Farm-To-Desk Blog
This Week!
March 7-10
At The Minor Theater and Richards’ Goat Tavern and Tea Room
Regional Wrap:
Shiitake Almond Pâté with Roast Beets and Kabocha vinaigrette
On Saturday:
At the North Coast Growers Association’s Winter Farmer’s Market
Teff and Rice Wraps
Pick up a 6-pack of our tasty tortilla-style wraps. They’re made with all organic, gluten-free, and animal-free ingredients and are unbelievably good. We’ve developed a wrap with a chewy texture that doesn’t crumble when wrapping. The flavor of teff gives these wraps the flavor you’ve been missing from gluten-free staples. All you need is a pan to heat them. Fill them with some local veggies, and make yourself a quick meal that will treat you right.
Our wraps come packed in a material called Ingeo, which is non-petroleum-derived material that is biodegradable. Click on this link to read more about the ins and outs of this packaging material.
6-Packs of our Flour Wraps are $8 each.
Locally Sourced
Food is love, Love is food proudly sources ingredients that were grown within the county in order to create foods that reflect a seasonal palette and an appreciation for the food culture of Humboldt County.
This Week:
Willow Creek Farm – Parsnips, Carrots, Turnips
Warren Creek Farm – Squashes
Wild Rose Farm – Beets, Quinoa
Mycality Mushroom – Shiitakes
Foodie pics
Kimchee fermented daikon radish.
Mediterranean-style Local Bean Pate with Roasted Leeks
Slowly roasting, at 325°F, mandolin-sliced turnips caramelize around the edges, creating a delightful browning that pairs well with delicate, onion-y leeks. Savory and inundated with olive oil, the flavors of kalamata olives and sun dried tomato, in the bean pate, tuck the brassica/mustard notes, of the turnip, neatly into composition.
Farmer’s Market Offerings 3/3/2018
This Saturday, at the Farmer’s Market, in the Arcata Plaza….
We’ll be right back.
We’re gearing up for our upcoming fresh wrap stand at the NCGA’s winter market, at the Arcata Plaza, each Saturday. We’ve just moved into a facility that will allow us to make this happen! Yeah, that’s right, that thing I’ve been blabbing on about for over a year, is finally going the direction of fruition. Friends, supporters, helping hands, and investors, it is because of your contributions, we are able to soon serve you in this way. Also available at our stand, our gluten-free, vegan, tortilla-style wraps and our delicious mini empanadas await you.
In the new year, we will have been offering our wholesale wraps (for purchase here) for 6 months. Our Party Platters have become popular. Our foods have been featured at several parties. We’ve been delighted to hear all of your enthusiastic feedback.
Running the lunch delivery has provided a unique way to demonstrate what we can offer from our kitchen. In the beginning, constructing gourmet ordeals, multiple times a week, and pedeling them to town to peddle them to those at work, was the only task we were orchestrating. Now that we’re expanding, we must bid adieu to the lunch delivery until further notice. I imagine that if we ever open a storefront, lunch delivery, by bicycle, would make a killer comeback.
Lentil patty wrap
Fulfill your starving fall cravings with this scrumptious lentil patty wrap. Its available at these locations: click here! You can also purchase one for lunch on Wednesday and Friday. Reserve early to help us curb food waste, like the day before. This helps us big time because we’re saving every cent we can to make our foods available at the North Coast Grower’s Association Farmers’ Market.
On envisioning
Thank you to Marnie Nave of Seapod and Brooklyn Marvin of Rose Mountain Photography for hosting one of our Rosette Mandalas, this past Friday, at their opening, for Arts Arcata.
In the center, slices of Regional Wraps were filled with a local rainbow bean medley with roasted delicata squash, and basil vinaigrette. Circling those were nori rolls with locally grown quinoa, ginger sesame broccoli, and roast parsnip red pepper sauce. SunSea salad rolled in chard leaves created the circumference. Borage blooms and calendula petals, flecked about each morsel, were a visual flavor of the passing season.
I’ve been conceptualizing a diagram to illustrate the relationship between the raw and prepared ingredients I use and a final product. Just to get something started, I designed a basic graphic, in Power Point. What percentage, in weight, does my ingredients sourcing globally represent? This is the most recent question I’ve asked myself when I think about the implications of running a food business. Sourcing local ingredients, as much as possible, makes an impact in several directions: environmentally, economically, and socially. Meeting them is meeting the triple-bottom-line. How to transition a conventional food-business model to a sustainable one is not as easy as replacing one piece in the machine. Can a practical measure of sustainability be rendered by calculating the percentage of bulk weight of ingredients from delineated regions of the world? For example, if 70% of the bulk weight of ingredients I used this month was locally sourced, 20% nationally sourced, and 10% internationally sourced, would that say anything realistic about the carbon footprint (or sustainability, in general) of this month’s menu? In the past few years of building Food is love…, I’ve discussed farming and food supply with many farmers (a lot of them with ecology degrees) and find that we talk about the weather quite a bit. With sudden unexpected, small yields, due to unfavorable conditions or pestilence, regional farmers must push other crops and mark up the best of the sparse. Can they feasibly compete with conventional wholesalers who truck, from afar, cases of inexpensive ingredients, ordered by a button on a website? On a larger scale, what does it mean to have more locally sourced, fresh ingredients in restaurants and stores during times when the unexpected happens? Could restaurants quickly change their menus, grocery stores their stock? How would their income be effected by a tomato demand following a week of fog and a cold snap, in a hypothetical future wherein most food retailers primarily sourced from their locality? Would their loss in tomato sales get redirected to support the conventional tomato market anyhow, thus looping us back into sourcing from conventional/large-scale agriculture? Reframing our food culture to respond adaptively, seems to be the responsibility of personal choice at the market both as a consumer and a purveyor.
I’m inspired by the straightforwardness of the research poster. During my undergrad, at HSU, I took a class in science writing, in which we were assigned a poster presentation like the ones you would see at a conference of research scientists. I was reminded that it was quite easy to create one of these colossal poster (it’s cute that there doesn’t seem to be a specific taxon for it other than ‘poster’) presentations on a single slide in PP. Typically, in preparing a research presentation, designing the poster is the final assignment, following the completion of the paper it summarizes. However, I learned calculus because my calculus professor insisted that drawing a picture of every problem is the bridge to understanding the mathematics. And it worked because I passed with a B, so I will will poster first, I guess. Burdened with so many topics and subtopics of importance, it is tedious to focus in on a presentation that communicates the central statement/thesis whilst being concise, informative, and precise. This is the crux of the science communication, in general. Food is love… is not a science-based anything but I rely on knowledge from scientific and science writers and science communicators for ideas on how to build an adaptive food business. Most writers and researchers I follow are ecologists, botanists, agriculturalists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, and other professionals who employ data-driven evidence in their work of studying natural systems. Manifesting the fusion of business practices and interdisciplinary research practices is one of my loftier goals. This simple graphic must do for now.
SunSea Wraps and Gin
September is celebrated, in Humboldt County, as local food month. A time to celebrate the diversity in abundance in our beloved region, a time for giving thanks, and a time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. I like the fruit of labor to taste like gin. At the Richards’ Goat, Amy whipped up a wonderfully smooth Marshtini with locally distilled gin from Jewel Distillery, housemade sage syrup, orange and lemon bitters and fennel sugar. I ordered one of my SunSea wraps, which for some reason taste better ordered out than right after making them in the kitchen. Perhaps it’s the taste of success. Here, at the closing of September, I’m happy that Food is love… made the cut to be part of Local Food Month. We’re getting closer to the dream. Thanks, Humboldt fans.
Food is love, Love is food 