Visiting Suzie's Farm

Catt White, a wonderful Farmers Market manager in San Diego posted a great question on face book a few weeks ago "Do your kids think vegetables come from the farmers market? Do you?". I had to laugh, of course my kids and I know that vegetables don't come from there!!! But it did bring up a very good point and that was although we shop at the farmers markets and know the farmers, we have not seen the farms, we don't see the food in the ground and the kids probably don't know as much about their food as I think. So I decided to sign up for Suzie's Farm tour, that they hold every second saturday of the month and go see where exactly our food DOES come from. There has been lots of events that go on at the farms that we regularly purchase from, but those farms are all in North County which is a significant drive for our unreliable vehicle that we have. Suzie's Farm is a SAN DIEGO farm, that is closer to us than any others and is actually in town. Suzie's is newer on the radar for us than the others, but that has made no difference, from the first time we purchased from them at the farmers market I was impressed with the quality and selection of their produce.

The tour is open to all and lasts about 2 hours, you pay $10 and you can harvest whatever you'd like while you're there. So Saturday morning we woke up and drove about 15 minutes down to the farm. Lucila (the owner) and two off her farm hands, Ellie and Misha were there to lead us through the forty acres we were visiting called "Kiki Town". Lucila gave us a brief introduction of how the farm came to be, how it got its name and where exactly we were in regards to the Mexico border and San Diego land marks. Then we grabbed our bags and started walking. She talked at different points about what the organic certification process is, how they have grown in the past year, what their future plans are for being Bio Dynamic and of course she spoke a lot about their crops and what the different foods were, etc. Lucila, Misha and Ellie would cut you something you wanted or pull it up for you, but I think most people got in there and got dirty for themselves....isn't that the point?

The kids had a blast running all around and pulling up their own food. When we first arrived my son said he didn't care about the vegetables, he just wanted to look for bugs and by the end I think he could've cared less about the bugs! They had a great time pulling up beets on their own and eating peas. They also tried hard at digging up carrots, it took three little sets of hands to get one carrot out of the ground! My daughter loves carrots and at one point I turned around and she was eating them straight out of the dirt. They sampled everything there was to sample and felt what it was like to get stung by stinging nettles! I didn't bring any home to cook up, but maybe one day because Lucila told us all about how good they are for you. They are a weed and there are PLENTY all over (especially in the pea vines where the kids were shielding their eyes) but they are 40% protein and chock full of vitamins. What we did bring home was a bag full of goodies: cabbage, lettuce, kale, chard, spinach, chois, broccoli, carrots, beets, radishes, peas, celery, dill, cilantro, and my new favorite fennel. I had never had fennel and did not know what I was missing, it tastes like black licorice and is crunchy like celery! I am in heaven! At the end of the day, after two tours, the farm had welcomed 100 visitors!! Hopefully good business for the farm and a great opportunity for our local community to learn about their food. I will not only continue to shop from Suzie's at the market, but we will definitely be returning to the farm again soon...and now I can say without a doubt that my kids know vegetables don't come from farmers market. Do your kids know where vegetables come from?

English Muffins...just the beginning

I've joined a new challenge! The Real Food Challenge over at Not Dabbling in Normal. The challenge is to get more real foods into your life and is going on for the month of March. A lot of challengers are attempting all "Real" food for the month, but I am not yet ready for that leap. My commitment is to learn to make a lot of bread/grain products myself. I can bake a loaf of bread in my bread maker that is decent, but I want to really master a loaf of bread for my family. I also want to learn to make tortillas, which we eat a lot of in this house. I added to my list English muffins, bagels and crackers because those are other things that we sometimes buy and I would like to cross off my shopping list forever.

I started last week with a decent loaf of bread in my bread maker just to get me going...my biggest problem with my homemade bread is cutting it. When I slice the bread, it crumbles and is all different sizes and doesn't work too well for sandwiches that aren't eaten at home on the plate ( school lunches =( ). Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? So onto the first real trial in my challenge, I made English muffins. My mom had been talking about wanting some for a few weeks and I didn't think she had bought any yet, so off to work I went. I found a recipe that seemed so simple that I figured something had to be wrong, but hey what the heck it had so little ingredients I figured if I messed up I wouldn't be wasting too much. Here it is:

Base:

1 1/2 cups warm water

2 tsp yeast

2 cups bread flour

1 tsp sugar

Mix well, cover and set aside for 2 -12 hours (the longer the better) - I sat mine aside overnight for about 14 hours

Next add:

1 cup flour

2 1/2 tsp salt

Mix well and set aside for 30 minutes

Heat griddle over med. heat for several minutes (add a smidge of butter if non stick)

Place muffin rings on hot griddle and fill 2/3 with batter

Cook on the first side for 5 minutes until bubbles come through and bottom is slightly browned

Flip and cook about 2 minutes, then remove the ring and finish cooking until browned.

Doesn't this sound simple? It was! I will not say I made a perfect batch, but they were tasty.

The problems I did have:

1. I had no muffin rings or cookie cutters to use to shape the muffins, so.....before I let the final dough rise, I used a sprouting jar lid and shaped the batter into circles and let rise that way.

2. I didn't have corn meal to use when shaping up the muffins, so they had a little flour on the outside as opposed to a corn meal dusting

3. I am crazy about things not cooking enough or being well done so I pushed down my english muffins while they were cooking and made them too flat ( I do the same thing with pancakes, I have to stop!)

But despite these issues, they had great holes and crannies, they had that English Muffiny taste and they were a big hit with my family. My sister came over to try one ( she only lives a block away so she can travel easily for food) and ate hers on the way home with no butter, jam, etc and said it was great! I know this isn't a recipe chock full of health, but it's definitely still better for you than the ones bought from the store and it really is that easy!

Dark Days Week #16

This week our dark days meal was not picture worthy, but I figured it was post worthy because I made my own refried beans and attempted to make my own tortillas. We've all been sick in my household and nobody is really hungry for much. My son must have asked every day if he could just have fruit for his meals and my daughter who could usually eat us out of house and home hasn't been to keen on meals this week. So we've been eating a lot of plain rice and pasta with raw fruits or veggies on the side, a lot of leftover soups from the freezer and yes even the last Campbell's we had in the cupboard. I think I only have about 5 cans of food left in there to eat one day and then it will all be gone!! I haven't bought any canned food, sauce, etc since we started this challenge and don't plan to.

On to the meal of the week that is post worthy, which was burritos we had for dinner Sunday night. I have started cooking beans A LOT since we gave up most non local meat but usually we eat them as is or in a soup. When we have burritos I just scoop the beans in whole and roll them up but my son usually says that's not a burrito and deconstructs his. So this time I decided to try my hand at refried beans and used a recipe from Rick Bayless: Mexico One Plate At a Time. Eventhough it is really just mashed up beans with some onion and garlic I am still pretty proud of myself that they came out good and my son ate his burrito whole! For some reason I always thought they would be hard to make but now I'm not scared anymore. The beans were from SunCoast Farms, the onion and garlic were from the farmers market and the avocado oil was from Bella Vado. I think what made them extra delicious to me was that I usually don't salt or season my beans at all and this time of course I did. I think I'm going to start experimenting with my beans now and adding a little something more than water when I cook them. I also attempted to make whole wheat tortillas, but that did not turn out as well as the beans. I found an EASY recipe in a hand me down old Whole Earth Cookbook that simply said mix flour, salt and water, knead till elastic, roll into balls, flatten into tortillas and heat on the griddle. LOL, not so easy for me. I have just started to actually knead a few products and I think maybe I just don't have that down. I mixed the ingredients, kneaded until I thought it was elastic and then wondered where I went wrong. As I split them into balls, they were slightly sticky and when I attempted to roll them into tortillas they stuck like glue. I was able to pull a few off the board and get them on the griddle, but they looked terrible and tasted not so yummy. Thankfully we had a few tortillas left over from the last trip to the market and my refried beans didn't go to waste. I piled the beans into the tortillas with Lundberg brown rice and topped mine with the last of my FireHouse Jack cheese and cilantro from the market. I just joined a new challenge over at Not Dabbling in Normal and my goal is to get good at tortillas, bread, crackers, bagels and english muffins this month....so I guess attempt number 1 at tortillas failed, but I will be trying them again.

Dark Days Meal #15

This week for the Dark Days Meal I made a meatless chili with wheat berries and black beans. I picked up some wheat berries last week at the market and wanted to experiment with them this week so I was looking all over for recipes and found this great one from Eating Well. I had the beans and berries, but was short on the veggies needed so I took a rare Friday trip to the FM near my house. This was a perfect trip made for chili, one of the stands was selling baskets of overly ready tomatoes for $2 which I picked up so I didn't have to use canned tomatoes and the tortilla lady had HUGE bags of jalapenos in liquid for only $2 and I picked up those so I didn't need a can of chipotle peppers. I also got the garlic, onion, bell peppers, avocado and cilantro I needed. So Friday night I cleaned and soaked the beans and berries and saturday morning I cooked them both. This is only the second time I've cooked black beans, but there has to be a secret that I don't know. Both times they have come out hard, I taste them at 1 hr and they seem pretty good, but a little hard so I keep them in about 1/2 more and it seems they only get harder!? Being in the chili it didn't really matter, but this is something I'm going to have to figure out!

On to the wheat berries, they were great! I took half of them and made a great wheat berry pudding (like rice pudding). In place of the maple syrup I used one of my new favorite things, Brown Rice Syrup. I had seen this online and wanted to order some, but the s&h was more than the product itself! Then a month or so back my local Henry's started carrying it and now I use it for everything. I put it on my pancakes, in my tea and coffee, to bake with and to sweeten anything else that needs it. I love it!

So into the pot went all the yummy ingredients from the market, along with some of our special salt, and other seasonings. About 1/2 hour later dinner was done, well at least my dinner was done. I took a bite and it was much hotter than I expected, both kids still tried it but my son wanted nothing to do with it. My daughter kept her bowl with a few bites to sample, but didn't want more. It was even hot for me, though I admit I am a sissy with hot stuff. What made it bearable and extra delicious was the fresh avocado and cilantro on top, each cool bite followed by the rush of heat! I'm definitely glad I have enough for the leftovers! Also on top I grated a little bit of Spring Hills FireHouse Jack which is my favorite, but added even more heat! Now I have to figure out what to do with the rest of those jalapenos...

Dark Days Meal #14

Things have not gone as planned the past two weeks and I have also really not felt like sitting down at the computer and typing, but I also don't want to miss another week! I did eat dark days meals last week but none were photo or post worthy. I made another soup of squash, beans and greens which I think is one of my new favorite things! I also made other go to favorites: stir fry, salads and simple bean/rice burritos with veggies on the side. The kids were sick, I was busy researching blood orange marmalade recipes and rounding up the stuff I needed for my recent purchase of 20 lbs of oranges, and I didn't do anything elaborate in the kitchen. I will be posting soon about my canning mission that ultimately didn't work out...I never thought I'd have such a hard time before I could even get in the kitchen to make something.

This week, Week 14, I did make something post worthy I made a quiche. I love quiche and have made quite a few from my aunt's recipe but I always use a store bought crust and ricotta cheese. This time I switched things up, I decided to make my crust. I remembered seeing a fail proof crust recipe on Sustainable Eats ( I know I get a lot of help from here, but I gotta start somewhere and this is a great place to start) so I went and dug it up. I was advised to leave out the sugar for a savory dish, but I usually buy the graham cracker crust for my quiches anyways, so I figured I'd leave it all in. The eggs and lemon juice were local, the butter was Earth Balance, the flour was Bob's Red Mill and the salt, sugar and vanilla were what was in the cupboard (2/3 were organic/natural). The crust came out perfectly and it was wonderful for my quiche, sweet but not overwhelming like the graham cracker crust. I will definitely be using this next Thanksgiving and hopefully a lot over the summer when fruits come into season...there is a bounty of pies in my future! On to the filling, I chopped up an onion and couple cloves of garlic which I added to a skillet with some Earth Balance butter, I added to that some broccoli, carrots, spinach, and green bell peppers. After this cooked a few minutes I poured it into the crust, sprinkled some Tillamook cheddar cheese over it and then added my wet mixture of eggs from the FM, milk, salt and pepper and a dash of nutmeg. Although the seasonings were not local or organic the salt was special. My son tastes salt from Xroads at the FM every time we go and always asks if we can get some, a couple weeks ago I indulged him and bought some. It's a white sea salt, but soooo delicious especially sprinkled on top of cooked veggies, pasta, etc. They are a couple who reside in San Diego and have started this business of selling Philippine Sea Salts, and although the salt isn't local the couple is and they use sustainable practices and offer a delicious product at my favorite Farmers Market, Little Italy. So into the oven the quiche went and it came out screaming to be eaten. I love quiche!! I ate my quiche that night with nothing else on the plate, though my kids had rice and fruit on the side. The next day for lunch I made a wonderful salad to go aside the quiche. I used up the rest of the spinach and topped it with roasted beets, blood oranges and fresh walnuts from Terra Bella Ranch. Next week I plan to do something with the rest of all these blood oranges, besides juice and figure out something to do with the wheat berries one of my local farmers gave me. I had got wheat berries from Sage Mt. Farm some time back, but hadn't seen any since and hadn't asked since I have yet to purchase a grinder. Then lately I'd been reading up on sprouting wheat berries and all else you can do with them and to my suprise last weekend at the market there was a bag by the scale. I said are those wheat berries and she said "Yes, take them". I will find something to do with them this time and now that I know they will continue to have them a grinder might have to be my next investment.

Dark Days Meal #12

Did I use meat for my Dark Days Main Course? No, it's a black bean burger courtesy of a recipe from SustainableEats. I had been waiting to try this for quite some time and when I finally did I realized it was pretty easy. My only problem was that when I was done mixing my ingredients in the food processor they were not quite solid enough to form a burger. I don't know if I did something wrong or didn't have enough of something, but it worked anyway. I simply poured the mixture in the skillet like a pancake mix and made patties that way. The beans, cilantro, onions and eggs in the burger were local from the market. The bread crumbs I used were from home made bread, but not local ingredients and the spices were not local. Because I ended up with a dry socket from my wisdom teeth extraction, I have had a really hard time eating bread so I attempted to eat the burger on some beautiful red lettuce I got from Sage Mt. Farm and it was delicious that way, but I couldn't stand all the juices running down and my arms and it was hard to bite a burger like that so I ended up eating this with a fork!! Next time I will definitely eat this on a bun!!

The burger toppings were sliced red onions, onion sprouts, green onions (we love onions and garlic in this house), avocado, and yellow tomato from the market and sliced house made pickles from The Linkery, a great farm to table restaurant that sells some good cured meats and other treats to take home. I had got some bacon from there as well that I was going to put on top, but we ate all the bacon before the burgers got made. My kids had these burgers with a side of Alexia fries, and some fruit...I just had the burger!

New Roots Community Farm

This is an article in the L.A. Times that tells a great story about a local garden here in San Diego.