GourmandeMom™

Urban Roots Austin Hosts (Another Great) Outstanding in the Field (a lesson in eating all your vegetables)

My new Greenling #LocalBox arrived--though I'm not done with the sweet potatoes from 2 weeks ago yet--but because of the recent consciousness-raising dinner via Outstanding in the Field, held this year out at Austin's Urban Roots, I'll be darned if I throw away any of these unconsumed veggies. I will--repeat--I will figure out an efficient way for my tiny family of two (2) to consume all of those sweet potatoes.

Outstanding in the Field is dedicated to hosting "Farm Dinners' In gorgeous settings, with local chefs and local local produce, thus connecting dining folk to the land, and making us think thrice about where food comes from and the people who are out working hard, in a field, to get it to us.  Like last year, I came away from this year's farm dinner recommitted to sustainability, emotionally and financially.

One other great place connecting people to the land is Urban Roots, an urban farm out at 7651 Delwau Lane.   The web site says this about their unique non-profit mission:  

Urban Roots uses sustainable agriculture to transform the lives of young people and increase access to healthy food in Austin. Founded in 2007 as a program of YouthLaunch, Urban Roots has transitioned to become an independent non-profit agency in the fall of 2011.

Urban Roots provides paid internships to Austin youth, age 14-17, to work on our 3.5 acre urban sustainable farm in East Austin.  Each year, we have a goal of growing 30,000 pounds of produce with the Urban Roots community of youth, community volunteers, and staff.  We donate 40% of our harvest to local soup kitchens and food pantries and sell the other 60% at farmers’ markets, through our Community Supported Agriculture Program, and wholesale.

After an array of passed appetizers (the homemade pretzel bread sticks and spicy cayenne-flecked mustard being our favorite) we got a tour of the farm. We heard young Joe here talk about his many hot days in the field.  We learned how they decide what to plant, what makes the most money, what life lessons the kids learn from getting out there and living la vida agricultural.  Most interesting factoid: okra is a pain in the butt to harvest.   I still have fresh okra in my fridge from the Greenling #LocalBox a while back.  Now I think to myself: "I don't care how much I do not feel like making gumbo: if Joe can work hard out there in the field to harvest okra, well, by golly, I will consume it."  

There's Joe, one of the young promising leaders of the kids out at Urban Roots, in the Urban Roots t-shirt.  We asked him if there were other programs like this one anywhere else in the US.  He said yes.  In NOLA, they have a "youth farm" program called "Grow Dat." 

Here's part of the group making its way through a field.  

I did the tour armed with my second glass of a cold lager.  Oh, what was it called: it was this:  a pale lager, "The One They Call Zoe."  Crazy about this stuff. They describe it as "based on pale and vienna malts, light to golden in color with a beautiful white layer of foam that rests atop the beer, constantly delivering floral and citrus dry hop aromatics with every sip."  

I thought, back then, early in the day: "With beer (lager, whatever) this good, and served in a wine glass no less, who needs wine?"  There was plenty of wine later on. And apparently I did need some of it. 

The next star of the show for me, after that cold lager, was the bread. 

Mark was manning the bread oven.  There will soon be this fine array of bread available for everyone else, so I seem to recall hearing, as part of the grand opening of Odd Duck at its brick and mortar reincarnation.  

One last look at The Table, in its lovely setting, before we all would descend upon it. 

As the tour was over, and we were summoned to head over to the table, I was delighted to see placed on the table, on each of the tables joined together, Mark's bread.  

We settled in.  All that walking around in a field drinking a nice cold lager can really make you work up an appetite.   We polished off our loaf of bread in about 32 seconds, along with the plate of sultry salty butter.  For the next 1.8 hours, I would glance every now and then at the group of people at the table next to us.  

"Why do they have bread left?  Who doesn't finish the bread?  How could you stop yourself from eating this bread?  Who ARE these people?"  

I composed myself.  I forced myself to look away from their half loaf of crusty bread, sitting there, alone, ignored, unloved, on the table next to me.

A beautiful large platter of our first course arrived.

This was the "Lightsey Farms field pea hummus...Pure Luck goat feta, okra...Urban Roots squash, eggplant & crispy Texas rice."

And then our kind server was nice enough to say we looked like a fun bunch and proceeded to give us some healthy pours: some Argus Cidery Idalou Brut was up first, and then a 2011 Duchman Family Winery Viognier (Texas wine). This was may been more of that delightful pale lager though.

There was another dish that came and went, as in it was devoured.  It was "Bandera quail stuffed with dirty rice...Top of Texas apples, cedar."  Lovely.  But those little bird legs were gone in no time.

The star of the show was about to arrive: the smoked Windy Hill goat.  But just before that was a platter of huge slices of "butternut squash, mesquite granola, yogurt."  With those lovely grill marks, the smoke of the grill, the sweetness of the squash, we could not hold back.  Our server urged us to wait just 3 minutes to pair the squash with the goat.  We couldn't do it.  

The large shallow bowl of smoked goat brisket arrives.  The goat heart is pointed out to us. I served myself a little bit of both. 

We also finally scored the bread on the table next to us.  They still had not eaten it. We adopted it.  Gave it a good home at our table.  

Thankfully, dessert was petite.  It was "Swede Farm goat's milk panna cotta...sorghum, pecan streusel, pumpkin ganache."  That had Barley Swine written all over it.   And no wonder, thanks to Barley Swine's Bryce Gilmore doing all the culinary magic out there in the field.

And then, they - we - were done.

Thankfully (for us), Allison's spouse spent most of the time out standing in the field (that one never gets old with us), on the phone for work stuff.  He missed/avoided/ducked/ignored gracefully all our drinking antics and drove us all safely home.    

 

 

Special Delivery - the "Local Box" (fresh, local, organic produce) from Greenling

Back in the day, when I had my season ticket for one (1) for the Houston Grand Opera, the fact of having a season ticket compelled me to make huge efforts to get to that opera I had already paid for.  Because of that season ticket, I saw not only the amazing Cecilia Bartoli in Cenerentola, but also pretty random, obscure operas.  Like Gertrade Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts.   Never ever would have gone to that, even if I am a literary Paris 1920s groupie.   Result: Loved it.  Quirky, weird.  Visually stunning when the HGO did it. 

And so it is going to be true, I see already, with my subscription to the Greenling organic produce home delivery service.

I will be meeting a founder of La Ruche qui dit oui when in Paris here soon, an organic, fresh produce delivery service in France, so it seemed right that I needed to get down to the business of getting familiar with the organic farm-fresh produce delivery situation here in Austin. 

I signed up for the service over lunch last week at Second.   No brainer I wanted the "Local Box."  No substitutions: just picks of what's best that week from local-ish farms. And a delivery every two weeks.  Once a week is no bueno with just me and the son.

My first box, crate, or bin, rather, arrived.  But not until like almost 8 p.m. on the one of two delivery days that I chose.  The experience so far:

Pretty easy interface for the website.  I was on the tiny iPhone; as I am over 45, and having increadingly difficult time navigating that tiny wondrous phone/computer to do intensive data entry, the fact that even I was able to do it says something.

The delivery experience/presentation.   I am not sure what I was expecting about this first delivery.  A gorgeous richly textured handwoven artisanal basket with funky handle and weave? Darling rustic and exotic-looking of colors or ribbons a la Williams Sonoma?  But when I got the green plastic bin, and first opened it after scampering back with it to the kitchen, I was underwhelmed.  Is this it?  This for my $40 something? ($10 deposit on the bin; you set it out when the next delivery comes but they will spot you a few times and remind you to return the create/bin from the last visit on the next delivery cycle, please, before they ding you for it.)

The Produce.   I started going through the items in the bin.  The first item I pick up for study was probably the smallest head of red leaf lettuce I have ever seen.  It was adorable. Like Ina had gone out into her garden and picked it right up out of there for a lovely weekday lunch for her Hampton friends, or a beach lunch with Jeffrey on the weekend.  I had two of those little heads of lettuce.

The List of Stuff: good, helpful explanations.  I realized there also was placed in the crate a list of the items, which included the name of which nearby farm grew the item.  Good thing there was a list.  I never would have guessed why I was getting a HUGE, giant bunch of ginger.  (And that would be because it was not ginger. It was what I would learn, after research, was sunchokes.)

And then I got more excited as I dug in.  Beets!  Goodie!  A beautifully formed green bell pepper!  A not so beautifully formed bunch of radishes!  And then I saw the real star.  A big frothy frilly bunch of this.  

Thinking it was rocket lettuce, I made a salad immediately.  Used part of that and an entire (tiny, tiny) head of red leaf lettuce.   Radishes.  And some of the many various brands of roasted almonds with sea salt I have on hand these days.  And the go-to dressing these days: fancy olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, sea salt, pepper.  

Back to the list for the Local Box items:  Rocket lettuce is nowhere on there.  But there is Mizuna.  I look it up.  Yep, that must be it.  Looks like rocket lettuce/arugula.  Related to mustard greens.  How cool do I feel.  Never heard of it. (I really should get out more. Working on that.)

Also in the green plastic bin:  bok choy.  Never had it.  Lovely parsley. (I have had parsley before.)  Two grapefruits. Those two grapefruits at first glance not too stunning.   But today, I cut into the grapefruit to accompany what I now know is Mizuna, not rocket lettuce.  This grapefruit is spectacular: everything you want in a grapefruit. Explosion of tartness and that wildly bright color.

Only much later did I realize that the folks at Greenling had done me another huge favor.  Not only did they include a sheet of paper listing all the produce and their provenance, and in the order in which the produce should be eaten based on the time in which each one will remain fresh for optimal enjoyment.  On the reverse side there are recipes for many of the items.  Good thing.  I've never had bok choy before, but I of course I will eat it now.  It was in my basket.  I paid good money to have that bok choy delivered to my door.  And of course those sunchokes. Cannot wait to try this recipe for roasted sunchokes. Delighted to learn that I do not need to peel the rough outer layer as with ginger (which it very much resembles). Just scrub.  Perfect for the time-pressed gourmande.

I admit, with some shame, that in preparation for this delivery, I had to throw away a lot of produce I had not gotten around to eating (and it was in the mushy phase).  It is shameful that waste.  Melissa tells me she can work up a nice composting routine for me.  

This wastefulness is one of my big ticket environmental, food-consciousness issues to work on this year.  As elitist as this luxury seems, of getting farm-fresh local produce delivered to my door, I feel much more committed to actually consuming it.  

Sure, it is a great cause and story that Greenling offers.  But it also is a good story if I can cut down on waste and get committed to this new angle of healthy eating and supporting my community.

I will stick with my subscription because who knows what else I have been missing out there all my life.  Because of it, I can already add mizuna and sunchokes to my list of "been there done thats."   Just like the Gertrude Stein opera. 

 

Outstanding in the Field Farm Dinner - A Day, and a Meal, in a Field in Brenham (and unexpected realizations)

I had been looking forward to this for months.  

A beautifully sited dinner table winding into a vast landscape of rocks, fields, cliffs or even coves for an Outstanding in the Field dinner out in the middle of nowhere.  

Outstanding in the Field is a series of "farm dinners" - getting people out into the land, the landscape, a farm ... the earth.  Then getting a great local chef onto that land - and a team of cooks, servers and organizers - to prepare a multi-course feast for well over 150 people.  Through this setting and the people and the food, you are reconnected with where your food comes from.  This was Jim's founding vision.  And it took years to catch on.

(Jim, the founder, talking about the tough beginnings, how a Range Rover commercial saved the concept (by providing a revenue stream for him)  and kept him in it to try one more time ;  years later, here we are)

Whatever.  What I was looking forward to was a beautiful meal, in a simple, beautiful, tranquil setting with friends.  And a lot of nice wine.

From Austin, we drive, and drive and drive.  Finally there, at Jolie Vue Farms, the site for the dinner - and in not Brenham actually - but Independence, Texas.   And our gracious hosts, who have developed this property into the organic farm and ranch it is today, are Glenn and Honey Ann Boudreaux.  

The land was a mess when they got it.  Torn up and dried out, worn down and out from decades of fertilizer, pesticides -- all the stuff of modern agri-business.  They didn't want any of that.  If God thought the sun and the earth were good enough to make food, why bother with all that extra stuff.  So Honey said, or something like that.

So they brought the earth back to life.  No more chemicals.  No more artificial fertilizers.  And the land rewarded them for the efforts.  So many natural grasses came back to fill the fields they had to summon folks from Texas A&M to make sense of it all. All told, 16 native grasses: all gone before, all brought back to life now.

(Honey talking in the field of natural grasses about the history of the farm, farm/ranching life, and telling us about heffers and steers and what not)

We learn where the pigs roll around, and how the animals get rotated to different pastures to let the earth rebound in one pasture over enough time; how this summer and last summer went for them and how they and the livestock survived (barely);how the new water tanks/troughs for the pigs save water and waste less of this precious resource; how smart the pigs are, how they rolled around in the summer with the rain shower waterheads and made giant pools of mud that you can still see dented into the earth; how the water hole is so low now - but it used to be so much more and used for the kids' fishing and swimming - and for helping to catch their own food.  Some weekends, the kids would be tasked with making do on their own: if you don't catch or find your own food, you don't eat.

Thus prepped with the idea of working for your food, we have to work to reach our food.  The table, the hallmark table of these Outstanding in the Field farm dinners, is way up high on another hill.  We would have to walk up there.  

Clearly this is part of Jim's founding vision.  

Jim surely wants us to walk up and honor the table as part of the earth we are walking on, earth that literally did produce some of the very food we would be eating. 

Another ritual, or tradition, is the bringing of your own plate.  You drop it off with the organizer upon entering the farm.  

You retrieve it later up the hill, as you get closer to the table.  There also was a pile of plates for those who had forgotten to bring a plate, a pile made up of plates forgotten at previous farm dinners.  And then, the table.

 

Just out there.  In a field.  Just as they say.    And then some food.

(the first course - including among other things scrapple, blue corn grits, a 63C egg, which I expertly, so proud of self, identified as sous-vide prepared and the 63C was the temperature, in celsius; on my blue Sasaki wedding gift plate (1 of 10) that I brought for the event)

And more food.   And then more food.  The bycatch fish - looking all prehistoric.  I loved that the best perhaps.

And by now, with wine at each course, and the sun setting ever so slightly, and the chill of these cooler days descending, we start to get a little feisty in our well-fed comfort zone pf this community of a long long table.  

We get up.  We walk out and around and out into the vast field.  The moon is starting to rise, just as the sun is setting.  

Dessert comes. 

Then it is over.  

On the ride home, we talk a lot to stay awake.  But back here, and even while there, I realize that what I expected was not what I got.  Not exactly at least.  

I expected a super high-end gorgeous meal, with exquisite wine, and maybe more than a little bit of food snobbery at the table, with carefree chatter of friends all around you.  It was sort of that, and there were glitches to be sure.  We almost got forgotten entirely, our group of 8, on that first course.   The wine was a little skimpy on the serving sizes I thought at first.  The courses came slowly. I almost had to whip out a protein bar. 

But all logistical glitches faded - soon.   And the most I got out of it was something entirely unexpected.  

As Honey Ann was talking, without judgment for our wasteful ways in the city at all, I realized, as if a cow patty had been thrown at my head to wake me up, was how much my life affects what I eat.  Duh.  

The water I use to water my lawn is water that is not going to help keep the animals alive that are being fed on thriving native grasses nourished in only the old-fashioned ways.  My choices to eat fruits and vegetables out of season only encourages the food system machine to spend more resources to produce an artificial food cycle that knows none of the ebb and flow of nature.  

  

In the heat of the moment, on that farm among the people helping to bring back a more natural and normal way of living and eating, I vowed I would stop watering my yard.  I hate doing it anyway - the cost, the waste.

I am back in Austin, and as it is fall I am not tested on the no watering rule.  I only watered one a week anyway when I did water.  But the farm dinner worked for me, and in this awakening way I never imagined.  

Outstanding in the Field takes its show on the road - in Asia and South America, for example. It was in Brazil recently.  But never France. Almost one time, but it did not work out. So I learned from Jim during the farm tour.

They wash all the plates by hand when everyone is done with the last meat course.   It is there for you to pick up as you leave the table for your walk back down the hill and through the farm.  

I chose to leave my blue Sasaki plate.  I like the idea of it being used by some other haggard single working mom who barely got her act together to get her ticket and get to the farm site for the dinner and so forgot she was supposed to bring a plate.  

I also like the idea of seeing my plate again someday at another Outstanding in the Field dinner...maybe in France.

(A bientot my blue Sasaki plate! ...Bon voyage, safe travels, and see you in France!)