For our first growing season, we weren’t prepared to commit to a permanent garden layout--we knew we had a lot to learn, including where the sun fell (or didn’t), so our first try at raised-bed gardening was intentionally temporary: we cut the bottoms off of large black plastic nursery pots, partially buried them in the ground, and filled them with a mix of compost and soil. This approach works great and we still use it to grow a forest of tomato plants every summer.

However, for four-season gardening and crops that need a boost in soil temperature, we decided a more permanent raised bed solution should be built.

I’d been searching for an interesting, visually aesthetic option. On a sunny spring Saturday we drove over to Farmington Gardens (a favorite local nursery) to look at their modular concrete block raised beds. Karen loved the idea: a wall high enough to sit on while tending our plants and weeding. And concrete as the material of choice was appealing because unlike wood-walled beds, I wouldn’t need to replace the concrete blocks after a few rainy seasons. Wood rots pretty fast here in the wet NW, as is evident after each big winter storm when we see toppled wood fences in our aging neighborhood.

We stopped briefly at home to collect a discount coupon before heading over the Willamette River to our local Basalite outlet to see what they had available. We decided on 15,000 pounds of Century Stone engineered concrete blocks, to be delivered that coming Thursday. Cedar Mill Lumber’s truck delivered 8 cubic yards of quarter-minus gravel. This gravel provided a level foundation, drainage, and fill for the blocks.

Building engineered concrete block walls turns out to be pretty simple. First, it’s important to measure out your garden bed before digging. I used four stakes to define the inside edges of the bed and a leveled string stretched tight between the stakes to guide me. It took me a few days behind a garden shovel to dig trenches deep enough for a stable wall.

The trench needs to bury the first course of blocks for a short wall and more blocks if the wall’s higher. Our site is on a slight grade so I had more digging on the east side to make the wall even and level. The directions state that gravel eight inches deep and four inches wider than the blocks is required. I made a miscalculation and had to excavate an additional few inches around the whole trench. I mush have forgotten the measure twice dig once rule... Next, tamping to assure a level foundation, a level gravel bed makes laying the first course of blocks go quickly.

Karen, our neighbor Brian, and his son Charlie helped build the walls one extremely rainy weekend. They brought blocks faster than I could place and level them, then fill them with quarter minus. At the end of the second day the garden bed was ready for compost.

Fast-forward to the end of our first raised bed harvest. The concrete blocks helped warm our soil and made our Nightshades extra productive during our short growing season. Last winter we harvested root vegetables. I’m glad the lawn is gone.

THE WRITER: Richard Tullis is an artist/photographer living with his wife Karen in Portland, Oregon. An amateur mycologist and organic gardener who forages wild foods in Oregon and southern Washington, he and his wife strive to live a locavore lifestyle.

What's your favorite thing to grow in your raised garden bed?

Sour raw milk is quite unlike pasteurized milk that has gone past its “use by” date.  Pasteurized milk goes putrid and must be thrown out at that point, but raw milk is still a highly useful item in the kitchen.

The difference is that pasteurized milk is a dead food – there are no enzymes or probiotics present. So, when store milk goes bad, it becomes a huge food borne illness risk to consume it and it must be discarded.

Raw milk, on the other hand, is loaded with enzymes and probiotics.  When raw milk starts to sour, it simply means that beneficial bacteria called probiotics have started to use up the lactose (milk sugar) which causes the milk to no longer taste as sweet.

Raw milk that tastes sour is still very much safe to drink and is even more beneficial to health as the higher level of probiotics have initiated the fermentation or clabbering of the milk.

So if you find yourself with some soured raw milk in the refrigerator, check through this list and see what makes the most sense for using it up.

Whatever you do, though, don’t throw it out!  There is no need for even a drop of your nutrient dense, grassfed dairy to go to waste!

Click here to read the rest of the article and learn Sarah's great tips for soured raw milk over on TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com!

This article originally appeared on TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com. It is partially posted here with permission of the author.

THE WRITER: Sarah Pope is a Nutrition Educator and Chapter Leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to getting the truth about nutrition out to the masses. You can learn more about Sarah at her website, TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com.

Do you drink raw milk? W

Check out this overview of awesome, kind of off-the-radar food magazines (although we don't really classify the Edible mags or Lucky Peach as 'underground'... but splitting hairs, etc). A wealth of fantastic content, contributors and kitchen cred. (via HuffingtonPost.come) 

"You Have the Right to Remain Delicious" or so proclaims the latest internet debutante, Law & Order & Food. It's got all your favorites! Jerry Orbach! Pizza! That guy! Chinese take-out! 

It's incredible what foods Mother Nature will produce when she's left alone to take care of her own business. A gorgeous heritage corn has caused a flurry of online excitement over it's brilliant, multi-hued kernels. (via EdibleGeography.com) 

Food52's Supply Chain has cookbook author Nancy Harmon Jenkins giving a virtual tour of her favorite spots in Tuscany. You can practically taste the goodness in her pictures! (via Food52) 

Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen shares a delectable recipe for a chocolate buckwheat cake that's "not too sweet or too intense." Will someone please bake this for us? (via SmittenKitchen.com) 

Have a great weekend everyone!

And something really good is happening.

The Lexicon of Sustainability films by Laura Howard-Gayeton and Douglas Gayeton are being presented by PBS. It’s good to see a project that has been tended, cultivated and nurtured with such great care being brought to a wider audience.

From the PBS site for the program:

In all, nearly two hundred leaders in food and farming from across the country have contributed their valued experiences to this rapidly growing Lexicon of Sustainability. These insights serve as the centerpiece for a series of short films which educate, engage and activate people to pay closer attention to how they eat, what they buy, and where their responsibility begins for creating a healthier, safer food system in America.

The idea that sparked this project sounds simple: How are we supposed to eat and live sustainably if we don’t even know the most basic terms and principles that define sustainability? Defining those terms and helping people understand the concepts of sustainability is why The Lexicon of Sustainability came into being.

For the past three years we have conversed with the foremost practitioners of sustainability in food and farming. They have shared their insights and experiences and contributed their words to our rapidly growing Lexicon of Sustainability. To spread their knowledge our photography project has grown to include short films, study guides, traveling show, a book and lastly a website where people can add their own terms to this ever-evolving lexicon.

(from LexiconOfSustainability.com)

It’s well-crafted, inviting and helpful communication such as this that helps propel the real food movement forward. Congratulations to Team Gayeton.

Have you seen any of the Lexicon films? What did you think of them?

Mr. Allen has written both a touching autobiography and a compelling history of this country’s dynamic food landscape in one fell swoop. Born to sharecroppers who moved north in the 1930s, Mr. Allen recalls a childhood textured with vague souvenirs of an agricultural life left in the south. Although he once felt “ashamed” of his parents’ past as sharecroppers, Mr. Allen eventually shucked his corporate suit in favor of work boots and dirty hands and became the man who revolutionized an inner-city community with a 3-acre farm.

He says of his transformation:

I fought my family’s history. Yet the desire to farm hid inside me.
It hid in my feet. They wanted the moist earth below them. It in hid in my hands. They wanted to be callused and rough and caked with soil. It hid in my heart. It missed the rhythms of agriculture.

(from The Good Food Revolution)

Mr. Allen is now one of the leading ambassadors of the real food movement, and his driving philosophy is simple:

If people can grow safe, healthy, affordable food, if they have access to land and clean water, this is transformative on every level in a community. I believe we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system.

(from GrowingPower.com)

Mr. Allen’s story is incredible, his prose is straightforward and heartfelt, and his new book is definitely worth a read.

Those of you who have been hanging around my blog for a while (and by the way, thanks — I don’t say that enough, probably) may recall that I celebrated Food Day back in October with a Virtual Progressive Dinner.  I teamed up with Bettina from The Lunch Tray, Grace from Eat Dinner, Kathleen from Dinner Together, and Jeanne from The Jolly Tomato to provide a full menu of delicious dishes, a course at a time; those who followed along stopped first at Bettina’s place, then moved on to mine, and so on and so forth until they’d consumed every last word and recipe of our online meal.

It was a lot of fun for us, as bloggers, but I had almost forgotten about our virtual soiree until I got a recent email from Bettina proposing that we reprise our event, this time in recognition of Chef Jamie Oliver's first-ever Food Revolution Day (May 19, 2012, if you haven’t already got it circled on your calendars).  Of COURSE I said yes…and, happily, so did Grace, Jeanne, and two new members of our Progressive Dinner club, Billy Mawhiney of Time at the Table and Eila Johnson from Full Plate/Meals in a Snap. This is going to be some party!

So on May 18 (yes, the EVE of Food Rev Day — we’ve decided to be sort of the kick-off to the main event), plan to be busy.  Get your mouse finger in fine clicking shape.  Make sure your chair is ergonomically adjusted to the height of your computer screen.  Charge your mobile devices fully.  Because you are not going to want to miss a single morsel of this dinner.  The line-up:

Appetizers: Time at the Table
Soup/Salad: Red, Round, or Green
Entree: The Jolly Tomato
Side Dishes: Full Plate/Meals in a Snap and Eat Dinner
Dessert: The Lunch Tray

Oh, and did I mention that there will be giveaways at every course?  So not only do you get to hang out with some amazing bloggers, join in the conversation, pick up a few new recipes, and celebrate Food Revolution Day, but you also get the opportunity to win some neat prizes.  What’s not to love?

What are you cooking on Food Revolution Day?

This article originally appeared on RedRoundOrGreen.com. It is re-posted here with permission from the author.

THE WRITER: Bri DeRosa likes to think of herself as a young, cool, urban fringe locavore, but the reality is, she's just a working mom, neither quite as young nor as cool as she used to pretend to be, who’s trying to figure out how to get everybody fed. See how that's all working out for her and her family at RedRoundOrGreen.com.

Well, you tell us!  With pretty pictures, of course. We're big fans of Pinterest 'round these parts and want to see what real food looks like to you, Pinterest-style!

Just send your real food themed boards to lulu@handpickednation.com by 11:59 p.m. EST on Friday, May 18th to be eligible to win a HandPicked Nation package full of real food surprises, including a copy of Nina Planck's book Real Food: What to Eat and Why.

Don't forget to follow our Pinterest boards and check out some of our favorite contest entries for inspiration.

Happy pinning!

With a working philosophy of low-impact, sustainable farming and high-impact, flavorful wines Shinn Estate Vineyards is making a big name for itself on the North Fork of Long Island, New York. Being great stewards of their land is extremely important to these owners. Innovative soil-building techniques along with what some have called “extreme viticulture” consistently yield wonderfully balanced fruit producing outstanding wines year after year.

Barbara and David are no strangers to food and wine. They met in Berkeley, California when both were in the food business and they came east to open Home, a restaurant in New York City that received kudos for being an early proponent of local food and wine. They have since sold their interest in
the restaurant, but the excellent cookbook Recipes from Home (Artisan) is a great introduction to their style of classic American fare.

Not only is their vineyard a no-till, yet manicured gem, their guesthouse is the only place to stay on a vineyard property on the North Fork. And the best thing? Breakfast by the fantastic David Page.

Whether pairing with good food now or laying a few bottles down for later, the wines from Shinn Vineyards are definitely worth seeking out.

THE FILMMAKERS: Slow Films tells stories about good food people. We shoot for compelling content with a cinematic attitude. We’ve stood in cow pastures in Virginia, on the banks of the Hudson River, orchards in New Mexico, and kitchens in New York, all for a good story.

Do you have a favorite local winery you support? Tell us about it in the comments!

No, this post is about their next door neighbor, Bi-Rite, a tiny neighborhood grocery store that has turned into what is arguably one of the most influential markets in the nation. Maybe that’s why fastcompany.com named owner and co-founder, Sam Mogannam one of its 100 Most Creative People in Business for 2012.

In his profile on Mr. Mogannam, writer David Lidsky describes Bi-Rite like this:

Bi-Rite is a single family-owned market with sales per square foot that exceed $4,000—Apple Stores stand alone in generating more than $5,000—and everyone from Walmart to Whole Foods has tried to learn from him. The lesson: "We've got this crazy rule for employees," Mogannam says. "If a guest is 10 feet away, make eye contact with them. If they're 4 feet away, engage them in conversation." And also, stay small. "The joke is that it's impossible to be more than 10 feet away from anyone in Bi-Rite," which has just 1,500 square feet of customer space.

Folks looking for success in the grocery business would be wise to pay attention to how and why Mr. Mogannam does what he does. Yes, hands-on attention to detail is part of his routine. Yes, buying the best possible products from the best farmers is automatic. Yes, he tastes the produce before it hits the shelves. Yes, ferocious editing of the products on his shelves and laser-beam focus on customer service account for much of Bi-Rite’s phenomenal success. His efforts are literally paying off – in the years since he taken over, sales have grown by $1 million every year.

But he runs his store like an anti-grocery store. Rather than grow his business to outsize proportions, he continually refines it. He limits selections in his store so that he (and his customers) can feel good about the products he carries.

All this sounds counterintuitive until one considers Bi-Rite average sale per square foot. A store like Safeway manages around $500 in sales per square foot. What all this means, simply put, is that Sam Mogannam has an expert’s feel for what his audience of sustainably-thinking shoppers want in a grocery store. And his customers support Bi-Rite overwhelmingly.

That support allowed the Bi-Rite folks to start their own farms. On their website they say:

Operating a farm, even at our small scale, not only teaches us where our food comes from but also helps us understand the hard work that farmers and ranchers do to feed us. Like many of the growers we work with, we never use any chemical inputs, but prefer to farm organically and harvest at peak flavor. Additionally, many of our staff members help out on the farm and can share that experience with our guests.

These farms are not designed to supplant farmers in their supply chain. Far from it. Bi-Rite operates their farms to help educate themselves about what it takes to bring food up out of the ground. They are rightly proud of their efforts and use “We Grew This” signs in the store to call out products from their farms.

As if any further evidence was necessary to show Sam Mogannam’s commitment to real food, he has plowed some of his profits into his non-profit community education space, 18 Reasons. Their mission statement reads:

18 Reasons brings people together to deepen our relationship to food and each other. Through an innovative community center and thought provoking, fun programming, we inspire action and foster collaboration toward creating a just and sustainable food system.

A pretty admirable effort, to say the least.

In the Fast Company article, Sam says:

"We love feeding people, man. We love teaching people how to feed themselves."

Sam Mogannam and the good people at Bi-Rite Market on 18th Street in San Francisco, California are doing that every day.

Have you heard of Bi-Rite Market? Do you shop there? Tell us what you think in the comments!

This first update finds us in North Conway at the precipice of the White Mountains. Since beginning from Brunswick, Maine on Saturday we have ridden 110 miles stopping in Portland, Maine (where we made it on to the local news! Check out the video here) and Naples and encountering unexpected sun, heavy rain, wind, and warm, hospitable hosts at each spot. We were sent off in fine fashion with a group of friends and family saying their farewells at Crystal Spring Farm, while a handful of well wishers road with us down the scenic bi-roads of the southern Midcoast and Casco Bay all the way to Portland. Tomorrow we’ll likely push on toward our first high mileage day, something over 40 miles, while also climbing out first significant mountain pass (Kancamagus Pass).

UPDATE FROM THE ROAD # 2: Waterbury, Vermont

Looking out the window we can see the mix of spring and winter colliding artfully. Daffodils, forsythia and Red Maple leaves flap back and forth in the wind and snow that we awoke to this morning. Yesterday we pushed our bodies and our loaded bicycles over 75 miles from N. Woodstock, New Hampshire to the lovely mountain oasis of Ron and Carolyn Fox, Leah’s family friends and our gracious hosts for the next 2 nights. We decided earlier in the day to go for big miles, our reward would be a warm dwelling later in the day. A day after climbing Kancamagus Pass on Route 302 we scaled Kinsman Ridge, the steep roads through Orange, Vermont and a mercilessly hilly section of roads to arrive here by 630 last night. Sitting here now, looking out the window, it seems like it was the right choice.

UPDATE FROM THE ROAD # 3: Charlotte, Vermont

We’ve got to keep this brief…having breakfast now with friends in Charlotte after spending a lovely night in a timber framed mini cabin in the woods…I want one. Today we’ll board a ferry across Lake Champlain and pedal to meet friends in the Lake Placid area. Pictures to come soon!

UPDATE FROM THE ROAD # 4: Lake Placid, New York

We’ve been traveling light miles these past few days, soaking in the generosity of friends with gratitude in our hearts. We pushed nearly 50 miles from Charlotte to The North Country School outside of Lake Placid where we remained for two nights. Our route there featured an amazing section of road on I-9N from Elizabethtown, NY to Keene, NY and the intersection of I-73W. In a full crouch, dropped nearly level with my handle bars, I looked on with excitement as my speedometer reached 48 mph. It’s the fastest I can remember going in a long while, and certainly never with such a sturdy load.

Our time at North Country School was a revelation. The programming emphasizes placed based learning and our friends Doug and Todd (current NCS faculty) introduced us to a welcoming community of children and educators. We worked to prepare the children’s garden, planting low bush blueberries, and a hedgerow of roses-while also learning about the distinct culture of such a beautiful learning environment. We were overjoyed to spend time with students, asking questions and listening to stories-we left this morning feeling like we had learned a great deal about a great many things from kids half our age.

Tonight we’ll stay with our friend Dan in Lake Placid (and find a place to watch the Celtics win…GO CELTICS) and tomorrow we’re off just a moment up the road to Saranac Lake to see dear friends there as well. We’ll embrace these familiar faces now, as many places and people unknown await.

UPDATE FROM THE ROAD # 5: Pulaski, New York

Our fifth update finds us drying our gear in room 105 of the Pulaski Travel Lodge, we slogged 42 miles here today in a pouring rain. We’ll try a different approach tonight, an update by numbers:

Days on the road - 17
Zero(mile) days - 5
Distance traveled - 510 miles
States seen - 4
Longest day - 76.5 miles
Total time riding(time spent actually pedaling) - 45h 5m 11s
Longest day (time…) - 6h 21m 36s
Nights camped - 3 (can you believe how many friends we have with spare rooms?)
Rivers/lakes drank from - 3
# of free eggs received - 1 dozen
# of men we’ve seen walking aimlessly with a loaded shotgun - 1
Mountain ranges biked through - 3
# of littered banana peels - 18
# of painted lady butterflies on side of the road - thousands
# of cyclists we have seen - 2 (a sweet Dutch couple)
# of showers taken (Leah & Adam combined) - 13

These updates originally appeared on FoodCycleUS.com. They are re-posted here with permission of the authors.

THE WRITERS: At its core FoodCycle is about adventure and education. This April a team of cyclist will embark on a self-supported cross county from Casco Bay (Maine) to San Francisco Bay (California) to "pedal" our vision.

Be sure to check back for more great updates and "On the Road" episodes!

With all this talk about detoxification around here lately, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce you all to a wonderful traditional beverage that my family loves!  It is called kombucha, and it also happens to be a great detoxifier!  I’m sure that many of you already know about this wonder drink, but for those that don’t, please allow me to share with you all the numerous benefits and a simple recipe to start making your own.

It wasn’t until I discovered traditional foods and picked up a copy of Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon that I had even heard of this strange drink.  Because it was so strange, by name and by looks, I wasn’t all that excited to try making it as I was to try everything else.  It is a fermented beverage, not unlike traditional wine or beer,  and uses a culture called a mushroom, or scoby, that looks like a thick pancake.  And, it has little floaty pieces of yeast in it!  Despite all that, kombucha is a beverage that is gaining in popularity.  Most traditional foodies have heard of it, and most of them probably make it too.  It is now popping up in health food stores for your convenience, but it is not cheap!  In Ontario, you can expect to pay over $3.00 per 500ml bottle!

Kombucha is essentially a sweetened and fermented tea.  Thought to have come from China, the recorded history of kombucha began in Russia during the late 19th century, according to Wikipedia.  Legend has it that the word Kombucha came from Japan around 400 AD, when a physician named Kombu served it to the emperor.  The doctor’s name was then combined with “cha,” meaning tea.  This drink reproduces itself, similar to kefir, and contains live friendly bacteria and yeast.  Ironically, it is made from black caffeinated tea, white sugar, and a bacteria/yeast starter culture.  Starting a batch is as easy as finding a starter culture. The starter is a called a mother, or SCOBY – symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast.  So, if you are asking yourself how there could be any benefit to consuming a beverage with these seemingly “unhealthy” ingredients, well, let me, or should I say, Sally Fallon explain!  "The scoby acts on the sugar and tea to produce both acetic and lactic acid, but also a potent detoxifying substance called glucuronic acid. Normally this organic acid is produced by the liver in sufficient quantities to neutralize toxins in the body — whether these are naturally produced toxins or poisons ingested in food and water.  However, when liver function becomes overloaded, and when the body must deal with a superabundance of toxins from the environment — certainly the case with most of us today — additional glucuronic acid taken in the form of kombucha is said to be a powerful aid to the body’s natural cleansing process, a boost to the immune system and a proven prophylactic against cancer and other degenerative diseases." (Source – Taken from pg. 596 of Nourishing Traditions)

Health Benefits and Reported Claims of Kombucha Tea:

• Immune system booster
• Body detoxifier
• Provides friendly and beneficial probiotic bacteria and yeast
• Prophylactic against cancer and other degenerative diseases
• Active enzymes and amino acids
• Contains B-vitamins
• Aids digestion
• Increases energy

But how does it taste you ask?  I tell people that it tastes like a slightly sweet and sour, fizzy apple cider.  It’s delicious, and refreshing.  The kids absolutely love it!  It is a great replacement for pop or sports drinks, and is a great thirst quencher, even better than plain water in many cases.

Here’s the basic recipe for Kombucha:

Ingredients:

1 cup organic white sugar                                 

5-6 organic tea bags (black, green, or white tea – basically any type of camellia sinensis tea)

1 gallon filtered water

1 kombucha scoby/mother + 1/2-1 cup of starter liquid from a previous batch

Method:

1. In a small pot, boil a couple cups of water (out of your total 1 gallon).

2. When the water comes to a boil, add in sugar and stir to completely dissolve.  Remove from the heat.

3. Toss in the tea bags and allow to steep until the mixture has fully cooled. Remove and discard the tea bags.  This will be your concentrate.

4. I prefer to use a gallon size glass jar to ferment my kombucha in.  You can also use a very large glass bowl.  Be sure not to use plastic or metal as the tea may leach chemicals and or react negatively with the bacterial culture.

5. Put your scoby and starter liquid into the jar or bowl, and add the cooled sugar/tea mixture (concentrate).  Fill the rest of the jar almost to the top with your filtered water.  Stir all together with a big wooden spoon.  Cover the jar with a coffee filter or clean cloth and a rubber band.  You want the culture to be able to breath, but keep out the dust and bugs.

6. Place the jar in a warm spot in your kitchen, out of the way, and away from direct light.

7. Do not disturb for at least 7 days!  After this time you can test your kombucha by drawing up a sampling of liquid with a straw.  It should no longer taste like very sweet tea, but slightly sour with an apple cider flavor.  If it is not ready, allow to ferment longer, testing every few days.  In the summer, fermentation will be faster with the warm weather, and slower in the cool winter weather.  Also, multiple scobies in your brew will speed up the fermentation.

8. Once it is done brewing, you can now filter the kombucha into smaller jars.  If you are fine with tiny pieces of yeasty strings, don’t bother straining.  They are harmless to consume.  Be sure to leave at least 1/2-1 cup of fermented liquid in the original jar, along with the scoby to brew the next batch.

8. At this point you can do a second fermentation, after the kombucha has been filtered. Tightly cap your jars and allow to sit out at room temperature for another day or so.  This will build up the gases in the jar and create some fizz that most people enjoy.

9. If you are feeling extra creative, feel free to add some flavorings to your second ferment! Try some ginger or citrus slices, frozen fruit such as berries, pineapple, or mango, herbal tea bags, or even some concentrated fruit juice like grape!  The choices are endless.

10. Brew another batch right away in the original jar, or give it a rest for a short time, somewhere in a dark cupboard.  Just be sure to leave enough tea in the jar to feed the scoby. It will continue to ferment and grow off of the tea in the jar, eating up the liquid.  You will not be able to make another batch if there is no liquid left!

Side Notes

You may be wondering why we are using white sugar in this recipe.  Interestingly, it is white sugar, rather than honey, maple syrup or any other unrefined sugar and black tea (rather than flavored or herbal teas) that give the highest amounts of glucuronic acid.  And, did you know, that kombucha that has been long-brewed, is legal on the full GAPS diet!

Each time you make a new batch of kombucha, a new baby scoby will form on the surface of the liquid, usually on top of the mother scoby.  You can keep the babies attached to the original mother, or peel them off and start giving them away.  Eventually, you will end up with more scobies than you can handle!  At that point, you can feed them to your dog, the chickens, or the compost pile!

Warning:  Kombucha is so good, you might want to start drinking a lot of it right away! However, please go slow!  Start by drinking about 1/2 cup per day and slowly build up your tolerance from there.  It is powerful stuff and can have a detoxifying effect (I can attest to this from personal experience!).

This article originally appeared on butterbelle.ca. It is re-posted here with permission of the author.

THE WRITER: Christine writes butterbelle.ca, her food education blog where butter trumps all and local, seasonal, organic ingredients are prepared the traditional way. Christine became a Local Chapter Leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2006.

Are you willing to try your hand at making kombucha?  Do you make and love it already?

Glen Andresen advised that a love of nature and a love of puttering is a good personality fit for keeping bees. Although you can build your own hive, he recommends to buy new equipment when you are starting out. If you find used equipment, ensure it has not been used by diseased bees. Keep in mind there are a hundred different ways to do everything, so this is how Glen keeps bees and what he recommended for us.

Hive Boxes

Majority of the bees will be confined to the bottom two boxes, or “deep” boxes often referred to as brood boxes. There are a few different options with the brood box, but Glen recommends the deep 9 5/8″, which can get up to 80-90 pounds when filled with honey. We wouldn’t be harvesting from this box though. This is sort of the permanent dwelling for the bees. The honey they fill these two boxes with will feed them through the long winter.

Glen uses “western” boxes, or ones that are 6 1/4″, as his “supers”. A super is an addition box you place on top of the brood boxes that the bees fill with excess honey. They don’t live in these boxes, as they have enough room down below in the two large brood boxes. The supers are smaller and easier to manage when harvesting honey. As one fills up, you simple add a new one on top, making a stack. Eventually you could have two brood boxes, stacked with 1-5 supers on top.

If you are assembling your boxes, always use glue and nails. They get very heavy when filled with honey and using both ensures a strong build.

Clothing

It is recommended to buy a full body harvesting suit to prevent stings from the bees. Although they can be mellow creatures, they will start become stressed in late summer when there are fewer pollen sources. When you are out there harvesting honey, they may be more apt to sting.

Gloves are also highly recommended and come with either areas of netting or solid cloth. Every beekeeper has their preference on equipment, but Glen prefers the solid cloth. He has been stung too many times by a bee sitting on the netting. When he moves his hand and squishes them, without having seen them, he gets stung.

It’s a hot business being out in the summer sunshine unloading super boxes weighted down with honey. Netting can be desirable for air circulation, but at least you know the trade off is more possibly stings.

Other Equipment

A queen excluder is something you place between the two brood boxes and the supers on top that are intended for excess honey. The queen, being larger, cannot fit through the excluder, but the worker bees can. First, let the work bees “draw out” the supers, meaning let them make cells/comb ready for eggs. Then put in the excluder so the queen can’t go up there to lay eggs.

The benefit of the excluder is that now the queen will stay safely in the bottom two brood boxes. The worst thing you could do when harvesting honey is slide a frame back into place and accidentally squish the queen – eventually killing your colony. With her safely in the bottom, she can keep laying eggs while the excess honey can keep filling the upper super boxes.

Harvesting

Before you begin harvesting honey, take off all of the supers. Add an empty super with a “trap screen” and stack the full supers on top. You now have two brood boxes, an empty super, a trap screen, and full supers on top. As the worker bees go down from the full supers into the brood boxes to “check in” with the colony, they cannot move back up through the trap screen. It’s a one way only, hence they get trapped to the boxes underneath.

This allows you to harvest the full supers without disturbing the bees as much, since it will take about a day for all the bees to be out of the full supers. All of the excess bees can have enough room with the empty super and it’s less stress for everyone. You can add a couple new supers and remove the trap screen, allowing them to keep busy filling the empty supers with honey. And it gives you plenty of time to let the honey drain out of the full supers.

I can’t imagine what a sticky mess this must be! Thinking about two or three full supers sitting in my kitchen, extracting the honey by hand with a scrapper into big buckets… And all the while the bees are outside filling up new supers.

At the end of the summer, all of the supers will come off. The honey season is over and it’s time for the bees to be done working.

Winter and Disease

To cut down on disease, freeze your supers for 24 hours before winter storage. This will kill any wax moth larvae and other pests. Clean 20-30% of your frames a year, to keep disease down and prevent old cells from getting too narrow.

Glen uses a screened bottom board instead of solid wood, which can be left on year round. There is not a strong draft since this is on the bottom of the brood boxes, but it does allow some good ventilation. When mites attached themselves to the bees, they will fall off and out of the tray, instead of onto a solid floor still within the hive. Try to ensure there are never openings on opposite sides of the boxes, for entering/exiting, as this will create a draft running through the colony.

Their numbers will decline naturally in the winter because they do not need as many worker bees with no pollen to harvest. They could be 80,000 strong in the summer, with only 15,000 overwintering at minimum. The brood boxes may get light in the winter, which means they have eaten all of their stored honey.

Glen will then add a jar with 2 parts sugar and 1 part water to make syrup for the bees to live off of. The jar has small holes in it, so water doesn’t drip out but the bees can drink. This isn’t always necessary, but it’s important to keep an eye on them in the winter months in case they need the assistance.

Conclusion and Resources

I learned a lot in Glen’s four-hour class, but I feel like there is still a lot of figure out. And maybe I’m just the kinda girl that likes to have a book on hand with way more detail than is needed. Teaching a class on how to keep chickens in the city seems a lot easier than bees, but that is because bees are so complicated and interesting! Glen can be reached via email at glen@pacifier.com to learn about any upcoming classes he may still have openings for. They are typically held in the spring.

Locally, Ruhl Bee Supply seems to be the only place in the Portland area for buying equipment. However, there are tons of catalogs out there that you can buy equipment from as well. I would imagine Ruhl would be a great on-going resource as well for local beekeepers who have questions or problems along the way.

There is also the local Oregon Beekeeping Association that would be a great resource for people starting out or wanting to learn more.

I’m very excited to get into the sticky, fun mess of keeping bees!

This article originally appeared on HipChickDigs.com. It is re-posted here with permission from the author.

THE WRITER: Renee Wilkinson is the creator of HipChickDigs.com, a popular website dedicated to urban homesteading, edible landscape design, and sustainable living. With a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and garden spade in hand, she has been inspiring urbanites everywhere to get their hands dirty in their own city homesteads.

Do you already keep bees? If not, do you think you got enough basic information in these posts to start your own hive?

I think the corn flour from Wild Hive Farm is really the star of this recipe. It's so light and makes the most delicate cakes but packed with cornmeal flavor. I highly recommend it.

Ingredients:

2 cups Rhubarb – sliced

3 Tbsp Raw Sugar

1/4 tsp Ground Ginger

1 Cup Corn Flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Salt

1/2 Cup Raw Sugar

1 Stick of Unsalted Butter – softened

2 Eggs

2 Tbsp Sour Cream

1tsp Pure Vanilla Extract

Method:

Preheat the oven to 350° Grease a 9” springform pan.

Toss the sliced rhubarb with 3 Tbsp of sugar and the ginger. Set aside. In another bowl, whisk together the corn flour, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, beat 1/2 cup sugar with the butter until creamy. Beat in the eggs, sour cream and vanilla.

Add the corn flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir just enough to combine. Pour the batter into the cake pan. Arrange the rhubarb slices on top of the batter and sprinkle the top with a little sugar.

Bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

Slice and serve with Whipped Cream or Vanilla Ice Cream.

Sources:

Rhubarb – Joan Reynolds, Bearsville, NY

Corn Flour – Wild Hive Farm

Butter – Cabot

Eggs – Quattro's Poultry

Sour Cream – Hudson Valley Fresh

This recipe originally appeared atthefarmersmarket.com. It is re-posted here with permission of the author.

THE WRITER: Cheryl Paff has been the manager of the Rhinebeck Farmers’ Market for over a decade. She is also a founder of the Woodstock Farm Festival. Her blog atthefarmersmarket.com features seasonal recipes that showcase the very best of the Hudson Valley.

What is your favorite way to enjoy rhubarb?

Well, the whole notion is relatively new and extremely scary. We don't fully understand the health impacts of consuming genetically modified foods, but early studies have already produced very alarming results. 

Here's another tasty tid-bit: GMOs are widely used in processed foods, but you wouldn't know it because there are no laws as of yet requiring statement of that fact in food packaging or labeling!

You might not mind if your favorite tortilla chip is made with genetically modified corn, but if you DO mind – your choice in the matter is severely hampered by current food label regulations... or lack thereof.

So, until we have GMO labeling in place (should that happy day ever come), what's a conscientious shopper to do?

Arm yourself with information to make the best food choices you can and NonGMOShoppingGuide.com is a tremendous online resource to help you do just that.

You can:

• Learn basic top-line tips to help you make better choices. 
• Get a better understanding of what GMOs are and the health concerns they raise. 
• Familiarize yourself with Non-GMO Verified brands and products.

(See the image above? That's the Non-GMO Verified seal. Memorize that cutie and look for it every time you step into a supermarket.)

And that's just a tiny taste of the great information you'll find on the site.

There's even a FREE app, to help keep all this great information at your fingertips. 

Here are a few all-star examples of genetic modifications to date for, ya know, fun and nightmares:

• Arctic fish genes gave tomatoes and strawberries tolerance to frost.
• Potatoes that glowed in the dark when they needed watering.
• Rice engineered with human genes (Applied Phytologics)
• Corn engineered with hepatitis virus genes (Prodigene)

(from NonGMOShoppingGuide.com)

I don't know about you, but I could really go for some hepatitis on the cob.

Do you already use the Non-GMO seal or guide when you shop? How has it affected your buying and eating habits?

You can see the steak in the accompanying photo, with a deep, beautiful color, well marbled with fine flecks of life-giving grassfed fat. It was one of the most beautiful steaks I had ever seen. I could only imagine how good it would taste. It looked even better in person than in the photo.

I have had plenty of great meat from this particular rancher, but nothing that looked like this. I asked the butcher why this meat looked so outstanding. He told me that they had been getting some beautiful meat from this rancher recently, even better than his usual excellent grassfed meat. And he told me the secret. The rancher said that there was a special pasture that he could use only part of the year. There was something about that particular pasture that his cattle thrived on. Every year when they grazed that pasture, they produced outstanding meat even better than usual. And meat that had a great deal of beautiful grassfed marbling. And the taste was also much better. The rancher just knew that this particular parcel of pasture produced magnificent meat. He finished as many of his cattle as he could on that pasture.

We had that steak for a special occasion, and I can tell you that it tasted even better than it looked. The tenderness was outstanding, and the flavor—that flavor would have won a prize anywhere. If that steak was a wine, it would have been a prize vintage. It was like magic. The magic of a special pasture, used wisely by a skilled rancher, enhanced by the art of two master butchers.

No factory meat, fattened on industrial feed, could come close to tasting like this.

Real food raised by artisan farmers is good beyond belief, Industrial food has no magic.

One of the worst things about industrial food is that we lose the joy, the magic of food. Once, in America, farmers just did not use an industrial mix to grow food or feed animals. They used the unique magic of the land itself. The local people knew what farmer had particularly good cherries, or corn, or beef, and these farmers used their knowledge of the unique aspects of their land to produce food that was so good it was magical. Fruits and vegetables were eaten in season, at the peak of their perfection. Cattle were finished on special pastures chosen for their richness and wonderful effect on the cattle. Cattle and sheep might graze in a particular meadow, whose plants would give a nice flavor to the meat. Every farmer and rancher had their own special knowledge, often passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. And they would use this special knowledge to create food that was so much tastier and nutritious than the industrial food of today that there is no comparison. Eating this artisan food will renew your body and energy, enabling all the natural functions of your body to perform perfectly.

Industrial agriculture produces food that has no soul. This food, raised with chemicals from a lab, has a mediocre taste that is the same no matter where it grown, and no art, no magic. Just fodder that people eat because they have gotten used to the mediocre taste, and know no better. Food that is inferior in taste, in appearance, in texture, and in nutrition. Food with no magic.

My father, who grew up in rural Canada many years ago, constantly told me how much better the food was, and how modern fruits, vegetables, and meat had hardly any flavor, and never made you feel good. I thought he was old, and lost his sense of taste. I realize now he was right all along.

Magic food only comes from small farms and ranches.

I have been blessed in being able to eat some unbelievably wonderful food on many occasions. Grassfed beef, grassfed bison, grassfed lamb, and heritage pork that have the magic that only a master rancher, with great pasture, can produce. Vegetables with so much flavor that they make even organic supermarket vegetables taste like cardboard. And I have experienced the wonderful nutrition you get from food like this. Not only do you have the great pleasure of eating magical food, your body feels wonderful and renewed. You never feel stuffed or bloated on food of this quality.

But you can only get food of this quality from one kind of place. A small farm or ranch, where the farmer knows the magic of producing superior, real food. Every farm and ranch like this is a treasure, one well worth preserving. The quality of food from such a place ranges from excellent to even better. And sometimes, if you buy just the right food at just the right time, you will experience the food magic that most modern people have lost.

Let us do all we can to support our great small farmers, so the magic will not die.

This article originally appeared on tendergrassfedmeat.com. It is re-posted here with permission from the author.

THE WRITER: Stanley Fishman has written two cookbooks, Tender Grassfed Meat and Tender Grassfed Barbecue. He is devoted to the real food movement and blogs about grassfed meat and other real food issues at tendergrassfedmeat.com.

Do you have a favorite small and 'magical' farm that you buy from?

This month’s spice of choice: chives.  Cultivated since the Middle Ages, this member of the onion family really became popular in 19th century French Haute cuisine, earning its present day spot in home gardens, windowsills and kitchen cupboards. 

From dressing up an old-fashioned grilled cheese to adding them into homemade pizza crust, it became hard to distinguish when NOT to use this burst of flavor.  Here are some great new tips I learned from all of the Twitter chatter:

• Roll a log of goat cheese in chives to dress it up for a cheese plate

• Chop up fresh chives finely and sprinkle on popcorn, pasta, eggs or corn on the cob!

• Use a sprinkle of dried chives in basic vinaigrettes

• Use to season your outdoor grill, or cast iron (along with lemon and garlic)

• Store dried chives away from light sources to savor flavor.  Their flavor also diminishes with heat.

• Use to tie up bundles of vegetables or beggar purses

• Great as a table decoration, on a windowsill or a housewarming gift 

• Chop and freeze cubes of chives to preserve them

• Rehydrate dried chives in white wine for 15 minutes to boost their flavor

• Paprika, garlic, parsley, rosemary, dill, tarragon, are all great spices to use with chives to balance their bright flavor

And what would #SpiceChat be without some shared recipes?  Here are a few favorites to help you get chive-y:

• Parmesan Chive Scones (via @MySpiceSage on TheKitchn.com)

• Ahi Fish Burgers with Chives (via @Global_Food on AllRecipes.com)

• Six Onion Pizza (via @Tablefare on Saveur.com)

• Chive Oil (via @TableFare on French Landry At Home Blog)

• Endive Spears with Sweet Potato, Bacon, Chives (via @TableFare on FineCooking.com)

Tune into the next #SpiceChat on Twitter on Wednesday, June 6th, at 4p.m. EST to chat about the exotic spice ginger.  They also post recaps of past chats on TableFare's website, so you won't miss out on all of the spice wisdom!

Miso Eggplant/Aubergine

(serves four as a side dish)

Ingredients:

2 medium eggplants

1/4 cup cooking oil (add more as needed)

2 tbsps Mirin (Japan­ese rice wine)

2 tbsps soy sauce

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 tbsp organic miso paste (either white or brown)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Method:

Cut the egg­plant into bite-sized pieces and saute in the oil slowly until very soft.  Drain egg­plant on paper tow­els and dis­card oil.  Mix all other ingre­di­ents and toss with the egg­plant.  Serve warm.

This recipe originally appeared on kristeninlondon.com. It is re-posted here with permission of the author.

THE WRITER: An art historian, former gallery owner and now a food blogger at kristeninlondon.com, Kristen lives in London with her daughter and husband.

Do you like to cooking and eating eggplant? What's your favorite way of preparing it?

Jeff Gimmel, chef of Swoon restaurant in Hudson, an organizer of the event and a very busy man, made time to talk with HandPicked Nation. He commented:

You know, ramps are the first things to appear after our long winters. We don’t cultivate them, we forage for them. Ramps are delicate, wild onion-like plants full of myth and mystery -- and the good news is they can be incorporated into lots of different dishes. These chefs have shown a ton of creativity!

The Ramp Fest is fast becoming a welcomed spring ritual in the Hudson Valley. This short film shows how much fun folks had tasting the chefs’ work, enjoying the spring weather and discovering the pleasure of the ramp.

Ramp it up!

THE FILMMAKERS: Slow Films tells stories about good food people. We shoot for compelling content with a cinematic attitude. We’ve stood in cow pastures in Virginia, on the banks of the Hudson River, orchards in New Mexico, and kitchens in New York, all for a good story.

Do you look forward to ramp season?

Plain old frozen water just not floating your boat (or beverage)? Check out these delicious and lovely alternatives! (via TheKitchn.com)  

What do sea cucumbers, R2D2 and The Minotaur have in common? They all make AWESOME PANCAKES! (via HuffingtonPost.com) 

Food fight! Anthony Bourdain issued some choice words for a fellow American food writer, setting the blogosphere all a flutter guessing who the mystery "abusive, misogynistic, back-biting" person might be. Most fingers are pointing to Jeffrey Steingarten... (via Eater.com) 

An excellent idea for grilling greatness, Adam Perry Lang's herb brush is simple, but sure to produce big results for your next cookout. (via FoodRepublic.com) 

Does your mom enjoy slaving over a hot stove all day? Well, here are some great gift ideas for Mother's Day! (via BonAppetit.com) 

Happy Friday everyone!

(Plate image courtesy of Kaboodle.com)

“Fundamentally, sustainable development is a notion of discipline. It means humanity must ensure that meeting present needs does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.“ - Gro Harlem Brundtland

"Visiting a farm and even working on one is an amazing experience for people living in urban areas, since they became so disconnected from Nature. They became 'people whose umbilical cords are tied to the supermarket.'” - Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms

It’s an amazing experience for the whole family; learning about the cycle of life, how real food is being grown, cooked and preserved, how to eat in season and how to respect Nature are vital lessons that have been transmitted for generations. These lessons play a crucial role in keeping your and your family’s good health. The supermarket “successfully” contributes to ruining your health.

You will have the opportunity to savor the amazing flavor and quality of the clean, local, fresh, and healthy food, so close Nature, maybe wrapped up in a traditional, delicious menu. You won’t have to “worry” about ingredients and their safety, and how many thousands of miles your food traveled. It will be about REAL FOOD. REAL PEOPLE. REAL EXPERIENCE. This can all provide you a very specific and true sense of awareness and happiness.

How to shedule your visit on a farm?

FarmStayU.S.  is an exceptional source to find sustainable farms and ranches all over US, that can offer you the “fresh” and active vacation of your dreams. The farms listed here offer special vacation opportunities, with or without meals and farm specific activities.  Here is how the founders describe this unique experience:

Some farms offer classes in cheese making, spinning, gardening, cooking, even animal photography!  Many are unstructured and expect you will feel the rythmn of the farm best if you watch and listen.In terms of lodging, some farm stays offer rooms right in the farm house.  Others have converted old farm buildings, like silos and chicken houses, into wonderfully eclectic rooms.  You might find yourself camping in a tent in the trees or at a campsite you choose for yourself down by the creek.

It really is worth trying! To find out what people are saying about such special vacations they had, check out Leaping Lamb Farm, Liberty Hill Farm, Montana Working Ranches, Cold Moon Farm and Armstrong Farms.

EatWild and Local Harvest are great resources to find sustainable, organic farms close to your area, that offer the highest quality of real food. Nothing like the toxin-laden frankenfood you would find in supermarkets! You can establish a connection with farms that sell at your local farmer’s market and/or health food store and that would be ideal, since this way you can take a trip to these very farms and actually see how your food is grown and where it’s coming from. Plus, you will have the opportunity to buy lots of fresh, organic food directly from the source, also paying less than at the stores and farmer’s markets.

For people that are looking for an alternative, different type of boot camp, this might be it! I believe going to work for a season on a farm, as an intern or just to get away from the white office walls and grey asphalt, is even a better experience than a “boot camp”. Whatever your worries are, your health and emotional problems, that you are trying to sort out, I believe some good physical work so close to Nature can be healing and liberating.  The hard work on a farm can really toughen somebody up, while offering an amazing life experience and knowledge. Many of the farms and ranches listed on FarmStayU.S. offer this type of opportunities. They mention specific seasons and types of work that can be done.

This article originally appeared on Guide2Health.net. It is re-posted here with permission from the author.

THE WRITER: Raluca Schachter is a passionate Nutritionist and Metabolic Typing Advisor®. She believes in traditional, unaltered food, ancestral wisdom, sustainable farming and living. For more information visit her website and blog Guide2Health.net.

Have you ever gone on a working vacation at a farm? Tell us about your experience!

The author of Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, The Elements of Taste and The Fly Fisherman's Guide to the Meaning of Life among others, has delivered a tome unlike any of his previous efforts.

Bill Buford (author of Heat) wrote this for the back cover:

Is Peter Kaminsky a double agent? For twenty years, he eats only the world’s best food, ‘happens’ to discover the cure for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, and comes home to tell us to cook our own food, have lunch, and eat leftovers? A savvy, audacious book – long overdue.

Mr. Kaminsky is known to most of his readers as the guy who explains why Jamón Ibérico is so damn good, how real chefs work in the real world and the proper way to present a dry fly to a brook trout.

His deceptively simple stories impart knowledge. His way of explanation enlightens. His writing makes you hungry and thirsty for more.

So instead of a book about exploring all manner of tastes, this book is about thinking twice about what (and how) we eat.

In his May 7, 2012 article in the New York Times, Jeff Gordinier had this to say:

Indeed, Culinary Intelligence (Knopf) has nothing to do with shame, and everything to do with the idea of enlisting pleasure as your dietary ally. “I didn’t want to write a finger-wagging book because I don’t think that motivates people to eat well,” he (Mr. Kaminsky) said.

In the book, Mr. Kaminsky makes a case that healthier eating can be achieved, in part, by cooking with foods that pack a lot of what he calls F.P.C., or flavor per calorie. The idea is that by amping up the taste, you can satisfy your cravings with smaller portions.

Mr. Kaminsky advises readers to steer clear of processed ingredients, white flour, sugar and potatoes, but has high praise for anchovies, chickpeas, capers, plain yogurt, olive oil and roasted almonds. And he happily finds room in his dream larder for bacon, butter, Italian sausage and dark chocolate. (Not tons of it, mind you. He recommends using sprinkles and dashes of bacon and sausage as a source of seasoning and crunch in, say, a lentil stew.)

“It’s really not complicated,” he said. “Many weight-loss systems are complicated.” Instead of directing people to a meal-by-meal regimen that’s “a lot to remember, hard to follow,” Mr. Kaminsky offers an approach that factors in our impulsive desire for the delectable.

And it sure works for Peter. The formerly 205-pound writer is now a svelte 165-pound and counting. Downward.

THE FILMMAKERS: Slow Films tells stories about good food people. We shoot for compelling content with a cinematic attitude. We’ve stood in cow pastures in Virginia, on the banks of the Hudson River, orchards in New Mexico, and kitchens in New York, all for a good story.

Do you need to consider changing the way you eat?

So I can hardly be blamed if as a young person with my first home, I stopped eating salad.  Then, in 1990, I moved to London and encountered “rocket,” tiny-leaved, bright green, not crunchy at all but with a delicious give to its leaves.  A salad of rocket was intensely peppery, actually spicy on your tongue. 

I first tasted rocket at Formula Veneta, a little Italian restaurant in Hollywood Road, SW10, the chic enclave for American expatriates in London in the 1990s.  We had moved there as newlyweds and ate at Formula Veneta at least once a week during our carefree honeymoon days.  There was a favorite dish in which the pasta was flecked with little bite-sized pieces of the Austrian juniper-flavored smoked ham called speck, and with the delicate green leaves of rocket.  I loved those leaves because they were spicy and flavorful like all European lettuces, but without the bitterness of French frisee.

The Italians (who started it all) call rocket ruchetta, or rucola, the French lisp the tender syllables roquette.  The British, with their typical insistence on Anglicizing any French term, ask for rocket in their salads.  And the Americans call it arugula. 

The original language is Latin and the original word is eruca sativa, meaning an unspecified vegetable in the brassicaceae (cruciform-leaf-shaped) family. 

After a delirious three years of our self-indulgent life of rocket in London, we went home to New York where not another leaf of it passed my lips for 13 years.   I was forced, every once in awhile, to turn to raw spinach to get any green leaves in my life, although I have always been happier turning spinach into a creamy, garlicky, cheesy side dish.

How thrilled I was to return to London to live, in 2005, to find that the little rocket leaf had more authority than ever, replacing iceberg as the lettuce of choice on and beside most sandwiches, perching with insouciance atop a piece of grilled beef tenderloin, providing a cushion for a fillet of pan-roasted cod.  The rest of England had, it seemed, caught up with my obsession.

The late, great culinary mystery writer Virginia Rich once wrote, “Food fads are like jokes.  No one knows where they started, but all of a sudden everyone’s telling the same one.”  An ingredient or dish that no one’s ever heard of is suddenly in everyone's shopping baskets and on everyone's dinner tables.  Take balsamic vinegar, for example.  A few short decades ago no one outside Italy ever had the stuff in the kitchen cupboard; now you’re as likely to be served a little dish to dip your restaurant bread in as you are to get a pat of butter.  Wild rocket is certainly trendy, so much so that it is the ubiquitous side salad for an English sandwich, the obligatory garnish for a fish or meat dish. 

I am devoted to rocket.  I’ll eat it tossed with black beans and minced red pepper (with a little balsamic vinegar!), or wilted under a grilled salmon fillet, sautéed slowly in olive oil with cannellini beans, garlic and rosemary, pureed into a soup with spinach and watercress. Its peppery attitude goes with virtually anything.

I spend summers on the East Coast of America, where “arugula” stands in for my beloved leaf.  Popular in Italy since Roman times (and long considered a lowly but edible weed to modern Italians) and common in England since the Queen Elizabeth they had before the current one, proper peppery rocket took a long time to hit the American palate.  As David Kamp entertainingly tells us in his history of American cuisine, The United States of Arugula, the emergence of arugula as a popular ingredient in everyday salads was the perfect example of America’s stepping onto the culinary stage, in the 1990s.

American arugula may share a Latin name, and some DNA, with English rocket, wild or cultivated, but not texture or taste.  Its leaves are large, with rounded edges, rather limp and almost tasteless.  English rocket is perky with pointed edges that stick out, and it stays crisp for a good few days in the fridge.  In fact, in England a packet of rocket is marked warningly “strong.”  And it is. This summer in Connecticut I noticed bags of something called “baby arugula,” but while it is closer to the shape and size of my English rocket, it has, again, almost no flavor.  Rocket/arugula feature prominently in an inventive leaf-mix called “mesclun”, now available everywhere on both sides of the pond.

Rocket is a super source of vitamins A and C, and folic acid.  It makes a perfect addition to a super-food salad of beetroot and goat’s cheese, and if you want to get even more virtuous, you can add avocado, hard-boiled egg, watercress and a creamy dressing.

My school-year English refrigerator always contains at least one bag of rocket (each English bag generally contains 75 grams, which amounts to about 2 loosely packed American cups), and I can find endless uses for it.  My favorite incarnation is a soup I invented in desperation when I had a great deal of sweetcorn to use up.  This soup is delicious enough to have got me a spot on a British telly cooking contest called Britain’s Best Dish, in which contenders appear in a cook-off of starters, main courses, or desserts.  My sweetcorn and rocket soup, topped with a good spoonful of fresh crabmeat, won the episode in which I appeared! (click on the main image above to see me in all my televised glory.)

This soup boasts a very appealing golden yellow color flecked with the bright green rocket, and tastes much creamier than the scant amount of cream actually in the soup would lead you to believe, and it's unexpectedly SWEET.

Some food trends are much more than that: they are the emergence of a truly great ingredient from underserved obscurity.  That tiny leaf will cover the giant ball of iceberg as paper does rock, and win the game.

THE WRITER: An art historian, former gallery owner and now a food blogger at kristeninlondon.com, Kristen lives in London with her daughter and husband.

What's your favorite way to enjoy the peppery green known as rocket?

Dad’s theories about the various foodstuffs that may, at any given time, be considered “a staff of life” are a running family joke.  The list usually contains, in no particular order: Velveeta.  Peanut butter.  Raw hamburger sandwiches.  Saltines.  Pretzels with onion dip.  Bread (but none of that weenie whole-wheat crap).  Milk.  And so forth.  It’s partly funny because, although certainly my father enjoys all of those items, he by no means really believes that they’re the cornerstones of a decent diet; and it’s also funny because, being married to my epicurean mother, he’s been served his fair share of pesto sauces, goat cheeses, and other various “exotic” items…and has lived to tell the tale.  (He may even have enjoyed some of those things — but don’t tell him I said so.)

A few weekends ago was Dad’s birthday, and he and my mother came to visit us for a family celebration.  My sister, D., surprised Dad by coming up from New York on the train.  There were festivities, merriment, and of course, plenty of food.  But since we were entering Week Three of a six-week gluten-and-casein-free trial with L., cooking and eating as a crowd was definitely a bit more… interesting?… than we’d planned.

Mom and Dad were, naturally, very supportive of our decision to try this dietary intervention for our little guy.  But I think it’s fair to say that it caused every one of us at least a momentary pang, at some point over the weekend, as we tried to work around the delicate dietary prescription for L. without either a) compromising some of the things we wanted to enjoy as a family; or b) denying a five-year-old a large number of items that were available to the rest of us.  I’ve been okay with the new diet, largely, because it’s been relatively easy (if not totally painless) for me to simply adjust what the four of us have eaten at home in order to accommodate L.  Over the weekend, however, with a birthday party to execute and houseguests afoot, it hit home for me just how much “tweaking” was necessary to make everything go smoothly, food-wise.

The lobster was no problem, but the drawn butter would have to be carefully clarified if we wanted L. to have a taste.  The grass-fed steak was no problem, but fettucine was off the menu altogether, and the brioche dinner rolls were sort of eaten on the sly (not that L. was unaware of them — he was grumpily resigned to his bread-free fate prior to dinner).  Asparagus and salad were welcome points of relief.  But bread pudding… bread pudding, Dad’s requested birthday dessert, was going to have to be off-limits to our newly GF/CF guy.  And as for Mom’s desire to take us out for lunch the following day, well, we satisfied ourselves with Japanese take-out instead so L. could enjoy some sushi and vegetables (no soy sauce) under our watchful eyes at home.

It’s not all dire, by any means.  We’ve done pretty well, and now that we’re part way through this challenge, I’m starting to catch on and figure out a rhythm that works.  I’m even starting to experiment, a little.  In some ways, we’ve expanded our palates a bit (quinoa was a new food to everyone in the family but me, and it turns out to be a raving success); in others, we’ve had to narrow our scope a little in order to quickly and confidently adjust to the list of “approved” foods without driving us (or, okay, ME) stark raving mad.  GF/CF is a steep learning curve, to be sure, but it’s not impossible.

This article originally appeared on RedRoundOrGreen.com. It is re-posted here with permission from the author.

THE WRITER: Bri DeRosa likes to think of herself as a young, cool, urban fringe locavore, but the reality is, she's just a working mom, neither quite as young nor as cool as she used to pretend to be, who’s trying to figure out how to get everybody fed. See how that's all working out for her and her family at RedRoundOrGreen.com.

Have you had to contend with a gluten- or casein-free diet? What were some of the most useful tips you received?

Rhubarb Ginger Oat Squares

Ingredients:

2 Cups Sliced Rhubarb

3 Thin Slices of Fresh Ginger

1 Cup Sugar

1 Cup Water

1 Cup Rolled Oats

1 Cup Pastry Flour

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

Pinch of Salt

1/8 tsp Ground Ginger

1/2 Cup Light Brown Sugar

1/2 Cup Chopped Walnuts

1 Stick Unsalted Butter – cut into chunks

Method:

Preheat oven to 350°

Combine the rhubarb, fresh ginger, sugar and water in a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat and simmer until the rhubarb has softened and is falling apart, about 15 minutes. Strain into a bowl pressing on the rhubarb and ginger to release the juices. Pour the strained rhubarb-ginger syrup into a bottle or jar and refrigerate. (Save the syrup for making Rhubarb Ginger Soda). Allow the rhubarb pulp to cool then remove and discard the sliced ginger.

Combine the oats, flour, baking soda, salt, ground ginger, brown sugar, walnuts and butter in a bowl. Work with your fingers to a crumbly texture.

Butter a 9x9 square baking dish. Pour 3/4 of the oat mixture into the dish and press firmly to cover the bottom of the dish. Spread the rhubarb pulp over this and then top with the remaining 1/4 of the oat mixture.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Cool and then slice into squares.

Sources:

Rhubarb – Joan Reynolds, Bearsville, NY

Flour – Wild Hive Farm

Butter – Cabot

This recipe originally appeared atthefarmersmarket.com. It is re-posted here with permission of the author.

THE WRITER: Cheryl Paff has been the manager of the Rhinebeck Farmers’ Market for over a decade. She is also a founder of the Woodstock Farm Festival. Her blog atthefarmersmarket.com features seasonal recipes that showcase the very best of the Hudson Valley.

What is your favorite way to enjoy rhubarb?

Imagine you’re an Eskimo. You can eat up to 10 pounds of meat a day, huge amounts of fat, and literally no carbohydrates. But you are perfectly healthy. Your entire family is healthy and your ancestors were too.They didn’t know what cancer or heart disease were. But then you decide to move to the jungle of South America and live with the Quechua Indians, that have been thriving for a long time on a nearly vegetarian diet. You marry a local and you have kids.

So…what will YOU eat then to stay healthy? And even better, what will your kids eat to grow healthy?

Well, here is my personal short story about the culinary journey I experienced: I was raised on an Eastern European traditional diet which included a variety of meats, organ meats, animal fat, fish and caviar, fermented foods, local vegetables and fruits as well as some grains.

After 1989 our country started receiving western imports of "modern" foods that were advertised as "healthy" like: margarine, pudding powders, milk powders, vegetable oils and other types of processed junk. We ate it since we were told it was good for us and at that time there were not many "experts" around to tell us otherwise. My health started to deteriorate. Well, usually that happens when you believe that Snickers is good for you since it has peanuts which contain "protein"…

Then I moved to US and was overwhelmed by the huge variety of foods from all parts of the world. I went with the mainstream dogma of eating LOTS of vegetables and grains and kept it low on animal fat and meat. Meanwhile, I started my nutritional studies. My health got worse, and I was underweight. I couldn’t understand it. Then I started my studies in Metabolic Typing  and ALL my questions and confusion ended. Obviously, the traditional Eastern European diet I used to eat in my childhood was actually the one I was thriving on! Larger quantities of animal fat and meat had to be my staple, along with full fat dairy, certain vegetables and very little grains.  I worked on eliminating blocking factors that were stopping my metabolism to function correctly. I gave my body the right chance to heal itself. In less than a year I gained the desired weight and my health got better and better each year.

So, would you feel "guilty" to eat red meat and animal fat if you were me?

Now here are some valid, irrefutable evidence, scientific and nutritional facts verging on natural law that support the above:

1. METABOLIC INDIVIDUALITY

It’s high time we think beyond mass marketing nutrition, since no one size/ diet fits all. And no one "meat" and "fat" fits all. There are metabolisms that thrive on high amounts of red meat and fat and there are metabolisms that thrive on lean, white meat instead. Ratios of animal proteins and fats as well as the type of proteins and fats vary tremendously from person to person, from culture to culture, from metabolism to metabolism. But these food groups have always been a staple in most cultures throughout the world.

The only healthy diet is the one that meets one’s genetically-based requirements. 

Our nutrient requirements are also heavily influenced by our environments and the kind of lifestyles we lead. Both of which have shifted dramatically over the course of the last century.

We are all unique on a biochemical level as we are in our fingerprints. Biochemical individuality is responsible for the fact that nutrients behave differently in different metabolisms. William Wolcott, founder of the Healthexcel System of Metabolic Typing explains :

“Fat doesn’t make you fat. Protein doesn’t make you fat. Carbohydrates don’t make you fat. And even calories per se don’t make you fat. But what does make you fat is the inability to properly metabolize, or convert to energy, carbs, proteins, fats and calories.

Eat the right foods for your Metabolic Type (metabolism) and eat the right ratios of macronutrients (proteins, fats, carbs) and you’ll be giving your body the right kind of fuel for your engines of metabolism. Science is beginning to awaken to the idea that much of what our bodies do with food is in our genes.”

2. NUTRITION

Saturated fats play many important roles in the body. They provide integrity to the cell wall, promote the body’s use of essential fatty acids, enhance the immune system, protect the liver and contribute to strong bones. The lungs and kidneys cannot work without saturated fat.

Dietary cholesterol contributes to the strength of the intestinal wall and helps babies and children develop a healthy brain and nervous system.

Cholesterol is vital for making our hormones, which have a profound influence over how we feel and act.

Red meat is a rich source of nutrients that protect the heart and nervous system; these include vitamins B12 and B6, zinc phosphorus, carnitine and co-enzyme-Q10.

3. TRADITION and ANCESTRAL DIETS

We live in a genetic melting pot. Our ancestors came from different parts of the world and most of us have lots of different blood running through our veins. A brilliant and world-renowned scientist – Dr. Weston A. Price traveled all over the world and sought out all the indigenous populations to study their diet and their health. His book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is a remarkable study. He discovered that:

• The diets of all the indigenous peoples were tremendously varied (being dependent on geography, climate and the food stuffs naturally available)
• Yet those indigenous people who followed their ancestral diets were robustly healthy.
• But those who moved away or for other reasons strayed from their ancestral diet developed degenerative processes.

Dr. W. Price analyzed the foods of indigenous people compared to the American diet of his day and found that they provided at least TEN  times more fat-soluble vitamins from animal foods such as butter, fish eggs, shellfish, organ meats, eggs and animal fats. (See images above in slideshow)

4. GENE HEALTH AND BEAUTY

The isolated groups Dr. Price investigated understood the importance of preconceptual nutrition for both parents. Many tribes required a period of special feeding before conception, in which nutrient-dense animal foods were given to young men and women. These same foods were considered important for pregnant and lactating women and growing children. Price discovered them to be particularly rich in minerals and in the fat-soluble activators found only in animal fats. The isolated people he photographed had fine bodies, didn’t have any fertility problems, didn’t have cavities and presented perfect dentures, were emotional stable and free of degenerative diseases.

People “designed” babies since ancient times. They were aiming for healthy, bright, happy babies, all necessary traits to the community long-term survival. Common sense, wisdom and careful observation helped them understand that when certain foods were missing from their diet, children came out with health problems and anomalies. So they learned how to use foods to avoid health problems. For example, locals from the Yukon Territory (in Canada) knew about scurvy, a disease of vitamin C deficiency and how to protect themselves against it. No, it was not by eating lemons, but the adrenal glands of the moose they were hunting!

In the Scotish Isles people used cod’s head (rich in essential fatty acids) as a staple food. The Maasai in Northern Africa drank mainly milk and cattle blood and presented amazingly, perfectly sculpted bodies and teeth. They didn’t eat any fruits or grain, but the milk they drank contained five times the brain building phospholipids of American milk.

Blackfoot Nation women utilized the still unknown nutrient systems found in the lining of the large intestine of buffalo to make the baby have a nice round head. In Fiji, islanders would acquire a certain species of lobster crab which the tribal custom demonstrated to be efficient for producing a highly perfect build infant. And such examples are many.

In her book Deep Nutrition, Catherine Shanahan, MD talks about how genes are affected by the foods we eat:

“Epigenetic researchers study how our genes react to our behavior, and they’ve found that just about everything we eat, think, breathe, or do can, directly or indirectly, trickle down to touch the gene and affect its performance in some way. (…) Not only does what we eat affect us down to the level of our genes, our physiques have been sculpted, in part, by the foods our parents and grandparents ate (or didn’t eat) generations ago.”

5. SUSTAINABILITY

”…Here are the questions you should ask, a new form of grace to say over your food. Does this food build or destroy topsoil? Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers? Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?”

(from The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith)

On Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm ("the mecca of sustainable food production" as L. Keith likes to call it), his rotating mixture of animals on PASTURE is building one inch of soil annually. Which is huge! Compare that to one-sixteenth of an inch of soil that a pine forest can build in fifty years!!

We all know factory farming is destroying our health and planet. But pastured animals will save it. If you are supposed to eat meat, then by all means look for grass fed varieties.

6. ETHICS

“The fact that life requires sacrifice has profound spiritual ramifications. In order for something to live, something else must die. And that should provide us a lesson in how we serve one another and the creation and Creator around us. Everything is eating and being eaten. The perpetual sacrifice of one thing creates life for the next. To see this as regenerative is both mature and normal. To see this as violence that must be stopped is both abnormal and juvenile.”

(from Folks, This Ain't Normal by Joel Salatin)

If you do have a craving for fat and meat you should listen to your body since it IS talking to you. Re-learning how to interpret the signals your body is sending you daily is vital for health and survival. The natural law will always be above science, technology, the latest diet trends, imposed philosophies or beliefs. The race after “newer, easier, bigger, faster” took out of the equation the ANCESTRAL WISDOM. And I think it’s high time we go back and re-learn precious knowledge we wanted to forget.  That too, would be ethical.

Resources:

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A. Price

The Healthexcel System of Metabolic Typing

MetabolicTypingOnline.com

Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan

Folks, This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Weston A Price Foundation 

This article originally appeared on Guide2Health.net. It is re-posted here with permission from the author.

THE WRITER: Raluca Schachter is a passionate Nutritionist and Metabolic Typing Advisor®. She believes in traditional, unaltered food, ancestral wisdom, sustainable farming and living. For more information visit her website and blog Guide2Health.net.

Do you crave meat or animal fats?