I was talking about the movie with a friend the other day and we were specifically talking about organic and bio-dynamically raised meat. I have to admit that this is something that I haven’t incorporated into my diet as much as I could/should. We usually order Bell and Evans or Murray’s chickens from our butcher, but have had some suspicions about the veracity of the being the real deal. (other butcher’s we’ve gotten them from have had Murray’s tags on the chickens and our butcher’s doesn’t) I bought an Eberly chicken, which Neil roasted on the bbq last night. It was flavorful and delicious. They come shrink-wrapped, so it’s impossible to substitute some factory-farmed chicken for one of theirs.

My friend mentioned a local bio-dynamic angus farm called Grazin’ Angus Acres. I am lucky enough that they come to my local farmer’s market every sunday. Below I put a blurb from their website that gives some information on why to eat grass-fed beef over corn-fed beef.

Ultimately it’s healthiest for you, the animals and the planet not to eat meat, but if that isn’t an option for you, switching to grass-fed is a much healthier and humane option.

Health Benefits of Eating Grass-Fed Beef:

Safety:  Because humans are omnivores, our stomachs are highly acidic. Meanwhile, the pH of grass-fed cattle is normal.  If Grass-Fed Black Angus happen to be carrying bacteria in their normal pH environment, our highly acidic stomach bath offers real protection.  Contrast that with corn-fed cattle…  Corn turns what is typically a normal pH environment into a highly acidic one.  Consequently, corn-fed cattle often require antibiotics in the feed to keep them from being sick, which generates its own set of concerns for human health.  Further, if corn-fed cattle carry bacteria (e.g. E-Coli) that is thriving in their now acidic environment, the acids in our stomachs offer little, or no, protection against it.

Omegas: Grass-fed meat has been shown to have a 60% + increase in omega-3 content, as well as a more favorable omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.  Both fatty acids are essential and must be obtained from food.  It is important to maintain a balance of omega-3 and omega-6 in our diets, as these two substances work together to promote health.  That balance is adversely affected when cattle are fed grain. Specifically, a grass-fed diet produces a 2:1 omega 6:3 ratio.  “Why should I care?” you ask…

Consider that omega-6 promotes inflammation, blood clotting, and tumor growth while omega-3 does the opposite.  Dietary experts estimate that current eating habits in America lead to an omega 6:3 ratio of about 20:1.  Grass-fed beef is a huge step in the right direction.

ProVitamin A / beta-carotene:  Beta-carotene is a fat-soluble vitamin &  antioxidant that is a safe dietary source of vitamin A.  Vitamin A is important to normal vision, bone growth, reproduction, cell division and cell differentiation.  Grass-fed beef has a 10-fold increase in beta-carotene levels vs. grain-fed.  Taking vitamin A supplements can be dangerously toxic – but, we can eat all the beta-carotene possible and the human body will only convert the amount needed to vitamin A.

Vitamin E / alpha-tocopherol:  Vitamin E is also a fat-soluble vitamin / antioxidant that protects cells from the effects of free radicals (which have been reported to contribute to cancer and cardiovascular disease development).  Grass-fed beef increases alpha-tocopherol levels three-fold vs. grain-fed beef.

Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA):  Numerous health benefits have been attributed to CLA including reduced carcinogenesis, atherosclerosis, onset of diabetes and body mass.  Grass-fed cattle have been shown to produce 2 to 3 times more CLA than grain-fed cattle.

IT’S NATURAL! Nature had it right all along.  The sun’s energy grows the grass that is harvested by the cattle that are harvested by us.  Grass-fed is how it was meant to be; it’s how our human construct was prepared to capture the nutritional value of meat.  The industrial machine – feeding cattle corn in confined areas - has destroyed what nature intended.

Begin to enjoy the benefits of local Grass-Fed Black Angus today!

I keep taking photos of the beautiful tomatoes I’ve been getting from my garden. I said taking photos, not posting photos. Argh. I’m so behind on sorting through my photos!! I was lucky not to have the tomato blight that wiped out so many people’s crops. I bought a 6-pack of heirloom tomato seedlings this spring, but the names weren’t identified, so I don’t know what they are. I know the ones on the right are green zebra tomatoes, but the beautiful persimmon-colored ones are a mystery. I want to find out because they were absolutely sweet and delicious. The little cherry ones were so sweet, it was like candy from nature.

We’ve been getting shorter days (sob) and cooler nights, so the days of tomatoes are coming to an end. I have basil that needs to be cut and turned into pesto and lemon verbena that I have some ideas for. I planted some salad greens (a mesclun mix, mache and spinach), which are already coming up, so I don’t feel as though my garden has come to an end. I love the weather at this time of year, but it always brings a bit of melancholy with the shortening days and the approach of the winter cold.

Last Saturday after going to the Greenpoint Food Market, we drove to the Bronx to go to a chicken meet up group being held on the Waterpod. KayCee Wimbush of Awesome Farm in Tivoli, NY came to talk about basic chicken keeping. Her farm pasture-raises chickens and lambs and are committed to taking care of both their animals and the land. While I knew most of the basic information, she did talk about alternatives to chicken feed.

In an attempt to reduce their feed costs and do some recycling, they gathered food scraps from local restaurants. Chickens are omnivores, or miniature goats as I like to call them, so they eat practically everything. Her solution was a win-win in that her chickens were getting high-quality food, she was saving money and the food wasn’t going to a landfill. I guess that’s a win-win-win. Anyway, these things always turn out too good to be true and they found out that what they were doing was illegal. Turns out there’s a law against feeding post-consumer food to agricultural animals. I’m sure I’m not quoting the law correctly, but it’s a way to prevent farmers from feeding ground up animals to their livestock, which can lead to many nasty diseases such as mad cow. Anyway, while it was a great idea, they had to stop.

If you are in NYC in the next 2 weeks, you should try and visit the Waterpod project. They are a self-sufficient floating farm. They incorporate many interesting ideas for farming, such as vertical farming, mobile farming, recycling graywater, etc. They are showcasing a new type of farming in a time of global warming and overpopulation. If land is too scarce, you can farm on a big barge. They are open to the public for tours and host performances and discussions. They were a great venue for our meeting and even have a few hens onboard.

We had our meet up under one of their domes. All of the materials have been gathered from salvaged parts. The dome was covered with billboard material (is it fabric, paper??). You can see a watch ad behind Owen, who’s the organizer of our meet up group. If you can’t visit the waterpod, check out their website at the link above. It’s a very interesting project and definitely applies to urban gardening.

Right around lunch time we headed over to the Greenpoint Food Market in Brooklyn. The market is inspired by all foods fresh and local, artisanal and homemade and encourages community involvement and DIY methods of food production. Sounded great, plus our friend Megan of Brooklyn Honey was going to be there and we hadn’t tasted her honey yet. Megan keeps bees on her roof in Brooklyn. She gardens and recently got chickens. Plus, who can look as cute as she does in overalls!?!

Our timing was great, because we were getting hungry and the food looked amazing. Our first stop was, of course, to see Megan. She sells honey that is still in the wax comb. It’s a totally different honey eating experience because once you taste the honey, you can chew on the wax like gum. She had other products made with her honey including nuts and the most delicious granola ever! I’ve tried making granola a couple of times and it is always the same recipe. “Bake the granola until it’s dark brown, then throw it in the trash and try not to think about how wasteful that was”

Soup from The Soup Spoon

We got soup from the very sweet ladies at The Soup Spoon. We shared a delicious gazpacho and a curried cauliflower puree. It was a drizzly day, so there was nothing better! I usually make gazpacho a few times during the summer, which is Neil’s favorite soup. Neil got cheated out of it this summer as I never got around to making it. Theirs was chunky and tangy and delicious, so Neil was very happy. They are looking to get a food truck, so keep an eye out for them.

We also had yummy kimchi pancakes, cookies and cinnamony mandelbrot. There was so much more to try – like the most beautifully decorated cookies from Sugarbuilt. Take a peek at their website to see what I mean. You need to scroll to see the different designs. Their Day of the Dead faces are amazing. I also love the architectural details they incorporate into their designs.

If you live in the area, I recommend going. It is going to be held every Saturday from 12-6. You can get more info on their site.

Seriously, where else are you going to get delicious food from fabulous Brooklynites? She’s selling angel food cupcakes and deviled eggs.

Greenpoint Food Market launches THIS SATURDAY Sept 12^th from Noon to 6pm!

This is the final segment of my anniversary/local food combo platter, which now takes us to Monterey in the Berkshires. In my previous post I mentioned that the chef at Blue Hill Restaurant (Dan Barber) gets his amazing ingredients in part from Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Blue Hill Farm was bought by Barber’s grandmother and has been in his family for 3 generations. They now have farmer Sean Stanton managing the farm, which has turned into a wonderful collaboration with Barber. Stanton works with Barber to obtain the tastiest milk, eggs and meat.

Neil and I figured that Blue Hill Farm was probably on Blue Hill Road. Duh. I emailed Stanton and asked if we could come out and visit the farm and he gave us the go-ahead. Interns (and fiancés) Daniel and Allison were getting the cows ready for milking when we got there, so we took a little stroll to see the chickens. They have 200+ laying hens that are the most free-ranged hens I’ve ever seen.

laying hens free-ranging

Chicken tractor

We then went to see the meat birds. They are in a chicken tractor, which is an enclosed run that is light enough to be pulled over different parts of the field. They rotate their cows to a new pasture every 12 hours. Then the chickens come in and do what chickens love best…pecking and scratching around for bugs. They pick through the cow patties and find nice juicy fly larvae. Yum. The chickens are fat and happy and there are fewer pests flying around the farm. Chickens also love to eat grass, so they are happiest outdoors.

The farm was absolutely picturesque. There were green rolling hills, a beautiful barn, happy animals grazing and bunnies romping around. We headed up to the milking barn, where Allison was handling the milking. Daniel filled a suck-bucket (this is a new term for me and I love how awful it sounds!) with fresh milk for the calves. The calves are raised for veal, and again I couldn’t help but notice how much better their lives are on this farm than on factory farms. They are outside eating grass and drinking milk, which is a far cry from the dark, veal pens one usually hears about.

Calves drinking from suck bucket

Lindsay really enjoyed watching the milking and learned a lot about the cows. They sell some of their fresh, raw milk right at the farm. It’s in a fridge with a metal box to drop money into. I am excited about a source of raw milk, because I want to work on making cheese this fall and winter.

So we went from Blue Hill restaurant for our anniversary to Stone Barns and now to Blue Hill Farm. So where is Blue Hill Farm? It’s right across from Beartown State forest, which is where Neil and I got engaged. How appropriate.

We had a very nice waiter who was able to answer a lot of our questions about what farms supply them, etc. They partner with two farms in particular. Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Wait, did someone say the Berkshires?? It turns out that Blue Hill Farm, which was Dan Barber’s (the chef at Blue Hill restaurant) grandmother’s farm, is very close to Neil’s parent’s house. We decided that the next time we went up, we would try and track the farm down.

In the meantime, we decided to go to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture the day after our fabulous meal. We packed Lindsay up after her sleepover and drove up to Tarrytown, NY. Stone Barns is set on 80 acres of gardens, pastures and woods. The mission of Stone Barns, as they say, is to celebrate, teach and advance community-based food production and enjoyment, from farm to classroom to table. We had fun in their impressive greenhouse finding some of the items in our meal from the night before. The different beds made a patchwork quilt effect.

We wandered through the fields and woods to see their animals. The animals were kept in very spacious areas, and you could see that they move them around to different pastures often. They used portable electric fences that were powered car batteries. There were quite a few pigs that were in the woodsy area doing the things that pigs love best; sunning themselves, sleeping and rolling in the mud. The word transparency kept coming to mind. This operation was beautiful, productive and offered the animals a very nice life. I guess it’s weird to say they have a nice life when they are meat animals, but it is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from feedlots.

They even have a big composting area. They compost everything from the farm and the on-site restaurant. There were machines that looked as though they chop everything up into smallish pieces and then lay them out into windrows (long piles of compost). The windrows were covered to keep in the moisture. I read that they were interested inharnessing the heat that the compost produced as a way to heat the greenhouse in the winter, and worked to implement a compost heating system. I love this place!!

It felt as though we were walking through a botanic garden as we toured the grounds. After we passed the laying hens out in their enormous field, we came across their bee hives. I am fascinated with honey bees right now, and have a friend who keeps bees in Brooklyn and sells her honey. I’m still too chicken to make the leap into beekeeping!

I’ve always been curious to try hunting for wild honey. That entails watching the direction bees fly from the flowers they are pollinating and triangulating the path back to their hives, which are often in a hollow tree. I don’t have much opportunity to do that in NYC and I haven’t found a cohort. Plus I think you need to destroy the hive to harvest the honey and I wouldn’t want to do that. Can you imagine thousands of really pissed off bees with no home? Okay, so I like the idea of hunting honey, but not the reality. So when I saw bees (or possibly wasps) flying into a tree during our walk I was really excited. That could be my elusive honey tree!!

At the end of our visit, we had a snack in their little café and peeked into the Blue Hill restaurant up there. It was a fun escape from the city on a gorgeous summer day.

This is the first year that I grew beans and that’s been a big success. I have a lot of light, but it travels between buildings, so technically I’m partly sunny.

It’s been very cold and rainy, which has helped extend the season of the greens. It has wreaked havoc on my basil because we seem to have a bumper crop of baby slugs. So the basil looks like swiss cheese. I pinched it back and already the new leaves look much better. Plus we’ve been having sun, so that should help as well. If I need to I will either put out some beer to lure the slugs or sprinkle some diatomaceous earth around the plants. The DE is made of tiny diatoms, which nick the slimey surface of the slugs and causes them to die. I think I’ll start with the beer though (if I can wrestle it away from my husband). I think the DE might harm the earthworms, which I really don’t want.

I have loads of tomatoes, so it will be interesting to see how they do. So far they look beautiful. I can’t wait for real tasting tomatoes!!!

A friend just sent me a great website called fallen fruit. Public Fruit is the concept behind Fallen Fruit, which is an activist art project that aims to map all public fruit trees around the world. They are based out of CA, so most of the mapping is there. When you go to their website there is a pull-down menu. Go to the maps and then click on the interactive online map. What is considered “public fruit” is fruit on or overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots. I think I would be respectful of a tree that is obviously in someone’s yard, but otherwise I think the concept is great. Why plant ornamental trees that aren’t even native species, when you could feed hungry people and wildlife?

In addition to mapping fruit trees, they are planning fruit parks in under-utilized areas. 

I love this idea and think that everyone should spread the word and add pin points onto their interactive fruit map.