Salad Mix, delicious & healthful!

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Our famous salad mix, this one is chock full of Arugula, Mizuna, and Tat Soi.  Yum!!!

Our famous SPINACH !

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Our famous sweet spinach.  Huge leaves, sweet taste.

Our farm's shining star this week: Gourmet Salad Mix

What a difference a bit of rain makes!  It's rained steadily for the past 2 weeks - hooray!  The rain has absolutely popped all of our fall crops into action.

Our farm's Gourmet Salad Mix is pictured below.  How beautiful is this?!?!  Organically grown, 3 types of lettuce, arugula, and baby mustard greens.  Washed & bagged for our customers.

Delicious & beautiful!

Making Beef Stock for soup

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Making homemade stock is incredibly easy!  Sometimes known as broth, stock is used as the base for most soups.  If you don't already make your own stock, I'll show you how.

Stock or broth is typically made from meat: chicken stock or beef stock.  (I'll talk about vegetable stock later)

I recently made a batch of beef stock.  I started with a beef soup bone from the last quarter cow we purchased locally.  You don't need a soup bone to make stock.  You can use your leftover bones from roast, steak, etc.  It is beneficial if there is still a bit of meat on the bones - gives the stock more flavor.

 

When I make stock, I do it very simply.  I put the soup bone into a stock pot full of water.

 

I quartered one onion and tossed it in, and brought it to a boil.   Then I let it simmer on low for a few hours.  That's it!  

 

I let it cool for a few hours, removed the bones and onion, then poured the stock into gallon-sized freezer bags.  I can simply pull out a bag and let it thaw when I want to make a batch of soup.

I don't season my stock when I make it, instead I leave it bland and season it when it gets cooked into soup.

If you want to make chicken stock / broth, follow the same directions but use chicken bones instead.  For vegetable stock, use the stems, ends, and peels of vegetables such as onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, and more.

Now you can use your beef stock to make a batch of delicious Italian Tortellini Soup!  (the recipe will be posted here on my blog in a couple of days, so be sure to check back!)  

Enjoy!

Thanks for visiting the All-Natural-Mama blog!!

Our really local foods challenge: Thanksgiving!

Some may say we're crazy.  Most would wonder why we would bother.

I've issued a challenge to my husband:  we're going to cook our entire Thanksgiving meal with local foods.  Really local.  I think we may be able to do it without leaving our community!  Within one school district.  No farther than 5 miles or so.  

All of it.     Really!

The turkey, the stuffing, mashed potatoes, pickles, corn, pumpkin pie, bread, butter, beans, salad, on and on.

I'm already working out the details in my head.  We'll have to make our own butter with local raw milk.  I've done that before.  Make our own mayo (deviled eggs) with local eggs.  Believe it or not, I've even done that before.  Though I'm not sure how I'll replace the oil in the mayo...

As for the stuffing & breads, I found a source of  locally-grown wheat and a friend to grind it for me.  We grew hundreds of onions this summer, those will be great in the stuffing.  I don't have any celery. I do know someone who grew it, but I'm not sure if they kept any in their fridge after harvest.  I'm thinking I could just substitute the celery with greens I still have growing in the garden (kale, Holland greens, spinach).

The mashed potatoes will be easy, we have boxes full of potatoes that we grew this summer.

The corn & green beans are in our freezer now.  The sweet corn came from a farm within 5 miles, the green beans from our own garden.

Salad?  Check.  Still have fresh lettuce, spinach, and radishes coming in from my garden.

Sweet potatoes?  Well, I didn't grow any this year, but I do know local people who did.  If they still have some for sale I can buy from them.  Or.... I can substitute with mashed winter squash.  I grew lots of that this summer.

Veggie tray?  Check.  Radish, rutabaga, carrots coming from garden and I still have some fresh pattypan zucchini.

Dessert? Check!  We baked & froze pumpkin.  I still have fresh pumpkin, too.  With the locally grown & ground wheat for the crust, this should be pretty easy.  I could also make an apple pie with the apple pie filling I canned this summer (apples from a local farm).  Or a rhubarb custard pie with the rhubarb from my fridge, and local eggs.

Most important: The turkey.  There is a farm just a couple miles from us that raises free-range turkeys. Done!

Problems:  There will be some things we'll have to cheat on.  Herbs & spices, salt, and sugar.  I'll use local honey wherever possible, but if I decide to make a custard pie I'm not sure that honey would work there...

Just some thoughts.  Oh, and I just realized almost all this food will be organic!  (I'm not sure about the wheat)...

I'll keep you posted!

p.s. Don't tell my parents or brother.  They're coming over for this meal.  They're not very into the local foods, organic, healthy, tasteful, good-for-you thing.  At all..... they're more the "eat out every meal, fast food types".  Shhhhhhhhh......

A fresh salad from my garden in November !!

Planting seeds is not something you usually think of doing at the end of July / early August.

Yet, there I was.  Luckily, the summer had been cool and wet.  I wasn't sweating and swearing out in the fields on that early August morning.

It was enjoyable.  I was planting.

Fall vegetables.  Some vegetables grow best in cool weather, others will only grow in hot weather.  Some vegetables can even tolerate a frost or freeze, or even snow!

Veggies that grow well in fall are basically the same ones that grow well in early spring.  Lettuce, spinach, onions, radish, turnip, rutabaga, carrots, beets, and many, many more!

So there I was, on November 8, picking food from the garden at the farm.  Yep!  I live on the Illinois / Wisconsin border.  It gets cold here.  We had our first frost this year on October 5.  It snowed a bit on October 10.  We had a freeze warning in early October.  Yet these vegetables grew on.  These hardy few.  These wonderful few.

I picked many varieties of lettuce, some spinach, too many turnips to count, rutabaga, kale, and green onions.

So.... on November 9, my husband and I sat down to a lunch that came from our garden.  A delicious salad.  It started with the gourmet lettuce that we had picked the day before. So good.

Then I added some chopped green onion which we had also harvested the previous day.

On top of that came a yummy "watermelon" radish that had been chilling in our refrigerator since it's harvest in September.

I even had a garden tomato.  I wouldn't lie to you!  I had picked it green the first week of October and set it on my counter next to some winter squash.  I then, of course, forgot all about it.  Until today, when I was getting a cup of coffee and had to blink twice at seeing a red orb lying next to the coffee pot.

We topped the salad off with some leftover locally-grown, grass-fed beef in the form of a giant grilled steak.  Oh, yeah!

It was scrumptious.  Yes, it is possible to eat a fresh salad from your own garden in November.  I am now saying my thanks to myself for planting those seeds in early August.  And counting my blessings for such a great harvest!

Are you a locavore?

Beautiful heirloom vegetables:
Locavore is a new term, defined below courtesy of Wikipedia:

Local food (also regional food or food patriotism) or the local food movement is a "collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place" and is considered to be a part of the broader sustainability movement. It is part of the concept of local purchasing and local economies, a preference to buy locally produced goods and services. Those who prefer to eat locally grown/produced food sometimes call themselves "localvores" or locavores.

100 years ago, everyone was a locavore. Our great-grandparents would have laughed at our desire to eat lettuce in January.

There are so many reasons to eat locally. Here are just a few, courtesy of http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/:

1. Eating local means more for the local economy.
2. Locally grown produce is fresher.
3. Local food just plain tastes better.
4.Locally grown fruits and vegetables have longer to ripen.
5. Eating local is better for air quality and pollution than eating organic. (This one bothers me a bit because it's very possible to eat local organics.)
6. Buying local food keeps us in touch with the seasons.
7. Buying locally grown food is fodder for a wonderful story.
8. Eating local protects us from bio-terrorism.
9. Local food translates to more variety.
10. Supporting local providers supports responsible land development.

For greater explanations of these 10 reasons, please visit http://www.lifebeginsat30.com/elc/2006/04/10_reasons_to_e.html.

On a more personal note, I'll give you my reasons for eating local foods whenever possible. It makes no sense to me to buy carrots, grown in California, from a grocery store when there is a struggling local farmer who will sell me fresher, tastier, more exotic carrots for the same price.

Having lived my whole life in the rural midwest, and seen our economy slide downhill, I can tell you firsthand how important it is to keep our money in the community. There is the study that shows for every $1 you spend locally it generates twice as much for the local economy. For example, I give $1 to a local farmer who then spends his/her money on items in our local stores, property taxes, other farmers, etc. When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.

My two oldest boys and I shelling locally-grown peas, 2008.

I was raised eating locally. This was definitely unusual for the 1980s, but my farm-raised mom would always buy fresh foods from farmers. We also have distant cousins around who farm and we would support them whenever possible as well. Our community has always had a farmers market. My mom would put up food each summer. This usually included sweet corn (which she cut off the cob and froze) as well as canning tomatoes. Some years also green beans, rhubarb, applesauce. There is no substitute for local tomatoes. The tomatoes in the grocery store should be left there. Seriously. They're poor substitutes for the real thing. They were picked before they were ripe, shipped thousands of miles. Plus the variety sold in grocery stores was chosen for it's thick skin (helps when shipping them, doncha know). Yuk. Grow your own. If you don't know how to can, toss them whole into freezer bags and freeze them for winter. Or support your local farmer's market! You can find your local market here: http://www.localharvest.org/ or contact your local university extension office.

Back to my mom. She taught me how to can and freeze foods. As her mother taught her. On and on backward through the generations. My family has never skipped a generation of local eating and food preservation. I'm very thankful for this, and hope to pass my knowledge onto others who may not have had the benefit of growing up this way.

My two oldest boys eating local sweet corn at a farm get-together about 1 mile from where it was grown and picked earlier that same day, summer 2008.

We also ate local meats growing up, as my family does today. You can buy directly from the farmer with other families (each purchase a quarter cow, half a pig, chickens, etc) and have them processed at your local meat locker. Your local meat locker also sells meats purchased from local farmers. Many of these farmers raise organic, grass-fed animals. Just ask.

Another way to find local foods is through your nearest food cooperative. Ask around, you may have one nearby. This consists of a group of people who order natural foods together to receive a reduced price. These foods are usually ordered from a corporation who sells to grocery stores, so they may not be local. However, as co-op people tend to support local foods there will probably be local foods available at your food pickup. Things such as local raw honey, fresh free-range eggs, meats, grains, fresh produce. The co-op I belong to in my small town offers all these and sometimes more.

As for taste and health, there is no substitute for eating local foods. Fruits and vegetables taste so much better when fresh and in season. Have you ever tried eating a grocery store peach in January? Leave it there. Buy some fresh, local peaches during the summer and can or freeze them instead. Same goes for all vegetables and fruits that are grown thousands of miles away and out-of-season. They just taste.... bland. Tough. Dry. Old. Not fresh.
Healthy? Not as much as a local vegetable. The vitamins are more intact the fresher the produce. Plus, if you know the farmer and maybe you've even visited or helped out on the farm, you know how it was grown. You know what they are or aren't putting on their crops. You will know if there is a non-organic disgusting mega-dairy next door that may give nasty runoff and pollute the crops (think e-coli).

Studies consistently prove that free-range eggs and meats are healthier than their corporate-farm counterparts. Tastier, too! Yum!

4 generations of my family putting up bushels of sweet corn picked that morning, summer 2008.

A recent phenomenon is heirloom vegetables. These are unique varieties of vegetables that have awesome tastes. Heirloom means the seeds have been passed down for generations. These vegetables have superior qualities. However, they usually don't make for good shipping... so they can only be bought locally. Want to try some? Find a grower at farmers market.

Local farmers also aren't likely to hire illegal immigrants for pennies on the dollar to harvest the crops.

Eat local! Support your local farmers!

One of our chest freezers full of local foods for winter, summer 2008.

If you are at all interested in this sort of thing, a great book to read is "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. Although it is a non-fiction work, Barbara is a famous novelist. Thus, the book reads more like a great work of fiction - it's not boring or dry at all.


(I planted some of the lima bean variety shown on the front cover! They're so beautiful. They're growing well and I can't wait to taste them.)