http://www.nwfoodnews.com Food and agricultural stories from the Northwest Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:01:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Northwest Food News is all about food and agriculture in the inland Northwest. It includes the NPR series Edible Idaho, the new series Northwest Food News, as well as on-line farmers\' market reports from the region and more. Food and agricultural stories from the Northwest Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/nwf_pod_graphic.pnghttp://www.nwfoodnews.com Edible Idaho, food, agriculture, food news, locavore, localvore, sustainable agriculture, Northwest, farms, markets, restaurants, no Guy Hand guyhand@nwfoodnews.com http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2012/01/04/the-year-of-idaho-food-wraps-up/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2012/01/04/the-year-of-idaho-food-wraps-up/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:00:29 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=7087 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2012/01/04/the-year-of-idaho-food-wraps-up/feed/ 0 If Janie Burns and Amy Hutchinson hadn’t organized the project called “2011: The Year of Idaho Food,” I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to spend the last 12 months sipping gin at 8:30 in the morning (well, once), foraging for stinging nettles in the forests of McCall, riding in a big-ass wheat combine on the Palouse, sampling more fermented foods than I thought humanly possible (or medically prudent), eating goat five ways, jet boating down the Salmon in search of pioneer apples and sifting through the sands of the Snake River for a lunch of fresh-water mussels (not recommended). And that’s just for starters. Still, my weekly collaboration with the Boise Weekly and Boise State Public Radio to write food and farming stories under the Year of Idaho Food banner was just one feature of the project’s broader agenda. Year of Idaho Food co-founder Janie Burns. “The Year of Idaho Food was envisioned as a means of engaging the public to think about their food,” local food advocate Janie Burns said of the statewide project she and Hutchinson dreamt up in March of 2010 while “Amy and I were trapped in a car for six hours, traveling back from Moscow where we’d both been at a food conference.” The two women wanted to create what Hutchinson called “a virtual table” where Idahoans who normally didn’t have an opportunity to express their interest in food and agriculture could gather and publicly share their food and farming stories via a Year of Idaho Food website. Burns and Hutchinson also wanted to organize actual on-the-ground events and encourage participants to organize their own events so people could meet face to face, all under the egalitarian banner of the Year of Idaho Food. “A lot of people think about food and the issues surrounding it,” Burns said, “but they’ve never had the opportunity or been empowered to do anything. So we hoped that this would be some kind of organizing principle that would allow people to do something that they might not have had the courage to do otherwise.” In January 2011, Idahoans from around the state began submitting their Year of Idaho Food stories to Northwest Food News (a web site I administer). The first, from Michele Murphree in Sandpoint, detailed Bonner County’s progress in creating school gardens. Over the year, stories included lessons shared by an accidental chicken rancher, a child’s fascination with tractors, an ode to sorrel, raised garden beds built from actual beds and a full-on, Idaho grown Thanksgiving. Some participants used the website to post multiple entries. Melissa Frazier, for instance, took the opportunity to begin cataloguing the state’s growing number of community gardens, a project she plans to continue on the Northwest Food News site into 2012. Casey O’Leary wrote several stories about the numerous epiphanies she’s experienced while working on her urban farm, Earthly Delights, and also plans to continue submitting stories. Year of Idaho Food co-founder Amy Hutchinson. Along with the 50 written submissions that the Year of Idaho Food posted, co-founder Amy Hutchinson, who also founded the Boise Urban Garden School (BUGS), said she was pleased to see how quickly participants put together their own grass-roots projects. “In addition to potlucks and different neighborhood gathers,” Hutchinson said, “there are now newsletters, a compilation of titles about books about gardening and food; there have been baby and bridal showers that have focused on local food as well as discussions and book clubs.” Hutchinson said schools and universities got involved too: “We’ve partnered with the University of Idaho; College of Idaho has done a tremendous amount around food this year and also different schools from Council, Idaho to the Boise School District, which held a harvest day.” Over the Labor Day weekend, Burns and Hutchinson organized a “Day of Idaho Food” celebration challenging Idahoans to create a meal made [...] If Janie Burns and Amy Hutchinson hadn’t organized the project called “2011: The Year of Idaho Food,” I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to spend the last 12 months sipping gin at 8:30 in the morning (well, once), foraging for stinging [...] Guy Hand 4:00 Year of Idaho Food http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/23/balancing-ducks-diversity-and-dollars-the-future-of-local-food/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/23/balancing-ducks-diversity-and-dollars-the-future-of-local-food/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:00:32 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=7076 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/23/balancing-ducks-diversity-and-dollars-the-future-of-local-food/feed/ 1 Mary Rohlfing holding freshly collected duck eggs. In the pre-dawn December darkness, Mary Rohlfing nodded toward a familiar silhouette perched in a tree on the edge of her Boise farm. As if on cue, a great horned owl let loose a burst of hoots as Rohlfing pulled on gloves, preparing for her morning chores. “Now that it’s getting a little bit lighter, you can see the bib on her neck area there. She’s kind of the mother owl,” Rohlfing said, her words condensing into translucent clouds. “And you named the farm for her?” I asked. “Yeah, we did name the farm for her because, in the morning, I’d come out and hear the owls, just like we are this morning, so we named the farm Morning Owl Farm.” That was 10 years ago, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Rohlfing, a tenured professor at Boise State at the time, decided to make a radical career change. “I was in my garden on about the 30th of September in 2001 and just realized I was at home and where I wanted to be,” she said. Rohlfing wasn’t thinking only of changes she needed to make to her life, but of changes she felt the whole nation needed to make in light of that then-fresh tragedy. “I felt that we needed to, on a grand scale, rethink how we were doing everything. And it seemed to me that one of the big changes we could make to be more self-sufficient and safe in the world was to begin to eat more food that was grown closer to where we lived.” Rohlfing owned 8 acres of land in the Northeast Boise Foothills and decided to give up her professorship and turn her fallow land into a farm. Along with organic produce, she wanted to raise ducks based on advice she’d gleaned from the books of Eliot Coleman, an authority on small-scale organic farming. Mary Rohlfing carrying duck eggs on a December morning. As the light behind the Foothills brightened, sliding from slate gray to salmon pink, Rohlfing began her duck-related chores: breaking up ice in several drinking basins, adding fresh water to rubber wading pools, gathering bags of feed, then finally heading toward her duck coop. “So the girls are in there,” she said as she approached a shed containing 200 sleepy ducks. “They’re being pretty quiet for us so far, but they’ll get noisier.” With the sound of Rohlfing’s voice, a few quiet quacks coalesced into a low chorus, then rose quickly to a cacophony of duck calls that soon threatened to blow the coop apart. When Rohlfing finally unlatched the door, flung it open and shouted, “Come on girls,” ducks burst out of the coop like a fire hose spewing feathers. “Some run straight for water,” Rohlfing yelled over the flapping, quacking din. “They’re like school kids at recess,” I said as the ducks ran into a fenced field, dove into pools and guzzled water, backlit now by a cresting, yoke-colored sun. “It’s part of the reason I love what I do,” said Rohlfing. “I like the routine of it all. I like the fact that you’re working with something that’s alive … that’s a mutual dependency. I didn’t know this when I started but I think it’s really hard to imagine farming without having livestock or poultry as part of the system. It’s sort of the way it’s suppose to be.” Endless studies have found that diversified farms–as opposed to vegetable monocultures or factory feedlots–are healthier farms. According to Rohlfing, her ducks were an integral part of clearing this once-infertile horse pasture of weeds and insects and greatly increasing its fertility with duck dropping-enriched compost. Ducks taking a bath. “Using the ducks as part of our plan has been a real help,” Rohlfing said. “And that’s why we try not to get too angry when it’s 8 degrees out in December and you’re trying to get a hose to run water.” Not to mention the 110 to 130 duck eggs she collects every day during winter. “Speaking of eggs,” Rohlfing said as she grabbed a basket and walked into the now-empty coop, “let’s [...] In the pre-dawn December darkness, Mary Rohlfing nodded toward a familiar silhouette perched in a tree on the edge of her Boise farm. As if on cue, a great horned owl let loose a burst of hoots as Rohlfing pulled on gloves, preparing for her [...] Guy Hand 4:00 Morning Owl Farm, ducks, duck eggs, local food, Mary Rohlfing http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/16/chestnuts-return-to-america/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/16/chestnuts-return-to-america/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:00:32 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=7033 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/16/chestnuts-return-to-america/feed/ 0 Chestnuts nestled inside spiky chestnut burrs. “I think we got a rainstorm coming in,” Peggy Paul said, pointing to the ominous band of clouds rolling our way on a blustery, mid-November day. She led me into the shelter of her nearby orchard as icy rain began to tick against the dry leaves and bristled burrs that clung to some 500 chestnut trees. As my eyes adjusted to the light under that nearly closed canopy, I whispered the word “beautiful.” Those trees both protected us from the rain and reminded me–with hundreds of trunks giving way to a tangle of interlocking branches–of an enchanted forest far more than a commercial orchard. Enchanted or not, a chestnut forest is a rare sight. That’s because, as a recent New York Times article put it, the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) “had a worse 20th century than the British Empire, the ice-delivery trade or rhyming poetry.” Once a stately member of the Eastern hardwood forest ecosystem, up to 4 billion American chestnut trees fell victim to a blight during the 1930s and 1940s, virtually scouring the species from its native habitat. That’s why the majority of Americans today experience the chestnut via imported and frequently inferior Chinese chestnuts, or vicariously through that 1946 nostalgia-laden chestnut of a ballad, “The Christmas Song,” in which Nat King Cole crooned about chestnuts roasting over an open fire. “These are Colossal chestnuts,” Paul said of the stately trees that surrounded us. “This is a strain of chestnut that has been crossed with a domestic nut and a Chinese chestnut. They’re blight-free chestnuts.” With the relatively recent development of disease-resistant stock, new strains of chestnuts are being introduced into the tree’s historic habitat, as well as into entirely new territory, like Peggy and Jim Paul’s commercial orchard near Nampa. “I, along with a lot of growers within the Northwest and the Midwest, am trying to bring chestnut trees back to the United States,” said Paul. Paul knows of one other commercial chestnut grower near Horseshoe Bend, about 20 growers in Oregon, 15 in Washington and another 50 in Missouri and Illinois. As Paul and I wandered through her orchard, we crunched our way through a lumpy carpet of what looked like brown, porcupine-quilled Christmas ornaments. She carefully picked one up–a chestnut burr–and through a slit in its side, showed me three shiny chestnuts nestled tightly within. Thankfully, she added, most burrs don’t cling so tenaciously to their contents. “When the nut ripens, the burrs open and the nuts fall to the ground,” Paul said. “Just kind of Mother Nature’s way of helping harvest.” Though the Pauls had wrapped up their 2011 harvest a few days before, Peggy Paul remembered just how the season began. “This year’s first 5 pounds were picked by my 3- and 5-year-old grandsons,” she said. “They came out here, and it’s like an Easter egg hunt: ‘Come on grandma, let’s look for a nut.’” Chestnuts at Peggy and Jim Paul's orchard and warehouse in Nampa. A trickle of nuts start falling from the sky at the beginning of autumn, which soon turns into a deluge as more and more burrs burst open, sending thousands of pounds of chestnuts raining down as the harvest progresses. For that, Paul hires a crew. According to a 2009 study conducted by the University of Missouri, commercial chestnut production in America is “still in its infancy” as growers like the Pauls plant and tend young, blight-resistant orchards that haven’t yet reached full maturity. The Capital Press, an agricultural weekly, reported last year that “many chestnut growers in the U.S. have no problem selling their entire crops year after year, either fresh or processed.” When the Pauls planted their orchard in 1993, they thought of it more as a hobby than a way to capitalize on a resurgent interest in a nearly extinct crop. Several years passed before they even [...] “I think we got a rainstorm coming in,” Peggy Paul said, pointing to the ominous band of clouds rolling our way on a blustery, mid-November day. She led me into the shelter of her nearby orchard as icy rain began to tick against the dry leaves [...] Guy Hand 4:00 chestnuts http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/09/quince-time-travel-and-membrillo/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/09/quince-time-travel-and-membrillo/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:00:32 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=7020 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/09/quince-time-travel-and-membrillo/feed/ 1 Quince from Dave Turner's quince trees. I hesitate to invoke the famous Marcel Proust time-travel tale one more time, since uncountable references to that story have ricocheted across food literature like pepper-spraying cops across the Internet. But for those whose reading habits haven’t myopically focused on food and culture, I’ll briefly recap: In the novel Remembrance of Things Past by French writer Proust, the narrator had an absentminded taste of “one of those squat, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell,” which teleported him back to his long-forgotten childhood. Proust explores this food-induced teleportation for nearly 1.5 million words, examining what he called the “involuntary memories” invoked by something as seemingly innocuous as a scalloped cookie. Boisean Dave Turner knows all about taste and memory, if not Marcel Proust and his madeleines. The catalyst that shot Turner into his past was quince, a fragrant apple-like fruit. “Somewhere when I was between 6 and 10, my grandmother used to make this quince jelly,” the 60-year-old Turner said as he opened a gate and walked me into his suburban back yard. “I never knew what a quince was, all I knew was it was the most marvelous-tasting jelly I ever had.” With an aromatic, apple-pear-citrus flavor, the quince was prized by Puritan settlers who brought it to America in 1629. The quince thrived in colonial communities and eventually spread across the country–even to Mountain Home, where Turner’s grandmother made her memorable jelly in the ’50s. Dave Turner with his quince trees As Turner grew older, though, he forgot about quince. Like most of us, life piled up on top of his childhood memories, and for a quarter century, quince never entered his mind. Then that forgotten taste resurfaced. Sometime in his 30s, Turner quietly began obsessing over his grandmother’s quince jelly. “I was kind of thinking back on how wonderful that jelly was,” he said with a fond, far-off gaze that made this graying Idaho native suddenly seem 6 again. “I looked around but you couldn’t buy it. Nobody even knew what it was.” In America’s early days, everyone knew what quince was. The fruit was more popular than the apple, according to author Barbara Ghazarian in her recent book Simply Quince. “Within a century, however,” she wrote, “the apple snatched the spotlight and the popularity of quince steadily declined.” Although delicious when cooked, the quince can’t compete with an apple plucked fresh from a tree. With the first bite of raw quince comes promise: a satisfying crunch followed by a burst of flavor. But almost instantly that bright rush is sucked away by a cotton-like astringency that fades into the flavorless finish of moist cardboard. Despite the limited charms of raw quince, the fruit was prized as a potent source of pectin, which is used to set and thicken all kinds of fruit jams and jellies. But that attribute was made irrelevant when mid-20th century scientists developed artificial pectin and quince was quickly tossed into America’s forgotten-fruit bin. Although Turner’s memory of quince had returned by the 1980s, he couldn’t find anyone who sold the fruit, the trees or even knew what he was talking about. “I started hunting around the Treasure Valley, calling different nurseries looking for a quince tree. And they pretty much thought I was nuts,” he said. None of the nurseries he talked to had heard of culinary quince, just the ornamental, flowering quince bushes that weren’t even a member of the same genus. But not everyone in Idaho had quince amnesia. Luisa Bilbao making membrillo or quince paste. Quince has long played a prominent role in Basque cuisine, having arrived in the Basque provinces of Europe in the 15th century. Quince is still prepared in the Basque Country in both sweet and savory dishes, but [...] I hesitate to invoke the famous Marcel Proust time-travel tale one more time, since uncountable references to that story have ricocheted across food literature like pepper-spraying cops across the Internet. But for those whose reading habits [...] Guy Hand 4:00 quince, quince paste, membrillo, quince jelly http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/02/the-raw-milk-deal-idaho-legitimizes-small-scale-raw-milk-producers/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/02/the-raw-milk-deal-idaho-legitimizes-small-scale-raw-milk-producers/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:00:49 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=6988 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/12/02/the-raw-milk-deal-idaho-legitimizes-small-scale-raw-milk-producers/feed/ 2 Amy Wincentsen of Little Bear Dairy with Butterscotch. On Aug. 3, federal and county law enforcement agents raided a Venice, Calif., raw-food club, searching for raw milk. The YouTube video of the raid showed officers, with guns drawn, working their way through the facility in what critics called “government-sponsored terrorism” and “an attack on food freedom.” Every few months, it seems, TV news or amateur videographers capture another raid on a raw-milk supplier somewhere in America. In the past several years, law enforcement agencies have carried out raw-milk raids in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio. Each raid increases the tension that already surrounds the debate over raw milk. Idaho, by contrast, has taken a very different raw-milk route. “Raw milk comes straight from the cow or goat. We don’t do anything to it except filter it and flash cool it and bottle it,” said Debra Jantzi, owner of Treasured Sunrise Acres, a Grade A raw-milk dairy in Fruitland. Pasteurization, on the other hand, is a heating process that kills bacteria and other pathogens and has been a standard practice in the U.S. dairy industry since the mid-20th century. Many state and federal health agencies claim that raw milk is dangerous to drink–citing a 2010 outbreak of campylobacter from raw milk in Indiana–and, therefore, ban or greatly restrict its distribution. Raw-milk advocates, like Jantzi, counter that pasteurization kills flavor, as well as beneficial bacteria and the nutrients that make milk healthful. They argue that far more illnesses are attributed to poorly handled pasteurized milk than raw. At the very least, they say, consumers should have the freedom to choose the dairy products they want. Idaho is one of only a handful of states that give consumers that choice. Jantzi began selling raw cow and goat milk at Boise’s Capital City Public Market in the summer of 2010. She was the first vendor to sell raw milk directly to customers in the market’s 17-year history. She now offers it through retail outlets in the Treasure Valley. Jantzi said pressure from the public and changes in Idaho law helped make that possible. But Marv Patten, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture‘s Dairy Bureau chief, disagreed. “That’s not exactly correct,” said Patten during an interview at ISDA headquarters in Boise. “The sale of retail raw milk in the state of Idaho has been legal virtually forever.” Patten should know. His own family had a dairy that legally sold raw milk in the Treasure Valley years ago. But then, as now, there were lots of hoops to jump through. Like Jantzi, Patten’s family invested in the equipment required for a Grade A dairy and adhered to the special regulations and inspections required to sell raw milk in Idaho. “You have to have a Grade A barn. You have to have a nutrient management plan. You have to buy all that shiny stainless steel-type of equipment, which could be very, very spendy,” Patten said. Raw goat milk from Treasured Sunrise Acres. Twenty years ago, that expense–along with added regulatory scrutiny, pressure from public-health organizations and a slumping demand for raw milk–made the legality of raw milk in Idaho irrelevant. Dairies simply quit producing it. “The last Grade A raw-milk dairy that I can recall was in the early ’90s in Northern Idaho that was licensed by our agency,” Patten said. “Since that time, I don’t believe there was anybody that was licensed with us to legally sell it.” But as the local-food movement has grown–with its emphasis on fresh and unadulterated products–so has interest in raw milk. Many of those eager to supply that new market were not Grade A dairies but small-scale farmers with a couple of cows and an often-evangelical faith in raw milk. Without legal pathways for small producers in Idaho and elsewhere to follow, they began distributing their wares through often quasi-legal “herd [...] On Aug. 3, federal and county law enforcement agents raided a Venice, Calif., raw-food club, searching for raw milk. The YouTube video of the raid showed officers, with guns drawn, working their way through the facility in what critics called [...] Guy Hand 4:00 raw milk, raw milk raids, illegal raw milk, raw milk controversy http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/25/bagels-bialys-hope/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/25/bagels-bialys-hope/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:00:34 +0000 Jane Fritz http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=6944 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/25/bagels-bialys-hope/feed/ 3 Bear's bagels. Photo by Jane Fritz Vicki Reich used to always pack light for flights to the East Coast to visit family. The food columnist for the weekly newspaper, The Sandpoint Reader, and merchandiser for a natural foods market, she wanted to leave plenty of room in her carry-on luggage to stash a couple dozen freshly baked, New York-style bagels to bring home to North Idaho. Inevitably, she would wind up apologizing for the onion-y smell coming from her overhead compartment and wafting through the plane’s passenger cabin. She just couldn’t help it. Bagels have been a part of her life since birth. “There were always bagels in my house. It was weird if there weren’t bagels,” Reich says. “You would have one, if not every day, certainly on the weekends and for Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur where you fasted all day long; that was the way you broke your fast. Bagels “schmeared” with cream cheese and lox and all sorts of smoked fish. M-m-m!” But eating bagels was more than an ethnic food tradition in her family. The practice evolved into an unusual, intergenerational family ritual. Her grandparents lived nearby, and whenever they would visit after Vicki was born, they would bring a dozen bagels with all the fixings, including whitefish salad — a delicacy Reich says she’s never seen in Idaho — give the tasty foods to her parents, and take little Vicki, a difficult child she readily admits, home with them for the day so her parents could have some down time. “My parents, of course, thought this exchange was awesome,” Reich says. In fact, she credits bagels for helping her make it to adulthood. A mere bagel in the home would engender a peaceful atmosphere even if she was around. So it was truly remarkable how happy Reich was after she discovered the Old Icehouse Pizzeria and Bakery in Hope, Idaho, two years after moving to Sandpoint. She bemoaned the fact that most of the bagels that she found living in the Northwest were huge, fluffy imitations — what she calls: “the Wonder Bread of bagels.” But biting into one of Bear’s dense, chewy, thick-crusted bagels, created amazement. Reich remembers thinking: “This guy must not be from around here!” And she’d be right. Edward Weiner, a.k.a. Bear. Photo by Jane Fritz. Edward Weiner, a.k.a. Bear, was born in New York City and like Reich, grew up in New Jersey. He also was raised Jewish. His father immigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine, his mother is of Polish heritage. Poland is actually considered to be the birthplace of the bagel, where it first was eaten by the wealthy in the 15th century. It later became a peasant’s Lenten bread and later was adopted as a daily bread for the Jews. We commonly think of bagels as Jewish, but it’s only because the bread came to this country with Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s. It wasn’t his ethnic heritage that transformed Bear into a North Idaho bagel baker, however. Oddly enough, it was his interest in forestry. He came west for college in 1973 and found that he resonated with the back-to-the-land lifestyle of the times, so much so that he made the Northern Rockies his new home, building a cabin in the wooded mountains surrounding the small village of Hope. Since he had enjoyed baking bread most of his life, he decided to try making a living with the dough in Idaho. In 2001, he bought the building that was Hope’s historic icehouse and surprised everyone by opening a pizzeria, filling a niche with what he enjoyed making when he lived back east — New York-style pizza. His creations inspired by and named for the Big Apple (a popular favorite is “The Hell’s Kitchen”) became a hit with locals and tourists alike, and soon he expanded the business to include artisan breads. Before long he began crafting the ethnic breads of his heritage: old style bagels and New York sourdough rye. He also expanded his bread-making knowledge by attending a week-long intensive under a master baker at [...] Vicki Reich used to always pack light for flights to the East Coast to visit family. The food columnist for the weekly newspaper, The Sandpoint Reader, and merchandiser for a natural foods market, she wanted to leave plenty of room in her carry-on [...] Jane Fritz 4:00 Bialy, bagel, Jane Fritz http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/18/get-yer-goat/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/18/get-yer-goat/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:00:41 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=6924 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/18/get-yer-goat/feed/ 1 Goats at Evelyn Simon's ranch near Hagerman. Photo by Guy Hand Say the word “goat” and most Americans picture a horned cartoon with a taste for tin cans. It started back in 1928, when a distasteful little goat ate Minnie Mouse’s ukulele in Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon to guarantee the goat its place in cartoon infamy. In 1943, a swastika-wearing Nazi goat did battle with Daffy Duck. Goats ticked off Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural in the ’60s, and to this day, goats peeve Homer Simpson and piss off the boys of South Park (where, in one memorable episode, a goat was mistaken for Stevie Nicks). No wonder goats get a bad rap. Even the goat’s recent good press–its environmentally friendly knack for consuming acres of invasive weeds–is a mere variant on the goateed-devil-with-an-eating-disorder mythos that got the animal erroneously linked to tin cans and cartoons in the first place. What we Americans don’t get about goat–which the rest of the world does–is that goats are also delicious. At least that’s what Twin Falls chef Lynn Sheehan says. “I’m just turning over the goat loins here in the pan,” Sheehan explained as she took tongs to a sizzling cut of meat in the kitchen of her recently relocated, soon-to-be-reopened downtown Twin Falls restaurant, Cucina Gemelli. “Goat meat, for people who haven’t had it before, is very lean, very healthful, very mild in flavor,” she said. Sheehan is not new to goat. She began serving barbecued goat to an enthusiastic clientele several years ago at Papa Hemi’s Hideaway, her previous restaurant in Ketchum. In September, she prepared chevon–as goat connoisseurs like to call it–at an actual goat tasting held at a goat ranch in the Magic Valley. So when I asked about her interest in this poorly understood meat, she suggested proof in the form of dinner. Lynn Sheehan, chef and co-owner of Cucina Gemelli in Twin Falls. Sheehan often offers goat on her menu. Photo by Guy Hand “We’ve got the spiced and roasted,” Sheehan said as she pointed to the most unadorned of five goat dishes she had sizzling, bubbling and browning on her commercial range. “And then we have the barbecued, rubbed and smoked. We have the Afghani-style marinade goat over a local chickpea salad. We have a whole barbecued goat that’s smoked, pulled with Caribbean spices and with jicama slaw–and finally, our ground goat meatballs in a spicy marinara.” A west Texas barbecue, Middle Eastern bazaar, Jamaican beach hut and Roman trattoria rose off that stove and filled her new kitchen, making Sheehan a fine example of the growing legion of American chefs who’ve embraced the varied virtues of goat meat. Once limited to ethnic barrios and back yards, goat has been spotted on the menus of uptown restaurants from San Francisco to New York. In 2008, New York Magazine predicted “the lowly goat” was “poised for the Manhattan big time” and has since installed a Best Goat category in its yearly Best of New York issue. The rest of the world would likely shrug at this development and simply say, “Duh, America.” According to the Snake River Meat Goat Association–yep, there’s a local goat-meat association–”approximately 65 percent of the red meat consumed globally is goat meat.” “The thing about goats that make them such a wonderful animal to raise for most cultures is they can subsist on what looks like completely inhospitable grazing land … and so you find them throughout the Middle East and dry places with no water. It goes great in Idaho since we’re in desert country,” Sheehan said as she dipped a spoon into her Afghani yogurt.   Evelyn Simon at her ranch near Hagerman. Photo by Guy Hand Simon Boers Goat Ranch, outside Hagerman, is the ranch that hosted that September goat tasting. Although the sky was gunmetal gray and the air smelled of snow on the day I visited, the goats seemed perfectly content. “I love how stout and strong they [...] Say the word “goat” and most Americans picture a horned cartoon with a taste for tin cans. It started back in 1928, when a distasteful little goat ate Minnie Mouse’s ukulele in Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon to guarantee the [...] Guy Hand 4:00 goat, goat meat, chevon http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/09/finding-profundity-in-food/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/09/finding-profundity-in-food/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:00:46 +0000 Clay Scott http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=6893 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/09/finding-profundity-in-food/feed/ 0 Photo by Kenton Rowe CLAY SCOTT: You’re listening to Mountain West Voices. I’m Clay Scott. Margaret Corcoran got one degree in Latin, then got another in philosophy, classics and religious studies…but her entire professional life has had to do with food. KITCHEN SOUNDS, PEOPLE TALKING SCOTT: That’s the sound of the lunch rush at Margaret’s restaurant, Benny’s Bistro, in Helena, Montana. She’s built up a loyal customer base over the years, mostly because of her philosophy that there’s something profound in simple, locally produced food. It’s an approach to cooking that she grew up with in Saint Ignatius, Montana. MARGARET CORCORAN: We learned really basic cooking. Meat loaf. And roasts. And roast chicken. My father was actually a very good cook. I would wake up every morning to the smell of my father’s pipe tobacco…and breakfast. He made beef stew, and he defined beef stew for me. And my mother, after she went back to work she cooked mostly on Sundays. And one of my favorite Sunday dinners was a stewed chicken with homemade noodles, and she would make a stiff noodle dough, and she would roll it out with her rolling pin on this big wooden board, and flour it, and roll it up like a cinnamon roll kind of thing, and then cut an egg noodle – country noodle – and then drop it in the boiling chicken broth. That was a great Sunday dinner. Photo by Kenton Rowe Then I went off to college, and I got overeducated and unemployable with my classics education, and took a job in a kitchen while I tried to figure out what to do. I was a baker’s assistant in a fancy supper club in downtown Boston. I liked the work…it’s very, very tactile. Cooking’s an art and baking is a science. You had to be very precise. And I liked that precision. SCOTT: You talk about precision and care and science and art, but the food you describe growing up with sounds like it was very basic. So… CORCORAN: But it was carefully made. And it was carefully seasoned. It was not thrown together. There was technique. My mother had technique. She knew how to season a chicken. She knew how long to cook it. It was not haphazard. It was not thoughtless. Photo by Kenton Rowe A huge part of why I do what I do is because I love community – as a concept and as a reality – and so I try to source locally, and I’m able to do that with some success. I think it was getting to know people who were trying to make a living gardening, and ranching, and on a small scale that really took me to the next step. It’s just so profoundly important that you be engaged with the food you eat and the place you live. You’re impoverished – truly impoverished – if you don’t have those connections. I love a couple hours when I can really cook. I actually like to go in on a Sunday and just make a big pot of soup that I’ll use on Monday. SCOTT: Because working 60 hours a week is not enough? CORCORAN: (laughs) Because the phone doesn’t ring. And I can just watch the onions, and the garlic, and the rosemary in the butter…turn translucent…and when you add all the tomatoes, and then you add a little bit of honey and some baking soda, you get to watch it all foam up, and you just get to watch those miracles… SCOTT: You’ve been listening to Mountain West Voices. Our series is produced in association with the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, a regional studies and public education program of the University of Montana. Additional support was provided by the Greater Montana Foundation. To see photographs of today’s story by photographer Kenton Rowe, and to hear more stories from the Rocky Mountain West, go to mountainwestvoices.org. I’m Clay Scott. CLAY SCOTT: You’re listening to Mountain West Voices. I’m Clay Scott. Margaret Corcoran got one degree in Latin, then got another in philosophy, classics and religious studies…but her entire professional life has had to do with food. KITCHEN [...] Clay Scott 4:59 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/04/craft-brewers-fight-for-a-share-of-local-hop-crop/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/04/craft-brewers-fight-for-a-share-of-local-hop-crop/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:00:09 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=6874 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/11/04/craft-brewers-fight-for-a-share-of-local-hop-crop/feed/ 0 Dried Idaho hops. Photo by Guy Hand I simply wasn’t prepared for what I saw when Fred Colby, co-owner of Laughing Dog Brewery in Ponderay, pulled open the heavy door to his walk-in cooler. Instead of setting eyes on cases of craft beer, I caught the cold gaze of six very pink pig carcasses. “Pig beer!” I blurted out reflexively, in order to suppress what would have been a high-pitched, porcine-like squeal. “No,” Colby said, drawing out the word in a calming, cooing way. “At our annual anniversary party, we barbecue six whole pigs.” Laughing Dog, it turned out, was on the eve of its sixth anniversary barbecue, and the next day, this large brewery would be filled with friends, fresh beer and the scent of spit-roasted pork. But this day, Colby was more interested in showing me why he believed his North Idaho brewery had become so popular. To the right of the pork six-pack, he grabbed a bag and opened it under my nose. “The best thing is really stick your nose in there and smell,” Colby suggested. Suddenly I was flung into a forest after a warm rain. I breathed in deep, earthy aromas, a hint of wildflowers and the slightly bracing bite of pine. “They can impart that same flavor into the beer,” Colby explained. Like so many craft brewmasters, Colby is a self-confessed hop head. Laughing Dog Brewery owner Fred Colby with hops. Photo by Guy Hand “Hops can be very complicated,” he said as we sniffed another, very different, very citrusy variety. “And one of the things that you see in craft brewers today in hops is they’re adding layers of complexity into the beer. So rather than one-dimensional beers, we can build really complex, artful-tasting beers. I think that’s why it’s called craft beer. It really is a craft.” The cone-shaped female flower of the hop plant, Humulus lupulus, a perennial related to nettles and marijuana, contains resins and oils that give beer its characteristically piney bitterness and layers of complexity. That aromatic complexity, Colby explained, is a fundamental reason his once-small North Idaho brewery has flourished for the last six years and now ships beer to 30 states and Canada. Yet despite the pivotal role hops play in America’s burgeoning craft-beer movement, hops are often hard to come by for artisan beer makers–even in the nation’s hop-growing epicenter of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. “Here in northern Idaho,” Colby told me after closing the cooler door and leading me around stainless steel brewing tanks, “just north of us, we have probably one of the largest contiguous hop farms in the world–Elk Mountain Farms. They have the potential to grow 1,700 acres of hops on one farm, and for us, it’s important that they’re there because they do grow some hops for us.” The key word in that last sentence is “some.” The fact that Colby can get any hops from local sources is unusual. Unlike the close connection winemakers have to grape growers–they are, after all, often one and the same–craft beer makers and hop growers seldom have anything resembling a face-to-face connection. America’s industrial beer brewers–what Colby diplomatically calls “domestic lager” makers–and international hop brokers dominate the hop and barley markets, reserving large quantities of ingredients before the harvest through long-standing contracts with growers. Elk Mountain Farms in Bonner’s Ferry, for instance, contracts nearly all of its hop harvest to the Budweiser-Michelob-and-Natural-Light behemoth Anheuser-Busch. southern Idaho hop farmers sell most of their crop to hop broker S.S. Steiner. These arrangements are understandable once you realize that craft beer totals a tasty, but tiny, drop in America’s vast beer bucket–a piddling 4 percent of U.S. beer sales in 2008, according to the Brewers Association. Therefore small breweries are often left scrambling after hop-scented crumbs the giant lager boys leave behind. When a hop shortage [...] I simply wasn’t prepared for what I saw when Fred Colby, co-owner of Laughing Dog Brewery in Ponderay, pulled open the heavy door to his walk-in cooler. Instead of setting eyes on cases of craft beer, I caught the cold gaze of six very pink pig [...] Guy Hand 4:00 hops, hop farms, beer, craft beer, brewers, beer making, hop industry http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/10/28/seeking-genetic-diversity-in-abandoned-apple-orchards/ http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/10/28/seeking-genetic-diversity-in-abandoned-apple-orchards/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:00:20 +0000 Guy Hand http://www.nwfoodnews.com/?p=6853 http://www.nwfoodnews.com/2011/10/28/seeking-genetic-diversity-in-abandoned-apple-orchards/feed/ 4 Several of the apples Sadie Barrett found at Lantz Bar. Photo by Guy Hand As we roared downstream through the River of No Return Wilderness via jet boat, skipping off rapids and dodging just-submerged boulders, I decided my imaginary movie version of this adventure should be titled Indiana Appleseed in the Canyon of Lost Treasure. Naturally it would be packed with whitewater action, pioneer spirit, hungry black bears and most importantly, a whole lot of strange apples. First, the backstory. Sadie Barrett–who took me on this Salmon River jet boat expedition–and project partner Candace Burns decided they needed to save the neglected, sometimes century-old apple trees they saw slowly dying all over Idaho’s Lemhi County. As a kid growing up in Salmon, the 35-year-old Barrett used to munch on apples from trees planted by Idaho’s early pioneers. But upon returning to her hometown after a 10-year absence, she was stunned by the number of trees that had disappeared. “They’d either been built over or just had perished because they hadn’t been irrigated,” Barrett said. Barrett and Burns decided this threatened edible heritage shouldn’t be left to quietly sink into oblivion, so the two women made plans to catalog, take cuttings and graft as many worthy fruit trees as they could find. As we skittered down the Main Fork of the Salmon River on a gleaming October day, Barrett showed me one abandoned orchard after another. Each orchard was perched on a terrace along the shore, wedged between rapids and steep-walled canyon, ripe apples dotting nearly every tree in pointillist patterns from pale yellow to bright green to burnt russet to Christmas-light red. Jet boating down the Salmon River. Photo by Guy Hand “I think there were 800 to 1,000 people living in the area when it was a mining community,” Barrett shouted over the rumble of the jet-boat’s twin engines. The importance of apple orchards to that burgeoning community of homesteaders was obvious, living as they did a long, arduous ride from anything they could even euphemistically call a grocery store. “They were subsistence farming,” said Mary Williams, forest historian for the Bitterroot National Forest, which manages the area. “I’m sure the earlier prospectors and miners who made up the bulk of those homesteaders down there probably brought apples in by horseback and planted their trees as saplings.” Apple orchards, and their relationship to pioneer progress, was a subject Henry David Thoreau addressed in an 1862 essay called “Wild Apples.” “It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man,” he wrote. “For when man migrates, he carries with him not only birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables and his very sward, but his orchard also.” After racing 12 miles down river, our jet boat driver suddenly pulled back on his throttles, the bow settled into the water and we quietly slid to shore at Lantz Bar, a pioneer homestead with a large orchard planted by the late Frank Lantz, which is now managed by the Forest Service and deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Scott Grasser and Sadie Barrett searching for apples. Photo by Guy Hand Barrett and friend Scott Grasser unloaded buckets, notebooks and cameras from the boat, then we walked a short, dusty trail up from the river and soon saw dozens of untended apple trees–and evidence of why Barrett carries a sense of urgency to her project. Many of the trunks in the Lantz orchard had long, parallel gashes sunk deep into their bark and large limbs were snapped completely off. “Broken down by a bear,” Grasser said as he ran his hand over a long series of claw marks. Around us were large piles of fresh, apple-rich bear scat. (In my movie version, of course, I’ll focus less on scat than on battling the bears.) According to the book River of No Return, a travelog and history of the Salmon River Canyon, Frank Lantz planted 80 [...] As we roared downstream through the River of No Return Wilderness via jet boat, skipping off rapids and dodging just-submerged boulders, I decided my imaginary movie version of this adventure should be titled Indiana Appleseed in the Canyon of Lost [...] Guy Hand 4:00 apples, heritage apples, heritage fruit, pioneer apples, The Idaho Heritage Tree Project