Planning for the off season

May 11, 2010
What if you've become convinced that food grown who-knows-where and who-knows-how isn't what you want any more? What if you wanted to try to eat (and support the production of) only local food -- food that you either grew yourself or got directly from the source -- grown with old-fashioned organic integrity (free of any pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, etc.)? What would you have to do to make it happen? How could it be done? We want to consider these questions as they apply to a full spectrum of food groups, but for this week we want to talk about vegetables.
   Vegetables may seem like the easiest food group to "go local" with, and they can pretty easily and conveniently be found from small farms and backyard growers. When it comes to vegetables, the challenges lie in eating in-season and in putting up surplus for the off-season. If you limit yourself mostly to a small handful of familiar vegetables, you're likely to encounter lots of weeks where there's little or nothing on your list that's in season. Learning to enjoy a wider variety of vegetables, besides being healthier, will surely help a lot in the effort to eat locally. Last year, even with several crop failures caused by all the spring rain, we had at least 7 (and as many as 14) different vegetables (and multiple varieties of many of those) to offer every week from the beginning of May through early November. Of course, some of those crops were more abundant and others sold out quickly, but even just from our farm there's a lot of variety to be had if you know how to enjoy it. One of the big advantages to a traditional CSA box (where members simply receive a full assortment of whatever is in season as opposed to custom ordering their boxes as our CSA members normally do) is that it encourages families to eat more like they were eating from their own gardens and to enjoy a fuller variety. Of course, eating with the seasons also means cooking with the seasons. Instead of letting a recipe or menu dictate your shopping list, eating in season generally turns things around: if you're eating in season, you'll probably start with what's fresh and in season and let that determine what you cook.
   As winter begins to set in continuing to eat locally mostly means relying on crops that you froze or canned or dried or simply put in the pantry earlier in the year. Sweet potatoes, garlic, and winter squash will keep well in the pantry all through the off-season without any special attention. Freshly dug fall carrots will keep for many weeks in the fridge. Most vegetables are well suited to simple freezing: butterbeans, October beans, broccoli, collards, sweet corn, roasted eggplant, field peas, kale and all the other cooking greens, leeks and onions, okra, garden peas, bell peppers and banana peppers, also roasted peppers, spinach, fava beans, and even tomatoes and tomato juice and sauce, etc. Canning intimidates a lot of people, but there aren't really that many vegetables for which canning is the only good way to preserve them, and if you want to learn to can, it's simple. (We'd be glad to teach you.) We use canning for green beans, beets and pickles (cucumbers as well as pickled beets and dilly beans.) Irish potatoes can be kept in the pantry for a few months (longer at cooler temperatures), but we can some potatoes for later in the winter. We prefer to can most of our tomatoes (whole tomatoes, juice, sauce, salsa), but we also dry tomatoes ("sun"-dried) in a cheap dehydrator, and we freeze oven-roasted tomatoes and tomato paste. We don't actually can (with heat) our sauerkraut, but we do make it in canning jars and keep it along with the rest of our canned goods. The Ball Blue Book is the most common "guide to home canning, freezing, and dehydration", and an old version is our standard reference book. Putting up vegetables for the off-season does require planning ahead. If there are crops you'd like to put up for the off-season that you'd like to get from us, please talk to us about your particular interests ahead of time, and we'll try to help plan for you to get larger quantities of those things to preserve for later.

Southern heritage staple

  We want to draw your attention this week to one of our most special and at the same time most basic products, our Southern heritage staple.  Do you want to break away from the standard corporate food/agriculture system?  Do you want to resist the take-over of our farmland and our food supply by GMO's (genetically modified organisms) and everything that goes along with them?  Do you want to help build a comprehensive local food system, independent of pesticides and non-renewable chemical fertilizers?  You should try our cornmeal and grits and make them regular staples in local kitchens again!  If we can recover that foundation, imagine what further steps our local food system could take!  If local agriculture is going to expand into grains and field crops (and all the animal products that depend on them), it's all going to have to start with the same grain that was most practical for our great-grandparents.  In terms of how land in America is farmed, field corn (which is corn that's harvested when the kernels are hard-dry) is singly more than 5 times as significant as all the fruits and vegetables we consume put together.  Cornmeal isn't just for cornbread and grits aren't just for breakfast!  

  Besides basic cornbread, we use cornmeal in a number of recipes including some of our regular favorites - okra fritters and cornmeal spoonbread.  We also make a basic cornmeal pancake.  Eric likes the cornmeal pancakes best unsweetened, topped simply with butter.  Of course, cornmeal is great for breading all sorts of things, from vegetables to poultry to fish.  Hush puppies are another southern classic worth remembering.  Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina has several cornmeal and grits recipes on its website well worth checking out: http://www.ansonmills.com/recipes-corn.htm
   Grits are, of course, a great breakfast staple, whether with eggs or cheese or country ham... For expanding beyond breakfast, shrimp and grits are the classic low country combination, but one of our favorite ways to eat grits is to make an extra large batch for breakfast and pour the leftovers into a greased bread loaf pan and refrigerate until gelled...then we'll slice the grits about a half inch thick and fry in butter until the surface is crispy.  It makes a great starch to go alongside most any meat and vegetables.  It's certainly different from rice, but it roughly fills that niche for us in a local, homegrown way.  We also use cornmeal for a crust in casseroles that we'll top with things like black beans, chicken, tomatoes, cheese, peppers... 
   If you'd like to read the specifics about where our corn came from and what we do with it, see our blog entry http://themilkandhoneyfarm.blogspot.com/2011/05/stone-ground-heirloom-white-cornmeal.html
    We've optimistically planted more than double the 'Floyd' corn this year than we've ever grown before (and convinced a neighbor to organically grow even more.)  We'll be hand harvesting it all fairly soon.  An interesting thing about 'Floyd' corn is its recessive trait that leads to a small percentage of ears that are entirely dark red.  If you'd like to help out in this year's harvest, let us know!  If you have any custom grinding requests, or if you'd like whole kernel corn to grind yourself or to make nixtamal with for tortillas, we're happy to accommodate with a little extra advance notice.  (By the way, we're looking for a mentor to show us how to best make nixtamal/tortillas starting with whole kernel corn.)  If you have any questions about differences in using homegrown cornmeal or grits like we're offering, please ask. 
   We're excited to be able to offer what nowadays is a very unique product.  There are some historic mills that still grind corn, but we only know of one other person in all of North Carolina (in Old Fort -- he also happens to be a farmer with his own mill) that's grinding locally grown heirloom corn.  We believe it's important to preserve these heirlooms not just to maintain non-genetically modified options, but also because these varieties weren't bred to depend on high rates of conventional fertilizer, on chemical control of weeds, diseases, and insects, and on combine harvesting. That means they're all around suitable to local use on small farms and to communities deciding how to grow their own food.  If you share our desire to restore a comprehensive local agriculture that doesn't depend on non-renewable chemical fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modified crops, consider making our corn a staple in your kitchen.  There's a lot to enjoy.

Local Milk

  We want to continue this week sharing our thoughts on how to get away from the conventional, corporate food system and how to develop a dependable, community-based food system free especially of chemical and pharmaceutical dependency. This week our focus is dairy. Increasingly, dairy cows are being kept (like poultry and hogs) without any access to forage or any fresh feed at all. Fortunately (unlike poultry and hogs), real, significant fresh feed is a part of the USDA organic requirements for dairy cattle. Of course, as with all rule-based programs, there are producers that seek to meet the minimal letter of those rules without following the spirit of the rules in order to gain cost advantages and increase their market share. However, there is one fairly big organic cooperative with farms in Iredell and Rowan Counties (and all over the country) that has really impressed us with their integrity, and that's Organic Valley. If we had to buy milk and butter, etc., in the grocery stores, we would definitely choose Organic Valley. First, so far as we're aware, there is no other government-regulated dairy or cooperative with farms in North Carolina that sells organic milk. Second, we've seen a couple of the farms that sell to Organic Valley and we've talked to some of the farmers, and what we've seen up until now are real family farms with cows on green pastures. If you're going to buy government-regulated dairy products, the Organic Valley cooperative would be, by our recommendation, the best option (and well worth the price compared to the other supermarket options we're aware of.) [However, see here for later thoughts on the declining integrity of the Organic Valley brand.] Of course, even the best milk in stores still leaves a whole lot to be desired in terms of community accountability; dependency on "organic" grain and/or hay from halfway across the continent; dependency on conventional transportation, processing, and distribution systems; and other issues of sustainability.

   At this point we're forced to confront the hot button issue of "raw milk." We wish it hadn't become such a hot button issue. It's an issue that the mainstream food/agricultural system clearly feels threatened by. We would much rather just mind our own business and let the people that want the government to oversee and guarantee the safety of their food supply remain in their own little world. Ideally, we would definitely want to offer milk (and cheese and butter, etc.) from our cows and goats for sale, but as things are, we just want to steer far away from the whole controversy of distributing "raw milk." There are still a lot of things we can actively encourage you all to do, however. We are very happy to share what we know about keeping a family cow or goat, and we would love to help you figure out how to get started milking your own animal, if you're at all inclined. Even if you live in town or can't keep an animal on your own land, there are other ways to keep a dairy animal. We like the idea of a real "cow share" where several families share not just the milk but the actual work, taking turns milking over the course of a week, such that the milk is only ever handled by the consumer himself. In the past, we have milked neighbors' animals when they've wanted to get away or take a vacation. If these kinds of ideas interest you, we'd be more than happy to talk to you and try to help you become more self-sufficient with regards to dairy. Even if you're simply buying all your milk, we would encourage you to learn how to take control of more of the processing, e.g. butter and ice cream and cheese and yogurt, etc. Making yogurt is often a very cost effective thing to do at home. It may be cheaper to simply buy finished butter than to buy cream in the store and churn it, but the more you get away from the industrial food system, the more opportunities you'll find to do these kinds of things and save a few cents along the way, and, of course, enjoy dairy products that you can feel worlds better about. We'd be very happy to talk to you about any of these dairy-related things, so don't be shy!

Where to buy good poultry

We were asked recently where we would recommend to go to buy good chicken. Unfortunately, chicken is an especially "corrupt" meat, having more than any other animal product (about 100 years) of ever worsening factory farming history, which makes the industrial product especially bad and leaves us with very few real alternatives. “Hormone and antibiotic free” poultry can be found in some stores, but those are misleading claims: there are lots and lots of bad things about what goes into chickens, but hormones aren't one of them; artificial hormones are available for and used on cattle, but there aren't any available for poultry, so all poultry is "hormone free." Antibiotics, on the other hand, are used with poultry, so that would be a potentially substantive claim. However, are the antibiotics just being replaced with another pharmaceutical product that isn't any more organic but technically just isn't an antibiotic? There are so many additives in conventional chicken feed that we don't know if that's an option, but we're suspicious of any such claims from any corporate source. Even if it were true and substantive, “hormone and antibiotic free” still leaves a tremendous amount to be desired. To pick just what we see as the two biggest issues, we would want to see the chickens fed something other than pesticide-intensive genetically modified (GMO) feeds, and we wouldn't want chickens raised thousands to a confinement house without any significant fresh grass or grubs or other forage. We consider those pretty minimal expectations, but there's really no regular place to go and buy chickens that meet both those expectations. You can avoid the GMO feed by buying USDA certified organic, but then you're still buying confinement house birds from a very industrial system, and you're doing nothing to contribute to the kind of local, independent alternatives that empower communities to stand up to industrial abuses. Alternatively, you can find chickens raised by local farmers in movable range shelters -- not free range, but a huge improvement over confinement houses -- but those birds are almost always fed GMO grain that comes from the very same market pool as what's fed to conventional birds. (A straight-forward question to ask the organic-looking farmer at the farmers' market is if he feeds his chickens any GMO grain.  If he knows anything about how his chicken feed was grown and if he's honest, the answer to that question should tell you something of substance.)  So typically as a consumer the only options left today are either the chemical-intensive GMO grains (farmers' market) or the factory farm confinement houses (USDA organic.) Forced with one of those choices, we would probably have to choose the GMO grains, because small local operations at least carry some hope of future improvements. We would be very eager to support and encourage those producers to take responsibility for the grain they feed their chickens, though, or better yet find motivation to personally engage in that work yourself (instead of buying poultry/poultry feed.) Hopefully, if more people realize how bad things have gotten, some of them will be inspired to start growing their own grain on a small enough scale (maybe a fraction of an acre) to be able to withstand commodity pressures, and maybe that could even lead to some small surpluses to sell to friends and neighbors. We certainly believe that there isn't any good way to raise and sell chickens at anywhere near conventional costs, especially not without hardly anyone living on appropriately scaled (small), working farms anymore. As consumers we've consented to giving so much control of our food supply to forces so far outside of our control, that a lot of options have just disappeared, especially when it comes to grain farming and grain-fed animals like poultry, for which there are practically zero local options outside the commodity system. As communities and as individuals, we should expect our helplessness to lead to our exploitation, and that's where we're at.  Lest we preach too much doom and gloom, there are some much better options with grass-fed (ruminant) meats (especially cattle.) A partial solution to eating better poultry may be to eat less poultry (and less pork) and more grass-fed meat. We've got nothing against feeding grain to poultry, but the only easy way to avoid the abuses of modern grain farming is to avoid grain-fed animals, so animals that can be raised exclusively on grass (like cattle) at least offer some ways to avoid some of the worst abuses of industrialized agriculture. You might even think further outside the box and hunt wild doves or raise a domestic gray goose in your backyard.

Mead and How to Make It

  Mead is the proper term for alcohol fermented from honey.  In mead's simplest form, honey is diluted with water to about the same sweetness as juice and then allowed to ferment like wine.  Mead is one of the very few kinds of alcohol we're able to make from all local, homegrown ingredients grown without the use of chemical pesticides.  (Traditional wine grapes are almost always grown in very pesticide-intensive ways, and most other fruits can't be made into wine without added sugar.)  If made only with honey and water, mead assumes its flavor mainly from the particular flowers from which the bees collect the nectar to make the honey.  Alternatively, honey can be combined with fruits that are otherwise unsuitable for fermentation on their own to make fruit meads, for example: blackberries, elderberries, muscadines, or strawberries.  Although most people assume that anything made with honey would have to be sweet, by using more or less honey, mead, like wine, can be made in a range of dry to sweet styles.  The alcohol level of mead is comparable to wines.
   Mead is very easy to make.  Begin with very good tasting honey.  Mead making generally amplifies the underlying flavors of the honey.  It takes about a quart of honey (slightly more for added sweetness) to make a gallon of mead (or about 5 standard wine bottles).  Mix the honey in with the water until it dissolves, then let it ferment.  Naturally occurring yeast strains could be used, but we've always added a selected yeast strain to our honey-water mixture.  Enough wine yeast to ferment 5-6 gallons can be purchased for well under a dollar.  We think it's best to ferment mead in what's called a carboy, a large glass container with a narrow opening that can be fitted with a stopper and airlock.  Once filled with water, the airlock allows the carbon dioxide given off by the yeast to escape but seals the mead off from the air, which helps prevent the mead from turning to vinegar.  It typically takes one to three months for the yeast to do their job and another three to nine months for all the yeast to drop out of suspension and for the mead to turn clear, which is when we like to bottle it.  Adding fruit can greatly accelerate the process.  If you've made wine before, you should already have all the equipment you'd need.  If not, you could spend anywhere from $40 to $150 for equipment that would pretty much all be reusable.

Eating Local, Organic Fruit

Here Nora and Paul pit cherries, some we got from our own two trees, and some from a neighbor's tree.  We've been freezing and drying them.
   A couple weeks ago we began talking about what it would take to really get away from the conventional industrialized food system and all its pesticides, fossil fuel based fertilizers, etc.  We want to continue this week talking about fruit and what we would recommend for someone wanting to eat real homegrown fruit grown with old-fashioned organic integrity.  What would a person have to do to eat fruit that was grown the right way?  As with vegetables, one would have to eat the fresh fruit that was in season and put up fruit for the off-season.  Some fruits (notably blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.) can be almost as good out of the freezer as they are fresh.  A lot of fruits are also especially well suited to drying/dehyrdating (figs, sour cherries...)  Unlike with vegetables, however, switching from grocery store fruit to homegrown fruit would require a lot more changes in what kinds of fruit we eat.  The fruits that are sold in grocery stores -- and therefore our habits and expectations as grocery store-bred consumers -- are largely those fruits that have lent themselves best to industrialization: fruits that are good for shipping and that have fairly long shelf lives, fruits that can be grown in large acreages with labor-saving chemicals, etc.  We think the kind of fruits that lend themselves to local, organic management are just as good if not better, but they're mostly not what we're used to or what we might go looking for.  Obviously, bananas and citrus aren't the fruits to look for, but other fruits that are grown locally, like apples and peaches, are generally dependent on extensive arsenals of nasty chemicals.  As much as Eric loves peaches and Melissa loves apples, learning just a little about how the local commercial orchards grow these fruits has made it really hard to feel right about buying them.  We do have some hope in growing cosmetically less perfect, disease-resistant varieties of apples, and we did plant a couple peach trees hoping against hope to harvest some edible peaches, but for us eating local fruit means turning primarily to other fruits.  There are some familiar grocery store fruits for which there are excellent local alternatives.  Even though conventional strawberries are one of the most pesticide-laden fruits there are, it's very feasible to grow strawberries organically.  We're just finishing an excellent strawberry year, and we hope you all got plenty these last few weeks.  Local blueberries, on the other hand, tend to be a very low-spray crop, even on non-organic farms.  (That's not true of some of the blueberries in supermarkets from other areas, whose pesticide residues we've been told have been linked to behavioral disorders in children.)  No-spray melons may be somewhat scarcer at farmers' markets, but that's something else to look for.  For a fuller variety, though, we think a person would really have to eat fruits that aren't common in supermarkets.  Figs have a short shelf life, but they're delicious and very well suited to organic management.  Mulberries (the fruit of a large tree, similar in appearance to a blackberry but with none of the bitterness) can also be grown very easily, and we've really been enjoying them lately.  Even some of the wild mulberry trees have really good quality fruit.  Persimmons are one of our favorite wild fruits -- some trees have lesser quality fruit but there are a lot of very good wild trees -- and they can also be planted.  Wild blackberries are more familiar.  There are quite a few old sour cherry trees in local farmyards.  Although they're called “sour cherries,” some varieties are plenty sweet and are excellent for fresh eating, although typically not as big as conventionally grown varieties.  Muscadines/scuppernong grapes fall into the same category as local blueberries, being a cultivated fruit that tend to be very low-spray even on non-organic farms.  We've been told that Asian pears (the pears with a more apple-like shape and texture) could also fit into that category.  And the list goes on: pawpaws, jujubes, raspberries, tame blackberries, serviceberries, mayhaws...  We wouldn't be satisfied simply with the fruit we could find at farmers' markets, but if you can go out into the country and find additional types of fruit, we think one can find a full assortment of fruit grown the right way.  If you're motivated to eat good quality fruit, we'd love to help you with whatever know-how we can share.

Substituting honey

We feel a lot better about eating honey than granulated sugar. We believe that foods that are less processed and more homegrown are generally a lot healthier than their conventional counterparts (not just healthier for us directly, but healthier for communities and ecosystems, too). Perhaps you share our inclinations, and so the question we want to address here is: how does a person go about substituting honey for sugar, i.e. using less sugar and more honey? Some of the answers are as simple as realizing where the sugar (or corn syrup) in your diet is.
Honey is great for sweetening hot and cold drinks. In the summertime we like to keep a gallon of honey-sweetened peppermint tea in the fridge. Honey can, of course, be used to sweeten any kind of tea as well as lemonade or homemade grape juice. Honey is especially nice for mixing in cold drinks like lemonade, because honey's already fully liquid, so you don't get the granular mouth feel of sugar added to cold lemonade. It's easier to mix the honey in if the liquid isn't fully chilled, but when we make tea we do like to let the tea cool down a little before mixing the honey in so as to better preserve the floral aromas of the honey.
One of the honey substitutions that most consistently impresses guests at our table is our standard salad dressing. We'll fill a quart jar about a quarter full with olive oil (that's 1 cup), then add half as much honey and cider vinegar (or 1/2 measuring cup of each). Then we add about a teaspoon each of salt and ground mustard, plus a little black pepper, and shake it all up. That's our standard recipe, but try substituting honey for any of your own dressing recipes or marinades.
Where our family probably consumes the greatest amount of honey, though, is as a substitute for store-bought breakfast cereals. One of our favorite breakfasts -- and it's quick and easy -- is a bowl of "quick" oats ("quick" oats are cut more finely, so they're less chewy and pasty than uncooked regular rolled oats) with cold milk or yogurt, sweetened with honey, and enhanced with whatever fruit (fresh or dried) or nuts are handy. Even simpler and a common snack for the kids or for us is a bowl of plain yogurt sweetened with tulip-poplar honey. (Plain yogurt, by the way, is cheap and easy to make, if you're so inclined.)
Another easy way to use honey in place of sugar is in canned goods, especially canned fruit. When making syrup to can peaches or pears, for example, we use honey in place of all the sugar. We also use a little honey in our pickled beets and sometimes in applesauce, if we want to sweeten it any further.
Honey has more concentrated sweetness than granulated sugar, so a little more than 3/4 cup of honey (about 10 ounces by weight) will sweeten a recipe as much as a full cup of sugar. If you have a good kitchen scale, it may be easier to pour out a given weight of honey instead of trying to measure out the honey by volume -- it can go straight from the jar to the mixing bowl without anything to stick to in between. Just put your mixing bowl straight on the scale, tare out the scale if that's easy, and pour the honey straight in until you reach the right number of ounces.  One cup of honey will weigh very nearly 12 ounces.
Baked goods can be a slightly trickier category for substitutions because more chemistry is at play than just sweetening effect. With a lot of baked goods recipes we'll substitute just a third or half of the sugar with honey. Flan (a simple custardy dessert) is greatly enhanced by the flavor of honey when substituted for the sugar.
And, last but certainly not least, honey makes for delicious homemade ice cream! We like to use about a half pound of honey (7-1/2 ounces by weight, to be exact) for every quart of liquid (milk/cream/pureed fruit).