Book Review: Food Inc

This book is called "a participant guide" to the movie Food Inc. and it is a collection of essays on the topics that the movie addresses. The essays are from a variety of authors and organizations and the topics go from food safety to the exploitation of farmers workers, from the effects of pesticide poisoning to a study of the ethanol policy of the government. What I liked the most about it is that every article ended with some idea or resource on what to do to improve the situation, to get more informed, to change the way things are. Also every topic was always covered by at least two different articles, so that two points of view were given on any given topic. It is a big eye opener and also a pleasant read, one that makes you think and makes you want to know more and do more. I definitely recommend this book, it will change the way you look at a supermarket, I guarantee it.

Our CSA experience - fifth box

This week from the CSA:
- Fennel
- parsley
- Lots of tomatoes
- fresh onion
- Italian beans
I haven't tried the beans yet, I wonder why they call them Italian anyway. We are very happy of the abundance of tomatoes and zucchini. I am canning as much sauce as I can but we alway end up eating most of it fresh, it is just too good! The fennel is still disappointingly small.

Our CSA experience -fourth box

This week from the CSA
- fennel
- onion
- kohlrabi ( we always get one!)
- basil
- arugula
- 7 tomatoes
- cucumber
I have to admit I was pretty disappointed by the fennel. I am used to nice big bulbs, which is the edible part, while these fennels seemed to have only leaves and very small bulbs, thus occupying most of our box while giving us close to nothing to eat. I know I could have used the leaf for tea, but being this hot out you don't really feel like a warm tea. The tomatoes instead where a nice surprise. By looking at them they didn't seem like very good sauce tomatoes, because I usually prefer the elongated ones, with more pulp and less seeds and water, but I have to say they compensated in flavor! I think I never had such a good tasting tomato sauce!

Our CSA experience - third box

In our third box from the CSA farm we got:
- beets
- our first tomatoes!
- fresh basil
- chard
- red cabbage
- salad
- walla walla onions
- kohlrabi
- eggs
- 1 zucchini
I tried roasting the beets, as many people had told me that was the best way to have them, and even though I have to say they were good, it seemed like way too much work and heat for a few beets, maybe if I had roasted them with something else it would have been different.

With the chard I made an awesome pie, I took the recipe from Martha Stewart's website and I have to say it was really tasty and pretty to look at. Definitely a good way to prepare any leafy vegetable, a great variation would probably be with spinach and ricotta, like we do in Italy.

Our CSA experience - visit to the farm

Freedom Organix - vegetable patch

A couple of weeks ago we visited our CSA farm, FreedomOrganix. The farm is located right out of Harvard, so for us it is about a 40 minutes drive from home. Harvard is still a very rural town where farming is the biggest source of income. Judging by the look of the downtown it probably saw better days and the recession must be hitting it pretty hard. It is also known for its "Milk days" a festival that honors the fact that dairy farming is big in the area. In fact we passed by a Dean's milk plant, but we didn't see too many cows around, a testimony to the fact that the cows are probably mostly kept indoors in big plant-like facilities. What we do see is field after field of corn and soy, each one with their little sign specifying that those fields are planted with such and such genetically modified kind of seed whose patent therefore belongs to such and such firm. I used not to notice those, now I see them everywhere and it is kind of scary to think of what they mean.
When we got to the farm we were greeted by a menacing dog, and the farmer, Cindy Nawiesniak, yelling at us to get back in the car until she locked the dog. It was kind of a scary beginning, but that's how farm dogs are, after all they have to defend the cattle and animals from intruders. Things got better right away though, Cindy was very friendly and talkative and enjoyed showing us around. We met the chickens that make our eggs every week and some other chickens that she "boards" for some restaurant. I have to admit these last ones didn't look particularly good, as they were losing their feathers, but she said it was normal. The chickens live in a pen that is moved around periodically. Around the pen there is an electrified fence to keep predators away.

 Apparently that doesn't deter some owl who keeps attacking and decapitating the chickens through the pen, and I thought owls only ate mice and snakes! She also has cows, and she sells the meat by the quarter, a little too much for our small family, but who knows, maybe in the future it would be an interesting way to buy meat and just freeze it and keep it, it would definitely be cheaper than buying it at the farmers market every week. She had a lot of calves who were very cute and she seemed very fond of them too. We saw all our future vegetables, including lots of potatoes and tomatoes and a lot of fennel apparently, and we found out that for some reason she is not very fond of zucchini (too bad because we love zucchini!)I think the reason is that it invades too much of the space of other plants. Our son was probably too young to appreciate any of this, although he enjoyed seeing the chickens, but I think it is going to be great to bring him there every year and make him realize that that is where his food ( or most of it) comes from.

Cindy talked to us about how she grew up in her grandparents farm, and how she felt the connection, how she had milk right out of a cow and ate fruit right off a tree branch and found unbelievable that kids nowadays don't make this connection with  the source of their food anymore. I think adults don't make that connection either, many of my friends will admit candidly that they don't want to know where their food is from, that they don't want to remember that it was once an animal, or something covered in dirt. People like prepackaged, sterile, unidentifiable foods, and that way get fooled by the industrial food system that sells them corn shaped into a hundred different things, and they are happy with it. Maybe if we knew what a chicken really looks like we would realize that a chicken breast CAN'T be that big, or if we knew what a fresh tomato tastes like we wouldn't buy those artificially ripened tasteless things they call tomatoes in the store.

Nature's Cornucopia in Mchenry,IL

I visited this store because of the large sign on the window that says "health food store" and because many websites related to organic products would direct me to it as a place that would be stocked with a variety of organic products. I was initially a little disappointed because most of the store seems to be actually dedicated to vitamins, herbs and other forms of holistic cures, which is something I am not very interested about. I wish they wouldn't mix the vitamin store with the food store, I think that taking so many integrators sort of contrasts with the idea of eating healthy and getting the best out of food, a sort of shortcut  that does not replace at all a varied and rich diet. There are contrasting opinions on the effectiveness of taking supplements, I don't think it is necessarily bad, but at the same time I don't appreciate how some of these products are advertised as some sort of "cure-all" for your problems. They have for example a nutrition consultant on site that for 95$ will give you a consult and prescribe the supplements that you need. It seems to me that a nutritionist should be recommending you a better diet first, supplements last. And the fact that he would recommend you the supplements in a store like this seems to me more like a way of selling more than a real doctor consultation.

 At the back of the store I found more food products: they have a large selection of gluten-free foods, including quinoa and buckwheat cereals, that I decided to try. I am sure I will also try some of their gluten-free flours once I get the bread machine. They have some frozen products, some of them gluten-free, others organic, including organic meats. I bought the chicken sausages, but they come from the the New York state, so they are definitely not a local product. They have slices of american cheese from the brand Horizon Organic, and another couple of cheeses that unfortunately are not organic. They also have some unusual finds like goat milk yogurt and many things from tofu dedicated to vegan eaters. The prices were quite steep, as expected, and I think I will only be going back for some of the most unusual products that I know I would not find elsewhere. I definitely did not like the vibe of the place, that seemed like a little bit of a mash of everything related to the adjectives "natural" and "healthy" that are so liberally and so mistakenly spread around to market so many different kinds of things.

Product Review: Organic Chicken from R-Family farm

Normally sized Chicken Breasts from R-family farm

Last week we bought a whole cut-up chicken from R-Family farm at the Woodstock Farmers'market. They had just killed them the day before the market, so you definitely cannot go any fresher than that! It has to be said that at 4.50 a pound it is much more expensive than any chicken you will buy at the store, but we are trying to reduce the amount of meat we eat per week, plus I could use the chicken to prepare three different dishes, thus making it last a little longer. Looking to other prices online it seems like it wasn't even that expensive for organic chicken, as I have seen some websites listing 6-8 dollars a pound.

I oven roasted the breasts, the wings and the legs, simply adding salt and pepper to them. Since I left the skin on while cooking I didn't even have to add any oil, but just a little bit of broth at the bottom of the pan as they were drying out a little too much. One thing I have noticed immediately is that usually chicken releases a lot of water and fat while roasting while this didn't have almost any. The result was crispy and full of flavor, which is what struck us the most: we are used to a pretty tasteless chicken, except from the taste of the herbs and spices that we add to it, while this chicken had a taste of its own. The meat was firm and juicy and did not fall off the bone as easily as a store bought chicken. 

With the back and the neck of the chicken I made a chicken broth that we ate the following day with tortellini, while I used the meat, together with some leftover breast, to make baby food for my son. We still have the chicken liver and I plan to make with it an Italian specialty, Risotto ai Fegatini,  that I hope my husband, the picky american, will accept to eat. I think that using all the parts of the animals is a way to respect the fact that we took their life, at least we are making the most out of it and not just discarding it and throwing it away.
I am posting a pictureof the chicken breasts because I wanted to show how much smaller they were in size compared to the gigantic breasts we find at the supermarket, but unfortunately I didn't put anything to the side to compare them with, so it is hard to tell. I will have to take a better picture next time.