Category Archives: Local Food

How to make acorn flour

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When you are interested in foraging, you really have to pay attention to the seasons. If you read about ramps in the winter, you are going to have to wait until spring to find them. Shopping at grocery stores seems to have made us forget that certain things grow at certain times of year. At least locally, that is. I had read about making acorn flour a while ago, but it wasn’t acorn season. I forgot all about it until I saw Stephanie mention it in her blog. I was going up to the Berkshires for the weekend and it was the right time of year for acorns.

We went on a hike and I brought a backpack along to gather nuts. I had no idea how many I would need, so I summoned my inner squirrel and kept gathering and filling my bag. When we got home, I weighed the nuts I had found and had 8lbs. After pulling off the tops and discarding the ones that had worm holes in them I had 6lbs. I read in a couple of places that you place the acorns in water and the ones that float aren’t viable. I tried that and almost all of mine floated. I decided to check inside and see what they looked like. Some were bad, but most were good, so I decided to skip that theory.

Now comes the gross part…grubs! Many of the acorns had grubs. The fat, white, wiggly things totally grossed me out, so I decided to bake the acorns at 170 degrees F to kill them. A dead grub is still gross, but a wiggling one is much worse.

After discarding the acorns that were discolored or had grubs in them I think I was down to about 2-3 lbs. Acorns are full of tannins, so you have to soak them for several days to remove the bitterness. I tried soaking them when they were chopped, but thought that the water wasn’t getting to the inside of the acorn meat. I ran them through a meat grinder to chop them smaller.

Directions for how to make acorn flour:

  • Gather a ridiculous amount of acorns
  • Discard any that have obvious problems (squirrel bites or worm holes)
  • Bake acorns at 170F for 1 hour to kill grubs
  • Shell acorns tossing out any that are discolored or have grubs. It is pretty obvious which ones are good and which ones aren’t
  • Grind acorns in a food processor, or a meat grinder
  • Wrap in several layers of cheesecloth and soak in water. You will need to do this for several days, until the meat isn’t bitter.
  • Lay the acorn flour on a pan and either dry in the sun, or in the oven on the lowest setting. Make sure it’s completely dry or it will mold.

I will post some recipes within the next few days.

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The Farmer’s Market

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This morning we had nothing in the house to eat for breakfast, so we picked up bagels and went to our local playground. This playground/park hosts a farmer’s market every Sunday, so we popped by to see what they had to offer.

One of the vendors was Grazin’ Angus Acres, which raises animals for meat and eggs. They had a certification of Animal Welfare Approved. I was wondering what that was compared to Certified Humane. I found this description on the WSPA (World Society For the Protection of Animals) website:

Are all humane food certification programs the same in terms of animal welfare requirements?

No. While the Certified Humane and American Humane Certified programs are similar, significant differences exist between these and the Animal Welfare Approved program operated by the Animal Welfare Institute. The concept of certifying animal foods as being humanely raised is relatively new and not all animal welfare scientists agree on what standards are appropriate. In addition, the administrators of humane food programs differ on the question of whether the programs should allow participation by producers that raise animals under both humane and factory-farming systems (referred to as “dual operations”). Certified Humane and American Humane Certified allow dual operations, while Animal Welfare Approved only certifies products from family farms.

Many products sold as humane are produced by companies that confine a majority of their animals under factory conditions. These companies can typically offer their humane products for less than they could otherwise because the products are subsidized by the intensive portion of their operation. Eventually small family farmers who run 100% humane operations could be driven out of business.

Okay, so Animal Welfare Approved sounds a bit better than Certified Humane. Live and learn.

Since watching Fowl Play, I haven’t eaten any meat. I just haven’t had the stomach for it. I even ordered carryout from a vegan restaurant last night. Which was delicious. 🙂 Tonight we are going in the other direction and eating hamburgers from Grazin’ Angus Acres. It is grass fed and finished, local, no hormones or antibiotics and has the Animal Welfare seal of approval. It’s been a gorgeous day and a dinner outdoors will be a nice way to end the weekend.

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Trade Off

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grape-tomatoes

My chickens are in the final stages of their molt. At least all signs point to that. Chickens begin the molt on their heads and kind of work their way down to their tail and wing feathers. Edie looks gorgeous and fluffy instead of mangey like she did after her bout with mites. I’m not walking into their coop to find loads of feathers these days. I think they should be well insulated for winter with all their new feathers.

However, when I check their nest box all I find are little fluffy feathers. No eggs. It’s been about 2 months with NO EGGS. I have to buy eggs from the store, which doesn’t suit me at all anymore. So instead of staring at an empty egg holder, I have decided to fill it with the gorgeous grape tomatoes that are still coming out of my garden. They are getting smaller and smaller as the days get shorter and cooler, but they are still coming. Winter is a mourning time for me when I don’t have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, so I’m enjoying each and every one of these little treasures.

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Backyard Harvest

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tomato-harvest

I keep taking photos of the beautiful tomatoes I’ve been getting from my garden. I said taking photos, not posting photos. Argh. I’m so behind on sorting through my photos!! I was lucky not to have the tomato blight that wiped out so many people’s crops. I bought a 6-pack of heirloom tomato seedlings this spring, but the names weren’t identified, so I don’t know what they are. I know the ones on the right are green zebra tomatoes, but the beautiful persimmon-colored ones are a mystery. I want to find out because they were absolutely sweet and delicious. The little cherry ones were so sweet, it was like candy from nature.

We’ve been getting shorter days (sob) and cooler nights, so the days of tomatoes are coming to an end. I have basil that needs to be cut and turned into pesto and lemon verbena that I have some ideas for. I planted some salad greens (a mesclun mix, mache and spinach), which are already coming up, so I don’t feel as though my garden has come to an end. I love the weather at this time of year, but it always brings a bit of melancholy with the shortening days and the approach of the winter cold.

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Saturday at the Greenpoint Food Market

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Right around lunch time we headed over to the Greenpoint Food Market in Brooklyn. The market is inspired by all foods fresh and local, artisanal and homemade and encourages community involvement and DIY methods of food production. Sounded great, plus our friend Megan of Brooklyn Honey was going to be there and we hadn’t tasted her honey yet. Megan keeps bees on her roof in Brooklyn. She gardens and recently got chickens. Plus, who can look as cute as she does in overalls!?!

Our timing was great, because we were getting hungry and the food looked amazing. Our first stop was, of course, to see Megan. She sells honey that is still in the wax comb. It’s a totally different honey eating experience because once you taste the honey, you can chew on the wax like gum. She had other products made with her honey including nuts and the most delicious granola ever! I’ve tried making granola a couple of times and it is always the same recipe. “Bake the granola until it’s dark brown, then throw it in the trash and try not to think about how wasteful that was”

Soup from The Soup Spoon

Soup from The Soup Spoon

We got soup from the very sweet ladies at The Soup Spoon. We shared a delicious gazpacho and a curried cauliflower puree. It was a drizzly day, so there was nothing better! I usually make gazpacho a few times during the summer, which is Neil’s favorite soup. Neil got cheated out of it this summer as I never got around to making it. Theirs was chunky and tangy and delicious, so Neil was very happy. They are looking to get a food truck, so keep an eye out for them.

We also had yummy kimchi pancakes, cookies and cinnamony mandelbrot. There was so much more to try – like the most beautifully decorated cookies from Sugarbuilt. Take a peek at their website to see what I mean. You need to scroll to see the different designs. Their Day of the Dead faces are amazing. I also love the architectural details they incorporate into their designs.

If you live in the area, I recommend going. It is going to be held every Saturday from 12-6. You can get more info on their site.

angel

Seriously, where else are you going to get delicious food from fabulous Brooklynites? She’s selling angel food cupcakes and deviled eggs.

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Greenpoint Food Market Opens This Saturday

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Greenpoint Food Market launches THIS SATURDAY Sept 12th from Noon to 6pm!

Here’s their press release:

We are SUPER excited to inaugurate the weekly food market this Saturday inside the Church of Messiah located at 129 Russell Street between Nassau and Driggs Ave in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
GFM started as a nagging daydream about a market exclusively serving food lovingly produced by locals. It is a response to a burgeoning culinary movement where DIY, artisanal, and traditional methods of food-making is short of becoming normalized in Brooklyn and beyond. GFM hopes to be a support system for explorative amateur chefs and gourmands wishing to share their goods with the community and maybe even make a buck or two along the way. GFM is all about community involvement and gastronomical gratification, bringing folks together through food appreciation.
The market will be an all-encompassing sensory experience where visitors can walk from table to table sampling the goods while listening to live music and marveling at the artwork installed throughout the space, all referencing food. The convergence of art and food will not only instill potential chaos in a cozy space but also foster a unique experience utilizing all senses for savory consumption.
The market will feature a little over 30 vendors sharing tables to bring variety and community essence into the space. Hungry and curious patrons will be treated to an array of homemade goods including:
Mini pies by Py-O-My
Jam by Anarchy in a Jar
Pickles by Brooklyn Brine
Kombucha by Kombucha Brooklyn
Honey by Brooklyn Honey
Kimchee by Mama O’s
Chocolate by Taza Chocolate
Cookies by Sugarbuilt
Soup by The Soup Spoon
Soda by Pumpkin & Honeybunny
A performance involving angel cake and deviled eggs by artist Hein Koh
A bake sale residency by Sweet Tooth of the Tiger
The launch of Food + Sex magazine
Custom made tote bags by Christine Cotter
The market will also feature vegan and gluten-free baked goods, beer poached bratwurst, cocktail syrup, mini tarts and bundt cakes, herb garni, boiled peanuts, granola and coconut macaroons. These specialty prepared foods will be offered and packaged to take home or enjoy at McGolrick Park across the street.
We’d love to see you at Greenpoint Food Market. Your attendance not only supports local food production and distribution but harbors community support through sustainable practices in and out of the kitchen.
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Blue Hill Farm

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This is the final segment of my anniversary/local food combo platter, which now takes us to Monterey in the Berkshires. In my previous post I mentioned that the chef at Blue Hill Restaurant (Dan Barber) gets his amazing ingredients in part from Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Blue Hill Farm was bought by Barber’s grandmother and has been in his family for 3 generations. They now have farmer Sean Stanton managing the farm, which has turned into a wonderful collaboration with Barber. Stanton works with Barber to obtain the tastiest milk, eggs and meat.

Neil and I figured that Blue Hill Farm was probably on Blue Hill Road. Duh. I emailed Stanton and asked if we could come out and visit the farm and he gave us the go-ahead. Interns (and fiancés) Daniel and Allison were getting the cows ready for milking when we got there, so we took a little stroll to see the chickens. They have 200+ laying hens that are the most free-ranged hens I’ve ever seen.

laying hens free-ranging

laying hens free-ranging

Chicken tractor

Chicken tractor

We then went to see the meat birds. They are in a chicken tractor, which is an enclosed run that is light enough to be pulled over different parts of the field. They rotate their cows to a new pasture every 12 hours. Then the chickens come in and do what chickens love best…pecking and scratching around for bugs. They pick through the cow patties and find nice juicy fly larvae. Yum. The chickens are fat and happy and there are fewer pests flying around the farm. Chickens also love to eat grass, so they are happiest outdoors.

barn

The farm was absolutely picturesque. There were green rolling hills, a beautiful barn, happy animals grazing and bunnies romping around. We headed up to the milking barn, where Allison was handling the milking. Daniel filled a suck-bucket (this is a new term for me and I love how awful it sounds!) with fresh milk for the calves. The calves are raised for veal, and again I couldn’t help but notice how much better their lives are on this farm than on factory farms. They are outside eating grass and drinking milk, which is a far cry from the dark, veal pens one usually hears about.

Calves drinking from suck bucket

Calves drinking from suck bucket

Lindsay really enjoyed watching the milking and learned a lot about the cows. They sell some of their fresh, raw milk right at the farm. It’s in a fridge with a metal box to drop money into. I am excited about a source of raw milk, because I want to work on making cheese this fall and winter.

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So we went from Blue Hill restaurant for our anniversary to Stone Barns and now to Blue Hill Farm. So where is Blue Hill Farm? It’s right across from Beartown State forest, which is where Neil and I got engaged. How appropriate.

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Stone Barns

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A few days ago I wrote about eating at Blue Hill Restaurant for my anniversary. I didn’t go into the food in depth, so I want to say again that it was absolutely delicious. They used fresh, local ingredients that really stood out with their superior flavor. One course was a medley of vegetables and fruit and we found ourselves picking each piece and tasting it individually and then talking about what we had just sampled. The combination of superior cooking and local ingredients made the meal memorable.

We had a very nice waiter who was able to answer a lot of our questions about what farms supply them, etc. They partner with two farms in particular. Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Wait, did someone say the Berkshires?? It turns out that Blue Hill Farm, which was Dan Barber’s (the chef at Blue Hill restaurant) grandmother’s farm, is very close to Neil’s parent’s house. We decided that the next time we went up, we would try and track the farm down.

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In the meantime, we decided to go to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture the day after our fabulous meal. We packed Lindsay up after her sleepover and drove up to Tarrytown, NY. Stone Barns is set on 80 acres of gardens, pastures and woods. The mission of Stone Barns, as they say, is to celebrate, teach and advance community-based food production and enjoyment, from farm to classroom to table. We had fun in their impressive greenhouse finding some of the items in our meal from the night before. The different beds made a patchwork quilt effect.

pigs

We wandered through the fields and woods to see their animals. The animals were kept in very spacious areas, and you could see that they move them around to different pastures often. They used portable electric fences that were powered car batteries. There were quite a few pigs that were in the woodsy area doing the things that pigs love best; sunning themselves, sleeping and rolling in the mud. The word transparency kept coming to mind. This operation was beautiful, productive and offered the animals a very nice life. I guess it’s weird to say they have a nice life when they are meat animals, but it is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from feedlots.

windrows

They even have a big composting area. They compost everything from the farm and the on-site restaurant. There were machines that looked as though they chop everything up into smallish pieces and then lay them out into windrows (long piles of compost). The windrows were covered to keep in the moisture. I read that they were interested inharnessing the heat that the compost produced as a way to heat the greenhouse in the winter, and worked to implement a compost heating system. I love this place!!

bee-hives

It felt as though we were walking through a botanic garden as we toured the grounds. After we passed the laying hens out in their enormous field, we came across their bee hives. I am fascinated with honey bees right now, and have a friend who keeps bees in Brooklyn and sells her honey. I’m still too chicken to make the leap into beekeeping!

I’ve always been curious to try hunting for wild honey. That entails watching the direction bees fly from the flowers they are pollinating and triangulating the path back to their hives, which are often in a hollow tree. I don’t have much opportunity to do that in NYC and I haven’t found a cohort. Plus I think you need to destroy the hive to harvest the honey and I wouldn’t want to do that. Can you imagine thousands of really pissed off bees with no home? Okay, so I like the idea of hunting honey, but not the reality. So when I saw bees (or possibly wasps) flying into a tree during our walk I was really excited. That could be my elusive honey tree!!

bee-tree

At the end of our visit, we had a snack in their little café and peeked into the Blue Hill restaurant up there. It was a fun escape from the city on a gorgeous summer day.

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Fallen Fruit

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A friend just sent me a great website called fallen fruit. Public Fruit is the concept behind Fallen Fruit, which is an activist art project that aims to map all public fruit trees around the world. They are based out of CA, so most of the mapping is there. When you go to their website there is a pull-down menu. Go to the maps and then click on the interactive online map. What is considered “public fruit” is fruit on or overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots. I think I would be respectful of a tree that is obviously in someone’s yard, but otherwise I think the concept is great. Why plant ornamental trees that aren’t even native species, when you could feed hungry people and wildlife?

In addition to mapping fruit trees, they are planning fruit parks in under-utilized areas. 

I love this idea and think that everyone should spread the word and add pin points onto their interactive fruit map.

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Milwaukee to use cemetery greenhouses for food production

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Here’s an interesting story about an organization called Growing Power in Milwaukee teaming up with Forest Home Cemetery to produce food for city residents. Once you get beyond the zombie images, it’s a very nice partnership. The historic cemetery has 3 century-old greenhouses that used to provide flowers, plants and trees for the park-like cemetery. The cost of heating the greenhouses became prohibitive and they were closed about 10 years ago.  

As the article mentions, urban farming is all about finding places to grow food that people wouldn’t have thought of. It sounds as though the cemetery workers are excited about having something positive and life-affirming happening at the cemetery. Soon school groups will not only tour the historic cemetery, but they will also tour the greenhouses and learn about planting and growing food.

I love stories like this. People thinking creatively. People working together. Healthy food going to people who might not otherwise get it. What a great partnership.

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