Edible Tulip

Farm-to-School Programs

Picture taken from a 100 Mile Dinner called Jersey Nights that I attended in August.

The following text is an excerpt from an article in Natural News written by Diane Raymond. I am so inspired by programs and initiatives that involve kids in their own nutrition, that allow for children to understand the direct relationship between food grown and food eaten, and to take ownership over the source of their food. There have been so many inspiring collaborations between schools and restaurants/farms in California (the climate is obviously a factor) but I have difficulty finding comparable things happening here in Canada, let alone Ontario. I understand the Ontario Provincial Government is looking to start up something, and given that Toronto is sitting on the best agricultural stretch of land from here to Iowa well it's frankly about time. Surprisingly (I guess because 'burbs get a bad rap for their lack of environmental awareness), Markham was the first city to legislate local foods into their schools, hospitals, and municipal offices. If anyone knows about any farm to school programs currently operating in Ontario, or Canada-wide, I'd love to hear more about them from you!

"Eating and Learning: Models of Success

In the small community of Glen Lake, Michigan the farm-to-school program gives local schools an opportunity to sample tasty, healthy meals grown with as many locally grown products as possible. Not only is this a great opportunity for the children to develop an appreciation for locally grown food, studies show that children who are fed healthier, more nutrient rich foods are better learners. Michigan's program is a prime example of how school districts can assist local growers and simultaneously teach students about the

health

and economic benefits of consuming local produce.

Schools in Berkeley, California, have become a national model for how to make schools more sustainable. The Edible Schoolyard Project at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School takes the farm-to-school concept one step further: the students use their school's organic garden as a

learning tool. Students learn about planting and harvesting, cooking and eating, and biology, ecology, nutrition and sustainability. This program has become so successful that many schools around the country now have their own gardens. The National Gardening Association (http://www.kidsgardening.org/School/sea

...) has a list of thousands of school gardens nationwide.

Students at the Louisa May Alcott elementary school in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood savor daily lunches dished up by local chef, Greg Christian. Christian runs the nonprofit Organic School Project, through which he donates half of his time and salary to a grand mission: seeing that Chicago students eat better. Nearby schools will be added to the OLP, with further plans to build teaching gardens at each school.

There is more good news: The National Farm to School program, a national network of community-based food systems that assist farmers and improve student health, estimates that more than 2,000 Farm to School Programs are currently underway in the U.S., with more than 8,700 schools actively participating.

HOW TO START A FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM
(

from The National Farm to School Program website

)

1. Research: Read the publication Going Local to acquaint yourself with model farm to school programs from across the country. As Farm to School programs come in many shapes and sizes, it's important to begin to identify what you want and what would work best in your school. Visit www.farmtoschool.org to learn if there is a program in your area.

2. Organize: Coordinate a group of cross-sector stakeholders in the community for a meeting to discuss farm to school (food service directors, parents, teachers, farmers, students, school administration, local nonprofits, etc.) Inspire potential supporters with an activity such as a farm tour or a farm-fresh taste test.

3. Assess: Facilitate conversations with various stakeholders to determine the feasibility of the program in your area-discuss where to buy local foods, assess how to serve them at school, identify staff or volunteers to support the program, and determine what the budget for your program can be.

4. Plan: Create a short description of your ideal program and then list specific first steps. Tip: start with easy wins! Try to limit this to five steps to help you organize and communicate your goals to others.

5. Start: Take small steps such as working with one or two whole products that are easy to process and popular among kids. Local apples, oranges, or strawberries are a good choice when they are in season.

What are you waiting for? Plant the seeds of farm to school!"

Where the Little People Live

 

Or so I like to think.

I kept running into a man with a plastic bag but without a dog for a few weeks. He looked intent like he was on a mission. This wasn't some contemplative stroll he was on across the field. There was an ever abundant variety of FUNGHI in the grasses in early fall. Large hard white shaped discs. Soft mushy black like tar wet spots. And these little toadstools. I'm not sure if these are the one the gentleman was after but I caught him plucking mushrooms from the ground and was both pleased to solve my mystery but also thrilled that someone was foraging.  

The Things We Find In The Woods

   

Ok, I'm with those other Canadians, from Ontario in particular, who are pissed off at our weather this year. Firstly, about 6 months ago we slipped from winter's "largest snowfall" embrace straight into heat. Where were the dewy cool mornings, the dank smell of the arrival of spring, the gentle intimate unlayering of the land of ourselves as we ripped the cobwebs of hibernation out of ourselves and danced in the rain. Well, I dunno. But I never saw spring. It was just cold and rainy and then sunhat weather. I was living in the city then where for most people the weather is an inconvenience "oh, it's raining today so I'll step straight into the car from the garage and then park under my office building and take the elevator up and then eat at my desk and drive to the gym and crawl back into that garage" so much so that you see people skittishly grabbing at tree trunks to hold themselves steady in stillettos during a first snowfall. I do find it amusing when people complain about the cold weather of winter. We are Canadian. It gets cold for 5 months of each year. It will always be that way. Please. Invest in a down jacket. A few toques. Some mittens and lined gloves. Some decent boots (I have sorrel mid-calf faux fur lined lace ups and they can honestly be sexy with jeans tucked in and a striped vintage winter coat). It's the perfect season to mix colour with fabric, to layer. Our fall this year lasted about 3 days. I respect mother nature. Do your business. Follow the intricacies and whims of your cycle, god knows, I'm at the mercy of my own. But I was saddened to see the colour of the season alight from every tree top only last 3 whole days. Now it's on the ground, curling, brownish, creating mulch to protect the earth through the upcoming seasons. The bare limbs of the trees now look pitiful against the dark skies. We've had turbulent weather here lately, a whole lot of streaks of cascading sunlight on the fields or through the treetops before everything gets dark and gloomy again. The sky is constantly in fast motion. The horizons are in diametric opposition, promising entirely different outcomes.

There's a gloominess inside our house too. The weather makes it that much more theatrical, more concentrated and claustrophobic. I think for both me and my partner "moving in together" has been a huge adjustment. We're both independent (read stubborn), willful (read difficult), and moody (read asshole-like on occasion). I'm also freakishly sensitive. Not so much emotionally, although that too, but more so in a way that revolves around my environment. As a child, I didn't even like living with my own family (their breathing, swallowing, and eating habits were intolerable). As I've grown older I've become more aware and possibly even more attuned to my intolerance (neurosis?). I read up on Asperger's Syndrome thinking that was perhaps my diagnosis. Loud sounds. Subtle sounds. Disorder. Mismanagement. Rhythmic motions. Yup. Drive me up the wall towards AGITATION hell. So now I share a house with creaky floors and squeaky doors with a heavy footed male who works from home. Our house has its own complaints with having to share space with us. Could it have any stronger a veto than to redirect our toilet plumbing so that it backs up into our basement laundry tubs?

Chimichurri and Its Many Uses

Given the name, I thought it was some kind of smoked mole sauce. But no, apparently it's a common condiment in Argentina, as ever present as ketchup is on American kitchen tables. The true recipe calls for a blend of olive oil, vinegar, finely chopped parsley and oregano, onion and garlic, and a seasoning of salt, cayenne ande black pepper. It adds a refreshing zing to grilled meats. Now I'm definitely a condiment kind of girl: chili sauce with scrambled eggs, hot red pepper jelly with grilled chicken, dipping sauces for meats, tart Indian pickles for rice dishes, sweet thai red chilis for stir fries, you get the point. Chimichurri is my new favourite. It's slightly sassy and poetic in a subtle but lasting way. The sauce I made came out of Gourmet Magazine's June 2008 edition:

serves 4

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

1 Tbsp water

1 Tbsp minced garlic

1 Tbsp minced shallot (I used green onion which is what I had on hand)

1 tsp hot red pepper flakes

1/4 cup finely chopped flat leaf parsley

Whisk together the oil, lemon juice, water, garlic, shallot/onion, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir in parsley. Let stand for 20 minutes.

Suggested uses: We drizzled it in clumps over grilled halibut one night and then I used the leftovers the following night and added it to my whole wheat fettucine con olio e aglio. I gently cooked garlic in olive oil in a sauce pan and set aside. When I was almost ready to serve, I tossed in a few Tbsps of the chimichurri and cooked it over a medium high heat for about 3 minutes, until it was hot but not cooking or boiling.

I know there's a dusty Argentinian roadside tavern somewhere in the wilds of Patagonia where a weathered Senor is drinking a cold beer at a bar lined with little steel bowls full of Chimichurri.

Walking Through the Changing of the Seasons

I feel like a new mother clinging to the cherished moments before time snatches tenderness and patchworks it into blurry nostalgia. Fall has come and gone in a matter of days around here. I was almost on an hourly watch, noting the slight change in colours, the blended hues in the sky turning to purplish blues and slate grays, the increase of light in the forest as the leaves fall to the floor, gone is the magical sense of wild cloistered abandon in the woods and welcome is the rich hubris I kick my boots through. I have been walking for a few hours a day since we moved here almost 3 months ago. The dog now leads me, looking back before taking a bend in the trail to make sure I'm close behind. I've put a small pad of paper and a pen in my satchel. Revolution seems plausible, emotionally, mentally, on these walks, everything is large and illuminated. I have to try to capture the moment. All before I come home and smell bacon. Talk about a wake up.

"Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking... questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world." - Honore de Balzac, Theorie de la Demarche

What Gets Me Up in the Morning - Strawberry Kefir Shake

I'm sleeping in WAY later than I'm used to. This morning I woke up early, 8:10 a.m. But that was simply just an extraordinary circumstance. Normally we wake up between 9/9:30 a.m. I have no idea why my schedule has completely retuned itself to a fast forward of 3 hours. I admit I like sleep. I don't do a lot of it but I do like the quiet, the lying in bed, the mental images, the awakening of the subconscious, the altered reality, the desolation of night. I have struggled with insomnia my whole life so now it doesn't help that I have a farting, snoring dog a few feet from my face, 2 cats that sleep on the bed - 1 of which sleeps in the crook of my leg so I'm rendered paralysed all night in case I squish his little head - both of whom are known to run up and down the cedar posts of my bed when they aren't sharpening their claws on it, and a heavy breathing boyfriend who flings the full force of his entire body when he rolls over onto his side then his back and then his other side so the gravitational pull of the mattress sinks a few inches. I stick to the outer foot of the bed wearing an eye mask and ear plugs and with the direct flow of a large stand fan in my face. Hey, we all have our ideosyncracies.

When I finally do make the slightest stir, my dog is up and off his bed and over licking my face so fast you know he's been lying there all morning staring at my face intently WILLING me to just wake up already and take him out for a walk. Given that I really don't know a single soul in this town, dressing for the outside world is really not an issue. I wear my glasses. Some sort of longish zippered cardigan over long sleeves and a scarf and a hat. When it's too cold to put on jeans, I opt for the 70s coloured checkered flood pants I bought in the kids section of Le Chateau about 15 years ago. They're synthetic and much warmer on the bare legs. I stuff this entire outfit into a pair of yellow rubber boots. A very tall cup of coffee to go and we're out the door for the morning walk. Our morning walk is no walk around the block. It typically consists of Simon attempting to herd seagulls round and round an enormous field. Then there's ball throwing and fetching. We cross over a foot bridge and make our way through an arboretum (lots of squirrels). We find a gravel path that wends its way through tall reed grasses under an archway of rippling poplars. Down alongside a river, out onto a marsh for a swim, back onto the trail and up along a boardwalk then down a dirt butterfly trail to a little beach then through the forest and back through a large swathe of greenery with picnic tables and around a naturalized section of trees and wild flowers and into the water to chase ducks and geese and a ball throw to the car.

When I get home, I'm starved. But by that point, it's almost lunchtime!, so not wanting to fill up too much, I make a variation of this shake, and drink about 3 tall ceramic mugs (in my case, they are vases) of it.

Morning Shake

1/2 cup orange juice

1/2 cup Kefir* yogurt or soy milk

handful of frozen strawberries or blueberries or mixed berries (you can buy these in bags at the supermarket)

1 cup diced canteloup melon

1/2 peeled, frozen banana

Toss all at once into a blender, pulse until the frozen bits start to break down, then fire it up on liquify. 

*Kefir is fermented milk, sort of like liquid yogurt but with a carbonated, sour taste. Kefir, pronounced like heifer, originated in the Caucasus and was originally made using camel's milk.  

Winter Squash Stuffed with Quinoa & Dried Cherries

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who spends hours looking through magazines (Fine Cooking... Gourmet... my gazillion cookbooks... online foodblogs...) for a recipe to make. Something different, untried. I've got my stalwart favourites but now that I'm cooking and eating with someone else I have to add a little more variety than I'm used to. Often, I hate to say, these recipes fall flat. And I don't make them ever again. This one fits the pattern.

I had been sitting on the couch one afternoon flipping through magazines. There was a special on cherries in the issue and one that included dried cherries and quinoa. I thought that sounded yummy. I only began to like fresh cherries this year. My mother ruined the fruit for me for years because she used to pit a cherry and then put a gravel pill inside and give it to me before a long car ride when I was a child. Unsuspecting, I would eat the cherry, chewing through it's tender skin and getting a first blast of sweet/tart flesh before BAM the inimitable bitterness of the pill would take over my entire mouth as the cherry slid down my throat and I stood there gagging. It's taken almost 30 years to get over that reflex. Enough so that I wanted to cook with the fruit. I ripped the recipe from the magazine only to put it down somewhere as is what happens to everything important ripped from a magazine for later use and totally forgot where I'd left it. I then began a google search for the two ingredients I remembered from the recipe: Quinoa and Dried Cherries. This is how I found Alanna Kellog's website, Kitchen Parade**, and her recipe for acorn squash stuffed with quinoa and dried cherries. The picture sold me. If it tasted like crap at least it looked like I'd made use of the local harvest and I had recently visited a squash and pumpkin farm down the road where I'd kindly been given a few varieties of squash to try. For this recipe I went with the White Swan (similar to acorn - mild tasting pale yellow flesh) and buttercup (round versus oblong with a deep orange, sweet potato tasting flesh).

Here's Alana's Recipe: Acorn Squash with Quinoa & Cherries

Serves 4

• 2 acorn squash
• olive oil
• 1 cup water
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 cup quinoa, rinsed well (water should run clear through the grains indicating the coating of saponins has been rinsed off and the grains won't take on a bitter flavour)
• 1/4 cup dried tart cherries or dried cranberries, halved
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans, preferably toasted
• 1 Tbsp maple syrup
• 1 Tbsp melted butter
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400F. Cut squash in half lengthwise; remove and discard seeds and membrane. Rub skin and cut edge with oil.

Place squash face down on a baking sheet (I use roasting pans with sides and I fill them with 1/2 inch of water) and cook for 30 minutes, or until the flesh is cooked through.

Meanwhile, bring the water and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add the quinoa, return to a boil, and cook for 15-20 minutes, or until the liquid cooks away. Stir in the fruit, nuts, maple syrup, butter and cinnamon.

Mound the quinoa mixture in the squash halves. Cover with foil and bake for another 15 minutes.

Photo use is courtesy of Alanna Kellog, Kitchen Parade.   

The photo looks delicious doesn't it? Well, it didn't taste delicious to me, and my partner spent most of the time picking out the nuts and dried fruit and squirreling them away under the folds of squash rind. The squash was delicious, and the nutty, light taste of the quinoa is a great compliment, but the nuts and the dried fruit was a bit too heavy, too perfumed, too dense for my tastes - all the reasons why I cannot stand wedding cake or christmas cake. I can take the flavour of chopped cashews and even dried tangy apricots in asian dishes when they are matched with more spice, more acidity, more fresh zingy flavours but mixed into the density of squash and grains the dried cherries unfortunately brought back the gag factor.

**The previous stuff has to do with my personal food preferences, and nothing really to do with whether the recipe is good or not. That's for you to decide for yourself. I just give my opinion. The interesting part of this story is what came of my losing the initial recipe. I went online first to google quinoa and see what came up. As I mentioned I got led to Kitchen Parade and once I saw her stunning photo I clicked on her About Page to read more about Alanna. She's got an interesting story. She's a "second generation good writer and home cook" in suburban St. Louis. Her mother started Kitchen Parade as a column for the weekly newspaper serving a small Minnesota-Ontario border town of 1,600 people when she was a young wife, and a young mother (to Alanna and her sister). Even when Alanna returns to the small town to visit her father, people still approach her to say "I made your mother's such-and-such last week" - this 35 years after the column ended. A true testament to the power of a compelling voice. After her mother's death, Alanna pulled out her mom's old columns and read them through, learning that her mum was a woman ahead of her time in her beliefs about nutrition and fresh, local food. Alanna felt moved to resurrect her column under the Kitchen Parade banner and thus life has come full circle for her - Kitchen Parade is published online here and in her hometown newspaper in St. Louis. I was moved by her story, and impressed by her website, so I hope you drop into her site for a visit.

Chicken Tikka Masala; a Cabbage Carrot Saute; Potato Stir-Fry; Coconut Snow Pea and Bok Choy Side -- Indian Night!

 

Not sure which part of my personality begs the over-achiever to rear up (middle child syndrome STILL?!?) but anyway I set myself up for ridiculous tasks sometimes. The idea seems intriguing. Challenging even, but always easily overcome in thought. But often when I begin the task I've enunciated out loud I feel so burdened, even angry, and all at myself, mostly pissed off that I can't just sit on a couch for an evening and eat a non proper meal and do nothing. I'm just not sure how much of my rigid upbringing around food, formality, getting dressed up for dinner (I'll almost always still change for dinner, put on lipstick, tie up my hair, etc.), selecting wine, prepping, lighting candles, even when I'm alone for god's sake. It is what I do to complete my day, to celebrate the evening, oh how I love the fall of dusk, the welcome quiet, the silent and thoughtful company of lamp light, and those first absolutely indulgent sips of wine. It's quiet here. We're still getting used to living in a smallish town. The crickets are still here and yet the coyotes have also arrived. Ten years ago a glass of absinthe, a mattress somewhere in Paris or Moscow, a typewriter, the constant sensation of feeling drunk on nicotine and soothed by booze, ravaging a loaf of bread, was all pretty much in an evening. Now I like a "family" meal. Even if there's just two of us. Or one of us. (My dog is also a perfectly good dining companion.)

So at 7 pm, I decided to start cooking my Indian meal, 4 dishes, from scratch. Granted, I had all the ingredients. The meal would consiste of a Chicken Tikka Masala, a Cabbage and Carrot Saute with Cumin and Lime, a Potato Stir Fry with Ground Coriander and Mint, and an improved Snow Pea and Bok Choy Side Dish based on a Green Bean and Coconut Recipe but in fact it was nothing like it (the grocery store was out of green beans, I brought home shredded coconut but could not convince myself to add it to the bok choy.) As you can see above, it turned out nicely. Everything came out suprisingly authentic Indian tasting, if perhaps more subtle, and less overtly saucy or heavy on the ghee. My boyfriend is now wowed by my multi-tasking, prioritizing, efficiency. That is, until I turn it towards home projects.