Three

It was wonderful to be back at the farm this week, the first week of work share for the summer. There is something about hopping on the back of a tractor flat bed at 8am on the way out to the field that feels just right. I like the morning harvest session for two main reasons: the smell of the earth and the plants seems heightened to me in the early morning dew and there is great satisfaction in hauling in hundreds of pounds of beautiful organic produce.

This weeks selction: 1 bunch turnips; 1 bunch radish; 1 cauliflower; 3 kolrabi; 2 heads lettuce; 1 handful oregano; 1 pint snap peas; 3 pints strawberries; 1 lb. braising mix; 3/4 lb. salad mix; 3/4 lb. spinach.

A friend of ours offered Snowden part of a honey and almond butter sandwich at the park today and Snowden happily accepted a good sized portion. Anything this friend offers my daughter I know will be high quality, more than likely local, purchased with health in mind and made with love.

Since it’s the beginning of the month and, as a family, we just did our big grocery trip for bulk flours, cereals and other mostly pure cooking ingredients, the cost of sweeteners was on my mind. “Hey, do you have a good source for maple syrup?” I ask. Maple syrup has been on my grocery list for a many weeks now but I cannot bring myself to pay the steep price. Still, maple syrup for a devotee of Deborah Madison and Cynthia Lair cookbooks, can easily be classified as an essential. We have been using small amounts of maple syrup and honey to replace refined sugars in most baked goods and our occasional batch of granola.

“Trader Joe’s” is my friends response to the maple syrup query. “Oh yeah! I forgot about Trader Joes, and I like their honey -it’s a good price as well.” But then the conversation veers sharply to food safety as my friend informs me of a PI investigation into imported, tainted honey flooding the market recently . .  but is not on Custom’s priority list of concerns (according to an unidentified Customs Supervisor). Bottom line: once again, buy local! Know your vendor! Avoid packaged foods! (the honey in my daughter’s sandwich bite was purchased from the Ballard Outdoor Market) I’m going to ask the well informed bulk foods department at my local grocery store if the bulk honey marked “Northwest Blackberry Honey” can be traced back to it’s local origin. If not, it’s back to the farmers marked where good choices abound from small producers you can talk to directly.

Apparently the purity of maple syrup can also be questionable even though the product is most likely to be produced in the US or Canada under strict guidelines. In a few cases, water or sugar has been detected in what was labeled “Pure Vermont Maple Syrup” according to a spokesperson in a food and agriculture agency in Vermont in this USA Today article I found. At least, after my quick online research I’ve found numerous US family vendors selling maple syrup online and out of their quaint red-roofed syrup houses. It may remain a luxury item on my grocery list, but I feel better informed and less incredulous about the price.

The USA Today article also mentions olive oil which reminds me of the New Yorker’s expose of the shady import practice of the oil.  Transshipping, relabeling, mis-representing origin, this sounds strikingly like the honey scams. Sean, an avid consumer of olive oil, the darker and more rustic the grade the better, took this article to heart way back in 2007. Since, we’ve typically purchased Spanish olive oil or California olive oil. We prefer a heavier, more herbaceous oil than the typical EVOO recommended for cooking but there seems to be no sure way of knowing the percentage of purity in the product. Trader Joe’s sells an Australian brand which we have purchased thinking naively “surely Australian products will be as pure as domestic products; it’s like California there, warm climate, grape vines and olive trees!” After reading in the PI how the Australian importer gets caught for relabeling the honey . . . maybe not.

What sticks out to me as just bizarre in this whole issue is the reality of those container ships circling the globe, powering across the oceans to get a forged label, a new flag, a tariff-free stamp on a piece of paper, before dumping barrels of what we call food and ingredients into our ports, into our grocery stores. This is the stuff of a fictional drama and yet, it’s real, expensive, and dangerous.

This is the lovely New Zealand bird that I think of when I hear the word Fantail.

This is the delectable Buttermilk Fantail Roll that I’ve made twice since the recipe came in my February ‘09 issue of Grourmet:

I remember looking forward to dinner at my Grandma Connie’s house becauce she would often serve these buttery pull apart rolls with strawberry jam. This is back in the day when I thought anything purchased at the bakery of a major grocery store was far superior in flavor and texture to something made at home. I don’t mean to say that incredible baked goods wern’t made at home by talented family members, just that I didn’t appreciate them at, say, 9or 10 years old. Home baked goods, when I was in elementary school, lacked a certain favored, shortening-laden, mouth feel that I associated with “the bakery department”. I’ve turned my back on fake buttercream flowers (you know, the corner piece of a bakery sheet cake) but when I saw these rolls on the cover of the magazine, I realized that I’ve not lost my love of a good butter roll with dinner. I had to make them. I haven’t even looked at anything else in this issue.

For winter comfort food, with a spot of your summer jam, these are perfect. One word of warning, you have to dole out an obscene amount of butter to approach the bakery goodness of your grandmother’s dinner parties, but hey, sometimes baking is about memories, not fat content, right?