I keep thinking of joining the Dark Days Challenge, but don’t quite. We make locally produced food (much of it our own) a feature of most meals already, rather than a feature once a week. I think our general approach is to eat mostly local food, and most of that is grown by ourselves, or someone closeby we know. But our effort seems to be put into having a significant part of almost every meal be local… rather than having limited times of being completely local.

Brunch today: (A sub-average one for us actually - it’s rare not to have some kind of homegrown vegetable, either in an omolette, or a side of cabbage or brussels sprouts…)

Sourdough bread using the recipe from Jeff Hertzberg, published in Mother Earth News, and using local flour. Eggs produced here at home; quince jelly we made from quinces that grew here. Butter, salt&pepper, and coffee were not local. Milk in coffee from a local source.

It fascinates me to see how many people are photographing their food, and their cooking processes in the kitchen. I feel drawn to do the same thing. When you grow and cook your own food, there is such wholeness to it, such wonder in it. I think it shows what a rediscovery it is, to want to document it.

Someone commented to me last night, “Well, so the garden is finished now, right? You’re not getting anything much out of it anymore?”

There is so much. We are so fortunate to still be pulling so much fresh food out of the garden for most meals. I guess, sometimes it’s hard to see beyond tomatoes, basil, potatoes, and zucchini, and recognize what’s still there when they’re gone.

So here’s what we’re still harvesting:

Brussels Sprouts… my favorite at this time of year. They are so good after a couple frosts, and just very lightly cooked until they are bright green. Dress with butter, some chopped chervil, parsley or dill, or balsamic vinegar.

Oh, the chervil, parsley and dill come from the garden still. And green onions. And thyme and sage.

Broccoli (little tiny florets “pre-cut”).

Celery. Beets.   Leeks…tons of leeks.  Radiccio.  Cabbage.  Carrots. Still have some potatoes to dig, just a few.

Parsnips and Rutabega. There are some Turnips there, but have been harvesting greens from them more than liking the roots.

Greens: (Our house salad mix is currently lettuce-free, as the voles ate ALL of several plantings of lettuce)…Mizuna, Chard, Kale of several types, Mustard greens, Arugula, Spinach, Beet greens

Corn salad is coming along, not ready quite yet.    Found a couple self-seeded Radishes.

There is still so much in the garden.

Discovering membrillo has been a revelation.

Quince Paste - Membrillo

We found out about it when we were researching what to do with our quince harvest a couple years ago. Quinces are hard, tart, and astringent raw, but cooked they soften and sweeten, and when cooked down, they magically turn from dun yellow stuff to clear, rosy red.

Membrillo is quince paste. Think of some meeting of fruit leather, jelly beans, and apple butter. The flavor is mild and flowery, but in appearance, it looks like a slab of organ meat. The traditional way of serving it in Spain is sliced with manchego cheese as a snack. We do the same with it, but also love it tucked into a hot popover with butter, sliced on toast, or just by itself.

quince pieces and cores ready for cooking

see the pectin-rich goo around the seeds?

We made membrillo by starting with the quinces, washed, and cut up. Most recipes say get rid of the cores, but I noticed that the cores seem to have a huge amount of pectin in them, which I wanted. (Pectin makes things gel!) So I boiled the best cores in a little pan and added that water to the big pot.

The cut-up quinces go into a pan with a little water, and brought to a boil. They cook until the fruit is soft and can be mashed easily.

processed, ready for second cooking

Drain off excess water, add the little bit of water the cores cooked in, and run the fruit through a food processor until it is a smooth yellow applesauce-y consistency.

Now, according to most recipes, the sauce is measured, and an equal or nearly equal amount of sugar (by volume) is added. I sweeten it by taste instead, and usually end up using 1/2 to 2/3 the sugar recommended.

This all goes into a heavy-bottomed saucepan (pick one that reduces jams and jellies easily, without burning!). Now comes the part that requires a fair bit of patience. The sauce is cooked over medium-low heat, stirring often to nearly constantly, until it thickens, loses moisture, and turns into a lovely shade of merlot red. If you leave it to cook on its own, it will burn to the pan!! It will begin to move and bubble slowly like lava, with steam-holes bursting through, and throwing red bits around your stove, or up to your ceiling, if the heat is too high!

When it’s thickened about until you can swipe the spoon through it and see the bottom of the pan for a moment, or it’s starting to hold shapes you stir into it, it’s ready. Have ready some lightly buttered pans (or line with parchment paper and butter over it). Pour the sauce into the pans, to about an inch thick or less, and smooth the top. Leave this to cool undisturbed at room temperature, and surprise! It magically solidifies into a gel that slides easily out of the buttered pan, and can be cut into squares or wedges. (This year…we’re going to try cutting into small squares and chocolate-covering it…) Another bonus - a big batch can be made and stored in the fridge, well-wrapped, for literally months.

Cooked down and ready to pour

membrillo setting up

We are blessed with a quince tree in the back yard.

It blooms with beautiful white flowers in the spring, and by fall, if it’s a good year, the branches are weighed heavily by fuzzy yellow fruit.  This year was a great year for the quince tree!

We picked quinces a week or two ago on a rainy day when our raincoats exactly matched the color of the fruit.

Quinces are an intriguing fruit that looks like a combination between a yellow apple and a pear.  But if you bite into one raw, the high level of tannins make you feel like the insides of your cheeks are trying to adhere to your tongue!  They need to be cooked……next post!

Everyone’s talking about tomatoes!

Some have lost them massively to the blight. Others are up at 3 am catching up on the canning.

I feel fairly content with where we are at tomato-wise. I planted about 8 varieties, grown at home from seed. I also allowed certain strong seedlings that self-seeded in the garden, ending up with a few unnamed mixed varieties. We have many beautiful tomatoes, despite the cool summer that slowed production and encouraged disease. But - I planted more tomatoes this year than I have ever before, and have less of a harvest than I have had many years.

This year we have a lot of Caspian Pink. Flavor-wise, it may be my favorite beefsteak type tomato, but it is problematic. It's bottom can start to rot before the top is ripe, and it splits very easily. It's hard to get a perfect one for market purposes.

Usually Costoluto di Genovese is one of my favorite and most prolific tomatoes to grow; this year it did very poorly. It seemed particularly susceptible to the blight or other diseases that did afflict some of my tomatoes - particularly the early planting set out under row covers. In fact, it seems the earlier the tomato was transplanted, the greater the chance of total loss to blight.

Last year, I discovered a new way to use Caspian Pink (and any other soft sweet beefsteak). We are drying them to make tomato chips! These are dried tomatoes with a twist - they end up so thin and crisp and intensely sweet that we just tend to eat them just like that!

The art of canning seems to be going through a revival, but the art of drying food is more seldom mentioned! We love our dehydrator, and are running it round the clock for the tomatoes, zucchini, corn, and herbs right now.

Cherokee Purple I tried for the first time. It’s okay, when I can get a good one off the plants. Tends to split and show blight spots on the top, in my garden.

Other standbys are Polish Linguisa and Opalka - two sausage-y paste tomatoes that look so similar I lose track of which is which. They are huge and fabulous and make great sauce.

Pineapple is a new tomato for me this year, that I haven't grown before. It is a beautiful (and luxuriously tasty!) thing.

Beautiful range of colors in tomatoes cut up for drying! Back to front: Cherokee purple, Pineapple, Caspian Pink, Pineapple.

In addition to the drying, I’ll be canning too, whole tomatoes, sauce, and maybe pizza sauce again.

It makes us so happy the way everyone exclaims over our nasturtiums at the market! Nasturtiums get some of the most frequent comments. People have asked a lot about how we get them to flower like that, because theirs don’t. Hmmm… I don’t know that I do anything special. I got my seeds from Fedco, and have been thrilled with the results. They are generous with their seeds amounts, nearly every seed I planted seemed to grow, and they have a nice mix of colors.

Other than that, I started them early in flats, and make sure they’re in good sun when they get planted out. They don’t get a lot of pampering attention otherwise. Perhaps they bloom more because I pick a lot of them.

Nasturtiums are edible flowers. You can add them to salads, or put them on any kind of crudite plate to add color. Some people stuff their centers with a little cream cheese spread. They are really pretty atop a bowl of guacamole. They are a combination of sweet and zippyspicy. Some flowers are spicier than others; some people eat them whole and the stems too; others just eat the petals, and the leaves can go in salad. (I put a few young ones in the bags of “wild baby greens” we sell at the market). I’ve read recipes about pickling the seed pods to use like capers, but haven’t tried it.

We’ve meant to post for awhile about the eggs this summer. The chickens roam through a wooded area all day, eating whatever they find that looks good to them. Eggyolks tend to reflect the chickens’ diets - the yellower they are, the more stuff they are finding to eat containing carotenoids (such as beta carotene).

For awhile, the chickens had found something to eat that was making their yolks astonishingly orange. Not even yellow anymore, but really orange. We think it was probably most likely some red and orange honeysuckle berries. Wild birds love those too. Some chickens tend to forage more than others, which might account for the differences between eggs in the same flock. The eggs in this picture are quite toned down compared to some we were getting for awhile. But they still bear a striking resemblance to the gorgeous delicious “Sunsugar” cherry tomatoes that are coming in finally….

Here are a couple pictures of the eggs at the height of their colorfulness, a couple weeks ago. First, a favorite recipe - homegrown tomato sauce warmed to simmering in a pan, then a few eggs dropped into it to poach. Heavenly spread on crunchy toast, with fresh basil.

And, just regular fried eggs, cooked in cast iron. Lots of range of colors to the yolks. If you’ve ever wondered why “yellow cake” was called yellow cake, this is it! The yellow that we’re all drawn to is supposed to come from healthy eggyolks, not red and yellow dye!

Last year, in maple season sometime around the middle to end of March, we had a sugar snow. It looked like this:

A sugar snow is a late winter/early spring snow that encourages the maple season to extend, by slowing down the trees production with cold nights. It’s the kind of snow that comes down one day and is gone the next. We haven’t had that kind of weather this year, and our maple sap harvesting may be over or close to over for the year - a couple weeks earlier than last year. So yesterday we made maple cream to celebrate.

If you like spreadable honey, honey butter, Nutella, maple glazed doughnuts, etc, you might love maple cream. (Also known as maple spread, or maple butter.) It’s not hard to make it, just takes some attention. We put a couple quarts of maple syrup in a deep pan, and brought it to a boil, then boiled it until the temperature - by candy thermometer - came up to 236 degrees F. It bubbles and foams up in the pan a great deal, thus the deep pan. I forgot to take pictures of it at this stage - too bad! But below are some of the finished product.

After it reaches this boiling temperature, we set the pan in a basin of ice water to cool rapidly. You’re not supposed to “disturb” it in any way while it cools (don’t stir). We waited until the temperature was around 70 degrees, then we divided it up between three bowls, took three wooden spoons, and three people started stirring.

This part went on for a long time. You pretty much stir until you think your arm will fall off, then switch to the other hand and stir until you have to switch again. You stir, past being certain it’s not working and you should give up and stop. It really helps to have several people doing it, because you can compare progress and egg each other on, and distract each other. The other thing you could do is switch back and forth between a couple people so you can rest your arm.

Eventually, after stirring with no results for what seems like forever (probably it’s about 15 minutes or so) you realize that your mixture is starting to change color and texture. You keep on stirring, and things happen faster at this point. The sugar is crystallizing, but the combination of the temperature it heated to, the rapid cooling, and your stirring is making it form very tiny crystals. This gives it a creamy texture. The color changes from golden-brown maple syrup color to light buff yellow, and it feels different to stir. It looks eerily like creamy peanut butter or cashew butter, or wood glue. When it gets to the point of having a dull sheen to the surface when you stop stirring a moment, it’s done. We spooned it into jars, divided them up, and put them in our refrigerators. This stuff has a shorter lifespan, and must be refrigerated.

How can we describe maple cream? It disappears in your mouth. It looks like it will be TOO sweet and gooey, and it’s not. It’s great on toasts, popovers, muffins, cakes, and spoons. I’ve been wondering what it might be like to freeze teaspoons of it and dip them in dark chocolate. It’s very special, and we’re glad we kept stirring!

Sigh.  It’s not starting off to be a good year, legislatively, for small farms, for organic farms, for people who eat food locally grown, sustainably grown, thoughtfully grown.

Yesterday it was HR 875, the bill that will make it functionally impossible to grow food sensibly and in effect make only the lowest common denominators of food products available, the kind mass produced by Big Ag in our stores.  Urban farmer’s markets selling local produce will become economically untenable, and they’ll wither and disappear or turn into craft fairs.

Today it is HR 814, the bill that will make NAIS mandatory.  HR 814: TRACE Act of 2009, “Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act of 2009″.  This bill requires, for the “safety” of our food supply, that every farm animal on every farm, large and small, be registered so that it can be traced from birth to death. As if that will make us all safer.

What’s wrong with our food supply is that certain large corporations value profits over consumer safety, and value revenue over responsibility.  They find creative ways to cut costs by poisoning the soil (and everything that grows in it) in the name of cleanliness and safety.  They pack their animals into tiny concentration camps where they defecate all over each other

HR 814 doesn’t specify how to trace the animals. That’s left to the regulators to decide within a year of the bill’s passage.  One year?  That means the only choice is to make mandatory the government’s only animal tracing program, the NAIS run by the USDA.  NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, an Orwellian Big Brother surveillance program for animals.  Ostensibly voluntary, the USDA puts pressure on state agencies to get their local farms to sign up and participate.  The state agencies cheat on this by using existing farm records to sign up farmers without their permission, or by calling farmers with surveys and using these results to sign them up, or by refusing state benefits or programs to farmers if they don’t sign up.

What’s wrong with NAIS?  That’s not the question.  What’s right about it?  There is no research that says the many millions spent on it will be able to stop any disease outbreaks or help anyone deal with the situation.  It is designed by Big Ag to benefit Big Ag and to penalize small farmers.  For example, if your company grows hundreds of beef cattle at a time and ships them all in one batch from feedlot to slaughter, then you need exactly one tag, one registration for all these animals.  But if you’re a small farmer with 60 sheep, trying to raise lambs for local sale, you have to register and track from birth to death every individual animal, every ewe and every lamb.  Sixty times the paperwork of a whole feedlot of cows.  Sell one lamb?  File the paperwork.  Keep the records.  Allow a government inspector to make copies of any piece of paper and any disk drive that might have information related to any of your animals.  Trust them with your privacy.

Sigh.  I’m not really the one to write this… not yet.  I don’t know enough about it, haven’t experienced it firsthand.  Go read the accounts of people who’ve already been affected by it at NoNAIS.org.  Find out why several states have banned the NAIS, who have taken a stand against this onerous burden on small farmers… with no increase in food safety, only costs.  Find out that federal legislation such as this could run roughshod over the states, forcing their farmers to comply despite the state statutes.

And then wonder why the supermarkets have more and more of less and less that you want to take home to cook and eat.  And think of us while you eat it.

I can’t write a lot about this just yet… too much studying to do, learning about the ways of politics, agribusiness, deceit (aka “framing the discussion”). But I want to put something down here.

Introduced last month into the US House of Representatives is a new bill, H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 , that has been carefully designed NOT to enhance food safety per se, but to ensure the long-term dominance of agribusiness at the expense of small farmers.

This bill was introduced by a Democrat and is co-sponsored by 39 Democrats (unfortunately including my own, Rep. Mark Schauer, 7th District Michigan). I’m glad that Republicans are standing, so far, against this. What I’d like is for Democrats AND Republicans who care about health, food and the freedom to choose will take a stand against this and make their voices heard.

What’s HR 875 about? HR 875 first charges that the FDA is inadequate to the task of protecting our food supply proactively… not enough inspectors, hamstrung by antiquated legislation, yada yada. Next it proposes a new Food Safety Administration within… well, let’s let the bill speak for itself:

Purpose: To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Who could be against safe food? Nobody. But this isn’t really about safe food… it’s about large-scale, factory-farm agribusiness coming under fire for endangering public safety. Think about it… every food safety issue you can think of has involved large-scale factory farms and agribusiness, not small farms and organic farms and folks who care sincerely about delivering healthy fresh food to you. There’s no major E. coli or salmonella outbreaks coming from farmer’s markets in this country.

What’s wrong with HR 875? I’ll take a first shot at it, but I’ll come back to visit the topic more in the future, because it’s that important.

Since agribusiness knows the situation for them is bad and that legislation could be introduced to penalize them for their sorry ways, what do they do? Well, if your CEO $$$ bonuses were on the line and stock options were underwater, you’d come up with a way to turn the situation on its head. And that’s what HR 875 does. It says “Hey, we need to protect your food from the farmer’s field to your table, and we can only do that with more regulations and unscheduled government inspection and animal surveillance, with mandatory food safety plans approved by the government, including minimum standards for fertilizer use, hygiene, and packaging.” These things might sound reasonable if you live in town and buy your food from a supermarket. But not if you’re a small farmer just trying to scrape by, which is about all that small farmers can manage to do, usually with the help of some outside income.

In short, make regulations that put an administrative burden on ALL farms regardless of size. If you sell food to consumers, you must comply. That makes some sense in a Big Brother, We Know What’s Best For You kind of way. But let me give you an example of what this means.

A farm, of any size, is called a “food production facility” (as opposed to a slaughterhouse, which is called a “food establishment”). Section 206 of HR 875 states that the government has the right and responsibility to visit and inspect the facility, approve the food safety plan, review food safety records, conduct monitoring and surveillance of animals and plants, and more. It goes on to establish that the government has the right to have access to and ability to copy ALL records (paper and electronic) necessary to determine whether the food is in compliance with food safety laws, and to track the food in commerce.

Hmmm? To “track the food in commerce”. Paul, I don’t see your records as to tracking your food in commerce. Wha? I deliver eggs and produce to a farmer’s market in Ann Arbor and make a few special deliveries door to door. I sell a few eggs from my back door. I need to track this?

A few years down the line, the regulations change… I need to what? Use bar codes to track my tomatoes? I need to use RFID tags on any lots larger than 10 pounds?

OK, could I be jumping the gun on this? Could I be paranoid that maybe big business really doesn’t have it’s own best interests at heart, and it’s really concerned first and foremost about the safety of our people?

No. I’m right. They know what they’re doing. Who? THEY. This is the biotechnology lobby, that got former Iowa Gov Tom Vilsack into the Department of Agriculture Secretary position (Vilsack champions GMO products and was selected “Governor of the Year” by the BIO, Biotechnology Industry Organization). This is Monsanto, whose strategic consultant Stanley Greenberg is the husband of US Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, who introduced HR 875 in February.

This is the dirty tail wagging the food safety dog. This is going beyond overkill to create overlords.

(sigh. breathe. focus.)

There is a Variance. In this bill! You’d hope that there would be a Variance, a loophole, something that would allow those with a legitimate need to skip the more onerous parts of this bill, and just get their jobs done. And there is! Right there in section 206, right after the hard parts about the bill’s burden of inspection, surveillance and seizing of records…comes this welcome relief:

States and foreign countries that export produce intended for consumption in the United States may request from the Administrator variances from the requirements of the regulations under subsection (c).

That’s right… not small farms. FOREIGN farms. All they have to do is write a request to the Administrator describing their practices, have their request reviewed, and get a variance. No inspection. No surveillance. Just ask and it shall be given unto you. So… all you have to do is get yourself a foreign farm, and put a few containerized freight carbon miles on your produce, and everything is fine again.

( breathe. )

I’m going to quit this post now. I’m going to think about it some more, read some more, and probably write some more. I’ll consider writing about it as if there is no complicity, no devious big agribusiness plot to come out ahead by writing food safety legislation their way. Perhaps I’ll convince myself that this bill is well-intentioned, but simply has too many unintended consequences for small farmers, for organic farmers, for reducing the food choices of all Americans, and ultimately the food safety of all Americans. I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, every Representative in Congress who will vote on this bill needs to know what the small farmers in their districts think of this bill, what every person who cares about the food that goes onto their plates thinks about this bill. It’s about choices. Where is that Farmer in Chief anyway? It sounds like Michelle might be getting the picture, with her new vegetable garden coming today. As long as they don’t try and sell any of the produce without keeping tracking records. No vegetable market stand on the White House lawn for those Obama children, not after HR 875 passes, or at least not without a White House staffer to record and track that produce.