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Prices at the Farmer’s Market- A Small Rant

28 Apr 2012

9 Comments

Tomorrow is the Kickoff Celebration to the Eat Local Challenge. (I hope the crowd is as big as the name.) I’m doing a cooking demo at the celebration and had to decide what to make. Random people have been asking me for weeks “what are you making?”. Even my husband asked. But of course I didn’t know until I got to the farmer’s market this morning.

It’s all about eating local- the freshest, most seasonal food possible.

Living in Florida and being a locavore is beyond all dreams of avarice during this time of the year. The sheer variety at the markets right now is breathtaking. Aren’t these colors just the most gorgeous? Those purple onions just got me.

This week my husband asked to take a small break from greens. Greens, citrus and sweet potatoes form a good percentage of our diet in the winter and we’re all ready for a break. That big bok choy in the corner is destined for the kimchi jar in the morning, and the only other greens are those dandelion greens. I just can’t resist French dandelion greens cooked with bacon with a splash of white balsamic vinegar. If anyone complains, I’ll happily scarf them all myself.

Bruised tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, red skinned potatoes, eggplant, various sweet & spicy peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, bok choy, purple onions, dandelion greens, and cilantro. Grand total= $40.

This got me thinking. I read about and see people complaining about prices at the farmer’s markets. Now, it’s true that there are yuppy markets out there with “inflated” prices. However, yuppy markets are easy to spot and easy to avoid if you want to. Find the older farmer’s market, the one that’s been around a while. The one filled with stalls of actual farmers. Then really look around and talk to the farmers. Buying directly from the farmers in your area is not like buying vegetables from the grocery store in many ways!

Snap peas are a good example. Snap peas are cheap at the grocery store, right? I mean, you can buy fresh snap peas at Walmart for $1 a pound sometimes. Well, here in Gainesville, you’re lucky if you can find a little basket of snap peas for $3 at the farmer’s market.

“That’s ridiculous!” I hear people say. “It’s so expensive!”

Well, let me tell you. Snap peas are cheap at the grocery store because they get shipped in from places where they are easy to grow. There are parts of the country where snap peas grow by the bucket, and home gardeners can just give them away.

That place is not North Central Florida.

Snap peas are difficult to grow here. They don’t like sandy soil, they don’t like heat, every bug loves them, and they curl up their toes at the slightest nematode. A home gardener is lucky to get one good harvest of snap peas before the plants keel over. That little basket of snap peas is expensive because the farmer had to nurse those plants carefully, plant them extra early, protect them from frosts, fend off the armies of hungry bugs by buying special row covers, and then quickly harvest what they could before the temperatures hit 85.

On the other hand, consider the lowly zucchini. A whole basket of the tiniest tender baby zucchini and yellow squash today was $2. That’s half the price of “gourmet” baby squash at Fresh Market, maybe less. Zucchini, yellow squash, collards, peppers, sweet potatoes, okra, eggplant… those things are easy to grow here. They grow like mad and require little special attention. They’re cheap at the farmer’s market, often cheaper than the grocery store.

So the next time you go to your local farmer’s market and see something that seems wildly expensive, ask the farmer about growing it or producing it. Let her tell you about the travails of trying to grow tender lettuces in the Southern heat, or the lengths he went to in getting those chilis to mature before the first frost.

Then maybe you’ll buy that $3 tiny basket of beans anyway.

By: Andi Houston Category: What's in the Basket?

Blueberries and Coming Home

26 Apr 2012

5 Comments

Going away is great. It makes you appreciate being home so much more.

The Spanish Peaks from my friend's back yard!

Colorado in April sure made me appreciate humidity in a whole new way. My gills dried out.

Eating very little home-cooked food for a week also made me appreciate my regular diet. I went to the downtown farmer’s market after work yesterday with an eye to add even more fresh produce to my diet for the rest of the week and cut way back on processed sugar. And behold! A whole table of fresh blueberries! So of course I bought a pint for dessert.

Oh, sour. Huge and plump and fresh and beautiful and terribly, terribly sour.

So we ate them happily anyway… over vanilla ice cream with a sprinkle of my hoarded pecans and a drizzle of cane syrup. I think the rest will become Blueberry-Banana Baked Oatmeal if I’m feeling virtuous, and Blueberry Boy Bait if I’m not.

 

By: Andi Houston Category: Recipes!

Pantry vs. Meal planning and Local Eating

18 Apr 2012

2 Comments

There are two major camps in the frugal home kitchen debate: meal planning vs. pantry stocking. After reading this article on stocking the pantry, I realized that I actually do a combination of these two methods. This is one of those (thankfully rare) weeks where we need to spend as little on groceries as possible. A lot of people ask me how I cook meals from scratch, eat such a high percentage of local foods, and stay on budget. This is the system that works best for me.

Most weeks I visit the farmer’s market and do the grocery shopping on Saturday morning.

1. Make a list of what’s already in the fridge and pantry, concentrating on what needs to be used up first like open packages or left overs.

2. Go to the farmer’s market. Buy whatever looks good and has a good price. Keep in mind how much your household can eat in one week. It’s really easy to over-buy and end up with produce that goes bad before it can be eaten. My weekly budget for the farmer’s market is $40-$50, about 1/3 of our total food budget.

This week's basket: onions, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, baby zucchini and yellow squash, rosemary, and lots of beets. All of this plus pastries for me & my daughter was $25.

3. When you are done at the farmer’s market, add the list of what you just bought to the list of what you already have. If you have the time, go get a cup of coffee or breakfast somewhere and plan a rough menu for the week. Look at the two lists like a puzzle. The goal is to use up all the pieces. What can I make that will use all of both lists? How do they fit together best? What absolutely must be used first? What can wait until later in the week?

4. Then write down the menu, and if you need to, make a third list of everything you need but don’t already have. Here is where I do a combination of the two methods. There is a small list of foods that I always like to have on hand, either because we eat them every day or because they’re good “emergency foods” that I can whip up in a hurry if the meal plan for that night has to be cancelled. Sometimes I forget to take the meat out of the freezer, or forget to turn the crockpot on in the morning.

I keep that basic pantry list in my head, but if you’re just starting out then you should write it down. Some of the items on my pantry list: milk, eggs, butter, whole wheat tortillas, Irish Breakfast tea, whole rolled oats, spaghetti, jarred marinara sauce, canned tuna fish, sugar, flour, salt, and a bottle of wine. A huge help is also participating in cow pools a couple times a year so the freezer is stocked with beef, pork, and venison. The only meats we buy weekly are fish, chicken, and sometimes specialty items like bacon or smoked sausage.

Notice, no long-term meal planning. I only plan for a week at a time. I’ve never done longer-term meal planning or shopping than a week. We don’t have room in our tiny kitchen for more than a week’s food for our family of 5.

Here is my notebook with lists of what we have, what we bought, and the resulting meals to use everything up.

5. Now that you’re sufficiently caffeinated, you can finish the shopping. I usually visit 2-3 stores each week to complete my shopping because I am cheap thrifty.  Certain items are cheaper at certain stores, and Walmart is not always the least expensive. For instance, the prices on ethnic foods at stores like Publix and Kroger (and Wards!) are extremely high. If you want ethnic foods, go to the ethnic food store. Not only will you get a better selection at a better price, you’ll probably find a bunch of interesting foods you’ve never tried. Since ethnic grocers are independent local stores you’ll also be pumping money directly into the local economy and, if you’re lucky, making new friends. There are items that quality will win over price, too. If you want fish, go to a fishmonger if you can. Try out the Latin butcher shop for meat (look for “carniceria”), or the halal butcher if you’re lucky enough to have one. Some weeks we visit the Indian grocer, the Asian grocer, the Russian grocer, and the regular grocery store. I like shopping for food; this is a chore I enjoy.

My total budget for groceries is $150/week including household items like shampoo and toilet paper. This week, because I had a well-stocked pantry and freezer, I spent $25 on fresh produce and $30 at Publix on the few things we needed to fill in the holes, and we won’t have to shop again until Saturday because of the combination of meal planning and pantry stocking.

So how do you grocery shop?

By: Andi Houston Category: Weekly Meal Plans, What's in the Basket? Tags: ,

My first blog award!

17 Apr 2012

2 Comments

Thank you to Mrs. Dull’s Nourishing Kitchen for choosing me for the Liebster Award!

“Liebster” is a German word meaning dearest, beloved or favorite, and the Liebster Award is sort of a chain letter among bloggers that’s intended to showcase exceptional up-and-coming blogs (typically, those with 200 or fewer followers). Now, there’s no evaluation committee or formal award process for the Liebster, but in a way it’s even nicer – it’s recognition that a peer has noticed and appreciated your hard work.

I’ve never paid attention to other blogs’ number of follower’s before, so going through the blogs I normally read (they are legion) was an interesting exercise in social media awareness and design.

Here are my five nominees to receive the Liebster Award:

1. Fox Grape Farm

I’m a total sucker for farm blogs and her honest and funny record of her farm experiments won me over years ago. I love that she and her husband both grew up in Gainesville and they both stayed here to farm and raise their children.

2. Offaly Tasty

This blog is a recent find for me after the author and I connected on Facebook. Any overlap between interesting/uncommon recipes, Weston A Price/Nourishing Traditions-led cooking, and Florida bloggers is going to catch my attention, and her take on cooking is fresh and unique.

3. I Believe I Can Fry

How often do you find a combination of unpretentious Japanese and Southern home cooking? Tuna casserole next to Korokke? Awesome. Also, she has a great recipe for Gumbo Z’Herbes, which I was convinced no one outside of Louisiana had ever heard of, much less cooked and ate.

4. Cocktail Remedy

“But Andi…” you say, “You don’t *drink* cocktails.” Well, that’s mostly true. I’m much more a beer (and newly, red wine!) person than a cocktail person at home and at a bar. However, I do love interesting flavors and adore experimenting in the kitchen, and this blog has plenty of both. Plus, the photography is gorgeous.

5. Urban Foodfare

This is the blogging side of Urban Jax Farm, an urban permaculture farm in Jacksonville. I read many, many permaculture blogs, budding permaculture geek I am, but there are relatively few compared to cooking blogs so they tend to have huge followings. This one is local (Jacksonville is just over an hour from me) so it’s immediately relevant to my own gardening research, and I like their uncommon farm projects (Geese! Turkeys!) and their unflinching treatment of omnivorism and raising farm animals.

Go check out these great blogs!

By: Andi Houston Category: Politics and Movement Tags:

Double Goat Sfeeha

16 Apr 2012

3 Comments

One of the best parts of visiting the same market for several years is building relationships with the farmers. I buy fresh herbs from this farm because he has the best price, cherry tomatoes from that one because they’re the sweetest, and I always buy goat cheese and kefir from Glades Ridge Dairy. Their chevre is a fridge staple, and I’ve been experimenting with using their kefir as a locally-available substitute for yogurt and buttermilk. Recently they started selling ground goat, too, so this week I decided to try some out. I’ve cooked goat many times before but never boneless ground meat. I wanted to highlight the flavor of goat, which to me is like less-strong lamb or maybe extremely tender venison.

This is a perfect light dinner and relatively quick if you already have pita or naan you want to use up. It’s also wide open to variation. I substituted several ingredients from the original recipe to fit what I bought that day at the market and already had in the pantry; you can do the same for what’s in season where you live. I served the sfeeha with chevre and tomato-cucumber-thyme salad on top, and sauteed baby zucchini and crookneck squash and roasted mini-potatoes as side dishes. The combination of goat meat and chevre is fantastic.

Double-Goat Sfeeha

1 1/2 lb Glades Ridge Dairy ground goat meat
large handful of fresh parsley, leaves and stems, chopped
3 large green onions, chopped
2 tbl olive oil
2 tbl pomegranate molasses
1 tbl ketchup
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1-2 tbl cold water
Tomato-Cucumber-Thyme salad
4 oz chevre, crumbled
6 pieces of naan, flatbread, or pita

Heat oven to 375. Combine goat meat through pepper in a food processor. Start blending, adding only as much water as necessary to help the meat mixture through the blades. Only blend in short pulses until the pomegranate molasses, ketchup and spices are incorporated. Next place 3 of the flatbreads on a baking sheet. Using a stout spoon, place a scoop of the meat mixture on each bread. Spread the meat mixture carefully over the bread, leaving a small border around the edge. Place in the oven and bake until the meat is cooked through and the bread is starting to brown, about 10 minutes. While the first batch is baking, prepare the salad, then bake the second batch. Let sfeeha rest for at least 5 minutes before serving.

Tomato-Cucumber-Thyme salad

1 large tomato, mostly deseeded and chopped
1 large or three small cucumbers, chopped
1 can of hearts of palm, drained, rinsed and chopped
small handful of parsley, chopped
5-6 sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves stripped off and chopped
2 tbl capers, chopped
3 tbl white balsamic vinegar
1/4 olive oil
salt and pepper

Combine in a bowl and let sit for at least 20 minutes to let the flavors meld. Taste for salt & pepper before serving on top of the sfeeha.

Full disclosure- I received one package of ground goat for free but my opinions are my own.

By: Andi Houston Category: Recipes! Tags: , , ,

Local in restaurants?

13 Apr 2012

3 Comments

I had lunch at Vello’s Brickstreet Grill yesterday, a small “grille” just a few blocks from my office in downtown Gainesville. I only go out to lunch once or twice a month, so when I do, it had better be good. I have tried several dishes at Vello’s but I often come back to the same thing- a big salad with baby arugula, shaved prosciutto, manchego, fresh cantaloupe, and balsamic vinegar. It’s a filling salad and nicely balanced. SO I order my salad and settle in to read my book and enjoy the gorgeous weather.

Then the salad arrives and I take the first bite of melon and arugula… and immediately have to spit it out in my napkin. The cantaloupe was both slimy and fizzy, a taste combination I do not recommend. I carried the salad over to the hostess and we did the whole I’m-sorry, no I’m sorry dance, and they brought me a new salad with freshly cut cantaloupe and everything was good and I enjoyed my salad. And that salad was really good… except for the cantaloupe which was nice and fresh but still lackluster. It was so obviously a cantaloupe shipped in from gods-know-where in Central or South America, ripened in an airplane or in a packing house with gas, and the refrigerated.

So, why did the restaurant use this obviously out-of-season, inferior cantaloupe in its salad? A salad of only 5 ingredients, so you’re going to notice immediately when one of those ingredients is not up to snuff?

I can think of two reasons:

1. Menu continuity. We are Americans. We are used to immediate convenience and chain restaurants that serve the same food whether we’re in Florida or Michigan. It may also be because printing menus costs money. So does uploading menus to websites, chowhound, urbanspoon, yelp, etc. Most people find one-two dishes they like at a restaurant and always order that. What would they order if the menu changed regularly?

2. Lack of awareness of what really fresh food tastes like. I don’t buy cantaloupes in the grocery store any more because once you eat a ripened-in-the-field cantaloupe, especially one that has never been refrigerated, you never want to eat any other kind. All I could think of when I was eating that salad yesterday was how much better it would have been with strawberries, which are nearing the end of their season but the height of the flavor.

So, good readers, what do you think? Why don’t independent restaurants use seasonal produce, especially when it will obviously affect the quality and flavor of the dishes? Would that make a difference for you?

By: Andi Houston Category: Politics and Movement Tags:

Home Skillet

12 Apr 2012

4 Comments

This recipe may have to enter regular rotation. It’s low-carb and high-veg, a little meat goes a long way, and it’s endlessly variable. This is a great “clean out the produce bin” dish and is also good to use up that last chunk of parmesan or cheddar lingering in the drawer. Also, I bought dandelion greens at the Union Street Farmer’s Market this afternoon and had no idea what to do with them, but my daughter actually said “Hey Mom, the saltiness of the bacon really works well with the bitterness of the greens”. Mom dinner win!

If I hadn’t bought a rosemary baguette to have with dinner, we’d've had “Home Skillet Biscuit” for dinner. My kids are finding this very funny.

Dandelion & Mushroom Home Skillet

5 slices of bacon, cut into 1″ chunks
1 large sweet potato, scrubbed and cut into 1″ chunks
1 bunch of dandelion greens, rinsed and chopped but still damp
8 oz. mushrooms, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 oz fresh parmesan cheese
An egg or 2 for each person
salt and pepper

Heat a large skillet to medium-high. Add bacon and saute until half-done. Drain off the extra grease and add the bacon back to the pan. Add the mushrooms and get them started, then add the sweet potato. Turn the heat down to medium. Keep stirring the ingredients around the pan every few minutes until the sweet potatoes get a nice crust and the mushrooms are nice and browned. Add the garlic and keep stirring. When the sweet potatoes are completely fork-tender, immediately sprinkle parmesan over the vegetables, salt and pepper to taste, and then turn the heat down to low. Make little holes in the vegetable mixture and carefully break an egg in each hole. For sunny-side up eggs, partially cover the pan and let the ambient heat partially cook the eggs. If you want the eggs totally cooked, tightly cover the pan and leave over low heat for 5 minutes.

I served this with a rosemary baguette and yogurt cheese, a great light dinner!

By: Andi Houston Category: Recipes! Tags: , , , ,

Eat Local Challenge 2012

11 Apr 2012

5 Comments

Yesterday I registered for the Gainesville area Eat Local Challenge starting May 1st.

What is the Eat Local Challenge, you say?

The basic challenge is to eat something local every day, just to get more aware of what foods are available locally (within 100 miles) and what’s in season. A surprising variety of foods are available to people in Alachua County in May, easily enough variety to make even a 100% local diet not just interesting but enjoyable, but the percentage of local foods you eat every day is up to you. Many people make personal challenges such as spending 25% of their grocery budgets at the farmer’s market, or only eating local meat. How you do the challenge is up to you. Eat Local Challenges happen all over the country, all through the year, starting with an online challenge in 2005. Stefanie Hamblen of Hogtown Homegrown and Illegal Jams started the Eat Local Challenge in Gainesville in 2007 and organizes them every year to introduce more people to the incredible Gainesville area “foodshed“.

The Eat Local Challenge is always exciting for us. We eat already eat local food every day, but the ELC month is when I go searching for new foods and new farms. The past two years I’ve focused ELC months on sourcing kitchen staples and more sustainably raised meat. This year’s ELC is special- we’re moving during the month of May! I know my life is going to be too chaotic for anything rigorous like a 100 mile diet, so for the month of May I will focus on the most local of foods… those you grow yourself.

The number one reason we chose this house was the large yard and small vegetable garden. I am diving into piles of books on permaculture design, native plants, butterfly and wildlife gardening, and perennial vegetables every evening, cramming before I start planning the new garden. But I still have two planted vegetable beds and food plants in my tiny yard now, and I want to get as much food out of them as possible. So the month of May will focus on growing your own food: building raised beds, composting, creating food guilds for our new microclimate, and planting perennials.

Come see me cook in public! Eat Local Challenge month starts with a Kickoff celebration on the 29th at Citizen’s Co-op on south Main Street. I am doing a short cooking demo, but I haven’t chosen what to cook yet. Any suggestions?

By: Andi Houston Category: Eat Local Challenge Tags: , , , , ,

Maple Sticky Buns and Going Out On A Limb

10 Apr 2012

4 Comments

Today I tried something completely new!

I happen to enjoy the challenge presented by eating as much locally-produced food as possible, but every once in a while it’s good to get out of my little box. I have been cruising the Food52 website for months now, watching the contests and browsing the recipes. Well, I finally caught one of their calls for recipe testers- so I signed up!

The theme for this recipe contest was “Best Maple Recipes”. Now, eventually I would love to send in one of my recipes to a Food52 contest, but this wasn’t the one. Maple syrup is crazy expensive here in Florida and there are locally-grown and processed alternatives like cane syrup, so I can’t even tell you the last time I bought maple syrup. There were quite a few maple-centric recipes to choose from, but one really caught my eye- Robert Frost Rolls.

I know! Mayonnaise and applesauce in bread! Isn’t that crazy? How could I possibly resist?

Then the mental substitutions started. Oo. I could use cane syrup instead of maple syrup. And I could thaw and puree those persimmons in the freezer and use that instead of applesauce. And I still have pecans; I like pecans better than walnuts anyway.

But first I had to make them exactly the way the author wrote the recipe. Then I write a short review and hopefully the review gets published. So I sent my husband out to buy all of these exotic ingredients. Applesauce. Maple syrup. Walnuts. It’s kind of cool that these ingredients feel quite indulgent and exotic, because they are, to us.

So how did the sweet rolls turn out? Here’s my review!

Review: Robert Frost Rolls by ChefJune.

I was intrigued by this recipe immediately. Mayonnaise and apple sauce in bread dough? I resisted the temptation to tinker and made them exactly according to the author’s recipe.

These might be the best-textured sweet rolls I have ever made. The crumb is perfect, slightly stretchy and soft. They are somehow not dense at all despite the high percentage of whole wheat flour. The dough comes together easily and rolls out beautifully. The maple flavor is mild but definitely present. For added oomph I suggest adding a simple white icing flavored with maple syrup, however if you prefer sticky buns that are not overly sweet like I do, this is definitely the recipe for you. Also, I got 16 medium-sized buns out of the recipe instead of 12. Bonus!

Now I get to tinker!

By: Andi Houston Category: Recipes! Tags: , , , ,

Homemade Marinara Sauce, cheaper than store bought?

5 Apr 2012

16 Comments

Marinara sauce is one of the last holdouts in the dwindling number of ready-made convenience foods we buy. I had to wonder… is homemade marinara really cheaper? How does it taste?

At the market last weekend Dogwood Lane Farms had a large number of bruised and over-ripe tomatoes off to the side in a bin. I’m always looking for a bargain so I asked how many bruised tomatoes I could get for $5. In the end she gave me all of the tomatoes with no mold for $3, 2 large variety bags. This was a huge savings since she sells 4 heirloom tomatoes for $4.

I started processing the tomatoes that very night. I knew these tomatoes wouldn’t wait. I cored each tomato and sliced it in half, gently squeezing out the seeds and the water around the seeds, and laying them out in a baking dish. I had so many tomatoes I filled every baking dish I had.

Following Alton Brown’s directions for roasted tomato sauce, I drizzled all of those tomatoes lightly with olive oil, salt and pepper. They all went into a 350· oven for an hour, then I rotated the pans. I left them in until the edges of the tomatoes were almost blackened and most of the liquid was reduced to a thick syrup on the bottom of the pan.

The next part is the easiest. Simply scrape all of those wonderfully fragrant tomatoes into a large pot and start seasoning. I started with a couple cloves of garlic, lightly sauteed in olive oil in the pot, then a couple of glugs of red wine, then I added the tomatoes. Out came my new toy, my first immersion blender. It worked perfectly, tearing through the tomatoes and turning it all into a chunky sauce. Then I added fresh oregano and rigani from the garden, some dried marjoram and basil, and plenty of pepper.

How does it compare to jarred tomato sauce? It’s thicker, richer, and much more complex, with a slightly smokey undertone from roasting the tomatoes. It’s also orange because not all of the tomatoes I used were red. This batch made a little less than 2 quarts. Our usual marinara sauce is “Mid’s Homestyle Pasta Sauce” because it has very low sugar, less sugar than more expensive brands, and tastes pretty good.

The best part? Homemade really is cheaper. One 32 oz. jar of Mid’s Homestyle is $6. I made 2 quarts for $3 in tomatoes and probably 50¢ in herbs, oil, and wine. I used recycled quart soup containers instead of jars because they’re free. I will definitely be doing this again and freezing the resulting sauce.

I can’t wait to try it on spaghetti!

By: Andi Houston Category: Recipes! Tags: , , ,
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