Thursday, May 26, 2011

Roasted Veggie "Pate"




I made this wonderful roasted vegetable spread for the Humble Feast dinner the other night. I'd listed it on the menu as "Roasted Vegetable Pate" because I've been trying to come up with more pretentious names for my menu items. Folks seem to respond to that.



In any case, I'd had this vision on roasting some veggies and pureeing them, along with some homemade bread. When I scouted around at the market last Sunday, though, the only veggies I could find worth roasting were yams, parsnips, leeks and shallots. The leeks and shallots would add depth, but the yams and parsnips were both sweet so I wanted something to balance them. I thought of sorrel, than wonderful, tart spring green.


It's a humble pate, and a very tasty one.

2 parsnips, cut in chunks
2 small yams, or 1 medium-size yam, peeled and cut in chunks
3 shallots, peeled and cut in half
1 leek, cleaned and cut in 2-inch lengths
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch of black pepper
1 tablespoon miso
4 sorrel leaves


Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Toss the parsnips, yams, shallots and leeks with the olive oil, salt and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet and roast them for about 40 minutes, until the yams and parsnips are soft.


When the veggies are cool enough to handle, puree them along with the miso and sorrel leaves. Serve with crackers or wonderful bread.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Opening Day at Georgetown 2011




Saturday was opening day at the Georgetown Farmers' Market. It was an overcast day, which wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy except that it followed the best stretch of weather we'd had all year. Three sunny days in a row! And we finally hit 70 degrees! After that teaser it seemed that nobody was particularly excited about being outdoors on a typical chilly gray day. Still, Patty Pan was lucky to be the only prepared food vendor there, at least on opening day so our sales were off the charts, at least compared with most of last year.



Georgetown is an interesting market. Some market purists argue that it's not actually a farmers' market at all because there are as many flea market vendors as farmers. But I'm not a purist and I think that the more different kinds of farmers' markets we see, the more options there will be for farm fresh food.



This market has everything going for it except customers. Georgetown is an increasingly trendy neighborhood with few grocery stores. The market has a great venue, with old brick, train tracks and a defunct brewery in the background. There's also plenty of space, in fact, there's enough space to configure the stalls so that every vendor has a corner, at least at this point in the season. Corner stalls allow vendors twice as much selling frontage, so they're usually in high demand and you often have to have seniority or an amazing product to get one.



So we'll just have to wait an see whether the Georgetown market will realize its potential. It may just depend on whether we can all stick it out long enough.




Friday, May 20, 2011

Making Work





These days I often base my decision to vend at a new market on the fact that every vending opportunity creates work, and people need work. My business has built an infrastructure over the years, and it's often not difficult for us to pick up new markets and make use of unused parts of that infrastructure by preparing a little extra food at the kitchen we're already leasing, and using a van and some equipment on days when they would otherwise sit ide. Even if we just break even, we're seeing what can come of this opportunity and we're making work.


There have been raging debates the past few years about whether new markets "cannibalize" existing markets, siphoning their market share and their clientele. The way I see it, they do and they don't. There's certainly the potential for someone who wants great tomatoes to stop at one market rather than another because it's more convenient. There's also potential for someone who wants great tomatoes to buy them rather than not buy them on a particular day because there's a convenient market nearby that hadn't been there a year earlier.


We're picking up a brand new market this year at Willis Tucker Park, in Snohomish. It's on Friday afternoons, so traffic is going to be hell, but I'm excited. Friday markets tend to be challenging. They're not like other weekday markets, where folks come on their way home from work and probably don't have anything else to do that evening. They're also unlike weekend markets, which tend to be more leisurely because folks often go there as a day-off activity. This new market is in a busy park with a swimming pool. I'm hoping it'll have some of the qualities that make weekday markets succeed as well as qualities that make weekend markets work.


We'll see. In any case, I'm be making work for my staff.








Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Swords Into Ploughshares




I got to thinking the other day about a weird irony: the birth of the modern industrial fertilizer industry parallels the famous line from the Book of Isaiah about beating swords into ploughshares, symbolizing a transition to a time of peace and harmony.


After World War II, there was a surplus of nitrogen that had been used for making bombs, and industrious entrepreneurs repurposed the material into a product that could improve farm yields. Like the image of beating swords into ploughshares, they switched a military product to an agricultural use.


But beating swords into ploughshares was supposed to be a beautiful thing, and the birth of industrial agriculture which came about because of the widespread use of chemical fertilizer has led to inferior food, widespread damage to wildlife habitat and the centralization of the global food system.


I guess we'd be better off if we'd just never created the weapons in the first place.


Saturday, May 14, 2011

Trash




Being a market vendor has given me a new perspective on trash. The health department requires that all food vendors keep a lined trash can in their booths, and that's a reasonable request because we need to have a place to put the waste that we generate. The market managers require that we take our trash away from the market when we leave, and that's a reasonable request because there are a lot of vendors generating a lot of trash, and someone has to haul it away.



As a prepared food vendor, my business generates more trash than most other booths because of the "disposable" plates and forks that we use. Some of the stuff is compostable, but we're still left with the issue of who has to haul away the compost. Prepared food vendors pay higher fees because of the waste we generate, but I still try to be mindful of it. The market puts out trash cans to collect customer trash, but space is still limited.



I often see customers confused about what to do with their trash. Market trash cans are available, but they're often 20 or 30 feet away. I try to keep the trash can in my booth out of customers' reach to limit the amount of trash I have to haul back to my kitchen with me, but several times a day someone will try to reach over the stove to get to the trash. I pay a lot of money in liability insurance, and it upsets me when people get too close to the stoves. I've seen people duck under the bright read "caution" tape that I use to keep customers away from the stoves, and come into the booth to put things in the trash can. Sometimes people just try to hand me their trash while I'm cooking.



I never thought so much about trash until I started doing this work. Although it makes me ornery when someone tries to hand me trash, I might have done the same before my vending days. I suppose this assumption of convenience is part of the same mind set that allows us to use "disposable" plates and forks in the first place. I don't have a good answer, but I do have some good questions.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Savoy Greens

This past Sunday Full Circle Farm was selling Savoy cabbage greens, tied in neat bunches. They looked kind of like collards, but their leaves were wrinkly like Lacinato kale (also known as Dino kale, black kale and Italian kale.)


When I asked about them, the guy said, "Yeah, they're going out into the fields and looking for anything they can possibly sell."


It's been a rough spring here in the Northwest. Granted, we haven't had to deal with anything like fatal, historic tornado outbreaks, but we have had our coldest April on record and there's not a lot of local produce available.


I'm convinced that an important part of the process of ending food insecurity involves making friends with parts of edible plants that we typically shun. I've been known to go around asking farmers to save me the broccoli and cauliflower leaves that they typically trim and discard. These leaves are perfectly edible: they're just a little tougher than collards, and a little sweeter. I pay the farmers for these greens: not as much as they'd get selling their produce retail, but certainly more than they'd get if they tossed them on the compost pile. I use them in the veggie mix I serve, introducing them back into the food chain.


I cooked up a bunch of these savoy cabbage greens for lunch yesterday, along with a chopped leek, a few spears of asparagus, some leftover quinoa and a bit of fancy vinegar. The greens were a little tough, but if I'd been more patient and less hungry I could have cooked them just a few minutes longer. All in all, it was a tasty, convenient use of something that would otherwise have ended up on the compost pile.