Dark Days Challenge/Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and salad

I just realized it's the end of the first week and I've neglected to post this week's official 90% local meal. I also neglected to take a photo, but next time I make this particular meal I'll photograph it.

Thursday night, we had:

Meatloaf (local ground beef, ground pork, eggs, onions, garlic, parsley, yogurt, and bacon, along with non-local pantry items: olive oil, chili sauce, brown sugar, cider vinegar, dried thyme, Dijon, Worcestershire, hot pepper sauce, panko bread crumbs. I ought to be able to find a local source for the chili sauce, vinegar, thyme, Dijon, hot pepper sauce. Not sure about the sugar -- do they make brown sugar from beets? I could also use locally-produced bread and make my own crumbs, but I really like the panko crumbs in this particular recipe, so I'll keep using them. And Worcestershire -- no idea, there. I know it contains anchovies, though, so I'm thinking not.) The meatloaf was out of the freezer, and it was my last one, so I need to make up a new batch of five. I'll take pictures and post the recipe.

Mashed potatoes (local potatoes, butter and cream.)

Salad (local lettuce and microgreens)

Salad dressing (locally-bottled, don't know any more about it. I should try making my own. I make my own mayonnaise, how much harder can it be to add yogurt and herbs?)

Today we freeze...ONIONS?

Yes, onions in the freezer. One of the nice things about onions -- an ingredient many of us use for nearly every meal -- is that they freeze beautifully with minimal processing. Unlike many vegetables, they don't need to be blanched before freezing. The thawed product can't be substituted for onions eaten uncooked (frozen and thawed onions have a texture similar to that of onions that have been sweated briefly) but the difference is imperceptible in nearly all cooked dishes.

We're nearly at the end of onion season here in Southwest Ohio, so this week I went out to Greenacres and bought all they had. The gardener said they might have a few more, so I'll probably head over again in the next few days and see what I find. In a month or so, when my fresh onions have reached the end of their storage life and everyone else is buying onions shipped from Texas, I'll still be using Ohio onions.

ONIONS FOR THE FREEZER

Peel and chop the onions into whatever size you find you use most often -- I generally do a 1/4" dice, as that's a fairly versatile size. Spread in a single layer on a foil-lined cookie sheet and slip into the freezer for several hours or overnight.

When they're frozen solid, pack the frozen pieces into bags. If you use gallon bags, you can simply take out the bag, remove what onions you need (freezing them before packing means they don't stick together in a solid lump, which facilitates the removal of the exact quantity required) and put the bag right back in the freezer.

I like to vacuum pack whatever I can because removing the air means less freezer burn and in turn longer storage life. I've never vacuum packed onions before, though, so I'll have to see how it works. They may end up sticking together a bit, but maybe if I slam the bag on the counter that'll break them up. I used a 6" vacuum bag rolls, cut a long bag and sealed one end using my handy-dandy Seal-a-Meal. Stuff it full of onions, seal the other end, and place it in the freezer. When I cut open the bag to take some out, I'll end up with a smaller bag but fewer onions and (I hope) have enough room on the new open end to make a fresh vacuum seal. (Sealing requires about 2" of unpacked bag end.)

I'm also saving and freezing the ends of today's onions for the end of next week's roast chicken. When the carcass is clean and I'm ready to make stock, I'll pull the onion ends out of the freezer. How frugal am I?

Eyes on Iowa

There's an argument to be made that as Iowa goes, so goes the future of American farming. Iowa produces more than its fair share of our feed crops and industrial food inputs. Nowhere has industrial agriculture been more important in changing the face of the countryside, and yet fewer Iowans than ever are actually farming, and diversified farms have for the most part gone the way of the VCR.

In a series of reports, Grist investigates what's happening in Iowa and what Iowans are doing to get Iowa -- and perhaps all of American farming -- on a different track.

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) thinks we're just dumb.

Rep. Collin Peterson, Chair of the House Agricultural Committee, doesn't think farmers raising organic produce and grass-fed beef for local consumers needs any federal help. ‘It is growing, and it has nothing to do with the government, and that is good,’ he told a reporter for Financial Times. ‘For whatever reason, people are willing to pay two or three times as much for something that says ‘organic’ or ‘local’. Far be it from me to understand what that’s about, but that’s reality. And if people are dumb enough to pay that much then hallelujah.’

I went to Rep. Peterson's website to explain in words of two or fewer syllables that when we eat local and organic, we're supporting local small farmers and sustainable ethical food production, which in turn helps our community thrive and helps protect the environment. But he doesn't take mail from nonconstituents so I guess he'll just have to keep on thinking we're dumb.

Finally, the rain we needed in August and September.

It's raining again today, hooray! I've been assiduously watering my trees since mid-August and anxiously watching those trees that had no one to water them as they slowly turned brown. According to CincinnatiGreen, a blog written by a local arborist, trees can go dormant in a severe drought but whether the tree has gone dormant or has died won't be apparent until the next spring when the tree either leafs out or it doesn't. And even if it does survive, the effects of the drought on that tree can be felt for a decade after.

Here's a fascinating animated map showing the progression of this year's drought week by week. (If the animation doesn't work, click refresh to get it going.)

Well, fascinating to me, of course. To local farmers, it's just plain depressing. I have heard of local grassfarmers having to sell off their pastured herds because there's no pasturing left and the costs of bringing in organic hay are prohibitive in a down year. Other farmers simply gave up on entire crops this year, or opened dying crop fields as pasture for foraging cattle. A year like this can provide a final blow to a struggling small farmer, so it's especially important to buy local whenever we can.

Sustainable Organic Local Ethical milk

When I decided I wanted to extend my local eating to local dairy, I discovered it wasn't going to be as easy as finding a local source for tomatoes. Most of us buy milk from some anonymous corporation which in turn has bought it from multiple dairy farms -- some of them megafarms -- and put it all into one big vat. It's impossible to know exactly where that glass of milk came from.

It may have come from somewhere not too far away. United Dairy Farmers' milk is local, if you consider the tristate to be our local area. Their 200 stores in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana are supplied by a milk co-op that includes approximately 75 dairy farmers located throughout the three states. In the grand scheme of things, that actually seems pretty local to me.

But there's a further issue. When I walk out of a UDF with a half-gallon of skim, I have no idea which of those 75 farmers produced that milk, whether his farming methods are sustainable, or how the cow was treated. I also know that the farmer likely is making around $1.77/gallon for his product, which for a small dairy farmer almost certainly isn't enough to keep his farm going from one generation to the next.

Part of my reason for wanting to eat locally -- a big part of it -- is that I want to know how my food is raised. I want to know my food dollars are going to support local farmers using sustainable, humane methods. When possible, I want to know the person who is feeding me. About the only way you can know who produces your milk and how it was produced is to buy it directly from the dairy farmer -- which means it probably hasn't been processed. It's raw. And here in Ohio, that's illegal. In Ohio, raw milk cannot be sold.

Which is why I bought a herdshare.

Under a herdshare agreement, the milk consumer purchases a portion of a cow, pays a set amount per month for that cow's board and care, and receives milk back as the owner's dividend.

I found a dairy farmer nearby who for $50 sold me 1/25th of one of his eight cows. I pay $22 a month for my portion of the cow's board, and in return each week I drive out to the farm and pick up a gallon of fresh raw milk, which works out to about $5.08 per gallon if you discount the original purchase price which I'll get back if I ever decide to sell my portion of the cow. My farmer* produces only raw milk -- an important distinction, as milk intended for pasteurization is generally handled very differently from that which is consumed raw. On my first visit to his farm, he took me out to his small sweet corn field where 'the girls' were eating the remains of the stand of corn that had been lost to this year's drought. They looked up when we came through the gate and came when he called, Cinnamon and the others, and they clearly expected to get petted for their trouble.

The farmer's wife told me on my last visit that they now had a waiting list. I told her they needed to buy another cow. She threw her hands up. "Don't tell him! That's what he's saying! We don't need another cow!"


* I won't reveal my farmer's name for fear of getting him in trouble. Herdshares take advantage of a loophole in Ohio law which has been treated differently by different administrations. The current administration is looking the other way, for now, but given that Big Dairy is a powerful lobby, that could change at any time. The previous administration had a policy of harrassment of herdshare offerers in what seemed a clear attempt to put them out of business by the simple but very effective strategy of requiring them to run up legal fees until they went broke.

At the Hyde Park Farmers' Market

I joined the Dark Days of Winter Eat Local Challenge, which asks us to prepare one meal a week from local ingredients from now until the end of the year. I've been putting some apples and potatoes by, but I figured we were going to want something green for those late-season meals. Today at the Hyde Park Farmers' Market I found some beautiful kale at Running Creek Farms, so I bought 6 bunches -- all he had -- and I'm going to blanche it and put it into the freezer today. Also grabbed some sort of Japanese greens from Rising Sun Farms, a couple of pounds also for the freezer. I also picked up a half-dozen butternut squash to store in the basement, hoping to serve those once a week, too, and some more raw local honey from McGovern Bee Company.

PREPARING KALE FOR THE FREEZER

Fill spaghetti cooker with water, salt lightly, and bring to a boil. Wash kale well (don't skip this step -- like many greens, kale tends to contain a lot of grit, which is not fun to eat) and trim by folding each leaf in half lengthwise and cutting through both sides of the leaf along the main vein to remove the tough vein. Place the trimmed kale into the spaghetti cooker's colander insert and into the boiling water for 2 minutes, then immediately into cold water to arrest the cooking. Drain well and squeeze gently to remove excess water. Separate into meal-size portions (I generally allow 3 ounces per person) and freeze.

If you process several batches of kale like I did today in the same water, consider saving the cooking water as vegetable stock for your freezer.

2007 Farm Bill at YouTube.

This from Oxfam on why it's time to call your Senator.

So that's why it's so hard to know whom to believe.

The New York Times this week offers a fascinating question: Is it possible doctors have succumbed to an irresistible pressure to agree that fat is bad for us when there's no such proof?

In Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus, (Findings, October 9th) columnist and debunker John Tierney talks about why physicians such as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop might have made dietary recommendations based on received wisdom rather than on actual evidence. Tierney presents evidence of a phenomenon social scientists call 'informational cascade' in which one person tends to agree with the opinions of trusted others rather than evaluating the evidence independently. As agreement on the issue builds, dissenters are ostracized until eventually an entire community of so-called experts may very well believe something that simply hasn't been proved.

Cultured butter from kefir-cultured cream

I attempted my first cultured butter today.

KEFIR-CULTURED BUTTER

Place your kefir grains into a flow-through bag (this will keep you from having to fish through the cultured cream, which is as thick as creme fraiche, the next morning to retrieve your kefir grains) and add the bag to a quart or so of raw cream in the bowl of your stand mixer. Stir gently, then cover loosely with a clean cloth. In the morning, the bowl will contain cultured cream. (Which by the way is delicious -- far superior in both taste and texture to commercial sour cream. Use it in place of sour cream, or mix with honey and use in place of cream fraiche or whipped cream.) Fish out the bag containing your kefir grains, squeezing the bag gently to remove as much of your cultured cream as possible.

Place the bowl of cultured cream into the fridge until the temperature of the cream is 60 - 65 degrees. (I use a probe thermometer.) When the cream is at the correct temperature, snap the bowl into the blender and using the whisk attachment (and the shields!) whip on high until the butter comes. I scraped the sides down once after a few minutes.

Drain the butter into a sieve over a catch-bowl. In the bowl you now have cultured buttermilk, and it's delicious if you drink it immediately. If you don't drink it immediately, use it for cooking. If you have no culinary use for it, pour it over the dog's food. I've also used it to encourage the growth of moss in my garden -- moss loves buttermilk.

Place the butter into a small bowl and cover with cold water. (I fill it from the tap and add an ice cube.) With a wooden spoon, press the butter against the sides of the bowl. When the water becomes cloudy, dump it out and start with fresh water, each time using the wooden spoon to turn and press the butter against the sides of the bowl. Turn and press, turn and press, dumping cloudy water and adding fresh water (and if needed another ice cube) again and again until several minutes of turning and pressing don't cloud the water. This step is the most time-consuming and tedious, and it's tempting to stop too soon. Any buttermilk left in your butter will quickly turn rancid, ruining your butter.

When the water stays clear after several minutes of working the butter, drain and place on a cutting board. Work the butter a little longer to work the water out of it, then spread on the board and if desired, lightly salt, work a little longer to work the salt through, then pack and chill. I generally put the finished butter on to a piece of plastic wrap and roll it into a log, then chill. If it's intended for the freezer, I mark and seal.

On first taste, I don't actually detect much difference between the cultured butter and the butter made from fresh raw cream. I need to do a side-by-side taste test using a bland cracker or bread as the delivery medium. Or possibly I need to culture the cream for a longer period before making the butter to develop a stronger taste.