On the face of it, that sounds like something out of a ’say wha?” sort of experience. Doesn’t every place have a farmers market? Someplace?

No. Actually, not. And it’s not like one of those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland pictures from the 30s where all the kids get together and gosh-darn, come up with the idea of putting on a show to raise money (for, choose one, the school, the town hall, some poor kid who needs to go to the hospital). It’s one thing for a single producer to pull a truck off the side of the road, put up signs in both directions and set up a display of tomatoes and melons. It’s an entirely different thing to develop a farmers market. And even if all the ‘i’s” are dotted, the paperwork is all filed correctly, etc. etc., the farmer’s market might still not succeed.

Here are a few items that are really and truly necessary to have a farmers market (success is another deal):

– A group of producers who are already growing what the local customers would buy AND who are not already over-drawn on other farmers markets in the reasonably close area. If your community doesn’t have one and the neighboring counties DO, there’s a reason for that. It might be that no producers in your county have the time to commit to a farmers market. Or, they might not be in the ‘direct to the consumer’ part of agriculture. Or, they might all be growing commodity items like soybeans, wheat, feedstocks. Or, they might already be going to the other farmers markets and do not have a family member or friendly person who will come out to the farm, pick up the freshly picked produce or the eggs or the dressed chickens or whatever it is, first thing on market day. Nor go to the market location, set up the canopy and the tables and the ice chests or whatever. Nor stay there for the whole market, promote the products, sell, make change, take customer names and emails, and the thousand other things that the individual vendor must do in order to make sure the customers come back next week. Participating in a farmers market takes a lot of person hours. Hours that are taken away from ..oh yes, the farm. For many producers, having a farm stand right at the end of their drive looks like a far better deal. So, question one is: Are there actual farmers (not folks who will go to the wholesalers and buy up yesterday’s green peppers and try to pawn them off as home grown) who are not already committed to a farmers market AND are interested?

– What does the ‘area need’ look like now? How close is the closest farmers market and how often does it operate? Once a week? Twice a week? Is it reachable by public transport? Who is the customer base? If you feel your community needs a farmers market or another farmers market, you have to look at that. We already had several farmers markets in our county at various times of the week, including one that operates downtown two days a week. However, the biggest market at that time operated all the way out at the western end of the county and due to location, had basically no parking and a vendor waiting list that was several years long. So we had access issues and we had vendors who were being shut out. The local cooperative extension was able to make the case that the area could use another farmers market, in an area more accessible, with more parking, and with public transport, one day a week, in a county park. This is now the largest farmers market in the county.

– Do you have an agency or organization that is willing to sponsor a market? This is mostly for organizational and physical location issues. Our local city economic development agency sponsors the downtown markets – they made arrangements to get the street shut to traffic; the park one is sponsored by the county parks department, the county cooperative extension, with an assist from the county public transport, which schedules bus runs into the park, right by the market, on market day. The agency or organization will also need to help the vendors organize themselves into a market group, write bylaws, set fees, define roles and so on. If vendors want to sell processed foods, such as baked goods, jams, jellies, salsa, etc. etc., depending on your state’s Health Department or Agriculture Department rules, the sponsors need to work with those state and local departments in order to get vendors certified, inspected if need be and so on. Again, this is not a Mickey and Judy “Let’s put on a show”.

– Is there a location with visibility and access? Our downtown farmers market has been moved several times over the years and every time it changed location, they lost vendors and customers. They finally moved it in a permanent sort of way several years ago and did lot of promotion and activities on market day to attract people from the 6 square block area. They put the market right next to the court house, on a non-busy little street, which basically was within a two block walk of all the major downtown employers. So, they concentrated the customer base. The county park market has a number of benefits: It’s in an open parking lot that is seen directly from the interstate. There is an exit and entrance right off the interstate right there. There is signage outside the park and inside the park advertising the market and the market developers do a fair amount of ‘activities-based’ promotion to get families to come to the market (bike helmet checks and giveaways, car seat checks, free cookbooks, and so on). The vendors at the park market love that location.

– Is there someone who is willing to put in all the work, usually as a volunteer (unless the sponsoring organization makes it part of that person’s job), to organize the market, collect fees, pay bills, police the situation, act as the face of the market, be the interface between the market, the vendors and state and local agencies and organize and put into play promotional activities, PR and so on? This is a huge issue for markets because vendors want their money to go into activities which put money into their pockets. They really would rather not have to pay for a market manager. Only in large cities or where the market is a ‘destination’ situation where vendors can charge premium prices for their goods and produce, do you find paid market managers. Being a volunteer market manager is a labor of love and burn out is a huge issue. If the market is on weekends, the manager not only has to do work during the week on the market but also has to be there for the market as well. There is a lot of turnover in market managers.

So, let’s say you feel your community could use a farmers market? My best suggestion at that point is to approach your county cooperative extension and ask to speak to the agricultural economic development specialist to talk about it.

(photo of farmers market courtesy of Corey Templeton)

1) Through various policies and procedures that have come down from the USDA in the School Lunch Program, America’s schools have been put in the position of having to balance their budgets on the backs of the kids. They have cut staff, personnel, equipment, and the quality of the food. It takes people to cook real food. It actually takes people to just reheat or ‘nuke’ food – but it does take more people hours to prepare and cook real food from scratch. You might want to take a look at what the kids in your school district are actually eating at breakfast (if you have a breakfast program) and lunch. Don’t think that it’s only kids in places like West Virginia or Mississippi who are eating chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. Kids need good food to learn. The kids are worth it.

2) Families, whether through marketing or convenience or seeming lack of time, have been put in the same position in terms of serving up processed, pre-prepared foods to their families. Aunt Toby and the DH did this, too – though basically in what we considered a good cause: we used to serve the Little Siberians frozen fish patties to get them into the thing of eating fish. Later, we got them oriented to eating plain, fresh fish. But I do wish we had not resorted to the breaded fish patties. It really does not take any more time to cook fresh fish or shrimp or scallops than it does to bake a breaded fish patty. (end of self-beating up rant)

3) Kids learn from their parents – whatever you cook and eat, they will eat also. If you eat vegetables, they will eat vegetables; if you don’t eat veggies, then don’t try to make them eat them. They’ve already learned the lesson from you that vegetables are not something they should eat. If you teach them to cook those things, they will cook and teach their kids to cook. One of Jamie Oliver’s points in the series so far is that we now have people who are parenting, whose only cooking skills consist of warming things up in a toaster oven and using a microwave oven to zap something in a package. Even if you want to do some ‘from scratch’ cooking, if you don’t have any kitchen skills, there is this ‘I’m going to ruin this” fear – and that makes it difficult to change. Oliver established a cooking school in Huntington, WV to teach everyone – parents, adults, kids, teens – how to cook. So, do a good deed: If you have kids or grandkids, teach them to cook some basic dishes. If you don’t, offer to teach kids from your ‘house of worship’ or other community groups. Volunteer to do cooking with your local county 4-H (the Cooperative Extensions usually have a big kitchen in their building).

And here is a bit of Aunt Toby:
Every kid, even as young as probably 4 or 5 years old, can be brought into the kitchen and allowed to help. Not necessarily chop or fry or get into trouble with the stove, but do actual preparation, such as:

Little Folks:
Washing their hands before they start
Washing vegetables
Helping to knead dough for bread or pizza
Spreading cut up veggies on a pizza before it goes into the oven
Setting the table

8-11 Years – here is where you can have them do more because they are more in control of themselves, but still you must monitor them and be right there:
Learning about the oven and the controls
Cooking eggs
Easy prep things that don’t involve knives, such as grating cheese
Making pizza from scratch, including kneading the dough, raising it, spreading it out on a pan, putting on sauce and toppings and putting it in the oven.
Making a salad
Making meatloaf and hamburgers
How to cook vegetables properly

12 years and up – here is where you can now give them the opportunity, with help, monitoring and guidance, with doing things such as frying, boiling, baking, using appliances such as processors and mixers, and chopping and slicing foods.

My earliest cooking memories were with my father, teaching me to make scrambled eggs when I was five years old, with me standing on the kitchen stool with a big kitchen towel safety-pinned over my clothing. He taught me how to crack an egg into a bowl, how to mix them up with a fork and pour them into the pan. He also was a real stickler for the eggs not being too dry. He also taught me how to make what he thought of as a proper hamburger, in an old heavy aluminum skillet we had, the bottom of which he covered in a layer of salt. I loved cooking with my father and the DH and I have tried to instill a love of cooking and good food with all of the Little Siberians, who are all not very little any longer.

There are things that I could not pass onto my kids as skills. I don’t know anything about electronics, for example. Or computer programming. Or plumbing repair, or putting down cement. I know very little about carpentry or welding. But I taught my kids to cook so that they could feed themselves and their families later on.

Bring the kids back into the kitchen.

When I saw that ketchup, I knew that it was time to stock up. Passover is not for another month, but I can tell you that the more unique items (the baking mixes, the salad dressings, the breakfast cereals and the ketchup) tend to disappear quickly. So, if you don’t see any of those items on the display, find the department manager and ask if the store will be getting any more shipments in before Passover. You might even ask the manager whether or not you can order case lots of items for personal purchase.

Not that I am advocating running around to all the stores in your area and buying up all the Passover items, but stores will order more if they think they can sell more. If you don’t see a well stocked Passover display in your area, you might wish to contact your local Jewish community and ask whether they are doing co-op buying for Passover – but do it quickly. Passover is one of those holidays in the religious calendar that is very important and Jewish families will have been planning for this for several weeks at this point.

If nothing else, tuck this fact in the back of your head: There is one time of the year when, if your supermarket has a well-stocked display, you will be able to find products that do not contain grains, corn, or corn sweeteners. And that is the month before Passover.

Eat in good health.

The first Thanksgiving was NOT like that. The socalled Pilgrims had arrived in November the year before and at least half of them died of starvation and disease by the next November, when a ship arrived with more Pilgrims and, Halleluiah!, provisions. They had food. They might make it through the winter! Now THERE was something to celebrate. The local natives supposedly provided five deer, which meant that the traditional food for the holiday should have been venison, except for the probable lobbying efforts of the folks from Land o’ Lakes or something like that.

So, seeing as how we’ve been eating non-traditional foods for what actually was a celebration for NOT starving to death, I’m going to suggest the following for this Thanksgiving: Think small. Think dainty, even.

Turkey: If you’ve just got to have ‘the bird’, get the guy behind the counter at your local store to put that baby through the bandsaw, right up the middle (leaving you with one leg, one wing, etc.) and wrap up each piece separately. Unless you are feeding the Mongolian hoards, half of one of those big birds is going to provide you with enough meat for 6-10 people, trust me. A couple of slices of turkey provides anyone (even a starving Pilgrim) with enough fats and protein to live another day or two. No one needs to go into tryptophan overload. What do you do with the other half? Ah…put that in the freezer. You will probably have left-overs for the weekend anyway. Now you have another half a turkey to cook for another time instead of 10 pounds of already cooked turkey that you will need to find things to do with..quickly.

Twist on the Turkey: Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F. While it is heating up, put the half a bird bone side up in the bottom of a large roasting pan. Put together your own favorite bbq sauce and paint the bone side and put in the oven. When the preheat “I’m done!” ding goes off, flip the bird skin side up, paint that with the bbq sauce and lower the heat to 350 degrees F and finish off the turkey until a meat thermometer stuck into the leg and breast reads 165 degrees. Baste with more bbq sauce as you go as well as the juices from the bird. Yum.

Veggies. What would we do for Thanksgiving without veggies? Actually, looking back on the First Thanksgiving, what they had probably was some version of squash, since that is what the natives grew in the area, plus soaked dried beans and soaked dried corn – succotash. Now, cooked up winter squashes and succotash would fill anyone up – I’d suggest choosing one or the other and serving whatever greens you can lay your hands on, whether it is a green salad, broccoli, chard, cabbage, kale, whatever. If you can still get locally grown greens, so much the better, but even in the Northeast, we can get cabbage family to eat at this point that is locally grown.
Twist on the Veggies: Please, please, please don’t put butter in the veggies. No one loves mashed potatoes more than I do but if you want to do something wild and crazy with mashed potatoes, sauté up a couple of cloves of garlic in olive oil, smash them up with the oil and then put all of that into the potatoes. For green veggies, just lightly steam – no “boiled up until they are grey”, please. Make the cooked green veggies the last item just before you put things on the table. If you want to dress them up a little, squeeze a little lemon or lime juice on ‘em.

Cranberry Sauce: I don’t care if you are a whole-berry fan or a Jellied fan but cranberry sauce is, in my opinion, one of the truly great inventions. However, canned is full of things like high fructose corn syrup, so here is what we do at Chez Siberia:

Twist on the Cranberries: One bag of whole cranberries, the same size bag of frozen blueberries, 1 cup of water. Put all three in a pan and simmer until the cranberries pop. Smoosh everything down. Taste. Put in ¼ cup of sugar, simmer and taste again. This should be sweet enough but if not, add another ¼ cup of sugar. This should be all you need and you’ve now saved a lot of sugar. The blueberries will gel up the sauce nicely; it’s a different color and has a nice perky taste. Oh, and did I say you saved at least half the sugar?

Dessert. I love dessert. There is not one dessert of any sort that Aunt Toby has not found her name written on it with an engraved invitation attached to it. But I ask you…how many times have you really gotten a dessert that people really went ga-ga for at Thanksgiving? Trying to figure out what people are going to like is why we end up with three different types of pie and one gets mostly eaten…one gets half eaten…and the mince gets one piece taken out of it and you’re stuck with the rest for the weekend. Do a plate of cookies. BUY mixed Italian cookies if you’re stuck for time. People LIKE cookies. Pie is like potato salad. People SAY they like potato salad but even if you used one big potato to make the salad with..you’d end up with left over potato salad. People will eat cookies. Even weird cookies that they have never seen before. As long as you say it’s a cookie, they will eat it.

Here’s a weird cookie that people will eat and you can secretly feel good about because the ricotta adds some protein.

Ricotta Cookies
Basic recipe:
2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
1 tsp of baking powder
1 stick of unsalted butter
1 cup of sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups of whole milk ricotta

Liquid. If you want lemon cookies use this:
1/8 cup of lemon juice
2 tsps of dried lemon zest

If you want the cookies to taste like something else, you can use one of the following:
1/8 cup of strong coffee; or
1/8 cup of orange juice concentrate; or
1 tsp of almond extract plus 1/8 cup of milk

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper or waxed paper. Don’t grease the sheets and try to do the cookies that way. Does..not..work.

Combine flour and baking powder in a bowl.
In the mixer bowl, beat up the butter until softened; add the sugar and beat until fluffy.
Add the eggs, the ricotta, the lemon juice and the zest and beat up.
Add the flour/baking powder mixture. It should have the consistency of the sort of cookies that you spoon out onto the cookie sheet.

With a table spoon, spoon out onto the cookie sheet. These cookies are more like ‘cakies’ – they do not spread much at all. They sort of rise. If you want them flatter, use a moistened spoon and press them down a little bit.

Bake for 15 minutes and when they are brown at the edges, take off the sheets and cook on a rack until they are cold.

Mix up glaze.
Basic glaze:
1 ½ cups of powdered sugar
1/8-1/4 cup of liquid.

If you used lemon juice or orange juice in the cookies, then use the same thing as the liquid in the glaze. If you used coffee, then melt up ½ cup of chocolate chips in the microwave with a couple of tablespoons of water and add that the sugar to make chocolate glaze and put that on top of the cookies.

When the cookies are cold, spoon about ½ tsp onto each cookie and gently spread on the cookie; allow them to harden for about 2 hours before serving.

Buon Appetito!!

“Most American women should consume no more than 100 calories of added sugars per day; most men, no more than 150 calories. That’s about 6 teaspoons of added sugars a day for women and 9 for men. The 2001-2004 NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) database showed the average intake of added sugars for all Americans was 22.2 teaspoons per day or about 355 calories….Soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages are the No. 1 source of added sugars in the American diet. A 12-ounce can of regular soda contains about 130 calories and 8 teaspoons of sugar.”

The US sugar industry’s response was actually what you would expect from an industry lobbying group:
US Sugar Assn.

“The Sugar Association is very disappointed that a premier health organization such as the American Heart Association (AHA) would issue a scientific statement titled “Dietary Sugars Intake and Cardiovascular Health” without a higher standard of evidence to support its contentions and therefore mislead the average consumer….Every major systematic review of the body of scientific evidence exonerates sugar as the cause of any lifestyle disease, including heart disease and obesity. In 2002, after its 3-year comprehensive review, the expert panel assembled by the Food and Nutrition Board within the Institute of Medicine at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated publicly that the body of scientific evidence did not support the establishment of an upper level (UL) for total or added sugars intake based on data available for dental caries, behavior, cancer, risk of obesity and risk of hyperlipidemia…”

So, we know what side they’re on. But I digress.

One of the things about the AHA’s announcement that I think is a little confusing for consumers is the whole dependence on teaspoons of sugar as a measurement that supposedly consumers can use. When was the last time you picked up anything, turned it over for the nutritional information and found ‘teaspoons of sugar”?

Right. Never. That is not how the items are measured and put out there. The measurement that is done is in grams.

So, today, Aunt Toby is going to talk about grams, teaspoons, and how to convert one to another. Print out this chart, tape it to a 3×5 card and stick it into your wallet. As a matter of fact, print out this chart multiple times – and also stick those cards into cookbooks, recipe card files or however you do your cooking thing. And by the way, in general white and brown sugar is basically the same.

Sugar:
1 cup……………..48 teaspoons………………192 grams
½ cup……………..24 teaspoons………………96 grams
1/3 cup…………..16 teaspoons……………..64 grams
……………………….1 teaspoon………………..4 grams

Honey:
1 Tablespoon……3 teaspoons……………………16 grams

Molasses:
………………………….2 teaspoons…………………..5.86 grams

The reason I’m putting this out there is that getting our arms around that limit of 6 teaspoons of sugar a day (9 if you are male) is a little bit tough if you are looking at printed nutritional items. Here are a few to get you started.

Item………………………..What’s printed on the pkg……………what that translates into
12 oz. Can of coke…………….40.5 grams of sugar………………………10 teaspoons
1 4.3 oz. Hershey bar…………….24 grams of sugar………………………..6 teaspoons
½ cup, vegetarian baked beans…14 grams of sugar………………….…3.5 teaspoons
1 Tbl. Ketchup………………………..4 grams of sugar…………………………..1 teaspoon

So, as you can see, eating commercially prepared products, whether they are canned, baked or whatever will add up rather quickly to being over the new limit on added sugar in one’s diet. We won’t even discuss activities such as the number of teaspoons of sugar that people put into coffee or on cereal.

Better to eat non commercially prepared items?

Ah, but baking and making your own have issues too – but that has to do with more than serving size. For example, commercially prepared cranberry sauce has 16 grams of sugar in a quarter cup serving, which translates into 4 teaspoons of sugar per serving. The recipe on a bag of Ocean Spray fresh cranberries calls for a cup of sugar, which translates into 22 grams of sugar in a quarter cup serving – over 5 teaspoons. So, making your own according to their recipe will not save you on sugar.

On the other hand, I have made cranberry sauce by only using half the amount of sugar called for (and probably could have cut it back to 1/3 cup) and adding a cup of frozen blueberries. The sauce gelled up extremely well and tasted wonderfully. With half the sugar used, a serving has 11 grams of sugar, or fewer than 4 teaspoons of sugar in a serving. If I cut the recipe back to 1/3 of a cup of sugar, a serving would have less than 8 grams or fewer than 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving.

Again, thinking about what we are eating during the day is always a good exercise in terms of capturing information about what nutritional content of the food we eat actually has – and what items we would like to take in fewer of.

(sugar bowl photo courtesy of britmum)

What is coming into season now and will be available from now and through to early spring (thanks to refrigerated storage and the process of freezing) is everything from the cabbage family: cabbage(in all its permutations, combinations and theoretical geographic origins: Dutch, German, Chinese, Napa), broccoli, kale, cauliflower, various mustards, and Brussels sprouts.

As Aunt Toby’s readers are definitely aware, I hold a special place in my heart (and digestive system) for members of the cabbage family. I come from an area of the country where cabbage growing (and sauerkraut making) are major activities and I recall many car trips where we saw field upon field of cabbages growing and being harvested. And I also recall my father explaining to me what a great thing it is to have a vegetable that could be grown in a place with such a short growing season and which was sooo good. I swear stuffed cabbage (or, as he called it, halupshis) ran in his veins.

But, back to reality. In 2007, Cornell University researchers issued a report dealing with vegetable growing and consumption in New York State and the rest of the US and the potential for producing more veggies in New York.
Cornell 2007 Veggies Report

This is a fascinating report on a lot of different levels, but what I focused in on was their chart of the top 10 veggies on a consumption base(and this is the same whether you are looking at New York, the Northeast or the rest of the US, in order of rank):
#1: Potatoes
#2: Tomatoes
#3: Head Lettuce
#4: Onions
#5: Carrots
#6: Sweet Corn
#7: Snap Beans
#8: Broccoli
#9: Cucumbers
#10: Green peas

Now, I think all of us can look at this chart and come to some assumptions as to where these figures are coming from:
Potatoes: No matter who, what, when, where, or how – you can find potatoes on the menu everywhere, whether it is home fries for breakfast, French fries at fast food places or potatoes on the menu at dinner. Potatoes are actually a great source of a lot of B vitamins and Vitamin C and fiber, but unfortunately, the way we cook and dress them up tends to put potatoes into a category where people avoid them.
Tomatoes, head lettuce, cucumbers: This, unfortunately, is the basic makeup of almost every salad that people eat, in or out of the home. Perhaps it gets dressed with a bit of grated carrot, but in general, this is a commercial salad.

Carrots, snap beans, peas and sweet corn: Open any freezer compartment in any home and you will pull out bags of this, either singly or in combination (can we say ‘mixed vegetables?’).

Onions: this is one of those basics that, like potatoes, is in every home and is used generally as an ingredient rather than a vegetable on its own. I think the last time ‘creamed baby onions’ was a popular home dinner dish was probably WWII. And that is really too bad because onions have a huge amount going for them in terms of nutritional value, as do all members of the onion family (see garlic).

Broccoli – Why is this vegetable #8???

We are obviously NOT eating enough dark leafy green vegetables, that is for sure. If people think eating head lettuce and cucumbers is the way to go, they are missing something. A little comparison is due on this, I think:

Iceberg Lettuce……………………..Cucumbers………………………..Broccoli
Protein 1.56 grams ………………….2.47 gr……………………………..4.66 gr.
Fiber 0.7 grams ………………………..83 gr………………………………4.68 gr.
Calcium 51 mg. …………………………………………………………………74.72 mg.
Phosphorus 41 mg. ……………………………………………………………140.78 mg.
Iron 1.5 mg. ……………………………………………………………………….1.37 mg.
Vitamin A 0.1 mg. ……………………223.6 mg………………………….2280.72 mg.
Vitamin C 14 mg………………………..5.58 mg…………………………123.4 mg.

Plus Broccoli and all other members of the cabbage family are rated ‘excellent’ sources of vitamins and minerals such as:
folate
manganese
tryptophan
potassium
vitamin B6
vitamin B2
phosphorus
magnesium
omega 3 fatty acids
vitamin B5
vitamin B1 (thiamin)
vitamin B3 (niacin)
zinc
vitamin E

Research over the past ten years into inflammation and cancer has shown conclusively that vegetables from the cabbage family (especially Brussels sprouts and broccoli) contain substances that do three things: dampen inflammatory response in the body, increase the body’s ability to kill tumor cells, and depress the ability of tumor cells to multiply. Brussels Sprouts Nutritional and Health Info

Why are we providing ‘stomach share’ to head lettuce and cucumbers?

I know there are people who hold the same opinion as a former president with regard to broccoli. I am not one of them. So, for those folks who want some great ways to serve the cabbage family to YOUR family:
Cabbage Recipes
More Cabbage Recipes

Tyler Florence Cabbage Rolls (he does his sauce ‘sweet and sour’ using sugar – in my father’s family, you use vinegar and raisins)
More Stuffed Cabbage

Here’s a tip on how to get the cabbage leave to soften up the way you want them:
–Take your cabbage and cut off the bottom and remove a good couple of inches of the core – you don’t need that anyway. Remove the outer couple of leaves.
– Take a BIG pot – a dutch oven, big soup pot, etc. Put the cabbage in the bottom of that and cover with water. Put the lid on the pot.
– Bring to a boil and turn down to simmer. Simmer for 10 min. The outer leaves should be soft enough to take off. You want them LIMP. If they aren’t, cover the pot and simmer some more until they are.
– Put filling in and wrap as you go and put into your pan with sauce to finish cooking the rolls. If you try to cook the cabbage long enough so that the inner most leaves are limp, the outer leaves will be mush. So, unravel the first couple of soft leaves; when you get to firmer leaves, cover the pot and simmer some more. This is really a process.

Broccoli – although I do not hold with handing kids a dish of ranch dressing and washed flowerets to try to get them to eat the vegetable, I do have to admit that doing our own version of Wendy’s ™ baked potato with broccoli and cheese sauce got my kids to eat cooked broccoli, like it, and it’s also a good cheap meal.

Ingredients:
Baked potatoes – however you do yours.
Sauce:
Milk – whatever you have in the fridge – 1-2 cups
2-3 table spoons of flour
2-3 table spoons of butter
Block of hard cheese – cheddar, swiss, whatever you have..combinations work too – the amount will be a block about 2 inches x 2 inches x 1 inch, chopped, grated, etc.

Put butter into a shallow pan and heat until melted.
Put in flour and stir around until it has taken up all the butter AND starts to give off a nice, sort of nutty smell. Don’t burn it.
Slowly, in little dribbles, add milk AND stir it around – use a fork or a whisk or something. Spoons will not work for this part. Keep adding until all the milk is used. You are looking for a thickish white sauce.
Add grated cheese and stir around until all melted into the sauce – if it is too thick, add a little bit more milk to thin it a bit. Cover the pan and put at the back of the stove on NO heat.

Broccoli – after you have made the sauce and the potatoes, THEN make the broccoli. I put ½ inch of water in the bottom of a shallow pan and steam mine. Don’t boil it – it should still be nice and a little bit crunchy.

Split the potatoes, put on the broccoli and cover with cheese sauce. Kids LOVE this and it’s a great fast Sunday ‘just got back from skiing/skating/snow forts etc.” sort of meal. Warm, filling, has all the protein, carbs, vitamins and minerals anyone needs.

Brussels Sprouts with Walnuts – there are a lot of different recipes for this.

Food Network Emeril Recipe (this recipe uses butter and calls for the Brussels sprouts to be boiled first)

My recipe (and my son eats these with no complaints, so it must be pretty decent):
Ingredients:
Fresh Brussels sprouts (you could probably do this with frozen ones too, but I have never tried it)
Olive oil for sautéing
Walnuts, coarsely chopped – 1/3 cup
Liquid (whatever you have in the fridge: red or white wine, a little lemon or orange juice, left over veggie cooking liquid, etc.)
A large frying pan with a lid

Prep:
Figure on 5 sprouts for each person. Make sure they are not too big or woody, wash well, and trim off the bottom. Slice vertically in half.
In the bottom of a large frying pan, put enough olive oil so that when you tip it, you have enough to coat the bottom but not enough to really ‘fry’ anything. This will be at least 2-3 tablespoons. Put pan on a medium heat and place the sprouts, cut side down, in the pan. Cover and cook for five minutes. Check and see if they are starting to brown – if so, turn the heat down.
Once the sprouts have started to brown, put in a little liquid – ¼ cup should be enough – and recover for five more minutes.
If there is still liquid, let that boil off.
Add walnuts, cover so that they are warmed through and serve.

As the Sainted Julia always said, “Bon Appetit!”
(brussels sprouts on stalks photo courtesy of h-bomb)

Something Aunt Toby discovered recently (and the world of food is just filled to bursting with new discoveries) is that nuts are really really good. And if you compare them with other stuff that people eat on a regular basis as sources of protein, they start to really shine in terms of what they can do for you. Ounce for ounce, nuts are standouts in terms of vitamins, minerals, and types of fats that they have. In many cases, they can be substituted ounce for ounce for animal products such as cheese and meat. For example, looking at 1 ounce of these items and just examining protein and fat:

Cheddar Cheese: 113 cal., 9 gr. Fat, 7 gr. Protein
Chicken Breast (commercially raised): 55 cal., 1 gr. Fat, 8.78 gr. Protein
Walnuts: 183 cal., 18 gr. Fat, 4 gr. Protein
Almonds: 167 cal, 15 gr. Fat, 6 gr. Protein
Cashews: 161 cal., 13 gr. Fat, 4 gr. Protein

I know some of you are falling on your fainting couches already, “Oh, Aunt Toby..how could you..look at ‘teh fat’…OMG!!!”

Stick a hanky under your nose with a bit of lavender water on it and listen up – more and more medical research is showing that fat is actually good for you and some kinds are even better for you:

“Research published in the British Journal of Nutrition (Blomhoff R, Carlsen MH), which identified several nuts among plant foods with the highest total antioxidant content, suggests nut’s high antioxidant content may be key to their cardio-protective effects.
Walnuts, pecans and chestnuts have the highest antioxidant content of the tree nuts, with walnuts delivering more than 20 mmol antioxidants per 3 ounces (100 grams). Peanuts (although technically, a legume) also contribute significantly to our dietary intake of antioxidants.
Nuts’ high antioxidant content helps explain results seen in the Iowa Women’s Health Study in which risk of death from cardiovascular and coronary heart diseases showed strong and consistent reductions with increasing nut/peanut butter consumption. Total death rates decreased 11% and 19% for nut/peanut butter intake once per week and 1-4 times per week, respectively.
…In addition to lowering LDL cholesterol, the walnut-rich ALA diet:
• lowered levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation strongly associated with atherosclerosis and heart disease
• increased levels of the protective omega-3 fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and
• decreased levels of ICAM-1 and VCAM-1 and E-selection, all of which are involved in cholesterol’s adhesion to the endothelium (the lining of the arteries).
The goodness of nuts

So, where are all these antioxidant goodies found? Ahem – the fat, which in the case of nuts, tends to be unsaturated, or monosaturated.

For a detailed look at nutrition of Walnuts: Walnuts

Almonds:Almonds
Health benefits of Almonds

Cashews: Something truly fascinating and totally different for cashews vs. other tree nuts is this: Not only do cashews have a lower fat content than most other nuts, approximately 75% of their fat is unsaturated fatty acids, plus about 75% of this unsaturated fatty acid content is oleic acid, the same heart-healthy monounsaturated fat found in olive oil. Cashew Overview
Cashew Profile

A chart comparing all sorts of nuts plus peanuts can be found here: Nuts and Peanuts Compared

Another site, which has even more information (actually, so much information that it’s a little bit dizzying, but still, any site that slices, dices, graphs, builds pyramids and analyzes food in such a detailed way is great) is here Nutrition Data Site

So, if you are looking for some protein to substitute for high saturated fat cheeses or meats, or protein which has omega 3s coming along for the ride, nuts are something that should be considered. (OK, I will also admit that it is easy to rationalize eating things like oatmeal cookies that have nuts in them, or carrot cake with nuts in it, or brownies with cream cheese filling with almonds on top from the ‘the nuts are good for me’ standpoint – we can talk about delusions later)

But, from an easy-to-remember standpoint, in rank order:

Highest Protein per Ounce: Peanuts, Pistachios, Almonds, Walnuts
Highest Phytosterols: Peanuts and Pistachios, Cashews, Pinenuts, Macadamias
Highest Monosaturated Fats: Macadamias, Hazelnuts, Pecans, Cashews
Highest Polyunsaturated Fats: Walnuts, Pinenuts, Pecans
Lowest Calories: Pistachios, Peanuts, Cashews, Almonds

Don’t be afraid of nuts – but remember – ounce for ounce, nuts are a very nutrient dense food. In one ounce of nuts, you will pick up almost the same number of grams of protein you will get in lean meats – but going along for the ride are a lot of good-for-you fats, plus amazing amounts of things like copper, manganese, and so on. A very little bit of nuts goes a very long way, so sprinkle wisely.

(photos of nuts courtesy of M.C. Demoura, Conan The Librarian, and JeanM1)

From a growing standpoint, places which ordinarily have not been ‘friendly’ to grains such as wheat (find a latitude on any globe where in your own mind – versus anyone else’s – you say, “It’s cold there” and you will find oats growing well there: parts of the former Soviet Union, Norway, Scotland, Canada and the northern US and so on). Weather conditions that make for poor growing conditions for wheat and many other grains (wet conditions, cool conditions, humid conditions, etc.) don’t seem to bother oats.

From a nutritional position, oats can more than hold their own with other grains. They are a great source of minerals such as manganese and selenium (which is something that we actually find it hard to get enough of in today’s diets), phosphorus and magnesium. It’s a great source of fiber.oats

In a one-cup cooked serving (which starts out as ½ cup uncooked), it’s got over 6 grams of protein all by itself and provides Omega 3 as well as Omega 6 fatty acids and a whole bunch of other stuff that frankly are really good for us in terms of vitamins and minerals. They are also a great base in terms of combining them with other food stuffs that will take advantage of the protein and other goodies in oats.

And don’t forget the fiber (because Aunt Toby’s all about the fiber).

Another item about oats which is actually sort of controversial is the issue of gluten. Oats, by themselves, out in the field, don’t have any gluten, so on the face of it, oats would seem a terrific food for people with gluten sensitivities, celiac diseases, inflammation issues and so on….EXCEPT, that people don’t buy oats straight out of the field. They buy oat-something – oats that have been processed, and unless you live in a place where oats and NOTHING BUT OATS can be grown, the mill that has been hulling, cutting, chopping, or whatever-ing the oats into the form that you buy, has also been doing the same things to a whole lot of other grains as well – like barley and wheat and so on. So, when you buy processed oats, you are actually getting oats with gluten contamination from those other grains. Unless the company making the processed product basically creates a mill that handles nothing but oats, consumers will be getting some gluten in their product. However – research indicates that a small amount of oats might be tolerated by people with gluten problems – but that they need to be closely monitored. Can Celiacs Eat Oats?

That being said, oats have their uses for the rest of us. Combining oats with other things is something that we are all very familiar with, if only we’d think about it. First example: the breakfast bowl of oatmeal. Do you know anyone who just cooks up oatmeal and then throws it in a bowl and eats it without…adding something else? OK – so you know people who throw in raisins and/or brown sugar. If nothing else, they should also be putting milk on it, right? Or maybe they are New Wave and throw some vanilla yoghurt and nuts on top. Bingo – more protein, more good fats. As far as I know, the only creatures that eat oats all by themselves are horses.

We like oats a lot Chez Siberia. In the winter, they are a favorite breakfast with milk or yoghurt.

Basic Oatmeal (not ‘quick oats’ or anything like this – made with plain, old thick cut, steel cut, or rolled oats)
For each person, take ½ c. dried, uncooked oats and combine with 1 cup of water in a saucepan.
Slowly, bring to a boil.
Cover the pot, turn down the heat to as low as you can get it.
Check after 5 minutes and stir. If it’s thick enough, put out in the bowls; otherwise, cover again and check in another five min.
Serve with things like: milk, yoghurt, (soy milk if you use that), dried fruit (if you use this, you might not need sugar), and brown sugar or honey if you feel the need.

At other times of the year, they make their appearance in everything from meat loaf to cookies and bars, bread, and the DH’s famous granola and muesli. So, that is what you will get here:

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies (modified from The Fanny Farmer Cookbook, 1979 – makes 50-60 cookies)
1 stick of butter
½ cup veg shortening
1.5 cups of sugar (we prefer splitting it 50/50 between white and whatever brown sugar we’ve got)
2 eggs
1 tsp of vanilla
2.5 c. of general purpose flour (if you have specialty flours in your kitchen, a 50/50 split between bread and cake flour works really well)
2 tsp of baking soda
1 cup of oats (we use thick cut, but any rolled or cut oats will do; I have no experience with steel cut oats)
1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips.

Sift the flour and baking soda together. Cream the sugar(s), butter and shortening together. Add the eggs and vanilla followed by the flour and soda mixture. Check it for ‘looseness’ – it basically should be thick and heavy enough that you could really make cookies with it already; if it is too ‘loose’, then add, by tablespoons, more flour until it is. Once it’s really ‘cookie dough’, THEN add the oats and the chips. Put on greased cookie sheets by tablespoonfuls. Bake in a 375 degrees F oven for 11 min. Take off and cool on a rack. Baking Notes: Bake these between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. because otherwise, they disappear within moments – quite magically. Also, don’t try to make them either with all vegetable shortening or all butter. Does not produce a cookie that either holds its shape or resists breaking. These cookies are actually ship-able and will arrive 99% in one piece.

Granola (again, modified from The Fanny Farmer Cookbook, 1979)
Dutch Oven or other large heat-proof baking pot or dish
¾ cup light olive oil(find the stuff with the label, “For sautéing and baking”)
4 cups of oats (rolls, thick cut)
1/2 sesame seeds
½ c wheat germ (and keep your wheat germ in the freezer until you use it; the oils will go rancid if you do not)
1 cup dried coconut (not baking coconut, which has been coated with glycerin and corn starch, ok? – look for ‘dried coconut’ or ‘desiccated coconut’ in health food stores, natural foods, etc.)
1 cup honey (please do yourself a favor and do NOT use commercial stuff like clover honey – get something like wild flower that has some taste to it, ok?)
¾ cup hulled sunflower seeds
1 cup nuts (roasted unsalted peanuts, slivered almonds, cashews, whatever you can get)
1 cup small dried fruit (currants, raisins, craisins tm, chopped dates, etc.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil and mix with the oil. In a large heavy pot, combine the oats, sesame seeds, wheat germ and coconut. Combine the honey with the oil and water, stirring well and mix into the dry ingredients a little at t eimt. When all the particles are covered with the honey mixture, put the pot into the oven and bake for 15 min. Stir well, Reduce the heat to 275 degrees F and repeat the procedure, stirring every 10-15 min. for 1/5 -2 hours, until the granola is thoroughly toasted. Let the granola cool, then stin in the sunflower seeds nuts and dried fruit. Store in the freezer or refrigerator in tightly sealed containers. Baking notes: This is a rather “soft” granola – this will not have crunchy clumps in it. If you want to produce that, then split up the granola onto cookie sheets, go through basically the same procedure, but don’t stir it up so often; it will clump up and get a lot more crunchy. Also, make the decision right from the get-go about what sort of granola you are going to make and if the rest of the family doesn’t like it, well, then..too bad. Unfortunately, at Chez Siberia, the DH offered to make custom batches for people and now he’s basically tied to the wheel of making ‘granola with nothing in it,” “granola with only nuts” and so on, which is most annoying.

Oatmeal Bread (Maryetta’s Oatmeal Bread from Beard on Bread, 1974)
4 cups boiling water
3 cups rolled oats (we use thick cut but regular rolled will do)
7.5 – 8 cups all purpose flour, preferably unbleached (we use bread flour, but regular will do)
2 packages of active dry yeast (we use 2 Tblsp. Of dried yeast that we get from the natural foods store)
4 Tablespoons of vegetable oil (we use the olive oil meant for ‘sautéing and baking’)
½ cup of molasses (we us ½ cup of our wildflower honey – again, any darker honey will do; the darker the better – best would be buckwheat honey)

Pour the boiling water over the oatmeal in a large bowl and leave to cool.
Stir in 2 cups of flour and the yeast and place in a warm, draft free spot and allow to rise, uncovered until double in bulk.
Punch down and work in the oil, molasses(or honey) and enough of the remaining flour to make s stiff dough.
Turn out on a floured board and counter and knead, adding flour if necessary, to make a smooth, pliable, firm dough; which will take about 10 minutes of good, solid kneading.
Divide dough into three equal pieces and form into loaves to fit three greased 9×5x3 inch loaf pans.
Allow to rise again, uncovered, until doubled in bulk.
Bake in a preheated 350 degrees F oven 40-60 minutes, until the bread sounds hollw when rapped.
Cool on racks before slicing.
Freezes well.

(photos courtesy of Racheliscocnut&lime and Pam-I-Am)

Snap peas are just coming into the farmers markets here in Upstate New York and I’m going to use them as a demo of how to do freezing Chez Siberian Style. You’ll end up with snap peas in small enough packages that you can just open, pour into the wok, fry pan or whatever and they taste really good and crunchy – not exactly ‘just like fresh’ (shoot – I did ‘cook’ them for 10 seconds for heaven’s sake), but definitely crunchy, sweet, not starchy, and not mushy.

Whether you do ‘pick yer own’ of buy off the stand, your job is to get them home ASAP. If you buy from the farmers, they’ve picked them early in the morning – so get them as early as you can. The earlier in the day, the better. Get the pea pods home and rinse them several times to make sure you get any dust, dirt, dead pea blossoms, and the odd bug off. While you are doing that, put a big pot of water on the stove to boil. I’m using a great pot we got years ago that has an insert you can pull out; it was originally meant as a cooker for things like asparagus or corn, but we use it because we can blanch things really easily with it. Although I have not seen another pot like it, something that looks as if it would work about the same are the pasta steamer inserts for big pots. They have handles and you could get one just one size smaller than your pot and still be able to use it and life it out (you might want to rig some lifting out handles out of …mmm…a heavy duty wire coat hanger so that you hands don’t get near the water). At the same time your water is boiling up on the stove, fill your sink with really cold water; if you can’t get really cold water out of your tap, also throw in some ice cubes.

Take off the heads and tails off the pea pods and fill your steamer basket, colander or whatever you are going to use to put the peas into the pot of boiling water.

Blanch and leave for a count of 10. No more. Pull out your basket/colander/whatever and drain until all the hot water is out. Empty the peas into the colander in the cold water and swish around. Pull out the colander and drain really well; you want as little water on the peas as possible.

Take a clean cookie sheet and put the peas on it in as few layers as possible and put into your freezer until they are totally hard. Take off the cookie sheets and use whatever freezer packaging system you use – ziplock(tm) bags, Seal-a-meal(tm), etc. and put in only as much as you think you’d use in a recipe – 1-2 cups is usually enough. With this method you won’t end up with a solid block of pea pods, so if you use a ziplock(tm) bag, then you can always just open it up, take out what you need, and reseal.

This same exact system (except for not having to do the blanch and cooling) works extremely well for all small fruits such as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and pitted cherries. For larger fruits such as peaches, we use a slightly different system which I’ll go over at peach time in August.

(snap pea photo at the top courtesy of Jeff Cushner)

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up.

Chicks: Well, as we saw last time, they stopped being chicks a very long time ago and are now pullets and cockerels and are now behaving a lot more chicken-y. The cockerels are getting quite annoying for the pullets now, and by the end of July, the pullets will have turned, magically, into hens and will start laying eggs, which means that they need places to lay those eggs IN..nesting boxes.

The DH, having gone through the experience of building the first chicken ‘tractor’ felt that he’d worked out the bugs from that and was now ready to build a ‘new and improved’ tractor complete with nesting boxes. No white wall tires, electric windows or automatic watering devices. In any case, no matter what, we would have two tractors and could theoretically pick and choose our way through our little flock to find the boys and the girls so that we could for sure get the girls into the ‘condo’ with the best roosters and leave the rest of the boys in the first tractor. You would think that knowing a boy chicken from a girl chicken would be the easiest thing going, and for the most aggressive and sexually mature cockerels, it is pretty easy: they are the biggest ones with the combs and wattles. It is a lot harder to select out the least mature cockerels, whose combs have not really started to develop and who do NOT have wattles. But we had to do it, if only for the space factor. There are all sorts of types of combs; our chickens because they were bred for cold northern winters, have what’s called a ‘pea comb’ which is teeny and lays close to the head. In the photograph, you have what people think of as a rooster with a comb – the farther south the chickens are, the better it is for them to have a big upstanding comb like this one because..combs radiate heat out of a chicken’s body. Those red things under the rooster’s chin are what are called ‘wattles’ and I have no idea what their function is, if anything.

As lonely as that sounds, it is not a whole lot of fun to be the cockerel who is NOT the biggest or best because that means that you are constantly being picked on, being shouldered away from the food, and being pecked. You are, as the saying goes, at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’. The ‘last guy’ as it were, is really in tough shape. So, by taking out the biggest (which turns out to be the most aggressive, most sexually mature, nastiest and so on) roosters out of the flock to put in with the pullets, it was as if we had completely reshuffled the deck for the rest of the roosters. They immediately got a lot more room than they had been able to occupy before, had less competition for the food, and a whole new pecking order had to be established. This did not, however, help the little guy at the bottom of the heap; frankly, he is still at the bottom of the heap but he will be able to avoid being pecked a bit more, be able to get a bit more food and will grow a little better and a little bit faster now.

It will also mean that he will probably be the last to go ‘a la Pepperoniville’ as we say at Chez Siberia. But I’m sure that being the last to ‘turn off the lights’ is not going to be much of a compensation for a lifetime of being the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Garden: One of the things about gardening here in Upstate New York is the telescoping nature of time. We really do not get a very long spring, so keeping up with harvesting early things like lettuce and spinach becomes a race against the plants’ bolding as the days get longer and warmer. Needless to say, we have eaten spinach in as many permutations and combinations as I can think of, though I think I might just blanch and freeze the rest to use during the winter when I make my own pasta.

Pick Your Own: Aunt Toby and Elder Daughter will be returning tomorrow to the strawberry farm to pick…snap peas, actually. They are rushing in and are still nice and flat and not woody. My plan is to pick several pounds, blanch a little bit and freeze them in seal-a-meal pouches for use in asian dishes this winter.

The Economy: I don’t care what the pundits are saying – it’s still stinko.
And that is all you need to know.

Anyone who has a child who graduated from college this spring (as we did at Chez Siberia)knows that the overwhelming majority of these kids (unless they are engineers, computer programmers or accountants) are unemployed at the moment. My son’s estimate (backed up by a college intern we have at our office) is that only 1 of his friends had a job by the time he left school and that most of his friends opted to try to get into graduate school to sit out the recession. The Boy has a job for the summer but is looking…and competing with people with much more experience than he has.

We have assured him that Chez Siberia will not be going into the boarding house business any time soon and that he still has his bed to sleep in. However, by the end of the summer, we will no longer be able to cover him with our health insurance (hey people; write your Congressional Reps and Senators and DEMAND health care reform with a public offering). Luckily, New York State has a program that will allow him to buy his own insurance coverage at a not horrible rate.

If you have a child who graduated and is not going on to graduate school, you will need to check out what is available in your state to keep your kid covered — they are only covered for 90 days after their date of graduation. Trust me – for some reason, they can go through an entire four years of college with no more problems than an attack of acne…and as soon as their coverage lapses, something will happen and they will need major healthcare or dental work.

(rooster photo courtesy of nal in miami Juggler photo courtesy of Robbie Veldwijk)