GOT SMALL POTATOES?
November 4, 2008
I moved into the great “new” house ( what do you call a new home that is very old –70 years old – but is “new to you”?) last August.
We had found a bag of uneaten potatoes from last fall before the move…they were a wonderful mix of colorful heirloom varieties – mislaid from Brookside Farm 2008 Organic CSA basket in a dark corner of the garage… Now - almost a year later - .they had huge 8” long sprouts on almost all of them.
The idea came to put them in our garden beds…a bit of a challenge as these beds had not been worked for a few years and had compacted soil (and not much of it) …but, what to lose? We stuck them in the soil, covered them with straw and watered a few times a week. Ten weeks later, the tops had been blasted by frost and so we dug them up…what a nice surprise! A bucket of smallest potatoes I had ever seen were our first harvest in this potentially wonderful garden. Some of them were the size of my small fingernail…no matter, I tenderly washed them all and made this simple dish ( see photo) from them…
Recipe: Wash potaoes & steam to almost done, cool. Toss with olive oil, herbs, garlic and salt. Bake or broil until slightly crispy on top. Eat. Yum!
Anyone can grow these hardy crop, a famine food for many peoples, and certainly a calorie booster to any one’s veggie garden mix. I suggest we all learn to grow potatoes – very soon!!!
Localize your food supply, you can’t start soon enough.
Local Food Rant
May 19, 2008
Eating avos in winter? Lettuce in the heat of summer? Here’s the hard truth! We have gotten so off track on local food in just the last 30 years we don’t even realize what that means to our footprint.
~ I love world market foods, give me a Thai Green curry any day… But, let’s take a look at this addiction to variety, to exotic tastes…
In my childhood, (1960’s) hardly one had ever eaten an avocado or artichoke in the
This boredom was also unrelieved by hot new restaurants. Mostly people ate at home, in fact - they hardly ever ate out, except for church socials or community potlucks…this all a world from the past, from our rural heritage, and certainly a world that did not know what they missed…
Fast forward to today - where Trader Joe’s brings us Israeli cheese, Italian olive oil, and such things are very available in any corner market in the
Yikes - time to reassess. Can we find happiness chewing on locally grown potatoes, broccoli in season, waiting for the peaches to come ripe? This is what local food means - grown nearby and in season. Your CSA shows the way - they give you a basket of whatever is ripe and ready to harvest in the garden. Try the Farmers Market for a great selection of timely foods, picked recently and by people you get to talk to while you handle their life’s work! Either is a simple and fun way to begin eating local.
Even more directly connected is your own garden, imagine how much more local can you get – than a 20 foot away dinner rather than a 1500 mile dinner! Check out your own slow food connection as you eat tomatoes that you grew – right off the plant, now that is a 1” dinner….the most local of all…now if only I didn’t need my hands at all – how much closer can I get? Mmmmm, a no-hands lunch! Ok, I am over the top – but you get the point… if I eat that tomato, ripe from the sun , my mouth filled with its just picked sweetness, I have just lowered my carbon footprint by a a factor of a thousand. Yay team! Let’s eat the imports, with grace and appreciation for their amazing availability, occasionally – as befits such luxury. Here’s to your health…please pass the spinach!
Check out this site for a localization conversation-locallectual
Also the movie - The Real Dirt on Farmer John! 
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