Painted Hills Corn

This year Summer Run Farm grew a variety of corn called "Painted Hills". Its kernels include reds, yellows, whites and blues, and its flavor isn't nearly as sweet as the sweet corn we generally roast or boil and eat with butter.

One of the Alvarez guys says that this is a variety that is traditionally ground and used to make tamales. My cursory internet research said that it is actually a recently developed, open pollinated variety, or a plant whose seeds can be saved and planted to produce a similar crop.

More often than not, when I set out to learn about a plant variety that I'm finding at the market, I run into conflicting information, or common names that don't fit Latin names, or a name that one farmer has been using that doesn't match the names other folks use. I find these discrepancies fascinating. They're the mark of a body of knowledge--seeds and plant varieties--that has evolved over eons in a wide range of places, the ultimate open-source document.

How to Pick a Delicata

Although I was very excited to see the earliest delicatas of the season, the first few that I ate were disappointing: dry and mealy instead of of creamy and sweet. So I asked a farmer friend how to tell if a delicata is ready. She said that some farmers pick them too early because customers (like myself) are so eager to have them.

To tell if a delicata is ripe without cutting it open, look for plenty of contrast between the green stripes and the yellow flesh. There should also be some orange around the rough spot where the squash sat on the ground.

The underripe delicatas worked fine when I peeled them, cut them up, and cooked them with a bunch of other veggies, but my favorite thing to do with delicatas is simply to cut them open, scoop out the seeds, rub them with olive oil, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and roast them for about half an hour, until they're tender. (Make sure there's some water in the pan, so they don't dry out.) It's simple, and it's exquisite as long as the squash is ripe and ready.

Campaigning at the Market

I often see people campaigning for local offices at the farmers' market. It's a smart strategy, a way to reach people who are opting for a different paradigm, at least in one aspect of their lives.

I know that I'm more likely to vote for someone who I've seen campaigning at a farmers' market because I figure that they're most interested in reaching voters like me.

Crazy Wind

Yesterday's windstorm started to kick up about halfway through the Magnolia Market. Vendors are required to attach 25 lbs. of weight to each leg of their tents to keep them from blowing away, but yesterday that really didn't feel like enough. Most of us were hanging on to our tents, as well. Fortunately, there wasn't much else to do, because no sane person was out of doors if they didn't have to be.

My employee at the U District Market just packed up and left: there was no business and the tent wasn't staying in place. Someone there actually lost their tent: 2 of the legs weren't weighted down, so the wind picked up the frame and bent it beyond repair.

Local Bounty: The Cookbook!

I'm thrilled to say that my cookbook is now available. Amazon doesn't have an image up yet but there is one (favorable) customer review already.

As far as I know, this is the first cookbook focused on bringing together local and vegan foods, though the connection seems obvious to me. It's always frustrated me to go to vegetarian food festivals and find myself surrounded by processed foods. There's a lot more to eating ethically than just avoiding meat, in fact, every argument you can give for eating a vegetarian or vegan diet applies just as well to eating a diet of local, seasonal foods. It's healthy, environmentally sustainable, and also humane: the small-scale farmers who we support when we eat locally grown foods tend to care about animal habitat and also treat their workers better than they're treated by industrial farms.

The book is published by Book Publishing Company, which is affiliated with the longstanding intentional community The Farm, in Tennessee. It was a pleasure to work with these folks, who are mostly vegan and also grow a lot of their own food. They get it.

Squash and Green Tomato Soup

I did end up getting some lovely ripe tomatoes from my 11 tomato plants but still, at the end of the season, there are plenty of green ones to be used. Here is the recipe for a wonderful soup I made last night.

1 acorn or carnival squash

2 lb. green tomatoes

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cloves garlic

1 small onion

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1 teaspoon chopped fresh marjoram (or substitute oregano or thyme)

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 cups stock

Black pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut the squash in half, remove the seeds, and rub each half with a little olive oil. Arrange the squash face up in a baking dish with about half and inch of water. Rub the green tomatoes with olive oil as well and arrange them in a separate baking dish. Roast the squash and the tomatoes for about an hour and 15 minutes,

Meanwhile, heat the remaining olive oil in a medium saucepan and add the garlic, onion, marjoram and salt. Cook on low heat for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft and translucent.

When the squash and tomatoes are ready, remove them from the oven and wait until they're cool enough to handle. Remove the cores from the tomatoes, as well as the skins, if you want a smoother soup. Scoop the pulp out of the squash and puree it along with the tomatoes, adding stock as needed.

Add this puree to the onion mixture, along with the remaining stock and black pepper to taste. Simmer for about 45 minutes.

Sustainable Tomatoes at the Industrial Food Service Grocery

Despite all of my convictions about how we need to shift our thinking about food prices, it's hard for me to walk by a case of nice looking tomatoes for under $10. I saw this stack of lovely specimens at the Cash and Carry the other day, and went to investigate.

I was surprised to see the phrase "sustainable farming" on the box. I'd just spend the weekend at the Sustainable Ballard Festival surrounded by green marketing, some sincere, some less than sincere.

I went ahead and bought a case of tomatoes, and later checked the company's website, which listed the farm's conscientious practices, speaking of ongoing "self assessments." Despite the fact that they didn't mention working with any certification agency, I liked their approach, which focused on keeping chemical pesticides and fertilizers to a minimum, and improving their practices over time.

I think that this kind of sincere, thoughtful, transitional approach is going to be a very important component in changing the way we eat, in some ways maybe more so than even the "all organic" label. We live in a transitional world, and we need transitional foods.

Still, I wonder how they managed to ship those tomatoes from California cheaply enough to wholesale them for under $10. I hope there were no middlemen, and they just found themselves with a surplus of tomatoes: it is that time of year, after all. I'll probably never know the whole story.