A) The undeniably obsessive baking of macarons. Ask anyone in the house, it’s gotten a little out of hand. I’ve read countless blogs with insane amounts of information that has led to a once, twice, or sometimes even thrice-daily macaron bake.  I’ve purchased enormous boxes of almond flour and gone through at least 10-12 pounds of butter in this month-long quest.  It’s led to some macaron disasters, but also some things of beauty…

B) Over-the-top Thanksgiving cooking!

We visited 3 Massachusetts farms and bought 2 turkeys, 2 pork shoulders, 5 hunks of smoked bacon ends, a ginormous bag of short ribs, and 150 pounds of fall vegetables.  Whew.  Check out our happy food faces:

So much food we jump for joy.  It was an epic 30-person, 14-dishes and 8-desserts night of eating madness. The very best holiday of the year.  And now for the big excitement…

C) We’re starting a sibling food business! Along with our awesome big brother Andy, we’re working on a very exciting venture and hope to hit the streets of Boston within the next few months. Keep your eyes peeled for more information soon…

Er – maybe not like this. They are pretty, though! Maybe you want to:

1. Grow your own sprouts! (Sprouted chickpeas are great for hummus)

2. Grow random crap from your pantry and fridge! (Special shout-out to potato sprouter extraordinaire Judith Ternes – you inspire us)

3. Check out Carolyn Cope‘s advice for edible windowbox gardens!

4. Find out who among your friends and family are undercover garden wizards! They’re everywhere, and they’ll definitely give you advice, probably bring you their extras, and maybe even deliver you some transplants.

Don’t forget to have fun and not worry too much! This spring, I tried to let go of my desire to read and read and read about gardening, and just gardened. It’s been great. Maybe (read: probably) I’ve made some serious technical errors, but I’m too ignorant to know the difference! And as long as I’m not perpetuating pests, I figure my amateurish behavior is acceptable. And the herbs are hard to kill. And it feels good to eat food you’ve grown. And it feels almost as good if not better to not pay $3 for a pathetically small bunch of “fresh” herbs.

Max and I threw a bunch of stuff in the ground this spring. Click on for some photos of our -likely-unimpressive-to-you-but-totally-life-changing-for-me garden! I’m practicing for my hopefully long career as a slightly senile but very proud grandmother who has impressively but inconveniently learned to use snapfish.

We started out with some super cute herbs from various farmer’s market stands (background), some tiny squash and melons, and some rhubarb. Special thanks to previous tenants for the tulips, mint, and marjoram! I think this photo is from May-ish.

Here’s a (slightly) better look at our herbs: three types of sage, rosemary, marjoram, basil, thyme, mint, oregano, chives, purslane (technically a weed, but apparently edible!), cilantro.

We were out of town for two weeks and our cilantro bolted! We could hardly believe it.

The rest of our herbs didn’t do so poorly either. The weeds, as you can see, are also well. We also added a jalapeno pepper plant and a serrano pepper plant. And our toes!

Here’s a closeup of our little squash:

They grow up so fast! From total cutie-babies to beautiful adults! But they’re overwhelming us. Maybe they’re more like teenagers.

We’ve also put in eggplant and tomatoes. Angela has graciously allowed us to plant our watermelon and extra pepper and eggplant seedlings in her garden. We can’t wait for harvest to continue! We’re so sick of lettuce!

When the Li-Bruynell-Hull vacation team pulled up for Pizza Night at the Orange Peel Bakery on Martha’s Vineyard, the sun was so bright that I forgave the weather for the past three days of rain, the stone oven so beautiful that I snapped pictures unabashedly, and the people so friendly that I wondered if I’d somehow teleported to the West Coast. In a word, it was heavenly. Special thanks to Amanda for the recommendation!

Here’s how it works:

During the rest of the week, Juli and the folks at Orange Peel can be found reaching into their stone hearth for treats like ciabatta bread, sweet and savory scones, and the amazing amazing amazing baking powder biscuits. Day-old goods can be found inside the kitchen while freshly baked items rest outside. Shelves brim with ingredients and possibility! Looking around in a small but organized kitchen like this (and unlike my large but very disorganized kitchen), all I can do is sigh.

On pizza night, though, things work a little differently. Drinks and special toppings are BYO to share, while the Orange Peel provides dough, sauce, shredded mozzarella, and hands highly experienced with roaring-hot-oven-pizza-cookery. The recommended donation per person is $10. It’s a great expression of what it means to cook and eat family style.

We always read through the recipe before we start cooking!

There were other first timers, like us, and plenty of regulars, many of whom helped out with prep and cooking. We brought fresh mozzarella, locally grown basil, portobello and white mushrooms, and some leftover salsa for the topping table.

The lovely volunteers presented us with dough, which we topped with our own and others’ toppings, and then returned for bake-ification.

We started things out with a simple basil-mozzarella pizza:

Minutes later, the pizzas emerged from the oven, hot, crispy, bubbling, and slightly charred, just the way I like it.

The Orange Peel folks sliced the pizzas and served slices up to any guest who wanted a taste. We got to try pizzas with pesto, pepperoni, fresh herbs, ground buffalo meat, and raw cheese! Sharing is so badass. We were stuffed!

Community vibes and teamwork can make good food great.  If you’re on the Vineyard on a Wednesday, don’t miss Pizza Night!

Thank you, Orange Peel, for a fun and delicious experience. We loved meeting you and hanging out with all the other people and families there. The community/family atmosphere was awesome and the pizza was great. Thanks for letting us have a taste.

Here’s hoping that heaven has a Pizza Night!

Dan Barber on ‘a farm that doesn’t feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, a farm that’s literally a water purification plant’.

‘We need a radically new conception of agriculture…one where the food actually tastes good.’

Insightful, inspiring, educational. Hilarious.

Promise me you’ll watch it when you next have a free 20 minutes.

We’ve been obsessively experimenting with happy chickens – here you can see Old Hall Farm and Fosse Meadows Farm stands, both of which offer a perfect bird for a Sunday night roast with market vegetables. And pretty bunting.

Perry’s Farm and Ted’s Veg are great for stocking up on produce – I’ve been trying all sorts of fun and colorful things like green and red kale, red cabbage, Isle of Wight tomatoes, sorrel, cress, local apple and pear varieties, rhubarb stalks, and purple sprouting broccoli.

It’s all excellent quality, grown by small farmers and producers, and a great way to get involved in supporting the local community. Plus, it’s delicious.  Showing up at the market and buying whatever looks exciting is a great way to try out new vegetables and play around with different recipes.

I love broccoli, especially when it’s pretty and purple. I think it’s delicious on its own, but let’s be honest…isn’t everything a little bit extra awesome when you add cheese into the mix?

This fantastic creamy feta dip is adapted from Sarah (fellow Rambling Restaurauteur) and her amazing Persian dishes that we’ve enjoyed at Nowruz new year celebrations for two years.  She’s made addictive rhubarb lamb khoresh and homemade baklava and all sorts of deliciousness.  I borrowed her lovingly worn Persian cookbook to play around with some recipes for a dinner party and ended up with a version of a Cheese and Walnut Spread that goes perfectly with lightly steamed broccoli.

You have to start with a really good feta cheese and our choice of cheese the past few years has been this delightful can of unintelligibility.

Having just got back from Berlin yesterday, I actually think it’s in German, although the writing also implies Bulgarian? Who knows – it’s creamy, salty, and fantastic and that’s all that matters.  Go comb the corner stores for it and you won’t regret it.

If you happen to be so lucky as to have received a Slap Chop (of incredible infomercial entertainment value, including the remix) for Christmas from your brother, you can use it to crush some nuts. You won’t regret that either.

Add some chopped parsley and mint to the dip, along with lime juice, some olive oil, minced garlic, and salt and pepper. I happened to have some creme fraiche in the house from Ottolenghi’s amazing caramelised garlic tart which added a nice smooth tartness to the dip.

It’s great with crackers, great with flatbread. Great on carrots or probably any other raw or lightly steamed vegetable. I bet it would be good stuffed in a chicken breast or rolled up into meat or spread on a sandwich. Cheese spreads like this are great multitaskers.  Make it and I’m sure you’ll find another ten great ways to eat it. Like by itself on a spoon…

Super Easy Cheese,  Herb, and Nut Dip

What You Need:

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really measure any of this, so don’t worry about the proportions too much. Try, taste, adjust as necessary, and I’m sure it will be delicious.

A good hunk of feta cheese (the Persian book says 1/4 pound)

1/2-1 cup of nuts – traditionally walnuts, but I didn’t have any, so I used almonds. Also delicious.

A handful of fresh parsley, chopped into little shreds

A handful of fresh mint, also chopped into little shreds

Other herbs that would be good but I didn’t have – scallions, basil, tarragon, etc.

1 clove minced garlic

1/4 cup creme fraiche

1/4 cup olive oil – I think I left this out

juice of 1 lime

salt & pepper

What You Do:

Ummm…put it all in a bowl and mix it up. It doesn’t get any more complicated than that and it will take only about 5 minutes of your life. Scoop onto a piece of broccoli or animal flesh or grain product and eat. Happy times.

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2011/04/11/sunday-farmers-market-trips-and-an-easy-cheesy-recipe/feed/ 0 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2011/04/03/real-bacon-real-excitement-and-a-really-delicious-caramelized-garlic-tart-obviously-with-bacon/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2011/04/03/real-bacon-real-excitement-and-a-really-delicious-caramelized-garlic-tart-obviously-with-bacon/#comments Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:34:01 +0000 mei http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=3528 If  you’ve ever met me, you know I have a thing for bacon.

I love bacon enough for my sister and I to make an all-bacon Thanksgiving feast with 8 dishes including bacon stuffing, bacon mashed potatoes, and bacon-wrapped turkey. I love bacon enough to go to a Bacon Camp and make bacon sushi and take random photos of beautiful bacon dishes. I love bacon enough to do a 4-course Iron Chef-style bacon smackdown that included bacon chocolate and bacon cookies and have been known to make bacon cupcakes and even bacon macaroni-and-cheese cat cakes. Don’t ask. I even love bacon enough to tattoo it on my face.

So you can probably comprehend my fat-kid-in-a-candy-shop-on-Christmas-morning level of excitement when this package arrived in the mail. I actually jumped up and down and squealed like a pig.  A delicious, dry-cured British pig.

Understandably, most people’s first question on hearing about my bacon package is ‘How did you get that?!?!’ Meaning, obviously, ‘How can I get that!?!?!’  The answer is that I was sent the bacon from a PR company promoting ‘Real Bacon’; that is, British bacon dry-cured in a traditional manner that involves hand rubbing with salt and spices and at least 21 days of air-drying.  In contrast to a lot of imported bacon that’s injected with water and chemicals, this bacon doesn’t shrink to half its original size in the frying pan or give off a funky white gloopiness when being cooked which comes from the injected water leaching out, two things I’ve actually noticed recently when cooking bacon. Plus, the bacon comes from pigs that are compassionately farmed, which I’m all about. Well, that’s what the press release says, which may require a little more investigation.

However, the interesting thing for me was that the press release didn’t come from an expensive artisan bacon company, or even from one company at all. In fact, the bacon came from multiple different supermarkets at a range of prices from M&S to Morrisons, all in support of the ‘I love Real Bacon’ campaign.  And while I’m trying to look for supermarket alternatives for a lot of my shopping, it’s a bit unrealistic to get all my groceries at farmer’s markets  so it’s great to know that there are some better options. And the bacon certainly looked better than a lot of the inspidly pink, monotonously hued, fleshy rashers you sometimes see down those flourescently highlighted megamart aisles.

P.S. For those of my friends back home wondering why the bacon is a funny shape and less fatty and stripey than normal, this is what is called ‘back bacon’ in the UK, which is essentially a bacon-cured pork loin. The typical long and skinny slice of pork belly that we just call bacon, they call ‘streaky bacon’. In case you were wondering.  They held their size pretty well when fried up with none of the gross white stuff, had a nice salty meatiness and got a good seared crisp on the fatty bits.  Pretty damn good stuff.

Now I love bacon, and you love bacon, and I want to share the glories of bacon. Getting a massive box of bacon is definitely a good opportunity to have a dinner party.  But as much as I would like to just hand over strips of bacon for our mutual enjoyment, I figured it should actually be incorporated into a dish before I get accused of endangering the cardiac health of my dinner guests. Enter Ottolenghi’s Caramelised Garlic Tart of amazingness.

I’ve talked about genius chef-man Ottolenghi before and the usefulness of his incredible vegetarian cookbook, Plenty, during my month of meatlessness.  Every recipe I’ve tried so far, from the Very Full Tart to this ridiculously good soba noodles with mango and eggplant recipe, has been absolutely stellar.  But of course, even stellar can be better with bacon. I bet Ottolenghi himself, as a meat eater with an appreciation of the glories of vegetables, would agree.

Caramelised Garlic Tart with Goat Cheeses and, Obviously, Bacon.

All credit to Ottolenghi, except adapted slightly in honor of bacon.

What You Need:

375g puff pastry – easy to buy pre-rolled in the store

a few tbsps olive oil

Salt and black pepper

2 heads garlic, cloves peeled – I did this once and my hands smelled of garlic for hours. My recommendation for lazy people who don’t mind spending an extra pound – buy them pre-peeled. Your fingers and your friends will thank me.

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1½ tbsp caster sugar – that’s just regular sugar for you Americans.

1 tsp chopped rosemary

1 tsp chopped thyme, plus a few whole sprigs to finish

120g rich, creamy goats’ cheese

120g harder goat’s cheese

2 eggs

100ml double cream  - heavy cream if you’re in the US

100ml crème fraîche

What You Do:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F and then roll out your puff pastry in a tart pan or pie tin. Create an outer crust lip, place some baking paper down, fill with beans and blind bake for 20 minutes. Take out the beans and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the pastry is a light golden brown.

2. While the pastry is baking, cover the garlic in water and simmer for 3 minutes to blanch. Drain, then return to the pan with a splash of oil to lightly fry for a few minutes. Add the vinegar and 180 ml of water (about 3/4 cup) and simmer for another 10 minutes. Then add the sugar, the thyme and rosemary, and a pinch of salt.  Simmer for another 10 minutes until the liquid is reduced to a delicious-smelling dark syrup and you are tempted to eat whole cloves of garlic straight out of the pan.

3. Crumble the goat cheese and strew across the pre-baked tart case. I’m interested to experiment with some other cheese here, but I used one log of chevre and another white hard goat cheese and they were delicious.

4. Now this part is pretty exciting. Spoon the garlic and the sauce across the cheese. It looks pretty already, and you will want to try to eat it now, but don’t. It gets much better.

Hello Beautiful.

5. Whisk together the eggs with the double cream and creme fraiche and some salt and pepper. Pour into the tart case, letting some of the garlic peek out and show their face.

6. ADD YOUR BACON! I only did half because one of our guests doesn’t eat bacon. Sad, I know, but that’s more bacon for the rest of us.

7. Bake the tart for about 35-45 minutes, until the filling sets and the top is a lovely golden-brown color that you just want to lick.  Mmmmmm.  I’ve made this thing of beauty twice now for dinner parties and brunches and it’s always a huge hit.

For those of you who might want a healthier or non-meat version, remember that it started as a vegetarian tart and is still seriously delicious that way. Although….well, come to think of it, given the eggs and the cream, I should probably avoid references to health altogether.  But the important thing to know is that this tart, like just about everything, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, Thanksgiving, is just better with bacon.

Yup, that’s a highland cow.  And that’s our house (or rather, country mansion) in the background. Coming up just at the end of the off-season, we got a great deal on the Bramble Lodge in the west wing of the Applecross Trust estate which, most importantly came with a massive kitchen complete with enormous farmhouse table and TWO stoves.  Perfect for sitting and eating hot Oak Smoked salmon from nearby Torridon…

After flying from London to Inverness, we hopped a train towards Kyle of Lochalsh where I entertained myself greatly by watching sheep gallop galumphingly alongside us. Once picked up by friends Mark and Jacq in Strathcarron, we immediately made a beeline to the family butcher in Lochcarron to buy local smoked salmon, venison sausages, black pudding and square sausage.  What is square sausage, you ask?

Bet you couldn’t figure that out.  Proudly made by the Mrs. Butcher herself, sliced almost as thick as her bulging, cleaver-wielding, leg-of-lamb-sized arms, square sausage is designed for optimum eating when fried up with onions on top of a tattie scone and sandwiched into a morning roll.

Tattie scones (potato, for those of you uninitiated into the magic) are one of my favorite Scottish food discoveries.  Soft and smooth like the best mashed potatoes on the inside, a little crisp and browned on the outside when slipped onto the old school always-on Rayburn stove as soon as you wander into the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed from a bit too much whiskey.  Nothing like a double-carb and onion-fried meat bonanza to soothe your hangover.

As fun as it was cooking and hanging around the warm and whiskey-filled kitchen, we had to venture out to taste the as-fresh-as-it-gets seafood straight from the nearby bay. Our destination of choice most nights was the excellent Applecross Inn a short walk around the bay from the house, a gorgeously scenic walk during the day and at sunset, a mildly terrifying pitch-black Blair Witch-style horrorfest on the way back.

Applecross is justly famous for their Applecross bay prawns (like little hard-shelled langoustines) …

and their hot and cold smoked salmon…

…and most definitely the squat lobsters (just like regular lobsters, except about the size of the tip of your pinky finger and swimming in an I-want-to-paint-this-on-my-face-level-of-delicious garlic butter sauce). They also have a dangerously good whiskey selection and an even more lethal sticky toffee pudding drowning a happy death in a pitcher full of warm custard.

Our other amazing food stop was the Shieldaig Bar & Coastal Kitchen for ridiculously good fish & chips, smoked haddock omelettes, seafood chowder, and a cheesy toasty amazing  fisherman’s pie.

Of course we had to try the haggis, neeps, and tatties, which I still really like despite a near-emotionally-scarring but eventually rewarding experience making haggis with foodrambler last year.   Not as scary as you might think considering it contains the grossest of the innards  of those happily galumphing sheep.

The clootie dumpling dessert, a heavy lump of fruit and suet and doughiness, was a bit disappointing compared to the sticky toffee pudding, so it’s not actually a highlight. But I find the name greatly amusing, so I included it anyway.  A great meal nonethless. Happy times.

The real highlights of the jaunt to Shieldaig?  First, we stopped off at the roadside stand in the mountains selling lovely bluish-green eggs and chunky hand-knitted hats, gloves, scarves, and kilt socks – essentially a serve-yourself filing cabinet with an honesty box just up the path from a farmhouse where you could just see a few chickens bopping about.   Here’s our crew decked out in finery before we waltzed off with our dozen eggs and brand new hats.

As if things couldn’t get any more exciting, we then continue down the one-lane highway snaking around the peninsula,  only to get beckoned off by a nice old lady who ‘just stopped to warn us that there’s a big herd of Highland cattle in the road.’ AWESOME.

If this cow could talk, it would be saying DUUUUUUDE.

We enjoyed our homegrown eggs softboiled in exciting little egg cups with focaccia soldiers and noshed on Scottish goat cheese drizzled in Struan heather honey.

Lest you think we spent the entire holiday stuffing our faces with prawns and pudding and lolling in front of the fire with a glass of Macallan, I’ll have you know we did a fair amount of tramping through fields and soaking our shoes in the marshes.

Definitely the best way to encounter future venison sausages. I mean, the local wildlife.

Actually, one of the great things about the area is the attention paid to sustainability and good food sourcing.  The fishermen, farmers and gamekeepers know they’d be putting themselves out of business if they overfished the bay or decimated the local deer herd, so they use traditional methods of fishing like special traps called creels that keep only the appropriately large prawns and let the undersized and pregnant mum prawns go.  They slaughter the deer that wouldn’t have made it through the winter anyway to keep the majority of the herds free to wander over the hills and through the Bramble Lodge backyard.  Or so you hear from the gamekeeper when you run into him down at the pub.

Basically, it doesn’t get better than Applecross.  I’m already planning a trip back, during which my main goals are:

1. Visit the Potting Shed and Applecross Walled Garden where Mark and Jacq got married. Check out the fantastic website – they grow their own fruit and veg, do their own fishing, tend their own happy piggies, and slaughter the deer from the estate on the premises.  As they say, the food miles ‘could be better measured in yards.’ They open for the season today and I can’t wait to go back.

2. Eat the seafood pizza at the Coastal Kitchen.

And most importantly….

3. Hug a Highland Cow.

I certainly don’t think that’s too much to ask.  Applecross, I’m coming back for you…

I always wish I had access to a table large enough to seat 20 of my best friends around it for an epic dinner party. I still haven’t managed to acquire such a table or a room large enough to put it in, but I got a taste of what it might be like at a great event last night called the Hub Feast.  It’s a potluck and a dinner party,  a chance to meet great people and talk about all sorts of cool food things, and an opportunity to make an unnecessary amount of insanely indulgent peanut butter cream cheese-frosted cupcakes.  What more could you ask for?

The event took place at one of the Hubs:  a network of beautifully designed office/event/social spaces for members and their guests to work, meet, connect,  innovate, and more, located as close as Islington (the first one) and as far as Bombay and Sao Paulo. I’ve visited the gorgeous wood-beamed and exposed brick-walled Hub King’s Cross a few times to meet with our friends at Hide & Seek and so was excited to return for one of their monthly community feasts, described as follows:

The programme of Feasts for 2010 is well under way now and this month, we’ll be looking at Guerilla Food. Across London, there are people running underground restaurants, growing things in weird and wonderful places, cooking in unpredictable locations and using food in ways previously not explored. If you want to meet these people and find out a bit more about what they’re up to, we invite you to come along.

As always, you can expect to sit next to people who love food, cooking it, talking about it and most of all, eating it. So bring both an open mind and a dish to share to eat with people that love all things food. An informal evening with a very loose agenda, we hope to create a feast where conversation about food, life, love and everything in between, can flow freely.

We’ve been chatting with the lovely Hub folks including Holly, Alex, Lucy, and Eleanor about doing some events, so they invited us down to chat about Rambling Restaurant and underground supper clubs and all things delicious and exciting.  It all sounded like  pretty much like my ideal evening, so Sarah, foodrambler and I baked up a storm of lemon curd meringue roulades and several batches of the most insanely deliciously orgasmic Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting.

A quick aside on these cupcakes: I’d recommend you don’t click that recipe. In all seriousness…it will haunt your dreams. The banana cupcakes are very good; the peanut butter cream cheese frosting will bring you to your knees in pure tastebud joy.  The sublime happiness is only slightly marred by the guilty knowledge that the peanut butter (fat) plus cream cheese (fat) plus salted butter (fat) plus icing sugar in this frosting  is probably at work hardening your arteries as soon as the  cupcake crosses your lips and the smile crosses your face.  However,  keep in mind that all this tasty fat and sugar are calories that humans are genetically hardwired to love. This means it is not my fault when I eat gargantuan mounds of the frosting piped onto cupcakes (dangerous), slathered onto apples (healthy!), spread onto bananas (still good!), licked off of several kitchen tools (not so much) and then, finally, by the unabashedly deliberate spoonful.  I guarantee you will do the same. Blame biology.

But back to the feasting – it was a lovely evening of meeting, chatting, and of course, lots of eating. We went around the table and introduced ourselves so everyone got to see who was there and their cool projects and organizations and affiliations. I had great conversations about cooking and food spaces with Holly from Food Stuff and talked sustainable food development with some great people from Forum for the Future and saw but didn’t get enough time to chat with Chris from the Real Bread Campaign.  Meanwhile I ate fresh bread, hummous, spicy ginger carrot beetroot salad, Spanish omelette, flapjacks, apple crumble, spinach and strawberry salad, couscous, roasted vegetables, and so much more.  One of my favorite dishes was an amazing wait-a-minute-this-is-vegan?-you-must-be-joking leek pie made by a really nice guy named Alessio, whom I tackled after dinner to express my delight in his dish and ask his secret. Apparently, it’s soy cream. Don’t worry, it’s not actually a secret.

It was a wonderful occasion to meet a lot of creative, friendly, interesting people, all equally in love with food and cooking and community and eating.  I’m excited for the next one.  You can come along too, but only if you promise to take home some cupcakes so I don’t have to.  I still have some leftover frosting in the fridge and it is calling to me to come eat it with a big spoon…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/29/community-feasting-and-the-best-cupcake-frosting-you-may-ever-put-in-your-mouth/feed/ 3 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/20/weekly-link-roundup-eating-maps-grass-fed-beef-aquaponics-and-more/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/20/weekly-link-roundup-eating-maps-grass-fed-beef-aquaponics-and-more/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:51:25 +0000 admin http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=2895 Here’s what I’ve been reading this week. Lots of good stuff.

Most Fast-Food Per Person and Other Food Facts [Daily Yonder] – some cool maps of eating habits across the U.S.

How Eating Grass-Fed Beef Could Help Fight Climate Change [TIME] – that’s as self-explanatory a title as you can get.

Behind the Organic Pasture Rule at the USDA [Chewswise]  – a blog by the author of Organic, Inc.

The Great Grocery Smackdown [The Atlantic] – on buying organic at…Walmart? Plus a blind cookoff between Walmart and Whole Foods. Some interesting results…

The Spotless Garden [New York Times]  – a great article about backyard and basement aquaponics systems and the ‘otherworldly yields’ from this type of growing.   ‘It is either a glimpse into the future of food growing or a very strange hobby — possibly both.’

More photos and cool stuff here. All credits to NYTimes.

Seems like everyone is talking about urban agriculture these days, with innovative new ideas ranging from tiny little crowd-funded SF city farms to fantasy skyscraper-high vertical farms.  From pundits to policymakers,  foodies to farmers to futurists, a lot of people are starting to think about urban food production for the sake of local economies, the environment, community resources, jobs creation, urban design, potential food security issues. and many more reasons.  I’ve been reading this really interesting report by the London Assembly called Cultivating the Capital: Food Growing and the Planning System in London (big PDF here) about working with city planners to increase the growing potential of the city.

Nerdy, I know.  In case you don’t want to read the 93 pages yourself (almost half of it is just appendices!), the report looks at the current situation of urban food producers, the barriers they face in growing and getting their products to market, and potential innovative solutions.  It also analyzes the city land that could be used for food production and encourages the use of  unconventional growing spaces, from rooftops to parks to housing developments.  And in terms of specific action, the report recommends that the Mayor of London promote and support policy and planning to increase Greater London’s food production and distribution channels.  They’ve got lots of important reasons to back up their suggestions:

‘There is a good case to be made that commercial agriculture is one of the best and most productive land uses in the Green Belt [an undeveloped area around London, set aside primarily for agriculture, forestry and outdoor leisure, but mostly not actively farmed]. The benefits include: opportunities for local job creation, skills development,  regeneration, preservation and management of green space, potential for waste management, providing healthy locally produced food and so reducing food packaging and food miles and the potential for improving food security.’

One of the big points is how much unused space there is within London that could be directed towards food production. The UK has these small plots called allotments that are available to the public for gardening/farming, but there are also swaths of unused industrial land and vacant building sites that could be improved visually and put to good use by developing for small-scale agriculture.   And it can get really small.  The report says, ‘Almost any site, irrespective of size, location or soil conditions can be used for food growing operations by making use of raised beds, skips and builders’ bags filled with good quality soil.’  Why not use green roofs or land along highways or railways or unused office land?

And it doesn’t even have to be a profit-making food-growing enterpise – it’s just fantastic to be able to produce any of your own food. And then you can get reaaaaally small. Because it doesn’t really get any tinier  in terms of space and literal lack of land than living on a houseboat (shoutout to my friend Olivia living on a houseboat in Alaska right now). And yet, this creative houseboater has developed an innovative way to grow tomatoes in a space smaller than that occupied by our forlorn and all-too-neglected barbecue grill.

I always talk about how much I’d like to grow my own food (despite my propensity towards immediately and invariably killing every single plant I’ve ever owned, including the cacti).  But I always live in the middle of cities and never seem to have enough space or enough land.  Yet these boaters have taken a very unexpected site and turned it into a mini growing area.  How sweet would it be to go pick tomatoes off your roof while enjoying this view of City Road Basin along Regent’s canal?

And looking back towards my hood…

A bit of inspiration for those of us who support the idea of more local food production. Until I get my act together to actually plant something, I’ll continue to buy vegetables from my local CSA veg box (and a shoutout to Growing Communities for being mentioned as one of the best programs in the report!), but I’m glad that other people are doing lots of growing in unexpected places.

Someday, I’ll be able to walk outside and pick what I want for dinner. Someday, someday…