Newsletter #19 – October 22, 2014

ANNOUNCEMENTS 

• Last COMMUNITY WORKDAY/SKILLSHARE of the season. THIS Saturday, October 25 – garlic planting, prepping high tunnel for spring planting, maybe assembling part of the timber frame.
• Extra produce available for sale for general sales.  We can deliver if you are in our delivery route:

red potatoes $1.75/pound

• The official final distribution day is October 29.  That means 2 more weeks. We want to extend the abundance of the season to you, so are offering an extra week of shares, November 5.  The cost is your standard weekly charge.  If you have contributed 5 hours of time to the farm this season then this extra week is on the house.
• Soul Fire handcrafted calendula-comfrey salve made with olive oil, beeswax and our own naturally grown herbs. Ample 4 ounce jars for only $9 (50% of retail). Show some love to your skin as autumn air advances. Free delivery with your CSA share on October 22 and 29. Order ahead. Limited availability.  Sign up form here.
• We are retiring our current 18 months old laying hens, and offering them at $5 per bird.
• Please read about our plans for Sabbatical next year in Newsletter #13, as we take the time to do some powerful reflection and development our organization, infrastructure and international networks of solidarity with farmers.
• Please RETURN YOUR BOXES.  You can leave them where you get your delivery. If you break them down, please make sure not to tear or bend any of the tabs, or just leave the assembled box for us and we are happy to break it down.
  
• WASHING YOUR VEGGIES.  We do not extensively wash veggies before delivering them to you.  We will do some washing if there is a lot of dirt on greens and we always rinse root crops.  In general, this allows the food to stay fresher longer.  It also means you need to wash your veggies before consuming them.  For greens: fill a bowl with cold water.  Soak greens in water for a minute.  Drain water and repeat two more times.  Dirt will rinse to the bottom.  Bugs should float to the top.
• All of our newsletters are archived on our website, along with lots more, including educational resources and more recipes.  Thanks!
  

Food Justice

I thought it appropriate as we round out the season, to share additional definitions of food sovereignty.  This is from By the Root, an occasional post from Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas

Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty is a term used around the world to call for food systems that are just, sustainable, and democratically governed by people and communities (not corporations). Food sovereignty is not a one-size-fits all approach, or a singularly defined demand. It is an expansive, and evolving vision that looks different in different communities. Six widely accepted principles of food sovereignty include: the right of everyone to healthy food; the valuing of all those involved in growing, harvesting, and processing food; putting providers and consumers at the center of decision making and rejecting policies that give power to remote and unaccountable corporations; local control over, and access to, land, water, and seeds; the honoring of local knowledge and skills; and working with nature and healing the planet.

The late Charity Hicks, from the Detroit Food Justice Task Force said, “Food sovereignty is talking about our quality of life. [It’s] the whole context of how we move from survival to ‘thrival’ culture. Food sovereignty is about ‘thrival’ culture.”

Recipe Story – Pickled Green Tomatoes

Read this beautiful story with recipe, even if you don’t plan to make it.  This week’s recipe is as much a recipe as it is a beautiful story, passing on cultural tradition. It comes from dear friend and shareholder Naomi Jaffe of her days growing up on her family’s farm in the Catskills.  You will be getting green tomatoes this week and next.

Classic kosher brine dill pickles, the kind you could get from the barrel for a nickel on the Lower East Side. Rivke, poking through the barrel, says to the pickle man, “How much is this pickle?” He says, “That one is a nickel.” Pokes around some more, “And how much is this little pickeleh?” “Only a nickeleh!”You make green tomato pickles exactly the same as the classic kosher cucumber dills. The first thing to remember is that a real Kosher dill has never seen a drop of vinegar. A brine pickle means it ferments in brine, period. The pickle barrel guys used to buy a pickling spice mix, and so did my father and my uncle, but as far as I can tell you can’t get a real kosher dill pickling spice mix any more. I went to look at pickling spice mixes in the supermarket and the co-op, and to my horror, I found they had CINNAMON as the first ingredient! So, we’ll have to make our own — we might have to buy a couple of things we don’t always keep around the house, and maybe I don’t know every secret ingredient that was in the bought mix, but mine came out a lot like my father’s anyway.

Ingredients: green tomatoes, chlorine-free water, 2 T. coarse salt, 2-3 cloves of garlic, 2 tsp. black peppercorns, 2 tsp. yellow mustard seeds, a large sprig of fresh dill, 2 bay leaves, 1 fresh or 2 dried cayenne peppers and if you can get it, a sprig of fennel. (It was the Soul Fire fennel and peppers that inspired me to dredge up the old recipe from the depths of my memory.) Some recipes say coriander seeds, they are probably right but I didn’t have any.

The most important thing is the brine. It does help to make it with coarse salt, either kosher or sea, but I didn’t have a chance to get any so I used table salt (papa and uncle being too long gone to turn over in their graves) and the pickles came out pretty good anyway, though a bit too salty because the proportions are different with a finer salt.

Let’s say we start conservatively, making only a quart of green tomato pickles, til we see how they come out. The tomatoes have to be REALLY GREEN, no blush at all, or they will turn to mush. Use a wide mouth quart jar, fill it about half full of chlorine-free water (any filtered drinking water or spring water) and put in 2 tablespoons of coarse salt or one tablespoon of non-iodine table salt, and shake it up with the lid on til the salt dissolves completely. Cut the tomatoes in quarters and stuff them into the jar quite tightly, leaving just a little bit of room on top. The brine should cover the tomatoes, it’s ok if some runs out. On top, stuff in the rest of the ingredients — garlic (whole cloves), peppercorns, mustard seed, bay leaves, dill, and optional fennel. If you have a fresh cayenne pepper, it will add to the fun, but a dried pepper or a few red pepper flakes are fine too. Stuff everything on top and down the sides, using just your fingers so as not to smash the tomatoes, put the lid on and shake it upside down a few times. Then TAKE THE LID OFF, pickles have to have air to ferment. The tomatoes should be stuffed in tightly enough so they can’t float up above the brine. Cover with a piece of cheesecloth or other light cloth secured with a string or rubber band, set it on the counter or a cool dry place and forget about it for four or five days, except if you think of it once or twice, take the cloth off, put the lid on, and turn the jar upside down very gently a couple of times. Don’t forget to take the lid off and put the cloth back on when you put it back to ferment some more. After 4-5 days you will have pretty good half-sours. After that you can put them in the refrigerator to slow the process down, or keep them out and just taste them day by day til they get good and sour or they are all eaten up. Papa and uncle did not refrigerate the pickles, but the unheated back room on the farm in the Catskills was pretty cold by September green tomato time.

The Catskills when I was a kid used to have a frost by the first day of school every year, which was always the day after Labor Day — no more. The growing season was not long enough, ever, to ripen tomatoes and Papa and Uncle insisted on growing them anyway, so the day before Labor Day dozens of green tomatoes were laid out on a long table, to be pickled (whole, not quartered like we just did) in big crocks, held down with slabs of board. Nobody touched them for a couple of weeks. Then we ate them right out of the crock, or brought jars of them up to the kitchen to eat with meals, for a couple of months.

If anyone tries this recipe, let me know how it comes out: naomi@nycap.rr.com

Es gezunter — eat in good health!

P.S. Papa lived to 94, Mama to 96, Uncle to 99, and Bubbie to 100, in case you were worried about them eating so much salt.

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