September 2011 Archives

Heritage Farm and Kitchen’s turkeys are free-range, hand-fed turkeys that are not pumped with antibiotics as a preventive measure or fed hormones or arsenic to make them grow faster.

You can purchase a white broad-breasted breed at $3.95/lb. or $4.95/lb. for a fully smoked turkey, and a Red Bourbon heritage breed for $4.95/lb. There are three size ranges: small (11-14 lbs.), medium (14-17 lbs.), and large (17-22 lbs.). Some of the white turkeys will be heavier than 22 lbs. — you can ask us whether any larger ones are available.

You can order by emailing us at jean@smartmarkets.org or signing up in person at our Oakton or Fairfax Corner market.

You will be able to pick up your turkey at Oakton Saturday, Nov. 19; Fairfax Corner Tuesday, Nov. 22; or at a special holiday market at Reston Wednesday, Nov. 23. These turkeys will be fresh, not frozen, and will have been processed only a few days before you pick them up.

Photo by moonjazz

• 4 T canola oil
• 1 onion (diced)
• 2 carrots (diced)
• 1 celery stalk (diced)
• 2 cups broccoli or other green vegetable (diced)
• 1 cup corn
• 2 T fresh ginger (minced)
• 2 T fresh parsley (minced)
• 5 cloves of fresh garlic (minced)
• 1/2 cup light soy sauce
• 4 eggs (scrambled)
• 4 T butter
• salt and pepper
• 3 cups brown rice (cooked)

Heat 1 T oil on medium in wok or frying pan. Cook eggs in pan, remove when done and set aside.

Turn up heat to high and add 3 T oil and cook onion for 5 minutes.

When onion is tender add carrots, celery, broccoli, corn, parsley, ginger and garlic. Cook for 5–7 minutes.

Add rice and soy sauce. Stir. Cook for 5 minutes. Stir in butter, salt and pepper and serve.

• 1/2 cup oil
• 4 cups butternut squash (peeled, seeded and cut up into 1” pieces)
• 2 cups of white, new or russet potatoes (cut into 1” pieces)
• 1 cup of corn
• 1 small onion (diced)
• 1 carrot (diced)
• 1 stalk of celery (diced)
• 1 lb of boneless chicken breast and/or thigh (cut into 1” pieces)
• 1 cup cornstarch

Heat oil in pan. Add onion, celery, carrot, butternut squash and potatoes. Cook for about 15 minutes until they start to get tender.

In a bowl or Ziploc bag cover chicken pieces in cornstarch, then heat oil in another pan and fry until lightly golden brown on each side (approximately 6 minutes). When done, drain on paper towels and set aside.

Once veggies are tender, add chicken and sauce and cook 10 minutes.

Sauce (can be made a week in advance)

• 4 cloves garlic (minced)
• 2 T fresh ginger (minced)
• 1 T fresh cilantro or parsley (minced)
• 1 T fresh basil (minced)
• 2 T canola oil
• 1 cup light soy sauce
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1/2 cup water or broth
• 1 T sesame oil
• 1 T hot chili sauce
• 1 t sesame seeds (optional)

Heat oil in frying pan or wok and add garlic and ginger. Cook on medium and keep stirring. You don’t want the garlic to burn or else it’ll taste bitter. Add all ingredients except for sesame oil, chili sauce and sesame seeds; cook for 5 minutes, remove from heat and add remaining ingredients.

This recipe appeared in the September 16, 2011, Washington Post Food section in an article about apple varieties and their uses by Tony Rosenfield.

Ingredients:

• 1 large (about one pound) sweet potato, peeled, and cut into ½-inch dice
• Kosher salt
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 small red or sweet onion, cut into small dice
• 1–2 jalapeno peppers, stemmed, seeded and minced
• 1 sweet, firm apple, cut into 1-inch dice
• 1 tablespoon oregano
• 1 teaspoon light brown sugar
• ½ teaspoon chili powder
• ½ teaspoon cumin

Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil and add the diced sweet potato; cook for four minutes or until the sweet potato is barely tender. Drain well and let sit on a plate or a towel for 10 minutes to cool.

Melt the butter in a large, non-stick skillet over medium heat and add the sweet potato, onion and peppers. Sprinkle with ½ teaspoon of salt and cook for about 4 minutes, stirring, until the sweet potato starts to brown and the onion softens. Stir in the oregano, the brown sugar, the chili powder and cumin. Cook for one minute more. Serve hot.

Serves 6.

Dear Shopper,

Here is a short video interview with Virginia’s own Joel Salatin, who has come out with a book that all of you who are interested in knowing more about why we should be buying local and what we can do to maximize and optimize our options for doing so should read. Michael Pollan’s books are great as motivational education, but I think this book will reach us at a different level, because we know Salatin has lived what he believes and that he has done much for other farmers in southwest Virginia along the way. It’s always invigorating to learn from someone who is actually sharing what he has learned on the field of play — or in the fields of work, as the case may be.

Joel is pleasantly strident because he knows how far removed we are from growing real food and getting it to our tables in good time and with little processing. And I hope his indignant and incredulous wonder at what we have wrought is contagious.

Here in our own little community there is activity on all levels promoting local producers and improving our opportunities for buying local. There are efforts to educate us about how to eat healthy all of our lives to minimize so many of the chronic illnesses that are now afflicting our children, no longer waiting for middle or old age to catch up with us.

I would like to see more attention paid to these subjects in our schools as part of the larger curriculum, not just the one semester of health that children get in elementary or middle school. This is an issue of lifestyle that has major ramifications for our economy and our health system, and who would argue that these are not issues to be discussed in school if not at home? And most important of all, there are facts out there that can inform the personal issue of eating for health.

I am never tempted to throw anything at the TV, but even the Orioles’ long and easily repaired history of losing does not upset me as do the news stories and ads provided by the drug companies that encourage us to ingest supplements to overcome deficiencies in our diets. If our bodies are not getting the nutrients we need to live long and healthy lives, then we need to eat the foods that will correct that — not eat like idiots and then make up for it with expensive pills. I haven’t quoted my girlfriend’s mom lately, but it never hurts to remember her saying that “food is cheaper than medicine” when even the most expensive apples, collards, good-quality meat or free-range eggs will never cost as much as the supplements and medicines we will need later on in life if we eat junk or poison ourselves slowly with the toxins in much of the food we buy and eat now.

So listen to Joel and get excited about doing something, and then get in touch with me. I will be happy to refer you to one or more of the groups working on these issues in our area. I also look forward to greeting the droves who come to the market this week.

See you at the market!

Jean

My father was a traveling salesman for much of my life growing up and it was always exciting to hear about his trips to NYC. He loved an Italian restaurant in the City and convinced the chef to share a spaghetti sauce recipe with him that he then adapted to his — and our family’s — tastes. It soon became our special-occasion dinner; he prepared it for company, often for the boyfriends of his three daughters. Somewhere along the line it was called “Daddy’s Famous Spaghetti” by one of those boyfriends and it stuck.

I also served it myself in my own apartment in Chapel Hill to a boy in my graduate school program the evening of our first date. I am still serving it to him — maybe even this weekend — as we were married about two years and much more spaghetti later.

Note the term “spaghetti” — even adventurous cooks like my Dad were not using the term pasta in the ’60s. In fact our favorite spaghetti was good old Mueller’s, and we loved the really long, thin spaghetti that came in the plastic wrapper rather than a box. And of course we all learned to twirl it!

Cook together 4 garlic cloves, sliced thinly, in 1/2 cup olive oil until very lightly brown. Remove from the oil. Add three medium onions, chopped, and cook until lightly colored. Add 2 1/2–3 lbs. ground beef to pot and brown well; season with salt and pepper.

(I would suggest one deviation from this method: brown the beef in small batches by itself, drain and then add to the oil and onions. Daddy always carefully ladled out the fat after browning the meat, but he lost the olive oil that way, and it was much harder to remove the fat.)

Add:

• 2 large cans of good quality Italian tomatoes
• 2 15-ounce cans tomato sauce (homemade if you have it)
• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon parsley flakes or 3/4 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley
• 1 tablespoon dried basil
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 4 bay leaves
• 1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
• 4–6 stalks celery, sliced thin, including leaves
• 4–6 carrots, sliced thin

Cook over a slow fire for 2–3 hours. Just before serving add 1 pound fresh sliced mushrooms, sautéed till brown in oil and butter; taste the sauce for seasoning, adding additional salt and pepper if necessary.

This recipe originally called for no fresh ingredients — you could not buy fresh herbs or fresh mushrooms at the grocery store even in Atlanta where we lived when Daddy developed the recipe. But now I encourage you to use fresh herbs instead — just add them near the end of cooking and use 3–4 times as much of the fresh herb as the dried.

Makes about 3 quarts.

Visit our Oakton or George Mason University markets and enjoy these delicious crepes from our new vendor, Crepes de Pouce Gras.

Savory Crepes

Mr. Breakfast: Fresh, Scrambled Egg, Potatoes, Bacon & Monterey Jack — $6

Moo-na Lisa: Roast Beef, Gorgonzola, Romaine, Tomato & Horseradish — $6

The Greek: Rotisserie Chicken, Feta, Spinach, Tomato & Tzatziki Sauce — $6

Miss Piggy: Ham, Monterey Jack & Apple — $6

The Vegetarian: Tomato, Mozzarella, Spinach & Basil (red onion optional) — $5

The Blue Tomato: Sundried Tomatoes & Gorgonzola — $5

Say Cheese: Imported Gruyere — $5

Sweet Crepes

Bavarian Heaven: Bavarian Cream Custard with Fresh Fruit & Whipped Cream — $5

All Shook Up: Peanut Butter, Bananas & Honey — $5

Cheese, Louise: Cheesecake with Fresh Fruit & Whipped Cream — $5

Coconut Monkey: Bananas with Caramel, Toasted Coconut & Whipped Cream — $5

Nutty Ella (Chocolate/Hazelnut Spread), Fresh Fruit & Whipped Cream — $5

Plain John: Cinnamon, Sugar & Butter — $4

Drinks

Homemade Limeade — $3

Dear Shopper,

Every now and then I like to throw out a thought for your consideration. These thoughts are usually triggered by something I have read. In this case it is two articles that were in the paper just in the last few days.

First there was an article in The Washington Post about a prediction that by 2030, 50 percent of the adults in this country will be obese. Obese does not mean grossly overweight, as we might imagine, but it does mean overweight enough to affect our health in numerous deleterious ways.

Most of the attention this statistic receives concerns those negative health outcomes, including chronic diseases and premature death. But I wonder about the effect of such a statistic on our nation’s productivity. Unhealthy people cannot possibly complete a successful day’s work as we now define it, so I am thinking that this crisis could also affect our economic output and our country’s relative wealth as well as its health.

I also read just today in The Wall Street Journal about some scary findings by scientists who are monitoring the cultivation of the new gene-altered corn crops. These seeds are designed to repel certain serious infestations, but the scientists have found evidence that instead of being eradicated in the cornfields, the bugs are returning as “super bugs” that are resistant to all known insecticides. That’s one we didn’t see coming! Or did we?

Who is going to want to insure all of those obese people? They will be as uninsurable as the Outer Banks homeowners before long. And what happens to the farmers who can no longer get a corn crop into the silo? Even those who did not plant the corn will be affected. Unintended consequences and their collateral damage — these terms are becoming as prevalent as obesity itself. Are we moving too fast or not fast enough in making decisions that affect our society?

In fact, lots of people saw these things coming. We have heard for more than a decade that we are heading toward a health crisis that will make our present health system’s deficiencies and high costs look reasonable by comparison. In doing some cleaning out of files and boxes lately I found clippings from early in this century raising alarms about both of these situations, and ten years ago official spokesmen for organizations and our government were minimizing both of these threats. Just look at the slow progression of the USDA Food Pyramid-to-Plate — you can see where these two issues merge under the umbrella of corporate farming and its political influence in this country.

Medical scientists, physicians, environmental scientists, nutritionists, reporters and writers did see these things coming. But even as these advocates for caution are vilified as radicals and un-American thinkers, it looks as if they were right. I wonder why no one is listening, and I wonder what we can do to change that at the grassroots level. There must be something we can do. If those of us who know how to prevent obesity in our own lives and families don’t take this on, we surely cannot expect those who are overwhelmed by it to lobby for change. And those independent farmers who are at the mercy of their corporate farm neighbors — who represents them?

Think about it as you buy your food from farmers and individuals who are dedicated to feeding you good food for your good health. Sounds pretty simple from that perspective, doesn’t it?

See you at the market!

Photo by puuikibeach

Here are some safety tips for using knives, courtesy of our knife sharpener, Rod Koozmin. You can bring Rod your knives and scissors for sharpening at our Fairfax Corner and Reston locations.

Cut away from your hand and body, not toward yourself.

If you drop your knife, let it fall. Don’t attempt to catch it.

Never run with a knife.

Use a proper cutting board. Don’t try and cut in the air without one.

Don’t throw a knife to anyone. Hand it to them handle first.

Never point a knife at anyone.

Do not use a locking blade if the lock will not lock open. Make sure the lock is working before using it.

Keep your knife folded or sheathed when carrying or storing.

Use the right tool for the job.

Don’t use a knife for prying. It can cause the tip to break, possibly causing injury.

Use in a well-lit area, so you can see what you are doing.

Do not use a knife on electrical items such as appliances.

Keep your knife clean, particularly the locking mechanism.

Keep your knife oiled and sharp. A sharp knife is safer than a dull one.

If you get cut, seek first aid immediately.