Easter fare

Today I was supposed to go to The Food Project and volunteer, but because I made the decision to eat something that didn't smell quite right yesterday...I'm stuck at home. Yes, I should know better. Hoping that I recover soon, for tomorrow I am hosting Easter dinner!

We're going to have the normal potato salad, sweet potatoes, standard salad, and so on. But feature is going to be meat from Chestnut Farms. It's all about making EVERYONE happy, isn't it?

Kim was kind enough to put a whole chicken into my share this month. I am going to use a recipe that M and B swear by, coating and stuffing the thing with Boursin cheese. Oh yes.

Then there's leg of lamb, which was in my share last month. I haven't chosen a recipe for that yet, but hopefully I can get cooking temperatures and times to match the chicken.

I also have a couple ham steaks saved from last month's share. I am going to make one with a typical pineapple glaze, and another with homemade applesauce. Yum stuff.

Jean and I are hoping to not cook for several days afterwards!

On to other things, this months' share!

• 1 whole chicken.
• 2 packagess of 2 pork loin chops.
• 1 package of 4 pork breakfast patties.
• 2 packages of ground beef.
• 1 package of 3 hot Italian sausage.
• 1 maple-sugar cured bone-in ham steak.

And lastly, Michelle Obama is still working on the White House garden with local kids.

Many hands make light work

Every year you have New Year's Resolutions that are difficult to keep. This year I resolved to volunteer more, and, of course, to get in better shape.

Today I volunteered at The Food Project. It satisfies both goals! And it's a wonderful way to see how your food gets on your plate. The Food Project invites volunteers to come work the land on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays in the spring and fall. (During July and August, they recruit dozens of high school students to do most of the work.) Each volunteer day, they have between 10 and 60 volunteers each week.

At 9:30, about 20 of us gathered. We played an icebreaker game, and part of it included facts about food production. For example, in a $3.50 box of cereal, about $3 goes to packaging and marketing, and $0.07 goes to the farmer. Yikes. It's like being a musician and selling CDs. We also learned that there are more people in jail than there are farmers in the US.

We split into groups, and I ended up working with five others in a hoop house where the winter share was grown. It was fun to see, since I participated in the winter share. The student leader ran the show, and we had to clear the whole place of plants and weeds. It's possible that I pocketed a bit of cilantro that maybe I had in an egg scramble when I got home, famished. I also learned a bit about using the hula hoe.

Once we cleared the vegetation, we put together a bunch of large tarps to cover the floor. Since we didn't know what to expect when we unrolled all the tarps, we had to puzzle things out a couple times before we could stake everything into the ground. That finally done, we started to build tables for new seedlings to grow on. The main greenhouse already had nice seedlings, particularly a bunch of beautiful onions. One of the students said, "They're so cute...I want to take one home!"

To build the tables, we stood cinder blocks on end, put slats of wood across the bricks, and then put the long flat crates on top of that. I ended up carrying a bunch of cinder blocks! By the end, I was pretty sore, and starving! We all got together and talked about what we did that we enjoyed. Weeding, building tables, finally getting the tarp down.

We ended the day with another game where we learned about healthy food communities, and how they are lacking in most areas. This is especially true of low income urban areas, where there are 30% less grocery stores. It can be difficult to get adequate nutrition when all you have is sub shops and convenience stores. The Food Project sponsors several farmers markets in areas such as these, bringing reasonably priced, homegrown veggies to as many people as possible.

The Food Project grows about 250,000 pounds of vegetables, according to their website. Today, I was a part of that!

Baaa!

I decided to trek over to Drumlin Farm yesterday to go to Woolapalooza. Drumlin Farm is part of the Mass Audubon "Protecting the Nature of Massachusetts." Mass Audubon was selling their membership, which gives you free admission to 45 Mass Audubon wildlife sanctuaries, a full-color guide to these sanctuaries, a one-year subscription to Sanctuary, an environmental magazine, and to Connections, a member newsletter. Plus you get discounts on programs and courses. It looked like a lot of value for a family.

I got there between the big events, a sheep dog demonstration and sheep shearing. I wandered around looking at their chickens first. I found out that free range chickens produce about 330 eggs per year each, but a caged chicken produces 265. Having considered owning chickens in the future, and pondering a flock of 20...would I really have 6600 eggs in one year? That's a lot of quiche!



I then went and checked out the merchants, which was interesting because they were not your typical merchants. The American Textile History Museum was there, and they are having a grand reopening in May. They were giving demonstrations on how to spin wool with a drop spinner and a spinning wheel. Kids were everywhere at this event, and they sure loved poking at (and trying to spin) the spinning wheels at various booths.

I chatted with a woman who makes angora products at Needle's Eye Angoras. She brought along one of her rabbits and let the kids pet it. She told me that she grows much of her own food during the summer and stores it over the winter. She was selling the yarn, headbands, and cute baby booties. She was delighted by the event, "So many parents with children, and they are talking to their children!"

Then I saw one of the main events: a sheep dog demonstration. There were four dogs, but one is still being trained. All the dogs are trained with voice and body at first, but then learn to respond to just a whistle. They love moving the sheep...one was just itching to start.



Whistling to bring them around:



Into the pen:



I went to the lambing shed. There were twins born the night before, and another baby born while I was there!



Along the way to the sheep shearing show, I walked along the Sheep to Sweater Interpretive trail. They were showing how to wash the wool, comb it spin it, and dye it with natural dyes. I liked the pokeweed, even though the color would look terrible on me!



The yellow is a goldenrod dye, and the brown is black walnut, which I learned about in the Foraging for Wild Edibles workshop I went to last year. They also had several pretty yellow dyes made from onion skin.

I ended with the best part, sheep shearing! I thought that I had to take a trip to New Zealand to see these demos, but no! For $10, this was a better deal:

Big fluffy sheep, dying to take off the winter coat when it's 55 degrees out:



Starting to shear:



Halfway there:



Almost done:



Done! With just a bit of razor burn:



This big sheep had about 10 pounds of wool on it, which would make 2 adult sweaters and a few hats. Hats off to you, sheep!

Woolapalooza!

Drumlin Farm is having Woolapalooza for "all things sheep" today from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Shearing and knitting o my!

Local food, national news

My blog only wakes up to scratch itself once in awhile over the winter time, generally on meat share days from Chestnut Farms. But now it's spring: people are digging, bees are buzzing, and I'm blogging again.

I joined the Facebook group Support Local Farmers, and they occasionally send information. Today they sent a link to farmfed, which is a site dedicated to educating people about where their food comes from and how to encourage healthy, sustainable farming methods. They have some nice photos of the White House garden ground-breaking.

Last year I cut off my hair for a good cause, but before that I used to walk around Moody Street in Waltham and was often stopped, "Can you tell me where the macrobiotic restaurant is?" Ah, long hippie hair. I didn't know where it was, but since people kept asking me, I figured I'd check it out. Yesterday my boyfriend and I went to Masao's Kitchen, a tiny little place that serves a beautiful buffet of simple macrobiotic vegan fare. You can order dishes of noodles or soup, but we decided to try the by-the-pound buffet ($8/pound). What's funny is that when you click on their menu, all you see are pictures of vegetables. Not bad!

There was a gorgeous dish of butternut squash and onion, which was steamed and brought out the wonderful flavor of the squash. I remember faintly that I was sick of squash by the end of the winter, but that memory is now overtaken by the sweetness of this dish. I had a lentil-chickpea dish with aromatics that was a lot like the dish my college roommate taught me to make. Comfort food. I rounded out my meal with some quinoa and steamed broccoli and kale. I did take little sides of a cabbage lotus flower mix, and a shiatake mix. My boyfriend also had the tofu, which he enjoyed, and brown rice. He ordered a side of the miso soup, which he really enjoyed but felt there was too much! (So I ate the rest...hearty and not at all silty like some.)

We kept discovering new food, but I'd already taken a pound and a half! So I left it at that, and ate it all. The restaurant was packed, and there were many families with little girls...perhaps a dancing school is nearby? It looks like they also do a healthy takeout service. The staff is extremely friendly and seems to love introducing people to the food. Most people there appeared to be regulars.

At the end of the meal I felt like I'd only eaten good things. It's rare to go to a restaurant and feel wonderful at the end, but here's your chance.

Arugula

Soooo excited about the first family's veggie garden--organic, started by Michelle Obama and some local fifth graders. The project is a combination of educating the young, feeding the first family, and providing fresh vegetables for a local soup kitchen.

And they even have the plans for the garden. I love that they are lining the walkways with flowers, especially marigolds, which keep out pests. It's a heavy greens garden, not much in the way of beans, potatoes, and tomatoes. But it'll make nice salads and steamed greens. They devote plenty of space to a variety of herbs.

I've been eating a salad mix from Whole Foods recently that includes mixed greens, dill, and parsley. I'll have to try that this summer with the farm food!

In other news, I finally invested in a real knife, the Wusthof Grand Prix II. I bought it at on the edge at Faneuil Hall Market Place, explaining to them that I get a lot of fresh meat that needs to be broken down sometimes, as well as tons of fresh veggies. And it's amazing! It takes about half the time for me to cut the meat and veggies, and the cuts are more even and accurate. It makes cooking fun again! OK, end of advertisement.

Suggestions of spring

I walked down to the square today just to go to the bank, and it was gorgeous out. Except for the snow melting everywhere, it felt like spring! I wanted to volunteer at The Food Project, but apparently that doesn't start until April. Alas...will have to wait to play in the dirt.

I picked up my meat share from Chestnut Farms this week:

• 1 leg of lamb (beautiful! I'm thinking of saving it for Easter, but it'll be tough seeing it in the freezer for that long).
• 1 chicken breast.
• 1 package of chicken legs.
• 1 package of three greek lamb sausages.
• 1 package of ground beef.
• 1 top round steak.
• 1 package of breakfast sausage.

I went to the doctor's last week to discover that my cholesterol has dropped 41 points in the past five years! I attribute this to the veggies and lean meat from the two CSAs that I participate in. It's also a lot of food, so I've significantly decreased the amount of ready-made snacks and dinners that I used to eat. Less salt, less corn syrup, less trans fat. All good things.

I'm reading a beautiful book This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm by Scott Chaskey. He's farmed in Cornwall, England and on the South Fork of Long Island at a CSA. He brings together farming and his love of poetry in a thoughtful, topic-based book. He does not go through the seasons, he isn't providing how to's. He paints pictures of various crops, farmers, CSA members, animals, whatever has moved him in his life as a farmer. The romance of the farm.