The Stash

We'll start this off with a quick pictorial of what we did with our CSA veggies on Monday and Tuesday:

Monday was a Tofu and Bok Choy stir-fry

 

Tuesday was stuffed Japanese Eggplant and summer squash 

The stuffed squashes were a creation of Joe's, made entirely with what we had on hand in the stash.  They were stuffed with ground beef, onions, tomatoes, garlic, garlic scapes, and topped with fresh mozzarella and basil from the garden outside.

You could easily sub in chicken or pork in the tofu stir-fry, but with its sherry-soy sauce marinade the tofu is wonderfully crispy on the outside and creamy-tasty on the inside.

So, what's this Stash I keep referring to?  Well, before this blog started, Joe and I tended to shop economically, buying things like meat and canned goods in bulk and freezing/storing them as appropriate.  As much as I love this experiment, we're not going to waste all that food by letting it languish in the freezer getting freezerburned.  So, we'll keep you all up to date when we run out of things in The Stash and what we're using to replace it.  We'll be following our Rules when we replenish, and part of that is humane, ethical treatment for not only the livestock involved in the food process, but the humans and the land too.  'Organic' doesn't mean good conditions or a living wage for farmhands, after all.  This means that simply heading to the grocery store and grabbing the first thing we see labelled as 'Organic' isn't going to cut it -- there are a lot of problems with the USDA Organic labelling.

One of the biggest problems with the USDA's certification system is the expense and amount of paperwork required.  This is a cost that agribusiness giants can roll into their operating costs pretty easily, but that can be quite difficult for small family farmers to bear.  Another issue is that once the standards are federally regulated, it opens the door for agribusiness lobbyists to water down the standards.  Finally, regulation is spotty at best -- there are only 53 domestic USDA Organic inspectors for the entire United States, and only 41 for the rest of the world!  Nonprofits like The Cornucopia Institute have formed to push for better enforcement and as an opposing force to agribusiness lobbying, while other organizations like Humane Farm Animal Care have created their own, higher-quality certification schemes for livestock producers trying to do the right thing.

All this seems pretty daunting when you just want to buy food for your family.  Over the next few months, I'll be researching these programs and others like them, going on farm visits to local producers around the region, and trying to figure out if it's possible to live entirely on food we can live with.

The Long-Awaited Ravioli Post!

Hi everyone!  Sorry for the gap in posts -- this last week and weekend were kind of crazy with various festivities and friends.  I'll try and catch you all up over the next week.  We actually only cooked TWICE last week, which is unusual for us.  But what we did cook was marvelous.

Tuesday was the 21st, the summer solstice, and Joe and I celebrated by making ravioli stuffed with homemade ricotta, sauteed beet greens, and Parmesan reggianio.  We sauced with a homemade red sauce, but you can also use browned butter or a commercial tomato sauce if you're not doing an experiment in sourcing your food.  Pictures for this post will be a little spotty because my camera battery died and I had to charge it so I could get the last few pictures.

I started out with making a basic egg pasta (10 oz all-purpose flour, three beaten eggs) in the food processor.  Dump the flour in and pulse it a few times to even it out, pour in the eggs while the machine is running, and when the dough comes together in a big shaggy ball, turn it out onto a clean work surface and knead any flour/scrappy bits of dough in until it's smooth.  Wrap in plastic wrap and let it rest for 20 minutes or so. 

While the dough was resting, the beet greens were being prepped.  If you don't have beet greens but still want to make this, any substantial green will work: kale, swiss chard, etc.  You want to use the leafy bits while cutting the center rib out of the green like this:

The ones on the left have been cut, the ones on the right still need to be done, and the things in the middle are some cut out ribs.  We cut the ribs out because they are quite grassy in flavor, while the leafy bits are interestingly bitter without being too much.


Once the greens are trimmed, heat 2 Tbsp olive oil in a saute pan.  Toss in a nice big clove of garlic that's been minced or put through a garlic press and saute the garlic until it's golden and fragrant (no more than a minute).  Throw in the greens, and saute them together until the greens are wilted.  Dump the greens and garlic into the food processor and pulse it until the greens are minced finely.  Turn the greens out into a largish bowl and add 15 oz of ricotta (preferably whole milk and even better if it's homemade), 3 Tbsps of Parmesan Reggiano, a little salt, a little fresh-ground pepper, and an egg white and mix them all together.
Start a big pot of salted water on the stove -- you'll need it to be boiling to cook the raviolis.

You can roll pasta dough out by hand with a French rolling pin, but I have a pasta machine and a powerful desire to use it, so machine it was.  Divide the dough into six pieces (I use a bench scraper), and work one piece at a time while keeping the others in the wrap.  Do standard machine kneading (set machine on the widest setting, roll it through, then fold the sides into the middle, turn it 90 degrees, run it through the machine again, and repeat the fold and turn twice more).

Then roll the dough very thin -- you want it to run through the machine at the next to last setting (don't forget that you have to roll it through each setting in turn!) in sheets.  Cover each sheet with a damp paper towel to keep the pasta fresh while you are rolling the others.

 Once the pasta is rolled, put a rounded tablespoon of the filling about an inch apart on the sheet of pasta.







Fold over the top half of the dough and seal the proto-raviolis.  Make sure that you get as much air out of them as possible, because the air expands during cooking and could make the raviolis explode, losing their filling to the boiling water.

See?  No exploded raviolis here!

When they float like this, they're done.  Put a cooling rack in the sink, and use a slotted spoon to gently remove the raviolis from the water and put them onto the rack to drain a little.

Sauce them however you like -- browned butter, red sauce, whatever.  Try and keep the sauce relatively simple, as you want the flavours of the ravioli to shine through.  We garnished with more Parm, and had a nice Chianti with ours.




Happy eating!

First CSA delivery!

So, on Friday it happened! I headed over to pick up our first CSA box. I intended to have a nice sit down interview with Leigh Hauter, one of the owners of Bull Run Mountain Farm, but just as he handed me the bag to pick out my veggies, the skies opened up. It poured for about 20 minutes, during which I chose this week's food and then retreated, soaked and bedraggled, to my car. Next time!

Let's begin the picture apocalypse, shall we?

The bag was provided to us by Bull Run Farm as part of our subscription. It's a lovely big sturdy bag that will get more use than just veggie toting! It looks so innocent in this shot, doesn't it?

Here's what was hiding in that bag!
Keep in mind that in these first few weeks, you'll be seeing a lot of green -- greens like lettuces, herbs, etc are always the first things to ripen.








We got radishes,


and beets


and beet greens


and curly endive (aka frisee)

and pac choi


and garlic scapes.


We also got basil, tarragon, chives, and catnip. The cats were impressed with the chives

and the catnip especially.


Temujin, of course, didn't care.



We've got a great list of meals with these ingredients planned! First up will be ravioli stuffed with beet greens, homemade ricotta cheese, and Parmesan. Joe will be making a homemade tomato sauce (using up some of the canned tomato stash!) to go with it.

Community Supported Agriculture and Seasonal Eating

So, here's where I sheepishly admit that I messed up my dates, and our CSA doesn't actually start until June 17th. Whoops!

To tide you over, let's talk about CSAs and what they are. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and many people think that it is one of the best ways forward for our family farms and farmers. In a CSA, you essentially buy a share of a local farmer's crop in advance. The farmer uses that money to buy seed, farm equipment, whatever, and you get a weekly share of whatever is ripe at that farm during the growing season. The advantage to CSAs is that they are often less expensive than buying at farmers' markets, the produce generally travels less than 50 miles from farm to your fridge, and many CSA farmers use organic methods. As well, you're supporting local family farmers and helping them keep agricultural spaces in an increasingly suburban and urban world.

The primary disadvantage is that, like a garden, a CSA forces you to eat seasonally. Seasons are different all over the US, but here in Northern Virginia, for example, it means that our first CSA delivery is going to be primarily greens, broccoli, and some herbs. Tomatoes don't start until sometime in July, and the greens will close to being over by then, so salads will have to be more creative then lettuce and tomatoes. As a consumer culture, we've gotten used to being able to have whatever we want whenever we want it -- strawberries in February, tomatoes in April, lettuce in August. We find recipes and then shop to buy the ingredients. Eating seasonally means that we'll be getting our ingredients and then finding recipes to use them in. Joe and I are actually excited by this prospect! This is going to challenge our creativity as cooks in a way that we find enormously interesting. Joe, of course, is going to be taking point on a lot of the recipe creativity, but I'll be doing my part and documenting the whole thing.

Our CSA is Bull Run Mountain Farm

Beginnings

In a way, this all started with the book Fast Food Nation. My then boyfriend (now husband) and I read it, put down the Big Macs, and moved on with our lives. We were just learning to cook then, back in the Dark Ages of 2001, and it was our first wake-up call regarding where food comes from and how it gets to us. But it sparked an interest in both of us, and we started to pay more attention to what we were eating and where it came from. We started seeking out local restaurants over chains, started patronizing our local farmer's markets, and started a love affair with cooking from scratch, not boxes or bags. Fast-forward to 2009, when I was taking a course in business and technical writing. I needed to interview someone in a company I was interested in about what sort of writing was important to them. I had stumbled across a non-profit organization called Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) that was using a labelling program to allow consumers to know that the meat, milk, or eggs that they were consuming had been produced from animals that lived pretty good lives, and so I contacted them. The interview led to an summer writing internship, and that spark of interest in where my ingredients came from flamed up again.

We started seeking out free-range eggs and grass-fed beef and organic milk, but it soon became frustrating trying to navigate whether 'free-range' actually meant that the chickens had the meaningful opportunity to go outside and be chickens, or if it just meant that an industrial farm cut a 1'x1' hole in a barn wall that led to 5'x5' asphalt pad (for a flock of a thousand) so they could charge a premium for my soft-heartedness. As well, the tightening job market and soaring food prices meant that it was getting harder to pay those premiums when I didn't even know if we were actually doing any good. We threw up our hands, and went back to Costco (but we still kept buying those cage-free eggs because I'm a sucker like that).

Then I discovered the Hunter's Head Tavern. The restaurant is owned by Ayrshire Farm, a name I recognized from my stint at HFAC as one of the certified farms, and I told my husband that I wanted to drive out to Middleburg, VA and give it a try. We got into a discussion about factory farming, the cost of raising animals in an ethical and sustainable way, and $100+ turkeys (ouch!). I had been kicking around the idea of a blog for a while, and he suggested that we try a 'Middleburg Challenge' where we see if we could afford to/put up with the inconvenience of eating ethically according to our standards. And an idea for a blog was born.

We're starting easy -- the growing season is on us and our CSA makes its first delivery tomorrow, June 3rd. We'll be keeping to our rules until our CSA's delivery season comes to an end in October, and then re-evaluate from there. I'll be posting about our meals, our food sources, highlighting products and producers and what makes them acceptable, and of course, our garden. I hope you'll come with us as we discover the food we want -- if it's possible on a real-world budget to live on food we can live with.