Holy crap, that was fun!

admittedly it was a bit of an experiment, that thing we did last night at the growing center. we had no idea what kind of successful outreach and interaction, if any, we were having with the interweb, or how likely it was to expect dozens of people we’d never met to find a sort of remote part of somerville and hang out with us. just before we headed over with our civic full of every plate we own and a couple pounds of local cheese, darry and i were estimating on our hands that probably, maybe, 15 people might show up. and most of them would be our friends that we made promise to go. 

so it was with profound surprise and happiness and gratitude that about 50 people, most of them strangers, arrived at the growing center to eat cheese with us. and put on silly name tags, and introduce themselves to strangers and linger in the fading light of a quiet urban garden. it was awesome, and i am seriously, seriously really glad you all came. it was a pleasure. also, it would have been a load of cheese to take home if you had not been there. thanks.  

and since a bunch of you asked, the following is a reprint of the cheese bios that were on display (and perhaps a bit confusing — my apologies for the clutter) last night. 

LOCAL BENDER … next month. we shall gather again to drink local beer.

the cheeses… all of these are available at some combo of farmers’ markets, Whole Foods, Formaggio Kitchen, Foodie’s, City Feed and Supply, Lionette’s, Dave’s Fresh Pasta, Harvest Co-ops and the Dairy Bar

GREAT HILL BLUE - This is made in Marion, Mass., in an old barn on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay. The cheesemakers use raw, unhomogenized cow’s milk from neighboring farms. The result is softer than your average blue cheese. And rather light and elegant. Put it on salads, please! Price: $14.99/lb. We get this is at Whole Foods on River St. It’s also at the Dairy Bar in Somerville.

GRAFTON CHEDDAR (sage + maple smoked) - This hails from lovely and terribly remote Graftonv, VT! Grafton Village Cheese Co. is literally the only thing happening in this town, and it employs a bunch of people. The cheesemakers use hormone-free milk from Jersey cows that live on New England farms. If you’re gonna buy cheddar, it’s way better to buy Grafton cheddar than some faceless, glow-in-the-dark orange crap you can find in any Grocery Store. It’s a quality, localish (most cheddar is not) and with a seriously good bite. And good news: Grafton is sold just about everywhere! Any Harvest Co-op, Whole Foods, Shaw’s, Hannaford’s should have it. Also, it comes in several tasty flavors, as well as regular old sharp cheddar, and it’s relatively affordable. Price: $6.99 for 8 oz wheel; $4.99 for 8 oz bar

CONSTANT BLISS, Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, VT -  Bliss is made from fresh, raw cow’s milk. Starter culture is added before the milking is even finished! The slow lactic fermentation that takes place overnight renders the milk yogurt-like by morning, Each cheese is turned daily for the first two weeks, after which they are turned twice a week until they have developed a rind and are ripe! Price: $10.99 for 5 oz wheel. We go this at Whole Foods too. 

BAYLEY HAZEN BLEU, Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, VT - Bayley Hazen Blue is a natural rinded blue cheese made with the early morning (raw) milk of Ayrshire cows. Ayrshire milk is particularly well suited to the production of blue cheese because of its small fat globules, which are easily broken down during the aging process. The paste of a Bayley Hazen is drier than most blues and the penicillium roqueforti takes a back seat to an array of flavors that hint at nuts and grasses and in the odd batch, licorice. It is aged between 4 and 6 months. It’s drier and crumblier than most blues — and damn strong. You need just a little taste to get the job done. Price: $21.99/lb. Whole Foods!

CRYSTAL BROOK FARM GOAT CHEESE, Mediterranean Marinade - This is made in Sterling, Mass., by Ann Starbard, a very spunky and rather iconoclastic lady. (Ye who ask her why local cheese costs more than Grocery Store cheese, BEWARE!) Ann also keeps a herd of 70 alpine and saanen goats. They’re wily and beautiful. And very well cared for — so are the pastures they spend their days on.  (Tidbit: Ann’s husband Eric is a sawyer; he producers lumber on the farm.) Price: $3.25 per serving. I got this at the Davis Sq farmers’ market on Wednesday. It’s sold at other markets. Check their web site for a listing. 

CAPRI, Westfield Farm in Hubbardston, Mass. - Ten years ago, the family that owned Westfield Farm wanted to retire. They put a classified in the Globe’s real estate section and Bob and Debbie Stetson, two urbanites looking for a change, made an offer! They ended up moving in with the family for a month to learn the ropes. The property is no longer a working farm; the Stetsons opted to just take over cheese production. But they do buy milk from four local goat dairies. They make fresh and aged goat cheese,  including an aged bleu goat cheese and a feta. But their wee logs of chevre are the easiest to come by. It’s creamy and the flavor is quite gentle. Plus, the Stetsons are very nice people. And this is sold at the Brookline Farmers’ Market. Price: $5.49 for 5 oz log. I got this at Whole Food’s but I’ve seen it around. Check the Westfield Farm site.

FIORE DI NONNO or “my grandfather’s flower” - Holy, holy crap. Here is the crown jewel! Lourdes Smith makes this mozzarella every morning right down the street in the Tazo chocolate factory in Somerville. Lourdes’ grandfather, an Italian immigrant, ran a dairy shop in New Jersey when she was a kid. As a grown up, she sought out to emulate his perfect hand-stretched mozzarella and went to study with a fellow who’d apprenticed under her grandfather. Thus, the recipe she uses today is pretty damn close to what he brought over from the old country. This mozzarella is nothing like the shrink-wrapped stuff in the supermarket. It’s meaty, perfectly salted and melty in your mouth. If you eat it with fresh tomatoes and basil, it will rock your world. You can get it at Davis Sqare, Belmont, Lexington, Copley Square and Kendall Square farmers’ markets. Also at speciality shops and a couple of fancy restaurants. Price: $5 per serving. Lourdes sells at Davis Sq, Lexington + Belmont Markets. Dave’s Fresh Pasta and Lionette’s. Check her site for the full listing, though.

VERMONT BRIE, Blythedale Farm in Corinth, VT - This cheese is new to us. What we know: it’s made with pasteurized, whole milk from Jersey cows. And the cows are hormone-free and have year-round access to pasture. Indeed they look pretty happy in the photos on the Vermont Cheese web site. Price: $8.99 for a wheel. Whole Foods!

SMITH’S COUNTRY CHEESE, Gouda from Winchendon, Mass. - The Smith family keeps a pretty large herd of Holsteins on their farm. They use raw milk from the cows to make this gouda. The rind on these babies is wax — so don’t eat it! The cheese — like all cheeses made with raw milk — is aged 60 days. That’s the law. The Smiths have a rather big operation out there in Winchendon and their cows are grain fed, which we are a bit dubious about. But still, this is not a factory produced cheese. It’s the real local deal, and just about the only gouda we’ve been able to find made in Massachusetts. Price: $6.99 for 8 oz wedge. I got this at the Dairy Bar in Somerville. 

HANNAHBELLS, Shy Brothers Farm in Westport Point, Mass. - The Shy Brothers are, in fact, two sets of twin brothers. Bizarre, no? They grew up on their dairy farm and, a few years back, when it looked like they might have to sell because mega, monoculture farms like to crush small operations like theirs, the Hanleys moved to town. The Hanleys are very nice business people who worry about the future of food. They decided a good way to save the farm was to turn it into a slightly more specialized place. Hence, these fancy little artisanal cheeses were born and the Shy Brothers became cheesemakers. Their cows graze, the milk is pasteurized and the cheese is ready to eat after about two weeks of aging. The cheese itself is modeled on a French recipe. It comes in fun flavors too! And the Hanleys insist the unique ocean-y climate in Westport Point gives the milk a super special edge. Price: $6.99 for 4 oz. Dairy Bar. But these also sell at a bunch of Whole Foods, Foodie’s Market in the South End and maybe Formaggio Kitchen. 

 

Cheese tasting, the roster.

good eaters,

The time is upon us to gather. This WEDNESDAY, 16 JULY 2008, we + The Growing Center will host a local cheese tasting. (See details below.) This is the first cheese tasting Darry and I have ever organized. It’s also the first one we’ve ever attended. I’m not sure what that will mean for all of you, but rest assured we eat lots of [LOCAL] cheese, we relish proselytizing about it and are highly skilled at feeding people, from both a professional and cultural position.

Please come! It is FREE! There will be cheese. There will be snacks to accompany the cheese, and extremely fascinating details about from whence all of this deliciousness came and how can you get your hands on it. Most likely, there will also be plastic cups filled with iced water and perhaps a donation bucket so that at future events there may be wine served in reusable cups instead.

So here’s the roster, so far:

Great Hill Blue — Marion, Mass. blue cheese
Grafton Village — Grafton, VT maple-smoked cheddar and sage cheddar
Westfield Farm — Hubbardston, Mass. chevre
Fiore Di Nonno — Somerville mozzarella that will alter the course of your life
Hannahbells from Shy Bros Farms — Westport, Mass. super fancy, thimble-sized hard cheeses

we’re also trying to get our hands on:
Hillman Farms — AGED goat cheese from Colrain, Mass
and whatever regional delights Formaggio’s got on hand tomorrow

DEETS:

The cheese tasting starts at 7 and ends roughly at 9. It’s happening at the Growing Center, a sort of community garden site on a very steep hill outside of Union Sq in Somerville — 22 Vinal Ave. Parking is ample, and it’s easy to drive to. It’s a pretty long walk from Central, Davis or Porter t-stops, though not impossible. The 87 and 85 bus routes drop off nearby on Somerville Ave. Bus routes 80, 86, 88 and 91 go right through Union Sq. See the MBTA site for directions.

Regular old thursday night dinner: outstanding

This is what you’d call a sausage action shot taken on our hand-me-down-but-still-an-amazing-improvement gas grill (thanks Rachael!). Yes, I’m saying what you think I’m saying. Smokey Joe is no longer with us. We sold him at our yard sale last weekend. But I swear he went to a good home. A young girl who lives on our street bought Joe, a charcoal chimney, two half-full bags of coals and some lighter fluid for the bargain basement price of $20. It felt right, though. She walked past, admired him, then walked past again and promised to be back with the cash.

But the new grill has made such a difference. Tonight, for example, we just turned it on and threw on some Stillman’s sweet italian sausage we got last week from the Belmont Farmer’s Market. So, so, good. But the glory is how easy it is to cook these babies. You just throw them on the grill and pull a jar of mustard from the fridge. No muss, no fuss, really. Same if you didn’t have a grill. Just throw them in a skillet and fry ‘em. The only thing about natural casing sausages is that they burst if you cook them on high heat. So don’t. But, guess what? We have burst them and eaten them just as happily as the photogenic ones we had tonight.

We did roast some fresh garlic, beets and carrots from the CSA share and threw them on a salad of green leaf lettuce and raddichio, also from the CSA. Actually, I threw them on *my* salad and Kristi inhaled them before they were allowed to touch anything else, so in love with roasted carrots is she.

The moral of this post is this: Sweet Italian Sausage is good, easy, affordable eats.

 

Sunday dinner: sustainable + Nana

When I was a kid on the Northern Shores of Boston, some combination of my father’s very loud and very large family gathered every Sunday at my grandparents’ house in Revere to share dinner, which was served, invariably, more like around lunch time.

The menu rarely strayed from: two pounds of pasta (DeCecco, produced in my family’s native region, Abruzzi, was preferred), Nana’s slow-brewing sauce and a large pile of meatballs, chicken, veal and sausage, all cooked in the sauce; a post-pasta salad dressed with olive oil and vinegar; post-salad fruit; post-fruit coffee and handmade pastries.

I thought for a long time that everyone did this. But when the tradition persisted into my adulthood, and other interests absorbed my time on Sundays, I figured out it was a relic; a privilege, in a way, but also a burden. Other recovering Italians will understand this, I think.

Nana, who is alone now, still makes Sunday dinner. Same menu, fewer people to feed. It is delicious, of course, and her sauce has a consistency that, I truly believe, only people born in her pocket of Italy can actually achieve.

The trouble is I escaped the North Shore, and was abducted by a troupe of good eaters in Western Mass and Southern VT. They taught me things that make me shudder about the origins of the thousands of meatballs I’ve consumed at Nana’s table; my palette now discerns a difference between her romaine and the greens I pick up the farmer’s market. I try to politely introduce these feelings and thoughts at Sunday, when I go, but mostly Nana just asks what’s wrong with me, and why I no longer like meatballs. Also, tangentially, she tells me I am tragically flat-chested.

Anyway. last Sunday, my mum and brother Marc bravely drove to Cambridge (people from the North Shore don’t often like to do this) and Darry and I served them our version of Nana’s menu. (PS, Nana knows nothing of this.) But here’s what our sustainable Sunday dinner looked like. I encourage you all to recreate it next week.

Fresh local egg pasta from Capone Foods (locations in Somerville + Cambridge; sold in specialty stores too. A-Mazing.)

My sauce: two cans of diced tomatoes, garlic, local onions; thyme and rosemary from our patio

A baguette from Hi-Rise

Salad: greens from Stillman’s (Cambridgeport farmers market); beet greens from our CSA; topped with goat cheese from Westfield Farm in Hubbardston Mass and PERFECT roasted beets from Drumlin

Strawberries and cherries from Drumlin Farm (Union Sq market); topped with ganache made from Taza chocolate  

There is a very important metaphor in this posting; something about the old world origins of the Sunday dinner being corrupted by the new world and the reinvention of the corrupted version of the dinner, using old world-style grown and gathered materials. But I am burned by the sun tonight and far from being able to extrapolate it. 

prego

Localvores don’t get E. coli! and etc…

It’s crap like this that makes me even happier to stand in the blistering sun at a farmer’s market and spend $9/lb for ground beef from Stillman’s, a rockstar operation in Hardwick, Mass. Yes, we dropped about $23 for a localvore July 4 feast of mini-burgers, but the wallet wincing is abated when you hear about dozens of people getting sick — AGAIN — because they bought the bright pink stuff from a Grocery Store. 

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nebraska Beef Ltd expanded its voluntary recall of material used in making ground beef to 5.3 million lbs, 10 times the initial recall, because it may contain disease-causing bacteria, the U.S. government said on Friday.

E.coli, glorious E.coli!

OTHER STUFF: Thanks very much to Adam for lending us his beer wisdom. You too can reap the benefits of it by observing our expanded beer page. 

 

And as of July 1, Darry and I have embarked on a new experiment. We’re keeping a food log. Every night, listing all the stuff we ate that day…and all that we spent on it. The idea is we’re trying to get a real set of numbers: the actual cost of sourcing food as locally possible, year round. We’re pretty sure this data will one day be summoned for Congressional hearings, or a court case, whenever Monsanto figures out a way to sue local, organic food proponents. But until then, we’ll make it available here, on this blog, when we calculate something meaningful.

 

 

 

Renegade Whole Foods directs customers elsewhere

Look what has arrived at our neighborhood Whole Foods! The same store that brought you $8 watermelons in June from Texas, “conventional” asparagus year-round from the Southern Hemisphere and strawberries, RIGHT NOW, in plastic packages from California is vigorously trying to co-opt the mantra of localvores everywhere.

Dear, dear Whole Foods. We thank you very much indeed for the limited support you provide small, New England-based farms, but we would be very pleased to see an addendum graffitied on this banner. Something to the effect, “Don’t Shop Here! … but just down the street on Monday is a delightful farmers’ market!”

And that is where I spent the better part of my morning: at Central Sq’s market, gabbing with Farmer Al, the future subject of a Globe story I’m writing. (Any and all anecdotes about Al, his Seeds of Wisdom or his famous callaloo should be submitted ASAP.)

The scene at that market beats all the food porn Whole Foods can conjure: its perpetually misted produce and its geographically untraceable ground beef have nothing on the $5/lb beef we got from Austin Bros farm, or $2 worth of tomatoes from Al, or the baguette from Hi-Rise, which is so sweet and heavenly it is like eating dessert for lunch.

buy. local. like actually local. 

Exciting cheese tasting + Kristi spotted playing in compost

Everybody, this is Kristi. She’s captured here in her natural environment with a Canon Rebel using a 18-55 mm telephoto lens. This awesome photojournalism took place this morning at The Growing Center in Somerville, where Kristi was adding dry stuff to the compost bins and just before an elderly Italian gentleman, taken with her “big, sparkling eyes,” serenaded her in Italian.

Our real mission there, though, was meeting with Lisa of The Growing Center and plotting an event. Please come. It’ll be really delicious and we’d love to meet you at [drumroll] The Local Cheese Tasting! Mark your calendars for July 16, from  7-9, plan on having a light dinner and wandering over to The Growing Center and nibbling on the many delicious + affordable cheeses. We’re also going to show a short film under the stars about some important food issue, but we haven’t quite decided which one exactly it will be. But that’s good for you, because you’ll have a surprise to look forward to.

If it were the year 2014, you could take the Green Line to Union Square and walk from there. But it’s not. So it’s either drive (there’s plenty of parking) or find a bus that goes to Union Square or has a stop somewhere near the corner of Highland Ave + Vinal Street (the #88 picks up at the Davis Sq station which is on the Red Line).

We’ll keep you posted on this, but please try to come! And if anyone out there has suggestions for cheeses we should try, write to us [info at bostonlocalvores dot org]. Also, we’re amateur cheesemongers — anyone with real language or expertise that wants to volunteer their skillz for a couple of hours would be repaid in cheese and karma and gratitude.

Preaching to the would-be converts

Very happily, Wednesdays have become a junket of local food pickups, which invariably punctuate with a feast, best enjoyed with others on the wobbly table we’ve got on our patio. Usually our friends showup when it’s time to eat, but yesterday, for the first time, we took someone — our friend Rachael — along for the pre-feast tour. 

The fun for us nerds begins Wednesdays in Inman Square, in an apartment house on Tremont St, where we get our Just Dairy order. Rachael watched me punch in the code on the combo lock, duck way down through the doorway, and into the basement where there’s a fridge filled with glass jars of raw milk and cartons of eggs. I scanned the goods for our order. She asked, more than once, who lives in the house. But I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know. “Sketchy” was the response.

Barely a moment later, we were back in the car and headed for the parking lot outside Harvest Co-op in Central Sq to fetch our CSA share. Per usual, there was a line of very hungry looking types checking in, gathering the week’s veggies with gusto and grace. Rachael wanted to know how all of these people , who looked roughly our age and basically like us, found out about the business of buying a CSA at all. This a good question, I think, and any thoughts on it are very welcome. 

We got home and here’s what we ate: 2 hard boiled eggs each (from Just Dairy), a salad with carrots (CSA share) and goat cheese (Vermont Butter and Cheese Co), sauteed zucchini, summer squash and garlic scapes (CSA). And some leftover bread from Hi-Rise. 

Rachael is not a self-described localvore. She is, however, an awesomely curious and open soul, and she is actively trying to eat well, and better all the time. And here is the point of all of this so far directionless chatter about how we spent last evening: We talk a lot about this local eating thing with Rachael, and she asks great questions about it that make us clarify and articulate (in our own heads) why we do this stuff and what it means. But it’s not actually that easy to transfer the core of this compulsion to another person who doesn’t precisely have it herself. 

There was a time, not long ago, when I gave an ex a load of crap for shopping at Whole Foods because I thought it was elitest. She politely told me not eating poison had nothing to do with class. And so this is to say, I wasn’t always the convert I am today. But trying to identify when and how exactly I went from the chipped-shoulder type who bought the cheapest ground beef in a Grocery Store to save a few bucks to what I guess I am today is tough. I’m sure it was a series of moments (like the ex rightly putting me in my place) that got me here, but I wonder about the trajectory other eager local eaters followed. Anyone? anyone anyone.

All in the name of getting Rachael (and everyone else who sits down to eat with us on our wobbly table) fully on board…

Saturday in Union Sq | CSA shares still open

Our day began at the Growing Center* — a wee sweet spot on Vinyl St just outside the happening-place-even-in-the-face-of-a-public-works-disaster that is Union Sq. We go to the Growing Center every couple of weeks to use their compost bins. Here, at home, instead of throwing our food waste in the trash, we save it up in plastic bags in the freezer until they get unwieldy. I really want to start a worm bin in the basement instead, but this scares Darry a little and so I haven’t pushed it. If anyone reading this is interested in giving me some worm guidance on the DL, please write!

IMPORTANT THINGS we learned from Lisa at the Growing Center: they are selling pepper and tomato starter plants RIGHT NOW! Go there and buy them, please, and your money will be used by a very lovely cause. 

Also, Farmer Dave is STILL selling a few more CSA shares for his East Somerville pick-up (every Wednesday). The shares don’t start until July 2, so if you join now, you haven’t missed any. Farmer Dave is in Dracut and he has a unique + cool feature with his shares — you can choose your own flavor of veggies: New England, Brazilian and Central American. 

We also visited the Union Sq farmers’ market for more strawberries and sugar snap peas ($5.25 total). This is the only one I’ve been to in the Bostonish area that always features live music. It’s also the only one that is set up sort of the middle of a really ugly snarl of traffic, but in spite of that, it’s quite a lively and rather youngish crowd. Stillman’s is there with meat; Drumlin Farm is there with lots and lots of veggies; and something called B&R bread is there with delicious-looking stuff. Alas, we were low on cash and couldn’t sample the goods. If you’re familiar with it, do tell. 

And now, I gotta eat lunch. Bread from Hi-Rise, cheese from Cabot, and a salad: spinach and kohlrabi from our CSA share, strawbs and peas from the market today. Painfully earnest, completely yummy.


*The Growing Center is on a generous (by city standards) piece of property that used to have part of the old middle school on it. After lots of political maneuvering by hearty volunteers about 10 years ago, it was preserved as open space and even as a sort of garden. City kids cultivate it with the help of city adults who make my heartache for southern Vt or western Mass not so achey. They have an open house every Saturday morning, if you are curious. They also have lots of family-style events over the summer. 

The CSA rocks hard this week


Seriously. Last week, it was good. Mostly greens, which is mostly what we expected. But this week, as Kristi and I waited in line for the veggie free-for-all to start (we were a miserable sight, having just had the CAR TOWED from the South End because of $treet $weeping. But I digress), we noticed quite a different spread. Arrowhead cabbage (kind of a pointy, leafy cabbage), kohlrabi, thick heads of romaine, turnips, dill plus tons more greens, like collards, kale, spinach and mesclun. 

We weren’t really even in the South End, just parked there while we dined in the Prudential Center mall. I’m doing research on a certain chain restaurant therein and it requires much firsthand sampling of their wares. I know, it sounds hypocritical of me to be preaching about fresh Massachusetts kohlrabi here and eating ata chain, but my story idea makes some sense (writing about local, handmade, artisanal food MUST be coupled with writing and thinking about long distance, industrial, chain food for the sake of context, at least). We had — wait for it — cheesecake! Kristi had some unholy coupling of carrot cake and cheesecake and mine was laced with caramel. They’re made, we learned, in a factory in New Jersey and shipped in weekly. 

The contrast between that reality and the reality in line for CSA pickup is disheartening. Not the CSA, just the chasm as represented by people eager to spend $7 a slice on too-sweet cheesecake spit out of a windowless turnpike factory and glistening, early season heirloom cabbages. Obviously, we want to know how to build a bridge, but we don’t. Thoughts are always welcome.

For the record, Wednesday is also the day we pick up the raw milk and eggs from Just Dairy, a buying club, which we did after we liberated Greenie, our trusty Civic. So for dinner, we made quiche with the local eggs and milk and filled it with sauteed spinach and garlic scapes. We pan fried a few baby zucchini and made a salad with the romaine, too. 

In our share this week:
1 head lettuce (our choice romaine, redleaf or greenleaf boston)
1 arrowhead cabbage
1 handful garlic scapes (we may have taken an extra big handful)
1/2 pound spinach, mesclun or a mix of both
1 bunch turnips (these are amazing sauteed in garlic & oil with their greens)
2 kohlrabi (green or purple)
1 bunch kale or collards
2 zucchini or summer squash
Rosemary, dill or cilantro