Where have all the cheap eggs gone?

The Price of EGGS is crazy. It's hard to believe that eggs have gone up in price almost double it seems, just in the last 6 months.

Here's a cool sign at farmer's market enroute to Corvallis.

In the News

Rising Food costs affect Obesity in the Poor

Paradise Found
Oregon: Land of Milk and Honey


Flowers in Bloom This is someone's yard and it felt like heaven.


Ripe Veggies

Why I'm living in Oregon for the summer

For those of you who weren't aware, I just moved to Oregon for the summer. I'm going to stay until blackberry season at least and may stay longer or move to Portland if I can find that dream job (or one that will offer insurance and a steady paycheck... I'm a little tired of freelance writing).

A few things I love about this area:

It gets dark at night. I don't miss the artificial lights of the city. Tonight I hung my clothes by moonlight in my backyard (I know, they'll have dew all over them in the morning... but I'll take them off in the afternoon.)

I love the markets. There's this great little co-op that has 1200 local foods

a cool little buffet that has gourmet meals you can buy per pound, a bulk section and unusual local foods like dried seaweed



And my favorite new icecream called Coconut Bliss.

They seem to care more about the environment here. Many people bike everywhere. The air is clean and smells like lilacs, it's so refreshing. This co-op does some great sustainable things like have a composting bin onsite and a place where you can throw your plastic so it can be re-used I LOVE THIS.

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People are more carefree here

What I could live without
Sometimes, I must admit, the hippie thing does wear on me. Where did all of these people come from? Some guy yesterday was wearing a tie-dyed skirt and was playing a long-necked lute thing? What's that? A Sitar? Why does he play it and where did he get it? My roommate likes to call these people the term Trustafarians.

But I do like the fact that people can get away with walking around barefoot, wearing flower wreaths on their heads and talking about things like the fairies that live in their attics.



A couple at a folk festival in Eugene earlier today.


Below: A woman at the May Day festival at a Waldorf school. The school is situated between several farmer's markets along one of the back highways.


I can drive along a few routes and find farm-fresh produce. This market north of town.



I stopped here on the first day it was open and bought some artichokes, rhubarb, lettuce and radishes.

Store Wars. . . starring Cuke Skywalker and Obi One Canola
From free range studios

May the Farm be With You!

This has been around awhile, but it's the first time I've seen it!

Linda Colwell, Slow Food- Portland
What We've Lost - As Eaters
Did you know that 93 percent of North American food product diversity has been lost since 1900?



Linda Colwell recently spoke at a lecture in the Ag Sciences building in Corvallis Oregon. She's a chef, writer and consultant in food, farms, and school-garden education. She founded the Garden of Wonders school-garden project and the scratch kitchen at Abernethy Elementary School in Portland, Oregon. Check out an article she wrote in Culinate about garden education programs with public schools.

Notes from her lecture:
6 THINGS THAT WE'VE LOST:

#1. "We've lost our ability to walk into our yards or into a market and harvest things from a source that we know.... food that has integrity."

Linda says that we're trained culturally to cook with our noses in a cookbook rather than following our instincts, which she thinks is a shame. "We have a whole industry around cookbooks," She says, adding that people need to trust their instincts, get in touch with their senses and just rethink the meal. "Opening a CSA box (full of veggies and fruit) is no different than opening a cookbook."

#2. "We've lost our skill at being adventurous around flavors and being willing to let something unexpected happen on the table."

"A perfectly cooked egg is truly amazing especially if it's 36 hours fresh from the hen."


Linda Colwell and OSU professor James Cassidy.

#3. Linda said it's not that we've lost our ability to cook, but our ability to taste. "We don't know how to taste anymore"

She says that most of us have become deficient in a seasonal way and in a nutritional way.

#4."We've lost our ability to understand the nuances of fruits or vegetables through the seasons."

#5 We've lost the biodiversity of our food products.

Linda talked about something called the Ark of Taste, foods, that the Slow Food movement has identified are at risk of dying out including traditional sea salt from Hawaii, a marbled chinook salmon

and a fruit called a pawpaw that is the "largest edible fruit native to the US."


All photos taken of Deep Run Pawpaw Orchard, owned & managed by Jim Davis of Westminster, MD.

And according to the Slow Food USA site:

The fruit is indigenous to 26 states from northern Florida to Maine and west to Nebraska. Fossil records indicate that the papaw’s forebears established themselves in North America millions of years before the arrival of humans. American Indians extensively used the pawpaw and introduced it to European explorers. As a much loved fruit, European settlers named towns, creeks, and islands after the pawpaw. Today, pawpaws are primarily eaten in very rural areas, and most Americans only know of the fruit from the traditional folk song, "'Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch."

Slow Food's Ark of Taste aims to rediscover and catalogue forgotten flavors, documenting excellent food products that are in danger of disappearing. Since the international initiative began in 1996, more than 750 products from dozens of countries worldwide have been added to the international Ark of Taste. The Ark of Taste is a resource for those interested in learning about and reviving rare regional foods–from Buckeye chickens to Ivis White Cream sweet potatoes, Alaskan Birch syrup to Greanthread tea.

-Slow Food USA Website

#6 We've lost our integration with the land and our relationships to the food systems developed and practiced when we lived close to the land as indigenous people.

She spoke about foods that are still raised and harvested by cultures that still know how to live integrated with the earth like the Ozette potato that's still harvested today and has been for 300 years by the McCaw Indians.

A CHALLENGE:

This month, why not try to procure some of these food and cook a meal with them, or procure the seeds and plant them.

Anyone up for the challenge?? I'll let you know how my SLOW FOOD dinner goes as I revive some of these foods in a meal.

SLOW FOOD NITE: Oregon

My dinners have resumed in Oregon. Jen and I made spaghetti for a few friends.



Spaghetti:
A few things I love to add to spaghetti sauce:

1. Butter (everything is better with butter!)
2. Fresh olives (not the cheap canned one)
3. Fresh basil and oregano
4. Garden tomatoes (hand-crushed)
5. Balsamic vinegar

And it helps to listen to Miles Davis while cooking

Making Spaghetti using the "massage the tomato" method though some call it a desecration of the tomato, I feel it's the ONLY way to make fresh spaghetti sauce. If your tomatoes aren't ripe enough to smush, then maybe you ought to make some alfredo. Video requires you to turn your laptop on its side or krink your neck- sorry!



Speaking of upside down things (like my upside down video). . .

For dessert, I made a pineapple upside down cake and I made it all wrong, more like a Pineapple Inside Out Cake, but it was still pretty tasty. I also subbed the white sugar with raw sugar. I liked this recipe, it smelled and tasted like dutch oven cobbler.

I put the pineapples on the top accidently, then threw on the runny brown sugar, butter sauce over the top and realized the pineapples were supposed to be on the BOTTOM- whoops! To get it upside down your supposed to flip it AFTER you cook it.

Trying to remedy my mistake, I found another baking pan and flipped the cake upside down while still in the batter phase. My friend Todd called it a "Pineapple inside-out Cake." But I liked the effect of flipping it. What happened was that goey sweet carmel stuff ran not just on one side of the cake, but on the edges too, which made it even yummier.

I didn't cook it in a skillet as the recipe asked. Here's what it looked like. Not pretty, really, but tasty.



The pineapple was upside down twice.
First off, I bought the pineapple in Ashland at Harry and Davids. It was a wonderful juicy thing.

Fruit Tip:The guy in the produce told me to cut off the stems the day before I served it and turn it upside down in my fridge, that way all the fruit sugar would run down through the pineapple.

I used this recipe from Gourmet, Feb 2000

For topping
1/2 medium pineapple, peeled, quartered lengthwise, and cored
3/4 stick unsalted butter
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
For batter
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 to 3 teaspoons ground cardamom
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 stick unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon dark rum
1/2 cup unsweetened pineapple juice
2 tablespoons dark rum for sprinkling over cake
Special equipment: a well-seasoned 10-inch cast-iron skillet

Preheat oven to 350°F.
Make topping:
Cut pineapple crosswise into 3/8-inch-thick pieces. Melt butter in skillet. Add brown sugar and simmer over moderate heat, stirring, 4 minutes. Remove from heat. Arrange pineapple on top of sugar mixture in concentric circles, overlapping pieces slightly.

Make batter:
Sift together flour, cardamom, baking powder, and salt. Beat butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, then gradually beat in granulated sugar. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla and rum. Add half of flour mixture and beat on low speed just until blended. Beat in pineapple juice, then add remaining flour mixture, beating just until blended. (Batter may appear slightly curdled.)

Spoon batter over pineapple topping and spread evenly. Bake cake in middle of oven until golden and a tester comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Let cake stand in skillet 5 minutes. Invert a plate over skillet and invert cake onto plate (keeping plate and skillet firmly pressed together). Replace any pineapple stuck to bottom of skillet. Sprinkle rum over cake and cool on plate on a rack.

IN THE NEWS

How to Fight Global Warming at Dinner

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization REPORTS that the meat industry is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, through fertilizer use, animal manure and the energy required to transport food and meat.