The owner of the local cafe posted a sign much like this one a few weeks ago.  This photo is for the second meeting, happening Tuesday evening.  She’s started a new business across the street from the cafe, a commercial kitchen with all the accoutrements.  Her idea, which was discussed with high enthusiasm by 15-20 people at the first meeting, is to create a local food “brand”, by combining local growers with local “processors”, the latter being people with recipes and products they are interested in producing commercially.  In other words, if someone wants to produce, say, apple butter, or jarred pasta sauce, they coordinate with the local growers to get the right variety of tomatoes, apples, etc.  After buying their ingredients (mostly local as possible), they make their product in her commercial kitchen, which has all the certifications and equipment needed to be legal.  UC Davis will provide us nutritional analyses of recipes submitted.  Items produced in this way will be eligible for the local brand label, and hopefully the local markets will be interested in carrying these products.  Of course they could also be sold at the Farmer’s Market (for which, in a parallel project also coming out of the cafe, there are plans to hold a second Farmer’s Market each week, the new one being in the middle of town and held on Saturday mornings, so that tourists and 40-hour-a-week-ers will be able to attend — the current Farmer’s Market, which will also continue, is held on the hospital lawn, which is *not* in the middle of town — even if it’s only a quarter-mile away — and it’s held at 3:00 on Friday afternoons, and is usually done by 3:30.  Not too convenient unless you happen to be right there).

I was wary that the first meeting, which was attended by much of the gardening crowd, would produce lots of growers but no processors.  However, when asked to show hands, there were a good 8-10 people expressing interest in producing a product.  Many were also growers.

My role in this project is likely to be grower only, unless I discover something I really want to make as a finished item.  And, since I’m in a new place and don’t know the details of how the garden will do this first year, I’m pretty tentative in what I can offer anyway.  I’m more likely to bring whatever does well in my garden to the farmer’s market.  Committing to provide X pounds of tomatoes or potatoes or whatever, will have to wait at least one growing season, as I learn what grows well in my location/soil/water.  On the other hand, there are a dozen mature fruit trees in my yard, starting to bud out as I type.  I know most are apple, I know there’s at least one apricot, and I suspect at least one peach and one pear.  Soon as I can figure out what varieties they are, I can make at least a tentative offer to provide some of the harvest for any processor who needs those ingredients.

My other role in this project is that the lower fields at my house will be used by my friend KH, who plans for large garden beds.  Her aim is to provide produce for the cafe directly, plus for the farmer’s market, but it certainly includes providing ingredients for the processors.

There are so many things that might possibly go wrong, both in my yard and with this project in general, but I am so excited to see it being discussed and tried!  I think this is just the kind of conversation we need to be having now, so that when/if a time comes, next year or in several years, when this valley returns to being dependent on its local growers for most of its food, we’ll not be starting from zero coordination at that time.

Also, Growing Challenge update:  I started a few seeds from each of my items yesterday.  They’re on the kitchen windowsill, in the plastic tubs that I buy organic salad greens in from the market.  (Of course, once I’m growing my own salad greens, I’ll have to get my indoor starter containers elsewhere :)  There are lots of other garden items I want to try starting from seed too, but other than some catnip, I haven’t planted those seeds yet.

At R’s, I grew jerusalem artichokes in the garden.  I first grew them the year before last when a neighbor brought us some to try.  They grew fine, but never having eaten them before, I wasn’t sure how to use them.  So, I let them overwinter in the ground, finally harvesting them in spring as I was preparing the garden for the new growing season.  Immediately after harvesting, a last-minute week-long trip came up.  When we returned from the trip the ‘chokes had gone bad (even in the cool of the root cellar — I’d read that they don’t store well and they apparently don’t).  So I composted them, the same way we composted everything else at R’s — by burying them in a fallow garden bed.  Of course, that just meant that, later that spring, not only did some hidden unharvested ‘chokes sprout from the original garden bed, but the composted ones sprouted as well!  Double the yield!

Last week when I was at R’s getting another load of stuff from my storage shed, he gave me a plastic bucket with the ’chokes he’d just harvested, stored in sand.  I knew I should not expect them to last long, even stored in the sand like that.  So tonight, I tried a recipe I’d been meaning to for a while, one that had been mentioned last fall on the HealthyCheapCooking group.  Turned out yummy!

 Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

1 lb Jerusalem artichokes
1 tsp Lemon juice
1 md Onion, chopped
1 Tbs Olive oil
3 cups chicken broth
Salt and pepper
1 cup milk (or soymilk)
1/4 cup walnuts, toasted

Peel the artichokes. Cut them in half. Rub the cut halves with lemon juice and set side.

Chop the onion. Heat the olive oil. Add the artichokes and saute them, along with the onion, for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add the stock, salt and pepper. Bring the stock to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. When cooked, remove from heat and let cool.

Place soup in a blender in batches and puree until smooth. Return to a clean pot, add the soy milk and bring back to a boil. Serve in bowls, garnished with walnuts.
Makes 4 servings.

I doubled the recipe (though I didn’t realize until typing this that I forgot to double the stock part — I only used 3 cups, so the soup would have turned out somewhat thinner if I’d paid attention and doubled *all* the ingredients).  I estimated two pounds of artichokes:

After peeling and dunking in lemon juice:

End result:

Not sure why it looks almost pink in that photo — in actuality the soup was slightly green-tinged, almost like split pea soup.  Mostly a light brown caramel color, with that light greenish tinge.

I hadn’t especially liked the smells while it was cooking, so I was afraid I was going to dislike the taste of the soup.  But no fear, it was yummy!  It tasted very much like potato soup, with only the slightest of difference to my tongue.  The walnuts added a perfect flavor and bitterness (even though I used untoasted walnuts — I’ve not toasted walnuts before, and wasn’t sure if it was just as simple as putting them in the oven for a bit, but even if it *WAS* that simple, I wasn’t going to turn on the oven just for that).

I had one *big* bowl of the soup for dinner, with some good french bread and a salad.  And the leftover soup is enough only for a smaller bowl than what I had tonight.  So even with a bulked up recipe I still only got two hefty servings.  Maybe next time I’ll make 4x the recipe instead!

While I liked this enough that I will probably make it again, it *was* a lot of work.  I’m not really sure the ‘chokes needed to be peeled and dunked in lemon juice — that might have been just so the blended soup had a paler color — just like when potato recipes tell you to peel them, but it’s not really necessary and besides, the peel is good for you.  Certainly it would have been a *much* easier process to just scrub the chokes clean and perhaps slice off the rootlets.  But when I cook something for the very first time I tend to follow all the rules, just in case it really matters.  But I think for next time I might leave them unpeeled.  The blending and switching bowls was a  minor hassle — mainly the idea of getting two pots dirty was unappealing — but if I don’t mind a less homogenously-blended soup, I don’t see why you couldn’t blend and return each batch to the original bowl…

 Anyway, success in eating from the garden!

It’s been a busy several days and before I knew it it’d been nearly a week since I made a post.  I’ll try to recreate what’s been happening here.

MOVING — Last Monday was my first night in the new house.  I spent that day shuttling more things from the schoolhouse, with the last item, as always – the cat.  With a nearly loaded truck, just enough room left for him and his stuff, I put him in his carrier on the porch (finally, he gets to go outside!) for an hour or so while I loaded up his food, litter box, etc., and then swept out the schoolhouse and wiped down the bathroom and kitchen.

I got to the new house and drove into the garage using the handy-dandy electric garage door openers.  Sheesh, talk about non-Riotlike!  I need to ask the landlords if the doors can be opened manually!   But I have found a benefit to the garage — once the door is closed behind me, the garage becomes part of the house, where the animals have free reign.  I carried the cat/carrier into the mud room and opened the carrier door so Bear could start to explore.  The animals wandered around as I unloaded the truck and brought things inside the house.

DOG-FENCE — Although the house includes 40 acres with all sorts of fencing and cross-fencing, it was all fenced for horses or other large animals and would not have held back the dog.  So for several days, the dog was permitted outside only on a leash.  Poor Luna!  She doesn’t like to go potty on a leash, plus she just loves to run around, and she couldn’t!

Some local friends have a fence-building business, and they came out starting on Monday to build me a dog yard.  They had some complications at their house (plumbing emergencies) so it took a little longer than expected, but by Friday afternoon, we had this:

There’s the gate (the gap near the top of the gate will be covered with chicken wire, just in case she thinks she could jump through there), and in the background you can see the fence going up the hill.  That’s a shed on the right, and the fence goes around it and up the hill and across and back down to the house, which is off the photo on the left.  It’s a nice backyard for her, and I can only hope that she stays in it!  I’m a bit worried about when she sees deer, which are abundant here — she goes a bit crazy, and might just make it over (or under, by digging) the fence.  I may add an electric wire for just such circumstances.  Especially since I want to feel secure about leaving her there when I’m away working for eight or nine hours at a time.

WORK — I’ve taken in one freelance proofreading job at the moment, in addition to my usual local work.  It’s been a few weeks since I sent out some outreach letters for (mostly) nonlocal proofreading work, so I’m hoping I might hear back from some of them soon.  I’ve calculated that I need twelve hours per week of proofreading, at my lowest hourly rate, to cover my new expenses.

GARDEN — My garden this year will have two components — first, the orchard.  There are about a dozen trees in the yard here — mostly apple, a few apricot, and rumors of peach and maybe a pear.  I will just have to wait to see what they are!  My role now is to prune them (long overdue) and to see what grows.  Here’s the orchard with the huge house in the background:

And here’s the area that will be my garden (the lower terrace plus however much I want on the upper terrace):

First step there:  deer fence!  And, while it’s still far too early for outdoor planting (the soil was frozen and snow covered most of the yard as recently as last week), I do have room now for indoor starts.  And, I’ve decided to join Melinda’s Growing Challenge (see button over on the right), which involves growing from seed at least one new thing you’ve never grown before.  I haven’t decided what thing or things I will grow, but I have lots of seeds to choose from!

Also, another part of my garden project this year is my friend KH’s efforts in the other fields surrounding the house.  She’s planning on growing a huge garden using the hot well water (stay tuned for descriptions of how she’ll do that, and how well it works).  She’s considering establishing a small CSA, with clients getting a box of whatever’s ripe each week.  She’ll be providing the local restaurants with produce.  And, she’ll be bringing her produce to the local farmer’s market — in fact, she’s working with the manager of the local cafe to set up a second farmer’s market for the valley, one that will be right by the cafe, and not during the workweek.  (The current farmer’s market is 3:30-4:00pm on Fridays, in the hospital lawn which is not right downtown where the visitors usually pass by.)  While this is all KH’s project, I’m very interested in seeing how it works, and maybe working with her, and definitely adopting some of her ideas!

Okay, that’s enough for now — time for dinner and to get started on that proofreading…