Good Food is Everybody's Business
Three weeks ago I began a class out of my kitchen, called “Meatless Mondays in Ina’s Kitchen.” For the month of March, I’ve opened up my kitchen to 8 eager participants who come hungry and receptive to what I’ve prepared and set before them. Each week I have a theme or two, and a menu that exemplifies the themes. The foods chosen reflect the transition into spring and the produce being as seasonal and local as possible.
Michael Pollan calls her one of his food heroes. Barbara Kingsolver credits her with shaping the history and politics of food in the United States. And countless others who have vied for a food revolution, pushed organics, and reawakened Americans to growing their own food and eating locally consider her both teacher and muse. Joan Gussow has influenced thousands through her books, This Organic Life and The Feeding Web, her lectures, and the simple fact that she lives what she preaches. Now in her eighties, she stops once more to pass along some wisdom—surprising, inspiring, and controversial—via the pen.
The Chaya plant offers extraordinary attributes as a food crop: potential year-round yields; highly nutritious; tasty; productive; minimal pest or disease susceptibility; tolerant of diverse growing conditions; easily propagated; perennial; handsome foliage; fragrant flowers that attract butterflies, moths and bees; useful forage for domestic animals. On the minus side… it is freeze-tender; its leaves should be cooked rather than ingested raw; it has but few cultivars, and their relative merit and behavior are practically undocumented. Overall, more people should know about, and grow, Chaya — hence this article.
Boarded up store fronts are a common sight in small towns across the heartland. But many rural communities are coming together to save their heritage and their towns. In the small Colorado town of Walsh, townspeople and farmers crafted a plan to keep the town’s grocery story alive and profitable.
Urban farming is grabbing headlines from Los Angeles to New York and everywhere in between. Everyone from retiring baby boomers to twenty-something hipsters are getting excited about growing their own food. What fewer people realize is that urban agriculture has a history that stretches back thousands of years, and that in many places in the developing world, people are producing a significant portion of their fruits and vegetables inside cities. Plant This Movie, then, will highlight the successes of urban farmers around the world and will also serve as a public policy film to ignite the debate around this vital topic.
I had bred for early lambs, so by the end of February lambing was done. I wanted to hit the early July market, as in recent years that had been the best market. There would be a slightly over 100 head of ewes and lambs on pasture. There would have been more, but I sold 25 of last years’ ewe lambs to another sheep producer, and only retained 3 for our flock.
I’ve been way into baking bread lately. Once a week on my day off, it goes something like this: wake up, throw a loaf of bread together, and let it rise while I shower and get ready for the day. Deflate the dough for a second rise and have a fresh loaf by the afternoon. We go through about a loaf a week, and I’ve been conducting careful weekly experiments in the hopes of perfecting the recipe for a whole wheat bread.
Whole Foods Market® is opening a new Seattle-area market in Lynnwood on March 15, and we got a peek behind the curtain at the controlled chaos going on before the grand opening. We arrived early for a tour of the new facility and dodged between trucks belonging to landscapers, electricians, and vendors. Inside we saw what looked like a laptop-armed battalion frantically tapping away at their keyboards and small groups of trainees in the check out lanes listening closely to their instructors.
