Soooo -new blog! Point your browsers over to www.eatgrowlive.wordpress.com.
I mean, we’re all here to eat sustainable, living sustainable, and enjoy the beauty of the world… eat. grow. live.  I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to corral those phrases into something witty, but I have a tendency to overthink.  This pretty much sums it up, right?

Got anything to add?  A great recipe? Want to garner some internet fame? Email me, and become a contributor at eat.grow.live.!

chickenbud

Spring’s here -ain’t she glorious??  We tilled the front field at Ceo Maidin this week, and the chickens immediately began scratching at the bugs we’d disturbed. Over by the house, fruit trees burst into pink buds.

Every Friday here at Lady Farmer, we’ll be posting a photo instead of an article, recipe or essay to celebrate the beauty of the world around us.

Happy springtime, and don’t forget to get your seeds in!

No, no -there is too much.  Let me sum up. This excerpt from a recent Virginia Informer article does it pretty well:

“According to legend, Williamsburg’s co-op initiative began in 2005, when William and Mary student Abigail Adams (’05) founded a food co-op based on natural and organic dry goods -pastas, chips, juices, and canned food. The co-op faded upon her graduation, but the idea behind it remained, and activists reunited in the Spring of 2007 during adjunct professor Charlie Maloney’s Sustainability and Agriculture course as part of a final project that was meant to be “something real.” When Lea Brumfield (’08), Josh Wayland (’08), and Jimmy McDonough (’07) got together, they took this suggestion literally, and the RealFood Williamsburg Food Cooperative was born.
With a focus on local, organic, and small-farm food, RealFood’s three-fold goal is to reconnect members with what they eat through buying local and naturally-grown food, to provide sustainable agriculture education, and to provide opportunities for participation in the production and preparation of food. From the time of its inception to the meeting on March 28, RealFood has continued to blossom. Its Spring 2009 listserv reaches 350 members, and is currently growing by about 2-3 members per week…”

Molly, one of our managers, wrote the article, I helped edit it, and now the WHOLE CAMPUS KNOWS. It was published in print as well as online. Read the rest of the article here.

Regular RealFood updates to follow. We’re doing a lot of cool stuff!

“But Lea,” you say, “I’m tired of just sauteing mushrooms in butter and olive oil.  Sure, they’re great, but can’t you give me some other ideas?”

“How can you be tired of sauteing mushrooms?” I argue.  “They’re like delicious little bits of fungal first-choir seraphim sex!”

“Uh…..”

Erm, so have you heard of Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook?

She’s a pretty swell cook, and one of the recipes you probably haven’t tried makes incredible use of mushrooms!

Virginia, a soon-to-be-contributor here at ladyfarmer, makes Mollie Katzen’s Hungarian Mushroom Soup on a regular basis.  I believe this is because the chemical makeup of the soup has similar addictive properties to crack cocaine.  The soup is even better after it mellows a day or two, but it rarely lasts long enough to mellow for long.

The lovely people down at Ten Speed Press have graciously allowed us to post the recipe online, so here it is:

Hungarian Mushroom Soup

1 hour to prepare, approximately 4-5 servings
2 tbs. butter
2 cups chopped onion
1 1/2 to 2 lb mushrooms, sliced
1 tsp. salt
2 to 3 Tbs. freshly minced dill
1 Tbs. mild paprika
2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
3 Tbs. flour
2 cups water
1 cup milk at room temp
pepper to taste
1/2 cup sour cream (I used fat free Greek yogurt)
freshly minced parsley for top

1) Melt the butter in a kettle or Dutch oven.  Add onions and saute over med. heat for about five minutes.  Add mushrooms, salt, dill, paprika.  Stir well and cover.  Let cook for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Stir in lemon juice.

2) Gradually sprinkle in the flour, stirring constantly.  Cook and stir another 5 minutes or so over medium-low heat.  Add water, cover, and cook about 10 min, stirring often (to avoid lumps).

3) Stir in milk; add pepper to taste.  Check to see if it needs more salt (mine did).  Whisk in sour cream (or yogurt), and heat very gently.  Don’t boil or cook after this point.  Serve hot, topped with parsley.

Reprinted with permission from The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen. Published by Ten Speed Press.

A Cabbage a Day…

 So it’s February already, and the earth is still sleeping.  What’s a seasonal eater to do when the winter blues set in and summer tomatoes seem so far away?  (Not to mention the spring herald: the ramp poking its head above a thick layer of leaf mould and screaming “EAT ME NOW!  It is time for RAMP PIZZA!”)

            A quick look around the late-winter seasonal eating grounds has come up with quite a lot of cabbage dishes.  I hope you like cabbage, they seem to imply, because that’s all there is to eat.  Eating seasonally does not mean eating crap, yet I personally don’t think of cabbage as a typical go-to vegetable when I’m staring at the produce section.  But then I started thinking of all those yummy Asian dishes that involve cabbage and oh gosh do I love me some pot stickers.  The great thing about pot stickers is their versatility!  You can pack them with veggies and with meat or keep the meat out entirely if that’s your thing – there’s no wrong way to do a pot sticker. 

            This recipe is from a friend of mine who runs Simply Culinary in Chesapeake, VA.  It is a lovely hybrid of a cooking store, cheesecake/coffee bar and show kitchen.  When I was Chef Randy’s sous chef at Simply Culinary we made these savoury and fast-disappearing morsels of cabbagey-shrimpy goodness (but hell, I’ll eat the filling with a spoon as a meal itself).

If you don’t like shrimp, substitute an equal volume of minced, lightly-sauteed mushrooms.  Or pork.  Or just up the amount of other veggies.  As long as it tastes good, who’s going to stop you from playing with the ingredients?  The cabbage is the main attraction, though, so don’t skimp on it.  Oh, and the Spicy Peanut Sauce.

Ginger-Cabbage Pot Stickers with Spicy Peanut Sauce

FILLING: 

• 3/4 cup shredded Napa cabbage
• 1/2 pound cooked peeled small shrimp 
• 1 tablespoon minced peeled fresh ginger
• 2 cloves of chopped garlic
• 1/3 cup chopped green onions
• Dash of hot sauce 
• 1/4 cupmatch stick-cut carrots 
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 teaspoon dark sesame oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt 
• 1-2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce (start with 1, and increase to taste)
• Chopped green onions (optional) 
• 24 wonton wrappers
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch 
• 1 tablespoon canola oil, divided 
• 1 cup water, divided 

SAUCE: 

• 1/4 cup low-sodium chicken stock (vegetable stock or mushroom stock a perfect vegetarian substitute)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons seasoned rice vinegar 
• 1/4 cup reduced fat peanut butter
• 1 1/2 tablespoons chile paste with garlic (you can find this at any asian store or international section)
• 2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar 

Preparation 

1. To prepare pot stickers, combine first 11 ingredients in a food processor; pulse 4 times or until coarsely chopped.  Place in a bowl and stir in the chopped green onions.  Working with 1 wonton wrapper at a time (cover remaining wrappers with a damp towel to prevent drying), spoon about 1 1/2 teaspoons shrimp mixture into center of each wrapper. Moisten edges of dough with water; bring 2 opposite corners to center, pinching points to seal. Bring remaining 2 corners to center, pinching points to seal. Pinch 4 edges together to seal. Place pot stickers on a large baking sheet sprinkled with cornstarch. 

2. Heat 1 1/2 teaspoons canola oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add 12 pot stickers to pan; cook 2 minutes or until bottoms are golden brown. Slowly add 1/2 cup water to pan; cover and cook 4 minutes. Uncover and cook 3 minutes or until liquid evaporates. Repeat procedure with remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons canola oil, 12 pot stickers, and 1/2 cup water. 

3. To prepare sauce, combine the chicken stock (or veg/mushroom stock) and next 5 ingredients (through sugar) in a small bowl stirring with a whisk. (Or you can use a blender). Serve sauce with pot stickers. Garnish with chopped green onions, if desired. 

Yield 12 servings (serving size: 2 pot stickers and 1 tablespoon sauce)

My last visit to Ceo Maidin Feirm, I spent most of the day raking dry grass off the remains of the herb garden. It was a cold day, so I wrapped my scarf around my head like a little babushka, and raked myself warm. Before too long, I’d taken off the scarf, my vest, and even my flannel, working in forty-one degree weather in just a teeshirt and a cotton thermal. What?? Exercise keeps you warm AND burns calories? Why didn’t anyone tell me before!??

The herb garden will be Lisa’s first priority this year, along with the cows she’s planning on getting. “A place of healing,” she says. “We need to focus on healing and good energies this year.” The garden is wrapped by a gray picket fence, centered around an old millstone and dotted with blue gazing balls and giant white seashells. A few rosebushes and lavender bushes stand naked in the corners, but most of the beds are empty, lumpy, and covered in wire grass.

To garden or farm (the same thing really, just on different scales) requires a heavy dose of vivid imagination, and more than a little faith. There’s heavy skies above, the ground is frozen in clumps, and even the weeds are dead. But somehow, every year, farmers and gardeners stand in bare fields and manage to picture lush growth and heavy fruit covering the ground.

January is the time for conceptual diagrams, seed catalogues, garden bed plots, and dreaming about the warm months. If you’ve weeded and fertilized the beds, planted the garlic and mulched everything, there’s not much to do outside. Instead, you finally have time to plan out on the crop rotation you heard about back in August, and figure out how many rows of tomatoes you need to can and sell and eat next year. You decide to move the compost heap to unearth the rich ground underneath, and to sow a few rows of parsley in the the tomatoes. Reading through seed catalogues is addictive and dizzying -every exotic carrot and heritage tomato looks delicious, and it’s difficult to resist buying them all, but the excitement can keep a farming girl warm all winter.

We’ve had a cold snap here in Southeastern Virginia, just like the rest of the East Coast. Most of the vegetables from the food co-op are coming in a little shriveled, or a lot smaller than they used to be. Two weeks ago, we sold Savoy Cabbages the size of my head. Now they’re softball sized.

The cold does have its benefits, of course, like the sunset I watched last Tuesday. The entire day had been bleak, a high peaking in the low forties, but when I started packing up the rakes I noticed the field suddenly brighten. I turned to face the west and gasped. The sun had slipped beneath the cloud cover, filling the sky with buttery gold, and every time I looked up, another color had begun to wash across the horizon -gold, orange, magenta, scarlet, lavender, and finally indigo, before the sunset petered into a gray, cold dusk.

Take me, for example. I’m 5’6″. Blond. Never leave the house without earrings. To meet me, you’d never expect that I was up to my elbows in well-rotted horse manure the other day.

As a young woman who prefers looking pretty and smelling clean, I wrestle with my love for the dirt and all things farm related. It’s difficult to feel feminine when covered in sweat, streaks of dirt across your forehead, god-knows-what under your fingernails, but isn’t our ultimate mother Earth the most feminine thing of all? Since Eve plucked that first apple, women have been farmers and nurturers of the land. From the Iroqouis to the Mbati, women in agricultural societies grew the starch and vegetable crops that men supplemented with protein, providing the majority of the calories and nutrients consumed. Only in more recent history have women been relegated to the misleadingly titled role of “farmer’s wife,” in which they still grew and prepared a large portion of food for their families and communities.

Today, women often lead the sustainable farming charge, some reconnecting with the Earth in a New Age, crystals-and-bare feet way, some for fear of their families’ health, some with an eye towards a simpler, cell-phone free life. Some work for all three reasons, and a dozen more. Regardless of why women are getting their hands in the dirt, I’d like to reclaim the beauty and feminine nature of farming, and proudly display my own labors as beautiful. In a culture of Queer Eye and metrosexual men spending thousands of dollars redecorating their apartments, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a femininity that embraces both perfume and wheelbarrows.

Manicures and Cow Manure is a place for sustainable ways to grow, eat, and live. I’ve asked a number of other women to join me in sharing our experiences as women working towards a sustainably grown future. They’ll be posting periodically as they find time in their busy lives.

I’ve gardened since I could toddle (if you can call picking fistfuls of green beans and immediately stuffing them in your mouth gardening), but it wasn’t until recently that I realized how few Americans have ever known the sweet crunch of a green bean straight off the vine, and how much help the American agricultural system needs. I spent part of my childhood in Japan, part in Spain, and part here in America, and I’ve witnessed the vast differences and paradoxes of each place. Superstores and vending machines dominate Japanese cities, but many sushi restaurants keep live tanks of fish to assure that customers eat only the freshest sashimi. In Spain, an elderly man drove a yellow van into our neighborhood every afternoon, selling vegetables picked that morning and bread still warm from the bakery, but I never encountered a restaurant dish without some kind of fatty meat in it. I’ve eaten food as varied as the countries that served them, and I’m starting to piece together my own vision of what agriculture and food could and should be . Back in America, writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan are helping the sustainable food movement gain momentum, but a country only now recovering from a Velveeta and fish fingers haze is naturally going to have trouble changing its eating habits.

I now work part-time at Ceo Maidin Ferim, a small farm in southeastern Virginia, where we’re getting ready for the planting season. And as anyone who’s ever been within five miles of a farm knows, manure is vital to the health, wellbeing, and unmistakable perfume of a farm.

Ceo Maidin Feirm, pronounced “cow maidin firm,” is Gaelic for “Morning Mist Farm.” A few years ago, Lisa and Keith Reagan bought the 8-acre farm as a refuge from gated-community burnout, and Lisa slowly nurtured the idea of running a mini-farm until it burst into a hard-won Community Supported Agriculture program (CSA) in 2006. Lisa tells the complete story much better in a Kindred Magazine article, titled Spiritual Composting.

Lisa has been progressively turning the farm into an obscenely fertile piece of land with the Grow Biointensive farming model, gaining CSA subscribers and expanding her crop selection all the way, but this previous summer, in July 2008, she suffered an injury that stopped all work, and the farm was left to the chickweed, spiny amaranth, and wire grass. Lisa has been slowly recovering, and decided to hire myself and a few other young people to help the farm begin its road to recovery.

Up until recently, my job has consisted of pulling weeds, pulling back ineffective weed plastic, pulling weeds, and oh, did I mention we pull weeds? I’m excited for the spring planning, planting, and growing season, and I’ll be sharing updates on the farm weekly.