“We live in an amazing country where it’s perfectly legal to feed your kids twinkies, hoho cakes, and mountain dew, but raw milk, that’s dangerous.”  So began Joel Salatin’s Saturday keynote address to the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association annual conference on February 13, 2010.  I attended the talk.  The writing below is my best effort to impartially summarize Salatin’s opinions as he shared them. Joel Salatin is the farmer behind Polyface Farms, a [...]

I visited the Columbus Winter Farmer’s Market this past Saturday January 16, 2010 for the first time.  It is held at First Unitarian Universalist Church in Clintonville. The market is small but well attended by vendors and consumers.  Tables in the center allowed patrons to enjoy their ready to eat purchases, including coffee from Crimson Cup. I am teaching a Kids Cook class about honey on February 11 but I was the student at the [...]

The first real snow is finally on the ground here in central Ohio. It might be hard to think about summer produce but that’s just what small farmers are doing. Several farmers offering Community Support Agriculture (CSA) shares already have their 2010 signups available.  At least one is offering discounts for those who register and pay before December 31.  Others have deadlines in early 2010. What is so wonderful about giving a CSA membership to [...]

A few things that might interest readers: PBS stations are showing a program based on the book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan.  I highly recommend reading Botany of Desire and am excited to watch the show.  Watch a preview here. Columbus residents can view Botany of Desire on Wednesday October 28 at 8 pm. Wayward Seed farms is offering a Thanksgiving CSA.  Their Thanksgiving box includes the [...]

Part of the purpose of Hounds in the Kitchen is to advocate for local foods and local eating.  ‘Local‘ is subjective and prone to green-washing as are so many other terms.  With the advent of Local Foods Week coming soon (see below), now is a good time to talk about what is local. Some define local in terms of miles: In 2005, authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon spent a year eating only what was [...]

After you have made tomato sandwiches, salads, stews, and more, it is tempting to just toss the rest of you CSA or home garden tomato harvest in the compost heap.  Preserving tomatos is not that hard and you will thank yourself in the fall for putting up farm fresh goodness.  Here are a few ideas for easy preserving: Make pseudo sun-dried tomatos: Halve and dry in a dehydrator or low temp (as low as you [...]

One of the more difficult parts of most tomato sauce recipes is blanching the tomatos.  Removing the skin has to be done in small batches and then you are left with slippery juicy innards to chop.  Not to mention that one more pot of boiling water on the stove means more chances to burn oneself. Sometimes when we make sauce, like when we made pepper tomato sauce last week, we skip the skinning.  The resulting [...]