Winter in Ballard

I'm continually amazed by the Ballard Farmers' Market over the winter. It continues to amaze me even though I've been vending there for 8 winters. These guys in the photo are queued up to buy salmon right as the market is opening. (Note the guy in the shorts. It's January!)

For my business this market peaked during the 2008 summer season, as far as summers go, but each winter is still better than the winter before. In fact, a typical winter day at this market is still better than a typical summer day at any other event.

I wish they could clone the magic here and import it to other neighborhoods, like Phinney Ridge. But then it wouldn't be nearly as magical.

A Website!

After many years of living off the grid, so to speak, my company now has a website. I'd put it off for a variety of reasons, not least because most developers seemed to want to sell me more than I actually needed.

I finally decided to work with Becky Dobbins after seeing the wonderful site she did for my friends at Farm Girl CSA. I love their site because its content and its design are so nicely in balance. It's not ostentatiously fancy, and it really does convey the essence of the gals' operation.

My major challenge in working with a designer to build a site was to bring together my business and my writing. I wanted the site to promote both endeavors in such a way that someone could come to it being interested in either one, and either find what they wanted easily, or become curious enough to explore farther. I also wanted a format that I could update myself, to tinker with the text and also change the menu as needed.

I love the result. I'm also looking it as a work in progress, because my various endeavors are also works in progress. A lot has changed even during the few short months that we have been working on the site, including opening the cafe and e-publishing Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Veggie Prep 101

Veggie Prep 101 is the name is the class I'm currently teaching through PCC. It's an unfortunate name, and I say that even though I named it. It sounds formal and academic, although the focus of the class is really just to get folks to relax and trust their instincts. I'm not there to teach them professional knife skills or the right and wrong way to cut an onion. I've been cooking professionally for more than 20 years, and I can't say that I know professional knife skills or the "right" way to cut an onion.

People were prepping vegetables and cooking fabulous meals long before anyone wrote a cookbook or started a cooking school. With few exceptions (like apple seeds and rhubarb leaves) the fruits and vegetables that we find in stores and grow in our gardens are not going to make us sick, so prepping them is just a matter of getting to know them, and also getting to know our our own tastes and preferences.

Personally, I like to push the envelope and try to use as much of the stems and peels as possible. Kale stems are too tough for me, but collard stems have great texture if you cook them through. So much of what we choose to leave on or take off has more to do with convention than with palatability.

More than anything, I want to use the class as a way to show my wonder at the vegetable kingdom. We prep vegetables, pass them around, sniff them, discuss the evolutionary continuum (think Savoy cabbage and Lacinato kale, or beet greens and chard,) and finally eat them. It's a good time.

Jubilee Beef Chili

When I first spoke to the folks about Jubilee Farm about vending at their fall pumpkin patch event, they asked if I could sell burgers, in addition to my regular menu. I was reluctant. I'd watched my dear friends from Green Go Food struggle with the economics of making and selling a sustainable burger, and had come to the conclusion that the term "sustainable burger" is an oxymoron.

Sure, you can make a great burger with great beef, great condiments and a great bun. But, at its core, a burger is a cheap, everyday food whose main ingredient is beef, and that's just not sustainable. According to Mark Bittman, the average person on the planet eats 3 ounces of meat a day. If you make a 6 ounce burger, you're using twice as much as the planetary average in a single meal. That's not sustainable, whatever kind of meat you use.

I suggested chili instead. I love chili, and you can use all good ingredients and still make an affordable, cost effective product. I use lots of chiles in my chili. Mostly mild, and a couple of hot. They give it most of its flavor, and if you use all hot ones your chili will get too hot too fast, and you won't be able to enjoy as much of that wonderful chile flavor.

I also use beans in my chili: local, organic beans from Alvarez Farms. They cost more than the ones in the grocery store, but not that much more. My neighbor at the Ballard Market, the guy who sells Zane and Zack hot sauce, comes from Texas. He scoffed when he heard I put beans in my chili, but he still eats the stuff all day.

We're using beef from Jubilee Farm. They didn't charge us anything for the wonderful, lucrative vending experience we had there, and I wanted to give something back so I bought a quarter of a cow, in one-pound packages. We'll run out of it in a few weeks, and then we'll figure out another sustainable option.

So here's the recipe. It makes four to six servings, depending on how hungry you are and what else you're serving.

2 tablespoons canola or grapeseed oil
1/2 pound ground beef
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons chili powder, mild or hot
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 medium sized onion
1 cup chopped anaheim, poblano or pasilla chiles
1 jalapeno, serrano or habanero chile (optional)
1 can (28 ounce size) crushed tomatoes, or 3-4 cups chopped fresh tomatoes
2 cups black beans, red beans or a combination

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the beef, salt and spices and cook on medium high heat for about five minutes, until it's nicely browned.

Add the onions and chiles and cook for about 5 minutes longer, until the onions are transluscent. Add the tomatoes and cook, stirring often, until they're heated through. If you're using fresh tomatoes, cook them until they start to break down and the mixture becomes soupy. Add the beans, lower the heat, and cook for at least half an hour. It can cook for hours, and the longer you cook it, the tastier it'll be.

Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food

I've published my opus on Kindle. It's called Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well, and it tells the story of our perpetually unfolding relationship with food, from the time we first started walking upright to the modern sustainable food movement.

Eating well means many things to many people. It can be a spiritual pursuit, as with Hindu vegetarianism and kashrut. It is also a social marker: think medieval banquets and four-star restaurants. Dietary prescriptions for eating well address health concerns, such as heart disease and diabetes.

A steak is never just a steak and a piece of bread is never just a piece of bread. Whether or not we are consciously aware of these countless layers of meaning, the allure of steak is subtly colored by the magic of the Paleolithic hunt, and the comfort of bread is inseparable from its long history as a vital staple.

Our food culture has evolved in tandem with our communication technologies. It is quite likely that we developed spoken language as a tool to organize hunts, and the earliest written documents in ancient Babylon and Egypt are contemporaneous with some of the earliest sophisticated cooking techniques. The invention of the printing press led to a proliferation of cookbooks, and today the internet puts worlds of recipes at our fingertips.

Grand cuisines require grand culinary infrastructures, but small-scale agriculture is necessary for a broad base of people to eat well. Olive and grape farmers in ancient Greece developed perhaps the first formal democracy, and modern independent farmers are creating life affirming alternatives to the industrial food behemoth.

I'm fascinated by these stories about ideas, recipes and technologies. I'm also intrigued by the possibility that a deeper understanding of our food history can help us to see past some of the blind spots that interfere with our daily ablility to make solid choices about how to eat.

So the book is available on Kindle. It's $3.99, which is cheaper than a quesadilla. If you have an Ipad with a Kindle ap, you can get it that way. I'm looking into making it available in other platforms as well, but I'm a bit of a Luddite so it'll be a process. If you're interested in reading it and you don't have the right technology, please email me and I'll get you a copy. Ebook marketing is the wild west at this point. But that's another story.

The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook

I first crossed paths with Kim O'Donnel soon after she moved for Seattle, when she was writing for the Washington Post. She ordered a quesadilla at a farmers' market, regretted it when she saw that it had beets, enjoyed it anyway, and wrote a post about the experience for her Mighty Appetite blog. I became her symbol of the fact that beets weren't that terrible after all and she became my high-profile-reformed-beet-hater poster child.

Kim has been instrumental in popularizing the Meatless Monday movement, a campaign to accesibly promote plant based eating to folks who wouldn't be caught dead calling themselves vegetarian. When I heard that she was working on a meatless cookbook targeted towards meat eaters I mentioned that I struggle daily at my market booth with prejudices against meatless food. She responded that the solution was simply to make the meatless food tasty enough that even meat eaters could enjoy it.

I wasn't convinced. If it were that simple then I wouldn't keep encountering those market shoppers who feel the need to exclaim every time they walk past my booth, "I'm a carnivore!" Meat eating has countless layers of meaning. Its appeal is not simply a matter of flavor.

The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook approaches the issue brilliantly, by blatantly celebrating the joys of eating meat while simultaneously offering an alternative. The introduction has a wonderful baby picture of the author covered in grease and enjoying a t-bone. For all practical purposes, she's winking at the reader and saying, "This is great stuff. Now let's move on. At least one day a week."

Oh, and the recipes are fabulous too.

New Boots and the Pineapple Express

My business hasn't missed a day at the Ballard Farmers' Market since 2004, unless you count the one day in 2008 when my employee took the company van home without asking and then couldn't get it off his street because of the ice and snow.

This past Sunday I woke up with the rain pounding on my roof and seriously considered calling in and saying I just couldn't. The weather report said to stay home if you possibly could. (What kind of weather report tells shoppers to stay home on a Sunday two weeks before Christmas? Positively unAmerican.) I decided to head to the kitchen and take it from there. I'd bought a pair of serious, warm boots when I was in Vermont last month for precisely this type of occasion.

A very soggy and cranky cat ran up to me as soon as I got the key in the kitchen door. I guess he'd been caught out in the elements all night. I didn't let him in, but I didn't latch the door either so if he'd been persistent enough he could have taken shelter.

I spoke to my employee who was doing the Broadway Farmers' Market that day and we decided to proceed, if only for the market managers who work so hard to make it all happen. The last thing they need is to come down in torrential rain and not have any vendors.

I put on the raincoat that I keep at the kitchen and began hauling things outside. Before I knew it the van was fully loaded. I headed over to Ballard. The rain seemed to be letting up on the way, but it started dumping again as soon as I pulled up next to my booth space. I took my time trying to get the tarp on the top of the booth as taut as possible so the water wouldn't collect, but it was a lost cause. I was knocking off buckets of water with the broom even before I'd finished unloading.

In the end, it wasn't such a bad day. The rain mostly let up by early afternoon, although few customers turned out. But I felt full of love for the customers who did show. At the risk of sounding creepy, I expressed that to one couple. They responded that if we vendors could turn out, they figured they could too.

That's my favorite thing about doing markets in horrible weather. The experience brings folks closer together as we each do our part to create something larger than ourselves.