Green Options

As turkey wafts the air this week, it means only one thing to me:  the scents of all holiday baking to come.  But how does our green and frugal focus at our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, blend with seasonal bake-offs?  Focus on creatively using ingredients already stockpiled in your pantry.

Case in point:  the story behind our annual bake-off favorite, Peppermint Biscotti.  Anybody else acquired a stockpile of those red and white peppermint candies, the freebies you pick up at restaurants and never use?  Or leftover candy canes? When I collected everything in our house last year, I had a gallon-sized plastic bag of peppermints.

I agree, there’s hardly any nutritional value in these peppermints or anything to prioritize in the sustainable of organic category.  But the point is I had them, they already existed and I’m a firm believer, whenever possible, to use up rather than throw out (or stir up mint-flavored compost).

As we head into the Thanksgiving season, all eyes (and mouths) fixate on that key holiday ingredient:  food.  From turkeys to pumpkin pie, Thanksgiving gifts us with a list of seasonal traditions that celebrate our love for good food.  While these all rank important holiday elements, let’s not miss the key ingredient rooted in the inherent concept of Thanksgiving:  gratitude.

A mindset of green gratitude emphasizes positive abundance, relishing the glass half full perspective.  An important concept to keep on the front burner, especially as tanking economies fuel table conversations that tend to serve up sentiments of fear, scarcity and deprivation.

Add a dash of green reflection and gratitude to your Thanksgiving table by throwing these three questions on eating and drinking better into the conversation mix:

As the colder November winds start to blow here on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, I feel a breeze of bittersweet. As I look at the pumpkins, potatoes and other root crops stacked up for the winter, I crave something else:  One last taste of crunchy, flavorful garden fresh.

That’s when these Fall Finale Muffins show up on our breakfast table.  Grab the last of the apples and pair them with shredded carrots for a hearty, healthy muffin packed with a nutritional boost.  Because of the high amounts of fresh carrots and apples, along with dried cranberries and nuts, these muffins take on more of a crunchy produce feel than a typical bread-like muffin.  Fall bounty you can hold in your hand.

Make an extra batch as these freeze surprisingly well.  Here’s the recipe:

My bookshelves creak with the weight of my amassed food preservation resource collection.  As we grow over 70 percent of our food needs on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, the how-to behind stocking up has always been area of personal, passionate research.

But as you can see, I’m already overloaded with info.  Do I need another food preservation book?  Not really, until I read Sharon Astyk’s latest book:  Independence Days:  A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation, a new release from the fine folks at New Society Publishers.  Lots of books, those on my shelves included, successfully detail the “how” of food preservation, from water bath timings to prolific pickling techniques.  Independence Days freshly blends “how” with “why,” serving up a modern take on stocking up and why this plays a vital role in our future survival as a planet.

Astyk’s approach, blending practical information and big picture context with a hefty dose of personal anecdotes and essays, nurtures readers into realizing they are doing more than creating a January supper when one puts up tomatoes in July.  We’re collectively part of a larger, strategic, hands-on revolution in kitchens across America to change the way we approach food, sustainability and life.

Here’s a sampling of fresh, inspiring perspectives I harvested from Independence Days:

I confess: rutabagas overwhelm me. Turnips come in a close second. As these hefty big root crops pile up on the counter here at Inn Serendipity, I realize I need an easy cooking plan.

Fall crops – from butternuts to beets – require taking out the big sharp knives, the cutting boards, and usually can’t go from garden to plate in ten minutes or less. (Case in point: the yummy, yet rather complex, Beet Burger recipe I wrote about last week). But there’s a reason for that: these types of fall vegetables are meant to store and be savored through the winter months, particularly here in through our Wisconsin winters. Tougher skins and harder insides hold up to seasonal and local eating booty through our lean Midwest growing months, providing the opportunity to still eat fresh year round.

Consider this Roasted Root Vegetable recipe my point of entry into the winter cooking season. Cooked in olive oil with some simple seasonings, this recipe showcases the distinct, hearty flavors of root vegetables. Potato recipes get temporarily bumped off the breakfast plate at Inn Serendipity this time of year as this flavorful, unusual recipe prompts folks to rethink their assumptions about rutabagas and other roots.

Roasted Root Vegetables (Vegan)

Fall ushers in burger season on our Wisconsin farm.  Beet burger season, that it.  These veggie burgers are house favorites here at Inn Serendipity farm and B&B.  Something about the red color and texture of the beets that cause even the committed meat burger eater to savor the veggie side of the bun.

This is a very adaptable, forgiving recipe—feel free to modify and experiment with ingredients.   Carrots can easily substitute for some of the beets.  The burgers freeze well (and taste surprisingly good cold), so we usually make a triple batch in a jumbo bowl.

Here’s the recipe:

Fresh ingredients go a long way in adding flavor to any dish.  The same culinary theory holds outside of the kitchen in other contexts as well, as evidenced at the 13th annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference this past week in Des Moines, Iowa.  Over 500 activists from around the country gathered to connect, collaborate and challenge each other on ways to transform and improve our food system, including representation from young women dedicated to a farming career in sustainable agriculture.

As a female farmer myself, running Inn Serendipity farm and B&B with my husband, John Ivanko, in Wisconsin, this increasing blending and crossover between new women farmers with a passion for raising both cabbage and change cultivates a hefty serving of inspiration. These new women farmers grow more than food for our table; they rethink the status quo approach to our food system and provide keen insights into what needs to change.

“As one of the fastest growing groups of new farmers, women can be the change makers that transform our agricultural system into one that provides organic, healthy and fair food to us all,” explains Faye Jones, Executive Director of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES), a Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) member organization that sponsored two women farmers to attend this conference. Wisconsin women farmers Jai Kellum of King’s Hill Farm and Erin Schneider of Hilltop Community Farm attended the CFSC Conference on behalf of MOSES.“It is important to keep the voice of farmers represented in the national discussion on food and agricultural policy and priorities,” sums up Jones.

Here are four of their tips for politicians to policy makers from Kellum and Schneider to improve our agriculture and food system:

We cranked up the woodstove for the first time this season last night at Inn Serendipity. The cool, fall nighttime breezes have arrived here in Wisconsin, and that means just one thing: time for hot cocoa. But not just any hot cocoa. When my husband, John Ivanko, and I moved from Chicago apartments to our Wisconsin farm, we traded convenience for countryside. No more quick runs to the mini mart store at the end of the urban block for a missing ingredient. . With civilization now a fifteen-minute drive away, I’ve learned the art of self-sufficiency by creatively making store bought mixes with pantry ingredients.

Hot cocoa serves up a good example of how making your own mixes from pantry staples deliver benefits on multiple fronts:

The sustainability mantra may be “less is more,” but there’s one exception when buying more makes green sense:  shopping the last farmers markets.  If you’re not gardening and growing your own produce, your local farmers market serves as your easy connection to one-stop local fare shopping.

But as frosts linger and the cold winds start to blow, don’t punt and think your fresh local bounty will disappear till spring.  With a little strategic shopping and planning, you can preserve a local meal focus all winter long by taking advantage of those last farmer’s markets.

Here’s another perk of eating local year round:  you’re supporting the economic health of your community.  Just ask Cindy Torres, manager of the Longmont Farmers Market outside Boulder, Colorado, and an IATP Food and Society Fellow.  Passionate about using local food systems as a healthy economic development tool, Torres co-founded the Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council to look at how her area can increase the local food supply to enhance the lives of community residents of all economic backgrounds.

“With a little bit of planning and preparation, we can readily eat local till the spring markets start up again,” explains Torres.  Here are her favorite five tips:

Apple harvest time arrives at the best and worst time on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity. As four bushels of apples sit on my front porch, I’m reminded of all those right reasons: the crisp flavor of fresh apples, appreciation of the harvest bounty and the tempting aroma of a pie baking in the oven.
Apple pies baking in the oven. That’s where I remember the “worst of time” mantra: apple season, like everything else on the farm this time of year, arrives during that crazy-busy, over-abundant time of year called “fall.” The final bounty of garden booty needs harvesting, along with a mile-long laundry list of farm chores that need wrapping up before the winter winds start to blow. Not ideal timing to be in the kitchen rolling piecrust. Actually, I can’t even see my counter top to roll a crust this time of year, as it is overloaded with tomatoes, zucchini and everything else in need of processing.

But don’t think this chaos of fall causes me to give up on pie making. The secret? Simplify the process. Our Inn Serendipity house favorite from our Edible Earth cookbook, Oat Apple Pie, serves up a good example of super simple pie making, as it doesn’t call for a rolled piecrust. Rather, the crust is pressed oatmeal dough, kind of like apples wrapped in a big, chewy oatmeal cookie. By rethinking the traditional pie model, you now have both cookies and pie wafting from the oven. Priceless.

Here’s the recipe, made from basic ingredients you probably have in your pantry right now. I easily adapt this for vegan B&B guests by substituting vegan margarine for the butter. This is also a great recipe for beginning pie-makers (and folks like myself with produce piling up on the counter) as there is no rolled crust.