The Cincinnati Nature Center will host a Local Foods Potluck Wednesday April 16th 6:30-8:30 in Rowe Woods Auditorium at their Tealtown location in Milford. If you'd like to attend, bring a dish made from local ingredients, copies of your recipe, and your own plate and utensils. There's no charge to participate. For more information or directions, visit their site.
Polly Campbell reports there's a new restaurant in Florence, NuVo, which will be focussing on "local ingredients, or at least American ingredients." No review yet, as it just opened Tuesday. I couldn't find a website for them, but their number is 859-283-2100.
Update: their site is up! Thanks, Skyler, for the heads up!
Must reading from today's New York Times for anyone interested in local, sustainable eating:
As the price of fossil fuels and commodities like grain climb, nutritionally questionable, high-profit ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup will, too. As a result, Cokes are likely to get smaller and cost more. Then, the argument goes, fewer people will drink them.
And if American staples like soda, fast-food hamburgers and frozen dinners don’t seem like such a bargain anymore, the American eating public might turn its attention to ingredients like local fruits and vegetables, and milk and meat from animals that eat grass. It turns out that those foods, already favorites of the critics of industrial food, have also dodged recent price increases.
Higher food costs, [locavores, small growers, activist chefs and others] say, could push pasture-raised milk and meat past its boutique status, make organic food more accessible and spark a national conversation about why inexpensive food is not really such a bargain after all.
Obviously no one would wish increasing food prices to cause true hunger in America, which economist and Pace University professor Robert Parks called a possibility last week in the Christian Science Monitor. But to spark a national debate on the true costs of cheap food? The loss of the dollar burger might be worth it.
Hooray, it's the time of year again when I optimistically start seeds in pots indoors, planning an abundant garden to nourish my family all summer. Since I garden with much more enthusiasm than competence, much of my early spring efforts eventually come to naught. I know this to be the likely outcome; nevertheless each spring hope triumphs over experience (see definition of insanity) and I soldier on.
Here in SW Ohio, we're in hardiness zone 5b/6a. That means our average date of last frost is around the 15th of May. Which in turn means we can start seeds during the first week of April and by the time the seedlings are ready to be set out 6-8 weeks later, we can (with fingers crossed) expect them to survive.
This year I'm starting chives, tomatoes, and basil. Chives and basil because I know the deer and rabbits and squirrels will leave them alone until they get desperate; tomatoes because, well, see definition of insanity again -- I know the squirrels and rabbits will get most of them, but I just can't help myself when it comes to tomatoes. I'm also starting about sixty impatiens this year, as last year I purchased four flats and it started to get expensive.
I've also just ordered some wild onion and ramp seeds. It seems odd to be planting wild plants, even more so one that most gardeners would consider a weed like the wild onion, but this year I had plenty of wild garlic and no wild onions. I'd like to have some for next year. And ramps! I am so hoping I have success with those -- it would be quite the bragging point if I could claim to have ramps growing in my backyard.
Is anyone else getting their seeds in yet?
Inspired by this comment from Kelly and this one from Jen on a previous post about cooking from scratch, I thought I'd ask:
If you had an unlimited food budget -- that is, you could spend as much as you liked on feeding your family but had to spend it feeding yourselves and couldn't use if for any other purpose no matter how much you'd prefer to give it to charity or save it for a rainy day or buy other things -- how would you eat?
Would you eat nearly every meal in restaurants?
Order pizza or pick up Thai food most nights?
Buy convenience foods because that's what you really prefer?
Shop for the best ingredients and cook most meals from scratch?
Hire a personal chef?
I guess the bottom line is: how does our food budget affect our eating decisions? As food prices continue to increase (and prognostications say it's going to get worse), how will that change our food choices?
For me, my food budget is one of the less important issues in my food choices. That is, it affects the details (Chicken vs. beef? Hamburger vs. steak? Go meatless a few nights a week?) but there are other things I'd cut out before budgetary concerns spurred me to buy cheaper, lower-quality food.
And if I had a truly unlimited food budget? A personal chef sometimes sounds like a tempting idea, but then I remember I live in my kitchen anyway. I might as well cook. So even with an unlimited food budget, I'd probably do pretty much what I do now.
Announcing the Looking Nearby for Food Blog Carnival!
A blog carnival is an online magazine dedicated to a particular topic and published on a regular schedule. Each edition is in the form of a blog post containing permalinks to other blog articles on the particular topic and providing a digest of the best recent posts on that topic by a variety of bloggers.
Looking Nearby for Food will be published monthly and cover topics near and dear to the hearts of local eaters everywhere -- truly seasonal recipes (please submit these during the correct season for your main ingredients), your area's unique local ingredients, the current offerings at your local farmers' markets, small farmers and growers in your area, reviews of restaurants in your area that focus on sourcing locally, foraging, growing your own vegetables, canning and preserving the harvest, and many other types of posts are welcome! If you have a blog and have a post on one of these topics that you are particularly proud of, please submit it to me here for consideration. Or just email me a link -- there's an email link in my profile. Here are some tips on what makes a great blog carnival submission. The carnival will appear each month here on cincinnatilocavore as one of our regular posts.
For bloggers, submitting your best blog posts to appropriate blog carnivals is a great way to attract new readers to your blog. From ProBlogger:
If I had to pick one tip to give new and aspiring bloggers, it would be this: participate in blog carnivals.
For readers interested in a particular subject, blog carnivals provide a vetted digest of the best recent posts on that topic and an introduction to some great blogs.
The first edition will appear April 15th. We'll accept submissions until April 12th; submissions after that date will be considered for the next edition.
I've been thinking a lot about cooking from scratch since I posted here. Eating locally pretty much assumes you're willing (and able) to cook from scratch. But it doesn't seem as if many people are actually cooking from scratch, and when they are it's not so much because they want the best food possible on their tables. I have a regular google search set up for the term, and every day I get a few new hits. And every day, by far the majority are for mentions of cooking from scratch for reasons of frugality, not for food quality or taste.
Why are so few people talking about cooking from scratch because scratch-cooked food is just better food?
It's better because you know all the ingredients. No butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) is needed for freshness or calcium proprionate to reduce mold growth or any other food additives to make up for the fact the basic ingredients had no flavor or to improve texture or mouth feel or color or palatability.
You know the ingredients were top quality and in prime condition. As compared to prepared foods, which contain ingredients so highly processed you have no idea what condition they were in when they started down the assembly line. That whole chicken you bought at the farmers' market just looked fresh. What does chicken look like before it's made into Tyson chicken fritters?
You know how the ingredients were prepared because you prepared them. You know the tomato peels weren't removed by spraying them with carboxylic acid because you peeled the tomatoes -- or decided not to remove the peels. You know the person who diced your carrots wasn't coughing all over them because you diced them.
You know what proportions the ingredients were in. You tweaked the recipe to your own family's tastes -- you used more garlic, less cayenne, butter instead of olive oil, left out the tree nuts, added extra veggies, whatever. You didn't need to add MSG to make the recipe universally appealing because you only needed to appeal to a small group, not the entire country.
You end up with something on your plate that you know, intimately. You know it's good food because you made it that way.
Wild garlic (Allium Vineale), along with wild onion (Allium Canadense), is one of the earliest harbingers of spring. I've been getting interested in learning more about foods we can forage here in Southwestern Ohio, and spring is prime foraging time. So I walked out to the boggy semi-wooded area of my back yard today. Sure enough, there were numerous clumps of wild garlic. You probably have some in your yard, too. They're easiest to see this time of year before you've started mowing, as they start growing before the grass does. They prefer wet areas at the edge of woods, so look under trees and wherever the ground tends to get marshy in the spring.
Growing, wild onion and wild garlic look very much alike in the early spring. According to the Michigan State Extension Service, wild garlic leaves are round and hollow and attach to the lower half of the stem. Wild onion leaves are flat, not hollow, and attach at the bulb.
It was helpful we've had so much rain recently, as in Cincinnati's heavy clay I'd've had a hard time harvesting these if the soil hadn't been waterlogged. I managed to pull up three clumps whole with bulbs covered in wet-clay mud, but one clump came up just leaves and no bulbs. But that's fine, there's plenty of flavor in the leaves, too. These are best in early spring, from mid-March to mid-April, while the tops are tender.
Cleaning these things is a royal pain. Mud, leaves, sticks, worms. Don't clean them in the In-Sink-Erator side of your sink. Trust me on this. But the hassle is worth it: you've just foraged a food from your backyard. How cool is that? And even cooler, this is a food that undoubtedly your great-times-five-hundred-grandmother was foraging in early spring 10,000 years ago as a member of some hunter-gatherer tribe. Now that's a traditional food! So turn on some music and get ready to stand at the sink for a while. Gx500Grandma rinsed them squatting by a snowmelt-fed stream. Kwitcherbitchin.
Here's what wild garlic looks like with most of the mud washed off but not yet trimmed. In my heavy clay this early in the year, the bulb ends haven't gotten very big. If you have a looser loam, you might get nice big bulbs, especially if you're harvesting in late April.
You can see the light brown hulls remaining on many of the bulbs. These slip off fairly easily -- soaking in warm water helps with the stubborn ones -- and then you just pinch off the roots between your fingers.
Here's what they look like trimmed and ready to use in a recipe. At this point, you can wrap them loosely in a damp paper towel and stick them into a plastic bag in the fridge for a couple of days, just like chives or other fresh herbs.
Wild garlic can be substituted for fresh chives (in which case you can just snip off the tops instead of pulling them and skip all the cleaning!) or for shallots, making its early appearance a boon to cooks trying to eat locally. However, it's not easy to find recipes specifying wild garlic. Most of what you find instead are recipes for ramps, one of the most prized of spring's foraged foods, which are called wild garlic in the UK. However, I did find one wild garlic recipe in The African-American Heritage Cookbook. I've adapted it here:
WILD GARLIC WITH BACON AND EGGS
Serves 1
1 slice bacon, diced
1/4 c wild garlic, chopped
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 t salt
1/8 t pepper
In a hot pan, saute bacon until nearly crisp. Stir in garlic and let cook until bacon is crisp. Stir in eggs and seasonings and fry, stirring, until eggs are done to your taste. Serve immediately.
Jamie Oliver, the British television cooking-show chef, is starting a new series in which he plans to teach people how to cook from scratch.
"We spend over £2bn a year on ready meals, and that's not even counting junk food and takeaways," said Oliver. "Millions of people up and down the country are really busy, they're on tight budgets, and no one has bothered to teach them how to cook. It's no wonder that the last thing they want to do at the end of the day is cook a meal from scratch."
He's taking his inspiration from the British government's hugely successful propaganda campaigns during World War II, which included the Ministry of Agriculture's Dig for Victory, a series of posters advocating planting home gardens, and the Ministry of Food's The Kitchen Front, a series of BBC radio shorts which through vignettes of life with the Buggins family instructed housewives in how to feed their families well despite food rationing.
"I hope that once people see how quick, cheap and easy - as well as rewarding - it can be to prepare good food for you and your family, the ready meals and takeaways will be straight in the bin."
Here at Cincinnati Locavore we're big fans of cooking from scratch, and not only because it's literally the only way to manage eating locally. Scratch cooking means knowing your ingredients and being able to pronounce them! So we'd love to see this series. Unfortunately the intense focus on the UK will probably keep it from crossing the pond, same as his Jamie's School Dinners series. Guess we'll have to wait for the DVD!
The Washington Post yesterday ran an article featuring chain restaurants which are experimenting with sourcing locally, including Chipotle Mexican Grill. But for Chipotle, supplying a single franchise with a single ingredient has required nearly a year and a half of planning and a complete revisioning of distribution channels.
This month, Chipotle hopes to serve 100 percent Polyface pork in Charlottesville [VA]. But that success comes after 17 months of complex negotiations and logistics, including buying extra cooking equipment, developing new recipes, adjusting work schedules and investing in temperature-monitoring technology for Polyface's delivery van. In recent months, [Chipotle's operations director for the northeast region Phil] Petrilli has visited the Charlottesville outlet about every two weeks, four times as often as he visits other restaurants in the region.
Even if Chipotle's experiment is just a marketing ploy to provide that trendy aura of corporate green awareness and responsibility -- greenwashing -- the message is a powerful one: Going Local is Possible. So big applause for their efforts. I do have to wonder if it's really possible to translate this to the rest of their ingredients and their other 699 outlets. It seems as if doing so would inevitably destroy the economies of scale that make fast food so cheap. Can fast food survive with slow food prices?
