Pasta with Parsnips and Bacon

For all those storage parsnips languishing in the back of your frige and that wonderful Woodbridge Farm bacon because, as Nick Kindelsperger observes

‘ … the fundamental property of the original Babbo dish remains the same: parsnips cooked in pork fat taste really good. They come out slightly sweet with a luscious, creamy texture. Whatever you do, don’t mess with that.’

This dish is from Babbo via Epicurious via Serious Eats: New York.

Pasta with Parsnips and Bacon

– serves 4 –

Ingredients

1/4 pound bacon or pancetta, chopped into 1/4 inch dice
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 pounds parsnips, peeled, quartered lengthwise, and cut crosswise 1/4-inch-thick
8 ounces pasta (fresh pasta if you have it)
1/4 cup chopped parsley
Salt and pepper

Serve with: Grated parmesan

Procedure

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, add the chopped bacon to a large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook until the bacon is browned, stirring often, about 5 minutes. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and let drain on a couple paper towels. Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat.

2. Turn the heat to medium and add the butter to skillet with the bacon fat. Add the parsnips and cook for about 12 minutes, stirring often. They should be lightly browned and very tender. Turn off the heat.

3. Cook pasta according to the directions on the box to al dente. When done, reserve 2 cups of the cooking water and then add the pasta directly to the skillet with the parsnips. Turn heat to high and add about 1 1/2 cups of the cooking water, the bacon, and the parsley. Cook for 1 minute, stirring often. Add more of the cooking water if it looks too dry. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Mulch Your Christmas Tree

NYC Parks & Recreation sponsors MulchFest 2010 — instead of throwing your tree in the trash, drag it over to Corlears Hook Park on Saturday and Sunday, January 9 and 10, between 10am and 2pm. They’ll be collecting trees to chip down for mulch throughout the city’s parks.

Update: Apparently NYC Sanitation Dep’t is collecting trees this year for mulch as well, from Jan. 4 through Jan. 15. Just leave the tree out on the curb for regular pickup, with no ornaments, stands, or bags. (There had been talk in the fall of suspending this program for budgetary reasons, but apparently it’s been restored.)

Join the Core

The core group does the basic admin work of the CSA — signing up new members, arranging distribution, creating special events, etc. In addition, there is a core member at each distribution shift during the season, which last year meant six volunteer shifts for each core member, as opposed to the usual two.

But specific responsibilities can vary depending on each member’s interests and availability. If you’re at all interested in participating in the CSA in a more constructive way, please join us for our first 2010 planning session on Jan. 13.

New Amsterdam Wintermarket

Blizzard? Schblizzard! The New Amsterdam Wintermarket will be open as planned:

Sunday, December 20

Wintermarket
on South Street in Lower Manhattan

Between Beekman Street and Peck Slip
11:00am to 4:00pm

They have a pretty great set of vendors, dedicated to regional suppliers, sourced directly from farmers … all the things you love about CSA, with even more variety.

Pork Delivery this Saturday

Woodbridge Farm will be delivering pork shares again to the city this
coming Saturday. For those of you who missed out last time or need
another share (!) please email Dave and Julia to let them know:

woodbridgefarm@sbcglobal.net

The Mini Share is $150 and is roughly 17lbs of pork consisting of
bacon, sausage, ham, chops, ribs, shoulder.

Distribution will be at Roots & Vines (409 Grand St between Suffolk St
& Clinton St) from 3:30 to 6:00.

Happy Holidays!

Window Farms

Moira came across this site about Window Farms — the idea is to grow food inside your own apartment, like some urban, indoor, modern wonder of the world.

Some of you probably already grow some herbs inside, or have a potted plant or two. The problem, as with everything else in the city, is finding enough floor space for everything you want to grow. So here’s a good vertical solution.

If you register for their forum, you can download a PDF with D-I-Y instructions. (They’re also trying to put some kits together, but they don’t seem to have these available yet.)

Let us know in the comments below if you have any other innovative ways of farming indoors.

LES Food Coop Preliminary Meeting

A very preliminary meeting to discuss the creation of a neighborhood food coop was held this past Thursday at the Education Alliance. A few members of the CSA attended, and many others expressed an interest in this project, so I thought I’d post some quick notes.

The meeting was hosted by Danny Rosenthal Education Alliance, though he made clear that he expected EA to have only a facilitating role in the project. Brian Crowley, of Hillman, also spoke — he’s a longtime member of the Park Slope Food Coop, and it was through his initiative that this meeting was held.

A food coop is, simply, a customer-owned and -operated grocery store. It’s a small business, and it will be no simple thing to get this off the ground. Danny Rosenthal estimated a timeframe of 18-24 months, though there was certainly a lot of interest in exploring smaller seed projects that could possibly make a difference sooner, such as a buyers’ club for dry goods, or an expanded CSA.

About 60-70 people showed up (including 8 CSA members). There was broad generational representation, though attendees were mostly from Seward, East River, and Hillman coops. Generally there was great interest in having healthier, less expensive options for food in the neighborhood, and, as you can imagine with so many people living in coops, strong support for the coop model.

One long-time resident spoke of how, in the 70s, she was involved in an urban farm on Grand Street (now paved over for parking). One new mother from Ecuador said that growing up she was able to pick fresh fruit from the trees in her yard, and wondered how she could give her daughter an experience anything like that. Neighbors involved in the restaurant business expressed their support. A representative of the Seward Coop Board attended, and said he would advocate for a partnership with the food coop, maybe even including use of the prized Hester St. lot (no promises!).

People were asked to sign up for two committees, a steering committee in charge of looking into how to actually start this business, and a short-term solutions committee to explore other smaller options. It was agreed that the first steering committee meeting would include representatives from the Park Slope and other coops in the city to draw a clearer picture of the nuts and bolts of this endeavor. No date was set.

If you’re interested in joining the steering committee, you can apply to the Google Group here.

If you’re interested in joining the short-term solutions committee, email Brian Crowley: bcrowley8 at gmail dot com

Notes from Woodbridge Farm

Julia, from Woodbridge Farm, wrote in to give us some feedback on our feedback — her response to our end-of-year survey:

“I would say, for us this has been the best season so far. There were certain issues with specific crops (see below) but overall we always had a good amount and variety of food available. There is of course always room for improvement, but with respect to the rainy season and the tomato-blight problem, we were not effected by either. A lot of other things happened on the farm: we finished the construction of the creamery, started to milk our cows and to make cheese. This is the other major component of our farm to enable us to become long term financially sustainable.”

She was also able to respond, vegetable by vegetable, to the items we indicated we would like to see more of:

Sweet Potatoes
Although we planted them again this year, they unfortunately for the first time did not grow at all. I figure it was simply too cold. Also, we get a lot of damage through voles, who seem to love sweet potatoes, and through harvesting without adequate harvesting equipment. I can put that question out to the membership: do you care if the sweet potatoes are sometimes cut in half?

The other problem is that sweet potatoes want to be cured in 85F for 2 weeks, to enhance sweetness and storability. I have very limited capacities to do this.

Brussel Sprouts
Brussel sprouts are a late fall crop. They come in in late November and taste best after they experienced a first hard frost. This is really after the CSA has finished. The other problem is that the aphid pressure gets so strong in late fall, that I haven’t been able to grow brussel sprouts successfully thus far.

Broccoli
I am very aware that broccoli is a favorite and considered a staple vegetable. For our situation it is actually very expensive to grow broccoli. It takes a lot of care, space, timely management, fertilizer, etc etc. And it only yields one proper head once. It is also a seasonal crop that grows in spring or in fall and gives you a harvest season of about 2 to 4 weeks each time. I have been working hard on improving the quality and quantity of our broccoli crop, and was actually extremely pleased with the results this year. I am not sure if I can substantially increase the supply in the future — if we were to increase the quantity, it would increase the amount offered at those pickup weeks in which we already offer broccoli, but it would not increase the number of times when broccoli is offered (it simply does not produce anything for most part of the season). Please let me know if that is of any interest to you, and I can see what I can do.

Cauliflower
This is a crop that is even trickier to grow than broccoli, and after trying it for a couple of seasons I stepped back from it.

Cucumbers
Cucumbers (along with eggplants) were one of the crops severely impacted this year by the cool weather, as well as an abundance of pests of all kinds: beetles, voles, groundhogs etc etc – we are changing management practices next year, moving to a black plastic mulch system for all the heat loving crops (cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, squash, this new system will also allow us to grow melons for the first time, which I am really excited about) – so hopefully this will solve most of the problems at once.

Spinach
For some reason, spinach is having an unusually difficult time in our fields. There appears to be a soil-borne fungus which wilts the leave before they can grow to any harvestable size. I have been trying every year, trying different varieties, supplementing with seaweed, etc etc but so far there has not been any reliable success – sorry, we’ll keep trying, and hopefully we will find a solution

Scallions
We will have scallions again next year. We did plant them, but 80% never took, never started to grow. The only explanation I have for this phenomena is a crop rotation issue.

Eggplant
(see cucumbers above) – they will really love the added heat they get from the black plastic

Peas
Peas are very seasonal and are usually grown in spring. We grow a lot of peas for the amount of people we have available to harvest them all. It takes four people more than six hours to get through them all, and we have to do this twice a week. Considering the little market value peas have, it is actually quite unreasonable for us to grow them, but we do it anyhow, because everybody loves them so much. (This is the same for beans, the amount of time it takes to handpick peas and beans makes us completely incompatible with larger and more specialized farms that have mechanized harvesting systems.)

Onions
Both onions and leeks I am hoping to improve the quantity that we will be able to harvest in the coming year. So far we had very little turnout (the percentage of harvestable sized crops compared to the amount we planted has been very low.) I ran some trials on the leeks late in the season and was able to observe a very great response to foliar feeding with a seaweed extract. I will include these sprays in our management practices from now on and hopefully have much better results.

Leeks
(see above)

Tomatoes
We had a very good harvest of tomatoes this year (especially compared to all the problems the farms north and west of us had, who ended up with no tomatoes at all) – if you are looking for an earlier crop, I won’t be able to supply that. Tomatoes grown in the field come in in mid August, Greenhouse tomatoes are 4 weeks earlier but we have very limited Greenhouse space. Unfortunately, the town doesn’t really seem to support farming too much, so the second Greenhouse we build, we were never able to take into productive use, since the town did not allow us to put the plastic cover on it.
Beets
Beets are a riddle to me. Some germinate, some don’t, some grow nice and large while the next one over stays really small. Why? I am not sure. I have a few hints to work with, namely application of lime at seeding, deeper seeding depth, earlier thinning (this is a real time constraint issue – maybe your CSA members can afford to come out to a volunteer beet thinning party?), possibly also seaweed extract application. Hopefully I will be able to solve this in the near future. I believe in addition to the normal riddle I experience growing beets, there was a problem of seed quality this year, the beets had extremely low germination rates.

Hungry Filmmakers

“Hungry Filmmakers” offers a sneak peek at six fresh films that offer unique perspectives and arguments on food, agriculture and eating more healthfully, from teen mothers who become urban farmers in an unlikely setting to a low-impact bike tour that hits up small farms throughout the country; from challenging the regulation of “organic” to celebrating young farmers battling the odds to grow food with greater integrity.

A lively panel discussion and Q&A with the filmmakers moderated by food activist and author Anna Lappé will follow the screenings. At 9:00pm, there will be an after-party at Jimmy’s No. 43, located at 43 E. 7th St.. Snacks from local purveyors including Flying Pigs Farm, Schoolhouse Kitchen, Blue Isle Oyster Company, Hot Bread Kitchen and more will be served. The bar will feature specials on Ommegang Beer of Cooperstown, NY. Any proceeds garnered from the evening will be donated to the nonprofit organization Just Food

The films:

WHAT’S “ORGANIC” ABOUT ORGANIC? Shelley Rogers
BIG RIVER and TRUCK FARM Curt Ellis & Ian Cheney
THE GREENHORNS Severine von Tscarner Fleming
GROWN IN DETROIT Manfred & Mascha Poppenk
FACES FROM THE NEW FARM Liz Thylander, Kat Shiffler & Lara Sheets
[AS YET UNTITLED FILM ON CLIMATE CHANGE & FOOD SYSTEM] Sara Grady

When: December 15, 2009. Doors open at 7:00pm. Screenings begin promptly at 7:30pm.

Where: Anthology Film Archives. 32 2nd Ave, New York

Cost: $9.

Advanced tickets can be purchased from Brown Paper Tickets.

For more information visit this blog.

Add this to your calendar.