How to Make Bread and Butter Pickles
In this episode, chef Kathryn Yeomans of The Farmer’s Feast demonstrates how to can home-made bread and butter pickles. For those looking for their first canning adventure, or for those new to pickling cucumbers, Yeoman’s shows you the complete process, and how easy it is to make your own fresh pickles. Check out the bread and butter pickle recipe.
Canning Food: Pickles
Paul Fuller and his wife Judy have been building their food processing business, Sweet Creek Foods, for 12 years. They started with pickles, then moved on to jams, tomatoes, salsa and tuna. But what they were really building, according to Paul, was an essential piece of a regional food system.
Co-Packing Cannery: Offering Added Value Food Processing for Farmers
What does a farmer do with fruit and vegetables that are cosmetically imperfect, and often less profitable to sell, but otherwise perfectly good products to eat? Sweet Creek Foods offers a co-packing service to growers that cost-effectively enables them to create added-value (for example, processing plums into bottled jam) out of their grade 2 fresh products, and to reach additional markets with their own established brand and product labels. It’s not just the machinery to process the food, it’s also the assistance with marketing, design of labels, and distribution that provides the farmer with the full set of tools to grow their new business.
Coming Next: Peppers
- Tuesday
Roasted Peppers and Corn Tamales
Gloria Vargas, of Gloria’s Secret Café, shows us how easy it is to make authentic tamales at home. Vargas, originally from El Salvador, loves this time of year because of all the different kinds of peppers that are available at the farmer’s market. - Wednesday
Peppers of the Basque Region
A love of Spanish food and culture, partly a reflection of one partner’s Basque heritage, was the impetus behind Manuel and Leslie Recio’s decision to grow peppers from northern Spain. The climate of Western Oregon and the Basque region of Spain are similar, so they have been successful in farming and at the market. - Thursday
Peppers – Hot or Sweet?
Manuel Recio shows us some of his favorite native Basque pepper varieties, and talks about some of their defining characteristics. While most of the peppers grown in the Basque region are sweet, not spicy hot, Recio also tells us what makes a pepper hot.
Weird, Wild and Tasty: Glacier Lettuce and Oyster Lettuce
Manuel Recio of Viridian Farms not only grows 20 different varieties of peppers from the Basque region of Spain (part of his family’s heritage), he also grows some unusual greens as you will see in this video: Glacier lettuce from the Canary Islands, and Oyster lettuce from Iceland.
The Weekly Roundup
- Farming Kelp: Seaweed becomes a new crop in America (NPR)
- Agribusiness tries to create a better tomato (WSJ)
We’re including this because it’s so irritating. When will people realize there are better tomatoes already? - Organic Agriculture and Organic Certification: Not so Ying and Yang (Cooking Up a Story)
This installment in their history of organic agriculture explores the challenges and contradictions of setting livestock standards using the scandalous abuse of the requirements for pasture to illustrate the very real limitations of organic certification. - Cooking isn’t creative, and it isn’t easy (NY Times)
Profile of Christopher Kimball, founder of Cook’s Illustrated. - Faces and Visions of the Food Movement: Denise O’Brien (Civil Eats)
For over 30 years, Denise has helped develop agriculture policy on the state, national and international levels, working specifically on local food systems and conservation issues. - Leftover Salmon Risotto (Good Stuff NW)
We wish our leftovers turned out this good. - Lobster Mushrooms (Seattle Mag)
Langdon Cook goes lobster hunting in the woods. - Ethiopian crops satisfy hunger for home (SF Gate)
Ethiopian immigrants in the SF Bay Area grow their native country’s grains and spices. - Heroic Endeavor: The Seed Farm (EcoCentric)
New farmers are grown in three-year program. - Ag cooperatives are key to feeding the world (World Food Day)
- Pig Day (Kevin Kossowan)
Every year for the past half decade, he butchers all the pork his family will eat for the year at once, at home. This year, he decided to test the waters on having a butchering party: 11 friends, 10 sides of tamworth pig, food, fire, and drinks. - Juneteenth Gardens: Seeds of Survival (NY Times)
This article about African-Americans and slave gardens features Michael Twitty, who explores these issues further on his website afroculinaria.com. - More farmers running for cover crops (Harvest Public Media)
Reporter Amy Mayer visits with Midwestern farmers who are using cover crops to increase yield. It’s an issue Cooking Up a Story examined in the video “Adding Cover Crop to a No-Till System.” - Vancouver planting 150,000 fruit and nut trees (Take Part)
We love this idea: cities planting fruit and nut trees in public parks, for all to enjoy. - Supporting our farmers, preserving the harvest (EcoCentric/Kim O’Donnel)
Kim decides to buy 25 pounds of tomatoes from a farmer who lost his home in a wildfire. - Homesteaders in South Africa Q&A (GNOWFGLINS)
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