Kamloops Farmer’s Market Videos: Silver Springs Organic

GUEST POST by Larkin Schmiedl

Mendel Rubinson farms near Savona, BC with his partner Paula Rubinson. Their farm is called Silver Springs Organic but used to be called Farmhouse Herbs. In this video Mendel shares a bit of his farming story, and his opinions about local, organic, and what he chooses when the two collide.

Just One Sit-Down Family Meal

heirloom-tomatoes

One of the pleasures of growing your own food is having a change to try heirloom varieties. These pear and cherry tomatoes do not travel well but have amazing flavor. You wont find these tomatoes at a grocery store but your local farmer's market will have them in season.

This is a post I wrote back in early October. It is quite a contrast from today, since we are pulling out our winter boots, snow pants and jackets after the first snow of the year:

Shaen and I spent the afternoon working at cutting back the tomato plants. We removed leaves and extra green growth from the tomato plants in an attempt to encourage the plant to put its energy into ripening the tomatoes before the first killer frost. Shaen found a monster eggplant and numerous hot peppers hiding in the greenhouse. Sonja worked on pulling up beets and baby carrots. Erika found a potato plant and dug up the tubers. Erika danced through the garden collecting ripe cherry tomatoes like some sort of fairy nymph. The girls cleaned and processed their vegetables.

For dinner, I made a mixture of baked vegetables in a glass baking dish. Most of the vegetables came from Farmhouse Herbs an organic farm that sells at the Kamloops Farmer’s Market. It hasn’t been a good year for our garden and Farmhouse Herbs has supplied my household with much of our vegetables. The vegetables included: parsnips, onions, green onion tops, garlic, beets and carrots. (By the way, those golden beets were the best beets I have ever eaten.) I added herbs gathered by the garden nymph, and mixed in sea salt and fat from my grease bucket. Please read The Great Grease Bucket: Something for Nothing for more information. In another glass baking dish, I cut the freshly dug potatoes and added sea salt and fat. I used our own garden carrots, lightly cooked in butter and dressed with fresh garden parsley.

When Shaen came in at the end of the day, he cooked three chuck steaks on the barbecue. Chuck steak is normally not grilled because it is considered a tough cut of meat but these steaks were tender and very juicy. We got the grassfed veal from Jocko Creek Ranch last winter. For more information please read Grassfed Veal and Cooking With Grass-Fed Meat and Fowl.

When we sat down to our meal, we each enjoyed a glass of fresh cow’s milk. There was a salad of sun ripened cherry tomatoes and herbs. The girls loaded their potatoes with raw butter I made last year. (I privately thanked Patty, our Jersey cow, for the wonderful dairy products.) It was a delicious meal. The meal was wonderful because so much of the food came from our own land or from the land of people we know and trust. We were hungry after working the afternoon in the garden. What also made the meal special is that we ate it together and enjoyed each other’s company.

I just wanted to tell about one sit-down family meal. It wasn’t a special meal but the way we eat normally. This meal might seem odd to the modern eater, rushing between the office, take-out, and home but this meal would have been the norm a generation ago.

Oven Baked Seasonal Vegetables
4-6 large carrots, cut into large 3″ pieces
4-6 parsnips, cut into large 3″ pieces
2 orange beets or turnips, cut into wedges
1 large onion, cut into wedges
1-2 leek tops, cut into large 3″ pieces
2-3 large garlic cloves, cut in half
1T fresh rosemary, chopped
1tsp sea salt
1tsp fresh growing black pepper
1T grease from the grease bucket
1-2 potatoes, cut into wedges, optional
The trick to this meal is to use the best seasonal vegetables you can find. Cut all the vegetables into pieces about the same size so they will cook evenly. Use a large glass baking dish and mix all the cut vegetables together with the grease, black pepper, sea salt and rosemary. Cook at 350F and stir every 15 minutes for about 45 minutes or until the vegetables are cooked through.

Sun Ripened Tomato Salad
2-3c sun ripened cherry tomatoes, whole
1/2c garden parsley, finely chopped
1/4c red onion, finely chopped (optional)
Add all ingredients together in a wooden salad bowl. Add 2-3T of Whole Seed Mustard Dressing. The recipe can be found in Making Homemade Lacto-Fermentation Whole Seed Mustard.

Hey farmer farmer
Put away the DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

Winter Storage: Kimchi and Lacto-fermented Green Tomatoes

crock

This is one of my fermenting crocks. I have about five different types and sizes. You can pick up crocks at garage sales or buy them new.

It is that time of year again to be thinking about winter stores. I spent the day making kimchi. Kimchi is by far my favorite lacto-fermented food. This recipe is based on a Korean Sauerkraut recipe from Nourishing Traditions. It uses mostly local produce that you can get at the Kamloops Farmer’s Market.

If you have never made lacto-fermented vegetables, please read Wild Fermentation. Remember to use organic or un-sprayed vegetables because the fermentation culture can be killed by residue pesticides or herbicides. Ask the Rubinsons at Silver Springs Organic for their organic fermenting cabbages for best results.

kimchi-and-eggs

This is a favorite breakfast with grilled steak, kimchi, eggs and garden fresh greens.

Kimchi
2 large organic fermenting cabbages, finely sliced
1 large organic onion with green top, grated or chopped
6 large organic carrots, grated or chopped
2c organic daikon radish (any type of organic radish will work), grated or chopped
4T organic ginger, freshly grated
1 organic hot red pepper, finely chopped
6 organic garlic cloves, freshly grated
4T sea salt
4T whey (if not available add an extra 1T sea salt)

In a very large bowl mix together all the vegetables, salt and whey. Put the mixed ingredients in a fermentation crock or follow the directions in Wild Fermentation. I use two types of fermenting crocks in my household. I have two 10L Harsch Gairtopf Fermenting Crock Pots and various sizes of Medalta Crocks.

Lacto-fermented Green Tomatoes
4-5 pounds organic green tomatoes
2 organic garlic cloves, whole
1 organic hot red pepper, whole
1T sea salt
2T whey (if not available add an extra 1T sea salt)
enough fresh water to cover green tomatoes

This is a good recipe if you find yourself at the end of the summer season with too many unripe tomatoes. Only use the hard green tomatoes that have not turned color at all. Follow the directions for Lacto-fermented Horseradish Dill Pickles. The green tomatoes need the same treatment as pickling cucumbers. If you like dill better than hot red peppers, try replacing the pickling cucumbers in the recipe with green tomatoes for a dill favor. The green tomatoes should be tried in a month and the flavor will improve over the winter.

Updated November 8, 2010: I originally wrote this posting back in early October. I had never tried making Lacto-fermented Green Tomatoes but I had lots of green tomatoes and nothing to lose. I have just opened my crock to find a coat of white slimy mold on the top. I have learned from experience not to worry about the mold as long as there isn’t a horrible smell. The mold on top actually seems to protect the contents below. I carefully removed the slime and cleaned the sides of the crock. I lost a bit of the mold to the fluid so I washes the green tomatoes in fresh water (no chlorine please) and filtered the liquid with a sieve. I returned the green tomatoes to the crock and poured the liquid back in. I moved the crock to our cold storage area for the winter. I tried a few of the green tomatoes. They remind me of a cross between an olive and a very crunchy pickle.

Winter Storage Part I

kimchi-crock

Opening the last crock in the spring is always an adventure. I am sometimes horrified by what I find on the top layer. But below is always beautiful kimchi with a complex, rich flavor. If at all possible, eat a small amount of fermented food with every meal.

This week my family have been working on a modified root cellar for winter storage. Traditionally, a root cellar would be built into the ground. This would give the vegetables a consistent temperature and humidity throughout the seasons. We will try to build a real root cellar next spring.

This winter we will have to be satisfied with a modified work shed. The work shed is a typical 8’x12′ wood-frame constructed building. The building will be too dry. We will have to put pails of water in the building to increase humidity. We will have to heat the structure during the coldest parts of the winter, something a true root cellar would not require.

We will be sourcing vegetables for storage over the next few weeks. We will be looking for potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, cabbage, assorted types of squash, garlic, hot peppers, parsnips, rutabaga, turnips and shallots. As I said before, I am not a local food zealot. But I like to buy as much as I can locally. My largest household expense is food. When I purchase my food locally, my money stays in our community. Also, the quality is better. It is great to be able to look at my plate and know where everything on it came from. It makes me feel somehow more connected.

I am madly making sour kraut and kimchi. I am always amazed at how many cabbages can go into a crock. These crocks will be stored in the root cellar for later consumption.

There are lots of great places to find local food for root cellar winter storage. These are some of the producers I have used this year:
1. Zaparango Organic Farm (certified organic)
Robert Vanderlip T: 250.318.0235
potatoes, carrots, onions, assorted squash, livestock feed corn
2. Lyne Farm (un-sprayed)
Liz Lyne T:250.578.8266
pickling cucumbers, beets, carrots
3. Farmhouse Herbs (certified organic)
Paula and Mendel Rubinsons T: 250.373.2312
pickling cabbage, onions, shallots, parsnips
4. Gort?s Gouda Cheese Farm (certified organic)
T: 250.832.4274
raw gouda, smoked raw gouda (Have Gort’s cut the large wheels into eight segments and vacuum pack. Each piece will naturally age and easily last through the winter months.)
5. Highland Farm (certified organic)
T: 250.803.0048
garlic, cherries, apples

Undated May 13, 2012: Last winter we finished the root cellar. It is forty feet long and three feet wide. There is another ten feet of covered space on the outside of the root cellar for storage of garden equipment. Here are some pictures taken as I clean out the root cellar today. It will give you an idea of what to expect if you store high quality produce.

root-cellar

This is our new root cellar. The south wall is a retaining wall of concrete block and the floor is gravel. The north wall is the back of the warehouse. The covered outside area is great for storing garden equipment.

cellar-beets-parsnips-carrots

These yellow beets, parsnips and carrots were purchased last September from Farmhouse Herbs. I should have opened the bag of carrots to let out extra moisture. The vegetables are still edible after over seven months of storage.

cellar-garlic-potatoes

This is the last of the garlic and potatoes. I ran out of onions last week. After over seven months of storage the garlic is still very good. The potatoes need to be peeled but are still edible.

cellar-beet-carrot-puree

This root cellar puree was made with yellow beets, carrots, sea salt, butter and raw milk. I added some fresh chives from my herb garden. It can be eaten like mashed potatoes or fry up in lard or butter for breakfast.