Valerie’s Corner

This week I would like to kick off a new Growing Your Own Food section with a guest column by Keith Parker, a Bisbee Farmers Market backyard grower for the past three years.  Keith is a professional chef who has cooked for several restaurants and last year for the Bisbee Food Co-op’s Bistro at the market, worked as the Co-op’s produce manager and now creates its deli selections. He sells his lovingly tended “Angel Food Produce” grown in his bio-intensive backyard garden in a historic old schoolhouse in the Warren section of Bisbee.  

Growing Your Own Food

Guest Column by Keith Parker

I started growing food for many reasons: I cook professionally, I enjoy the interface with Nature, watching the seeds perform their little miracles and it’s certainly a healthy activity. These and more reasons all came together for me a little over a decade ago. I called it my “garden epiphany.” When I saw the Earth as the proverbial garden and me (along with whatever else I may do in life) as a gardener, (even though I had close friends who gardened professionally, I had never tended my garden, ever).

I turned to one of the gardening books I owned at the time, but hadn’t opened yet, and read a quotation from Abraham Lincoln.  “Ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.” I felt: Wow! What a vision to have over a hundred years ago, and even more potent today!

Then, one of those “books-falling-off-the-shelf-opened-to-the-right-page” moments happened, and there was Mahatma Gandhi saying, “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” In that moment I got it!

I saw clearly, how “backyard” food gardening, and small “mini” farms can begin to move our modern culture back to a sustainable regional food self sufficiency and subsequent healthier, more balanced lifestyle in the process. Whew! Evidently many others sense this vision too, because it’s happening everywhere! More farmers markets are opening every year in the U.S. From a count of 1755 in 1994 to a whopping 4500 in 2007! (This will be the 7th  season for Bisbee Farmers Market and the 3rd  for Sierra Vista Farmers Market.)

The global dilemma for us and all countries is to learn how to live in sustainable ways on the Earth sooner, than later. (There evidently isn’t much later available.) Actions are demanded now. Every person and every family is pressed to make decisions to make a difference now and each day forward into an eventual totally sustainable future for all our future generations.

Small scale food gardening and supporting the local food movement are among the most powerful actions any person/family can take to actively work for the ecological solutions necessary to meet the needs of the times in which we live.

With a rapidly growing demand for fresh and healthy food and a need to reduce our collective and personal carbon imprint, ideas like rethinking the shipping of food thousands of miles, (especially when most can be produced locally in most places), become very important and as it turns out, doable.

There’s precedence for this kind of life-style change, meeting the need of a crisis. During World War II, Victory  Gardens in this country produced up to 40% of all the vegetables consumed by Americans. Family gardens in Russia and other countries have accounted for as much as 50% or more of the fresh produce consumed. Before the advent of modern industrial farming methods, China enjoyed a 4000 year period of small scale agricultural success in food self sufficiency. Small scale regional food production is an ancient and sustainable model. We don’t have to reinvent anything but our attitude to our food and where we get it.

There are plenty of great ideas already out there, we just need to start practicing them. We really don’t need any more “new breakthrough technology” to solve the planetary problems we’ve created, we just need to act on what we already know!

My next installment will be about taking steps and learning how easy it can be to grow food and/or support the local food movement.

This Week at the Sierra Vista Farmers Market

Stop by Grammie’s Garden for the Wyckoff’s own greenhouse tomatoes including large Beefsteak, Sweet Clings and grape varieties.  Look for Willcox organic Pink Lady apples, green beans, red bell peppers, winter and summer squash, Arizona citrus (lemons, oranges & grapefruit) as well as certified organic mangoes, pineapples, avocados and specialty melons from Mexico.

Get bags of fresh lettuce mix, Swiss chard or spinach from the Bertys as well as white and pie pumpkins, great baked or for pumpkin bread.

Stop by to talk to McNeal Eggman, Don Smythe, and see pictures of his 120 hen flock.    His chickens are really producing so all his eggs are very fresh, at most only seven days old. 

Adventure Coffee will feature samples and sell cups of hot coffee from a different variety of organic, fair-trade coffee each week.  Anyone buying a pound of coffee beans receives a free cup of coffee.  A full line of Maya Tea will be available including Gun Powder Green Tea and Peach.

Simmons Honey will be at the market with desert honeys, beeswax lip balm and candles and heath-promoting hive products such as bee pollen and royal jelly.  The Simmons family are expert canners and produce a large array of jams, jellies and preserves.

Esperanza Arrevalo, who has been out with painful sciatica, will be back with her regular flour, corn and mesquite tortillas, fresh salsa, mesquite bread and cookies and tamales.

Rancher Dennis Moroney of the 47 Ranch on Davis Road will bring grass-fed beef and goat to market including tongue, heart, liver and ox-tail for great soup.  He also has summer sausage and red chile chorizo.

If you’ve given up factory-farmed bacon for health reasons, try some nitrate-free local bacon from rancher Nathan Watkins of San Ysidro Farm who raises his pigs without hormones and antibiotics.   He will again have lamb chorizo and a few pastured turkeys for sale.

Mama Llama will be back with South American-inspired “take and bake” empanadas, both mini for party appetizers and regular for a quick but very tasty breakfast, lunch or supper. 

Take home or eat at the market the Next Door Kitchen’s home-style cooking.   

Maggie and Paul Smith sell Arizona produced trail mixes and dried dates, figs, apricots and raw and roasted nuts so you can make your own mix as well as Dr. Hummus Middle Eastern appetizers made in Phoenix.

Also at the market:  Tucson’s Azmira healthy pet food, Desert Oasis Soaps, Dragoon Marketplace with Planet Earth Remedies, Just Coffee, Native Seeds/SEARCH dried beans & Southwest Soup Mix, desert health foods, frozen & smoked salmon and breads & pastries made from healing Emmer grain.

Recipes

Keith’s Winter Squash Gratin

1 medium winter squash, peeled & steamed

2 medium onions

1 cup grated cheese (Swiss or Gruyere)

? ti 1 tsp dry sage or five fresh sage leaves, chopped

1 bay leaf

salt & pepper to taste

4 slices sturdy bread

1 ? cups soy or regular milk

virgin olive oil

Reserve the water from steaming the squash.  Saute onions with sage and bay.  Season them with salt and pepper and spread on bottom of baking dish.  Tear bread into pieces and moisten with hot squash water.  Lay squash over onions and season with more salt and pepper if desired.  Add grated cheese.  Pour milk over all and top with moistened bread.  Cover and bake at 325 for 40 minutes.  Continue baking uncovered until liquid is absorbed.  Let sit a bit before eating.   

Roasted Winter Squash, Onion and Garlic Soup

(A gorgeous, tasty and easy soup to make when roasting a chicken in the oven. Adapted from a recipe from the Burda Farm.)

2 pounds winter squash

1 large unpeeled garlic head

1 large unpeeled onion, cut in half

2 tblsp olive oil

? cup whipping cream

8 sprigs fresh thyme or 2 tsp dried

2 tsp Spike seasoning or veggie bullion cubes

11/2 cup water

(Optional: a can of chicken broth can be substituted for veggie seasoning and water)

Cut squash in eight pieces, soop out seeds.  Cut 1/3 inch off top of garlic head, exposing cloves.  Place garlic, squash and onion, cut side up in baking dish.  Drizzle vegetables with olive oil.  Crumble thyme over top.  Cover dish tightly with foil and bake until tender, about 90 minutes.  Uncover and cool.

Scrape squash from skin into food processor or blender.  Pell outer layers and trim root end from onion halves and add.  Separate 9 garlic cloves and squeeze into blender.  Add any juice from baking dish.  Add cream and puree until almost smooth.  Add more galic if desired.  Put puree in sauce pan.  Whisk in water and veggie stock seasoning or chicken broth.  Stir over medium heat until cooked through.  Taste.  Season with salt and pepper.  Best if made a day ahead.  Serve in warm bowls garnished with a bit of chopped parsley.