Posts Tagged ‘eating local’

First Summer Salad

Posted on June 22nd, 2011 by Tonia 11 Comments

Today we harvested salad greens from our garden for the first time this summer. They were so tender, so alive, and tasted like rain.

It has been raining here for days, and we are really starting to miss the sunshine. To lift our spirits a little, I made the most summery meal I could think of: Cherry-chipotle BBQ chicken sandwiches with homemade buns, corn on the cob, salad, and refreshing glasses of chocolate-mint water. Everything on the plate was delicious, but the dark green salad was definitely the “lagniappe”.

I used this recipe for the buns, and they turned out fantastic. Crusty on the outside, soft on the inside, golden, and yeasty. I made them a little smaller than the recipe recommends, and I ended up with 12 instead of 8. They were the perfect size this way, if you ask me.

For the BBQ chicken, I didn’t have a recipe. I had a bottle of this ridiculously good sauce, and a whole chicken from a farm nearby. It’s not often that we use “condiments”. Usually we make things like BBQ sauce, ketchup, and salad dressing from scratch {to avoid high fructose corn syrup and other gross ingredients that tend to be in condiments.} But this particular BBQ sauce happens to be really tasty, so we break our rule for it.

I cut up the chicken, put it {bones, skin, fat and all} into a dutch oven, and poured almost the whole jar of sauce over it. It cooked on the stovetop on very low heat for about four hours. I started pulling the meat off the bones at that point, removing the bits of skin and bones from the pot and leaving only the juicy, shredded meat. It cooked for about one more hour then, just enough time for me to get the corn and salad prepared.

The buns came out of the oven, the meat went on the buns, extra sauce went on the meat, the corn got a healthy slathering of butter, we tossed a few leafs of chocolate-mint {from our garden} into our water glasses, and the greens were tossed with oil, balsamic vinegar, crushed walnuts, and shredded parmesan cheese. Done! Such an easy dinner. So flavorful, summery, and satisfying.

Vegetables, including leafy greens, actually lose about 80% of their nutritional value after only about a week out of the ground. If we’re eating veggies that are being transported to us from far away, by the time they reach us we’re maybe getting 10-20% of the vitamins and enzymes that veggie had to offer. Just another reason why having a garden is so rewarding and worthwhile!

I tasted the sunshine and rain and life in our greens tonight…they were hugely different, more delicious, than anything we have ever gotten at the store. What a wonderful reward for all our hard work tilling, planting, watering, and weeding.

Fresh Local Foods

Posted on June 17th, 2011 by Tonia 9 Comments

A couple of cool kids down the road from us, Alan and Alison, started their own organic produce company this summer: High Five Produce. They, together with a few other farms nearby, started the Washburn Farmer’s Market.

The next closest Farmer’s Market is a couple towns over, so we’re thrilled that they got one started right here in our town! It’s so much fun to be able to walk or bike over to their stand on Friday afternoons and chat with them and check out what’s good. We usually leave with a bag of salad greens, or a bunch of rhubarb {grown by the kids at the elementary school}, or a bar of soap.

We’re SO lucky to live in an area where fresh, organic, local food is plentiful. It seems like there is a farm around every corner, and we can get just about any kind of meat, dairy, and produce we want from a local source. Eating local is the greenest way to eat- the closer to home your food comes from, the less impact it has on the environment.

Al & Al grow their produce in their front yard currently, and they’re searching for a piece of land in the area to expand to. Someday High Five Produce might be High Five Farm! We’re happy and excited to see their dream growing into reality.

Maybe when our fruit trees are big enough and producing enough, we’ll join them at the stand and sell preserves and fresh fruit! It is going to be exciting to see the Market grow as more and more folks get involved.

Behind them is the studio of another cool kid in town, Jesse Woodward, who makes sculptures out of scrap metal. It has really been fun to get to know the kids our age in town. They’re doing some really cool things, they’re interesting and fun and have been extremely welcoming and friendly to us. High five to that!

Thank you all for making this a cool place to live!

Washburn Farmer’s Market members: High Five Produce {produce} / Maple Hill Farm, Washburn {whole wheat flour, soap, yarn, produce} / Northwind Farm , Bayfield {fruit jams} / Wild Girl Farm, Washburn {raw honey} / Washburn Elementary Farm-to-School {produce}

P.S. If you like the shirts they’re wearing, I could score one for you. Alison printed them herself on reclaimed t-shirts from the thrift-store and they’re selling them at the stand for $5.

Lessons in Smelting

Posted on April 23rd, 2011 by Tonia No Comments

Yaaaaaaawn! It is nearly 11 am, but I am still recovering from a very eventful Earth Day. Last night, after a full day of working around the farm, we ran into a couple friends in town who enticed us to come smelting with them.

{Image found here}

Smelting…the practice of waiting until dark, pulling on waders, strapping on a headlamp, walking out into the dark water of Lake Superior right after the ice lets out, and dragging a huge net in to the shore in hopes that thousands of tiny fish called Smelt will get trapped in it. It’s a group activity because the nets that are commonly used are so long that they require at least two people to drag them in.

Smelt only run in the shallow waters of the big lake for a few days each spring, so when we arrived at the shore, about a dozen trucks and campers belonging to avid smelters were already parked in a row, marking the ideal {sandy, shallow} smelting spots. Most of them had been camped out and smelting for two days already.

“They’re runnin’ good oh boy!” A bearded man with a Bud Light sloshed past us in camouflage waders. We hurriedly pulled on our gear and headed to the water.

There is something very counter-intuitive about walking out into a frigid, black, never-ending lake at night. You have to force your legs to take you further as your feet fox-walk along the bottom, careful not to trip on rocks, and all the while sensitive to the slow and steady descent you’re making…your thighs are under, now your hips…now your stomach.

It was raining last night- a freezing cold April rain that was somewhere between rain and snow. It pelted our cheeks as we edged deeper and deeper, the net stretched between us, our breath hanging in the air like ghosts.

“Here’s good.” We turned, dropped the net into the water and started towards shore. It’s a slow walk back; The net is heavy and the waves roll up around your body and drag on you. Headlamps and campfires struggling in the rain dotted the shoreline ahead. Cheery banter carried out across the water…”Hey! I smelt somethin’ fishy! Har har har…”

Finally we were back to shore and it took all four of us to scoop the net up in a way that would not to let any Smelt escape. Sure enough, it was sagging with the weight of about a hundred tiny fish.

“Good load!” Passing fisherman congratulated us on our success. We did about eight more runs and filled up a large cooler. A nearby group of smelters caught a large fish in their net. I went over and asked what kind it was.

“Oh he’s a big sucker,” the man replied.

“Yes, he is, but what kind is he?”

“I told you…a Sucker.”

{Image found here}

Slosh, slosh, slosh…we were wet and chilly as we loaded up our gear. “Want to come over and fry some of them up?” our friends asked. It was 11 PM, but why the heck not. We retreated to their warm home, chopped garlic, heated oil, and cleaned our fish. They’re so small that you just cut their heads off, squeeze out their organs, fry em up, and pop them in your mouth whole. They’re crunchy, tender, and tasty.

I wish I had some photos of this adventure to share, but the combination of sleety rain and pitch-black-darkness made photography pretty difficult. Plus our hands were full as it was. But please enjoy these vintage images from the prime smelting days in Duluth, MN- just an hour to the West of us. The spring tradition of netting Smelt has been going on for generations. I’m excited to have been exposed to it. Like ice fishing, it seems to be a “must” for anyone who lives on the shores of Lake Superior.

Earth Day 2011 was marked by hard work that resulted in a delicious, local and seasonal meal. We stepped out into one of Mother Earth’s greatest features: Lake Superior. We felt her breathing and we saw the twinkle in her eye. We were let in on her secret: that everything we need, she provides. We just need to learn how to be a part of the giving and the taking.

Winter Gardening and a Seasonal Diet

Posted on March 9th, 2011 by Tonia No Comments

“You are what you eat.” -Unknown

Mike and I have had several great conversations over food about food recently. We go around and around trying to figure out how best to stay healthy while cutting back on the impact that our food consumption has on the environment. We’re extremely interested in the idea of a local diet. Exclusively local. Sounds great, especially when we live in a town with an organic family farm around every corner. But there are some real challenges with this lifestyle, like making sure we still get a diversity of food and nutrients in our diet.

Since moving here, we have already cut way back on buying food products that are processed and packaged. But we still buy a lot of things like nuts and fruits that were grown far, far away and then transported here.

How do we get away from that? We have come to the conclusion that there is not one solution/alternative to big agriculture for the whole country, let alone the world, or even a state. It comes down to a person’s region, and the type of foods that are abundant in that region. We need to eat more of what is native here.

In northern WI we have wild rice growing in abundance in our rivers and lakes. We have thick forestland and lakes where fish, deer, rabbits, ducks, and other game live. We have maple syrup. We have farmland.  We really have everything we need in order to feed a bunch of humans. What we don’t have is bananas…avocados…exotic fruit and veggies that need tropical or Mediterranean climates in order to survive.

If we’re going to do this eating local thing the right way, we would have to give up those things. But could they possibly be grown here? According to Eliot Coleman in his book The Winter Harvest Handbook, you can actually garden all winter long, even in cold climates. We’ve been reading his book and thinking hard about how we can put some of his ideas for winter growing into practice around here. Mr. Coleman’s main strategy is to build a greenhouse within a greenhouse- to really capitalize on the sun’s heat during the day and retain that heat all night long.

If these techniques work to grow regular veggies during the cold months, might they also work for growing exotic veggies and fruit during the warm months? We intend to find out. First on the list is peaches. We would love to grow fresh peaches here, but it’s just a tad too cold. If we can figure out a way to keep a peach tree alive and happy, we’ll move on to crazier things like olives and maybe even mangoes!

But there is another possible solution- a seasonal diet. Basically every animal on the planet has a season diet, besides modern-day humans. Deer eat bugs and birds and grass all summer long, but during the winter they eat the bark off of trees. Bear enjoy an enormously diverse diet all summer long, and eat very little of anything during the winter. Native Americans way back in the day had very seasonal diets.

Most people today have season cravings, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a seasonal diet. We crave apples and pumpkin in the fall, melons and strawberries in the summer, root veggies and hardy meat stews in the winter. Our cravings happen because our bodies know what foods are in season and therefore are the tastiest. But because modern technology and big agriculture make it possible, our society has grown accustomed to supplementing those seasonal goodies with so many other foods, imported from far away.

I am always shocked to see watermelon sitting in the produce section of the grocery store in mid-December. WHY? Does anyone even feel like eating a watermelon in December?? My guess is 75% of those melons end up going bad and being chucked out by the produce guy. Sad! Why even have them in the store at all, until June?

I challenge you all to be more sensitive to what is in season in your area and what is not. Find out what foods are native to your area, and increase those in your diet. Treat exotic foods as luxuries and cut way back on them if you can. Appreciate the technology that makes it possible for you to eat them. Maybe even make a family outing to a Native American reservation and shadow someone as they go out for the annual wild rice harvest in the fall, or collect and boil maple syrup in the spring. I bet they’d be happy to share and teach their traditions with those who are interested, and they are usually very skilled and knowledgeable in ways to use our area’s natural resources for survival.

One last thing, check out this great website for videos and recipes for local and seasonal eating.