One of the best things about sourcing locally grown farm produce is that you’re guaranteed to get a variety of different items as the seasons change. Pulling the first new season Discovery apples out of my fruit and veg bags a few weeks ago put such a smile on my face. This week’s enormous cabbage also made me laugh, partially because the basketball-sized monstrosity was even larger than my face. Which of course left me facing an interesting question: what does one make with an excess amount of English cabbage?
It’s another installment of the Veg Bag game, where I explore new recipes to use up the array of organic fruits and vegetables that I pick up every week. Carrots and potatoes are a familiar arrival (which have gone into crispy pancakes and veggie fritters) but this week’s cabbage presented a new challenge. I also received some lovely green beans about the length of my forearm - who says organic vegetables have to be smaller than conventional? With all these excellent British vegetables in hand, I had to go for an old-school British classic: bubble and squeak!
One of my favorite parts of the week is picking up my Growing Communities veg bag from Hackney City Farm. As I’ve written before, a veg bag is the British equivalent of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box, filled with organic and mostly locally grown produce. Following a veggie burger as well as carrot potato pancakes, I’m doing more fun kitchen experiments figuring out how to use all the random vegetables that come my way. It’s the veg bag game! Can’t beat anything that combines games and food: two of my favorite things on the planet besides panda babies.
Growing communities is nice enough to include a recipe in the bags each week, which I’ve found to be a great starting point for figuring out what to make. It’s amazing how many dishes can be made based on what can often be found in your average kitchen - today I debated a pasta primavera and a stir-fried eggplant with brown rice - but decided to riff off the Courgette and Cheese soup recipe from the bag. The fun part of the game is playing with ingredients depending on what I’ve got lying around and seeing what deliciousness results. I didn’t have any cheese, but I did have cherry tomatoes and some verging-on-stale whole wheat bread so I tossed them both in for a texture similar to ribollita (a Tuscan soup made with stale bread). The bread makes it hearty, but it’s got the lightness of a vegetarian as well as dairy-free soup. Depending on what you’ve got lying around, you can make any adjustments as well. Enjoy!
Carrots straight from the farm are dirty little freaks. Knobbly, hairy, misshapen and covered in soil, these root vegetables bear no resemblance to the neon orange and uniformly shaped clones found in your average supermarket plastic bag. But I love knowing where the vegetables came from and supporting local farms through my veg bag of organic produce (British equivalent of a CSA). I enjoy confronting an array of unfamiliar vegetables or familiar vegetables in unfamiliar guises like a large green ball of cauliflower that’s nearly 90% leaves. My favorite new game is figuring out how to use all these vegetables in delicious vegetarian dishes.
However, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the carrots as they’ve always been lower down on my list of favorite vegetables. Once the more perishable items like the spinach and tomatoes have been eaten in fresh salads, I find myself with a big bowl full of dirty carrots and potatoes. It’s like getting to the harder advanced levels of the How-To-Cook-Up-Your-Veg-Bag game and I need to challenge myself to solve the cooking puzzle. So I’ve written up two simple recipes that explore the wonderful world of carrots and potatoes: a Carrot Potato Pancake and Crispy Veggie Fritter that’s essentially a vegetarian meatball. Perhaps it should be called a veggieball. Regardless, both recipes are simple and tasty and a great way to use up any root vegetables you’ve got lying around. Enjoy!
I feel blessed to live in the same area as Growing Communities, because it means I get access to their boxes of local and organic fruits and veg (the nickname everyone gives to vegetables here). You have to live or work in the neighborhood of Hackney in order to be a part of the scheme, which I’ll explain below. Their box scheme is particularly cool for a couple of reasons:
I just finished watching the documentary The Future of Food. The film goes into the safety and ethical issues behind patenting genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and introducing them into our food supply. Check out the trailer:
If you want to watch the whole film, it’s available for free on Hulu! The facts about Monsanto and the GMO industry are pretty infuriating, but the film ends with an optimistic call to action. We can combat companies like Monsanto by voting with our pocketbooks and making our voices heard!
Is there anyone NOT sucked into the whirlwind of earth day hype? Is there anyone that isn’t thinking of how they can get their green on? Is anyone else feeling overwhelmed by it all?
Us Green Divas area all about easy does it! If we make earth day more of a lifestyle and simply start by making one green improvement from wherever we are on the big green super highway, sustainable living habits seem to sprout like hearty organic weeds and multiply. Before you know it, you’re talking local sustainable agriculture at your favorite new potluck dinner club!
I started with food. Yum.
The low-stress way of doing this, is to know you don’t have to do it ALL. Just pick one that resonates with you and start there. It should be fun and bring you some joy. This is NOT about adding stressful activities to your lifestyle, but adding some thoughtful and hopefully more meaningful activities to the things you already do anyway.
A farmer in Milwaukee is taking the green roof to the next level. Community Growers’ founder Erik Lindberg’s rooftop garden is yeilding enough organic produce to launch a CSA.
After more than seven hundred hours of filming and editing, largely underwritten both by himself and those organizations supporting his visionary film-making endeavor, Chris Bedford has offered an inspiring documentary, Coming Home: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, where people are, once again, people, not reduced to “consumers” or “tax payers” (recently on the hook for billions of dollars of bailout money).
As an award-winning film maker for such films as What will we eat? and The Organic Opportunity, Bedford has honed his craft to capture both the pivotal work of the late E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and subsequent endeavors of the E.F. Schumacher Society and the creation of a local economy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
While viewing the film Coming Home, officially released at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I realized that this was no ordinary 37 minute documentary. It could very well be the start of a revolutionary way to view the local economy, starting with sustainable agricultural systems and the organic foods these farms provided to community residents and ending with BerkShares, a local currency. According to Coming Home, about 2 million BerkShares are now in circulation throughout Berkshire County. As of February 11, 2009, 100 BerkShares equal 95 U.S. dollars.
From provocative interviews, timely quotes and excerpts from E.F. Schumacher or from those in the community, Coming Home weaves a story of hope, empowerment and some practical ingenuity at just the right time when We the People are searching for solutions, turning not to Congress, but to our communities, and to Main Street, not Wall Street. Carefully selected footage and fine editing work makes for an engaging review, even for the most skeptical of viewers who may not see the power in communities that have their own farmers, radio station, interdependent retail district and currency.
Whether you’ve got a big back yard, some room on a windowsill or patio, or no inclination towards gardening at all, it’s easy to get in on the Springtime bounty!
Spring is getting close! The bulbs from last year are peeking out of the ground, and I’ve even spied a few things starting to bloom out back! This week’s Vegetable Husband newsletter mentioned that farms nearby are starting to plant for Spring, and it reminded me that it’s time to get my own Spring garden going, too! Here are some great resources to get you started.
As much as people might recognize that Ayurveda is an ancient medicine from India and that it enhances positive health, most do not realize how intricately it is connected to sustainability.
Translated from Sanskrit as The Science of Life, Ayurveda is probably one of the oldest known systems of sustainable living. Given that it enhances longevity goes to show how important sustainability is…not just as a marketing or lifestyle trend but as a method of achieving long term health.
I always struggle over what to buy my father and stepmother for the holidays. They have everything they need, and when I try to buy something for their home decor, it often ends up in a garage sale. This year I had a brilliant idea: a share in a family farm.
This summer when my dad came to visit, I told him about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and he sounded interested. You see, my dad is a big Willie Nelson fan, and he grew up visiting family farms. As Beth Bader explains:
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It is basically a mutual agreement between consumers and a farmer that helps guarantee the farmer a reliable income, and the consumers each get a share of the produce throughout the season.
A CSA is a real partnership; the consumers take on some of the risk of farming as a bad season can mean less produce. However, the support through the tough seasons allows the farm to continue, and it certainly pays off during the good seasons. Most seasons, a CSA subscription provides enough produce to feed a family of four. Many will offer shared, or half subscriptions for single people or small families.
