KGI Newsletter: March 2007

Contents:

 

Gardening:

 

Food and Cooking:

-How to make Italian-style meatballs

-Irish-style coleslaw with blue brie dressing

-Video how-to: Garlic ginger bok choi

-Dutch oven cooking for the cast iron newbie

 

Food for Thought:

-Green incentives: when going green pays

-When honeybees vanish, will our food follow?

 

Garden Humor:

-The lighter side of food security

 

Photogenic:

-Back to the future: S.F. city hall victory garden

 

GoodSearch

 

While surfing and gardening are two activities that don't lend themselves well to multitasking, you can help promote kitchen gardening while surfing the internet by using GoodSearch as your browser's search engine. 

 

GoodSearch uses the same search technology as Yahoo and yields the same results.  The difference is that every time you search for something with GoodSearch as opposed to Google or Yahoo, you earn 1 penny for a nonprofit organization of your choice.  Click here to start GoodSearching for KGI

 

Local Organizer Tools

 

Join our crackerjack crew of local organizers by gathering some kitchen gardeners in your area.  Plant a garden behind  your local school or church.  Organize a neighborhood local foods potluck dinner.  Start hatching plans for a Kitchen Garden Day (August 26th) celebration. Keep it fun and light and watch your local network grow.

 

Here are some tools that might help:

-Post our flyer in your community

-Place our open-source article in your local paper

-Connect with other organizers online

 

La Dolce Vita

 

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Last month, we posted some new information and photos about our fall trip to Tuscany. 

 

We are now accepting deposits and registrations.  Click here to download these forms and documents:

 

-draft program

-registration form

-participant info pack

 

Deposits are due by April 27th.


Virtuous Virtual Shopping


There are 1000 places where you can buy food and garden books, cooking equipment, and garden tools on the internet, but only one where a percentage of your purchase goes to promoting kitchen gardens (at no extra cost to you).

 

Check out our new online store

 

James Beard on Onions

 

“The kitchen, reasonably enough, was the scene of my first gastronomic adventure. I was on all fours. I crawled into the vegetable bin, settled on a giant onion and ate it, skin and all. It must have marked me for life, for I have never ceased to love the hearty flavor of raw onions.”

Dear Kitchen Gardener,

To celebrate spring, I started preparing a large pot of potato leek soup this morning.  If all goes according to plan, the soup should be done simmering by late September. 

No, there’s no problem with my stovetop or my cooking skills.  The problem, if there is one, is with my admittedly extreme definition of slow and local foods.  

Unless you managed to lock yourself in your kitchen pantry for the past year, you will have heard that road-weary foods are out and fresh, local ones are in. Yet, different people have different ways of defining local.  John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has said that local foods are those sourced within a 200 mile radius of a store.  Nutritionist and author Joan Dye Gussow has defined local more poetically as “within a day's leisurely drive of our homes”.

In my case, local foods are those coming from my own backyard, literally.  In order to have backyard-grown leeks by September, I’m planting seeds indoors now which will grow into pencil-necked seedlings that I’ll move outdoors in May when Maine’s winter officially ends and summer begins (for those who haven’t been to Maine before, spring comes the second week of May, except for those years when it skips us completely).  Once the seedlings are in the ground, they’ll need a hundred days before they’re ready for the soup pot. 

There are certainly easier paths to delicious, local foods than the one that passes through the backyard garden, but none more direct or more satisfying.  It is a path, however, that fewer and fewer people are willing to tread.  According to latest data from US Department of Agriculture, home food production hit an all time low last year and was down a full 20% from the previous year.  Meanwhile, despite recent trends, foods in the US have never traveled farther than they do now, over 1500 miles on average from field to fork, using up to 17 more fossil fuels than foods sourced locally. 

With the gardening season and climate change both upon us, I am encouraging people who have a little bit of land - be it a vacant lot, a yard, or a well-tilled window box -  to use it in the service of their planet and their gastronomy.  Last year, a Vancouver couple made the international news by eating a ‘100-mile diet' for a year.  In a globally-warmed world with a growing population, we’ll need even more ambitious experiments in local eating in the future and slower interpretations of “slow food”.  

My goal this growing season is to meet one third of my family’s annual vegetable needs through our modest suburban plot.  That may not sound like much, but a lot of little kitchen gardens can add up to a small farm in urban and suburban areas where farmland is either not available or affordable.    

Now that my leek soup is on the boil, so to speak, I’ll soon turn my attention to making pasta with red sauce, starting with a tomato seed order later this week.  I’m thinking of trying an heirloom variety called Amish Paste.  It takes about 5 days longer to mature than the paste tomato I grew last year, but, heck, I’m in no hurry.

Happy spring,

Life's Three Great Inevitabilities: Death, decomposition, and taxes!

We can help with the last two!

Whether it's teaching you how to compost or offering a tax deduction, KGI is here to help!  Plan ahead for the 2007 tax year by making your tax deductible contribution today. 

-Donate by online payment

-Donate by mail-in check

 

 

 

CULINARY QUIZ courtesy of FoodReference.com


1) This dish takes its name from the pan it is cooked in, which in turn comes from the Latin word for 'pan' or 'dish.' It originated in the Valencia region, traditionally cooked outdoors and eaten right from the pan. What is the name of this Spanish dish, AND the two ingredients common in all variations of it?

2) What food product comes from a rare species of tropical American orchid?

3) This is an ancient dish mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, but the modern version from Spain contains 2 ingredients from the New World which did not arrive in Spain until the 16th century. It's classified as a salad in Andalusian cookbooks, but Americans call it a soup. What is this confusing dish, AND what are the 2 New World ingredients?

4) What food related term did Shakespeare use to refer to a time of youth, innocence and inexperience?Bonus question: What play, scene and act does the term come from and what character said it?

5) A deep-water fish from New Zealand that increased in popularity in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. It has a mild flavor, white flesh and firm texture. One of it's names is 'slimehead', what is it's common commercial name?

6) A small grocery store opened in 1915 by S.M. Skaggs in American Falls, Idaho grew into a chain of supermarkets which had 3,527 stores by 1931, and is still one of the largest supermarket chains. What is the name of this grocery chain?

7) This is the name of a tart, unripened cheese from central Europe. In German, the word is used as a figure of speech for "nonsense." It is also the name of a group of six hypothetical particles that form the basic constituents of 'hadrons'. (Huh?) It is also a word from a line in 'Finnegans Wake' by James Joyce ("Three ______ for Muster Mark!"). What is this curious word?

 

Click here for answers