A Story.

Read this!
Kathleen Holt, a member of the PGP Food Buying club, wrote a wonderful essay for Culinate that I just had to share. It’s titled The wisdom of crowds: How to buy — and share — your groceries in bulk.

15 Miles Farm
Yesterday we visited 15 Miles Farm located on Bella Organic’s land out on Sauvie Island. This is the CSA program I signed up with for winter. They promise not only seasonal veggies, but eggs, goat milk cheese, and summer bounty preserved as jam and frozen berries. My hopes are high for this CSA! The visit was lovely. The weather warmed up and it is just so pretty out on the island– really makes me wish we had some land of our own for the kids to run around on, and for some animals… We also got to see RedTree Farm, which is the source of the goat milk cheese and eggs we are so looking forward to. Our hen

Do you know what your child’s school uses to clean? Is it safe? Is it non-toxic?
Munchkie, our 3 (or 3 1/2 as she says) year old just started preschool, and although it’s only been 2 weeks since we started, we have already learned so much (and not just how to stack blocks and paint with water color)! The other day, we had a parent meeting where we found out about government requirements for disinfecting in the classroom. Especially right now, with the H1N1 scare, all disinfecting products used at schools must be EPA certified as a pesticide. Needless to say, virtually all these products are toxic not only to germs, but to humans too, causing skin, eye and lung irritation or worse,

3,000 lbs of tomatoes!
Two weeks ago I organized a bulk buy of Early Girl and Roma no spray tomatoes from a local farmer in Oregon City. I also got some additional Roma tomatoes, including an heirloom variety called Black Plum, from another organic local farm on Sauvie Island. All in all, I think I must have bought over 3 TONS of tomatoes for 45 or so families. I canned about 6 or 7 lugs (120-140 lbs) of tomatoes so far, which yielded 6 qts frozen and 36 qts canned tomato sauce. I am hoping we won’t need to buy any commercial sauce at all this winter. My method is probably cheating, but it works for me. 1. First, I wash all the t

Trying my hand at some Baba Ganoush.
Our CSA has been giving us eggplants these last 2 weeks. I didn’t really think eggplants grew up here in the Pacific Northwest. To me, they are more of a Mediterranean vegetable and they remind me of all the delicious dishes my Nonna used to make with them when I was little. My favorite was breaded, deep fried eggplants with lots of garlic. She also made a Baba Ganoush dip that my parents loved, but that didn’t really appeal to me as a child. I do remember watching my grandma make it though– roasting the eggplants on an open flame on her gas stove, mashing up the insides with some lemon, garlic, parsley and tahini– and today will be my first attempt at maki