Archive for May, 2010

At the CSA, we were able to sample raw milk from a local farmer.  I have only recently heard about consumers buying raw milk, after a farm faced some legal trouble for selling some in an illegal manner.  This whole situation made me think:

WHAT?

Do the local police not have better sting operations to set up?  Shouldn’t they be approaching some drug dealers, instead of farmers’ daughters?  Maybe the cops could work on the recent rash of robberies instead?

This made me imagine raw milk was a very dangerous substance because it has to be so strictly controlled.

So, is it?  I’ve read several articles on the Internet, and I’m still not sure.  There are plenty of articles saying it is more nutritious and more flavorful, and I’ve found some articles about salmonella outbreaks.  However, haven’t there been plenty of e-coli and salmonella outbreaks occurring in supposedly safe foods?

This situation makes the police look like they are attacking the little guys while the big corporations get to pass off whatever they want.

I’m going to enjoy our lovely glass jar full of pure milk, despite wondering a little about its safety.  For now, bottoms up!

What do you think about raw milk?

My oldest son doing some veggie cleaning.

We were able to pick up our first ‘green bag special’ today.  We were excited to officially be starting our journey.  The CSA had planned a bonfire and potluck, but the April May showers drowned out that plan, so members were invited to the farm to pick up their shares.  Despite the less-than-stellar weather, we enjoyed the beautiful view from the farm.  We were able to see the raised beds, already overflowing with the plants that will eventually bear dozens of different vegetables.  Today’s share included several types of lettuces and salad greens, as well as green onions and radishes.

We brought home our healthy haul and proceeded to investigate.  My oldest son jumped right in to help clean.  I was pleased to see him so eager to be involved.  We had towels lined up along all of the counters, so the washed leaves could dry (see below).  Though we have a half share of vegetables, it felt like a good amount.  We could make two huge salads, at least.

Remember my references to mystery veggies?  Well, we had some mysteries on our hands tonight.  Luckily, a couple of friends had joined the same CSA, and we were able to confer on Facebook.  Google Images was also handy tool.  Several times tonight I googled things like “green leaves, red veins” and “green leaves, purple veins.”  Thank goodness for Google!

Our bounty

After washing all that produce, we were ready to eat.  I was partially interested in taking on this change in our lives in order to inspire my sons to eat more healthful foods, and tonight, I couldn’t have been prouder.  After volunteering to clean the vegetables, my oldest son continued to jabber about the bounty.  He was very interested in learning about each green leaf and willingly sampled them.  We decided upon a salad for dinner, starting simply with our first harvest.

While preparing the salad, my oldest even recommended a type of salad dressing he enjoyed: Honey French.  Our friend Google led us to a recipe, and we created homemade salad dressing to accompany our locally-grown foods…yee!

Salad, with locally-made sourdough bread

The salad was delicious.  You cannot compare the pale, watery lettuce in bagged salads to what we ate.  Our salad had a multitude of interesting flavors.  Yum!
So, overall, I’m feeling pretty good right now.  We ate well, we have a drawer full of greens for the rest of the week, and we are still excited about the weeks to come.

What about our youngest son, the picky one, you might ask?  Well, he was at his grandma’s house tonight, enjoying a ham sandwich.  He’ll get to participate in the next green haul.

Offering a reward increases the likelihood of desired behavior.

Those are dreaded words whenever we are looking for a place to eat out.   That means our small son has one restaurant on his radar.  One and only one.

Nationally, conversations are being held about whether restaurants should give away toys in kids’ meals.  Santa Clara county in California is thinking about banning them.  As a mom who wants to lead my children to healthier choices, I wouldn’t mind if Happy Meal toys went extinct.  I might even rejoice.

Of course, parents have the choice not to frequent such places, and I’m sure I have many friends who don’t.  However, one visit is enough to ensure you will hear the refrain, “Moooommm, I want a toy” every time you are dining out.   This is one of the many ways our diets are shaped by things other than hunger.  Getting a toy (reward) for eating Happy Meals is definitely an example of Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning.

There are people who are outraged by Santa Clara county’s exploration of this topic.  They act as if this is an example of government controlling people’s lives.   I wholeheartedly support the First Amendment, and I guess I missed this line:   “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the dissemination of junky toys with children’s food.”

So, lead the way, Santa Clara county.  Give me one less thing to argue about with my young son.  He can whine about the mean government instead of his mean mama.

Farm fresh!

After deciding to eat more locally-grown foods, we thought through our options for obtaining these foods.  Here are two we didn’t choose:

1) Growing our own foods.  As discussed previously, I am not equipped for this.  While we may try our thumbs at gardening for fun this summer, I don’t want to rely on this as a major food source just yet.

2) Buying vegetables at a farmer’s market.  The farmer’s market has great appeal.  It is a fun place to visit.  Our problem, however, is our location.  We live 20-25 miles from the nearest large-scale farmer’s market, meaning it would require a special trip each week to get fresh vegetables.  We found a CSA that could deliver to our town, which would save us from committing to traveling to town to pick up our vegetables.  If you don’t know what a CSA is, read my description here.

What makes the CSA appealing?

1)  Someone knowledgeable does the work.  By supporting a CSA, we are helping a local person who has an interest in farming.  Perhaps they can even earn a living from it.

2)  We get a bag of vegetables!  Visiting a farmer’s market would require us to pick out vegetables.  I think I would limit myself and not take a variety of items.  The bag of vegetables will force me to think and cook creatively and will open us up to new experiences.

3)  We participate in the process.  The CSA involves visiting the farm to help with the harvest.  We can show our kids how food is grown.  Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle talks about how disconnected Americans are from our food supply.  When I was a kid, my parents thought it was hilarious that I didn’t realize they could make french fries from potatoes.  I had no clue!  I thought french fries came from a bag…where else?

This is what I'll look like doing my share at the CSA this summer.

Just a few short weeks ago, I had never heard the term “CSA.”  I happened across an ad on Craigslist offering bags of organic, farm-grown vegetables delivered weekly.  I was immediately intrigued and began investigating.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.

People become members of a CSA by paying a fee to join.  The farm uses the money to purchase plants for their garden, and in return, they promise the members a share of the harvest.  Each CSA has different prices and offerings.  You will have to decide whether to purchase a whole share or a half share, if that option is available.  For us, since we are light vegetable eaters, we are going with a half share for this year.  If that doesn’t fulfill our needs this year, we will know to get a whole share next year.

Some CSAs are limited to the veggies grown on the individual farm, while other farms have joined forces with others who grow fruit, raise meat, collect eggs, bake bread, and etc.   Members can then add on shares for the optional items.

Many CSAs give you a discount on your vegetable share if you agree to help harvest the veggies.  Next week, our CSA is having a meeting for members, where we will sign up for our work dates.  Though I’m not known to be the outdoors type, I am actually eager to participate in the vegetable harvesting.  Some friends from work are also signed up for our CSA, so it will be fun if we are able to work on some of the same dates.

If you are interesting in finding a local CSA, a good website is Local Harvest.  You can search for CSAs based on location and based on the types of shares available.  After researching various local CSAs, we went with the one advertised on Craigslist because they deliver to our local area.  Not all CSAs offer this service, but we are happy to have it available to us.   Other CSAs expect you to pick up your share at the farm or at a mutually-agreed upon location (sometimes a local farmer’s market, where the farm is selling other goods).

I’m just five days away from receiving my first green bag special.  Woohoo!

Look! He ate green things!

To encourage all members of the household to try out our many veggies this summer, I’m planning to create a bingo board with names of various vegetables filling the boxes.  We’ll mark off a square each time we try something on the board.  First person to hit bingo gets to make plans for a family outing to places he/she wants to visit.  Hopefully, this will make the mysterious veggies more appealing and will make the whole adventure more fun for the kids.

My youngest is a very picky eater.  He eats these things: cheese, bread, peanut butter and jelly, apples, cereal, bananas, graham crackers, chicken nuggets, sausage, pancakes, chocolate milk, and apple juice.  And that’s about it.  Literally.  Yes, you are reading that correctly, not a single vegetable on the list.  He doesn’t just not like vegetables, not a single one has passed through his lips his entire life (edited to clarify: I was a good mama and fed him vegetables when he was eating the mushed-up kind.  Somehow, it trailed off after that as he became picky).

How did we get here?  I don’t know exactly.  If he were our first child, we would have tried harder to encourage him to eat a wider variety of foods.  However, he is the blessed second child.  The one who gets fewer photos in the baby book and less stifling attentive parents.  With two young boys and two full-time jobs, we felt lucky to get dinner on the table with the four of us around it, so we weren’t all that into dinner time battles over food.

It didn’t seem to be a big deal to give our toddler a piece of cheese or bread instead of a dinner plate, but somehow that toddler turned into a pre-kindergartner in a blink of an eye.  In the meanwhile, he developed a very limited palate.

Right now, he thinks vegetable is a bad word.  Maybe a little vegetable bingo will entice him.

I borrowed Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life from my local library and devoured it this week.  Though I have loved Kingsolver’s fiction in the past, I wasn’t sure how intriguing this book would be.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The book follows Kingsolver and her family as they attempt to live a year eating only locally-grown foods, mostly homegrown.  The current popular term for such a lifestyle is locavore, and it’s an idea that is spreading.  Kingsolver was ahead of the curve.

The book could have made for dry reading material, but Kingsolver was great at including just-right anecdotes to keep the story flowing with a light, sometimes humorous, narrative.  Readers will not only get to know Kingsolver’s family, they will learn a lot about how to raise and preserve vegetables and animals.  Readers even learn about the very rare practice of turkey sex.

The narrative of the family’s experiences is broken up by occasional informative pop-out sections, explaining the myriad reasons why people might want to think more carefully about the American diet.  This information comes across as merely informative, not preachy.

The book also includes seasonal recipes, which is a wonderful feature.  Kingsolver shows what kinds of delicious foods can be enjoyed without visiting the grocery store.  I was amazed by the wide-range of foods the family was able to eat, even in the depths of winter.

While this book was fascinating, I’m not planning to follow suite.  Kingsolver apparently already had a green thumb and a great base of knowledge, before beginning her experiment.  My family lacks in these elements; however, the book reminds me that we can greatly improve our food sources, even without going to the same extremes.

Kingsolver was kind enough to share all of the recipes on the book’s website.