On The Atlantic’s Food Channel this week, YSFP Director Melina Shannon-DiPietro on Yale Dining’s newest employee: Ian Pocock, forager. No, he won’t be roaming the forests and living off the land — the forager’s job is to match local farms with Yale’s dining halls to make eating sustainably become an economically and organizationally sustainable choice, too.
Go read the post – Melina cites Yale’s all-local salsa as a great example of where sustainable choices go right. Ian is a friend, and a regular volunteer at the Yale Farm: we wish him all the best.
The weather was cold and I was a little bit underdressed in shorts, but I went to the farm on Friday, anyway. I arrived as the harvest for market on Saturday was winding down: the lettuce was being bagged and the radishes were being bunched. I headed out with a friend to harvest swiss chard (only the larger outer leaves — the plants we picked from were the same ones I’d planted months before in August, and last until the weather gets too cold), and root fennel.
After that we whacked the life out of the tansy on the lower terrace’s berms. They’d reached over six feet tall and were falling all over the beds of leaf lettuce. Other work included prepping beds in the south hoop house and getting ready to put doors on the north hoop house to keep the warmth in and the wind out in this winter.
The funnest task was picking saffron out of the tiny crocus bulbs on the berm near the horse chestnut tree. Look out for a post on Monday all about saffron!
After all this work it was dark: sunset comes earlier now. We hung lights around the pavilion, providing just enough light for the welcome pizza that warmed our cold hands. A good workday!
Last semester, when I was supposed to be studying for my finals and writing my final papers, I found myself devouring a copy of the Omnivore’s Dilemma instead. During my summer in New York, I vowed to live as “wholesomely” as I could on my stipend. I bought free range chicken. I went to the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market and bought greens, berries, apples, and yogurt. When I was craving snacks and desserts, I either made them using organic whole wheat flours with locally grown summer squashes, organic fair-trade chocolate (since, unfortunately, cocoa beans can hardly be local to these parts), etc. I tried. And, to be honest, living my life that way made me feel really good about myself. But it was hard to stick to. The Waffle and Dinges truck on 7th Ave. called to me every time I left the house. I couldn’t live in Brooklyn and not give in to a chewy bagel baked with the kneading of generations of Brooklyn’s Jewish artisans every bite. What was the most difficult part about living this way? I started to realize that there were so many foods I loved that my newly informed mind was “morally” opposed to eating. And my wallet started wincing every time I needed groceries.
I found eggs to have one of the greatest disparities in price between the “eco-friendly” version and the typical grocery store, industrial farm-produced cartons. One half-dozen of free-range eggs, sold by farmers who let their chickens graze and run free in a grassy pasture, at least for some period of their lives, cost me six bucks. Back in my world as a student, cage-free organic eggs, which are the closest to food godliness at Shaw’s, cost me about $3.60.
What does it mean to be cage-free? According to Pete and Gerry’s website, one of the most visible companies that sells cage-free organic eggs, their hens are fed organic grain from birth and live in spacious barn space, free to lay their eggs wherever they may like inside a large barn. There are several third party certifications that you might find on egg cartons, which aren’t approved or officially recognized by the USDA, but if you’re curious enough, you can look them up online. “Certified Humane” is one example of those labels/organizations. The free-range eggs aforementioned mean that the hens who hatched them literally run around (heads on) and spend a good period of time outside pecking for worms.
What does it mean to be cage-free? According to Pete and Gerry’s website, one of the most visible companies that sells cage-free organic eggs, their hens are fed organic grain from birth and live in spacious barn space, free to lay their eggs wherever they may like. There are several third party certifications that you might find on egg cartons, which aren’t approved or officially recognized by the USDA, but if you’re curious enough, you can look them up online. “Certified Humane” is one example of those labels/organizations.
All of this egg talk made me think of a bill that was passed in early September which allows New Haven residents to keep up to six hens in their backyards. Whether this surge in the desire to have one’s own collection of hens chirping in the backyard is a consequence of the economic downturn or a growing interest in sustainable and local foods in New Haven, the fact remains that this bill means the Yale Farm can actually get a chicken coop!
At the Harvest Festival this past weekend, which the Yale Sustainable Food Project hosted at the Yale Farm, I met a woman who lamented that in the county over, they weren’t allowed to build chicken coops in their backyards. Growing up in the SoCal suburbs, I never thought that urban backyard chicken coops would develop this kind of Beanie Baby following, to the point where significant numbers of homeowners would demand their right to keep these birds, their molted feathers, and their chicken poo all in the convenience of their yard. Of course, there is the obvious plus side: eggs that you’ve tended from lay to stomach. The right to good food. This recipe for black bean dark-chocolate cake, inspired by this one here, incorporates sustainable and local ingredients in the best way I could manage. It is surprisingly intense, moist, and a whole lot of cocoa. Recipe after the jump.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about oatmeal for my Natural Nibbles column. I talked about my obsession with oatmeal, how often I find myself thinking about it or thinking about eating it; I even wrote one of my final semester papers on it. I wrote about how I find comfort in each warm, gooey bite, and how the heat and creaminess from the oatmeal spread from my stomach to my blue limbs that would scream for warmth if they weren’t so lifeless and lazy from the cold.
What I didn’t stress last time is that oatmeal is a kitchen chameleon. It can be anything you want it to be. Oatmeal is like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, which have been on my mind lately, as I’m going through the senior job search and thinking about what I want to do, where I want to live, what stores I want in my neighborhood, whether or not my future land”person” will let me grow vegetables on or around my apartment building, what it will mean if I eat mashed potatoes for dinner, etc. You know what I mean. Oatmeal is so basic that it can become the dream of whimsy.
You can start with a can of whole rolled oats and end up with plain oatmeal. You could be in a chocolate frenzy and end up with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. You could have a craving for crunchy, buttery, honeyed granola. You could rice for oatmeal and eat it with your stir-fry. You might start out with cinnamon and sugar on hand and realize that what you actually want is maple oatmeal with bacon mixed into it. Mmmm that last one sounds good. For those of you who, like me, are in a “festive fall” mood, your tastebuds might crave apples and cinnamon, or, tired of the traditional flavor, might decide to branch out the tiniest of bits and make this pumpkin spice oatmeal.
The bright orange hue of the oatmeal is so reminiscent of the changing colors on the leaves and, of course, pumpkin flesh. Note: no pumpkins were cruelly harmed during the making of this oatmeal. While one of the most pleasing aspects of this oatmeal comes from its sheer aesthetic beauty, the best part of this recipe is that it tastes just like pumpkin pie. And you’ll still fit into your jeans after you eat it. Recipe after the jump.
Today, a farm vegetable that is nearing its end – the difficult but delicious tomato.
This wasn’t the best season for tomatoes. Late blight came early, causing many organic farmers to lose their tomato and potato crops entirely. Many other farmers had to make the choice between letting their cash crop go, and trying to combat late blight with expensive copper treatments. Late blight spores travel on clothing and in the wind, making all the more difficult to avoid.
At the farm, we avoided late blight by limiting how many people were allowed in our tomato hoop house, and completely prohibiting work on tomatoes and potatoes on the same day by the same person. We were very lucky and avoided the disease! And here’s one of our Sungolds to prove it:
Tomato plants die with the first frost, so we’ll be clearing out the hoop house soon in preparation for the winter greens we’ll grow there. This photo is no match for the resplendent green canopy it was this summer, when late blight fears kept us from entering the hoop house to prune the plants:
The tomato’s time is over, but come back tomorrow for a plant that will reach maturity, instead of dying, with the first frost. See you then!
In preparation for our Harvest Festival coming up this Sunday, October 25, we thought we’d ease into fall with a weeklong series on the farm’s vegetables – alternating day by day with crops that are just getting ready to harvest, and crops that had their summer time to shine but now go to rest until it gets warm again.
First up, we have the Brassicas, also called cole crops: brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, kohlrabi, rutabaga, and turnips. After planting their tiny seeds in soil block in our propagation house, we transplanted them into beds in late summer, in Quad 2 behind the tomato hoop house, and all along the streetside beds. They were tiny! Diligent weeding, the occasional watering with a seaweed-based fertilizer, and a couple of months’ time yielded what we see today:
We’ve been selling kale and collards at market, but the broccoli and brussel sprouts, as you can see, needs a little more time:
Tune in tomorrow to hear about another vegetable, and come out to the farm on Sunday to see them all in person!
Two summers ago when I was in Budapest, I had a craving for peanut butter. Budapest, however, had very little in the ways of peanut butter; it’s simply not a popular food there. My friends and I were the only people in the whole neighborhood who ever bought those mini-jars of incredibly sweet paste-like peanut stuff. We bought them with gusto. Peanut butter was, at times, the closest we ever came to home. It’s a childhood food. I think in the 50s and 60s people used to joke that Americans were corn and beef-fed. I mean, we still are, but I think there’s also enormous truth in the assumption that all who aren’t allergic are also peanut-butter fed. I loved sitting with my friends by the huge windows of our apartment, hanging out with a spoon in one hand and my peanut butter jar in the other.
But now I wish I could take it all back. I wish I could take back the entire year of peanut butter sandwiches I ate after that summer. In fact, I wish I could take back all the typical grocery store peanut butter I’ve ever eaten. I think it amounts to like twenty-five jars or something. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when I think about all the hydrogenated vegetable oils (fake food) and all the unnecessary sugar that was added to every jar of grocery store peanut butter I spread on Wonder Bread, I want to vomit. Of course, neither I nor my parents knew any better when I was growing up–the organic and natural foods movement was a thing of hippies past, Trader Joes was too expensive, and Asian people never ate peanut butter anyway.
Last semester, I really started paying attention to the ingredients in my foods. It’s hard to be disciplined, to give up foods that you love and have eaten your entire life. I’m still working on it and while I want to be that person who eats only natural foods and never gives in to processed snacks, I fail. I fail a lot. I eat cereal too much for my own good, for example. And so with the foods that I know are my go-tos, I’ve tried to seek out organically grown foods or foods that have natural ingredients in them. What do I mean by natural? I mean ingredients that aren’t the product of human food engineering/ingenuity. Like hydrogenated fats. Margarine is probably the most famous of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil family, proven over recent years to be even worse than its evil fat twin, Butter. Partially hydrogenated essentially means that oils that are liquids at room temperature are chemically altered to become solid at room temperature–your body breaks it down differently than it would fats that come in their natural form.
Of course, with peanut butter, there are some aesthetic things that makers have tried to deal with by adding other ingredients. With regular peanut butters, they usually add hydrogenated oils to make it smoother and solid at room temperature, and sugar to give it that slight sweetness. Organic or natural peanut butters are mostly made of just the nuts, either roasted or plain, unsalted or salted, and are usually unsweetened. Because peanut butter made of just peanuts tends to separate (the oil rises to the top), customers or people have griped about having to stir their peanut butter, and so companies conscious of the ills of trans-fat that come from hydrogenated oils have taken to adding palm oil, which is solid at room temperature. I have to say though, that peanut butter with palm oil tastes awful–the palm oil really envelops and overwhelms the flavor of the peanuts. And for those of you who love peanut butter, you know that overwhelming the flavor of peanuts is a really hard and unfortunate thing to do. So I will stick to yummy peanut butter that I might have to stir every once in a while–I eat it so much anyway that it’s just worth it.
This week on The Atlantic Food Channel, Yale grad David Thier investigates a food the majority of us will never encounter: alligator.
Along with a recipe for Alligator Sauce Piquante from a true Louisiana native, David describes the ranches where alligators are raised to be sold as meat and describes which parts and what kind of alligator are good for eating (they’re surprisingly similar to pigs)! So what if alligator isn’t being sold at the farmer’s market? Head over and live vicariously through the post.
In this week’s food news, I happened upon this great link from our friends at A Hamburger Today about Burgerville, a chain in Washington and Oregon that emphasizes using local ingredients in its foods and operates on a sustainable business model. Burgerville is printing the nutritional information of its customer’s orders on their receipts (at left)! I guess it’s time for us to know exactly what it is we’re paying for. Fast food might be quick and tasty, but it comes at a price. What do you make of Burgerville’s offer? Is this TMI?
The Food Issue of The New York Times Magazine has been all the buzz in the food world this month. Some of you might remember last year’s Food Issue in which Michael Pollan entreated the White House to come up with a healthier, more sustainable food policy. In this year’s issue, Mark Bittman writes about making online grocery shopping more efficient and more specific, to help encourage Americans to return to their kitchens and make meals together, a la the slow food mantra.
People often say that the challenge for the slow food movement and for the locally grown, sustainable, organic market is price. Well, several California food banks are doing their best to change the perception that farmer’s markets and fresh, locally grown produce are an elitist practice by trading canned goods for fresh produce and making “farm to table” available to more Americans.
Speaking of making fresh foods more available to more Americans and encouraging more Americans to make healthier food choices by picking minimally processed foods with real nutritional value, President Obama has proclaimed every second week in October “National School Lunch Week” to raise awareness about and improve the quality of school lunches. Progress?
Lastly, fall is upon us. New Haven has not made any effort to hide the coming cold and the change of seasons–here’s a fantastically delicious pumpkin pie recipe from Sweet Corner.
On The Atlantic Food Channel this week, the YSFP’s own Melina Shannon-DiPietro shares her advice on an item most of us might forget to bring along when packing for college: the kitchen knife.
You can read her advice on the only three knives you need here. It’s so easy to forget that cooking becomes so much more of a joy when your onion, tomato, roast chicken, or anything else slices easily. And your elbows and joints will thank you!
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Nozlee Samadzadeh
