Eat Local KC

Dinner Events for October

Two notable dinner events this month:

CHEF JOHN BESH, Monday, October 16, 2009
at a four-course dinner at Jasper’s featuring dishes from
Chef Besh’s first cookbook My New Orleans

Dinner includes non-alcoholic drinks and dessert
Alcohol, tax, and gratuity additional
Cost: $75.00; includes a signed copy of My New Orleans
Reservations: (816) 941-6600

GREEN DIRT FARM TO TABLE DINNER
October 21st, 2009 at Zest
Chef Linda Duerr will prepare a fabulous 4-course dinner featuring Green Dirt Farm's 100% grass-fed Lamb and Farmstead Sheep's Milk Cheeses.

Cost of dinner is $50 per person and $75 per person with suggested wine pairings.
Reservations are required and can be made by calling Zest.

Zest, 10681 Mission Road, Leawood, Kansas 66206
telephone: 913.381.5678

Please post a comment if you have any additional special announcement for food events in KC. Remember that this month is the last month of local farmers markets before we start the winter market season. Get your fall pumpkins, sweet potatoes, pecans and local veggies!

Thanksgiving Recipes

The Halloween candy has not even hit the bargain bin yet and already the shelves are going red and green. Wait a minute. Where's Thanksgiving?

You know, the holiday created around sharing our blessings with family and friends, cherishing what you have, not shopping for more? Oh yeah. That doesn't sell on the store shelves. And that is exactly why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. That, and it's a holiday with FOOD.

I will be working on a new menu for this year, but below are my favorites that I made for the last couple Thanksgiving meals. I hope you and your family are blessed this holiday season.

Thanksgiving Recipes:

Apple, Sausage and Sage Stuffing Cauliflower, Chard and Leek Gratin Cranberry Applesauce Basil-Orange Sweet Potatoes Sweet Potato and Aged Gouda Gratin with Sage and Thyme Roasted Green Beans Vanilla-Sweet Potato Pie with Pecan-Brown Sugar Crust Red-wine Caramel Apple Tart with Gorgonzola on a Walnut Crust Roasted Fig and Pear Crumble

Fall Menu Side Dishes Roasted Whole Pumpkin with Gruyere Winter Risotto Balsamic-Glazed Carrots Sesame Kale Polenta Cakes with Sun-dried Tomato and Spinach Collard Greens and Bacon Caramelized Onion and Chard Saute Carrot Orange Souffle Honey Sage Sweet Potato Pasta Apple Cider-Sauce Delicata Squash with Red Rice, Cranberries and Pecans Maple-Orange Sweet Potato Souffle Fall Menu Main Courses Pumpkin Gnocchi with Walnut Cream Sauce Turkey and Noodles Acorn Squash and Chicken Sausage Cassoulet Apple-Sage Roasted Chicken

Fall Soups Coconut Curry Pumpkin Soup Pumpkin, Lentil and Carrot Soup Pumpkin White Cheddar Soup Vegetable Soup, How to Make Broth-Based Soups Cauliflower, Carrot and Greens Soup, How to Make Cream Soups Fennel, Potato and Leek Soup Carrot Soup with Coriander Two Ways Other Maple-Sage Reduction Sauce Brown Butter Sage Sauce

Attack of Chickenzilla

The title may sound scary and the size of this bird was frightening, but Chickenzilla was easily the best chicken I have ever had. Three of three family members agree, including our child who was munching a leg in one hand and crispy bits of skin in the other, all the while calling for "More!"

Based on our great success in sourcing local beef, we decided to look for local poultry as well. I had met Marcus Moreland who had both chicken and lamb, and he sold me some of his chickens to "try." I meet him, he has two ginormous birds, two smaller ones and a pack of lamb shanks. He asks me for ten bucks. I tried to force forty on him. He met me at twenty.

"You're nuts," I said. "This is  a hundred bucks worth of meat at Whole Foods."

He smiled. And just handed over the bag. He's won us over for good. We'll be buying lamb soon.

You see, the natural meats, even at Whole Foods, are not pastured chickens. They are cage free, meaning they have some access to outdoors, but not true pastured chicken. That natural diet of grasses and bugs supplemented with organic grains. For the first time chicken didn't have an indistinct flavor that could be any tasteless meat. Chicken really does taste like chicken. And, I tell you, it's not what you've been eating all these years. Wow.

Here's the menu for our feast:

Apple-sage Roasted Chickenzilla
1 large pastured chicken
1 apple cut in half
1 rosemary sprig
3 thyme sprigs
1 handful of fresh sage
olive oil
coarse sea salt
balsamic vinegar
pepper
rubbed dry sage
dried rosemary

Preheat oven to 350 degree convection roast if you have a convection oven.

Stuff chickenzilla with the apple and fresh herbs. Pour on some olive oil and balsamic and rub. Rub on some sage and dried rosemary, salt and pepper. Roast for about an hour for an average size bird, or 90 minutes for a chickenzilla. Use a meat thermometer inserted into the fleshy inside part of the thigh up next to the breast. This is the last part of the bird to get done. Temp should read 180 when cooked for safety. The balsamic will caramelize a bit and give the skin a deep golden brown crispiness.

I served this with Roasted Green Beans, and my husband brought home Sage Walnut bread from a local bakery. We also had some sweet potatoes, so I made a sweet-savory roasted blend.

Honey-Sage Sweet Potatoes with Shallots
3 large shallots, peeled and quartered
2 giant sweet potatoes (about 3-1/2 pounds) peeled and diced
2 tbs. olive oil
1 tbs. brown sugar
2 tbs. honey or maple syrup would be even better
liberal shot of fresh ground pepper
coarse sea salt
2 tbs. chopped fresh sage

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Spray heavy baking sheet with cooking spray. Roast potatoes for about 40 minutes, turning at least twice to avoid burning. Toss all ingredients together and spread into one layer on baking sheet. They will be dark golden and crisp when done.

Dessert? No, we just had chicken skin for dessert. It was that good. The only problem now, I muttered to my spouse over a bite of chicken, is that we can't ever get chicken out again. We're ruined. Sad, but so true.

Preserving the Harvest — for Generations

A couple weeks ago we went to pick up our CSA bag. Part of the week's harvest included an small melon with a light green rind. It smelled crisp and citrus. I can't even remember the name of it. As we placed it in the car, the farmer said, "Hey, be sure to save the seeds on this for me. They cost me a dollar each."

He gave my husband instructions on how to save the seeds. When my husband cut into the melon, the texture and flavor were just like the smell. It was a very interesting fruit. He did as the farmer asked, and saved the seeds. When he counted them, he said, "You know, there's like $150 in here." The next week we returned the seeds to our farmer, keeping a few to try and plant ourselves.

Seed saving has been in practice for far longer than glossy seed catalogs. For many heirloom varieties, this is the only reason they have survived and been passed along for generations. When you consider that the diversity of our food crops have been reduced by 75 percent since 1900, it really becomes critical to preserve that 25 percent we have left.

You can learn more about how to save seeds and about the history and importance of seed saving at my post for this September's Eat Local Challenge.

No Logic Here

In reading a New York Times article about the coming ethanol boom, it occurred to me that this whole approach is short-sighted and makes little sense. Here, an excerpt from the article:

"In short, the ethanol boom is accelerating the inequity in the rural landscape. The high price of corn — and the prospect of continued huge demand — doesn’t benefit everyone equally. It gives bigger, richer farmers and outside investors the ability to outcompete their smaller neighbors. It cuts young farmers hoping to get a start out of the equation entirely. It reduces diversity in crops and in farm size."

By removing diversity in crops and turning over our farms to ethanol production, we are only trading the import of fossil fuels for importing foods. And, we've seen from China, our third largest imported food source, what that means for food safety and quality.

It's not a valid solution: risking your health and relying on imported foods so you can keep driving a Hummer to the grocery store that is a half mile away where your food has been shipped from thousands of miles away. There's just no logic here.

Roasted Ratatouille

No, I haven't seen the movie. But I've known about Ratatouille for a lot longer than the Pixar version. It's one of those long-standing classic dishes, but until recently, I could not tell you why the dish made so much sense. Not until last summer at the farmers market while I was shopping what was fresh and in season for mid-summer.

Consider what is in season right now: tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplant, okra, zucchini, yellow squash, garlic. All in season, all together, all in the one recipe. Makes perfect sense to build a dish around those ingredients, right? I just never got that point. The recipe existed before the corner Megamart with anything and everything regardless of season. It was built around the vegetables that were available, fresh, and in grown in one's garden. Simple. Rustic. And delicious. Recipes follow ...

A Note From Our Farmers

While buying local is a great thing to do to reduce one's carbon footprint, and to support sustainable small farms, there is a lot more you are getting in the process than just food.

We try to buy eggs either through our CSA, or the local ones that are sold at the store. Both varieties taste great and are from pastured hens. One of the producers includes a note in each carton that lets you know how the "girls" are doing that week.

"Hello from Campo Lindo Farms. We are sad today. Lambert, the Great Pyranees dog that has watched over our ladies for almost 12 years, is no longer with us. He was born with no eyes and we thought he would have to be put down eventually. He never had any trouble though, other than bumping into vehicles that had been moved, so when he was about a year old, we put him in wiht a group of hens. He found his purpose. Though he couldn't see, he was great at keeping critters away that wanted to sneak up on the ladies, day or night. He was happy with his lady-friends, and always followed us as we gathered eggs to wrap a frong leg around us and get a little pat (he had a built-in "people locator"). By Lambert, you'll be missed. Thanks for supporting a local, temporarily sad, family farm."

Choosing Local, One Thing at a Time

An interview with Tim Schlitzer, Executive Director, Food Routes Network and Buy Fresh Buy Local.

Chances are if you live near one of its 50 chapters in 17 states, you've seen a "Buy Fresh Buy Local" sign. Sighting one of these is a great way to know you are near a source of an active local food network.

"It's not a brand," he says. "It's just continuity that can be identified." You see, brands, according to Tim, mean a label. A set definition. Rules. Eating local is for a person and a community to define for themselves. An approach not unlike that of the Eat Local Challenge.

An example of such interpretation, he said, is the hundred-mile diet. A hundred miles of choice is a lot different for someone in Kansas compared to someone in New Jersey. People have to be able to localize their approach.

Thus, the Buy Fresh Buy Local program exists to help insure that there are local choices, and that consumers can find them. The program includes everything from creating "feedability guides" that identify new opportunities for growers and producers based on an individual community's needs, to assisting with grant proposals, to helping raise awareness of endangered foods and the importance of seed banks.

The program also provides marketing materials and the "continuity" of the Buy Fresh Buy Local program that can serve as a guide for consumers. At the heart of all these different activities, the organization serves as a liaison for sharing information on what programs work and what kinds of solutions are working in other chapters.

Each of the 50-plus chapters then determines its own needs and can use the support, marketing materials, and shared knowledge to succeed in recreating its local food system.

Tim uses the analogy of microbreweries to help people understand what has happened to local food systems. As he explains, small, quality-driven breweries used to be the norm. Larger breweries with a standardized, cheaper product then took over. People since realized that the beer just wasn't as good, Tim says, and now you see the rebirth of microbreweries. Local food needs to experience the same rebirth.

Tim also advocates the rebirth of dialog with regard to food. As individuals we need to stop being complacent and take an active role in learning more about where our food comes from, he says. And, while the journey for each of us to define our local food may be complex, starting that journey does not have to be.

"I would say [for a consumer] to start with one thing rather than trying to broadly replace it all," Tim advises. Try sourcing that one thing, and the rest will grow from there. This is sound advice given that many local food systems can't offer all of the local items needed to sustain their surrounding communities. By starting small, demand and supply can grow together.

As the executive director for the program, it's likely Tim has seen his share of both successes and, well, not successes. Despite this, he remains optimistic when asked about the next ten years ahead for his organization and the long-overdue "consumer-driven food revolution."

"I'd like to see local food systems to be recreated in every state," he says. Currently about two percent of foods are sourced locally. Tim's goals include raising that percentage to ten or even twenty-five percent. "Communities will learn to feed themselves again."

Tim seemed less optimistic about the pending farm bill.

"Too much politics. We can't wait. The public has to stop looking to government for change." There is a certain irony in allowing a centralized government define "rules" for local food systems. These systems are unique and can only be understood by the people in them, Tim explains. "Local chooses local," he says.

Despite the overall optimism, Tim advises others not to take the fragility of our food systems for granted. It only took fifty years to get to the current state of a highly centralized and industrialized system. It's the goal of Buy Fresh Buy Local and Tim Schlitzer — as well as the responsibility of each of us — to guarantee that when we choose local, we will have that choice.

More information on Buy Fresh Buy Local can be found at foodroutes.org. Kansas City residents can learn more about our local Buy Fresh Buy Local Chapter through Bridging the Gap's site.

A Mixed Bag of Greens

We had a rough spring with that loathed cold snap. It hurt all the farmers. Our CSA is starting nearly a month late. We see the grower at the market selling a few things he does have, that are not enough yet to fill the CSA bags for a week.

I bought some chard and kale from him. But as we walked away, he ran after us.

“Hey, you forgot your onions and radishes, oh, and some of these.” he said, running off before I could protest.

The bag contained a large bunch of green onions, radishes, three small heads of bok choy, and a pound of fresh baby arugula, and a small greenhouse grown cucumber. He would not take any money for them.

Sunday night, I contemplated the market bounty. I needed to use it, but did not have time to make many different things. Then, I thought, what about a stir fry kind of thing? Can you mix all these and have it work? The end result has lots of flavor and texture with the mix of spring vegetables. It turned out way better than I thought it would.

Honey-Lemon Spring Vegetable Saute
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbs olive oil
zest of 1 lemon, plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
1/4 tsp. Red pepper flakes
1-1/2 tsp kosher salt
black pepper to taste (couple grinds)
3 small heads bok choy, sliced (about 2-1/2 cups)
1 small bunch kale chopped (about 1 cup packed)
1 small bunch chard, chopped tough stems removed (about 1 cup packed)
2 large green onions, sliced thinly (about 1/3 cup)
1 cup asparagus tips

Steam the asparagus tips in a steamer for 7 minutes. Heat oil in large dutch oven. Saute garlic and sliced green onions until just golden. Add honey, zest, juice, salt and pepper flakes. Stir. Add the chard, kale, and bok choy. Toss to heat through, just until it starts to wilt, about 3 minutes. Add black pepper to taste. Add the asparagus tips, still hot, and toss with the greens to mix. Serve immediately. It’s still good the next day, but it’s really good with all that texture. Much better than a mushy pile of greens.

Must Have Been The Weather

I am pretty disappointed that we could not do the Pennywise Eat Local Challenge here. We were having this great early spring, it all looked just right for fresh produce, early in the season. Then out of nowhere, well, the Northwest actually, came this freeze with three days of lows in the teens. Brutal. So many lost plants and replanting. I woke up to the first open day of farmers markets to snow on the ground. The Midwest is a hard place to be a farmer indeed.

Here is it May, and the past weekend at the farmers market yielded little in variety for vegetables. I did find all my herbs and plants, but otherwise, the early spring lettuces were nowhere to be found unless you count the greenhouse-grown plants for sale. I did find two large plants of leaf lettuce for $2.00 each. The grower said I should get about four cuttings, making my investment $4.00 for eight heads of lettuce. Not bad.

The other items we found, much to my relief, were scallions, and green and purple asparagus. The purple asparagus is a treat, milder and sweeter, and only to be had for these first weeks of the season. I was worried that it was lost for the year.

As we head into May, the produce we should have had in April will start to show up. Lettuces, Chard, Kale, Radishes, Beets and more Asparagus. I had posted my spring greens recipes in anticipation for April. Looks like I will just now get to make these recipes with local produce.

Here are just a few of my seasonal recipes that can be made with the early season bounty:

Basic Viniagrette for Fresh Greens

Ham, Asparagus, Onion and Goat Cheese Tart

Roasted Asparagus

Asparagus, Ham, Peas and Tortellini with Parmesan Herb Sauce

Braised Red Cabbage with Blueberries and Goat Cheese

Sauteed Red Chard with Clementine Sections, Feta, and Balsamic Reduction

Crispy Kale

Garlicky White Beans and Kale

Chard Tart with Grana Padano and Goat Cheese

Hashbrown, Chard, Tomato and Ham Frittata

Roasted Beets with Mixed Herbs and Shallot