This Sunday….looks fantastic!
FRESH movie free online this week!
Worth a look! Click here to check it out….
Synopsis:
FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.
Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.
(from http://www.freshthemovie.com)
blueberry cornmeal muffins
a perfect use for that cornmeal in your box this week, thanks to winter member Chris from Wynchwood – thanks Chris!
here’s a picture and a recipe of what I did with most of the cornmeal in the box this week. That cornmeal was such a treat!!
the smell of it wafted out of the box – nutty, buttery sweet and rich, so had to do something with it right away. I know you must have lots of recipes for cornmeal muffins, but these are very good.
Blueberry Cornmeal Muffins
1 ¼ cup cornmeal
1 cup unbleached flour
½ cup sugar
4 tsps baking powder
½ tsp salt
2 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk
¼ cup oil (canola or sunflower)
1 cup frozen wild blueberries
Preheat oven to 375
Prepare a 12 cup muffin tin by oiling lightly.
Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Make a well in the centre. Combine the buttermilk, eggs, and oil in a separate bowl and mix until blended.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, and mix until just combined. Roll the frozen blueberries lightly in flour and mix into batter. Spoon evenly into the prepared twelve cup muffin tin.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes until the tops are lightly browned and the top of the muffin rebounds when lightly pressed.
Remove from oven, let sit in tin for5minutes then remove by running a knife around the edge and lifting gently. Serve warm with butter.
(note – you can make something equivalent to buttermilk by adding a tbsp of lemon juice to a cup of 2% milk and leaving it to curdle a bit. Not quite the same lightness and tenderness that buttermilk offers, but close)
Guelph Organic Conference Jan 28-30
The biggest Organic Farming conference in Canada! Always a great time, and includes great workshops, lectures and a trade show…relevant for any scale of growing, from balcony to backyard to full scale farming!
http://www.guelphorganicconf.ca/
(can’t get the pretty pic to load – so you’ll have to click the link and see for yourself!)
Shoresh Conference – Toronto Feb 5
Looks like an interesting conference, put on by a Jewish environmental group in Toronto focussing on sustainable education:
Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs (formerly The Jewish Nature Centre of Canada: Torat HaTeva) was established in 2002 to lead the Jewish environmental movement in the Greater Toronto Area. Through educational programs and grassroots initiatives, rooted in Jewish social and environmental values, Shoresh’s mission is to build a more connected and ecologically sustainable Jewish community.
Worth a look – click the image to get to their site!
the “incredible edible” project
here is an inspiring, even comforting article about a small town that aims to be completely self-sufficient in regards to food within 7 years.
“Admittedly, it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest, too. Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, there are three large raised flower beds. If you’d visited a few months ago, you’d have found them overflowing with curly kale, carrot plants, lettuces, spring onions — all manner of vegetables and salad leaves. Today the beds are bare. Why? Because people have been wandering up to the police station forecourt in broad daylight and digging up the vegetables. And what are the cops doing about this brazen theft from right under their noses? Nothing.”
http://wakeup-world.com/2011/12/14/a-deliciously-resourceful-town-aims-for-total-food-self-sufficiency-within-7-years/
and heres the “incredible edible” main page
http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/
Leeky Pear Soup
Perfectly seasonal and delicious!
6 leeks
3 potatoes
1 jar of pears (if you didn’t can any of your own this year, you can still get beautiful local storage pears from our friends at Bizjack Farms – another reason to come to Wynchwood!)
3 cups stock or water
1 cup cream (optional)
strong crumbly cheese and/or herbs for garnish
sautee chopped leeks in butter or oil for until they start to soften, then throw in your potato chunks (German butterballs would be divine! I used agrias last go – also good). Sautee for 5 or 10 minutes, then add stock. Cover and cook for 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft enough to puree. (If you’re using fresh pears, throw them in there too! Core them first of course…). Puree soup (and canned pears, if using). Add cream and put back on the stove until just heated through. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve with cheese and/or herbs sprinkled on top. Homemade croutons/crostinis are perfect here too – and a nice way to use up that delicious but stale bread you got at the market last week….
carrot and apple salad
since we are surrounded my root vegetables right now, here’s a salad that you can make in less than 10 minutes and keeps in the fridge for a long time.
first, get your hands on a couple of good, really tasty eating apples (you can get apples at wychwood barns right now) of any variety you would like. you will also need a couple of carrots, and some lemon juice, and for a sweeter version you can use some good local honey as well.
- grate two medium-sized apples into a bowl, stopping when you hit to core. you can peel them first if you want, but i dont bother and personally i like the peel included in the salad.
- grate a couple of carrots into the bowl until you have roughly equal amounts of apples and carrots.
- add a squirt of lemon to help stop them from browning and to kick up the flavour just a little bit. toss the salad so its evenly coated
- i generally stop here, but if you would like a sweeter salad, drizzle a little honey and mix that in as well.
i find this is best served chilled. makes a great lunch!
Beet chips
everybody loves the potato chip… but nobody loves the empty calories, the carbohydrate-sugar high and the guilt trip, right?
well then! it’s time for beet chips! (kale chips…. chard chips…. carrot chips….) (this is a great way to make use of those “elderly” beets (or insert-your-favorite-winter-vegetable-here) in the bottom of the vegetable drawer… i know we have some in our fridge right now.
Beetroot is full of good things like antioxidants, magnesium, sodium, potassium and vitamin C. Beets help prevent the development of heart disease, stroke, and peripheral vascular disease. I’ll bet the potato chip cant quite do that.
beet chips are dead-easy to make and make a really delicious snack. here’s how you do it:
- preheat your oven to 325 degrees, get out a few baking sheets.
- wash, trim and peel as many beets as you want. slice them thinly and evenly. if you have a mandoline, this is the time to find it.
- arrange beet slices in a single layer on a baking sheet, drizzle lightly with olive oil, and if you’d like, sprinkle with sea salt.
- bake them for about 30 minutes to an hour, stirring them around slightly every now and again and keeping an eye on them, because burnt beet isn’t very tasty.
rooted millet. (or what I had for dinner the next day…)
A lovely dinner with lovely friends, in which everyone pitched in big and small – lots for little hands to grate, stir, beat! We made this up as we went along out of what we had around us, and it turned out better than we ever imagined….
1. cook millet (2 waters to 1 millet – we ended up with about 6 cups of cooked millet)
2. grate roots. we used 2 large-ish carrots, 1 medium celariac, one big sweet potato and 3 cloves of garlic.
3. melt butter in pan, and saute grated roots until they look, smell and taste good.
4. mix cooked roots with millet. add salt and pepper to taste and a bit of oil to make it stir. you could also add seeds if you wanted (or anything else for that matter!), but we didn’t. done!
100% local. (ok, maybe not the salt and pepper – make that 99.9% local. that’s pretty damn close! 
)
we ate this with scrambled eggs and potato patties, but it was definitely the star of the show and could really have been it’s own meal. and there were lots of leftovers – would make lovely millet burgers the next day with a bit of egg and/or oil to make it stick, and those amazing sourdough buns from St. John’s…
really a beautiful dinner. thanks Jennifer!