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July 19, 2008
Bread Salad, Mozzarella, and Lemonade
Food is becoming increasingly important to me as I try to be more mindful about planet Earth and my place on it. I was intrigued by Ezra Klein's pointer to a grilled bread salad from Marc Bittman because it seemed like I could get all of the ingredients besides olive oil at our farmer's market up at Grand Army Plaza. I struck out with one thing -- lemons, which give the dish a nice citrusy kick. (Perhaps a bit too much of a kick. If you try out the recipe, I might recommend cutting the lemon juice by about a quarter.) Lemon trees just don't grown in Brooklyn, it seems, nor its environs. I was, though, able to pick up some organic ones at the local natural food store, and with the leftover juice I made what I have to say was a tremendously delicious simple-syrup lemonade.
I'm a big eater, and a bread salad alone seemed like it might be a bit insubstantial, so I made up a batch of my mozzarella to kick in some milk proteins. Nice pairing, I think. Jane's studying for her upcoming bar exam, but she carved out a little time to have this meal out on our stoop. She said it made her belly happy, and fueled her up for the tough task ahead.
cheese, farmers markets, food, locavorism, recipes
July 22, 2008
Lazy Locavores
Huh. To help you eat more local, farmers will come to your house and plant you a vegetable garden. Then they'll come back to tend to it and harvest it for you. Barbara Kingsolver on urban dwellers wanting to make a stronger connect to what they consume:
As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places, I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.
I'm about 15 pages from the end of Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," and it is just plain stellar. She writes so well that I'd pay good money to read her account of mopping her kitchen floor. The topic here, though, is a bit more gripping: a year she and her family spent on their Virginia farm growing and eating most of their own food. For me, it made the idea of eating local feel less clinical, more soulful -- and more achievable, even for a city gal like me. Highly recommended.
Barbara Kingsolver, farming, locavorism, urban life
July 20, 2008
Vertical Farming
Manhattan's borough president is dreaming of vertical farms, growing plots stacked one on top of another, forming some pretty captivating structures. A slide show.
farming, food, locavorism, New York City
June 13, 2008
The Economics of Eating Local
Given that specialization makes things cheaper and more efficient, maybe the idea of locavorism/grow-what-you-eat doesn't make a lot of sense.
I've been occasionally documenting here my own experiences making cheese, and I have to admit that I'm paying a fairly steep price for my adventures in fromage. Let's see, the original kit cost $40 and additional supplies, include a suitable pot and wooden drying board, ran about $35. I've spent $36 on milk trucked in from the Hudson Valley to the local farmers' market. That's more than a hundred bucks spent, and I'm probably missing an expense or two. Of course, if I keep up my cheesemaking I can spread out some of those costs across future batches. But so far I've made three pounds of hard cheese, working out to be about $35/pound for cheese that, frankly, between you and me, hasn't tasted so great.
Now, I like supporting local farmers and knowing where my food comes from, but at the same farmers' market I buy that milk there are locally-made artisanal cheeses for sale that probably top out at, what, twenty bucks a pound, max? I enjoy the actual making of the cheese as a hobby, but it might not be the smartest way to put food in the pantry.
cheesemaking, food, locavorism
June 2, 2008
Spain's Chefs Fighting Over Strange Foods
Strangely enough, here's a pointer to another story involving the congealed juices of salty produce. Spain's elite chefs are bickering over whether or not such inventions as "green olives made of 'spherified' juice" and "parmesan snow" have a place in a cuisine known for its use of fresh local ingredients. I'm smelling a market opportunity for the Pickle Sickle...
food, locavorism, Spain
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