June 2008 Archives

This week at the farmers market someone asked me what grass-fed beef tastes like. I've had it before from vendors at the farmers market in Bloomington, but frankly it's been a few years so I'm not sure I can accurately summarize the differences between grass and grain-fed. And beyond that, I don't eat a lot of beef anyway, buying it perhaps once or twice a month, and some months not at all.

My immediate remembrance: there wasn't a huge difference, but I remember the taste as pleasant. I recall reading that some people describe it as being a little gamey, which I think can be attributed to the lower fat content (feeding cattle grain makes them gain weight, primarily in the form of fat); the meat is more lean, like game would be, and the taste is well, more meaty.

There's definitely a perception that grass-fed beef doesn't taste good, but if you think about it, it makes sense that we're more likely to react unfavorably to an unfamiliar taste. And certainly people who raise cattle using conventional methods have an investment in making people believe their product tastes better. Here's an excerpt from my April 16 post, Rising Demand for Meat Takes Toll on the Environment:

Not everyone is familiar with the advantages of grass-fed beef, which is leaner and healthier to eat, as well as better for the environment. When I started looking for sources of local food in the area, I called a local meat market and asked if they carried any locally produced beef. The woman told me that 'all the cattle around here are raised on grass, and you wouldn't want that. All our beef is grain-fed.'

• Raising the Steaks: If you feed cows grass, does the beef taste better? by Mark Schatzker at Slate.

For more about the health and environmental benefits (and there are many) of eating grass-fed beef, see:

• Eat Wild is a web site dedicated to providing information about grass-fed animal products of all kinds. They have a good links page that will lead you to a lot more information.
• Greener Pastures and the Greener Pastures FAQ, from the Union of Concerned Scientists discusses many of the environmental and health issues, and touches on the question of taste.
• Grass-Fed Beef on The Sustainable Table provides an overview and cooking techniques.
• Cattle Feeding on Wikipedia covers some of the basic issues.

I know some of our readers consume grass-fed beef. Would any of you care to share your thoughts on how it tastes?

I Can't Believe I Bought the Whole Thing, an article in the Washington Post about renewed interest in buying meat in whole animals, sides, or quarters.

In our area, you can get pastured beef at Hastings Farm in Bay Minette. There are other farms within driving distance; find them at Local Harvest (do a 100-mile search) or on the Eating Alabama map.

The Alabama Farmers Market Authority is excited to announce a new web-based program connecting farmers with local chefs, restaurants, other farmers and/or other potential consumers wanting Alabama grown produce. The new program is appropriately named Farmer Connect. We encourage you to visit our site and register as a seller, buyer or both. (All participants are subject to approval and/or inspection. All products listed for sale shall be grown/produced by the registrant.)

Farmers can list fruits and vegetables and potential buyers who are registered with the site will then be able to contact farmers directly. This unique program gives Alabama farmers another outlet to sell their goods and consumers another way of connecting to local farmers.

The Farmers Market Authority believes in the BUY FRESH BUY LOCAL principal and Farmer Connect allows local farmers to use global technology so consumers can act locally. Frequent and updated use of the program is critical to its success and Farmer Connect.

Please visit our www.BuyLocalAlabama.com site and click on the green Farmer Connect icon and register to use this site.

I arrived just after 7:30 and the market was the busiest I've ever seen it.

Items included: baked goods, beans, blackberries, blueberries, candles, collards, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, eggs, flowers, goat cheese, herbs, honey, melons (cantaloupe and watermelon), okra, peaches, peppers, pillows, plants, potatoes, seafood, soap, summer squash, tomatoes, vinegar, wine.

I was pleased to see a stand for Henrietta's goat cheese (they were also selling eggs). The farm is located in west Mobile county. If I'd been paying more attention, I would have known that you can buy Henrietta's chèvre (fresh goat cheese) and goat milk at Virginia's Health Foods, The Health Nut, and Jimmy Lowe's. When I'm at those stores I'm never shopping in the dairy section.

I was recently contacted by reader Val Webb, a Mobile resident who blogs about organic gardening and sustainability at The Illustrated Garden. The real treat is that Val, a professional illustrator, uses her own work throughout the site. It's gorgeous. Be sure to check out the archives at the blog's previous address, since that's where most of the posts are. She also has a nice selection of links in the sidebar.

Via Culinate, a link to New York Times food writer Mark Bittman's latest, Putting Meat Back in Its Place, providing tips on how to eat less meat (as opposed to arguments in favor of). As he points out, many cultures regard meat as a luxury and use it as a "condiment or a treat," where its purpose is primarily to add flavor to a dish rather than be the center of a meal.

Wasted Food isn't about local food, but it is food-related and timely, given our rising food prices. From the blog's About page:

Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce for consumption. That comes at an annual cost of more than $100 billion. At the same time, food prices and the number of Americans without enough to eat continues to rise. Fusing my journalistic research on the topic with the work of countless others, this site examines how we squander so much food. Part blog, part call to action, Wasted Food aims to shed light on the problem of, you guessed it, wasted food.

At the New York Times Freakonomics blog, Stephen J. Dubner asks: Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? It's a good question, and a persistent one. When you start to think about economies of scale you do begin to wonder whether all that work, and possibly freezer space if you're going that route, makes sense. Nevertheless, I think he's wrong, and on top of that the example he uses (making homemade sherbet) is a poor one. Read through the comments to find many insightful counterarguments. One I find particularly convincing is that it's easier to practice sustainable agriculture on a small, local scale, and since that's better for the environment and our health those benefits should have more weight.

In terms of home gardening, when we lived in the midwest I actually stopped keeping a vegetable garden because there was such a fantastic amount and variety of fresh local produce available at our markets that I felt it didn't pay for me to expend the labor raising my own food. It made more sense to spend money at the market and help support people who were farming professionally, trying to make a living (or supplement their income) at it.

I've changed my tune now for several reasons, including:

• since I'm a work-at-home-mom I have more time to spend in the garden on a daily basis, and it provides a good educational activity for my child;
• the market season here is much shorter, and I can't always find the items I want;
• I can garden year-round, when the market isn't open;
• I enjoy gardening as a hobby and get a lot of satisfaction from it;
• although market produce is very fresh, it's even better to be able to walk out to my yard and harvest something when I need it;
• it does offset the cost of groceries, although when you balance that against the cost of seeds/plants and other expenses I don't really grow enough to save a ton of money.

What's your perspective on the cost of buying local/growing your own?

At Sustainable Table, a guide to grilling with sustainable ingredients.

So many of the summer vegetables in season now are wonderful when thrown on the grill. I'm in love with sweet, carmelized grilled summer squash. Add some eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes, throw it on a nice roll with cheese and balsamic vinaigrette, and you've got a great veggie sandwich.

At Kitchen Gardeners International and The Washington Post, Barbara Damrosch writes about weeds.

My own personal weed challenge comes in the form of dollarweed, also called pennywort. (If you're not familiar with what it looks like, here's a photo and description.) Since it spreads by runners, it's virtually impossible to eradicate; it regrows from any pieces left in the soil. I've weeded it, and weeded it, and weeded it again in an ongoing battle that has lasted close to two years now. My next try is going to be to solarize one of my beds that's out of cultivation at the moment.

Anyone have other suggestions?

At The Ethicurean, some perspective on the finally-passed 2008 Farm Bill. Michael Pollan seems embittered, Debra Eschmeyer stays optimistic and reviews the positive aspects of the bill, and a well-informed commenter provides some additional insight.

We need MORE information about the safety of our food, not less. In disturbing news, in late May the USDA announced that it would stop the collection and public reporting of pesticide use data, citing budget cuts.

For me, this just reinforces the fact that we need a sustainable agriculture system that does not rely on pumping chemicals and poisons into our land and food. Why should consumers be the ones responsible for ensuring that their food is safe to eat?

Here's some coverage:

NRDC: USDA cuts budget to its pesticide use data program
The Ethicurean: Everything looks better when your head’s in the sand: The USDA stops tracking pesticide use
Grist: USDA: What pesticide use?

This is short notice, but I happened to see a flier for this event at the newly opened Mellow Mushroom in Midtown. Presumably the sandwiches will be made from homegrown tomatoes! We've been loving the tomatoes in our garden; had some more delicious bruschetta last night.

From the City of Mobile web site:

WHAT: Tomato Tango Sandwich Sale
WHEN: Saturday, June 14; market hours are 7:30 - 11am
WHERE: Cathedral Square Farmers Market, Mobile AL

The Gulf Coast Herb Society and the Mobile County Master Gardeners join up and help spread some delicious tomato lovin' with the Tomato Tango sandwich sale. Both organizations will be on hand: one to make gourmet sandwiches with generously donated tomatoes; and the other to give out pertinent information about how to care for your toms in your own garden!

This for tonight's dinner, all from my garden: sliced tomatoes, boiled new potatoes, and blanched pole beans. The beans are Kentucky Wonder, and they are delicious!

So far this season our beans are doing a lot better than they did last year. I've added compost to the soil, and we've probably gotten more rain, but other than that I don't know what to attribute it to.

Don't forget to get cash.

Don't forget to stop at the bank once you've forgotten to get cash.

Don't forget your check book if you're going to forget the cash.

Don't take a three year-old.

If you do take aforementioned three year-old, don't mention that the place you're going after picking berries is the beach.

We made an abortive attempt to pick berries yesterday at Bee Natural Farm in Baldwin County. I was interested in seeing Bee Natural for the first time, since it's the only CSA (farm doing Community Supported Agriculture) in the area. It was fun to look at, with lots of intensive beds, berry bushes, and an orchard. However, circumstances did not permit a leisurely look around. We had been picking - make that I had been picking - for all of ten minutes when my daughter declared that she was "going to the car" and stalked off through the field. She had been so distracted and uncooperative that I ended up just putting my half-pound of berries down in the shed so the other family picking at the time could claim them.

A note for the uninitiated: ever wonder why blueberries are so expensive? It will only take you ten minutes of picking to figure that out. Blueberries are really small, and it takes a whole lot of them to make even a pound (unlike strawberry picking, which goes pretty quickly). I believe there are machines for large commercial operations, but at a small farm picking blueberries is labor intensive.

If you're going blueberry picking at Bee Natural, the going rate this year is $2.25/lb, and you need to come prepared with either a checkbook or close to the correct amount of money, as there is no way to make change. Buckets and bags are supplied.

After being away from the market for two weeks, it was fun to get back, though even at 8am the heat and humidity were making everyone sweat and look uncomfortable, except the kids and dogs playing/laying in the fountain.

Items included: baked goods, blueberries, candles, collards, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, flowers, herbs, honey, melons, peaches, peppers, pillows, plants, potatoes, seafood, soap, summer squash, tomatoes, vinegar, wine.

We bought some sweet corn (Silver King) and had it for dinner. My daughter loved helping shuck the corn, and ate part of an ear herself, professing it to be "the bestest corn I ever tasted" (make that the ONLY corn she ever tasted!). I had purchased corn labeled "pesticide free," and as we were shucking it I was unsurprised to find some earworms at the tips of the cobs. My daughter is quite familiar with bugs on vegetables from our own pesticide-free garden, where a daily ritual is to go out and "check the bugs." Still, she was fascinated, and I reminded her that when you don't put chemicals on your plants you sometimes get bugs on them, and that's OK; you just pick them off. It's something you can forget when all you buy is sterile grocery-store produce.

Are you tired of seeing photos of potatoes yet? Here are the last couple of baskets of this year's potato crop. There's Desiree and the Russian Banana fingerlings.

I also had my first handful of pole beans yesterday, and we're continuing to get very tasty tomatoes.

As Bill Finch noted in last week's garden column, plan to get your tomato seedlings in the ground at the end of June if you want a fall crop.

ADDITIONAL INFO (8 Jun): I wasn't keeping meticulous records, but my estimated yields from the potato plants are as follows:
Caribe: an additional plant or two put the total at just under eight pounds
Desiree: just under seven pounds
Russian Banana: just over five and a half pounds
TOTAL: about 20 pounds for three pounds of seed potatoes. That's probably about 50% less than could be expected under ideal growing conditions, but since this is just my second year growing potatoes and my conditions are not exactly ideal, I feel like I'm doing pretty good. I estimate between a five to ten percent loss because of insects.

A fundraiser for the Fairhope Local Food Production Initiative will be held tomorrow evening.

WHAT: "Sentimental Journey" Dr. Jazz Normand Dance Orchestra
WHEN: Saturday, June 7, 2008, 6:30pm - 10:30pm
WHERE: Fairhope Unitarian Fellowship Hall, 1150 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope AL (across from the satellite courthouse)
COST: Suggested donation of $10 per ticket or $15 for two tickets.

CONTACT: For more information, call 251.928.2284 or 251.928.4646.

WHY: Benefit to establish local food production initiative and community garden.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Dr. Jazz Normand's formal dance orchestra, featuring rising star vocalist, Lauren Jackson, for your ballroom dancing and jazz listening pleasure.

Hot hors d'oeuvres. Dressy or sporty-casual wear.

Donations for tickets available at the door (or for advance reservations, send checks or money orders to: CFRG, 560 Morphy Ave, Fairhope, AL 36532).

Dancing and listening from 6:30 - 10:30pm. Guided dancing tips from 6:30 - 7pm.

When you're a gardener, there's part of you that never looks forward to summer vacations. What will the aftermath be when you return? How high will the weeds have grown? Will lack of rain cause plants to shrivel or stress? Will invading insects have decimated a crop without your being able to prevent it? Will you have missed the prime harvest time for your favorite vegetable?

Sadly, a week in Indiana left many tomatoes ripening on the vine, and now they're in the compost. Our neighbor, who very kindly watered while we were gone, harvested some, which she said were delicious, but that didn't dull the pain of having to throw out over a half dozen once-delectable looking fruits.

We've been visiting my parents in Indiana, where strawberries are still in season (yay!) and about two hours from my parents' house some of the finest goat cheese in the United States is produced at Capriole Farm. Situated in the wooded limestone hills of southeast Indiana, the farm produces a variety of artisan cheese, including fresh, surface-ripened, and aged raw milk. We used to buy the cheese at the farmers markets in Bloomington and Louisville, so it was fun to get to visit the farm itself.

In the tiny sales room, one of the employees brought me a cutting board full of samples of every kind of cheese they had available. They're all wonderful, but the ones I chose to take back to Alabama were a round of fresh goat cheese covered with herbes de Provence; the surface-ripened Piper's Pyramide; the aged Mont St. Francis; and a slice of Bourbon Chocolate Torta dessert cheese. I wouldn't have bought the latter, but I tasted some and it was fabulous! Said to go well with strawberries.

We took a short stroll around the farm while we were there. My daughter was entranced by pens of friendly goat kids, and a coop full of chickens. The house is beautifully landscaped too.

I discovered a few months ago that my daughter likes fresh goat cheese, and have since found a few other young children who also enjoy it. I suppose it's not surprising, except that I didn't come to enjoy goat cheese until well into adulthood.

I'll post a photo as soon as we've unwrapped some cheese for eating. UPDATE: photo added 7 June 08.