Ingredients

• 4 peaches
• 1 cup fresh ricotta
• honey
• 2 Tablespoons thyme, picked
• extra virgin olive oil
• sea salt

Preparation

Cut the peaches in half and remove the stones. If they are not too soft you can twist the cut peach to get at the stone more easily. Toss the halved peaches with olive oil and honey and place on a sheet tray, cut side down.

Roast in a 400 degree oven until just soft but not mushy, about 10 minutes. Removes peaches from the oven and let cool.

Place peaches on a plate and put a spoonful of ricotta on each half. Drizzle with additional honey and olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt and a little thyme. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Photo credit: Bob Krasner

Recipe Source

The Diner Journal

]]> http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/07/recipe-peaches-with-ricotta-honey-and-thyme/feed/ 0 http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/06/protecting-farms-and-open-space/ http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/06/protecting-farms-and-open-space/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:06:16 +0000 David Becker http://friendofthefarmer.com/?p=2058 When European settlers arrived more than 350 years ago, it was said that the Eastern forests were so expansive that a squirrel could travel from the Chesapeake Bay to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.

Most of the broad, open views that we associate today with a drive in the country are essentially manmade. The fields we pass were likely farms that went fallow as farmers sold out or left to farm in the Midwest and California after WWII.

East Coast farms face multiple threats: cheap imports, competition from huge farms, an aging farm population that often earns the minimum wage, the relentless pressure of development and a lack of infrastructure to bring products to market.

Protect Land by Farming It

If you want to preserve “viewscapes” you can do what Chef Dan Barber’s grandmother did in Great Barrington, MA: Farm your open land, or lease it to someone else to farm. Keep it in sustainable and responsible production.

Both you and the surrounding countryside will receive all manner of benefits.

Towns and landowners have a number of options to protect their agricultural heritage, including:

• Protective Rural Zoning: zoning of a very low density. This is one of the most effective ways to protect rural and agricultural land and to maintain a critical mass of land required to support agricultural economies without buying conservation easements.
• Conservation Easements: a legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust or government whereby a landowner sells or donates the rights to develop his or her property to a conservation organization. When development rights are sold or donated, the land can never be developed.
• Transfer of Development Rights (TDR): a legal agreement that allows a developer (who wants to build at a higher density than is permitted) to purchase or trade for additional development rights from a willing seller who owns land in an area designated for preservation. (Source)

These well-structured and tested programs run into well-organized business and real estate interests. Last year I sat in on an open space planning session in the charming town of Millerton, NY. An audience member worked hard to discredit a team presenting a conservation framework. It turns out he was a real estate agent looking to protect a sale of a large farm. His groundwork paid dividends. Not that night but months later, when the Town tabled the plan—two years in development—without explanation.

More Reading

Keeping Open Space Open

Franklin Hiram King. You may not know the name, but you know the legacy: More than 100 years ago King invented the cylindrical silo.

It was King’s aversion to waste — something that any farmer can appreciate — that led him to create a new way of storing corn.

Until King, grain was held in rectangular buildings that had to be incredibly strong to support tons of weight and pressure. Rectangular buildings used up valuable land, and yet they waste space (those corners rarely get filled).

Wall and roof joints admit moisture, rodents and insects that led to rot and spoilage.

In fact, even today, the lack of proper storage facilities in India leads to the loss of 10 per cent of the total foodgrain production—in a country where hunger still claims the lives of a million children every year.

But the cylindrical silo has just two joints, is airtight and therefore easier to fumigate, and seals the harvest safely away from the elements.

Silos also put gravity to work. So, no need to use equipment to push grain into a corner, and no need to use a machine to load it onto a truck either. Both problems are easily solved when you load from the top and unload from the bottom.

A modern marvel and distinctly American invention, the cylindrical silo is a form so beautiful that some say Frank Lloyd Wright used it as inspiration for the Guggenheim Museum.

SOS—Save Our Soil

King has another legacy that may have an even bigger impact in the 21^st century.

King studied soil fertility and soil depletion, first at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (where he started a department of agricultural physics) and then later at the USDA.

He saw that the use of chemical fertilizers, just becoming popular, “cannot be considered indefinitely.” In just three generations, they were depleting the soil of a nutrient base that had built up over millennia.

King urged that the same amount of nutrients that are taken out of the land be put back in. That’s the definition of sustainable agriculture, and a practice universally accepted by all types of farmers.

His insights came from a nine-month study of farmers in Asia, including China, Japan and Korea. At the time Asian farmers protected fertility by incorporating every bit of waste back into their fields including “human waste, ashes from the cooking fire, muck from ditches, any scrap of food for humans or livestock.”

King’s resulting book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, may have launched the sustainable and organic agricultural movements in this country and Europe.

While many of the methods that King described are no longer used in Asia, farmers I talk to today are embracing age-old methods, even plowing with oxen, to keep costs down and to create food with great flavor.

From Farmers of Forty Centuries

“Time is a function of every life process as it is of every physical, chemical and mental reaction. The husbandman is an industrial biologist and as such is compelled to shape his operations so as to conform with the time requirements of his crops.

The oriental farmer is a time economizer beyond all others. He utilizes the first and last minute and all that are between . . .

They have long realized that much time is required to transform organic matter into forms available for plant food and although they are the heaviest users in the world, the largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or subsoil before it is applied to their fields, and at an enormous cost of human time and labor, but it practically lengthens their growing season and enables them to adopt a system of multiple cropping which would not otherwise be possible.

By planting in hills and rows with intertillage it is very common to see three crops growing upon the same field at one time, but in different stages of maturity, one nearly ready to harvest, one just coming up, and the other at the stage when it is drawing most heavily upon the soil. By such practice, with heavy fertilization, and by supplemental irrigation when needful, the soil is made to do full duty throughout the growing season.”

More Reading

Farmers of Forty Centuries

Franklin Hiram King: Farmer For Future Centuries

Compost: An Incredible Transformation

Turns out that milk from grass-fed cows has significantly more of something called conjugated linoleic acid (which may create insulin resistance in the body) than grain-fed cows. Some researchers will add that cows fed on grass are just plain healthier. Cows may love grain but it’s not great as a steady diet.

Smart farmers don’t just turn animals loose on pastureland; they follow a process called rotational grazing.

Goats Are Your Offensive Line

Jen Dustin and her husband, Phil Leahy, of Leahy Farm in Lee, Massachusetts, will tell you that Step One is clearing brush, especially the invasive species. This is most efficiently done with goats—nature’s own brush-clearing machinery. They’ll eat the bark right off the trees if you’re not careful.  Only when the goats have cleared up overgrown fields will Jen and Phil bring in their cows.

Phil makes sure that his herd of Milking Devons only spends a couple of days on any one area of pasture, so they’re always on fresh grass.

Like a gardener working on a massive scale, he knows that when you cut back a plant—as grazing does naturally—it stimulates growth.  The pastures are more productive, the animals healthier and the milk they produce is apparently more nutritious and tastier. And if the cows don’t nibble the grass all the way down to the ground, they are less likely to ingest parasites, which would require medical intervention.

It’s more work to do rotational grazing; Phil and Jen are constantly moving electric fences powered off a car battery. They’re fortunate to have enough land to feed their herd. But many farmers are limited by acreage in how they feed their animals.  Grain becomes a necessity or a supplement if pasture is limited.

Helping the Farmer Next Door

Do you live next to a farmer raising animals for dairy or meat? Do you have open land that is lying fallow? Consider leasing that land to your neighbor. You’ll get a nice tax break, a nominal cash payment and fresh meat and dairy. And the inevitable manure factor can be mitigated when a right-sized herd is moved frequently.

More Reading

Baloney Science on the Perils of Meat

Grass-Fed Beef from Pasture to Plate

1. Throw them out immediately because you know you’ll never eat them.
2. Put them in airtight containers to be thrown out after they have had a chance to putrefy.
3. Anticipate the quick and easy meal that you can make in one-quarter of the time—thanks to leftovers.

I was a follower of the first and second principals but I’ve recently converted to the third.

When I was growing up my parents prodded me to finish my dinners by invoking starving Biafran children. But even after that admonition I often didn’t finish my meal—and yet I never saw the dish in a new incarnation the next day. All those calories wasted!

Working with leftovers tends to be a great way to stretch a tight budget. It turns out you’re making a huge environmental contribution in the process. More on that in a minute.

The great chefs, like Jacques Pepin, know that to make the most of their food budget they need to be creative:

1. Leftover salmon can be transformed into salmon cakes with little more than Old Bay Seasoning, an egg, onion and old bread. I like to use Panko breadcrumbs for a crunchy exterior.
2. Turkey can be given a second life when served with mole sauce.
3. Almost any vegetable will live happily ever after in pasta primavera.

In the process you save time and money, and feel as smart as any celebrity chef. Take those savings and buy a new book, kitchen utensil, even a new outfit.

Stop Us Before We Toss Again

When you reuse rather than toss you’re cutting down on the millions of tons of food that goes into the waste stream every year. Fully 12% of the entire US waste stream—both residential and commercial—is made up of food waste.

An estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption is discarded, according to a government study. It happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen.

The Department of Agriculture estimated that 96.4 billion pounds of the annual 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. That’s 3,000 pounds per second or one pound per person every day. With 36 million people going hungry, we can do better.

Groups like City Harvest in New York do step in, annually saving more than 26 million pounds of excess food from establishments across the country. A tray of lasagna that was never served, bread that’s a day old, tomatoes with a minor bruise that would be great in sauce or a salad—all can be repurposed.

City Harvest’s 17 trucks and three bikes pick up food from sources as varied as the St. Regis Hotel and Trader Joe’s, 7-Eleven and Goldman Sachs, Le Bernardin and the Delta Shuttle. The food is delivered to 600 community programs at a cost of 22 cents per pound.

Two More Ways to Recycle Leftovers

If you didn’t make that casserole or shred the pork for a sandwich, you still have options. Of course, you can freeze it and feast another day (be sure to put a date on the bag).

Or, turn food waste into lovely compost for your garden. There are small sink-side composting units for urban living and larger ones for those with more outdoor space.

When I calculated how much effort goes into food production and how many people go without, coming up with a simple strategy to transform leftovers into something tasty seemed like a pretty easy thing to do.

Useful Links:

City Harvest

Compost: An Incredible Transformation

How Long Can I Store _________ Before It Is No Longer Safe to Eat?

Clever Composting for Urban Dwellers

75 Things You Can Compost, But Thought You Couldn’t