Green Options

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Aside from being dubbed the Green Diva, I’ve also been called the salad queen (these may actually be different variations on the same title!). Since my earliest memories of food, salads have been and remain a favorite staple in my world. I was somewhat of a natural vegetarian, gagging on most meat and thus being extremely particular about what meat I managed to stuff down as a child, I always gravitated towards any type of vegetable.

This time of year, us salad-lovers are in heaven. The fresh, crisp and colorful bounty beckons the creation of all kinds of fresh veggie meals.

I’ve become an unofficial expert on making meals out of salads. I can be extremely happy with a large bowl filled with lettuce and a variety of other food groups that make up a healthy combination all mixed up. In fact, I have a special hand-crafted wooden bowl that was given to me when I attended ‘farm camp’ in Vermont last year, that I love to make these salad meals in.

While there are several million ways to create a core group of salad meals, I’m going to pick just two that I’m currently rotating through the menu these days.

Carlton Winemakers Studio

If you build a cooperative winemaking facility, they will come. Prophetic words in winemaking circles. The only thing lacking is someone with the vision and drive to make it happen. Enter Eric Hamacher and Ned Lumpkin.

In 2000, the winemakers opened Carlton Winemakers Studio in Carlton, Oregon, a sleepy farming town in Yamhill County, southwest of Portland. The Dundee Hills of Yamhill County resemble the Burgundy region of France like no other place on the planet. A farming region for more than a century, about 30 years ago someone recognized the similarity, and Yamhill County started its slow rejuvenation from agricultural hard times to vintners’ paradise.

I’ve got a love-hate relationship with Whole Foods. On one hand, I like having organic products of all kinds available for my kitchen. I love their cheese counter (being a cheesemonger is my fantasy dream job!) and the specialty products I can find there that I can’t find anywhere else. On the other hand, it’s always crowded, and it’s always pricey. I really can’t afford to buy everything I need there, particularly their conventional produce. If I’m buying conventional apples from across the country, I’d rather not pay an arm and a leg for them.

Lovin’ Fresh is a series of recipes designed to showcase produce gathered from local farms or grown in my own garden.

Gardening brings so much pleasure and beauty to my life.  I’m really pleased with how my little plot has been progressing over the past few months.  A friend who stopped by my garden the other night asked me to explain my broad sweeping goals for [...]

Summer vegetable slaw

It’s a perfect side dish for summer picnics since it’s an ideal accompaniment to grilled meats. The slightly acidic mustard dressing is a refreshing contrast to crunchy, colorful vegetables like red and yellow peppers, radishes, fennel, onion and cabbage.

Change the vegetables based on the season, keeping in mind that it is best to have a variety of colors, textures and flavors. Avoid any vegetable that will bleed, such as red beets, or that will overpower the other flavors in this dish. The key is to cut the vegetables in roughly the same size and shape.

The Quebecois, always more French in their approach to food than the rest of Canada, have decided raw milk cheeses are worth taking a risk on after all.

Quebec, like the rest of Canada and the U.S., has long required raw-milk cheeses to be aged 60 days before sale to ensure against the possibility of harmful bacteria in unpasteurized milk. Artisan cheese makers [...]

One of the more delicious ways to eat locally is to drink local milk. For most of us, this means raw (unpasteurized) milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy or sell in many U.S. states.

But often there’s a way around it: A herdshare program. Drinking raw milk from a cow you own is not illegal. When a milk drinker joins a herdshare, he’s buying a part of a cow — usually 1/25th of a cow — and paying each month a fee for that partial-cow’s board and care.

I own 3/25ths of a cow (a Jersey named Cinnamon), which I purchased from a local dairy farmer for $50 per share. (If I ever decide to sell my shares, the farmer will buy them back from me for the same price I paid.) Each month, I pay my farmer $22 per share for my portion of the costs of Cinnamon’s care, and each week I drive out to the farm (in Ohio, it’s illegal for my farmer to deliver my milk to me) and pick up 3 gallons of beautiful whole unpasteurized milk. It works out to $5.08 per gallon, which just a few months ago might have seemed like a lot to pay for milk. It was worth it to me because I wanted to buy my milk from a local farmer raising cows on pasture without rBGH — cows living the way cows are supposed to live — and in my area that means raw milk. It’s worth it to others because they want raw milk in particular.

Summer is my favorite time of year. The days are long and perfect for hiking, traveling, going to the beach, or just sitting on the porch. And summer is the season of my favorite fruits: berries, plums, and melons! I grew up picking huckleberries every summer in Idaho and am always on the lookout for wild berries. Free, fresh-picked fruit is always the tastiest, and wild blackberries and plums happen to be just ripening for the picking where I live on the Mendocino coast of California.

We took a walk to the beach the other day through an orchard overflowing with ripe plums. Further on, the path was lined with tall blackberry bushes. Needless to say, we had an excess of blackberries and plums for a while. Add to that the fact that a local organic wine was on sale this week, and I naturally just had to make sangria!

My sister lived in Spain for a semester last year, and I had some amazing sangria when I went there to visit her. Of course she knew a recipe for sangria, which the one below is based on. (Thanks sis!) So, with a little local foraging, some fresh-picked seasonal berries, and some local wine, I made a yummy summer drink that can be adapted for any kind of fruit that’s in season.

Back in the days before refrigeration, freeze-drying, vacuum-pack processing, aseptic packaging and even canning, savvy cooks invented ways to store food for future use. Salting, smoking, pickling, confiting, canning and drying were the most common methods of food preservation, especially on country farms. Root cellars for storing vegetables like potatoes, parsnips and carrots, and fruit like apples, were also common, and a necessity.

Today, in some sense, we’ve come full circle, seeking greater flavor, taste and control of what we eat and how it’s raised, grown, processed and preserved. Happily, we can take advantage of the freezer - it really works now. We’re rediscovering methods of preserving foods that were common over a century ago. Preserving the harvest dovetails perfectly with the concept of sustainable cooking, since it’s all about using what is produced or raised locally, what’s in season, and storing it so it can be used in the future.

Happens every year here in the Midwest — that week when the mercury peaks, the garden wilts and everyone droops and sweats. My motivation to harvest produce, much less cook it, fades as fast as an ice cube on the driveway.

Wait — save that ice cube. As a matter of fact, bring out all the ice trays. When temperature and humidity rise, there’s only one word that inspires us through: blender drinks. And look no further than the humble rhubarb for cocktail inspiration that frappes local flavor with a new twist on happy hour.

You have to admit, rhubarb could use a new recipe twist, something other than pie or cobbler. For the gardeners with prolific rhubarb patches, bet you could use a recipe that uses twelve cups of this vegetable that thinks its a fruit.

This cocktail recipe uses a rhubarb-sugar syrup as the base, blended with ice and rum. If you’re in more of a margarita mood, blend with tequila. For a non-alcoholic version, mix equal parts of the syrup with plain seltzer. The syrup readily freezes and is easiest (and most energy efficient on a hot day) made in the crock-pot.

Here’s the Rhubarb Cocktail recipe, using the sugar syrup

Ernest Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast“ wrote:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to feel happy, and to make plans.

Oysters lead a pretty cushy life. Most oysters on the U.S. market — and many of the clams and mussels, too — are farm-raised. They’re grown in estuaries, those incredibly productive zones where nutrient-rich fresh and salt water meet and mingle. Oysters feed at their leisure, filtering up to eight gallons of salt water per hour to collect food; they simply relax and waits for the tide to bring the next serving.