nutmeg. It was all very, very good. The inmates were pleased. Everything was purchased at our local curb farmer’s market, except for the oil and spices, purchased at our co-op. Our take last week and this week looked pretty similar. This week, we came home with eggs, cucumbers, peaches, cheese, lettuce (one head of red and one head of green), some gorgeous ground beef, bulk pork sausage, a beautiful chunk of cube steak, yellow squash, and some of the first tomatoes of the season out of a field, as opposed to out of a hothouse. I’ve been grateful for our local hothouse tomatoes this winter, but they’re nothing compared to summer’s. Meals this week (subject to change, of course): Saturday: I had a party to go; I sent Jeff and his mom, who is in for a visit, out to Moe’s Tacos, where we had buy-one-get-one coupons We got: strawberries, yellow squash, zucchini, lettuce, broccoli, the season’s first peaches (!!), and 2 dozen extra large eggs and a dozen large (for making deviled eggs for a party yesterday). We did not get: the season’s first blueberries, at $5 for a half pint. Ouch. I wanted more of the Chinese cabbage I got last week (so, so good), but he was either out already or didn’t have any this week. It’s going to be a tasty week around here. E. Coli strikes again, this time from the JSM Meat Holdings Co. in Chicago. *Yet Another E. Coli Incident Liz of Pocket Farm has retired from the blogging business, and this year’s One Local Summer is being hosted by Farm to Philly. If you don’t normally eat local, One Local Summer is a great way to ease into it, by trying to eat local one meal a week. It’s also a great chance to see what other people are cooking, which if you’re nosy (like me) is always a lot of fun. It’s still not too late to sign up! (Oh, and I’m acting as the southeast regional coordinator this year. This week: 2 dozen eggs There were strawberries all over the market. Two weeks ago, one stand had them; this morning, half a dozen stands did. There were greens all over the place, too. No asparagus, that I saw - I should call my mom and see how hers is doing. It should be a delicious couple of weeks. I’m getting impatient for the good stuff of summer - once the weather warms up, all I want is corn and peaches, in quantity. I’m trying to remind myself to be patient and enjoy what’s in season now, with mixed success. I just emailed my chair a full draft of my thesis. There’s going to be plenty to fix, but this is still a huge deal, and I’m this much closer to having my brain back (and being able to can and cook and blog and etc. again). Woot! 2 dozen eggs, a package of bulk ground beef and bulk sausage and a beautiful hunk of sirloin steak that’s big enough for 2 dinners from Rocking F, potatoes and tomatoes from Faucette Produce, cheese from the Mulners, lettuce from Weatherhand (I think that’s his name) farm, strawberries (!) from High Rock Berries, sprouts from Snow Creek Organics, our chicken from the Petersons. A lot of things were just a little bit more expensive this morning; the vendors apologized when they handed me back my change, talking about feed and fuel and looking worried. I told them not to apologize, that we eat a heck of a lot better eating from them than we do from conventional sources, and we’re glad to pay it, and we know things are getting a more expensive. Their worry makes me worry, though. There’s been some kerfuckle on the internet lately about impending food crises, and that, I haven’t taken all that seriously, but when the people that grow my food start looking worried and talking worried, that I do take seriously. Jennifer over at Last Night’s Dinner is after my own heart today. These days, it simply doesn’t occur to me that we could, you know, go out and buy strawberries fresh in January. It’ll sound silly, but I forget that you can even do that. Eating local when possible has, after a couple of years, become an ingrained habit. (Thesis watch: 55 pages and counting. I’m hoping to have a full draft to my chair by Friday. Meep.) Yea, it’s that time of year again… 2.5 weeks until the end of the semester, and I’m huffing and puffing up to the finish line. This spring has just been too busy, anyhow. It turns out that finishing my coursework, trying to write a thesis, tutoring ESL classes, teaching a community college class, being a worker owner at Deep Roots, finishing out my assistantship, and job hunting for the summer and next year, all along with normal life - is a lot of work. Hence, the lack of posting. Things get a lot better May 6th (I turn in grades for my class, after grading 21 take-home essay finals in 20 hours, I need to time that better next semester) and then even better sometime over the summer, when I defend my thesis. At which point, I will have a masters degree (in two calendar years, considerably less than the 11 my BA took.) (The plan for after, since people ask, is to teach community college next year. Local CC has a small program that trains faculty. After that, the plan is to continue to adjunct and apply to permanent instructor positions [me and the 1234235234 other people in this state with masters degrees that want to teach] until either I get hired for one [oh hallowed day], or lose my patience and start applying for part-time staff jobs that allow me to teach one or two classes, or lose my patience and go to phd school, though whether it’s going to be sociology, anthropology, or education is anyone’s guess.) Meanwhile, we got our first strawberries of the season yesterday, and they smell amazing. We picked up our first chicken from our chicken CSA, which I’m looking forward to eating with great glee. Both are reminders that spring is here and summer is coming, and life will slow down a bit. I have Great Plans for this summer, including learning how to can, so hopefully there will be a little more activity around here soon. I’ve been in the Seattle area for the last week visiting my mom and tromping around my adopted hometown. Actually, there hasn’t been quite enough of the latter since my mom lives in Marysville, a fair distance north of Seattle. I think next time I’ll get a hotel or, something Joyce pointed out to me, rent a private apartment for a week. I love seeing my mom, but part of the reason to come to Seattle is to see Seattle, not Marysville. Plus, the cigarette smoke in the house is driving me nuts. Blech. I figure we can get my mom a room of her own for three nights or so to give her a mini vacation. I ran this idea past her and she likes it, so this sounds like a win-win. I used to live in Everett, just south of Marysville. I often said that the best thing to come out of Everett is Interstate 5. I must say, I think the same thing of Marysville. With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there’s no there there. I reserved a compact rental car but was given a free ‘upgrade’ in the form of a brand new Chevrolet Impala. In a word, YUCK. The HVAC controls are nearly perfect, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about the car. It’s huge, handles like the 3600lb car it is, and it gets absolutely horrible city fuel economy. Highway fuel economy is decent at about 28, thanks to a V6 engine that can run on three cylinders under light loads, but it doesn’t take much city driving to drag the average down into the teens. The next time I get offered an upgrade I’ll ask them if they’ll pay for the difference in gas usage, since a major reason for me to rent a small car is the fuel economy. Thursday night I went with a friend to see Cabaret for her birthday. The woman that played Sally Bowles had a serious set of pipes on her, and the Emcee was a heck of a lot of fun. I’m going to have Two Ladies running through my head for weeks to come. I had a great time. Yesterday I met up with an old friend for lunch and a few hours in Seattle, specifically Pike’s Market and the waterfront. The clouds cooperated by holding back the rain and even parting for some sun to shine through, though they came back together and let loose shortly after I dropped my friend off. It was great to spend the afternoon with her. I’m returning my rental car at noon and then my friend from Thursday are going to go play. A ferry ride from Edmonds to Kingston, a jaunt down to Bremerton, then a ferry back to Seattle. Dunno about after that. I’m glad I decided to be here for two full weekends, though I’ll be glad to get back home to Joyce, our kitties, our space, and our routines. A short video I spotted over at Boing Boing TV. I’ve long held that technology, properly applied, can improve the lives of everyone. In this video, Doug Fine says a couple of things near the end that sums up my point of view nicely, namely that we don’t have to give up everything to be green. Thoughts? An appalling article from the New York Times in which a small farmer talks about expanding his operation to meet the demand for local food, only to be penalized for doing so. Snippet from the article: Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program. All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix. The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program. I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.) Emphasis mine. I can understand why the subsidy would be lost, but why the penalty? Once on the government teat, always on the government teat? Does anyone else think this is outrageous? 1. I got to meet La Stewie today! 2. We have a chest freezer now. A friend is slowly divesting herself of large possessions in preparation for a move, and cut us a great deal on her chest freezer. My inner squirrel is gleeful, letmetellyou. One day, when I have time to think again, I’m going to stock it with lovely stews and chili and such, and then, when we don’t feel like cooking, we’ll just pull something out of the freezer. And we can freeze produce this summer. And chicken. Lots and lots of glorious chicken. 3. We’re joining a chicken CSA. We’re going for the 8 chicken option, starting at the beginning of April and running through July. The farmers are folks we’ve gotten chicken from before, and they’re always awesome. If a girl were interested in getting started with canning and freezing who was a complete newbie, where would she start reading about it? What resources would y’all recommend? Also, what do you guys freeze in? I’m hesitant to use those freezer bags that seal shut with heat, unless you can reuse them - I’m becoming more and more concerned with waste generation, and using something like that as a one-off just seems environmentally irresponsible (our city only recycles 1 and 2 plastics that are in the shape of bottles. Other 1 and 2 plastic can’t be recycled.) I’m hesitant to use zip top bags because I always say I’m going to wash them and reuse them, but they’re a pain to wash, and even if I do wash and reuse them, they do wear out pretty quickly. Would regular old Gladware “tupperware” do the trick for large scale vegetable freezing? They do wear out eventually, but it takes much longer than plastic bags and they’re much easier to wash, which means they’ll actually get reused. How does glass work for freezing? It seems like it would stress the glass. Has it really been since November that either of us has posted? It doesn’t seem like it. We got through the holiday season relatively in one piece. Normally, Thanksgiving is up in Baltimore with my mom’s family; however, my grandmother, the matriarch of the family, passed away this fall, and collectively, it was decided that we didn’t want to do the big Thanksgiving this year. Things are still up in the air as to whether we’ll resume Thanksgiving next year or pick another holiday to celebrate together. Meanwhile, we did a big Thanksgiving dinner down here at my parents’ house with my parents, my sisters, and our cousin, who might as well be a brother. Jeff and I contributed a local turkey, as well as a few other goodies to the festivities. That turkey received many, many compliments. The rest of November and December disappeared in a flurry of finishing the semester, passing my thesis proposal defense, and starting my thesis research (me) and work and pager duty (Jeff), along with Christmas and New Year’s and my sister’s birthday. New Year’s was quiet for us; we stay in on New Year’s Eve, preferring to stay off the roads where all the crazies are. We cooked up a steak from Rocking F Farm with my sister, stayed in, and played board games. The semester has started for me in one place (I’m teaching my first real class this semester) and starts on Monday in the other. In theory, this should be my last semester of graduate school, so I’m going to be frantically trying to finish my thesis (or not, if I decide I can’t hit the deadlines for May graduation and that I’m going to aim for August. I should know by the end of January). Life is going to be busy for the next few months. Right now, we’re both fighting off the tail end of colds. I blame my students. Blogwise, I need to post and tie up Nitty Gritty, and we’re going to try to post here a little more this year. Right now, we’re on an every other week farmer’s market schedule, as it’s not exactly high produce season, and what we can get freezes or keeps pretty well. Today, we got eggs and extra sage sausage from Ward’s Happy chickens; potatoes and hothouse tomatoes and cucumbers from Faucette Produce; green, yellow, and red peppers, and salad greens from the greenhouse stand across from Faucette Produce (one of these days, I’ll get his name) [normally, we get our lettuce from Weatherhand Farm, the local hydroponics guy, but he was sold out by the time we got there today]; ground beef from Rocking F; and cheese from the Molners. Tucked up in the corner of the market was someone we hadn’t noticed before: Cane Creek Farm, selling pork and beef products, and advertising humane treatment, and antibiotic-free and animal by-product free meat. We’re not about to abandon Rocking F for our beef needs (Margueritte’s prices and quality just can’t be beat), but we did get a pound of Italian sausage, which we’re eager to try. If it turns out to be good, they have bratwurst, chorizo, and other good looking things. I’ve been chomping at the bit for a greater variety of local meat products, so hopefully the sausage is tasty. We’ll make a full report. What is it going to take to make it stop? E.coli is everywhere. It’s part of nature. You have some in your gut right now. It only becomes a problem when we handle our food in a negligent manner. ‘We’ mostly means ‘bulk food producers.’ There are questions I could ask here, but I’d just be preaching at the choir. Joyce and I need to replace some aging skillets and we want to get away from Teflon. We’re seeking opinions and experiences with enameled cast iron cookware. Do you like it? How long can the enamel be expected to last? Any brand recommendations? Thanks! One of my daily blog reads is Zen Habits. Yesterday there was a great post that I thought I’d share with you here. The title of the post is 10 Tasty, Easy and Healthy Breakfast Ideas. I want to try almost all of them. This week, we didn’t have tacos. |
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We did quiche and vegetables Thursday night. 
We also had a bonus local meal Friday night: roasted pork tenderloin from the Wards, and twice baked potatoes (cheese from the Molners, potatoes from Faucette Produce), along with leftover vegetables from Thursday night.