Small? On the scale of “Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, Jumbo and OOOOO, That Hurts”, this particular egg did not even register as a Pee Wee. Pee Wee Eggs need to be 1.25 ounces. This one weighed 1 ounce. Flat.

Fertile? Maybe – possibly – but not necessarily likely as at this early date – a pullet’s reproductive system is still getting organized in terms of putting the eggs together, putting a membrane around it and putting a shell around it. Sometimes things get all mixed up and you can get eggs-within-eggs, eggs without yolks and so on. Odd Eggs

One of the things that occurred to me when I was looking up the weights on egg grades (and if you want to know more about eggs than perhaps you EVER wanted to know, go
USDA Egg Manual
is this: the weight of an egg is really sort of indicative of how much actual liquefied stuff is resident inside that shell. I realize that sounds sort of like an agricultural ‘No, duh” but for those of us who bake, the size of an egg – the sheer amount of liquid that it adds to a recipe – makes a huge amount of difference in terms of the end product. The more liquid in the recipe, the more dried ingredients you need to balance it off. Here’s a basic chart:

Egg Size………..Weight Per Egg in Ounces
Jumbo…………..2.5
Extra Lge………2.25
Large……………2
Medium……….1.75
Small……………1.5
PeeWee……….1.25

Now, let’s just look at that for a second. If your cake recipe calls for 2-3 large eggs (and there are a whole lot of cake recipes that do call for that – we’re not talking chiffon cakes or pound cake or anything like that) that is between 4 and 6 ounces of liquefied stuff. It occupies a certain amount of space in the batter. For the sake of argument, let’s say that your spousal unit went to the farmers market and thinking he’d do you a good deed, he bought Extra Large eggs instead of Large. If you use 2-3 Extra Large eggs, you are putting between 4.5 ounces and 6.75 ounces of liquefied stuff into your cake batter instead of the 4 ounces which would have been contributed by 2 Large eggs.

Better to hedge your bets and only put in 2 Extra large eggs (4.5 ounces), see how the batter handles that and if it is too thick, add 1-2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (such as the light olive oil made for sautéing and baking).

Why not just add another Extra Large egg? Because if you do that, then you have to balance that off with more flour and in a cake (especially if you have already added the flour and have beaten it up and the protein in the flour, the gluten, has been worked a bit), this can frankly make the cake texture “tough” and the added flour may not combine as well as the rest and you will end up with little clumps of flour in the cake when it’s been baked.

Yuck.

Or, let’s look at the other side of things. Now, I sincerely doubt that you’d be able to find, in your local “super-marche” small or even medium size graded eggs. Just like, your chances of finding anything other than Grade A or Grade AA eggs are basically nonexistent. But at a farmers market, you just might be able to find mediums or even smalls. What do you do then? Well, if you know you have mediums right up front and know that you need 4-6 ounces of stuff, then you can do a little bit of figuring and and jigger the recipe right from the get-go. Take out your calculator and multiply the number of large eggs called for in the recipe by 2 ounces and then divide that by the number of ounces per egg that is in the size egg you’ve got.

Voila.

And, this little egg here – well, it is going to be joined by many many brother and sister eggs over the next several months. Once a hen gets her egg laying system going, they produce, on average, 2 eggs every 3 days. And we have 12 hens out there. That means for every hen, in a two week period, we’re going to get (on average again..all dependent on feed, light, warmth, etc.) 8 eggs.

And we’ve got 12 hens out there. That’s 96 eggs. Every two weeks.

You see how people end up in the egg business?

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)

Local strawberry season is upon us (well, local to Chez Siberia – depending on where y’all are located, it may already be past – or in the future) and we must attack it like Lance Armstrong on a hill at the Tour de France. Time IS of the essence.

I received a communique (it must be an all-French weekend too) after yesterday’s strawberry post asking, “Aunt Toby – I only know how to go to the grocery store, pick up a box of strawberries and pay for them. No one ever took me strawberry picking; I was deprived as a child.”

So, I apologize; Aunt Toby many times forgets that the rest of the world has not had the same ‘in the trenches’ experiences that she and the DH have had. So, this weekend, we are going ’strawberry commando’ – total strawberry immersion. If Steven Colbert shows up, he can have some strawberries too. This post is a review and some promises.

First: What are you going to do with the strawberries, anyway? What sort of strawberries should I be picking, anyway? Are you ready (yes, I’m ready)?

Second: Aunt Toby and the DH are going to take all our greedy little buggers along with us on a strawberry picking expedition. Think of this as “This Old Mouse” meets “We’re Not Martha”. It will just be you little buggers, Aunt Toby, the strawberry field and the DH with the camera. Nose to nose with strawberry plants. Aunt Toby has not figured out ’smell-o-vision’ yet but it will be everything else BUT the intoxicating fragrance of strawberries in their not-so-wild habitat.

Third: Get those babies home, boys! (sung to the tune of “Boil That Cabbage Down!”) What to do between the field, the kitchen counter, and the jar or bag so that you end up with What You Wanted ™. And, THE two most basic strawberry preservation methods that I know that will give you great tasting jam and fantastic straight-out-of-the-plastic-bag berries.

OK – un! Deux! Trois! Allez Vites!!

(Strawberry diving into the milk photo courtesy of tesKing)
For more in this series on strawberries: Planning for picking and preserving strawberries
Cheap and Good: Pick Your Own Strawberries!

Good, fresh, sweet-all-by-themselves strawberries are not only a treat, but nutritionally fantastic – 8 medium sized strawberries has 140% of the Vitamin C that an adult needs on a daily basis (and I’m assuming that is a strawberry that is the size of a thumb, not one of those monsters you sometimes see). The berries are also high in folic acid, potassium and fiber. On the other hand, you can get strawberries at other times of the year, but there is a whole lot of freight and transport in those berries, which are being trucked from California, Texas and Florida. I tend to like my berries when they are in season in my neighborhood. One sure fire way to save money and get a better product (that is, with fruits and veggies, product that is fresher, newly harvested, and therefore bursting with energy, vitamins and minerals) is to buy local when things have come into season. Lots of supply.

Strawberries are fully ripening in local farmer’s fields right now; the DH and Elder Daughter went out today and picked pounds and pounds (and pounds) of strawberries. ED is turning this batch into fruit leather; the DH is turning some of ours into strawberry wine (a very nice, light, not too sweet summer wine) and we’ll freeze the rest.

But, as you can see from the photograph above, I sneaked some of them away to go with tonight’s dinner. I baked sweetened biscuits for the ‘short cakes’, sliced up the berries and just covered the split cakes with cut berries, a bit of stiffly beaten up sweetened heavy cream and added…what else..more berries. Total yumminess. I caught our son licking the plate when he was done. To make sweetened biscuits – just add 1/4 sugar to your usual biscuit recipe. If you want to dress them up even more, add 1 tsp. of vanilla and an egg. It makes the biscuits more ‘cakey’ but you can’t beat them in terms of not needing extra sugar on the berries.

What else can you do with strawberries besides just eating them fresh?
Cold Strawberry Soup – sort of a dessert soup. Strawberry Soup

Strawberry Chicken -Chicken with strawberries

Strawberry streusel muffins – strawberry muffins

Spinach, strawberry and pecan salad (and this works since spinach is just coming into its own in our garden right now!) salad

And of course, we can’t forget standards like strawberry smoothies, strawberry rhubarb pie, jam and all the rest: All the standards

Every local area has a variety of strawberry that grows best there; here in Upstate New York it is “Sparkle”. I fully intend to eat my fill over the next couple of weeks and perhaps even attend our local strawberry festival. I’m hearing mumbles from the DH that he intends to put in a whole bed of strawberry plants next year! Now THAT’s going to be an adventure as we have never grown those before.

Next fruit up? Well, around here, early in July, it will be sweet and pie cherries..woohoo!!

Well, Aunt Toby realized that she missed out on an entire section of stuff that gets sold at farmers markets (and increasingly gets sold, I might add), which is meat.

Honest to gosh, shrink wrapped (though usually not on a slab of Styrofoam, in my experience), frozen, labeled with weights on ‘em, meat. And many times, they are labeled with words such as ‘free range’, ‘pasture raised’, ‘grass fed’ and so on. This is to differentiate them from what’s in your butcher or supermarché, which generally is ‘conventionally raised meat’ which means “grain raised”.

And when you see ‘grain raised’, the little voice of reason in your head should be saying, “and that means, ‘corn fed’.”

Not that ranchers and feedlot operators do not feed animals other grains to ‘finish’ off the animals that they are raising for slaughter (and when they say ‘finish’ what they are talking about is NOT ‘finishing the process of growing’ although that is what is happening; they mean ‘putting a finish on and into the meat’ and by that, they mean – fattening the animal up). Most feed rations out there have a combination of grains in them: wheat, corn, rapeseed, alfalfa, etc. Feed Ingredients

But the king of feed grains, due to its price and due to what it does to animals that eat it, is corn. Corn is King.

When the DH and I were raising chickens, lambs and goats for market, we especially used corn in the ration we fed in the winter time because of what was referred to as ‘heat’ – if it was especially cold, a little corn in the ration would keep the animals warmer. Why? Because corn has fat in it that animals can use to keep themselves warm in really cold weather. But in conventionally raised animals, corn feeding causes the muscles (the meat) to contain a relatively higher ratio of one sort of fatty acid than of others. That fatty acid is: Omega 6.

Now, Aunt Toby is not going to get into a discussion about ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’ or this Omega vs. that Omega. The human body requires a little bit of all of them; it is the balance that causes all the mischief.
Omega-3 Fatty Acid
Omega-6 Fatty Acid

What I AM going to talk about (because Aunt Toby is all about the pragmatic aspects) is some basic facts about ‘grass-fed’ vs conventionally-raised meats and should you choose to buy them, what you can do to get the best out of the meat.

Because if you try to cook pasture raised meats the same way you cook conventionally-raised meats, your garbage can is going to be very very happy and you will be going back to your farmer and saying, “I want my money back; this tasted like my shoes”.

First things first: Nutritionally, what are the differences between grass raised/pasture raised meats and conventionally raised meats?
1) No matter how you measure it, pasture raised meats have much less overall fat than conventionally raised (grain fed) meat.
2) No matter how you measure it, pasture raised meats have a much smaller % of Omega 6 fatty acids in them than grain fed meat.
3) Grass fed meats have vitamins that conventionally raised meats lack or have much less of. Health Benefits of Grass-Raised meats

From a cooking and “putting on the plate” aspect, what do the first two items mean for consumers?

In meat (whether beef, pork, chicken, turkeys, lamb, etc.), it is fat that carries the flavor of the meat. Let’s not fool ourselves in this – for all the push by the health community toward low fat meats, we’ve ended up with some meats and some cuts of meats that frankly taste like paper towels because they have so little fat in them. At the same time, the lower the percentage of fat in the meat, the more time and care must be taken by consumers to cook it so that it will taste good, feel good in your mouth, cut well and so on. And unfortunately, consumers still think that they can throw a piece of meat or a quarter of a chicken on a grill or into an oven with a high temperature and get something memorable.

Well, it’s memorable all right but it’s not a memory that they want.

Secondly, by any measure, the higher the Omega 6 fatty acids in meat, the higher the temperature can be in the oven or on the grill. I am not an organic chemist, but the difference in cooking conventionally raised chicken and pasture raised could not be more dramatic. With conventional, I can put a piece of chicken in my oven set anywhere between 375 degrees F and 400 degrees F. The fat starts to liquefy very quickly – I can move that piece of chicken from a raw state to the plate in 30-45 min. (depending on whether or not this is boneless chicken or bone-in). Because there is so much fat in the bird, both inside the muscle and on top of the muscle and under the skin, I not only can quickly cook this bird (and get that crispy skin that will cause us all to end up with cancer, right?), but I’m internally basting the muscles with the liquefied fat that is being drawn off the bird by the high heat. The chicken itself does not have a whole lot of flavor to it – a large part of that is the breed (Cornish-Rock crosses which are bred to be the ‘beanstalk’ chickens of the battery world – these go from chick to Styrofoam in 6-8 weeks. They literally have not had time for the muscles to mature enough to gain any flavor) – but the other part of it is that the high heat is moving the flavor-carrying item, the fat, off the muscles much too quickly. At the same time, however, consumers will end up with meat that is cooked and relatively moist.

With pasture raised chicken and turkey, I have to be much more careful. I have to use my meat thermometer a lot because I am looking for a very specific temperature. I have to give myself several hours to cook the bird because I’m starting it at 325 and moving it to 350. No more. It seems to take a very long time, relatively speaking, for the fat to start coming out (and dressed pasture raised birds do not have nearly the same amount of visible fat – unlike conventionally raised birds, I am definitely not taking out great handfuls of fat from the internal cavities and so on). Pasture raised meats cannot be cooked under high heat conditions – because of the low percentage of fat and because of the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids in the meat, if I try to cook them the same way I can cook conventionally raised meats, I will end up with something resembling shoes. Anyone who has cooked game or wild meats will have the same experience. LOW and SLOW. Pasture raised meats are not something you can leave out on the counter when you leave for work, throw into a hot oven when you get home, and hope to have an edible meal on the table in 45 min. That is a given.

So, if you as a consumer would like to move your family to pasture raised meats (and there are all sorts of good, honest, health and local economic reasons for doing so), my advice to you is this:

1) Get big honkin’ cuts of pasture raised meats: roasts, a turkey, a big roasting chicken.
2) Use your weekends to slowly and tenderly cook this item so that you can have a lovely weekend dinner (hoo-wee – remember those?).
3) Then either slice it up and package for the freezer to be used later on or use it over the week for sandwiches, sliced with gravy for dinners, etc. etc. You will have lovely, flavorful, cooked meat which you as a time-stressed consumer can use as you need it. You won’t have to fire up the oven or grill under stressed conditions.

At the same time, I know there are some readers who are saying to themselves, “But Aunt Toby – pasture raised meats are soooo much more expensive than conventionally raised.”

Yep – Aunt Toby is not going to lie to you – the price per pound is going to be more. But the question comes down to this (and Aunt Toby has discussed this before in terms of price per pound of protein): when you buy meat, what are you buying? What should you be buying?

You buy meat for – protein. That’s what you want to get out of this relationship – not fat and certainly not the type of fat that appears to cause cardio vascular disease and inflammatory syndromes. I’m not saying the pasture raised meats are not expensive – they cost a lot more per pound than conventional ones do – but I am fairly sure that considering what consumers get out of eating them in terms of health benefits, in terms of not paying for fat that gets cooked off, in terms of greater flavor, that they just might be worth it. This is of course totally ignoring the locally grown aspects and the facts that you can, nose to nose, ask the producer exactly what has been given to the animals, how they were treated, and so on. That is ‘feel good’ stuff and is very difficult to quantify – but worth considering in any case.

So, remember, low and slow. We learned this at a wonderful ‘grass fed grilling’ workshop that was arranged by our county Cooperative Extension in support of local grass fed meat producers. If you want one, call and ask your Cooperative Extension or suggest it to the manager of your local farmers market. It will really open your eyes to how meat should taste and feel.

For more information on grass fed meats and how to cook them:

Grass Fed Cooking
Texas Grass Fed Beef
Grass Fed Cooking Tips

(Grass fed roast chicken at the top, courtesy of my son, who followed the directions and produced a really delicious bird, along with roasted carrots, potatoes, and onions. If he can do it, so can you)

OK…we’ve got two issues here. First is probably the fact that north of some predetermined spot, it’s really too early to find a whole lot more than green onions and greens. It’s just not warm enough yet and the farmers, even with row covers, etc. will not have had enough time to actually grow a whole lot. And second, Aunt Toby realizes that some farmers’ markets are NOT very special – the one closest to you might not be – the one in the next town over might be. It’s worth doing some searching to find all the markets in your area and doing some comparison shopping. How to find farmers markets near you?

“Near you” is sort of a nebulous concept, I realize because in my area, depending on what part of the week we’re talking about, ‘near me’ might be downtown, and sponsored by the City Department of Economic Development. Or on another part of the week, it is in a county park. At another part of the week, it is out at the western end of our county, in the parking lot of one of the Town Libraries. It’s sort of fluid. So, it behooves you to check out web sites or call such people as:
– City government
– County Government
– Township offices
– County/City Dept. of Parks and Recreation
– Your county’s Cooperative Extension
– Your state’s Department of Agriculture (or Agriculture and Markets)

Once you get a listing with addresses and the schedule of dates and times, then you can take your shopping list and do some visits and see who has what. Every farmers’ market has its own ambiance — market managers will truly try to have a little bit of everything and will also try to recruit vendors who have something a little bit unusual to attract more consumers. Some are more ‘hard core’ in terms of fruits and veggies; others are more of what I’d call a destination, and will have everything and anything anyone can make, produce, bake, or grow on sale. It is up to consumers to find the places where what they are looking for is available to them and at a price they are comfortable paying.

On the other side, though, nearly every farmers’ market is going to have something special about it and that is going to be fruits and veggies that perhaps consumers are not familiar with. In a grocery store, it’s sort of easy to ignore weird veggies and fruits because the entire trip is sort of a chore anyway. Going to a farmers’ market is meant to be more charming and fun and educational. And there will be some vendors who want to make it as educational as they can and will offer recipes, free samples and so on. If you find a vendor like that, then make use of them. They are extending themselves to you and you should open your brain and your mouth and try things out.

My best example is the humble but strange veggie illustrated here: Kohlrabi. Aunt Toby considers herself to be a pretty adventurous consumer but I had never had kohlrabi before I walked in front of a vendor at one of our local farmers’ markets and was offered a free sample – the vendor was basically just cutting up a washed, peeled green kohlrabi and offering people pieces to try. The DH and I were a little dubious, but we gave it a shot and found the veggie to be a very subtle version of cabbage, which should not have surprised us at all since ‘kohl’ in the name should have been a dead giveaway of its family. That’s the reason that one of America’s favorite salad dishes is called Cole Slaw. Kohl is the German word for cabbage; rabi is a German variant of their word for turnip, which if you look at the shape of the thing, makes perfect sense.

If you are already eating cabbage, broccoli or any of its cousins, why bother eating kohlrabi? Well, cabbage can, if the weather is hot and dry, taste pretty hot and peppery and broccoli sometimes is not available. Kohlrabi is grown fast and eaten at the baseball size. It’s very nutritious, has 103% of the daily nutritional requirement of Vit. C. , has a good bit of fiber going for it and you can use it in stir fries, soups, and even…grated up as a very nice, subtle ‘cole slaw’. Once it gets really big, it’s no longer good and is very woody, so don’t buy those. There are a bunch of cultivars out there, including a purple one (purple veggies are the hot item these days; there are even purple carrots out there).

Here’s a great collection from Simply Recipes: kohlrabi

Here is a great site that gives veggie history on kohlrabi (hey – this veggie goes back to Roman times). kohlrabi 2

But the message remains – if you see something displayed at a farmers market that you don’t recognize, you still know something about it. First, the farmer would not be growing it and selling it if it was not something that did not do well in your area (always a great advantage in terms of eating locally). And second, it’s something that is definitely worth trying. Walk right up, stick out your pointer finger and say to the vendor – ‘What’s that? Can I eat it raw? And can I have a sample?” Usually, the vendors will be more than happy to give you one – they just might make a sale.

This is not to say that you should only go to farmers’ markets to look for unusual veggies; frankly as far as I’m concerned, consumers should do as much local fresh shopping as they can. But something that makes farmers’ markets ‘special’ is that vendors are willing to try something different or unusual and it’s up to us as consumers to give it a shot to encourage them to do so.

(photos courtesy of emptyhighway and pomax)

Update: Mr. Weiner, the gentleman mentioned above, succumbed to H1N1 and died Sunday evening.first swine flu death in New York City

For current updates on H1N1, see US CDC: Swine Flu Update

What Aunt Toby wants to talk about is this: Where the hell did this thing come from? Remember ‘bird flu” – remember all the hooha about THAT? And do you remember what happened with that, either?

Me, neither. Aunt Toby is sort of like everyone else – if it doesn’t come and bang on my door, then I’m not paying attention. And we should all pay a LOT more attention.

NC Hog Farm Birth Site of Flu
“The new H1N1 influenza virus that continues to spread through the United States has ancestry in a swine flu outbreak that first struck a North Carolina hog farm more than 10 years ago, according to scientists studying the strain’s genetic makeup….The current strain’s eight genetic segments are all associated with swine flu, said Raul Rabadan, a Columbia University scientist studying the new H1N1 genetic sequence that was made public this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….”
“This virus was found in pigs here in the United States,” Rabadan said in an interview. “They were getting sick in 1998. It became a swine virus.”
It spread among pregnant sows in Newton Grove, N.C., causing them to abort their litters. The virus then spread to pigs in Texas, Iowa and Minnesota –putting epidemiologists on alert about the new viral strain and the potential for a human outbreak.
Scientists don’t yet know when or where the current H1N1 strain first emerged. They know only that it was identified after people in Mexico began falling ill with the fevers and aches..”
“ A May 1999 N&O story titled “Disease detectives untangle mystery of mutant flu virus” (available in the paper’s online archives) reported that the 1998 bug — a pig virus “wrapped in a shell of human proteins” — was isolated by a [North Carolina] state government veterinary lab. Similar mutations are suspected in earlier flu outbreaks, including the 1918 Spanish flu that killed more than 20 million people worldwide.
According to that story, the virus was discovered in August 1998 at a 2,400-sow breeding farm owned by Newton Grove, N.C.-based Hog Slat Inc., a leading builder of factory-style hog farms. The company is also one of Sampson County’s largest employers — as is Smithfield Foods, the Virginia-based corporation that owns numerous hog farms near the Mexican community where the earliest case of the current swine flu was identified.” Swine Flu Genes

Smithfield Foods. Remember that name because there is a more recent story about them as well:
“For centuries…peasant farmers here have eked a living from hogs… Old customs and jobs are dying and the air itself is changing, however, transformed by an American newcomer, Smithfield Foods. Almost unnoticed by the rest of the Continent, the agribusiness giant has moved into Eastern Europe with the force of a factory engine, assembling networks of farms, breeding pigs on the fast track, and slaughtering them for every bit of meat and muscle that can be squeezed into a sausage….In less than five years, Smithfield enlisted politicians in Poland and Romania, tapped into hefty European Union farm subsidies and fended off local opposition groups to create a conglomerate of feed mills, slaughterhouses and climate-controlled barns housing thousands of hogs.
It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths — lapses that emerged after swine fever swept through three Romanian hog compounds in 2007, two of which were operating without permits. Some 67,000 hogs died or were destroyed, with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.”
Smithfield Takes Over Pig Production in Eastern Europe

Why pigs? Why this and why now?

Pigs are amazing creatures – they have this ability, unknown in any other mammal, to act as a cauldron for viruses (and as a ‘mix and match’ operation as well) of creatures totally unlike pigs. Even totally not mammals – the current ‘swine flu’ is actually a tricky little creature that consists of swine, bird and human virus segments – it’s a ‘threefer’ – and because it’s got that human virus ‘hook’ to it, human beings can get it. And for those folks who are yawning about now, I’d like to remind them that the 1918 flu epidemic which killed tens of millions of people (most between the ages of 15 and 40) around the world, was just such a ‘combo virus’.

Scientists who have been able to extract viral materials from the cadaver of a person struck down by the 1918 flu, have identified that killer virus as another avian-based virus – but how can human beings catch a bird virus? Because it got mutated inside the bodies of swine who can act as the intermediaries of both bird and human viruses – a bird-swine-human virus salad bar.

It stands to reason then that birds and pigs should not be hanging out together in great numbers, right? It really is a ‘no duh’ that we should be giving hogs and birds, especially domesticated birds, a whole lot of air space between them so that they are not playing ‘changing partners’ with their viral material, right?

Well, we don’t. Companies such as Smithfield Foods (and they are not the only villains of the piece here – but they certainly are now the largest and the fastest moving) have taken advantage of modern agricultural technologies and of places where people do not ask a whole lot of questions, to create mega hog farms, putting thousands upon thousands of hogs into confinement conditions, with moist bedding, little air transport, and a whole lotta disease stuff going on. On the Eastern Shore area of Delaware and Maryland, chicken giants such as Purdue do the same exact thing. We will not discuss the environmental impact of this – that’s a discussion for another time. But the outbreak of H1N1 points a finger at the swine flu outbreak in Eastern Europe in 2007 and the bird flu outbreaks in Vietnam and Indonesia in 2004, 2005 and 2006(two places where, interestingly enough, pigs, chickens and other domestic fowl are raised together on a traditional basis) and this year in Egypt and also Vietnam.
Is high concentrated hog and chicken farming lighting the fuse on a killer influenza epidemic on a pandemic scale? And is there anything we can do to slow or stop this?

Well, only scientists can say what they think about pandemics. This is scary stuff and frankly I don’t think any country’s government is ready. Tamiflu is just not going to cut it since viruses hop around and change partners at will and it takes months to come up with a new Tamiflu to combat a new mutation.
But we CAN do something about companies which take advantage of lack of regulation and enforcement to put in high concentrations of hog and bird raising. This type of agricultural practice has turned out to be disastrous from an environmental and public health standpoint. Wouldn’t it be better to look at the alternative? Which is?

Pasture raising. De-centralized agriculture. The way agriculture was in this country before the Second World War. What was raised in a state was, by and large, eaten in the state. I remember reading a study done by Rodale where they looked at how self-sufficient the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was in the 1930s versus how self-sufficient it was in the 1980s. The statistics were staggering – in the 1930s, the vast majority of food that Pennsylvanians ate, all year round, was raised in Pennsylvania. Now, the numbers have flipped; the vast majority of food that people in Pennsylvania eat is raised…elsewhere and trucked or flown in.

We have all gotten so used to eating veggies and fruits out of season through the miracle of long distance refrigerated freight, that we are now at the mercy of what happens in other states. Want a salad in January or February and there is really bad weather in California or Florida? No greens. Want grapes in the spring and something happens in Chile? Out of luck. Want affordable bread and something happens in the Midwest (like what happened to grain stocks a couple of years ago)? Bread gets really really expensive. And so does animal feed – which makes conventionally raised meat and chicken a LOT more expensive.
It really would be better for us all if we supported and encouraged out local (as in state and neighboring states) farmers to grow everything they can, under the healthiest situation they can. That means pasture raising meat, chickens and eggs – no houses with tens of thousands of pigs and birds, releasing thousands of tons of manure at one go. (remember the lagoon failures in North Carolina a couple of years ago? The Cape Fear River still has not come back from that) That also means having farmers return to crops and varieties that worked for them and technologies that work in the state’s environment. In Upstate New York for example, grain farmers are returning to varieties that were grown in the 19th century, and grain mills are being built again. It certainly is not the same sort of stuff that comes out of the Midwest, but it’s here..it’s close..and it will provide an alternative. Tomato growers in Western New York are taking advantage of greenhouse and hydroponic technologies to produce tomatoes all year round. Their tomatoes can be on customers’ tables within hours of picking.

Aunt Toby lives in a county that has not had a large agricultural industry in probably 50 years. Yet – I can go to my farmers’ market and find and buy pasture raised beef, pork, lamb, turkey (pasture raised turkeys?????), chicken and eggs – not from one farmer only, but several. This is amazing – and our county is not exactly what I would call wealthy. We’re not talking Westchester County here – we’re talking about a place that is one of those ‘used to be big in manufacturing’ sorts of places. It is not just a case of ‘kindness’ either(though that is a factor also) – it’s a case of people’s being concerned about their health, the health of the community and the health of the animals: pasture raising integrates manure and other products into the environment in a small, ongoing sort of way. No lagoons to fail. No ungodly ammonia from chicken batteries. Also, no hormones, no antibiotics (to also end up in the environment), and animals getting enough fresh air and sunshine on a daily basis so that they are not subject to viral infections that can be passed on.

The other thing is this: In those huge hen houses and swine farrowing facilities, there are people working under the same conditions as the animals are living – exposed to the ammonia, exposed to the manure, exposed to the diseases, and exposed to the viruses that are being cooked up by the swine. Under pasture raising, the amount of exposure to the animals is actually pretty limited to moving the animals to a new piece of pasture, in the sun and breeze.

A lot safer for all of us.

Concerned about swine flu, avian flu and the role of confinement animal raising in public health? Contact your state health department and your state legislators and demand that these types of operations be stopped. Not grandfathered. Stopped. Torn down. Eliminated. Also Contact the US Agriculture Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and your Congressional Representatives and Senators. What happens in North Carolina and Delaware and other states affects every single one of us. Those Smithfield Farms pigs in Mexico sure did not care that their viruses came from North Carolina – but the folks in Mexico and Texas and now places like Wisconsin and New York City certainly do.

And so should every single one of us.

(illustration courtesy of Hector Aiza Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary)

Today’s topic is farmers markets and Aunt Toby is hearing the eye-rolling and groans from here, deep in the computer dungeon at Chez Siberia.(and by the way, the rolling of eyeballs, as any parent of teenagers can tell you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard and is usually accompanied by the word, “Moooooom!!!” which is at the frequency of dog whistles). “Oh, come on, Aunt T – EVERYONE knows about farmers markets. Can’t you come up with something more interesting that THAT?

Well, 30 minutes ago, I would have agreed with you and turned in my blogger’s license right there except for an IM I got from a friend who lives in the more suburban part of a large metro area. We were talking about pasture raised meat (which is another topic for another time) and she was saying, “Oh, I’m sure “large national supposedly organic grocery store chain that is only found in large metro areas” will have that” and I replied, “Mmmm, I’d rather deal nose to nose with the person who actually raised it so that I can ask what they did and how they did it – how the animals were ‘finished’ and so on.” And then she dropped the bomb on my little idea that ‘everyone knows about farmers markets’:

“You know, I’m going to go down to the xxx farmers market right now (which is, like a 15 min. bike ride from her house) – we’ve lived here 25 years and I’ve never been.”

The sound of my teeth tinkling on the floor as my jaw dropped was deafening.

This is a lady who I have discussions with on a regular basis about solar energy and saving water and energy independence and air and water pollution and food and health related topics like that. But the damn grocery store is soooooo….convenient? We will now draw a veil over this before my blood pressure reaches the top of the bulb on the thermometer like in the old cartoons.

Why do people NOT shop in farmers markets?

Well, I think first of all is this overwhelming mythology about ‘teh’ cheap food (and how Americans somehow ‘deserve’ it). There is food that may not cost you a whole lot that ends up rotting in the vegetable bin in your fridge. That is NOT cheap food. That is actually very expensive food. That is food that has been bought on a ‘just in case’ basis. It is also food that has been purchased from the growers, usually through multiple intermediaries (though some grocery chains are going direct now), been trucked or freighted hundreds if not thousands of miles to get to that bright and shiny display in the store. It is food that is being sold on margins so thin and sharp that you could perform brain surgery with them. Every hand that has handled that food between the field and the display has taken their cut – there is not a whole lot of wiggle room there. So in order for everyone to get their ‘grift’ on this, the grower has to sell it so cheaply that they really can’t make enough money to even cover their costs.

This is also food that actually American consumers pay for multiple times because a) there is a huge amount of petroleum energy in it from fertilizers, harvesting and trucking, and b) your tax dollars have gone to agricultural subsidies – not only to the growers, but also if it’s meat animals, to the Big Ag corn and grain growers whose products are used in feeds. Before consumers even go to the grocery store, they have paid for that food at least twice already – but they don’t see that – they see the cheap price tag at the grocery store and feel that they are getting a better deal. Small local farmers have to compete against that mythology. We will not even discuss the amount of time it takes from field to display in terms of what the nutritional quality of that food actually is when the consumer buys it. Suffice it to say that Aunt Toby, who is a mean lady with a penny, wants to get all the nutritional bang for her buck and feels that tired green beans in March from Florida is not a good nutritional investment. She’d rather wait for her own local farmers to have beans fresh from this morning for her table – and a lot of other people feel the same way.

That is why a lot of growers are going direct. I have read about dairy farmers going back to putting in their own pasteurizing and homogenizing plants (as they had when Aunt Toby was just “little Wober” and would be taken to the ‘dairy store’ by her father for ice cream. That store was owned by a family farm. Their milk, cream, sour cream, cottage cheese and ice cream (‘Three regular flavors plus Maple Walnut!!”) came from their cows, was pasteurized and homogenized and bottled and packaged in their own plant. DairyLea put an end to that then, but you see more and more dairy farmers getting out of the coops and going direct to consumers now.

In the beginning of farmers markets and ‘green markets’ 30+ years ago, mostly what you saw was fruits and veggies in season and perhaps some eggs. Now, depending on where your farmers market is and how creatively it’s run, you can have everything from plants and flowers, some processed products, eggs, chicken and now pasture raised meats (being sold right out of freezers in the backs of farm trucks being run by auto batteries, etc.). In some other markets, actually hand crafts can be sold.

And in some ‘farmers markets’, you will see stuff that is being sold straight out of the cardboard cases from the wholesale distributors. Sometimes, you will see absolutely perfect peppers being sold out of wooden crates…and not by people who have grown them, either. This is not really a ‘farmers market’ – it’s a market for sure, but distributors and wholesalers and people selling case lots of tomatoes that they’ve gotten from wholesalers and distributors are not farmers. And the farmers with the stands next to them have to compete.

So, if you want to buy food that is grown in a certain way, by people from your area, under certain conditions and you are willing to pay to make sure that this is so, here are a few pointers about how to use farmers markets. The first time you visit:

1) What sort of signage is there announcing the market? Permanent? Sandwich board next to the road that has fallen over? Banner on a fence? No signage? Although this might seem to be more for evaluating the market’s marketing, if there is no signage or poor signage, then the market is not paying attention to its farmers. Which means that it might not be paying attention to other stuff either.
2) The first time you visit, find someone who looks official or ask one of the venders to point out to you the “Market Manager”. The Market Manager should be in attendance…every single time.
3) When you find the Market Manager, ask him or her what the rules are for the market. If the market has its own site (which more and more of them do), they may have them posted right on the site, as the Ithaca, New York Farmers Market does: IFM Vendor Rules Notice the first thing on the list: “To become a farmers market member, you must live within a 30-mile radius of the market and make or grow the items that you are selling.” That means that you will not be finding imported veggies and fruits there. All local; all locally grown or made. And therefore worth supporting, no?
4) Let’s say that the rules of the market allow anyone to basically sell anything. The Central New York Regional Market in Syracuse is like that. You can find anything from winter gloves, fish, meat, eggs, chickens, fruits, home made baked goods, veggies, hats, etc. there. Years ago, I saw people selling puppies and kittens there (but I admit that I have not seen that recently). The Regional Market is huge – and has buildings with garage doors on them, plus outdoor areas for sales booths. That means that this market runs year round. This sort of free-for-all has certain benefits, but it also means that as a consumer when I visit, I have to be really sensitive to who is doing what. Even when a display ‘looks’ like a ‘we grew this’ display, I always ask. I ask where the farm is located and I ask what they do in terms of when they pick, what they are using for fertilizer, etc. It’s not offensive to ask those sorts of questions – these are the items that differentiate them from the guy standing next to them selling out of wholesale cases of peppers. If you do canning or freezing and find vendors who do a really nice job with their produce, ask them whether or not you can get bushels from them. Sometimes they will even give you a price break on it.
5) Some folks who do meat and chickens (pasture raised or more traditionally raised) will do a long-term deal with you. We did a handshake deal with a pastured chicken and turkey raiser last year for a certain number of chickens and turkeys. They even cut the birds in half for us. They gave us a 15% discount on the per pound price. Very good birds. Let’s say your family alone would not qualify – it’s time to make some friends and put an order together.
6) Some growers don’t ‘do’ farmers markets. What some of them do is make deliveries to metro areas or have a store. One good example is Joe Salatin of Polyface Farms (and the man considered to be the ‘father of the pastured poultry movement). He has a delivery truck that makes deliveries to various metropolitan buying clubs in the DC area. Polyface Farms Metro Buying Clubs
7) Truth in Advertising: Daughter the Elder is the Market Manager for the newest farmers market in our area, which has grown from 4 venders two years ago, to about 20 now. She says that the number one limiting factor in terms of growing farmers markets and in establishing new ones is – lack of farmers. Yep – everyone wants a farmers market but no one wants to have to grow for one. It is a lot of work and when you operate your stand and have people constantly telling you “I can get that at xxx grocery store for half this price”, it gets really wearing. Why bother to fight it unless you are committed to offering people high quality, safe, healthy food? If we want more farmers markets, we need to produce more farmers. Period. Got a big back yard? Why are you mowing a lawn? Check out Growing Power — this guy got started in the middle of Milwaukee, WI on three acres and is raising everything from Tilapia and Yellow Perch to fresh veggies and educating tons of urban kids at the same time. Again, I say – why are you mowing a lawn(unless you have some sort of covenant on your property, in which case, you have my sympathy)?
Even beyond the ‘wanna factor’ (as in, I wanna farmers market in my community), farmers markets are really good things to have. They are a ‘public good’ (like museums, thriving local art communities, a decent coffee shop, a bookstore that is NOT a national chain, good parks). To find out more on farmers markets and their role in communities and why they should be supported, see: Projects for Public Spaces Projects for Public Spaces

OK..I promised that I would do this and then tell you what the next topic would be and then do that and not go flying off. The next topic(which is really attached to this) is about pasture raised meat and why we should as a society support that and why pasture raised meat is a solid, proven alternative to swine flu.

Bon appétit!

(photos courtesy of kahala and chrisjohnbecket)

First, as is said in The Hitchhikers Guide: Don’t Panic. Don’t feel that there is nothing you can do because you have a landlord or are occupying a unit that is 60 feet up over the asphalt. The trick in your situation is to think: not permanent — movable. Let’s look at people’s costs of living one at a time in terms of what we can do to lower those costs.

Heating and cooling. What do you have control over? If you have no control (no thermostat, for example; central boiler and central air unit and everyone gets charged their “fair share”), then yes, you have no control and there is nothing to do about those costs. But if you do have a thermostat, your job is to seal up your place the best you can for the winter and keep the sun out of the rooms in the summer. Your friends are: rope caulk and those “shrink the plastic sheet around the window frame” kits that you can find at hardware stores. Don’t have a heat gun? That is ok also; the point is to seal up the place where the window frame meets the wall (use your rope caulk for that) and then seal up the window with the plastic and the annoying tape (takes a little practice, but after a couple, you’ll be able to make a seal just as good as the one with the heat gun).

Another friend are curtains. If you have insulated curtains, bravo. If you have lined curtains, that is not so good but you can always add another layer of lining (something like flannel sheets is a good bet – just cut to fit and either safety pin them to the back of the curtain or get out your sewing kit and tack to the top just underneath whatever the top treatment is – hooks, gathers, rings, whatever). If you don’t have lining, go to your local Joann’s or another fabric place that carries drapery lining – get the insulated lining – it’s worth the cost. You can always take it out when you get tired of the curtains and use it for the next set. Take one of the curtains with you and let one of the clerks help you by measuring it, etc. They are usually wizards at this. Take it home and again either safety pin it to the curtain back or sew it on (and yes, by hand if you don’t have a sewing machine).

Insulated curtains are great for both summer and winter because in the winter, they are another layer preventing the cold from conducting into the room; in the summer, they block the radiant heat from coming in. So, even if you use AC, it doesn’t have to work so hard. If you are really hard core, you can always go to the lumber yard, get some materials and make yourself insulated inside shutters – those are amazing and save tons of energy. When you leave, just take them with you. (How to Make Your Windows More Energy Efficient)

Wearables: I know a guy who claims that he absolutely positively needs to keep his house at 78 degrees year round. He literally walks around his house in the middle of winter in a tee shirt and gym shorts and bare feet. He’s lived in Upstate NY for thirty years. If you have control of your thermostat and you’ve sealed up the windows and any extraneous doors that you don’t use, then (cue scary music)it’s time to lower the thermostat. If you don’t own a sweater or two, go the Salvation Army/Goodwill/Volunteers of America and get a couple of good, thick, long sleeved, wool sweaters. Wool is best and the heavier the better. You’ll be wearing them over something else, so you have no excuses like “I’m allergic”.

The other thing to do is – forget the flip-flops in the house. Wear good warm socks, tights, etc. and shoes or sneakers. Put a good layer of warmth between you and the floor.

Food: can you grow your own in an apartment or a rental situation where you can’t rip up the lawn for a garden? Two questions: Do you get sun and do you have a terrace or deck? If you get sun and have a terrace or deck, then you can very easily get big pots and grow everything from squash to corn and anything in between, including climbing stuff (you just need lattice that you can get from the hardware store and secure it to the deck because when you are a hundred feet up, things can get breezy and you don’t want your planter of pole beans sailing out over the street). If you don’t have sun or don’t have a terrace or deck, your options are sort of limited to a grow light and greens. But you can grow a lot of greens that way.

Your friend is the farmer’s market. Some cities have larger regional markets where you can buy from farmers…and a lot of other people and wholesalers. To get the best selection, be the first guy there. To get the cheapest selection, go in the last hour and negotiate with the farmers because they do not want to take stuff home. Be prepared to deal with large quantities of the same thing (this is where partnering up with your neighbors can be really good). This is a good time to invest in some jars/lids/bands, a pressure cooker/canner and an instruction book. Also, there are things that can really well and some that do not. Anything that you see in your grocery store that comes in a can is a candidate (heh) for you to can in a jar. Things that you don’t see in a can (like broccoli, for example) are not good candidates, but if you have a bit of space in your freezer, you can get some extra at the farmers market and freeze it.

No space in your kitchen to store cases of home made spaghetti sauce, canned beans, and pickles? Best place to store boxes of home canned goods is: under your bed. There is nothing like the feeling, esp if there is a howling storm outside, of sleeping on top of several weeks’ worth of food that can’t go bad if you lose the electricity. You feel almost like Smaug.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)