Endangered foods

Endangered species have come out of the woods and onto the table.

No, people aren’t eating piping plovers or eastern pumas. At least no one I know. But people also aren’t eating a lot of the vegetables our grandparents ate … because they don’t exist any more. Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland and the rest of Big Food have eliminated hundreds of thousands of heirloom seeds and plants.

Factory farms select their vegetable varieties based on one thing: shipability.  Say, the ability of a tasteless tomato to look good at Giant after it’s traveled 3,000 miles.

Working to reverse that are

Current Events

Time to celebrate spring greens and spring lamb

By CURTIS VREELAND

Slow Food Harrisburg is hosting its Meet the Producers Slow Supper, Spring Tonic, celebrating the birth of the year. This dinner will be a cuisine du marché — market cooking — selecting the freshest local greens available the day of the dinner and pairing with locally raised natural lamb.

This Slow Supper will feature products from Creekside Nursery (Marysville), Lancaster Farm Fresh Organic Cooperative (Lancaster County) and Blue Rooster Farm (East Waterford), and give you a chance to talk to the farmers involved.

The dinner is a collaboration of guest chef Drew Wandishin, the PA Preferred Best Chef of Pennsylvania, and two chef educators from the culinary program at HACC, Michael Finch and Jim Switzenberg.

It is scheduled for …

Chefs who blog

Michael Ruhlman did a great post on chefs who blog, with a bunch of links and a link to more.

I’ve wanted to put a list of chef blogs in the right column of this page for ages but a number of posts and articles about chefs who write have forced me off the couch. Mario and other chefs have decried blogs, viewed them with scorn at best (mainly chefs who own restaurants maligned by bloggers or commenters, often anonymously, a practice I find pathetic and regrettable and I hope short-lived). It’s an understandable response to this new anarchy. But what about chefs themselves who’ve embraced this new medium, whether by blogging or by reading and responding to blogs? It’s exciting.

Indeed. Especially because Ruhlman links to Andrew Little, a Hanover chef who writes Fresh Inspirations From Central Pennsylvania.

Professional cheese tasting

The Pennsylvania Farmstead and Artisan Cheese Alliance is offering a cheese tasting at 5:30 on Thursday, April 3, to chefs and restaurant owners.

If you’ve never tasted Dragon’s Breath or Ewe’s Dream or the other artisan cheeses made around here, it’s worth the trip to Carlisle. The event is not open to the public, only to people in the business.

Call Sandy Miller at 423-5663 or email her here for details.

Pastured beef

We got a happy surprise at the Carlisle Market on Saturday. Jonas Stoltzfus of Jujo Acres Beef Farm had set up next to Sandy Miller of Painted Hand Farm and the Fishers of Otterbein Acres Farm.

So within ten steps there was all the free-range grass-fed organic beef, lamb, pigs, goats and chickens — and eggs — imaginable.

I asked Jonas if he was going to be at Carlisle regularly; he said he was thinking about it. Then he gave us some of his wife’s beef vegetable soup and we talked about their beef. They raise heirloom Limousin cattle at the northern end of Perry County, up past Loysville, and distribute it at dropoff points in the Harrisburg area.

Christian Ruzich emailed me a month ago about their beef and he said he also gets eggs from them.

You can ask for a price list from the Stoltzfuses here.

Farm restaurants and brewpubs

This was a comment by Pubcrawler that I thought I’d steal:

In response to the Good Life Cafe being “the one and only local farm restaurant” and, “It may be the only one in Pennsylvania,” let me tell you about Elk Creek Cafe + Aleworks in Millheim, PA and Emma’s Food for Life in Selinsgrove, PA.

I really love the Good Life, and when I first visited, it reminded me so much of a “Happy Valley” brewpub with the same focus. At Elk Creek, award-winning brewer Tim Yarrington is brewing fresh, local beer (although I doubt the ingredients are all local), the decor highlights local artists, they invite local musicians to perform, the bar stools were created by local artisans, but most importantly, Elk Creek Cafe + Aleworks is supporting sustainable small local farms and businesses.

Two of the suppliers are Tait Farm Foods and Gemelli Bakery (in State College). Meat and fish come from many sources, one of which is Over the Moon Farm; I’m pretty certain they use Cow-a-Hen Farm in Mifflinburg and the Elk Creek Fish Hatchery. And I’m sure the cheese is local - I just don’t know where it comes from.

Apparently Elk Creek is so dedicated to the environment that they’ve installed waterless urinals (I wouldn’t know for a fact - I just read about it.)

In terms of brewepubs, three others to check out that also focus HEAVILY on local and/or organic foods are Selin’s Grove Brewing Company (Selinsgrove), Bullfrog Brewery (Williamsport) and Otto’s Brewpub (State College.)

In Selinsgrove, Emma’s Food for Life features Whitefrost Farms (Washingtonville) and other community supported agriculture.

The Harrisburg area could certainly use more restaurants focusing on fresh, local ingredients. The BLUE Bistro & Wine Bar stated in a recent newsletter that, under chef Pippa Calland, it is leaning that way; “We are interested in bringing in fresh products from small producers. We are interested in sustainable products that not only support the environment but also support us as beings.”

Kitchen School

Four guys will graduate from The Kitchen School tonight — four guys “who have overcome roadblocks ranging from fear to felony,” according to Maureen Romanowski of CHANNELS Food Rescue

CHANNELS operates the 12-week culinary arts job-training program for low-income, disadvantaged adults in the Harrisburg area. It is an amazing, turn-your-life-around idea, run by Chef Michael DeMarco. Sure, it’s about jobs, income, professionalism, self-respect, discipline, all of that.

But in the nicest way, it’s about food and cooking.

Students learn their craft cooking for the Kids Cafe, a free meal service for children who come to Camp Curtin YMCA after school.

Turning a bag of groceries into a meal — whether it’s from Giant or Sysco — is seriously undervalued in our time. Darnell Foster, Anthony Jacobs, Gary Taylor and Vaughn Torrence are bringing it back, a little, giving proper value to a skill most people ignore.

And they’re talking value from it for their own lives.

For more information or applications to The Kitchen School, call CHANNELS at 612-1300. And if you missed it, here’s how Mary Klaus of the P-N saw The Kitchen School when she visited several weeks ago:

PREPARATION — Ex-offenders find job prospects, new attitudes toward life through cooking schoolBy MARY KLAUS

With the confidence of an experienced chef, Vaughn Torrence grabbed a long-handled skillet from the stove and flipped over a chicken breast as easily as he turns …

Buying local beef

This is the guide to buying local, grass-fed beef that was supposed to run with Sue’s story on PennLive.

Chapel-Ridge Farm, 680 Barlow-Greenmount Road, Gettysburg, 334-4222
or 334-5684, www.chapel-ridge.com. All-natural beef raised, sold at
Chapel Ridge Meat & Mercantile store 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays or by
appointment.

Landisdale Farm, 838 Ono Road, Jonestown, Lebanon County, 865-6220:
Grass-fed beef available at the farm by appointment.

Lil’ Ponderosa Enterprises, 44 Ponderosa Road, Carlisle, 245-2820.
Purebred Black Angus cattle raised on all-grass diet available
frozen on farm by appointment.

Natural Acres Farm, 175 Maple Drive, Millersburg, 692-1000. Certified organic since 1999, selling Black Angus organic beef and all-natural beef from farm store open 9:30
a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday.

Tuscarora Lowlines, 409 Mountain Road, Millerstown, 589-7483. Grass-fed beef available by appointment.

Wil AR Farms, 76 Parker Road, Newville, 776-6552. Grass-fed beef

Beef on grass

Sue Gleiter Food Writer took a good look today at local grass-fed beef in the P-N.

“I very emphatically try and get people to grasp the concept, you are what you eat, and more importantly, you are what your animals eat,” Lil’ Ponderosa Enterprises owner Bob Boyce told Sue.

“People don’t get that linkage anymore. People think a cow is a square box in the grocery store. We have removed the people’s contact with the land that they have no concept of how things grow.”

2 for You

May 2, that is … just for you. You would look mahvelous, dahling, with your plate full of organic spring greens from Lancaster Farm Fresh and grass-fed lamb prepared by Drew Wandishin, the PA Preferred Best Chef of Pennsylvania. Wandishin is executive chef at Top of the 80s in Hazelton.

At the Farm Show in January, he won the Iron Chef competition with venison and raspberry sauce, and a tarragon-infused tofu with balsamic vinaigrette. Wandishin is a graduate of Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island and opened The Terrace Cafe in Hazleton in 1991. In 1994 he became exec chef at Top of The 80’s, and five years ago began hosting his own local cooking show, which you can see here.

For tickets and information on the May 2 dinner, email Slow Food Harrisburg.

(Our Slow Supper in January sold out in about four days. There are only 100 tickets for this one.)