Momentary Indiscretion

Still not caught up from the semester's end, but here's a video we shot two weekends ago. Also, since last we posted, there was a nice little article in the Birmingham News about the project. You can read it here.

















UPDATE: Click on the picture above or click here to watch the video. Having the videos directly on the site was a drag for those without fast connections. The video is rather large and might take a moment to load.

Farm Trips: Chicken and Wine Edition

Two weekends ago we made a jaunt closer to home to visit a small sustainable family farm in Prattville, a winery in Harpersville, and a 50,000 square foot corporate grocery store in Birmingham. Details as follows:














1. BC Hunt Farms, Prattville, AL

After nearly a month without so much as a taste of our fine-feathered friends, we decided it was high time that chickens became a part of our regular menus. Hungry for what some fans of pastured chicken call a more "chickeny taste," we set off to BC Hunt Farms in search of our first farm fresh chickens. When we arrived early Saturday morning, we were greeted by the Hunt clan - Bryan, Cat, and their three daughters, Kimberly, Mary, and Ryan, who had obviously all been busy killing chickens prior to our arrival. Blood-stained shirts and plastic aprons adorned even the littlest among them. The oldest daughter, Kimberly, came to meet us with knife in hand. After a little chit-chat, the team was back to work, affording us an opportunity to witness the much anticipated chicken slaughter, which took place entirely in the family's backyard. Up until now, my knowledge of chicken killing methods consisted largely of Michael Pollan's account in Omnivore's Dilemma and of the quick show-and-tell (sans birds) in the barn at Rosita's Farm. The Hunts' set-up was nothing fancy, but it worked. Plastic potting containers with holes cut in the bottom served as the "killing cones." The cones helped to contain the flapping chicken while its neck, exposed through the hole, was cut. A pair of 2x4's with a space between them just large enough to place the chicken's head sat over a series of buckets that would collect the draining blood. It was the youngest daughter's job to hold down the thrashing bird while it slowly died - a job which she relished with considerable delight. After the cones, the birds took a soak in a 145 degree water bath for 3 minutes, which helps loosen their feathers for the plucking machine. Their naked bodies were then passed to the oldest daughters for gutting, beheading, and cleaning. Finally, they were slipped into a ziplock bag and thrown into the cooler, ready to be claimed by waiting customers.

The Hunts killed more than 30 chickens that day. It was a family affair. The girls helped their dad, and they did so willingly. Each knew their responsibility - their part in turning living birds into food. Customers trickled in throughout the morning and afternoon playing audience to the carnage - Sarah even joined in on the gutting herself (see below). Some, ourselves included, took a reprieve from the slaughterhouse, to pick strawberries, or take a walk to see the pigs (which also will be turned into food later this summer!).

The Hunts started their little operation back in 2004. They run a CSA, sell pastured chicken, free-range hogs, and grass-fed beef. They also have a nice little patch of naturally-grown strawberries that are possibly the best strawberries I've ever tasted. Go visit them sometime and see the farm in action. You'll be happy you did.

2. Morgan Creek Winery, Harpersville, AL

After a long day of chicken-killing voyeurism, nothing hits the spot like a little wine-tasting at one of Alabama's wineries. Morgan Creek Winery is located about 30 miles east of Birmingham, and offers a wide variety of muscadine wines. We took a short tour of the facilities and were given an introduction on muscadine grapes, which are apparently coveted for their high levels of resveratrol, an antioxidant contained in the grape's skin and seeds. Even though white muscadine wine is made without the skins, it contains 7 times more resveratrol than the average non-muscadine merlot. A red muscadine wine, which is made with skins, contains 10 times more resveratrol. So we quickly found out that drinking muscadine wines (in moderation of course) is almost certainly better for our health!

After the tour, we had a chance to sample some of their wines, which included dry, semi-sweet, sweet, and fruit varieties. My favorites were the Cahaba White (sold at most grocery stores), a dry, fruity wine, and the Regal Red, a sweet wine with hints of cherry. They'll even let you buy a bottle and drink it on the premises, where you can sit at picnic tables overlooking the vineyards.


3. Whole Foods, Birmingham, AL

Before making the drive back to Tuscaloosa, a last-minute curiosity urged us to stop at Whole Foods Market, to see what, if anything, we could buy from Alabama. We strolled the produce aisles looking frantically for fruits and vegetables from Alabama, reading signs that told where each item was grown. In the produce aisle there was a lot of stuff from Georgia, more from California, and a handful of items from abroad - from Mexico mainly, and even something from China - but nothing that we saw in our quick survey from our great state. A quick run through the rest of the store revealed only a few Alabama products - Alabama farm-raised shrimp, goat cheese from Belle Chevre in Elkmont, Alabama honey, and Alabama wines. There's liable to be more Alabama products than what we found in our brief visit, but our quick scan looking for local goods was disappointing.

There are a number of reasons why Whole Foods in Birmingham doesn't carry more produce from farms down the highway. First, there's the issue of suppliers. It's much easier for Whole Foods to deal with established companies who supply organics than it would be for them to deal with a handful of local farmers in the area. Second, there are not a large number of USDA Certified Organic growers in the state - and, the buzz in foodie communities has largely been about "Certified Organic," and not "Certified Naturally Grown." Third, simply the size and the scale of Whole Foods makes it unreasonable that they could get even a tenth of their produce from Alabama farmers.

But still, Whole Foods could do more for local farmers, and the folks who shop there should demand it. Our friends David and Margaret Ann who run Snow's Bend farm here in Tuscaloosa County had a dealing with Whole Foods that ended in an out of court settlement. (You can read about their lawsuit here.) Long story short, Whole Foods came out to the farm and took some pictures of David, telling him that soon they would start buying from the farm as part of their "local supplier" program. Instead, they bought nothing and used David's picture in advertisements touting the local food offered at Whole Foods. Similar stories from other parts of the country abound.

While shopping at Whole Foods gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to many peoples' hearts (I'm buying organic, I'm buying local!), the reality is that like any other large publicly-traded corporation, the concerns of the board of directors are not so much about paying David and Margaret Ann a fair price for their produce. Instead, they're mainly concerned with having the largest profits possible to please the shareholders. It's legitimate to suggest that having a more aggressive stance toward supporting local farmers could be a way to maximize their profits. But, it doesn't appear that this is the strategy Whole Foods has chosen. And it doesn't seem to be hurting them either. The day we were there it was packed full of people.

UPDATE: A second fact checking trip to the produce department on Saturday, May 9th, revealed that we had overlooked two local goods - hothouse tomatoes from Blackjack Farms near Birmingham, and sweet potatoes from Haynes & Sons in Cullman.

Enter the Weevil.

UPDATE: Click on the photo above or this link to watch the video.

Also, the plural of larva is pronounced lar·vae (-vē)

Music by my college roommate and BFF Joey Thompson. He's got a great band called The Archibalds. Check them out here.

The Gray Area

Do you see what is in my freezer? (Please disregard the residual frozen peas.) Front and Center. Yep, that is ICE CREAM. Do not be fooled by the Wright Dairy label. While the milk may be produced in Alabama, the sugar and vanilla was not. Sure, Joe bought the flavors Butter Pecan and Strawberry, and, possibly, the pecans or berries could have been grown in Alabama. Still, we know that the sugar and vanilla had to have been trucked here.

So, how local is LOCAL? Have we failed in our moral endeavor somehow by choosing to eat some delicious, nutritious, and filling ice cream?

Immanuel Kant wrote of the “Categorical Imperative.” His ideas don’t drink as well as the vodka but he was an absolutist. If our “imperative” is to eat only local for 4 months, then how can we reconcile the consumption of this impure ice cream with our objective? I feel Kant’s ghost breathing down my neck.

The answer to this dilemma is that eating local is not the ultimate “imperative.” There are myriad reasons for our mission. So let’s evaluate this question.

Support local economies: Yes, Wright Dairy
Reduced emissions from trucking: No, the sugar, vanilla bean, xanthum gum, and guar gum were not produced here.
Local for Health: Yes, local milk / No, refined sugar
Organic vs. Local: No, beet and cane sugar production is heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. Yes, small scale dairy production is vastly superior to factory cows.

This is simplified and I could certainly argue about water quality, wars for oil, and corporate maleficence, but you get the idea. I guess we are hungry. Please weigh in on this moral dilemma.

Soybeans

Editor's Note: The four of us are all teachers and this is the end of the semester crunch. So, apologies for the very belated post, and promises of much more to come in the near future to get us caught up.

A couple of weeks ago Joe and I drove north toward Fayette to visit a farmer by the name of Johnny Walker. Mr. Walker and his son John farm about one thousand acres in northern Tuscaloosa County. They are traditional commercial farmers, growing primarily the key cash crops of our industrial agriculture system - wheat, soybeans, and corn. Most of what they grow isn't for human consumption. It will become animal feed or be made into alternative fuels. But, the fact is, like most industrial growers, the Walkers don't ultimately know where their crops end up. Once they sell their grains to an elevator, they join the great grain river that flows across the country and propels our food system (thanks to Michael Pollan for the "river" analogy). Unlike many of the small scale producers we've dealt with so far, the Walkers have been farming for generations on the same plot of land and have seen the progress of industrial agriculture first hand. We had a fascinating conversation about the futures market, about the state of agriculture subsidies, and about the volatile economics of food. Mr. Walker told us things I'd recently been reading about in the New York Times (like this story or this one), but hearing them straight from a farmer in my own county underscored the growing complexities of the global food market.

We originally called the Walkers to see if they might have some wheat, but they informed us it was long gone. The corn too. All they had left was a few thousand bushels of soybeans, and they were about to clear the grain bins of those to make room for their wheat harvest in early June. So Joe and I came back with two huge containers of soybeans - about three bushels each, weighing in around 200 pounds. What we'll do with all these soybeans has yet to be discovered. Joe and Sarah have made flour with them, but soy flour is different than wheat flour in that it doesn't contain gluten and can't be used in bread recipes, etc. We can make tofu, but haven't had the time. Rashmi and I have boiled some of them in our pressure cooker the way we would any dried bean. The result is a fairly bland but protein heavy bean, good as a side dish with more flavorful foods. So, if you've got a dried soybean recipe, by all means let us know about it!

Waste Not, Want Not

One aspect of the Eating Alabama diet that is important to discuss is the issue of WASTE. Prior to this diet, Joe and I did not generate enough trash to warrant carrying it to the curb weekly. There were plastic bags from frozen food or baby carrots, but it did not add up as it does for some folk. However, we did have a huge recycling pile- cans from beans and other veggies; cans from beer; glass jars from salsa or tomato sauce; paperboard boxes from veggie sausage and burgers; plastic containers of every shape and size from margarine to cottage cheese to sody pop.

Now, since all of our food is fresh, we generate even less trash. There are no take out containers, no plastic bags that are not reusable, no cans. The majorityof the waste that we are producing is compostable, i.e. the vegetable scraps and egg shells, or else meat by-products, which our dogs happily consume. The boxes that our strawberries were picked into will be reused on our own farm and the egg cartons returned to the egg farmer for reuse. The first word in the triad is "REDUCE, reuse, recyle." We are able to do this when eating only local foods.

Since we cannot buy any beer in cans and really the only alchohol that we consume in any quantity is wine, we are collecting a fair amount of glass to be recycled. Still, the amount of "trash" that we produce, which would occupy space in a landful and require a gas-guzzling vehicle to collect, is down by more that 50%. I realized this when my parents came for a visit and I bought "conventional" groceries. We had to throw away bags from potato chips, paper from cereal boxes, milk containers from soy milk. It adds up. Even if you think that how you are eating is ethical- the organic potato chips or the antibiotic free milk, there is still the issue of waste to consider. How we make decisions about food should not exclude this concern.

UA Farmers Market

Hello visitor from the Tuscaloosa News. Because of an article in this morning's paper, you may have come here by mistake looking for information about the UA Farmers Market. Feel free to look around while you're here, but this is the link to Homegrown Alabama where you'll find information about the market.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

After a couple of days of sporadic planting last week, we finally got our vegetables in the ground. We discovered that we had gone a little overboard at our Arboretum's recent plant sale, grabbing more vegetables than our little plots could handle. We managed to find a home for our surplus purchases, but even after downsizing planted 18 tomato plants and 29 pepper plants (sweet and hot), not to mention a few other things like okra, squash, cucumber, eggplant, and basil. It was exciting to spend some time in the sunshine, digging in the dirt, and working on my farmer's tan. And of course, there is a certain satisfaction in looking back upon a day's work in the yard, especially when that work involves planting for the season.

Even though I've had a garden for three years now, I'm still amazed at how relatively easy it is to grow a portion of my own food, and how fulfilling it is to watch a plant (or even a seed) grow and bear fruit under your care. In the days to come, I would be counting on each one of these plants to feed me. And until then, they would be counting on me too. Now that our plants were safely tucked in their beds, the ritual of mulch, feed, water, and weed would begin. It would become a symbiotic relationship of sorts - I would encourage their lives and they would encourage mine. They promised me nourishment, a richness of flavor devoid of pesticides and fossil fuels, and a fulfillment of being at least partially (maybe minutely) self-sufficient.

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan urges us to believe in the power of the home garden. In the light of a growing climate crisis, our dependence on petroleum, and rising food costs, growing your own food may make more of an impact then you may think.

"But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do— to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind." -Michael Pollan

Health Trouble?

You are what you eat. If you eat healthy foods, you will be healthy. If not, you won't be. So, when you start Eating Alabama, and you quit eating refined sugar, white flour, red dye #4, red hot weinies, and partially hydrogenated oils, you have to replace that crap with healthier foods.

One of our favorites is the sugar snap pea, particularly satisfying when harvested from your own garden.

A single serving of sugar snap peas has 98% of you daily needed vitamin C; 21% of your vitamin A; and 11% of the iron that you need.

I promise, after a while you will quit craving cheetohs and start craving peas.

Fad Diet

Ladies and Gents! Can't see your toes for your tummy? Got a few spare tires? Then the Eating Alabama diet is for you. In three weeks, eating anything I want as long as it is grown in Alabama, I have lost five pounds. My hubby has lost ten! So, pack up all that pre-fab diet food and make for the nearest farm. You'll be slim and trim (and hungry) in no time!

How To Build Community

Lesson #1: Dig up your front yard.

In our lawn-centric culture, you might expect to get a few guffaws, or at least bewildered looks from your neighbors when you set out to tear up the neatly manicured green grass of your front yard. "Are you making another flower bed?", "Getting ready to lay some sod?" I have to admit our yard could have used some sod. We have some pretty tenacious weeds that if left untreated (and I mean mowed here, not doused with chemicals), could take over the yard in a matter of days. But the truth was, we were breaking ground for another vegetable garden. Sure, we already had 2 plots out back, big enough to ensure at least a healthy yield of summer tomatoes, peppers, and whatever else we wanted to plant. But, we wanted more space. And, if we planted another bed, we felt sure at least some of our plants might make it. I guess when you are trying to eat locally, you begin to look at your yard differently. Every square inch of dirt has the potential to give us food.

So how is digging up your front yard a lesson in community-building? Well, the hum of the rototiller might as well be a siren-song for curious neighbors. We found that people wanted to stop and chat to find out what we were doing. We took a break from our efforts to talk with Michael - the son of one of our neighbors - who as it turned out had a couple of acres in Holt, and sold some of his surplus vegetables at the Tuscaloosa Farmers Market whenever he could muster up the strength to get down there at 5am. We told him about our project, as a way of further explaining our impetus to make a front yard garden plot. He immediately offered us some of his vegetables, and next thing we know he'd gone back to his Mom's house down the road to snag a couple of Mason jars of green beans and field peas. To me, this encounter was a reminder of how seldom we talk to our neighbors and how disconnected we've become to our immediate communities. I also pondered this disconnect on the level of our project. With our detachment from food comes a detachment from the people who grow it, and maybe even from the people we share it with.

I came away from the conversation with a new perspective on neighborly banter, and having learned a little something about growing and canning. And, what's more, Michael came back about ten minutes later asking us if we wanted any catfish!

I say Tomato...

I'm a little chagrined. After all that talk about food seasonality and about eating things when Mother Nature intended, what did we go and do? We found ourselves a hydroponic grower in Muscle Shoals (see below) and took home several vegetables that if grown in the ground, wouldn't be ready until later this summer. After just one trip, our refrigerator and our menus underwent a massive overhaul. Tomatoes would co-mingle with squash, eggplant, green beans, and feta cheese. Sure, we still ate mustard greens and salads. But now those salads were adorned not just with root vegetables, but with cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. The possibilities in the kitchen were endless. Andy and I both felt emboldened by our new, albeit early, vegetable recruits. They gave us cause to experiment, to try unusual pairings, and to rediscover cooking with fresh foods. We found ourselves pouring over recipes, seeing what could be modified to suit our needs, and getting really excited to cook come supper time. We are quickly realizing that our palates still have some tastes left to discover.

Here's what we had the other night. This recipe is very similar to a dish my mother-in-law makes with zucchini. We tried squash instead and it turned out great:

Squash-Tomato Casserole

5-6 small squash, sliced in rounds
2-3 medium tomatoes, sliced in rounds (from Jack O Lantern Farm, Muscle Shoals)
3-4 strips of bacon, uncooked (from Rosita's Farm, Hartselle)
1/2 cup (more or less depending on your liking) of cheddar, jack, parmesan, or similar cheese, shredded (ours is Bama Jack from Sweet Home Farm, Elberta, AL)
fresh oregano, chopped (from Fig Leaf Farm, McCalla, AL)
salt

Layer sliced squash and tomatoes in a 2.5 qt casserole dish. Sprinkle with salt and oregano. Repeat layers (in given order) until dish is almost full. Top with grated cheese and bacon. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 45 min. Take cover off and bake for about 10 minutes more, until bacon is crispy. Divide and serve.

Farm Trips: a north Alabama jaunt

Last weekend, Rashmi and I made a trip up to north Alabama to visit her folks and a few farms in that part of the state. We left Friday afternoon, after a careful consideration of what we could bring to eat for the next 24 hours. Travel within the state becomes a whole new adventure when you're restricted by what you can eat. Gone are the gas stations and their Moon Pies, the fast food pick me up, the Cracker Barrels with their greasy biscuits. Instead, you become a time traveler. How much hard tack and cured meats are we going to need for the long haul across the prairie?

We brought a steak to share with Rashmi's parents and some sweet potatoes for ourselves. They provided the last few sprigs of kale from their garden - the Beckers are indeed a kale loving family. The next day for breakfast we enjoyed a few eggs, scrambled up with an onion and some yogurt from Wrights Dairy. Then, it was off to the first farm.





1. Jack O Lantern Farms - Muscle Shoals - After visiting Jack O Lantern's website and being quite impressed by the amount of local produce offered at their Saturday market, I gave them a call to make sure I wasn't missing something. Steve Carpenter and his wife Carol run the farm. Steve assured me that most everything available at the market was grown within the state, and gave me a brief outline of what was being offered: tomatoes, basil, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes and more. That, and the farm is Certified Naturally Grown. Now you may be thinking, as I was, that there's no way a tomato grown in the ground could be up in Alabama right now - especially north Alabama. You're right. But Jack O Lantern operates two large greenhouses where they grow much of their produce hydroponically in the off season. Part of what we set out to do in this project is to rediscover seasons. Eating hydroponic vegetables seems to undermine that goal. Point taken. However, another part of our project is seeing what's available, when it's available, and where. Personally I'm conflicted about hydroponics. On the one hand, it's not a fully sustainable model, it's not in the ground, the nutrients supplied to the vegetables are a concoction cooked up in a lab somewhere, and, as I mentioned, it negates the idea of seasons. Just ask someone involved with sustainable agriculture about hydroponics and they will immediately turn their nose up at the idea. But, Steve supplies much of his produce to local restaurants in the Shoals area in addition to the throngs of folks visiting his market. The Marriot (one of his largest customers) isn't about to stop serving fresh lettuce and tomatoes in their salads just because it's April. So, is it better for that lettuce and tomato to have come down the street from a small scale hydroponic grower, or for them to have been trucked in across Mexico, their provenance and growing methods unknown to the average eater? We loaded up on their produce - squash, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce from Jack O Lantern, and potatoes (the last left over in the cellar from last year), eggplants, sweet potatoes, and hot peppers from growers down in south Alabama. Steve is trying to set up a network of farmers across the state. He gets hot peppers from south Alabama, and the grower there gets his tomatoes to sell at market. It's small scale solutions like this that could make eating Alabama feasible for more than just the four of us.

2. Rosita's Farm, Hartselle - At Rosita's we were welcomed by Karen Wynne (director of the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network), her husband Santiago, and their precious newborn Margarita. Rosita's has chickens, cattle, and pork available throughout the year. We were there with the expressed goal of bacon, and they did not disappoint. First, we were treated to a farm tour led by the farm's namesake - their dog Rosita. A handful of piglets roamed around in the pen, while chickens wandered near their hen houses - all adorned with rescued campaign signs otherwise headed for the landfill after an election. Santiago finds them to be a perfect construction material because of their durability, weatherproofness, and price. We had a great conversation about our project and as we were leaving Karen went back to her office and emerged with a can of peas from China. Someone had given them to her years ago, and she thought that we might get inspiration from them now. The fact that somehow it makes sense for typical green peas to be grown in China and shipped here for an American market using an importer in LA, suggests the lunacy of our foodways. Now the can sits on my shelf. Thanks Karen. But the thanks doesn't end with the untouchable (at least until July) can of peas. The biggest boon of our trip to Rosita's was the five pounds of bacon that brought us there in the first place. This is the best bacon I've ever tasted in my life. Period. Hands down. End of conversation. And, for those who know my dear wife, she's quite the connoisseur.

Check out some pictures:

We cheated.

Yes, people. We cheated. We claimed it was for a good event, and it definitely was, but nevertheless last night Rashmi, Joe, Sara, and I ate of the forbidden fruit - bread, chocolate, grits (still 0-10 on the local grains front), mushrooms, red peppers. The annual Alabama Environmental Council Green Tie Affair was last night in Birmingham, and our quartet got dressed up and chowed down. We justified our choices based on the fact that the food was sponsored by the local Birmingham Slow Food Chapter - a movement that stresses locality, seasonality, and sustainability. But nevertheless, I have no idea where the chocolate which coated my strawberry was from, much less the strawberry itself - although, on that count I can hope it was from Snow's Bend, since they were sponsors as well. We ate nervously, wondering a bit about where everything was from, but in the end we decided not to ask too many questions. At one point in the evening I realized they were about to take the brownies away and I made a mad dash to refill my plate, elbowing aside those who stood too calmly in line. "They don't know what's at stake here," I thought to myself. But there was solid Alabama food there - Snow's Bend like I mentioned, and Belle Chevre had an offering of their goat cheese. We talked with Tasia, who runs Belle Chevre, about her methods and she invited us up to see her operation sometime. More on that in the future.

We hope this doesn't cause a mass revolt in our readership. We assure you, at least in the Grace household, it was back to local yogurt with south Alabama strawberries, leftover sweet potato stew (see below), and stir- fried broccoli rabe with turkey from Bates Farm today. Don't hate our momentary indiscretion. We will be faithful otherwise...

Farm life.

The other weekend Rashmi and I were over at Joe and Sara's doing a little planting and a little farm tending. I was also doing a little filming. Here's a brief introduction to a few of Joe and Sara's animals. Hope you enjoy. Click the photo below or this link for the video.

Growing

We're in a privileged position here on this project since we've got the space and motivation to grow much of our own food, although a relatively small part of our diet's coming from our own produce at the moment. We had some of the cool weather crops and now that spring is here and the last of winter's chill has passed, we're gearing up for the summer and planting like crazy. Here we're transplanting lots of our baby plants. This is a gorgeous and busy time for gardening. I'm hoping for a few days with no rain so I can plow. I need to get that corn out if we're to have our own grains later this year.

Song of the South...

sweet potato soup and shut my mouth!

Ok, so I tweaked the lyrics just a little bit. While I'm sure the beloved sweet potato pie that the band Alabama sang of in "Song of the South" must surely have been palate-pleasing, I would be willing to bet it doesn't hold a candle to the soup I made last night with those same red-skinned tubers. April has brought us some unseasonably cold weather this week, pushing back our planting days and giving us cause to return to the hearty goodness of the one-pot meal.

Sweet potatoes got you down? Have you had them every which way you could imagine? Baked, mashed, French-fried, potato-chipped, au gratin? If your answer is yes, then it's time for you to return to our culinary beginnings--the humble stew, where every vegetable (and meat) can coexist, mixing and melding flavors until finally, thirty minutes of simmering later, you end up with one rich taste explosion! And leftovers to boot.

Sweet Potato and Sausage Soup (adapted from a similar recipe on Epicurious)
2T extra virgin olive oil
1 10-11 oz. smoked turkey sausage, cut into 1/4" thick slices* (ours came from Bates Farm, Logan, AL)
2 medium onions, chopped
3T fresh garlic chives, chopped
2 lbs red-skinned sweet potatoes, peeled and quartered lengthwise and cut into 1/4" thick slices (we used the "Ruby Red" variety from Burris Farms in Baldwin Co., AL)
1 lb white-skinned potatoes, peeled and quartered lengthwise and cut into 1/4" thick slices
1 cup dark beer (we used Abita Turbodog)
1 cup water
4 cups vegetable stock (we used stock leftover from blanching broccoli)
6-8 oz. turnip greens, kale, or spinach (we used turnip greens from Snow's Bend Farm in Tuscaloosa, AL)

*Don't like sausage? You don't know what you're missing! But if you insist, try this dish sans meat. It'll be nearly as delicious!

Heat 2T oil in large heavy pot over med-high heat. Add sausage. Cook until brown, stirring often, about 8-10 min. Transfer sausage to plate to drain. Add onions and garlic chives to pot. Cook until onions are translucent, about 5 minutes. Garlic chives will darken, be careful not to burn. Add all the potatoes and cook until they begin to soften, stirring often. About 12-15 min.

Add broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to med-low, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Potatoes should be soft at this point. Use a potato masher to mash potatoes while in the pot. Add cooked sausage to soup. Stir in turnip greens and simmer for 5 more minutes, until wilted. Season with salt and pepper.

Speaking of sweet potatoes

Have you tried them fried with a little cilantro and wild garlic? Oh my goodness lordy, I could live off this stuff!

Yes, this handful of cilantro does indeed constitute "a little".

Complements a little collards and ribeye like nobody's business. Wow.

The bread that didn't rise.

After breaking both an estate sale coffee grinder in less than five minutes and a state of the art $50 Braun spice grinder on our tenacious wheat berries, this weekend Rashmi's folks offered us their circa 1970 Sears' blender. "We have a blender," I thought to myself. But we nonetheless took their relic back to Tuscaloosa. I gave it a shot the other morning, and to my surprise the Sears and Roebuck beat out that fancy German engineering. I thought for sure that we'd done a number on those wheat berries. They were ground fine with just a little bit of grit to them. So, coming off two weeks with no bread, I decided to make pizza. Using a simple pizza dough recipe I put all the dry ingredients in the bowl of my mixer and started to add the water. I could tell as the water hit the wheat that it wasn't going to work. That grit I had hoped would disappear instead showed up as big unprocessed flakes of the wheat berry. Even though I could see some of the strands forming in the bread as I kneaded the dough, I could tell that this sucker wasn't going to rise. A couple of hours later it sat there in the bowl, a lifeless inert hunk of wet partially ground wheat berries. So our first food disaster was upon us. I scrapped the pizza idea, but decided to cook the bread the same way on a pizza stone. I rolled it out a second time to rise and still nothing. So here it is, in all it's glory. My failed Alabama pizza dough that tastes pretty good but has the consistency of a brick. Not too bad heated up with a little jelly. That's the thing about being hungry - you even eat your failures.

Deprived?

Unless I had planted my own garlic last fall or had saved some from last year, there is no garlic to be had at this time (that we know of). Traditionally, you plant garlic in October or November and then it is ready to harvest in June. You hang it to dry in a warm dry place for a week or so and store for use.
Since we are sans garlique I went out to harvest the wild garlic growing on our land. I found large spring onions as well. The taste of the garlic is not as powerful but it will suffice. You can eat the bulb, green and flower. I am not deprived!!!

Which came first?

Eggs. If you can't find local eggs in Alabama, you simply aren't looking hard enough. Hens in Alabama layed 2.1 billion eggs in 2004, the most recent year for which I could find hard numbers. That's about 9 eggs a week for every mother's son and daughter. Although many of those eggs are shipped outside the state in typical agribusiness fashion (Alabama is the nation's number 3 egg producer), my experience has been there's no shortage of folks selling eggs locally in any given rural locale. We're all getting our eggs now from Bryson Farm, in McCalla, which is about 1.5 miles up the road here from our place. Mr. Bryson does a brisk business amongst the country folks around here. He also sells chicks - which is where we got our flock (pictured: Henrietta). Actually, all of our hens are named Henrietta, which keeps things simple. Our rooster, a Bard Rock, is called Silvestre (doing his well-rehearsed Godzilla impersonation here). They are quite a sight: genuinely better than anything your TV has to offer.


Speaking of eggs, we missed the big local event: the Chicken and Egg Festival in Moulton (link) this past weekend. I really hope to go to lots of local food-related festivals. Particularly looking forward to the Butterbean festival. These festivals are great opportunities to celebrate local food and consume unhealthy quantities of the same.

And also speaking of, raising chickens in the city has become pretty common: check out this article from the Mobile Register: The Urban Chicken. You can do it too!

the wall

F*@%#K!!!!

At ten this morning I was thinking about happy hour at the Mexican restaurant. By about 2pm, I could have torn a punching bag to shreds. At 6pm, I had all but convinced myself and Joe that taking a “time out” from eating Alabama was justifiable. Every once in a while during the four months, right? Corn bread, meat, and muscadine wine just wasn’t going to cut it.

I wanted an f-in’ margarita and how!
A salad and some vino later and I had sort of settled down but wasn’t happy. I tell myself that I don’t want a one night stand. I will maintain my chastity.

A Few Recipes

1. Cream of Wheat (not to be confused with the breakfast gruel from "Oliver Twist")

1 cup wheat berries
3 cups water
honey

Grind wheat berries in grinder until you achieve a coarse texture. (An actual grain grinder will probably work best, although I haven't tried it yet. We used both a coffee grinder and a spice grinder successfully for about a week. They both eventually broke. ) Boil 3 cups of water. When water is at a boil, add wheat, and turn the heat to medium. Continue boiling for about 8 minutes stirring often. You want a consistency similar to oatmeal. When you've achieved your desired thickness, remove from heat and serve. We like mixing it with a couple of teaspoons of Alabama honey!

2. Cilantro Mayonnaise (this recipe is adapted from Mark Bittman in "How To Cook Everything")

1 whole egg
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp dry mustard
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 T rice vinegar
1 T water
1/4-1/2 cup freshly chopped cilantro
1 cup oil (we used 1/4 extra virgin olive oil, 3/4 corn oil)

Combine first 7 ingredients and 1/4 cup of the oil in a food processor. Continue to add the remaining oil in a slow steady stream. It will begin to thicken after you add about 1/2 cup of the oil. Blend until smooth. Check consistency and seasoning. Add more salt, pepper, or cayenne if needed. If it's too thick dilute with a little warm water while machine is running.

We used our mayo on cornbread buns that housed the most delectable deer burger I've ever tasted!

Psycho Tiller (Qu'est-ce que c'est)

Yesterday I walked into my front yard with a gasoline powered rototiller and created a new garden plot. We've got two in the backyard already, but there's a lot of good space in the front being taken up by grass - which mainly means green weeds that require constant summer mowing.

What will the neighbors think? I don't know. But I think it makes perfect sense. I've got this whole huge patch of good earth that's level, has good drainage, and gets full sun. I was tired of mowing it anyway - thick with weeds and doing nothing for us. Now it'll yield sunflowers and okra and basil and peas and tomatoes and cucumbers and squash and cantaloupe (maybe).

Exceptions (Grace family version)

For every rule there are exceptions. It's as true for grammar as it is for eating Alabama. Many have asked what our exceptions are, so we're laying them out on the table. We should also note as a general rule that two decisions are factored in when purchasing our exceptions. First, how far did these goods travel to get here, and secondly, were they grown, raised, etc. in fair and sustainable ways. This second question is much more difficult to answer about products produced by multinational corporations, but we're trying to do our best. These are the Grace's exceptions, Joe and Sara's differ. They are, from left to right, roughly:

1) Tea - only fair trade and organic from our local health food store. We can't grow tea with enough caffeine here in Bama.

2) Leavening agents - both yeast (for when we get more wheat and flour) and baking powder.

3) Salt N' Peppa

4) Cooking oils - mainly olive oil, but vegetable or peanut for frying. We'd love to find a local peanut oil manufacturer in the state, but so far no dice.

5) Some spices - dried local when we've got them.

6) Vinegar - often a replacement for lemon in recipes and also a base for dressings, marinades, and sauces.

7) Beer - but only Beer from nearby states: Abita (just over 4 hours from Tuscaloosa in Lousiana), Lazy Magnolia (4 hours away in Mississippi), and Sweetwater (3 hours away in Atlanta). Because of our archaic prohibition-era beer laws, it's nearly impossible for a brewery to operate in Alabama. The state's only brewery from my hometown of Huntsville burned last year and is in the process of rebuilding. (Terrapin, a wonderful brewery in Athens, Georgia, contract brews their bottles up to Maryland, but their kegs are safe on our exception list.)

Part of our rational for these exceptions is selfish - we love food and we'd like to get the most out of the ingredients we have. Without oil we couldn't do a lot of things, like make chips (which would make life with Rashmi difficult), and without spices we couldn't cook Indian food, make a tasty soup, season a piece of meat, etc. But the other rational is historic. Are we going to go back to pre-modern days in our experiment, hunting only wildlife while growing corn and other native edibles? Of course not. So we allow ourselves much of what has always been imported into Alabama - tea and spices and oils and beer. If there was a strong native beer culture in Alabama, I'm not aware of it. As Joe and I are both homebrewers, we've discussed making an all local beer with local ingredients. We're still hunting a few down, and we'll let you know if anything develops on that front.

Exceptions (Brown family version)

Not really. These items just happened to be in the New College refrigerator. Overall, I'd say this would be a pretty good random sample from an American fridge anywhere.

Let's see what we have here:

Mandarins in orange "gel" (the fruit, presumably, not the people); lean cuisines (30% MORE FOOD! MMMMMMMM!); the ubiquitous ketchup (fresh tomatoes teasingly implied by the label, undetectable in the taste); and the synthetic chemical substance masquerading as cream known as Cool Whip (strawberries not included). Now, I'm not trying to get snobby or anything, but I am starting to look at "food" like this with amazement comingled with a real sense of horror and disgust. Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces would be applauding the development of a culinary "valve", something akin to an extra sensory organ that detects taste, decency, theology, and geometry in my diet.

Our actual exceptions to our all-Alabama diet are much the same as the Graces: tea and coffee, cooking oil, beer except for homebrew or from a neighboring state, salt (but not pepper), leavening agents, vinegar. I do plan to grow my own yeast from one starter and I hope eventually to make some vinegar from Alabama wine (perhaps the best use for some of the local wine we've tried here, in any case). Sara has chosen to eat the occasional piece of chocolate as well, but I won't object if I want to keep the peace in our household.

Looking closely at where our food comes from and why: a rant in B minor

MMMMMMMMM....The collards I ate last night.


I think it hit me a couple of years back as I peeled the sticker off the apple that said it originated in New Zealand. Thoughts that were going through my head:

1. That's a long way for an apple to travel

2. Wow, that's a really long trip for an apple

3. I want to go to New Zealand, but it would cost thousands of dollars

4. I wonder how it would be cost effective to send apples all that way if it costs so much for people to fly

5. I guess they go on boats, because flying apples wouldn't make any sense

6. If they go on boats, how long would it take to get from New Zealand to Alabama? Months?

7. How do they keep them fresh all that way? Chemicals? Refrigeration?

8. Wow, a LOT goes into delivering this apple: fuel, refrigerant, boats, people, inspections, etc

9. The apple is quite tasteless: wonder why they took all this trouble?

10. If it costs that much to send this apple and here I am only paying a dollar for it, how much did the farmer get paid for it? Probably next to nothing!

11. We have really tasty local apples here: I wonder why I can't buy them in stores? Don’t say that we can’t grow apples here because I grew up with several apple trees in my yard, and they were great. And what’s more is we never sprayed them. Not to make the argument that trees don't need to be sprayed, because they usually do, but, well....

I have a sneaking suspicion that it all has to do with subsidies, tariffs, the value of a dollar, trade deals, and all that other stuff I don't fully understand. Things that aren't food, things that don't include this idea of people and apples coexisting in the same place. That would sound too much like ecology or nature or common sense or any of those other radical, totally impractical communist things.

Food. The more I think about food, the more I realize that all food is bound up with complex socio-cultural, environmental, and economic questions like these, questions that peskily present themselves at all turns. I often wonder where my food comes from, why it usually has mysterious ingredients like "xanthan gum", why we don't have access to real variety or fresh produce, even though we live in one of the richest agricultural areas of the country. I wonder why Alabamians are among the most obese, diabetic people in this country, why generations of children are being fed fast food, why small farms have continued their slow decline, why we've all sat back and watched this happen.

Because we don't know what's in our food, where it comes from, how it's produced, or who produces it, none of these questions have any immediate answers. Best not to ask. While everyone recognizes that home-grown food is best, we lazily accept gassed tomatoes, cardboard-tasting strawberries, canned corn, and a variety of chemical junk masquerading as food. Thinking about why things are the way they are invites confusion and despair. But a closer examination reveals that there are very specific reasons why we are so disconnected with our food:

1. It's cheaper to produce crops in huge quantities in places where the growing seasons are longest and there's a massive supply of cheap labor (South Texas, South Florida, California). There's a series of implicit assumptions here that Americans don't want variety of produce, food that tastes like food, food that was produced ethically and sustainably, etc. Because all those things will cost a little more money, and people would rather pay less for tasteless food. We're just wolfing our food down in McNastiness anyway, right?

2. Because we produce all of our "food" in vast monoculture on corporatized farms, all that stuff must be stored somewhere en masse, chemically treated to stay fresh or ripen because the distribution chain is so long that things must be picked before their time, trucked thousands of miles to people at great cost (also contributing to environmental degradation and degradation of infrastructure). Economies of scale. These make sense when we do not factor in environmental costs of transport and the externalities of farming (e.g., creating the giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico due to ag runoff from irresponsible land management), costs for health care of obese people, etc.

3. Because marketing and distribution of food in the current system consumes so many resources, production must be really cheap, which means that farmers barely scrape by on razor thin profit margins, cheap migrant labor is necessitated, farmers cannot afford to be conscientious stewards of the land. Agribusiness gets rich, we get bland food. All of this is based on the assumption that we all want (or will accept) cheap, uniform calories in the form of uninspiring, chemically treated "food" that comes from faraway places. I mean, it's almost as if no one's read Grapes of Wrath!!

4. Subsidies of agribusiness – a topic for a later time, a can of worms.

As Southerners (by the grace of God) we value our traditions and our traditional food: my favorites are fried okra, black eyed peas, and creamed corn with a big hunk of cornbread with fresh butter. But nowadays, you generally can't get any of this stuff that was locally produced (although there are occasional exceptions), not in most grocery stores, not even in most farmers' markets, not even when things are in season. On close inspection, you find that all (ALL) corn products come from the Midwest, or if they are produced here they are under contract to big Midwestern firms, usually just feed corn because aflatoxins so afflict big scale operations where large-scale grain storage is necessitated. The peas and okra come from Florida or Texas (still the South, I realize, but just barely, and even they deny it). Even if you can get locally milled grains - and you can, if you look hard enough - none of those locally milled grains originated in the state of Alabama. All from the midwest. And local grain producers are mostly under contract to big midwestern firms. Forget local butter – it doesn't exist. All the food that is produced here is shipped elsewhere, while all the food available to consumers is trucked in. What gets lost in the balance is fresh traditional food, taste, connection to the land, and the rest of it. I'll bet Dreamland doesn't even get local meat - o sacrilege! Enquire the next time you are there, and you'll get funny looks, I promise.

So what to do? Producers and consumers in this state will have to start connecting, and there are some admirable efforts being made on both sides as people strive to reconnect with their food and producers start thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing. The Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign, for example, of the Alabama Farmers' Markets. But to date, these efforts have been very small-scale and I still can't find local corn meal. Milled locally, yes, but not produced and milled locally. And the state of Alabama is a huge place, with wonderful agricultural diversity and tradition.

Eat well, y'all. And don't get caught up in asking too many questions.

Three real happy meals

One point I want to make is this: Eating Alabama means eating well, very well indeed. Today was typical.

Breakfast: yogurt from Wright's dairy, Alabama honey, frozen strawberries and blueberries

Lunch: cornbread, a little sausage, salad with blue cheese from Sweet Home Farm, two boiled eggs from Bryson Farm, roasted turnips

Dinner: sweet potatoes au gratin, steak from Boutwell Farms, collards

Wow: every meal so far has been wonderful. Now if I can just locate some garlic!

Just in the nick of time

Today we received our first CSA share from Snow's Bend Farm. A beautiful array of cool weather vegetables rich with color (and flavor) now accompanies our dwindling supply of turnips, cabbage, and onions. It couldn't have come at a better time. Just when our refrigerator shelves were looking a little sparse, they got a healthy dose of fresh produce to keep them warm! We also welcomed the new arrivals to our menu:

1. Red Russian Kale. Kale happens to be my favorite of the greens. We try to grow it in our garden during the cooler months.

2. Salad Mix. Margaret Ann of Snow's Bend told us that the mix includes 10 varieties of lettuce, two types of Asian greens, and pea tendrils.

3. Mustard Greens. These particular greens are a mix of Suehlhing No. 2 and Red Giant varieties.

4. Arugula. Another salad option.

5. Carrots. I could use these as salad-toppers or eat them alone as a healthy afternoon snack (Oh, who am I kidding? All my afternoon snacks are healthy now!). They would also work well along side turnips in the roasting pan.

6. Radishes. Again, no more naked salads!

Thanks Snow's Bend!