Farming Portland - Local Food, Local Sources

6 Ways to Make Valentine's Day Local

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:59:00 +0000

Don't forget to take the Local Food in Your Life survey. Results posted at the end of the month.

It starts off as a cliche: I'm standing in the aisle at the grocery store, looking at a wall of imported foods. I'm leaning over the case at the jewelry store, gazing at sparkly things from around the world. I'm walking between the rows of flowers harvested thousands of miles away and flown in.

Everywhere we look, we're surrounded by wonderful things collected from around the world and transported directly into our neighborhoods. Sometimes we don't even think about how many things and ingredients and components from other lands are included in our everyday life. This valentine's day, I'm taking a moment to think about my buying choices, and trying to find a way to support my local economy by buying local. Here are six ways you can make a difference and substitute a local item for something imported.

1. Fruity Drinks
Eating out is maybe the most common way of celebrating Valentine's day with the one we love. Those cocktails are filled with tropical fruits and liquors brought in from far away places.

Fruity Drink photo by Miss Peach

Local alternative: Rogue beer. The Chateau Rogue label of Rogue Brewery is 100% local ingredients and a perfect substitute for imported mixed fruity drinks. Rogue pub in the Pearl has a good supply.

2. Flowers
Everyone gives flowers on Valentine's day. Their bright colors light up any room. It's too bad they are cut by impoverished child workers, flown around the hemisphere in a day, and trucked across the land to get to the store in time.

Local alternative. Red Kale. This colorful and hearty winter green is not only beautiful but edible. Available wherever local veggies are sold.

3. Chocolates
These sweet morsels are the classic gift to give to your sweety. Unfortunately there is nothing local about the cacao and sugar needed to make these.

Local alternative: Six cleaned trout. Locally and sustainably caught trout can be a great alternative to foreign mass-produced candy. Ask Flying Fish Company what they have in stock.

Photo by Cobalt_grrl

4. Jewelry
Although it is very common to make your partner's eyes shine with precious gems, jewelry is nearly always trucked in from somewhere far away where it was probably extracted from the ravaged ground of a destroyed ecosystem.

Local alternative: Raw oysters. These little gems always say "I love you" and their legendary aphrodisiac qualities can give a little boost to the second half of your Valentine's day. Yeowzers! Check Eat to find great oysters in Portland.

Photo by mindync

Photo by Dyste's Grocery

5. Perfume
Many people like giving and getting perfume on Valentine's day. Sometimes there is nothing better than dressing up and smelling good. Unfortunately, these little bottles of scented chemicals are filled with unpronounceable tinctures from the corners of the earth.

Local alternative: 5 lbs. chuck roast. What would be better than the down home aroma of a hearty stew simmering on the stove. 5 lbs. slab of locally raised red meat is just the thing you need.

6. Lingerie

Although this is usually a gift for yourself rather than the other person, lingerie is something many people buy on Valentines' day for the loved one. However, almost all lingerie is made from synthetic materials derived from petroleum products making this outfit not only imported, but a sure way to increase your carbon butt-print.

Local alternative: A block of butter. Just because it tastes better than polyester. And it's spreadable. Available from any of the local dairies, like Noris Dairy.

Hopefully this has been helpful. Take a few minutes this year to find ways to make your Valentine's Day more local. Happy Valentine's Day!

The Farming Portland Survey and Favorite Sources Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:52:00 +0000

The Farming Portland Food Survey
There are so many reasons not to eat local and sustainable. I know that in my house, we've tried and failed many times to eat more local, to support our local food economy, and to eat less industrial food. But the demands of work and life make the convenience of grocery stores undeniable.

How does your family handle these challenges? What resources do you rely on to feed your family? Please take a couple minutes to fill out this 100% anonymous survey. I'd love to learn more about how your family handles these challenges. I'll post the results at the end of the month.

100% anonymous.
This survey should take less than 2 minutes of your time.
Check back later in the month to see the results..

>>>Take the Survey<<<

Also, this week I am launching the:

The Farming Portland Favorite Oregon Sources Tab

This is something I've been thinking of creating for a long time. There are so many really good sources for sustainable food here in the Portland area, but not everyone knows about them. Because I've been asked many times what sources I like for this or that, a local resource page seemed like a good idea. This won't be everything, just the things that I like. I'll work on updating it as more things cross my path.

Links to responsible local sources
I'll be updating this over time with more information
Great vendors you might not have known about

Tuna Balls

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

I'm standing on the beach at Nehalem Bay State Park. The ocean is dark grey and the wind coming over the water is cold. The clouds are heavy and low; rain could come at any time. This is what the Oregon coast is like most of the year. It is not a soft, warm place for beach towels, bikinis, palm trees and coconut scented sunscreen. It is a hard cold place where ancient volcanic flows meet icy currents from northern places. The ocean is always dark and never warm.

Beach grass at Nehalem Bay State Park, looking toward Nehalem Bay.

We leave the beach and are heading back to Portland. After spending a weekend renting a house with some friends, I appreciated the break from routing but are looking forward to getting back to that routine with the baby. The weeks upcoming responsibilities have already started pulling our thoughts back to home. My wife and I are discussing the logistics for the next five days. Our minds have left the beach, and it's time for our bodies to follow.

But the ocean is there, next to us, undeniable. And I know that under the impenetrable surface lives a bounty of creatures. These creatures are my connection to this place. The water is too cold to swim in. The cliffs are too steep to climb. But the seafood is there to be savored.

We stop in Cannon Beach to get lunch on the way home. The town is cedar shingles and narrow streets. Now is the off-season and the day is rainy. There are no lines; parking is easy. Surprisingly, good seafood restaurants are hard to find on the Oregon coast. A generally slow economy combined with heavy dependence on tourism mean many places don't last a whole year. The ones that do survive are generally low priced and moderate quality. The harvest of the sea is captured and distributed to other places with stronger economies and stronger demand.

We stop at Ecola Seafood for lunch. To our surprise we find a menu full of delicious ideas and a deli case stocked with fish and shellfish of all kinds--whole crab, salmon fillets, halibut steaks, shrimp cocktail, oysters. Stacked in front of the case is something I'd never seen before--locally caught Oregon tuna in cans.

Fish Balls

In The Essential Mediterranean, Nancy Harmon Jenkins says the fish balls recipe comes from a little Sicilian fishing port of Porticello and that Franco Crivello serves them like tiny meat balls, rolled no bigger than marbles, as an appetizer. The recipe is simple--make meat balls out of tuna and serve them with red sauce. In her recipe she uses tuna steaks, then grinds them like ground meat. Egg and bread crumbs hold things together just like a real meatball. But I don't have tuna steaks, and I don't have time to drive across town to Flying Fish Co. to get responsibly caught local tuna. Then I remember the cans.

Canned tuna, while probably not as good as fresh tuna, would probably work just fine in a pinch. Luckily, I find some at New Season. Whole sections of tuna in a can. 7 oz of loin steak for $7. Expensive. This is the sames as $17 per pound of fish. The pricing is not competitive, especially when Starkist is on the self below at a fraction of the cost. But it is the only option for line-caught, local tuna. And it is only half a mile from my house. It will have to do.

Franco Crivello's Fish Balls

The recipe is very simple, basically make little meat balls out of fish. If serving as an appetizer, make them marble sized. If serving as a main dish, make them ping-pong ball size. Make sure to add enough egg to get them to hold together. I had to add an extra half an egg.

Oregon responsibly caught canned tuna
Grated Romano cheese
Mint
Italian parsley
Roast pine nuts
Black Currant
bread crumbs
egg

Mix everything together to your liking and form into balls. Saute the balls in vegetable oil until they are brown and the egg has set.

For the sauce, make a simple red sauce. I don't like red sauce very much so mine is chunkier than they call for in the recipe.

Can of tomatoes (crushed or diced depending on your texture preferences)
Onion
Garlic
White wine
Pinch of sugar
Spices

Saute the onions and garlic until soft, reduce the white wine, add tomatoes and spices. Done.

How you serve this is up to you. I put it over rice for lack of imagination. Overall the recipe is good. I would add more spices to the fish balls next time, more salt at least. I left out the currants because I didn't have any and the pine nuts didn't really add much for me so they could stay out next time too. More cheese might be nice. And the sauce needs more complexity. But different and healthier than beef meat balls. A fun thing to experiment with.

Oregon Oysters are Delicious

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:48:00 +0000

A few years ago I learned about Oregon oysters and decided that I must learn to eat oysters. I'd never had an oyster before. Although I really like clams, I avoid mussels because I don't like a big gush of mushy guts in my mouth when I'm eating. Remember Tidal Wave Bubble gum? That juicy center? Disgusting. No thank you.

But if you are going to eat local, then a part of that is eating what grows well here, not just what you can get to grow here. Acceptance, not imposition.

Oysters grow well in Oregon (and the PNW in general), so I tried to eat oysters. Tried is the main word, because whatever I did was absolutely disgusting. I tried frying them. I tried breading them. I tried raw. And then I was done. Oysters were something that I caulked up to a long term objective and an acquired taste--something I'd have to work at over time and eventually learn to tolerate. But at the time, all I could do was gag.

Fast forward a couple years. The desire to learn to eat oysters is still there, and I have not made any progress. Then I find a place on N. Williams called Eat, An Oyster Bar. The only reason I went into this place is because I heart Cajun food. And with oysters so close, how could I not try them again. This time different. The server even offered to give me a couple for free just to give it a shot.

So I did.

I ordered their Oysters Rockefeller. Baked oysters with creamed spinach and cheese melted over the top. Browned under the broiler. My life changed. They were delicious. The oysters were petite. The spinach was mild and the cheese just sharp enough and browned enough to bring texture and substance. It was a revelation. Finally. Finally. Finally, after several years of hopes and disappointment I'd found the key to a truly local treasure.

Then the server brought me a couple raw oysters. The smallest Tillamook Sweets they had. On the house. Just to try.

With great trepidation I poured one into my mouth and braced for the disgusting gush of shellfish mush I'd experienced with dread so many times before. But this time was different. The oyster was soft, but not an exploding shit bomb of guts in my mouth. It was briny, and sweet. It was something I did not need to fear. In fact, I wanted some more of them. They were delicious, and I was amazed.

All of this is a big lead up to the actual point of this blog post, which is that I am making oysters as an appetizer for this year's solstice dinner. Normally, for the appetizer, I put together a charcuterie and fromage plate. But this year I'm trying to increase the amount of seafood in my diet. Plus solstice dinner always has a local focus. Plus I have finally found the path to the mysterious Oregon oyster, and it is delicious.

So this weekend I tested some recipes. Next Saturday (6 days away! Yikes!) we will be doing solstice dinner, and I need to know if the oysters will work. After reading far too many recipes and opinions, I narrowed it down to two finalists. Here they are.

Oysters Rockefeller

Based on a recipe from The Best of Gourmet. I've written about this splendid cookbook before and I'll do it again here. Here is my version of the recipe in a nutshell:

Saute spinach, parsley, watercress, and scallions in butter. Chill.
Shuck your oysters,then set in salt.
Sprinkle bacon over the top of the oysters.
Put some of the spinach mix over the top, sprinkle shredded and bake.

Now, I changed their recipe a bit because I didn't use Pernod and bread crumbs in the spinach mix. Instead I kept it to greens and then added a layer of Parmesan over the top. This is how Eat does it, and that's good enough for me. It was good. And very attractive. But next time I think I'll add some cream to the greens.

Baked Oysters with Leaks and White Wine Cream Sauce

Based on a recipe from Fish and Shellfish by James Peterson. James Peterson just writes the best cook books. This was a much more mild recipe than the Rockefeller. It was luxurious and buttery. It was delicious.

Saute fine julienne leaks in butter.
Shuck your oysters.
Put the leaks in the shells, then oysters on top.
Spoon the white wine and cream reduction over the top.
Bake and then broil to finish.

I left out all the details of Mr. Peterson's instructions on how to cook the oysters. There were a few steps involved.

These were very tasty. Rich and buttery. Not as picturesque as the Rockefeller oysters though.

Not sure what way I'll go for Solstice dinner next weekend but its outstanding to finally be able to do oysters.

By the way, Eat also sells oysters direct. If you are looking for a good place to get local, sustainably farmed Oregon oysters, stop by Eat and see what they have.

Thanks-sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:36:00 +0000

No turkey.
No cranberries.
No candied yams.
No green bean casserole.
No cornbread.
No pumpkin pie.

What we did have was one outstanding dinner. We broke from tradition and made a new meal that was a welcome relief.

This year it was a conglomeration of the best flavors we could come up with. Instead of sticking to the Thanksgiving script, we decided to make this food holiday about the food that we love rather than the food we are supposed to eat. Each person brought something different; each person shared a little of themselves in the process. They were small gifts to each of us, from each of us, enjoyed together.

There were, of course, a lot of meats. Jamie called it a "meat-fest" and it pretty much was. Dave laid out an amazing collection of charcuterie and cheeses as an appetizer. Delicious cured salamis--thin and fat--from Olympic Provisions and imported cheeses from New Seasons--soft and hard--one of which was the best blue cheese I think I've ever eaten. By the end of the night, I realized that in the hurley-burley of getting dinner ready, we did not spend enough time with this part of the meal.

When dinner did get on the table, it looked like a winter feast of foods. I brought a sirloin tip roast. Dave brought a full king salmon fillet topped with pesto and laid on a bed of parsley. Tiffany brought her infamous champagne mushroom risotto as well as yams with yogurt. Jamie provided the beet salad. I made chard packages filled with sausage stuffing. There was fruit salad. There was a lot of wine.

Desert was no different. Pumpkin pie is wonderful, but custards are more wonderful. So, pumpkin creme carmels it was. Pecan pie also showed up, as well as a beautiful apple pie.

Sitting around a table of food made by people who are sharing from themselves, and enjoying that experience with those same people has to be one of the great experiences of life. We do several big meals a year--birthdays, holidays, etc.--but none is a holiday really devoted to breaking bread together the way Thanksgiving is. It's a unique time. It's a wonderful time. Thank you to all my friends, for sharing.

In the interest of continuing the sharing, here are the recipes for a couple things:

Packing not Stuffing
Stuffing is good stuff. I actually wish we ate more of it the rest of the year instead of reserving it mainly for holiday times. With no turkey to stuff, I had to come up with something different. This worked perfect.

Chard Packages Filled with Sausage Stuffing

Chopping Leaks

This is a cosmetic variation on the recipe from The Best of Gourmet, 20th anniversary edition. The original calls for the chard leaves to be drawn up into a "purse" shape. However, I found this impossible to do. What was much easier--just fold the chard leaf over the stuffing and use the leak strips to tie it closed.

The flavors of the stuffing are simple and down to earth. The bread is a nice medium for the salty, sage-y sausage and the earthiness of the only 2 vegetables. Add salt and pepper and it is a nice uncomplicated stuffing.

Pork breakfast sausage
Dried bread cubes then soaked in milk
Red chard stems and leaks chopped and sauteed in the sausage fat.
Mix together and use egg (to bind)

For the packages use blanched chard leaves. Plop a half a cup of stuffing in the middle and fold the leaf over. Use strips of leak to tie it closed. Bake with a little bit of chickstock to keep them from drying out.

WWROD (What Would Richard Olney Do)
I made a sirloin tip roast, but I knew it would need something to help it. There was a good chance I would mess up the roast (it did come out a little over cooked) and a good sauce can help bring almost anything back to life. But what kind of sauce? In these moments of culinary confusion, I frequently turn to The French Menu Cookbook by Richard Olney. Once again, i found what I needed to find. As an accompaniment to a formal autumn dinner, he puts Poivrade Sauce with a leg of venison roast. But does it only go with game? I checked in with my Larousse Gastronomique and found that no, Poivrade Sauce goes with most red meats but as some well known variations for game meats.

Poivrade Sauce

One thing to know about Poivrade Sauce, is that it is an old school (1700's) french meat sauce. What that means is the flavor profile will be more vinegary. It also means you will be able to find 100 variations of this sauce because everyone does it differently. Given those circumstances, you can really bend the flavors of this sauce to be whatever suits you. Poivrade sauce is in the general family of sauces that use black pepper as a main flavor. I stayed pretty close to Olney's formula.

Carrots and onions and soup bones all sweaty and browned.
Flour roux for thickening.
Wine vinegar to deglaze (and some white wine)
Beef stock, tomatoe juice, herbs and juniper berries simmered for a few hours and reduced.
Add crushed black peppercorns at the end.
Add some butter to make it shine.

I also used more flour at the end to thicken it up like a gravy.

Pumpkin in a Cup
Pumpkin pie is delicious, not for the pie, but for the pumpkin. Custard is delicious, for every reason. What better time of the year to get two great tastes that taste great together? I checked in with my buddy Alfred Portale. In 12 Seasons of Cooking he has a nice recipe for Pumpkin Creme Brulee. However, I had just eaten creme brulee a couple weeks ago. So, it had to be creme caramel instead.

Pumpkin Creme Caramels
Of course, for the definitive recipe for custard anything, I have to check in with my other buddy, James Peterson. In chapter 46 of Glorious French Food, he gives the best overview of each kind of custard and how to make them I have ever read. Basically one egg will set 2/3 cup of milk. After that come the variations, and there are a ton of them. I used his orange creme caramel as the starting place and infused pumpkin flavors instead.

whole milk infused with pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar
whole eggs
more sugar melted to make the caramel sauce

Epilogue
Here are a few random pictures from the night.

Waiting for Local Tuna

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:01:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about having a more balanced diet. This mainly included eating more grains, vegetables, fruits, and fish while eating less cheeses, eggs, and animal meats (esp. fatty meats like bacon...sigh, just kill me now). This doesn't seem like it should be that hard, and technically it isn't. But there are so many delicious ways to cook up animals that it really involves ignoring a universe of edible delights. Or it involves making totally unacceptable substitutions (i.e. vegetarian "breakfast sausage").

Getting back to the point, one meat that the Old Ways Mediterranean Diet says we should eat more of is fish. Not just any fish, but fatty fish full of Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, calcium, and minerals. Some great examples of these fish are salmon, tuna, halibut, and trout. Coincidentally ALL of these are available either locally or close by. Wonderful! No problem! Support the local food economy AND eat a more balanced diet.

Yeah, not so easy. Vegetables are a no brainer. Go to the farmer's markets. Go to Pumpkin Patch farm on Sauvie's Island. But finding fresh local sustainably caught fish at a reasonable price is an entirely different story.

Can I Get A Fish Monger Please?
Of the places I went, the guys behind the counter usually had very little knowledge of the fish they were selling. They knew what kind of fish it was (usually). They knew where it came from (for the most part). Mainly they knew when the distributor dropped it off. Surprisingly, Newman's Fish Market on 21st was the absolute worst even through they are located in upscale City Market NW. The workers there were clearly just day labor hired to wrap and tag fish they knew nothing about. Questions seemed to irritate them and they didn't even do a good job filleting the whole fish I bought. On the other hand, the guy at The Flying Fish cart knew a lot about the fish he was selling and where it came from. Unfortunately, he was out of stock of what I was looking for that day. I was looking for was fresh tuna.

In the end I went with some nice fresh tuna I bought at Fred Meyer. Not local fish, but the rest was pretty local. I'm still working on finding good, sustainable sources for local fish.

Fresh Tuna with Tomato Stew
The recipe I used was from a book I have: Mediterranean, A Taste of the Sun in Over 150 Recipes. Although this is a kinda cheesy theme book, the recipes inside are actually really good. In fact, I've used this book many times over the years and never has a recipe turned out bad. Just remember that an aubergine is an eggplant and a courgette is a zucchini.

This recipe is a pretty simple one. It's just cubes of tuna cooked in stewed tomatoes and onions with some herbs. This also makes substitutions easy. I, personally don't like sun-dried tomatoes, so I left that out. It had the effect of making the sauce thinner. Also, since there were no baby onions in the house, I used chunky normal onions and it worked out fine.

Here is how I did it:

Tuna
Tomatoes (I used canned tomatoes but the recipe calls for stewing your own)
Onions
Olive Oil
Garlic
White wine
Clam juice
Herbs--fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme.

I laid this over some cous-cous with a fresh cherry tomato and lemon cucumber salad on the side. Overall it was real good. A nice light summer meal.

Epilogue: Local Fish Ain't Beef
What a pain in the ass it is to find fresh, sustainable, local fish in Portland! You want grass fed beef or buffalo or "pastured" chickens--no problem. But you want local fish on a Tuesday night, WTF!

Part of the reason I haven't posted in a while is because I've been looking for local fish to write a very nice and informative post on how to find local, sustainable fish. But to tell the truth, it's been a huge pain. There are very few places to get reliably local and sustainable fish in town. This just confounds me because fish, especially salmon, is so iconic in the PNW.

Fred Meyer has fresh tuna. I went there because if good fish is going to be a normal part of my diet, then it has to be accessible. I walk up to the fish counter at the Hawthorne location. There is a wide display of fish and shellfish laid out, everything looking like it just came in that morning. On the far right are stacks of pink tuna steaks, each one looking exactly like what I was hoping for. James Peterson gives a great list of items to look for when choosing fish steaks and fillets in Fish and Shellfish on page 3.

No slime. Check.
No off color. Check.
Should be slightly translucent. This tuna is mostly opaque.
Tuna should be big chunks wrapped in plastic. Big chunks yes, plastic no.
Tuna should not have a rainbow-like opalescence. Check.
No spaces between the flakes. Check.

There are other factors but they didn't apply to me this time.

Then I looked at the tag. "Product of Indonesia." Seriously? It's frickin tuna season in Oregon and you can't get a nice piece of tuna from our own home-grown Fred Meyer grocery store.

I have to admit, I didn't check New Seasons. They are just too expensive. I'm over New Seasons.

Back to Fred Meyers' tuna. It was wild caught Indonesian tuna. Besides the "not local" factor, is it bad? According to Seafood Watch, this Tuna had a 50-50 chance of being either something to "avoid" or a "good alternative". Unfortunately, I will probably never know exactly which it was. Seafood watch lists and grades 29 variations for tuna. Of these, 17 are not US or Atlantic specific. Of these, 10 are rated "avoid", 5 are "good alternatives", and 2 are "best choice". Of these, there were 6 that seemed the most likely category that this fish could be. I had about a 50-50 chance of destroying the planet with my purchasing decision. Here's to rolling the dice.

Fishformation Overload

Seafood Watch has a very lovely fish app that you can get for free. This makes it easy to look up the fish you are thinking of buying to see if it is:

"green" fish (sustainably caught and responsibly harvested)
"red" fish (avoid--if you buy this fish you are financing the death of the oceans)
"yellow" fish ("good alternative")

This seems great, but it has some practical usability issues. Take the tuna example for example. There are 29 different listings for tuna, and it is a mixed bag of red, yellow, and greens. Much of the distinction lies in how the fish was caught. Nets are bad, hooks are good (sometimes). But the package never says how the fish was caught, and the 22 year old behind the counter usually has no idea either. So unless you are buying direct from the fisherman, who knows what the heck you are buying?

One Spot of Fishy Light, Unexpectedly

There was only one time that the Seafood Watch fish-o-matic was actually usable. I was at Costco, looking over the fish section at stacks of lovely coho salmon and stealhead fillets. I decided to see how this stuff rated. I knew these were wild-caught, Alaskan salmon. This was great, because according to the Seafood Watch app, all the wild caught salmon is either green or yellow. Only the farmed stuff comes up as red. At $7.99/lbs, Costco is one of the most affordable places to buy big fillets of responsibly harvested salmon. This is actually a way to make fatty fish and all it's Omega-3 goodness a normal part of a daily diet. Big box stores can do somethings right, it seems.

Eating With Your Wallet and Some Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:37:00 +0000

I had this idea that the way we eat is killing us. I don't think I made this up. It seems like there are warnings all over the place about foods. Shows like The Biggest Loser and Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution really hit home the fact that obesity and diabetes are on the rise like never before.

Although refined sugars and empty calories are primary culprits in our ill-health epidemic, another aspect is that we eat too much meat. Meat gets a bad rap by all kinds of people. Meat takes more resources to produce, the meat industry uses insane amounts of antibiotics in really unsafe ways, etc. Also, eating more red meat (and cured meats) is related to increases in cancer and heart disease. Here are some fun facts about meat:

Meat is devoid of the protective effects of fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and other helpful nutrients, and it contains high concentrations of saturated fat and potentially carcinogenic compounds, which may increase one’s risk of developing many different kinds of cancer. http://www.cancerproject.org/survival/cancer_facts/meat.php

Eating one serving a day of processed meat -- or the equivalent of a single hot dog or two slices of salami -- was associated with a 42% increased risk for heart disease and a 19% increased risk for diabetes in the study, conducted by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health. http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=116365

High red meat intake was also associated with increased risk of esophageal and liver and a borderline increased risk for laryngeal cancer. And high processed meat consumption also was associated with borderline increased risk for bladder cancer and myeloma, a kind of bone cancer...In addition, both red meat and processed meat consumption were associated with increased pancreatic cancer risk in men, but not women.
http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/healthday/071211/high-meat-consumption-linked-to-heightened-cancer-risk.htm

Take this chart for example:

http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-2859/AGEC-603web.pdf

Or this chart:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/

Americans are eating a lot more meat than we used to. If the research on disease is right, than we are all increasing our chances of cancers, etc.

Given the plausible epidemiologic evidence for red and processed meat intake in cancer and chronic disease risk, understanding the trends and determinants of meat consumption in the U.S., where meat is consumed at more than three times the global average, should be particularly pertinent to researchers and other public health professionals aiming to reduce the global burden of chronic disease. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/

Now, I'm not advocating not eating meat. Anyone who knows me knows that I like a good barbecue as much as the next guy. But what I am trying to get to is the idea of a balanced meal.

I had developed this theory that the subsidy system and food industry was producing more of the foods that are bad for us, driving price down on those items, and making us sicker at the same time all in the name of profits. It sounds crazy, but I had some time to kill so I thought I'd look into it.

What is a Balanced Meal?
First, let's understand what a balanced meal is.

http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
In 2011 the government got rid of the pyramid and now have a much better way of showing you what you should be eating. This is an outstanding info graphic. If you go to the website, this graphic is interactive. Clicking on the different sections will take you to drill-down information on vegetables, fruits, grains, etc.

I was surprised at how much protein they recommend eating. By protein they mostly mean meats, but also include fish, nuts, and beans.

This is the original food pyramid which was designed in 1992. It replaced a much simpler graphic that showed all food types as equal--four squares. Interestingly, it was very controversial when it first came out because the food industry did not want the government telling people they should eat less meat than vegetables. Nutritionists also had a problem with it because of the emphasis on grains (huh?).

Just for giggles, I also included the revamped federal food pyramid for reference. Released in 2005, this is an information visualization disaster.

http://www.oldwayspt.org/
Oldways is my personal favorite. Old Ways is an organization that promotes traditional diets from cultures historically known to be more healthy than everyone else. They are doing some really interesting work in the areas of diet research and promotion.

"This pyramid continues to be a well-known guide to what is now universally recognized as the “gold standard” eating pattern that promotes lifelong good health. It has been widely used for years by consumers, educators, and health professionals alike to implement healthier eating habits...
The pyramid was created using the most current nutrition research to represent a healthy, traditional Mediterranean diet. It was based on the dietary traditions of Crete, Greece and southern Italy circa 1960 at a time when the rates of chronic disease among populations there were among the lowest in the world, and adult life expectancy was among the highest even though medical services were limited."

Comparing them, the Oldways pyramid is much more clear about getting more of your protein from fish, dairy, and vegetable sources. Red meats are the most limited kind of protein. The USDA plate, although the easiest of all to use, is much more ambivalent about where your proteins come from. This would allow a diet high in red and processed meats to fit the model, even though these are some of the most likely suspects for various kinds of cancers.

Also, the Oldways pyramid includes a glass of red wine with dinner. Allllriiiighhhttt!

Comparing Prices--Are there different ideas at work?
The costs of buying local food has also been on my mind. Is local food really more expensive? So many people are in favor of higher prices for local food because they claim it is more accurate price of what the food actually costs, plus it keeps more dollars in the local economy. I think these are great points, but if local food is ever going to be anything more than a dinner party braggable for the bourgeois, then the pricing really needs to be able to compete with mainstream foods. Josh from Stone-Buhr understands this. Few others do.

My conspiracy theory goes along these lines: Americans eat more meat because meat is cheap and this is bad for us. Why would this be? I don't know. I've read that, sociologically, meat played a symbolic role in American culture, especially after WW2. It represented success. It also represented affluence and something to aspire to after the hard times of global warfare. The decadent, juicy steak at a swanky restaurant. The good times of hamburgers on the grill with friends in the summer time. The elegance of marinated, thinly sliced flank steak layered over a bed of baby greens with blue cheese crumbles. Etc. In order to make the most money, the meat industry played these ideas up while also bringing prices down. Everyone could partake of the good life. The combined effect of this bought a flood of money to the meat industry. The birth of the fast food industry in the mid 20th century exacerbated this trend. Maybe the health implications were unknown at the time, but the profit motive certain was not.

I went to two grocery stores and the farmer's market to see how things priced out. I was looking to see how meat prices compared to other products. My thinking was that pricing structures that support a healthy diet would make meat more expensive than vegetables, grains, etc. My suspicion was that the pricing structures did not support a healthy diet by making meats artificially cheaper than they should be thereby encouraging people to skew the balance of their diet toward meat.

My unscientific methodology was pretty simple. If you bought 10 items and spent $10 on each, how much could you get?

I went to New Seasons (premium grocery store), Fred Meyer (normal grocery store), and the St. Johns Farmers Market.
I compared items as close as I could but admittedly did not get apples to apples (the farmer's market had a different selection than the grocery stores, especially in fruit).
No sale prices
No premium products
No preference for organic or local foods
Just looking for low, everyday prices on standard items.

My own notion was that corporate pricing in the grocery stores would lend itself to a less healthy diet, and the farmer's market pricing would be more true to a healthy diet.

As it turns out, I was totally wrong. You could get more vegetables, less meat, and a middle portion of eggs and beans from all of the vendors. The pricing scheme at each place was roughly in line with the food pyramids above.

Despite New Season's healthy image, their price structure was almost exactly the same as Fred Meyer, just a little bit more expensive overall. And the farmer's market was not much better, just a lot more expensive overall.

Relative volumes of food purchased with $10 each based on averaged pricing.

The only thing that can be said, is you'd probably be less likely to over-eat if you shop at the farmer's market because you simply get less for your money (perhaps helping with overnourishment and it's associated health problems).

Compared to the Old Ways pyramid, all of these vendors fall short in that:

Fish is too expensive. Old Ways encourages more fish eating than red meat, but at these prices beef is the more affordable option.
Beef should be much more expensive to discourage purchasing. Beef was most expensive at the Farmer's Market (but so was everything else).
Fruit is over priced. This changes with the season and is an average, but it should probably be closer to the price of vegetables (apples actually were, but anti-oxidant rich berries were super expensive).
Eggs could be a little more expensive, just to get them more in the proper place.

Because my initial price gathering was pretty limited, I will probably continue to test pricing. In the process of collecting this information I realized just how much variability there could be and how much more research would be needed to give a truly accurate picture. But it's interesting anyway. What it did do is get me thinking in other directions.

Chef de Cuisine (a.k.a. The Protein Dealer)
If the problem isn't the pricing structures themselves, then maybe it is something else. Maybe is it just the way we choose to spend money. If our purchasing habits reflect the way we think about food, then the problem may be just the way we think.

Imagine you are going to cook dinner. If you are like me, you think of the main item first, then build out the things that go around it. For instance, for dinner tonight, I could cook pork chops, then put a simple garlic pan sauce over it. Some boiled baby potatoes would go nice with that. For greens, I can use either the asparagus I bought at the market or go trim some lettuce from the garden for a salad. This is how I think through cooking dinner for the family.

What is wrong with that way of thinking? Most of the food groups are represented. It's home cooked with local, (mostly) organic ingredients. It's not overloaded with fats, processed oils, or sugars. It leads to the whole family sitting down together and eating together. Everything that a meal is supposed to be is here.

But what it also is is centered on a single chunk of meat that becomes garnished with all the things that are good for you. Potatoes are chosen because they match the flavor of the pork chop. The greens are chosen because they don't conflict with the flavor of the pork chop. Had I started with a salad as the first thought, then I probably would not have ended up adding a pork chop. At most, some slices of very lean pork tenderloin might have shown up.

It's this way of imagining what we eat that drives us to have unhealthy diets. To avoid the pitfalls of excessive meat consumption, create balanced meals that are more in line with the recommendations, and truly treat food as a primary means to good health, we need to upend the way we envision the plates of food we prepare and how we see ourselves eating them.

I was hoping to see a more informed perspective from the professionals in this world. If anyone should understand the nature of meal and menu preparation, I thought it would be them. But unfortunately, this is not what I found. At least not in the way they talk about their food and describe it on the menus.

Here are some examples:

As an example of affordable, mass-market dining, Denny's really focuses on the meat in the meal. Their descriptions and pictures are all very clear about what the priority is. If red meats and proteins were supposed to be 90% of the meal, Dennys would be right on.
http://www.dennys.com/#/menu

Denny's Steak and Shrimp dinner. The name says it all. This is almost the exact opposite of what the food guides recommend.

The LePigeon dinner menu for June 20th.
Meat, meat, meat, meat, mushrooms, meat.

LePigeon is an upscale french restaurant here in Portland. I was hoping that price would influence perspective but that didn't happen. Again, the meats are the focus at dinner time.

Granted, LePigeon is devoted to excellent food. My understanding is that they source as much of their ingredients as locally as possible. They make no mention of this on their website, however, because their focus is quality and deliciousness. To people not familiar with preparations inspired by rustic french cooking, some of the dishes may seem "out there". But they are delicious. Unfortunately, they are also totally unbalanced. The menu continues to use language that favors proteins over everything else.

Paley's Place is one of my favorite restaurants in Portland. Vitaly Paley is regularly recognized as one of the top chefs in Portland and his restaurant gets all kinds of awards. The Paley's Place cook book is also very good.

Paley also has a focus on local, organic, sustainable ingredients, which I really appreciate. But when we look at how the dishes are characterized, it is the same problems.

http://www.paleysplace.net/menu/index.html

Paley thinks meat first. In the entree list, 4 out of 5 of the dinner entrees focus on the meat and only secondarily mention the accompanying vegetables. There is a seafood section that comes after this where everything is meat based. We are supposed to be eating more fish than red meat, but it is still the psychology of "proteins first."

I would like to point out an interesting disconnect. Take for instance this beautiful image of what looks like seer'd tuna and a spring salad that I stole from the Paley website. Not doubt this dish was described as a tuna entree that also happened to come with some greens. But if you look at the actual portions, the tuna is not so dominant as the name implies. The photographer, like the menu writer, is focusing on the tuna, but the chef that composed the meal actually gave a lot of balance to the accompanying vegetables. In fact, the greens provide a physical foundation for the main attraction--the tuna.

I have to say, that through the course of my investigations, I really didn't find anything that provided a nice contrast to the repetitions I was finding. This was a bummer because I was hoping to have an example to contrast with. But, whether cheap eats or fine dining, the language of food is very similar everywhere. If language is thought, then there is a lot of similarity in the way corporate menu planners and executive chefs think about food. Most of that thinking gets focused on the "main" item of a dish which is normally the big protein. This way of thinking about food is in sharp contrast to the way we are supposed to be actually eating based on the food pyramids.

How did we start thinking this way? I don't believe the meat industry created this phenomena. They just capitalized on it.

The Modern Meal is a Super-Condenser
Here is my theory on how this came to be: In the past the wealthy and the common folk ate differently. The common folk could not afford as much meat and ate only one course meals mainly. The wealthy could get whatever they wanted to eat (mostly) and took more time at home to have leisurely multi-course meals with all their smelly friends. What else would you do without movies and internet and cars and video games?

Circle of Frans Francken the Younger, (1581-1642) Belshazzar's Feast.

These aristocratic meals were probably something like what Richard Olney describes in The French Menu:

"A dinner that begins with a soup and runs through a fish course, an entree, a sherbet, a roast, a salad, cheese and desert, and may be accompanied by from three to six wines...the movement through the various courses should be an ascending one from light, delicate and more complex flavors through progressively richer, more full-bodied and simpler flavors." (p 22)

If you were a peasant, your meals were much simpler. Depending on the era and the location, peasants had access to better or worse foods, but in general:

Medievalists agree on certain characteristics of medieval diet such as the overwhelming importance ascribed to cereals generally and bread in particular, or the great disparity in protein consumption between an upper class that enjoyed vast quantities of meat and fish and a lower class more dependent on grain, dairy products and vegetables. http://www.uv.es/consum/freedman.pdf

If you were an English peasant:

The main meal was vegetable pottage. Again, if the family was lucky there might be some meat or fish to go round. Bread would be available and ale.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/food_and_drink_in_medieval_engla.htm

German peasants seem to have had it better than most:

But the German peasants, workers, and the many poor made do with their homemade beer and filled their stomachs with kraut and bacon, lentils and peas, firm satisfying breads and light dumplings. By the 1800s more than four-fifths of the German population were peasants, and their own pigs were the mainstay of their diet. Thanks to Frederick the Great, it could be said that by the end of the 1800s, "potatoes were such a regular item that smoke coming from a cottage chimney at night was almost a certain sign that inside, potatoes, bacon and onions were frying." http://www.food-links.com/countries/germany/germany.php

The poor ate closer to the food pyramid (less meat and more vegetables and grains) in one course. The wealthy at closer to the food pyramid but spread it out across many courses.

Our current diet has roots in classical, aristocratic dining. The hotels adopted it, Escoffier codified it, and we live it. And, thanks to government and industry, it is made up of foods that only the wealthy could afford in years past. But, in our modern, democratic disdain for the hoity-toity aristocracy of the past, we eat like peasants--usually only eat a single entree plus maybe a desert or appetizer. Because of that, we are jumping straight to the main course (the big protein), bypassing the other courses that provide for an overall balanced meal.

The occasional exception is that even though the language may not be that much different, sometimes in fine dining the actual meal may not be as unbalanced as in lower cost establishments. Compare the Paley's tuna meal to the Denny's Steak and Shrimp. Denny's is clearly the meal with a higher percentage of red meat and heavy fats. And it is cheaper. And obesity is linked to social class. No kidding.

How do we fix this? I think a good place to start is quiche.

Quiche Will Save Your Life
What is in quiche? Almost anything you want. Is quiche a meat or a vegetable? Probably both. Does it give primacy to a big protein? Well, besides the fact that it's mostly eggs, no. We've often had frittata at home filled with only vegetables. And they were wonderful.

Gratins would fit the bill also. So would salads. So would soup. So would stir-fry. So would gumbo. So would a calzone.

There are a lot of meals we could make that are not formed around language the reinforces an unbalanced view of what a meal should be. When eating a simple dinner after work, maybe it's best to conceive of meals that are "one pot" style meals.

Soup with crusty bread could be perfectly balanced, and it gets us out of mentality that you build a dinner by starting with a slab of meat then adding some veggies.

A summer salad of fresh greens, baby sweet onions, lentils, cucumber, goat cheese crumbles, a few flank steak slices, and a light vinaigrette would perfectly balanced.

A calzone filled with spinach, garlic, some bacon crumbles and gruyere with a side of pear slices would be delicious.

Quiche could be a perfect surprise. Lots of veggies. A little chicken. Some cheese sprinkled on top. You just ate the food pyramid properly and your chance of getting cancer is theoretically lower.

When several courses are involved, it makes more sense to have a big steak and shrimp plate in there somewhere. But the rest of the food pyramid shows up also. It's just exploded out across several plates.

By changing the way we talk about food, and consequently the way we conceive of our meals, maybe we can start having intrinsically better meals for the health of us all.

Hello Pot, My New Friend
In the interest of practicing these ideas, I've been trying to bend my thinking to this new model. It is hard. Like the example I gave before, my normal way of imagining meals is to start with a main ingredient and build out. In this new model, it is easier to start with the pot you cook with and add in.

Pretty similar to my fish stew. http://bit.ly/qto26n

I've found that the way I describe even one-pot meals tends toward old habits. I'm making a simple seafood stew.

16 oz can of tomatoes, drained
Two cups clam broth + one cup water
carrots
celery
onions
garlic
6-8 shrimp
some clams
1 cod filet
spices

By volume, the dominant ingredient is tomatoes and clam broth. However, I call it seafood stew. Why don't I call it tomato and clam broth stew? I don't know, but proteins are powerful things and it's going to take some practice to break out of their hold.

Lobsterfest: Eating Local in Rhode Island

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 02:02:00 +0000

Although Rhode Island is only 37 miles wide and 48 miles long, it has 400 miles of coastline. If you like seafood, that is outstanding. Eating local in The Ocean State means eating from the ocean, and that was exactly what we intended to do.

Every summer my wife's family in Rhode Island has Lobsterfest. This is exactly what it sounds like. You eat lobster, and a lot of it. A month in advance her Uncle Nino sent out an email asking for people's orders so he could order the lobsters in advance just to make sure there would be enough. These people are serious about lobster.

Monster Lobsters of Yore http://www.raremaps.com/maps/medium/8732.jpg

For those of you that don't know, the lobster has not always been something to celebrate. Lobsters used to to be so abundant in New England, the Native Americans in the area used them for fertilizer. After a big storm, piles of lobsters could be found washed up on the shores around Boston and Cape Cod, sometimes several feet deep. The new European settlers didn't even need traps to get lobster. They just walked out to the tide pools or out the beach after a storm and grabbed lobsters by hand. The lobster industry became strong, but really didn't take off until the mid-19th century when canning made it possible to ship lobster meat greater distances. In the 1880's, the lobster industry was pulling in over 130 million pounds of lobster per year. However, during this time, lobster was always considered a poor-man's food reserved for indentured servants and anyone who could not afford something decent to eat. Kids who brought lobster sandwiches to school got beat up regularly and no one wanted to trade lunches with them. In the jails, the criminals would riot and refuse to eat if they were served lobster for dinner more than twice a week.

But all that changed in the mid 20th century as the lobster population got crushed from over-fishing and people discovered how delicious fresh lobster with melted garlic butter and a sprinkling of flat-leaf parsley can be.

In 1977 the largest live lobster on record was caught off Nova Scotia. This 44 lbs monster was over 4 feet long! A 42 lbs. giant caught in 1935 is on display at the Museum of Science in Boston. To get an idea of how freaking huge that is, take a look at this measly 17 lbs lobster:

At my wife's family's house, Lobsterfest is a more reasonable affair and normally doesn't involved monster lobsters. But it does involve t-shirts. Everyone gets lobsterfest t-shirts. Even the babies.

Then there were the clams. Half a bushel (apx. 15 lbs.) of little neck clams steamed in a giant pot of white wine, garlic, onion, parsley and butter.

Then there was the steaks. If you are the sort that does not like lobster, you're covered. T-bones and ribeyes were ready.

Then there are the sides. Most sides are brought by guests. Pasta with shrimp and artichokes. Chips. Potato salad.

The main show is the lobsters themselves. This year Nino got twenty-two 1.5-2 lbs. lobsters. Mike went and picked them up from the dock that morning. Talk about fresh! These would not last long.

After all that comes the deserts and hanging out with family and friends.

That's how you eat local in Rhode Island. Thanks to all of Kim's family for the great time!

The New Geopolitics of Food is Crap

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:19:00 +0000

The most recent issue of Foreign Policy is the "food issue" and the lead article is :

The New Geopolitics of Food

From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

I saw this article come across my feed reader and thought it looked interesting. It was very interesting. Admittedly, I don't know much about the geopolitics of food systems, but the concept of food systems has been on my mind lately.

A Little Bit About Where I'm Coming From

We do this thing every so often called 7 Days 100% local challenge. The goal of the challenge is to move our diet in a more local direction with the goal, for those 7 days, of getting as close to 100% locally sourced food as possible. A big part of this is discovering what my friend would call an "honest" local meal. What does it look like to really eat local? What would be missing from your plate? What new items would show up? How is eating local in Portland different than eating local anywhere else? It's not about making substitutions. It's about discovering what "here" means. (Of course, the ultimate in "honest" local food would be only foraged an indigenous items, but I haven't gotten there yet.)

Doing this challenge has also let me to thinking about other issues--mostly what really is the impact of eating local. If part of the goal of the challenge is to move more people and dollars away from industrialized food and toward local sources, does that really have an impact? How many people and how many dollars would need to be moved out of Kroger Corporation's pockets and into the local food economy before it could be considered "making a difference"? According to the 2009 Kroger Fact Book (PDF), Kroger has 2468 super markets representing 36 different brands with over $76 billion dollars in annual sales. That's freaking huge! There there is a gigantic industrialized agriculture machine pumping unimaginably large quantities of food products out these stores.

How in the world can choosing to eat local impact this system? How can something so big, so entrenched, and with so much money behind it be moved by just by choosing to eat local? We could do the "our family chooses to eat local" thing, but that just feels too self-righteous for me. Honestly, I've started to become pessimistic about the whole thing.

Where the Article Steps In

The New Geopolitics of Food does not brighten my day. It's a really interesting article that hit home the point that the world of food is really about food for the world. This is the opposite of local intention. The article points out how food is used for foreign relations. We export massive amounts of food to other countries when they are having a bad year. It also points out how as economic growth and the appetite for meat seems to go hand-in-hand. China is a specific example. Meat production is soaring there, and demand is outpacing supply. For anyone concerned about the horrors of industrialized meat production, this represents a very real and growing nightmare. It also makes a good point about the rising price of food and how foreign governments (mostly in Africa) are leasing their arable land to foreign food companies while their own population starves. It also points out the we are starting to use grain for fuel as a substitute for fossil fuels. This is putting tremendous pressure on grain production because its using up our "surplus".

Multiple Problems. Multiple Answers.

The answer the article positions at the end, is to find ways to increase crop yields in a hurry because there is an international food catastrophe on its way.

The answer, apparently, is not to transition more to local sources.

Increasing yields also could be a way of supporting more intensive industrialization of the food chain, along with more GMO products. Overall, this solution is the opposite of what the local food movement cares about.

Also, as food--especially meats and grains--becomes even more of an international bargaining chip, having deep production reserves will be a key component of being a powerful nation, just as oil reserves are now. Given this reality, it seems unlikely that the government will want to support reducing industrialized food production. This puts the local food movement fundamentally at odds with the government also.

What to do!

Is the local food movement really taking everything into consideration? Is local food philosophically aligned with isolationism? And is that realistic in today's interconnected world?

As a person interested in transitioning away from industrialized food and who believes that the commoditization of food in general creates lower quality food, damages the environment, and encourages a system ripe for abuse under the guise of increasing "production efficiency", this article causes a lot of thoughts. Unfortunately, not all of them are hopeful.

Start of Summer Pork Barbecue

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 02:06:00 +0000

It was time again for our annual birthday barbecue. Time for bags of hard wood, pork shoulders, and a little Buckwheat Zydeco. Every year Kim and I have a big get together with our friends to celebrate our birthdays, the start of Summer, and the beginning of barbecue season. The normal activities ensue--buying bags of hardwood for the smoker, tracking down two Boston Butts, checking how much brown sugar and apple cider vinegar is in the house, scrubbing the back deck, etc.

Central to this party, is the barbecue. When I say barbecue, I mean pork that is smoked for hours, shredded, simmered in sauce, and served on a bun. Later in the summer we'll have our annual rib barbecue. But for our birthday its always pot-luck, and I smoke some pork butts. Since this is a food blog, let's get right to the goods. Here's what we made for our party this year:

Pulled Pork Sandwiches

The one in the middle is
the local picnic ham.

This year I'd planned to do something a little different. Last fall I got a whole pig. In the process of butchering it, we specifically left one shoulder whole just for this event. That's a 20 lbs piece of meat! Normally the shoulder is cut into the Boston Butt and the Picnic Ham, but this time I wanted to keep it all together and do one big, glorious smoke out! And make this the first year we do 100% local meat in the bbq.

Unfortunately, I didn't plan things well and the shoulder didn't defrost in time. However, there was a single Picnic Ham that I was able to get defrosted, so we did half local. The butts came from Costco which is where I normally get them from. I've looked into other places in town for local meat, but none of them sell whole butts at a price that is reasonable. Considering we're talking about a 8-10 lbs chuck of flesh, getting 2 or 3of these can get expensive if you are paying $4-$5 per pound for local meat.

Anyway, in my experience, running the smoker around 250 means keeps the cooking time at around an hour a pound to get to an internal temp of 185-190. So, for an 8 lbs shoulder, you'll need 8 hours of cooking time at 250. This will produce a nice crust, a quarter to half inch smoke ring, and make the meat soft enough for shredding with forks.

For the pulled pork, I use my own rub which is a modified version of a Memphis style rub I found online. The print out I have actually says the original rub recipe comes from The Barbecue Bible, but I checked my copy and couldn't find it.

Jason's Pork Rub
Paprika
Black Pepper
Brown Sugar
Salt
Garlic Powder
Dried Oregano
Chipotle Powder

This is my "magic powder" (a la Mike Mills). I altered the original with the garlic powder, oregano, and chipotle powder to give this rub a touch of herbiness and a little more heat. The sugar-paprika-pepper combo is pretty normal barbecue flavors and seemed too dry to me, especially for Oregon. To alter this rub for fish or chicken, just reduce the paprika and black pepper and increase the garlic and oregano.

Don't be shy about laying on the rub. It will make a nice crust.

The beast at work.

2 butts, a pot of beans, and smoked cabbage (in the tin foil) on the smoker.

The picnic ham ready for shredding.

Once the shoulders have smoked and are all tender and black, I take them out of the smoker and shred them down with forks. This can be a time consuming process, but it really does produce better results that chopping the meat. Then I simmer the meat for at least 30 minutes in a ketchup vinegar sauce, pretty much following the recipe for North Carolina Pulled Pork from The Barbecue Bible. I'm not much for barbecue sauce, but the sweet-hot tang of the vinegar sauce combined with the salty-sweet crust of the rubbed pork makes for outstanding pulled pork.

Smoked Cabbage

Last year, while looking for something different, I found a recipe for smoked cabbage in The Legends of Texas Barbecue. My first thought was "gross." My second thought was "cabbage is cheap". My third thought was "I'll give it a try if I have room in the smoker". It was outstanding. If you haven't had smoked cabbage, I highly recommend it. Uncle Kermit's Barbecued Cabbage is outstanding and simple.

Cabbages cored and packed with spiced butter.

Cabbage
Butter (one stick per cabbage)
salt
pepper
garlic powder
onion power

Make a spiced butter and pack the entire stick into the core of the cabbage. The cabbage will groan and seem like it's going to burst from the butter. Wrap in tin foil and stick it in a smoker for a couple hours. Cut into wedges and serve. Wonderful.

Cole Slaw

Normally I don't do cole slaw. I just don't like it that much. But this year it seemed like a good idea, just as an experiment. To match with the vinegar sauced pulled pork, I found a vinegar based cole slaw recipe in Peace, Love and Barbecue. The Lexington Barbecue Red Slaw recipe was a good match, especially since I added a little too much chipotle pepper to the first batch of pulled pork. Cole slaw still isn't my favorite thing, but this was about as good as I could ask for. Note: make this the night before so it has time to marinate. Otherwise, it just tastes like cabbage and vinegar.

Potato Salad

Mama Faye's didn't last long!

Kim made potato salad. She found the simplest recipe and it turned out great. She looked through several options and then found Mama Faye's Home-Style Potato Salad. This turned out to be another hit from Peace, Love and Barbecue. A classic, simple, delicious potato salad.

Beyond that, everything else was provided by the people who showed up. In normal pot-luck style we had all sorts of goodies to choose from and they were all delicious.

Here are some random pictures from the barbecue and some of the people who showed up to help us celebrate our birthday...and eat!

There was a lot of food!

Marsh mellows too!

The real power of barbecue...bringing friends together.

The BBQ Books I Gots on my Shelf

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 03:32:00 +0000

Tomorrow is our annual birthday BBQ, so, of course, today is the run around like a maniac and get ready for the BBQ day. Part of this running around is figuring out what to cook. We normally do it pot-luck style and let people bring whatever sides they want (except Blu--he is required to bring deviled eggs). For our part, Kim normally makes something and I make pulled pork sandwiches. I'll have more on this tomorrow. This year I thought I'd also do a cole slaw to go with the sandwiches which sent me digging though my BBQ books to find something great.

As a preamble to the much anticipated BBQ of the Year post coming in the next couple days, I figured I'd give a run down of the BBQ books that I use in case anyone is interested in getting some books on BBQ.

Now, let's define BBQ (Bar-B-Que) for a minute. Many people think of Weber grills and charcoal briquettes when they think of summertime, have-your-friends-over bar-b-ques. This is not what I'm talking about. Although the rich petroleum aromas of Matchlight briquettes brings back many childhood memories for me, and the explosive rush of lighter fluid is fun, I'm doing something different.

When I'm talking about Barbecue, I'm talking about something that is more like what people think of when they imagine smoking foods. I'm talking about slow cooking using indirect heat with hardwood logs for hours on end in a big, black metal drum. Technically, what I'm talking about is called "hot smoking". Hot smoking is like slow roasting in the oven, but with smoke. Hot smoking is meant to take tough pieces of meat and melt them down over time. Normally the temperature is around 225 degrees (f). I don't want to go on about this, but I just want to be clear about what kind of cooking we're talking about here.

Grilling is direct heat, high temperature, fast cooking. Grilling is for hamburgers and steaks and bratwursts and legs of lamb, etc. Grilling is what most people do. It's gas grills or Webers with charcoal briquettes.

There is another method called "cold smoking" which takes several days, never really gets over 90 degrees (f) and is what you do when you are trying to cure large peices of meat or some types of sausages. I personally have never cold smoked anything...yet. Cold smoking is used in some kinds of charcuterie.

Okay, now that we've got the definitions out of the way, let's get on with the books. I'm leaving out the charcuterie books because those are more in line with "cold smoking" and that is not what I feel like writing about today.

The Barbecue Bible

I'd resisted this book for a long time because of the cheesy title (I've resisted buying the rest of Raichlen's books that came after this one for the same superficial reason). Actually, this is a really good book. I have been surprised how often I reference it for ideas on barbecue. The international nature of this book is interesting, but not my favorite part. What I really like is that it is that this book is well rounded. It's the kind of book that you can sit down with and find something. It is by no means exhaustive (although I think the sauces and rubs chapters are given more room than they need), but what is in here is good and interesting. That's why I like it.

Legends of Texas Barbecue Cook Book

I have to admit that Texas style barbecue is not my favorite. Mesquite smoked beef is good, but not my personal favorite. That being said, this is an outstanding cook book. It really does try to be a "cook book" in that it features a deep collection of old-school Texas barbecue recipes from masters around the state. And Robb Walsh is successful at doing what he seems to set out to do--bring forward the down-home roots of Texas barbecue. He clearly prefer history over awards in this book. If you're still running the same pit your grand-dad started in 1940, then you've got a good shot at getting into this book. This book could be called "Roots of Texas Barbecue". It's a good read

Peace, Love and Barbecue--Recipes, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue

Easily my favorite BBQ book; this is a unique BBQ book. There are more stories than recipies in this book. It's more like a tour around the professional bbq world that just happens to pick up some great recipes along the way. If you want a specific recipe you have to go to the index, because the chapters are about the bbq world and the pit masters who inhabit it. Mike Mills clearly knows the BBQ world inside and out. This is the kind of cooking book that can go from night stand to kitchen counter in the same day. It's just fun to read.

Dinosaur Barbecue

From what I understand Dinosaur Barbecue is a pretty good place to eat if you are in upstate New York. I wanted the book because I'd found a recipe online a long time ago and it was attributed to Dinosaur Barbecue. The cook book is good. It has some interesting ideas about meats and sauces. I like to use this book for some alternate ideas and to see how they mix flavors. And the pictures are good.

Weber's Charcoal Grilling

Not really a barbecue book at all, but it's in the same general world of outdoor live fire cooking. There are some recipes for indirect heat cooking using 2 stage fires, etc., in a Weber grill. I got this as a gift and have been really surprised at the quality of the recipes. There are some really interesting ideas with small sauces and grilled meats. And the photography is beautiful. Like the Dinosaur Barbecue cookbook, I use this as a secondary reference to see some alternative ideas on flavor pairings.

Seven Fires

I was really looking forward to getting this book, and when I got it I was mostly satisfied. Again, not really a barbecue book, but more a grilling book using seven different ways to set up the fire. The chef--Francis Mallman--is Argentinian and the book positions itself as a sort of manifesto on Argentinian outdoor cooking. What this book really excels at is surprising you with some really new ideas on how to grill meats. The example of cooking an entire cow whole on a giant metal rack raised over a bonfire using cables and pulleys is amazing. Hardly practical, but amazing.

A Little Bit More About Cheese--My Last Blog Post Ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sat, 21 May 2011 15:44:00 +0000

I previously wrote a post about trying to make 100% local cheese. At the time it was all I could do to make 99% local cheese because of the issues with finding a mesophilic starter. Buttermilk was the best substitute I could find, but even that has small amounts of added cultures which make it not 100% local.

However, there other ways of making cheese that do not require mesophilic starter and rennet. I'm thinking about something yellow...something yellow...Lemons! That's right, lemons can be used to make a few kinds of soft cheeses, most notably, lemon cheese. The acid in the lemons curdles the milk making it possible to separate the whey from the milk solids and there you have the start of a cheese.

Skeptical of the outcome, I tried one of these lemon cheeses and it was...okay. The baby liked it (but he also likes plain tofu with prunes). Probably if I'd added some salt and spices the taste would have been better, something I'm learning about every kind of soft cheese. But, since I'm a bit of a deconstructionist when it comes to cooking, I had to start with plain first just to understand the underlying flavor structures (yes, I have been finding ways to combine my degree in literary theory with cooking).

One problem with making lemon cheese is that lemons do not grow well in Oregon. It's just too freaking cold here for those sun-loving tarts. That could be a problem...unless you have a green house. Which is exactly what the people at Raynblest Farm have. They were the only people at the PSU farmer's market to have lemons, and that continues to be true (as far as I know). Thank god for them. They never have very many, but if you are there early, you can get them. And some very nice honey too. And three kinds of prunes.

So, I have to retract my former statement. It IS possible to make 100% local cheese in Oregon. Using lemons, milk, and whatever herbs you have at hand, 100% local cheese is possible and could be delicious.

Unripe lemons growing. Meyer lemons fruit all year round but take about 9 months to ripen.

If you don't want to depend on the whims of the market, growing your own lemons is pretty easy for anyone reading this blog, because I'm betting that if you have internet access you also have central heating. And if you have central heating, then you can keep a lemon tree in a pot in your house. Planting it outside would kill it, so don't do that. I bring this up because Graceful Blades is selling Meyer lemon trees at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market. The wonderful thing about these trees is they can be trimmed to be whatever size or shape you want them to be. That way they don't have to take up any more space than the average ficus, but with lemons.

(Btw, having local lemons now makes 100% local eggs Benedict possible. Hallelujah!)

So, this isn't meant to be a 100% local post, but one more thing. I had also previously written that thistle juice was a viable alternative to liquid rennet. Well, I've tried this a couple more times and found out that...it's totally true! AND it keeps in the refrigerator. The only "however" is that you need to use a little bit more than what the recipe calls for. For instance, I made Bondon cheese first and it worked great. Then I tried to repeat the recipe and it completely failed because the milk never properly separated and I was left with a weird sort of slimy yogurt. But I tried it again this week using twice as much rennet as the recipe calls for and it worked great! So, that is my current theory--the thistle juice is not quite as strong as real rennet so you need to use more. In my case, I used two drops of rennet to one quart of milk instead of one drop of rennet. The cheese turned out really good (with some added salt, garlic powder and herbs).

Thistle juice. Black and smelly,
but perfect for cheese.

Now, if you would like to make your own thistle rennet, here is what worked for me. Buy (or gather) a bag of thistles. One bag cost me about $4 at the farmer's market. Stick them in a food processor and grind them down until they are a wet messy paste. This will take a little while and you'll need to stop periodically and use a wooden spoon to mix it around. Once it's as pasty as you can get it, scoop it out into a fine mesh sieve and press to extract the juice. You want only juice and no solids, so use the finest mesh thing you can find. Pour the juice into a glass jar and keep in the refrigerator. I don't know how long it will keep, but mine's been in there of a couple weeks and seems fine.

One bag of thistles yielded a little less than 2 oz. of black, gross looking liquid. But because each cheese recipe only calls for a few drops of rennet at a time, this should be enough to make many many pounds of cheese. As long as it keeps in the refrigerator, this little bottle of liquid black gold will last a long time.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to use any other that rennet because today is May 21, 2011 and the rapture is happening this afternoon. So, it's been a nice time eating and blogging. Thanks for reading. For everyone left behind, good luck with the thistles.

7 Days 100% Local Round 2, Completed

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 01 May 2011 17:52:00 +0000

We actually finished the 7 days last week, but I've been kinda slow in writing about it. It was a good time. Some other families joined us which made for a new dynamic. The social part of it made it more fun, and helped with supplies. But just talking about the challenge with other people was interesting to me. If you take a hair-brained idea and put it out there, you can get some pretty neat stuff.

My new Meyer lemon tree.

Anyway, moving on to our week. It was pretty good. It was easier than last time. I already wrote about the yogurt issue. That was the big lesson for this week. We didn't have the shock of the limits of local food; we knew what to expect. We knew how to find most of what we needed. But the devil was in the details. How local is local? When is it okay to bring in outside things? What is reasonable? Those were the things we dealt with, mostly around fermented dairy products. One surprise was that I didn't really miss spices as much as I thought. If you have salt, butter, and/or garlic, you can make most anything taste pretty good. Having lemons was nice too.

Things we really liked this time

One really good thing we found was the corn grits from Gee Creek farm. Kim used these to make polenta a couple times and it was really good. So easy and a perfect base for all kinds of stuff.

Another treat was the blueberry pancakes on the last day. I don't know how Kim figured this one out, but they were great. No baking soda meant they were a bit flatter than normal buttermilk pancakes, but that was fine with me.

The rock fish from Linda Brand was really good. After this meal, we decided we need to eat a lot more fish. At around $9 per pound, the price wasn't bad and the quality was excellent.

Fruit roll ups from Raynblest Farm. These were a great find. And these are the people who had meyer lemons also. Raynblest Farm mainly sells honey products, but their fruit stuff was a real treat for us.

100% local corn levain bread from Grand Central Baking. A great loaf of bread that seriously made the week so much easier. Bread is such a fundamental food.

Here is a run down of what we ate this past week, with some pictures.:

Chicken, roasted potatoes and salad

Monday

B: Oatmeal with honey, mint tea

L: Nut butter and Jelly Sandwiches

D: Sauted fiddleheads, blackbeans and spinach with garlic. Potatoes au gratin.

Tuesday

B: Gruel. Mint tea, strawberry yogurt, toast

L: Sandwichs, hard boiled egg, apple

D: Roasted chicken with potatoes and carrots. Spinach salad with pears, cranberries, and lemon cheese.

Wednesday

B: Scrambled eggs, gruel, toast, tea

L: Sandwich, hard boiled egg, popcorn, apple

D: Kate and Ian came over and brought Quiche. We made polenta with mushroom cream sauce. Rogue beer. Spinach salad.

Dinner with Ian and Kate and Celeste was a mid-week 100% local treat.

Thursday

B: Eggs on toast. Tea

L: Leftover polenta. Hard boiled egg. Apple. Popcorn.

D: Braised ham with carrots on pasta. Spinach salad

Friday

B: Egg sandwiches

L: Leftovers

D: Leftovers

Saturday

B: Oatmeal with cranberries and honey

L: Sandwiches, yogurt

D: Potato Leak Soup, spinach salad, toast

Sunday

B: Blueberry pancakes

L: Soup with Ham

D: Broiled rock fish, sauted kale with garlic, golden potatoes.

School Lunches--!00% No Problem

School Lunches were not a problem again. My daughter usually likes local week lunches better than her normal lunches, in face. In general, we just pack these items, more or less, each day.

A 100% local school lunch for a fourth grader.

Sandwich (hazelnut butter and jelly)

Hard Boiled Egg

Carrot sticks

Cranberries

Yogurt with fruit

Fruit roll ups

Popcorn

Honey Sticks

The baby had these foods this week, mixed around at most every meal. We found out he loves black beans, which is pretty neat.

Oatmeal with blueberries
Steamed carrots
Yogurt with fruit
Hard boiled egg yolks
Polenta
Pureed prunes
toast strips with lemon cheese
black beans
chicken breast meat

Bacteria in Local Food

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 15:25:00 +0000

Lactobacillus bulgaricus from http://bioweb.usu.edu/microscopy/

This is a post about thinkin. No recipes today. Probably not many pictures.

We are doing 7 Days 100% Local Challenge again and a couple issues have come up. This time the work of the experience is easier. I am expecting not to drink coffee. I am expecting to eat smaller meals. I am expecting to have limited choices. Definitely no going out with clients out for beers. I dealt with these issues last time.

But this time the issues are deeper. They are more complicated. They are asking me to look deeper into what 7 Days 100% Local really means. We went to the farmer's market a couple weekends ago and were talking to a vendor about the challenge. She was pretty clear that 100% local was nit-picking. 95% local was just fine.

This seems to be coming up more often. More and more the negative feedback is coming from the people who either have no interest in local food or the people who are eating mostly local already. These two opposite groups seem to view the 7 Days 100% Local challenge as far-fetched? Comical? Ridiculous?

But what they don't understand is that is not the point of the Challenge. The point of the challenge is for people who want to try to push their diet more local than it currently is, with the ultimate goal of 100% local. Someone who is 20% local may work their way to 80% local for the week. Afterwards, they may end up being 50% local because they learned some new things and found some great sources in the process. Someone who is 90% local already, if they are willing to try to stretch a little bit further, may make it to 95% local. That is the beauty of this challenge. It is not for people who are done looking. It is for those of us who are willing to go a little bit further and see what is there...

Ok, back to the point. In my house, we're past the surprise of local food limits. Now we're facing the tougher choices around what those limits of local food really are and what we are going to choose for ourselves. My wife is thinking always about the baby and my daughter--what to feed them, how to make meals for them, how local limits are impacting their food choices.

The issue of yogurt has come up a lot. What is "local yogurt". The baby loves yogurt. At 8 months, we are trying to give him more and more "solid" foods. This includes yogurt mixed with all sorts of berries, etc. The problem is that yogurt is milk + bacteria cultures. The milk is local fo'sho. But what about the Lactobacillus bulgaricus cultures? I can guarantee they aren't home grown. And even if they were, they would be home grown in a laboratory which is the anathema of small farm goodness we also look for in local week.

So, I've been doing some research. Here is what I found out:

Bacteria grows fast and dies fast. The lifespan is hours to weeks. That's it.
It reproduces itself as clones asexually, making it the least fun organisms on earth.
It is microscopic and lives in a world very different than ours.
Live ("active") cultures are good for you because they are probiotics.
The bacteria cultures needed to make yogurt are called a thermophillic starter. Cheddar cheese also uses a thermophillic starter, so you can see that when we address the topic of yogurt, we can extend this topic to cheese and, ultimately, all fermented milk products.

Now, how does this enter into the topic of local food?

An apple and a tub of yogurt walk into a bar...
If you have a quart of yogurt made from the cows down the street + a packet of yogurt starter ordered from a laboratory in California, can you call that 100% local in Portland, Oregon? No you can't. It may be 99% local, but it is not 100% local. By extension, does any fermented milk product that uses bacteria automatically get excluded from the 100% local challenge? Seems like it. If you are adding foreign ingredients to your mild to make yogurt, then it's doesn't meet the 100% local standard.

Here is another way to think about it. Hood River, Oregon, is famous for the apple orchards. No one would disagree that a Hood River apple is a local apple. But the saplings and the seeds used to grow these orchards very likely came from somewhere else. I really really doubt that these are indigenous apple trees. We have no problem eating these "local" apples even though they originated at one time from foreign sources.

Why is bacteria any different than an apple tree? Both are cultured. Both are living organisms. Both are used as food producers. Both are transplants. Why be a size-ist and say that bacteria grown from an east-coast starter kit isn't local while a tree grown from an east coast seed supply company is?

Let's talk about yeast for a minute. Yeast is very small and is used in bread. If you make a loaf of sandwich bread, you'll probably need some packets of instant yeast. But if you make a sour dough from a cultured bucket of wild yeast, then it is local. Also, if you culture your own yeasts in San Francisco it will taste different than yeast cultured in Portland . Wild yeast has it's own flavor profile depending on where it is. That is one of the things that makes it so great.

Now, does this mean that a natural yogurt culture will taste different in Portland vs. Ohio? Probably not. There is more to the flavor than just the bacteria and these other factors will most likely overwhelm.

But what is not different is the idea that you can do things in a variety of ways. You can get Fleishman's Instant Yeast out of a package or you can culture your own. You can order apples from Idaho or you can plant a seed and grow a tree. You can empty a packet of Lactobacillus bulgaricus into your milk and make a quart of yogurt, or you can cultivate a "mother" culture of yogurt bacteria.

In each case, culturing the thing is what makes it local. It imparts an artistry. It shows a certain amount of care. It creates a local "colony". Also, it creates a chance to fail.

Failure Can Be A Good Thing
A big part of appreciating local food is appreciating that there are lots of things that are not local. There are lots of things that will fail if they are planted here. Mango tree = fail. Raspberries = success. That is how we separate what is true to this place from what is not. That is how we know we are someplace distinct, that we are not just floating in a Willy Wonka wonderland of edible conveniences. It is the opposite of Ray Krock's dream of universally accessible and homogeneous food. As a person interested in local food, I'm glad for that.

Eating local means understanding that this place is not like every other place. You're feet are on this ground. This air is in your lungs. This wind is on your face. This food is in your belly. These horizons are your horizons.

Back to yogurt. Does yogurt have a chance to fail? I guess that depends a lot on the competency of the yogurt maker. If you constantly supplement the yogurt and keep pouring in more starter, it won't fail because you have it on life support. But if you are cultivating something and you take it off life support, then it has a chance to fail.

Supplementers or Cultivators
Because of the nature of bacteria, it really does come down to either it's okay or it's not. There cannot be much gray area with something that has a lifespan so short and reproduces by cloning itself. These things will never become "acclimated".

It is the intention of the producer that matters more here. Are they cultivating the culture, or are they just supplementing? If the intention is to cultivate the yogurt rather than just pour in another packet of yogurt starter each time, and if the intention is to create a local yogurt bacteria colony, then I'd say we're on track to local. It represents a local intention, with a kick-start. Those east coast apple seeds are a kick-start too. They start a local orchard, and we eat the local apples.

I don't think my family's struggles with sorting though the finer points of local food are done. The question of fermented foods and bacteria presents a real challenge, especially when you realize just how much of these sorts of things we eat. We'll keep working it out.

In the mean time, we figured out that making yogurt at home is actually really really simple. It just takes milk, yogurt, and an oven. Using some yogurt bought from a local dairy as the kick-start, we're starting our own yogurt colony. Then we'll have local yogurt and the baby will be happy.

Get Ready for another 7 Days 100% Local

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 16:57:00 +0000

We're going to do it again and it's almost here.

7 Days 100% Local, redux.

7 days doesn't seem like it should be that hard. It's only one week. How hard can that be. I think it would not be hard on its own. But when you add in the 100% local part, things change.

Most people are aware of local food.

Many people choose to eat local food.

Hardly anyone goes 100% local. And by 100% I mean 100%. Every ingredient in every food item sourced locally. No added salts. No packaged yeast. No spices. No lemons. No cultured enzymes. No coloring. No added anything that wasn't sourced locally. That makes for a lot of "No"s.

The thing is, there is a lot of ways to make products from local sources, and we just don't. For instance, if you want to make cheese you need rennet. Vegetable rennet can be made from thistle. Thistle grows like crazy in the Northwest. Why doesn't someone start a thistle farm, press the juice out of it, make vegetable rennet, and corner the Pacific NW cheese market?

Another example. Vinegar. We got the apples. We got the wineries. We don't got vinegar. Why? Someone needs to take that last step and make vinegar. They'd own 100% of the local vinegar market.

Salt. A subject close to my heart. We have a whole ficken ocean of salt just across the valley. But no one has thought to set up a commercial kiln and corner the PNW salt market. Why? Local salt would be a snap!

Commercial yeast. Yeast is in sooooo many things. Why is there not a yeast producer around here? Maybe that is a little more work than vinegar, but come on. It can't be that hard.

I digress...

Anyway, we're getting ready for the 7 Days. I think we'll do a very similar plan to last time.

Breakfasts -- hot cereals. eggs and toast.
Lunches -- finger foods. Nut butter and jelly sandwiches. Leftovers.
Dinners -- Meats and veggies. Savory custards. Frittatas.
Desserts -- Simple sweet custards.

No client lunch meetings.

Seems simple, but when you start deconstructing everything you eat, it becomes harder. That's part of the point, I guess. I'm glad it's only 7 days...

I'm excited that there are a bunch of people joining us this time.

Making 100% Local Cheese

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:16:00 +0000

As we get ready for the next 7 Days 100% local challenge, I'm thinking through all the things that were difficult last time and trying to get ready for them. Some things were really hard to let go of, like snacks (I eat more snacks than I realize). Something were easier to let go of, like coffee. Seely Farm's mint tea was so good it totally replaced coffee for me even after the challenge was over. And some things seemed like they should not be so hard to do local, like bread and cheese.

Anyone who has been to the farmer's market, or New Seasons, knows that we have a lot of cheese in this town. Portlanders love their cheese, especially creative cheeses from non-bovine animals. Goat cheese. Sheep cheese. I'm surprised someone doesn't make breast milk cheese here. With all the cheesiness around here, I thought taking some time to track down 100% local cheese would just be a matter of a few phone calls.

Well, I was wrong.

Let's step back for a moment. Cheese is basically pretty simple. You need milk. You need an acid to make the milk curdle. You need to separate the curds from the whey. You need to let it dry to some extent to firm up. You do more or less of this depending on what kind of cheese you want to make. If it's so simple, then why no 100% local? I asked around at the farmer's market and got different reasons, but the answers were the same. Cheese makers use imported enzymes because they are manufactured to produce consistent results.

One cheese maker clearly thought it was stupid not to use these enzymes in any case.

Other cheese makers though it would be fine to experiment with smaller batches. For larger commercial production, the reliability of the manufactured enzymes was just too important.

So, if I wanted to have 100% local cheese for local week, I wasn't going to get it from a cheese maker.

(The good ladies at Heidi Ho Vegan Cheeses were very interested in taking on the challenge of making a 100% local vegan cheese. The only problem was what kind of coagulant to use. The coagulant they use now comes from plants that grow just off the coast...of Chile.)

To find out for myself if it could be done, I bought a cheese making book. Found the simplest recipe in the book. And gave it a shot.

I made the Bondon. With only 3 required ingredients, it seemed like a good place to start.

Whole Milk
Mesophilic Starter
Rennet
Salt and herbs are optional.

Rennet traditionally made from the lining of a very young cow's stomach. However, many people nowadays use vegetable rennet. You buy it in a little bottle and use a very small amount to get the curds and whey to separate. In the cheese book, there is a little side box that talks about vegetable rennet. One of the sources for this is Stinging Nettles. Conveniently, Stinging Nettles grow locally. I got some at Pastaworks on Hawthorne. After crushing some of these stinging nettles through a garlic press, i got the one drop of liquid rennet I needed for the recipe. I also got a tingly thumb for the next 3 days.

Mesophilic starter is another thing that helps the rennet separate the curds and the whey. The book recommends you get this in little packets, but I thought there must be a better way. That is when I found Dr. Fankhauser's cheese website. Cultured buttermilk is a mesophilic starter! Where ever the recipe asks for prepared mesophilic starter, you can substitute cultured buttermilk. I grabbed some buttermilk at the store.

Now, my goal was to see if all these improvisations would work. Would fresh pressed stinging nettle juice really act as rennet? Would the cultured buttermilk really be a good starter? 24 hours later I found out the answer is YES. They did work just fine for the Bondon cheese. The cheese was a mild and spreadable. Sort of like a cream cheese, but with a little tang like a farmhouse goat cheese. One part I only added salt to. The other I added some garlic powder and dried herbs. It was very good.

I have no reason to believe they would not work for other kinds of cheeses too.

Wait, What About the Buttermilk?
So, there is one catch in this and it is the cultured buttermilk. Cultured buttermilk is not like normal buttermilk. Normal buttermilk is basically the skim-milk-ish leftovers from making butter. Cultured buttermilk is totally different. It is milk that has a bunch of bacteria in it and is thick like a smoothy. The bacteria is what you need for making cheese because it gets the milk to separate for the rennet. Having cultured buttermilk is pretty important and is key to making local cheese. So making it 100% local (like wild yeast sour dough starter) is a prerequisite for making 100% local cheese.

If you read any recipe for how to make buttermilk they all say to add buttermilk cultures to milk and that makes cultured buttermilk. That's like saying if you want chocolate milk, add chocolate to milk. It doesn't really help.

Welcome to the Raw Milk Revolution
After looking for a while, the only recipe I could find for truly home made cultured buttermilk is on Dr. Fankhauser's Buttermilk page. If you scroll down to the section entitled "Making Cultured Buttermilk from Scratch" you will see the recipe. The risky part is that making cultured buttermilk requires starting with raw milk.

Raw milk is not legal for commercial sale in many places. The Campaign for Real Milk is one organization that is all about getting people to drink more unpasteurized milk. They have a long list of Oregon dairy farms that sell raw milk, and many of them are right outside Portland.

Raw milk is something that I know little about and have heard mixed opinions about, so I decided to do some research.

The Food Poison Journal has a Raw Milk Scorecard for 2010. Perhaps I'm being shallow, but if you are being tracked on a website called the "Food Poison Journal", that is not a good sign.

Overall, of the articles that I read, the case of the Hartmann Dairy in Minnesota seems a great example of the conundrum of raw milk. In a nut shell, 4 (possibly 5) people got sick from the milk at Hartmann Farm. Investigators know it was from the same farm because they used fancy scientific tests to isolate the bacterial DNA and wrote a report about the Hartmann case. This resulted in the state of Minnesota placing an embargo on products from the farm.

Well, the Hartmanns strongly disagree. Citing that none of the dairy or animals tested on the farm had any form of e.coli present, they feel like the state has done a bad job and hurt the reputation of the dairy.

The crux of the situation, in my mind, is summed up nicely in the article:

In many cases, says the fact sheet, only particular batches of product may have been contaminated. And because in many cases, perishable products have already been consumed, they aren't available for testing.

This is the difficulty of the raw milk debate. A couple people get sick. The evidence is hard to find because of the perishable nature of the product. The state does some tests. The farms refute those tests. It's hard to tell what the real situation is or what your risk as a general consumer is.

No one denies that raw milk has a chance to contain e.coli and other bad bacteria. Maybe that chance is very, very small. Maybe it is so small, that it does not bother some people. I am normally up for a food adventure, and if it was only me, then this would probably not be an issue. However, when it comes to my kids, I'd rather play it safe. Health insurance is great, but I don't want to test it.

99% Local Cheese
So, this puts truly 100% local cultured buttermilk out of the question, and with it goes the option of 100% local cheese. We'll have to settle for 99% local cheese, I guess. Unless someone out there knows of a 100% local source for safe buttermilk in the Portland area, this case is closed.

I'll still be making cheese for local week. It's pretty darn close to 100%. But that is part of the project, right? Find the gaps. Find ways to fill them.

Someone out there can safely make 100% local cultured buttermilk, I'm sure of it. I just have to find them...

100% Local Bread from Mel and Grand Central Bakery

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:27:00 +0000

Bread coming out of the oven at Grand Central Baking in Portland Oregon.

Many of you may know that my family did 7 days 100% local last fall. While there were many challenges that week, one of the toughest was making bread. We use a lot of bread--breakfast toast, school lunch sandwiches for my daughter, etc. Knowing that bread was a key part of our diet and we would not be able to go 7 days without it, we tried to make our own wild yeast bread. I wasn't great. Edible, but not great.

Now that we are doing the 7 Days 100% Local Challenge again, I knew it would be critical to come up with a solution to the bread issue. So I reached out to Grand Central Bakery. Knowing their commitment to local sources, I was hoping they would be into the challenge. You can imagine how happy I was to get an email back from them saying they were in!

The Grand Central Tour

Mixing dough for ciabatta.

On Thursday, Kim and I were treated to a tour of the main Grand Central bakery. Mel Darbyshire, their master baker, gave us a tour of the facility and explained how they source their ingredients. It was impressive the lengths she goes to to support local growers and producers as much as they can. For instance, they now get 100% of their wheat from Sheppard's Grain. Their honey comes from Hood River. They source potatoes from local farms as much as they can. Mel is constantly on the look out for new local sources that can replace as many of the industrial products as possible. It's not as easy as it might seem. Commercial bakeries need quality, consistency and volume. Not many small farms can deliver on all these fronts.

Mel's commitment to keeping the production of the bread as close to "by hand" was also impressive. Because of the size of the operation, some automation is necessary. But the criteria is always to ensure that the product does not become a "machined" loaf. For instance, only the baguettes and buns are shaped by a machine. All the other loafs are done by hand. This is amazing considering the number of loafs that are produced there 24 hours a day.

Getting ready to shape some loaves

Another example is the automatic proofer. Grand Central recently bought a proofer to help proof the loaves. It was a slow decision for them to do this, as Mel does not believe in rushing the process. However, do to some specific issues related to air circulation and the layout of the bakery itself, it eventually became clear that a proofer could help out. However, even though they now have the ability to hurry the proofing process along, Mel chooses not to. The settings on the proofer are basically the same as the bakery. Same air temperature. Same humidity. The only difference is inside the proofer the environment is consistent from floor to ceiling. This allows all the bread to proof evenly, and reduces waste while keeping the proofing process itself true. It also allows them to make more loaves overall.

The New 100% Local Loaf
At the end of the tour, we got a real treat. Mel has created a special 100% local bread loaf. It's a wild yeast loaf made with a corn levain and subtle honey sweetness.

It's delicious. Especially toasted with butter.

We were treated to a sample. Mel is still finalizing the formula, but the results so far cannot be denied. And it's a beautiful looking loaf.

Once the recipe is finalized, the loaf will be available for sale at all Grand Central locations. Huge thanks to Grand Central and Mel for a great tour and for taking a personal interest in 100% local food.

7 Days 100% Local -- April 18 to April 24

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:51:00 +0000

Update: 7 Days 100% Local now has its own blog! Check it out!

We are going to do it again.

Our last adventure in 100% local eating was a really good experience. Three months later I still find myself talking about it, digesting the lessons learned, and thinking about how to do it again. Even though it was not the easiest week of eating--eating 100% local requires giving up quite a few things--it was really good week of eating. Dinner table conversation was more interesting. The meals required more creativity with less options. We recognized just how dependent on imported products we actually are. It was more expensive. It required everyone in the family to be on board with the effort. It required us to do it together. There are not many things that are truly whole family projects, but this one is a good one.

How to get ready for 7 days 100% local
1. Prepare. Knowing how to prep food. Learn how to cut larger pieces of meat into smaller ones. Learn how to make bread with wild yeast. Learn to make pasta. Learn how to take rough produce and turn it into ingredients to cook with.

2. Prepare. Know where to shop and get your food from. Most stores don't carry local food and many don't label their food well--even New Seasons and the food co-ops were not easy to navigate. Shopping at the farmer's market is a good way to go, but it is very expensive and not always open. If possible, find restaurants that make 100% local items on the menu. I couldn't find any in Portland. It would have been really nice to be able to eat out at least once during the week.

3. Prepare. Get mentally ready for some limited food choices. My friends who are gluten and dairy intolerant skip meals all the time because they aren't sure about the ingredients. 100% local can be the same, unfortunately. Until local food becomes more standardized and the prices come down to earth, eating 100% local will feel like you have a serious dietary restriction. Just say you are industrial-intolerant.

I'll update this post with resources as I come across them. If you want to join us in going 100% local for 7 days, let me know!

Oregon Durum Wheat, Update 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 03:27:00 +0000

Durum wheat in Oregon has been an interest for me ever since I tried to make homemade ravioli last year. I thought local durum would be easy to find considering that Oregon is one of the top wheat producers in the country. But when I tried to find local Pacific Northwest (PNW) durum, I couldn't. When I started doing some research, I found that durum wheat growing has a long and sorted history in Oregon involving university scientists, corporate underwriters, and even a foreign geneticist. But in the end, no durum had been successfully grown with real commercial potential.

And then I heard of the WSU durum project. I contacted Dr. Mike Pumphrey and asked him if I could find out more about their program. Dr. Pumphrey directed me to Dr. Aaron Carter who is the winter wheat breeder for WSU and had recently started working on the PNW durum project. Neither had heard about the OSU durum trials from the 1990's, but had gone ahead with their own trials based on what grows well in California, Arizona and Italy.

Recently I wrote to Dr. Carter to see if the results were in. At the time, the trials had been completed, but the data was not ready. He promised to get back to me with results when they were ready.

Good to his word, Dr. Carter sent me the trial results from the WSU PNW Durum trials. You can download the results, but here is the summary from Dr. Carter (emphasis mine):

I will provide my disclaimer again that this is only one year’s worth of data and at that we had a very unique spring in Washington so before making any recommendations I would like to see another year of data. Overall though, it appears that durum can be competitive with hard spring wheat and quality standards appear to be met. Let me know if you have any questions. As far as I know, there is no commercial production of durum in the PNW so your problem with locally sourcing this is still present. The addition of another year of data may be enough to convince producers to grow it if there are markets identified...

I will make the upfront comment right now that this data is only from two locations in 2010 and should be regarded as such. The 2010 year was very unique in Washington as we had a very cold, wet spring with a lot of disease pressure. More disease was seen in Pullman than in the Othello location. Pullman is a rain fed location receiving around 22 inches of annual precipitation. Othello was irrigated using a center-pivot system and is located in central Washington. Weed pressure was controlled at both locations. Stripe rust was the major disease at both locations, with Pullman receiving the higher, more uniform pressure. Data is included for stripe rust reaction in Pullman. Also included are five hard spring wheat cultivars used as comparison. The Othello location had unusually low test weight and yield potential for an irrigated site. Yield appeared competitive and protein levels were acceptable.

WSU seems to have had success where others have not. As Dr. Carter says, Durum production can be competitive. This was news to me. I was under the assumption that durum was a long shot in the Northwest and growing it was difficult. But the early indicators from the WSU trials show reality may be very different.

Why isn't PNW Durum Happening? Three Reasons
To help answer this question, I reached out to Scot Lany of Eat Oregon First and the Basque Ranch.

When I showed Scot the test results from WSU, he was not surprised. It just makes sense the durum should be able to grow well in central and eastern Oregon (and Washington). The test result yields looked good and the protein variation was narrow enough to be acceptable.

The issue to Scot was not if it would grow; the issues are everything except growing a durum crop. In particular, Scot identified three trouble spots:

1. Cross Pollination. If you are going to grow durum, in a state that has 975,000 acres of wheat (source), you are going to cross pollination problems. To avoid this, you need a half mile barrier between your durum and any other types of wheat. That's a half mile of unused land that could be used to grow a profitable crop of soft white wheat.

2. Storage and Transportation. Infrastructure in general is a problem. Wheat is a commodity. When wheat is grown, it is normally grown in huge quantities. Quantities so big that wheat can really only be thought of as a "regional" product, as opposed to a "local" product. Harvesting the crop takes large equipment. Storing the crop takes gigantic facilities. Moving the crop takes trucks and trains. If everyone is growing one kind of wheat, then that makes it possible to share costs because the equipment and facilities needed to do the job can be shared. Durum processing would need to be kept completely separate from the other kinds of wheat.

3. The Politics of Co-Ops. Because commodity farming requires such huge investments in equipment and infrastructure, most wheat farmers join co-ops. Co-ops provide all sorts of benefits to being in the club. They can help when someone has equipment problems. They lower costs on necessary supplies, like fuel. They help with marketing and education programs. It's more than a giant club that buys in bulk for its members, it also handles the marketing and selling of the wheat. In this environment, deciding to go your own way by growing a crop that is not what the co-op grows is not supported. The co-op only buys and sells what it buys and sells. And the big co-ops only buy what they can sell in the biggest markets for the most profit with the lowest risk. In Oregon, that means 8 types of wheat, but mostly soft white winter wheat. If you aren't into that, you should find a different co-op (if you can). There is no "I" in co-op.

Oregon Wheat Variety Study

A Different Point of View from the Oregon Wheat Commission
To get more insight into the issues, I spoke with Tana Simpson, administrator for the Oregon Wheat Commission. Tana was very nice and explained to me more about wheat in Oregon.

There are two main co-ops in Oregon--the Mid-Columbia Producers and Pendleton Flour Mill. All of these are set up to handle huge amounts of grain (primarily Soft White wheat) from the farmers of Oregon. One thing you will notice is that only one of these co-ops has the word "mill" in its name. That is important because Oregon exports about 92% of all the wheat grown here, mostly to Asia.   And that wheat is exported raw.  The only large scale commercial mill in all of Oregon is the Pendleton mill.

This idea that we export almost all the wheat we grow is very important because it dictates what is grown by creating an environment of very strict standards for the product. Soft White wheat grows really well in Oregon.  Because of that, the quality and quantity can be consistent enough for the international export market.

The OSU durum wheat trials showed that durum production is not consistent enough to meet these types of strict standards. Because of that, what is grown here can't play in the "big leagues" of the international export markets.  Thus, no one really wants to grow durum. Why grow second-rate durum when you can grow first-rate soft white?

Consequently, if anyone is going to grow an alternative crop, they need to start out with smaller local organizations such as Bob's Red Mill or one of the others.

One More Reason Why We Don't Have PNW Durum
I spoke with Josh Dorf, CEO of Stone-Buhr, about the PNW durum situation and he brought up a great point. PNW durum is an experiment and experiments are expensive. Those extra costs for infrastructure and processing would have to be passed on through higher prices. These higher prices would not be able to compete with the existing durum producers in Montana and North Dakota. If they can't compete, they won't sell, and then the experiment would fail. The work that WSU is doing may help to reduce the doubts that a viable crop can be grown, but it does not change the fact that there will be lots of extra costs to create the infrastructure needed to get the grain to market.

Going Home Grown
So, is it possible to roll your own? Sure it is. The new WSU trial results are very promising. It won't be easy, but here are a couple examples of people who have bucked the system.

Basque Ranch. At Basque Ranch they grow Triticale wheat, a variety developed in the UK as a cross between wheat and rye that was meant to be exported to Africa to fight world hunger. Scot heard about this, thought it was pretty cool and decided to plant a couple acres. He took it to a private mill and gave out some samples to Pasta Works and other places in town and they liked it. The next year he planted 4 acres, and it all sold. This kept going until this past year he planted 40 acres of Triticale. Scot created his own market. Now he is one of only 2 or 3 growers in the state that has a commercial crop of Triticale wheat. Available through Eat Oregon First and Fork Revolution.

Stone-Buhr (distributors of Sheppard's Grain). Easily the largest scale producer of the bunch, but still centered in the Northwest. Sheppard's Grain is notable not because they are growing alternative wheat, but because they are doing it on their own terms. Eschewing the co-op system, the farmers work together as a pool. Costs are based on the true cost of growing the wheat and everything is Food Alliance certified. Because of the record keeping required for Food Alliance, Stone Buhr is able to tell you exactly who grew the wheat you are buying on their Find the Farmer website. The Sheppard's Grain / Stone Buhr system builds the regional grain industry based on sound ecological practices and pays the farmers based on true costs (not commodity board price fixing). They provide a great example of how to keep local values even on a large scale. Available at most major super markets.

Where does that leave PNW Durum?
Basically no where...until someone steps up to the plate and plants a few acres of durum. I'm sure there are plenty of local restaurants and grocery stores that would carry the product. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would buy it. And if the WSU results hold true through the next round of trials, then there may be no reason not to grow durum here. But someone has to take the risk, and right now there are no takers.

Making Ketchup, Mustard, and Mayonnaise Local

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:59:00 +0000

Sometimes food just needs a little help. Brats need mustard. Crab cakes go great with Aioli. You can't have mashed potatoes without ketchup (or so says my daughter). Condiments are so useful and so ubiquitous that not being able to make them locally is a big oversight in any local food plan.

All of the preparations I did below were not done using locally sourced ingredients. In fact, I didn't even try to local source them. There are a couple reasons for this. The most important reason is that I have never made ketchup or mustard before. Having never made them before, I thought it more cost effective to do a practice run using less expensive ingredients, learn how to make the stuff, work out the kinks in the recipes, then spend the money for local ingredients later when I know I'm not going to screw it up.

Making Ketchup Local
If you look at the ingredients, ketchup is really an Autumn and Winter food--after we've eaten our fill of late summer sliced tomatoes but want to keep that sunny goodness going through the dark months. By spring you've probably used up whatever ketchup you'd made. Besides, spring foods don't really lend themselves to ketchup (fiddle heads and ketchup anyone?).

I went for the simplest recipe that I could find, thinking that I could make fancy ketchup later, but I at least needed to know the basics first. I used my Epicurious app to find a simple homemade ketchup recipe that got good reviews. It wasn't hard to find. There were several.

My thoughts were also leaning toward how I could adapt the recipe to 100% local ingredients, knowing that not all ingredients can be sourced locally. Here are the original ingredients:

Canned Tomatoes
Onion
Olive Oil
Tomato Paste
Brown Sugar
Cider Vinegar
Salt

Then, for fun, I added a little bit of Worchestershire Sauce and some Bourbon-Chipotle sauce from Fire on the Mountain.

Most of these seem pretty easy to replace.

Canned tomatoes = Fresh Tomatoes, blanched and peeled

Onion = Onion

Olive Oil = Olive Oil

Tomato paste = This can probably be skipped. may not have as strong a tomato flavor, but i think it will be okay.

Brown Sugar = a little bit harder. the closest we can get is local honey. This would add an interesting herby sweetness.

Cider vinegar = it is possible to find from a local orchard, but it is also pretty easy to make at home.

Salt = you'd have to make your own salt.

Worchestershire Sauce = just skip it.

Bourbon-Chipotle Sauce = use some local crushed red pepper.

A note about preparing ketchup. This was my first time and one thing that I learned is that the texture of ketchup is really key to it tasting like ketchup. Or maybe I should say the lack of texture. Store bought ketchup is completely smooth, it has no texture at all. I used the fine plate on a food mill for mine, but it still had little tiny chunks in it. These chunks make it seem a little bit like tomatoes sauce, rather than ketchup. Next time, I'll make sure to run mine through a fine chinois to get all the chunks out and achieve that super smooth ketchup texture.

Making Mustard Local
I like course grain mustard more than any other condiment, so I was really looking forward to this experiment. I was hoping to replicate McMenamins Terminator Stout whole grain mustard, which I think is pretty good. But it turned out to be harder than I thought.

To make whole grain mustard, I looked to James Peterson's great book, Sauces. He has a very simple whole grain mustard recipe in there, that I adapted to use beer instead of wine and malt vinegar in stead of wine vinegar.

Mustard Seed
Shallot
McMenamins' Terminator Stout
Malt Vinegar
Salt and Pepper

Really pretty simple, but to localize this is a little bit harder.

Mustard Seed = not sure. I haven't found a local Oregon producer of mustard seed.

Shallot = shallot

McMenamins' Terminator Stout. = Unfortunately, although this is produced locally it is not sourced locally. You'd have to substitute for something like Rogue Brewery's Chateau Rogue Black Lager. The Chateau Rogue line of beers are all sourced 100% locally by Oregon farms. These are the only line of beers that I have found that do not use any imported ingredients. Go Rogue!

Malt vinegar = Cider vinegar? Local vinegar options are very limited. There are some fruit vinegars and Cooper Mountain vineyard makes a local Oregon Balsamic. However, all of these are cost prohibitive. When I started looking around, I did not find a single Oregon vineyard that was making wine vinegar. None of them wanted to divert part of their crop from wine production. This is a real bummer for local food. I understand there are cost pressures and growers want to get the highest margin they can, but by neglecting the basic ingredients, we are left having to import what could easily be created here.

Salt and pepper = you can make your own salt, but pepper is just not available.

A note about making mustard. When mustard is first made, it is hot. I thought I'd messed something up when my mustard tasted like wasabi-horseradish-vinegar-fire sauce. Mustard needs time to mellow, and there is no telling just how long that will take. Right now, my mustard has been mellowing for 3 days and it is still a little too hot for my taste. Luckily, mustard does not go bad, so you can leave it out and take a taste every day to see where it is at. When letting your mustard mellow, make sure not to put it in the refrigerator. Refrigeration basically stops the mellowing process and your mustard will be fixed at that heat. I didn't know this at first and put one jar in the refrigerator. Three days later the other jars are developing a nice flavor while that one jar still makes my eyes water.

Making Mayonnaise Local
Local mayo is not really possible simply because every recipe I found called for canola oil or peanut oil, neither of which we have here. What we do have is olive oil. And we have garlic. This mean that while we can't make traditional mayonnaise, we can make something better--Aioli. Aioli is like garlic mayonnaise, but a little bit different. It has less ingredients, is full of garlic and tastes outstanding on crab cakes. It is better than mayonnaise in my book.

I turned again to James Peterson's Sauces for a simple Aioli recipe, and really it couldn't get simpler.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Garlic
Egg Yolk
Salt and Pepper
Lemon Juice

If we want to do this local, here's what we'd have to do:

Garlic = garlic

Egg yolks = no problem

Salt and Pepper = make your own salt, but pepper is out. That's okay though, because the pepper doesn't
really contribute that much in this recipe.

Lemon Juice = it is possible to find local Meyer lemons. But you gotta look.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil = Extra Virgin Olive Oil. There are several producers of local olive oil for this, but cost will be an issue. The recipe in Peterson's book calls for 2 cups of oil. That is 16 ounces of oil. Considering that a 12.7 ounce bottle of oil from Red Ridge Farms costs around $17, you can see that this will not be a cheap aioli. In fact, it would say that it is cost prohibitive to make aioli with local oil.

A note about making aioli. If your aioli breaks while you are making it, James Peterson says to beat an extra egg yolk, then add the broken aioli to is slowly to re-bind it. This worked for me. Peterson also says that extra virgin olive oil is fragile and will become bitter if over worked. However, when I looked on YouTube, I found plenty of chefs using their Kitchen Aids to do the mixing. I tried doing the hand method then resorted to a Kitchen Aid to get the job finished. It seemed to work for me.

Local Sourcing Local Condiments
Overall, most condiments can be simplified and adapted to local ingredients just fine. There are a couple sticking points though, mainly with vinegars and oils. This really brings to the front a problem that I have been running into more and more with local sourcing in general. Eating local is more than a nice chicken from the farmer's market or a pint of u-pick strawberries or a bag of sweet corn in late summer from Sauvie's Island. While all these things can be wonderful, the food we eat every day is made up of many more ingredients. Almost all of these can be sourced locally, but are not. Cost pressures and thin margins lead growers to pass them over because they do not generate the profit that "premium" products do. But if we are really, truly going to cook and eat locally, we need to find ways to source all our ingredients locally. Eating local cannot be a "gourmet" event every day. There is a place for premium products, but we need the staples too.

A Whole Pig

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 19:33:00 +0000

I didn't kill the pig.

When you tell people you are going to butcher a pig, most people think that includes killing the pig. But it doesn't. Slaughtering the pig is the process of killing it, and that's handled by a USDA certified slaughter house. Butchering the pig is the process of cutting it up. Slaughtering is an efficient and mechanical process (when done right), but butchering is a creative process.

I'm getting ahead of myself...

Going Full Piggy
This all started because my family has been talking about getting a pig for a long time. We already get whole chickens and have gotten a quarter of beef. A pig seemed the next step.

A few weeks ago my family did seven days 100% local. During that week we did not eat anything that was not sourced locally. The experience was interesting, fun, challenging, and enlightening. Some parts were easier than others and some were harder. One thing that came clear was that eating takes a certain amount of skill. It takes different skills than we normally work on in an everyday home kitchen. Cooking skills and presentation skills are nice--they create and refine the meal. But what we seldom work on are production skills. These production skills are normally left to other people, like butchers, and they add to the price of what we buy. The price of everything can be brought down if you learn to do some of the production yourself. Pound for pound, steaks cost more than a loin. When price becomes an issue, as it can when eating locally sourced food, learning to buy big can help you spend smaller.

Through Foodbuzz, I found a local vendor, Eat Oregon First, that sells whole pigs. Normally they sell to local Portland restaurants but they are starting to branch out into consumer direct sales. So I gave them a call.

Here is the catch. When you buy a hog from Eat Oregon First, you buy the whole hog. And it comes whole, which is to say slaughtered but not butchered, because they normally sell to restaurants who employ talented chefs who know how to break down an animal (Eat Oregon First does sell amazing beef by the cut, but not pig). To take care of the butchering, I hired Tracey "Tray" Satterfield of the Portland Meat Collective. She was my own personal butcher for the day, and she was awesome. (If you ever need of a personal butcher, contact Tray at traceysatterfield@gmail.com)

The Three C's -- From Country to Corpse to Cuisine
Let me digress for a minute. When you look at it from the basest perspective, eating animals is all about killing something, cutting up the corpse into manageable pieces, cooking it, and eating it. Most of us deal only with the last two parts of that sequence, but there is a lot that comes before. With wild animals we leave the care and feeding to Mother Nature. Domesticated animals are different. With domestic animals, how they are raised and what they are fed is directly the responsibility of the farmer.

Everything starts with how the animal is raised.

Get A Life, Pig!
It is important to me that the meat I eat is raised "well". What does "well" mean? To be completely honest, I'm not sure. It's something I'm still working out. But I do know that "well" begins with pigs having a life. I understand that these are domesticated animals raised solely for the purpose of food production, but food is not just about meat in the same way meals are not just about eating. A home is more than a house. Family means something different than relatives. There is more to what we eat than what we eat, and how we approach the dinner plate has meaning. For me, ethical meat eating begins with understanding where your meat comes from and how it lived before it became delicious. Pastures are an important part of this. Wind and rain too. Mud and pigs go together in my book. Knowing the name of the farmer that raised the animal you are going to eat is very important
.
This pig came from Payne Family Farm in Carlton, Oregon and was raised by Mark Payne. I spoke with Mark Payne over the phone about his farm and his pigs (hence no pictures, sorry).

Mark Payne is a fourth generation Oregon farmer, located just outside McMinneville. In the 60s, it became clear to the Payne family that,due to the changing realities of modern farming and agricultural economics, they had to move away from the diverse family farm and focus on something that could provide the volume. The Paynes chose Pigs. Mark believes in taking good care of his pigs--a decent life and decent death--while understanding that the economic realities of modern farming necessitate a certain amount of production volume.

Mark's pigs eat grain that is locally grown in the Tygh Valley in Eastern Oregon. Through partnerships with Basque Ranch, Eat Oregon First, and Rogue Brewery, Payne Family Farm is able to be the final part of a completely locally sourced cycle of food production. I'll have more about this in another post. It's really remarkable what these guys have put together.

Back To The Bloody Parts
When I arrived at the Eat Oregon First warehouse, the pig had already been delivered and Tray was just starting work. Half the beast was laid on the table in front of Tray. The other half lay on a second table along with the head. Tray was just beginning to make the first cuts.

Cutting the side into portions was not nearly has hard as I thought it would be. I'd seen the pig diagrams many time and even have a copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game that describes very clearly how to process a whole animal. However, looking at pictures and actually cutting an animal are different things. I knew I didn't want to try to take this on my own. Tray really made it all simpler. She walked through the animal, showing me what the lines were, how to find them, where the divisions made sense. Watching her make the cuts and comparing them to the drawings in the book brought it all together.

Inside of a side of pork, head removed, before cutting.

Slowly, methodically, the pig carcass was turned into stacks of the most wonderful cuts of meat. 1.5 inch thick bone-in chops started piling up. A Boston Butt was magically pulled from the animal along with its twin, the picnic ham. We found bacon tucked in under a sheet of spare ribs. Hams sat in a clustered huddle, hiding inside the legs. Tray's cutting was so well placed, that we wasted almost nothing. I was pressed to figure out what to use for sausage meat!

Cutting out the spare ribs.

Sirloin Chop

Wrapping was like a carnivore's Christmas. I was a ghoulish Santa, I driving home with a load of meaty presents.

Home Is Where The Heart Is, and the rib chops, and the...

Honestly, a whole pig is a lot of meat. 221 lbs. of meat in my case. I filled both freezers and still had the head left over, sitting in the refrigerator, in a plastic bag. This did not make my wife happy, and I was a little unsure what to do. Everything was fresh so I knew it would hold in the refrigerator for a couple days. But I needed to make a decision quick before I ended up with a rotten pig head in my refrigerator.

The answer came from Jane Grigson's book, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. She has a simple pate recipe specifically for pig head. Exactly what I was looking for! Here is my modification to the recipe based on what I had on hand:

1.5 lbs. meat cut from the head (jowls)
0.5 lbs ground pork (I ground the trimmings and the heart together)
1 large egg
2 oz. Madeira
1 large onion
1 Tbs. flour
Salt and pepper and dried herbs

It was toward the end of the day that I took this recipe on. I'd already ground up several pounds of trimmings and the heart for sausage meat. I'd started a slab of bacon curing in the refrigerator (based on the instructions in Charcuterie). My last task for the day was to deal with the head. It couldn't wait. The next day was garbage day and I didn't want to miss my chance to get rid of whatever was left over.

I cut the ears off and gave them to my dogs. Then I got out my boning knife and started with the fatty cheeks because that seemed easiest. Keeping the thin knife as close to the bones as possible, I peeled the meat away from the face, exposing the jawline and teeth and moving upward toward the cheek bones and the open eyes. The tongue was in there; I could see left over food (or blackened blood) in the pig's teeth. It had a distinct odor--not like rot or sour. It had a strange smell like blood, fat, fresh meat, and bad breath all together. It smelled in a way that was different than any of the other parts of the body. Maybe it was the amount of glands that are in the head. Maybe it was the tongue. Either way, it made me take a step back and gather myself. At this point I thought about skipping the head. It seemed an unnecessary trouble--it was difficult cutting. And the smell was getting stronger and making me sick.

Jonah was in his bouncy chair by the kitchen doorway watching the whole thing. Kim and Hazel had gone Christmas shopping, so he stayed home with me. He was smiling and bouncing and having a good time chewing on his hands and his toys and watching me trying to cut up a pig's head. He was unaffected by the smell. It didn't bother him at all. He was having a great time doing his baby stuff right where he was. I was the only one feeling sick. I was making myself feel sick. It was all mental. Jonah wasn't sick, so why should I be? After all, I choose to do this. I requested this pig be killed for me. He's not chomping on acorns and checking out the sows. He's sitting in my freezers and in my refrigerator. And his head is sitting, open eyed, on my cutting board, because this is what I wanted. I had to finish what I'd started. Throwing out a whole pig's head just because I didn't have the stomach to finish the job would have been...disrespectful. Disrespectful to what I was learning. Disrespectful to what I was trying to do. And disrespectful to the pig. That is not what I wanted this to be.

Pate. (colors adjusted a bit for poor lighting)

I gathered myself, stepped back up, and then the job became easier. I had not use for the brains, so I didn't crack open the skull. I've never liked head cheese either, so I didn't make that. I got as much from the jowls as I could, took out the tongue, and went on to make my pate.

If you want to see pictures of the pig's head here are the links. Warning: you might get grossed out.

Pig's head before.
Pig's head after.

Over the next week, we had a dinner party for the solstice and the pate was well liked by everyone. For that same party I did an 8-bone loin roast with a salt, garlic, and pepper rub that turned out great. The bacon finished also. The day was clear so I smoked it with hardwood outside, then cut it by hand and vacuum sealed half pound packages.

I'm working on a brown sugar glazed ham for Christmas dinner--it's brining in the refrigerator right now. The Christmas ham--I guess I really was wrapping presents.

Oregon Olive Oil Update feat. Red Ridge Farms

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:20:00 +0000

Harvest is here and Winter is just around the corner. It had been a while since I looked into how the Oregon oil farms were doing. The trees have had a chance to root and grow all summer. But winter is coming and winter has not been nice to Oregon olive oil in recent years. To find out how things are looking, I visited Red Ridge Farms in Dayton.

Drive an hour out of the city, and you can find Red Ridge Farms owned by the Durant family. On a hill top, surrounded by Oregon wine country, step out of your car it almost feels like you've been transported to another place. Manicured gravel pathways. Herb gardens and green houses. Fountains and teak patio sets from which you can survey olive orchards, clusters of birch, oak, and distant golden rows of autumn pinot vines under the pale autumn sky.

Although the Durants have been Oregon wine pioneers since the early 70's, now it is the olive trees that are the hot topic.

Arbequina olives.

Because of the cooler climate, most olive growers in Oregon are planting super high density Arbequina trees. Although most olive trees thrive in warmer weather, this variety can withstand temperatures down into the 20s. But even that may not be enough. For the past two years Oregon winters have had cold snaps down into the single digits, and this has devastated the industry.

"We lost about 60-65% of the Arbequina last year," says Paul Durant. And that was not the worst of it. The Durants also planted a acres of Arbosana and Koroneiki. Not quite as cold tolerant as the Arbequina, both of those crops took almost 100% losses. The impact was great enough that the Durants have decided to move on from Arbosana. The few bottles left in the gift shop from last year's harvest are all that is left.

The Koroneiki is another story. After milling what little crop they harvest and combining with olives bought in California, the results were outstanding. "We're thrilled with the Koroneiki this year," says Paul. And I have to agree. Koroneiki is a darker green Greek variety with a smooth and buttery richness that is outstanding on bread with a little salt.

Fresh Oil and A Fresh Start?

At the Olio Nuovo Festa this weekend, the excitement about the new oils was clear. The parking lot was full and the tasting room was bustling. There was wine tasting of the Durant Vineyards Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. Caterers set out bruschetta and crushed garlic with, of course, olive oil to drizzle over the top. But the focus was the tasting tables featuring the three types of oil Red Ridge is producing this year--Arbequina, Koroneiki, and a Tuscan blend of three northern Italian olives which the Durants are experimenting with to replace the Arbosana.

Fresh olive oil tastes really different than aged olive oil. It is cloudy with fruit particulates that have not had time to settle. In fact, all the oils had been pressed just a few days before the Festa started. Having so much fruit still suspended in the oil gives the oil a heavier texture. Low quality fresh oil tastes pungent, bitter, and burns your throat. Good fresh oil catches you off guard with its penetrating flavor of herbs and black pepper. Here again the Koroneiki was the favorite.

It's because of its amazing flavor that the Durants replanted their Koroneiki orchard this year, even though it took devastating losses last year. "We just like it that much," says Paul.

Hopefully the excitement and good wishes of this year's Olio Nuovo Festa can hold back the harsh winter weather. A third deep freeze in a row could be a catastrophe for Red Ridge Farm and the handful of other Oregon olive oil pioneers. Like Red Ridge, all the other Oregon farms, such as Belle Ragazze, have been taking a heavy beating. For a fledgling industry it is a lot to bear. But as more people and restaurants realize how good Oregon olive oil is, the risks may all be worth while.

Fresh Tuscan Olive Oil

7 Days 100% Local--Completed

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:45:00 +0000

We did it!

It wasn't easy, but we managed to get through 7 whole days of eating nothing but locally sourced food.

It Was Good Stuff
For all of us, it was a fun family challenge that we all worked on together.

My wife was happy that we ate everything we bought. We had very little food waste. We even ate the bread, although it was frustrating and coming out too dense. My daughter thought the bread was better this way, and when toasted with a little butter, I think so too.

All of us recognized that our meals were more colorful than they typically are. They were fresher. They had less sweeteners and no refined sugar at all. In fact, the only sweetener we used all week was honey. This could get a little repetitive, but also it was healthier.

It was a learning experience. Kim and I went out to some of the farms and were able to have more meaningful conversations with the vendors at the market because of it. Learning about where your food actually comes from was interesting for all of us, even Hazel got into it.

Would you like a side of eggs with that...and that...and that?

Sunday Breakfast--scrambled eggs with onions, Anaheim chilies and heirloom tomatoes on handmade tortillas.

Eggs became a central part of our daily diet. So much so that we ate a total of 3 dozen eggs in 7 days (combined from Noris dairy and Sweet Briar Farms). Their versatility made them really important. Eggs scramble with vegetables for breakfast or poached on toast. Hard boiled eggs are super portable and great for lunches on the go. Eggs in egg noodle pasta. How did we use so many eggs...I don't even remember. But by the end of the week, it was 36 eggs eaten. We had anticipated that we would be relying on eggs more than normal, but none of us expected just how much.

How about some mushrooms with that...and that...and that?
This was more about finding a great deal than anything else. Springwater farms was selling 6 lbs boxes of chantrelles for $25 at the farmer's market. Consequently, we had mushrooms with almost everything. The nice thing about mushrooms is how versatile they are and how mildly flavored. They go with meats, eggs, and vegetables. They can be a side dish or sauced or the featured flavor. Having something that could add a flavor layer when needed (especially since we had no spices) was really helpful.

School Lunch: Better than ever!
One thing that we thought would be a real sticking point was school lunch. This was something that we thought a lot about over the weekend. A normal sack lunch that we pack for my 4th grader is something like:

PB&J sandwich
apple slices
cliff bar or some kind of cereal-fruit bar
tings
Tillamook cheese slices
carrot sticks

Everything except the apples and carrots were off the table. What we came up with was basically this:

Building blocks for a new school lunch.

Hazelnut butter and Jelly sandwich (homemade hazelnut butter, our own jelly sweetened with honey, and homemade bread)
apple slices
hard boiled egg
carrot sticks
honey sticks
apple (or pear) cider

The verdict? She liked it better that the original! Especially the bread. School lunch turned out to be easier than we thought.

Unexpected Local Gems
There were a few things that were really great.

Mint Tea from Seely Family Farm. With no coffee, we were hoping to find some kind of warm morning drink when we ran into Seely family farm at the PSU farmer's market. Mike and Candy were running their booth. They are the nicest people you could meet and make some of the best mint tea I've ever had. Their peppermint-spearmint blend got us through the week splendidly. They don't have a website, so if you want to find out more about their tea, call 503-728-4603.

5 Grain Cereal from Gee Creek Farm (aka Gruel). Although they mill several different kinds of hot cereals, we bought the 5 Grain Flourless mix for the week. It comes in a 2 lbs bag for $4. This oat, rye, brown rice, barley, and flax mix turned out to be one of our favorite things to eat. I made a trip to the PSU market this past weekend just to get another bag.

Scottish Wheat Flour from Eat Oregon First. We used this flour to make pasta and were really happy with the results. The texture stayed firm giving the noodles a good bite. I had low expectations because non-durum pasta usually comes out pretty soft, but this wheat was not. I should have known it would be good when Scot, the owner, told me Pastaworks also buys his flour for their noodles.

The Hardest Parts
Overall, the week was a bit of a shock. Being constantly faced with very limited food choices was easily the hardest part of all. Going cold-turkey on any kind of modernized food was a bigger shift than we thought it would be. No coffee. No chocolate. No bananas. No pizza. No ketchup or mustard (it is possible to make this yourself from local ingredients, more about that later). No black pepper or imported spices of any kind. No prepared foods. No eating out. No convenience. Everywhere you go there are restaurants and easy food--all of which we just had to ignore. By the time Wednesday rolled around, we were gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves not to order pizza for dinner (which we didn't).

Take for instance, the bread. Even though I though we had figured out how to make bread, it turned out very dense and generally not so great. But we had to eat it. It was all the bread we had. There was no throwing it out and picking up a new loaf at the store while we worked out the kinks in the recipe.

Another example--I had a work meeting where the client wanted to take me out to lunch. We went to a deli and they order the most amazing cheese steak sandwiches. Oh my god they smelled good. I sat and watched knowing I had a sack lunch of carrot sticks, apple slices, and hard boiled egg in the car. It was a killer.

Local week was expensive. It was shocking how expensive it was. I understand why this kind of food is more expensive and what that cost represents, but it was still surprising just how much more expensive it turned out to be. Truly local food is treated like gourmet food and given gourmet prices. When you drop almost $200 at the farmer's market in one day for groceries for three people, it makes you think twice. Granted some of those costs were recouped throughout the week because we had to eat home all the time. There are some remedies for this, but that is a matter for another post.

The Best Part, by far
Perhaps the thing that all of us recognized this past week was how eating 100% local brought us all together around the shared experience of food even more. We normally eat dinner together as much as possible, but this time it was different. All of us were interested in what dinner was going to be. We could talk about making it, because almost everything we ate was made by us from scratch, even the hazelnut butter. We could talk about where it came from. We could point out what we liked about it, complain about the lack of pepper and spices, and laugh about how many times we'd eaten the same ingredient over and over. Kim said it was almost ceremonial the way we all came together around the food we were eating and preparing. It gave every meal an extra, deeper dimension that we could all take part in, together. That was the best part of the whole week.

A Run-Down of Our Week's Menu
Here is a quick summary of what we ate for the week. I'm leaving out the flowery descriptions because we got a whole week to cover. You'll see there are some themes. You could call it repetitive, but really it's the local, seasonal reality. With more planning and preparation it would be possible to branch out more, but this is what we ate.

Saturday
Breakfast: 5 grain cereal with milk and honey.
Lunch: Apples and hazelnut butter, hazel nut butter and jelly sandwich
Dinner: Braised SuDan Farms Lamb shoulder with white wine and chantrelle sauce and roast root vegetables

Sunday
Breakfast: scrambled eggs with anaheim chiles, heirloom tomatoes and homemade tortillas.
Lunch: Apples with hazelnut butter and cheese quesadilla.
Dinner: Chantrelle soup with 5 grain bread.

Monday
Breakfast: 5 grain cereal
Dinner: Clams in white wine and butter. Bread. Chantrelle soup.

Tuesday
Breakfast: Poached eggs on toast
Lunch: hard boiled egg. carrot sticks. bread.
Dinner: Roasted Eliza Chicken. Roasted root vegetables. Steamed Purple Califlower and broccoli, bread.

Wednesday
Breakfast: 5 grain cereal
Lunch: Hard boiled egg, apples with hazelnut butter, salad with chicken on top
Dinner: Sweet Briar Farms Pork chops with creamed mushrooms. Sauted broccoli and brussel sprouts.

Thursday
Breakfast: Poached eggs on toast
Lunch: Hardboiled eggs and apples, cheese quesadilla
Dinner: Homemade pasta with pumpkin and chantrelles

Friday
Breakfast: scrambled eggs with onions, chiles, and cheddar cheese
Lunch: Hardboiled eggs and apples, leftover pasta
Dinner: Lamb Chops with chantrelles. Roasted root vegetables. Mashed potatoes.

Two Exceptions
There were two items that we did not 100% local source--cheese and olive oil.
We bought 2 kinds of cheese--an aged cheddar from Willamette Valley and a soft farm house style cheese from Fraga farms. Both are local companies that produce their own product using their own milk from animals they raise, but they also use salt and enzymes in the processing that are not local.

We also used olive oil from Red Ridge Farms. This oil is primarily from olives grown in California and crushed at their mill outside McMinnville, Oregon. They do grow and crush their own olives, but the volume is still very low and constitutes just a small percentage of the actual oil. I included this because of my desire to support the fledgling olive oil industry in Oregon. More about Red Ridge Farms in an upcoming post.

Otherwise, everything else we ate or drank for the entire week was as locally sourced as we could get it. The grains came from a little further away than the other stuff.

Would We Do It Again? Yes.
Even though we drooled our way past restaurants and longed for orange juice with breakfast, we would do it again. With more planning and preparation, the 100% local diet could actually be workable. Might be a great project for the spring.

7 Days 100% Local--Starting Today

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 20:49:00 +0000

Today is the first day. We woke up to a new day, the start of a week of eating only local foods and local ingredients. We woke up and realized we had nothing for breakfast--no eggs, no coffee and muffins, no tea, no bread, no bacon, no oatmeal, no pancakes. Why was this a good idea?

What We're Doing and Why

We are trying to go seven days eating only 100% locally sourced foods. This does not mean locally produced foods, like artisan breads. It means only foods that are grown here or are made from ingredients that are grown here.

Local can be a subjective word. Does it mean within 20 mile radius? Within an hour's drive? Within the Willamette Valley? Within Oregon? For us, it mostly means foods that are grown withing about an hour's drive. Most of what we're getting is from the farmer's market and most of those farms are within an hour or 90 minutes drive. There are some things that come from farther away. Grains grow best east of the Cascades, so our bread and pasta will be regional (Oregon and Washington) but the yeast for the bread is from our own house.

We are doing this because we want to know what it really means to eat truly local. It is easy to say "eat local". What most people seem to mean by that is choose something that looks great at the farmer's market, then they go home and surround it with all kinds of things from everywhere around the world. Having a local star with a foreign cast can hardly be considered a truly local production. If the local food movement is going to be anything more than a curiosity, it has to be able to provide all the pieces of the pie. If the desire really is to move form industrial agri-business to small batch, local food culture, then that local food culture has to be able to meet the omnivorous needs of the people involved. It is understood that this will require some bending on the part of the consumers involved, but how much bending? And in what ways? We live surrounded by grocery stores and restaurants and food carts that literally offer a world of edible delights. Is there really any way that a strictly local, non-industrial, small batch food ideology can realistically compete with that? When faced with such outlandish and comprehensive competition, can the ideas of the local food movement be anything more than a whim?

We're taking seven days out of our lives to find out for ourselves.

7 Day Local Food SWOT

SWOT (Strength Weakness Opportunity Threat) analysis is a device that is used by many types of business organizations to think through new projects. It's a very useful tool that is intended to help the group consider things from several different angles.

Strengths

We're both pretty good cooks
We're familiar with using local ingredients
We're motivated
It's only seven days

Weaknesses

We compulsively eat out. We have food A.D.D.

Opportunities

Learning what eating local really takes, what the trade-offs are, and how/if it can be done.
Teaching my daughter about food
Eating healthier
Learning to be more creative with food
Learning how to be more purposeful with food
It's likely we'll shed a few pounds

Threats

100% local food options are impossible to find on the menu of any restaurant, even the ones that bill themselves as local and seasonal.
Coffee shops and social events = temptation
Can't run to the store if we forgot something
Limited food choices in Autumn might be too limiting
School lunches
Time limitations with the new baby

Things We Know Will Suck
Already, we know there are going to be some things that are tough to let go of. Here is the current list:

NO coffee (and most teas)
NO scones, muffins or pastries
NO Cheerios, Cinnamon Life, or other cold cereals
NO fruit from other places
NO spices, including black pepper
NO beer
NO eating out in general, or at other peoples' houses

Here is a look in our refrigerator. I took this yesterday just to get a glimpse of all the things that we will not be using. Basically, we have to restock our food for the week.

The Meal Plan

We don't really have a set menu for the week. But we do have some ideas about what we'd like to eat and when we'll eat them.

Breakfasts will mainly be eggs, toast, hot cereal, bacon, tea, milk, honey, yogurt (maybe).

Dinners will be mostly meat, veggies, soups, salads. Maybe pasta one night if we have time. Left-overs will be important. Doing meals that will last 2 nights will be important. Pot roast one night turns into lamb ravioli the next night. Fritattas are quick on weeknights. Custards for desert make sense.

Lunches are the hardest, especially when packing for an elementary school student. Sandwiches go far here, hazel nut butter, jelly, fruits, hard boiled eggs, cheese, veggies, honey sticks.

For drinks we're pretty much limited to water, milk, apple cider, and wine.

Using all those components, I think we can swing a week of local only food. We'll see.

Tonight will be braised boneless shoulder of lamb with roasted root vegetables. I'll save the broth and use it for wild mushroom soup tomorrow.

Farm Profile: A Little Hope Farm -- Pasture Chickens and Heritage Turkeys

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Lucey) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:23:00 +0000

This post is about A Little Hope Farm in Sandy, Oregon. I'm writing about this farm because we are getting our turkey for Thanksgiving from them. We've also bought chickens from them in the past.

The Basics
A Little Hope Farm is owned by Eliza Cannaday and Jeff Hlavac. It's on five acres in Sandy, Oregon. Eliza and Jeff live there and do all the work. They have many animals, but raise Cornish Cross chickens and Bourbon Red turkeys for sale, one small flock at a time.

The Chickens, the Turkeys, and...the Donkey?

Cornish Cross chickens are not a heritage breed. I asked Eliza about this. They'd tried heritage chickens in the past, but it didn't really work out. Americans have a clear idea of what chicken meat should taste like, and that is not how the heritage chickens tasted. "I don't think the American palette is ready for heritage chicken," she told me. Although Cornish Cross are the most common meat breed of chicken you can buy, the chickens at A Little Hope are strictly pasture raised. Never crammed into tight little cages--they sleep under the stars, walk around in the rain, eat all the fat earth worms they can find, and live their short 8 week life in about the most ethical conditions you could ever hope for a chicken to have.

The turkeys have it just as good, if not better.

The turkeys and the donkey--buddies. Well, sort of...

Bourbon Reds are a true heritage breed, and it shows. They are about as close to a wild turkey as you can get in domestication. The Broad-Breasted Whites you buy in the frozen meat case at the super market are descendants of this breed. Bourbon Reds have not been altered to grow fast or get super-sized breast meat. It takes about 7.5 months to raise a flock for slaughter. Compare that to the 12 weeks it takes a normal supermarket bird and you can see that this is no get rich quick scheme. Seven and a half months means these birds have been outside for most of the year. They arrived with the spring rains, ate worms and grubs all summer long, took dirt baths on hot days in August, and are now fattening up for the coming winter. They fly out of their pen to roost on top of the chick coop in the evening. They get chased back into their pen by Eliza in the morning. Good times for turkeys.

This tom gets all the ladies to himself.

One other important feature of the Bourbon Red turkeys is that they can naturally breed. Because they aren't genetic mutants, they can still get to makin' babies when the mood is right. Ohhh-yeahhhh.

A Little Hope for a Reason
There are so many good things about the farm that you should know, but one of the most important is the ethics they bring to farming. It isn't just about humane treatment of the birds they are raising; it's also about humane treatment of the people in their lives.

"If you are lucky enough to have five acres, you have an opportunity and an obligation to grow for your community."

Five acres is enough, says Eliza, that you can have a small farm with some diversity and enough room for the chickens and the turkeys and goats and donkey and human kids to roam around.

Eliza and Jeff are strong believers in the benefits of diversified small farms over large mono-cultures. Not only because small batch farming normally results in less sick animals, but also because it leads to more accountability.

Eliza getting some turkey eggs. Yummy.

"Buy your meat from who fed it," Eliza says. This is key to breaking the industrial system. Even organic farming--if it is embedded in an industrial system--does not increase accountability between the consumer and the producer. It is the industrialized systems themselves that create separation. This includes large scale operations like Oregon Country Beef where you can have no idea who raised the meat you are eating. You're required to put your trust in the system and not the people. This can create loop-holes and gaps that perpetuate the disconnect and reduce the sense of accountability.

It is this sense of accountability--to the animals they raise, their community of neighbors, friends, and customers, the natural world they are a part of--that motivates Eliza and Jeff.

If you know the person you are buying from, if you see where they raised the animals and what it means to them to have a healthy product, then you are changing the way things are done, even just a little bit.

That is the little hope that this farm is built on.

To find out more about heritage turkeys or pastured chickens, call Eliza at 503-997-8308.

Normally every bird is sold well in advance, so place your orders early.