I believe in canning, putting up the glory of summer for winter. I always loved the fresh tasting flavors of the quick refrigerator, but could not get around liking the store bought ones. Even the fancy brands seemed to be tasting too much like vinegar, salt and spices. To my palate that is. Hence I got my mind set on a line of pickles very soon - especially as here at The Scrumptious Pantry it is all about making foods that are connected with the culinary heritage of a region. If not pickles made in the Midwest, then where? All those immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe - pickling was their preferred choice of preserving the summer bounty.

And that is the keyword PRESERVE. We wanted to make pickles that preserve the flavor of the ingredients, accentuate the character of the veggies - not alter it to a point that if you took out the texture component and taste a pickle blindfolded you would be unable to identify the veggie.

Today, we are launching our first two products in the new line of pickles. It has been in the works for two years now. Our obsession with authenticity led us to put up jars and jars of pickles, trying every pickle recipe we could find in historic recipe books. Just for the fun of it, I just counted the open jars in my fridge that represent the various stages of testing (and which I am eating no matter how they taste cause I cannot throw food away. A salty dill pickle for example is great in an omelette w. potatoes) - 38 jars. I still have 38 open jars in my fridge, and 47 jars that have already been cleaned and stored away for the next round of testing. That equals 85 different test batches on four products. Now, surely that is not a lot of R&D for big food companies. It is a lot for us.

Besides canning batch after batch in the test kitchen, this project  led us to browse seed catalogues and speak with agricultural historians, in our quest to identify vegetables that have a history in the Midwest. With all the Polish & German immigration patterns beets made it onto our list pretty early in the process. The Giardiniera was decided on without much discussion, too, because this vegetable medley is the signature "vegetable preserve" of Chicago. The Lemon Cucumber we fell in love with at local Farmer's Markets. And then the Beaver Dam Pepper jumped out at us, when we were researching the Slow Food Arch of Taste – a listing of culturally significant varietals at the brink of extinction. The Beaver Dam Pepper was introduced to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, around 1913 by an Hungarian immigrant. It has a mildly spicy flavor and is just delicious. But it is very difficult to grow – the peppers can get enormous, requiring to put up trellises. So although it was a great tasting pepper, it was abandoned in favor of the easier to grow varieties

                                                                                       John of Stone Circle Farm with a small (!) Beaver Dam Pepper

Luckily by word of mouth we found a farm in Reeseville – Stone Circle Farm – that had been growing some experimental Beaver Dam Pepper plants last year. And how excited we were to hear that John would be willing to give the Beaver Dam Pepper a try on a larger scale. He brought on another Farm close to Beaver Dam – Good Earth Farm- and we were ready to go. We had some setbacks and we had some great successes. Some beautiful peppers and some pretty ugly ones, scarred up with sunburn. The spice profile for brine we developed for the Beaver Dam Pepper was reminiscent of the flavors of Hungary, and we are pretty excited about what we think is a greatly balanced flavor, supporting the characteristic taste of the Beaver Dam Pepper.

Today, we are launching the Beaver Dam Pepper and the Lemon Cucumber. Giardiniera and beets should follow before Thanksgiving. We want to thank our Farmers - John, Nicole, Rink, Jenny, Alison, Alex, Andy and Dirk - for trusting us with their beautiful veggies. A special thank you also to all our taste testers, that might not have tasted through all 85 batches, but still ate a considerable amount of pickled veggies. I personally want to thank Andy Fair, my partner in the kitchen, for not giving up on me and my quest for the perfect preserved pickle.

All our pickles make great additions to a Cheese plate or as an antipasto, but my favorite match so far are slow cooked beans with pulled pork over rice and a Beaver Dam Pepper on the side. How do you like to eat our pickles? Have a taste and let us know! They are available in our online store and moving to your trusted retailers in these days, too.

Updating...

The opinions on Slow Food’s 5$ a meal challenge are divided – there is the group that is going after Slow Food for assuming that a family of four can afford a daily food budget of 60$. Then there is the group that heralds Slow Food’s initiative (which is subtitled “take back the value meal”) as the solution to one of this country’s most pressing problems – people do not cook, but eat out. And unhealthy choices to boot. Surprisingly, both groups are right.

I am pretty sure no one at Slow Food would expect every home cook to spend 5$ on every meal every day. If you read this article in the Washington Post, Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA, clearly states that 5$ is a very generous budget and that you can assume to be cooking for less – with leftovers. When Slow Food chose the 5$ mark, it was in order to benchmark against the classic fast food meal. Taking part in the 5$ challenge is for those people that do not cook, buy their breakfast at the coffee shop, their lunch at a foodcourt in their office building and call the Chinese restaurant for take-out on their way home.

Now, the question is, will the 5$ challenge reach these people? I sure hope so, but I am sceptical. Because in order to leave behind take-out food and start cooking from scratch, you first need a lifestyle change. You need to decide that good food is important for you. That the way you nourish your body counts. That you can only perform as well as you fuel yourself.

I do a lot of tastings in grocery stores and speak to many customers at our Farmer’s Markets. Most people do not cook. It is a chore. Grocery shopping, cleaning pots and pans for a meal that you inhale exhausted in front of the TV is not something many people with a busy lifestyle find attractive.

But why – and this is the mystery to me – does cooking seem too difficult for most people to attempt in the first place? What triggered the misconception that you either cook four star gourmet meals at home or eat out of a Styrofoam container? What happened to the good old casserole loaded with nutritious beans and veggies? The one you cook on Monday with the bones of the Sunday roast and that costs $2, does not need any attention while on the stove, feeds a family for two days and even has a portion or two left over to store in the freezer for emergencies?

Is it really the happy meal that stands in the way of people to eat healthy and home cooked meals, or is it Top Chef and other spectator cooking shows that instill in viewers the sense that cooking is too complex? That you cannot serve a simple and tasty frittata for dinner or a hearty chili?

Or is it the fact that we have no one to eat with? I agree that cooking for myself and eating by myself is far less fun than feeding a crowd. Maybe we should foster food exchanged in our neighborhoods? Know a neighbor that lives alone, too? Take a bowl of casserole over and hopefully you will be rewarded with a nice piece of lasagne the week after.

There are many ways to “take back the value meal”. The 5$ challenge is a great way to draw attention to a home cooked meal. And if you do not know where to start: all our recipes are simple to prepare and cost way less than 5$ per person. Even if only using fresh, farmer raised ingredients with a provenance.

+++ UPDATE: in order to help fund for the production of these products, we have launched a Kickstarter Campaign - a community driven funding tool for sustainable & creative projects. You can pledge as little as 1$ and we have mostly tasty rewards lined up for you in return. Please check out our project on Kickstarter and help spread the world. Think about what would be possible if 500 people pledged 10$. Thank you! +++

We are so excited so announce the soon to come launch of our US-farmed product line, we want to give you a sneak preview on our US farmed products! If you are following us on Facebook, you have seen the pictures we posted of our farmers, and here is what they will be bringing to The Scrumptious Pantry:

Michelle from Dietzler Farms (Elkhorn, Wisconsin) & Kevin from Happy Valley Farm (Black Earth, Wisconsin)

We used Michelle's sustainably & humanely raised beef and Kevin's organic tomatoes to make a meat sauce! There are a lot of tomato based products out there, but a high quality meat sauce that is shelf stable has been missing - until now. We researched many historic recipe books to come up with the taste profile, cause we really wanted it to reflect the culinary heritage of the Midwest. So look forward to a meat sauce inspired by the beef stew recipes we found in those historic cookbooks. And we added some bell pepper as an homage to the many Serbian & Hungarian immigrants to the Midwest. The result is a mighty tasty meat sauce that you can enjoy over pasta, rice dishes and that makes a pretty neat base for casseroles, too.

Ruth & Jacob from Fine Vine Organics (Three Lakes, Wisconsin) & Kevin from Happy Valley Farm (Black Earth, Wisconsin)

Get ready for our Cranberry Catsup! We are pretty proud of this product, because it is an absolute novelty. We found many cranberry & tomato condiment recipes in the recipe books we studied and loved the idea to have a 21st century condiment using cranberries - after all one of Wisconsin's major crops. The idea to work on a specialty Catsup was fueled by our background in wine: generally, a wine with high acidity is recommended for fatty foods, because the acidity cleanses the palate. Given our love for bacon, sausages and other fatty pork products maybe a Catsup naturally high in acidity would be a better match than the "one fits all" tomato ketchups on the market today? We can tell you, we ate a lot of bacon and sausages to find out and we can confirm, yes, our Cranberry Catsup is delightful on fries, on a bacon sandwich and also goes really well with white meat, too.

Olivia & Darro from Berkeley Olive Grove 1913 (Oroville, CA)

As you all know, we love Extra Virgin Olive Oil. We always wanted to add a domestic oil to The Scrumptious Pantry and finally found Olivia & Darro and their organic 20,000 tree olive grove on the edge of the Northern Sacramento Valley. Their oil is fruity, with a nice pungent finish, and it is super rich in anti oxidants. This one will be your new best friend when preparing salads, veggies and fish!

We will be launching our Heirloom Tomato Sauce w. Beef and the Cranberry Catsup at the FamilyFarmed Expo in Chicago, March 18 & 19. The Californian oil should be available around the same time, too.

Over the next two weeks, we will be sharing every farmer's story with you in more detail. We are so happy to have the chance to work with these amazing stewards for sustainable agriculture!

And stay tuned for more new Midwestern products in The Scrumptious Pantry, too. We have FIVE more products in the pipeline and we hope to be launching those in late summer.

I am grateful for the many great publications - in print and online - that bring together the community of consumers interested in delicious, healthy food, in sustainable agriculture, in supporting small family farms. Mindful Metropolis is one of those publications that are a joy to read and that broaden my horizon every time I pick up one of their issues.

This month's issue though made me take a pen, circle a part in an otherwise great piece on apple harvest roadtrip, put a question mark next to it and reach for my email program. Time for a letter to the editor!

What caused my attention was the following sentence: "...why not get out of town and pick (the apples) yourself...Plus, it's the quintessential locavore statement: supporting local farmers (cutting out the grocery store middlemen saves farmers about $50/bushel)"

And this is what I wrote:

Dear Mindful Metropolis Team,

thank you for another great edition of Mindful Metropolis. I do have one comment though on Daisy Simmons' "Orchard Days". I am all about buying directly from farmers whenever I can - be in the farmer's market, a CSA or a road side stand. These are great ways to better understand where the food I enjoy comes from and to interact with the people that grow it. I do not agree though that it is the best way to support local farmers by "cutting out the grocery store middlemen" as your article suggests.

I am pretty sure that if you ask the majority of our farmers if they want to spend hours every week commuting to local farmers' market, they will tell you they might prefer to sell to a distributor who pays fair prices and through a grocery store that respects their work. Also, I am sure they will agree that for most of them, having unannounced visitors dropping by to pick up a couple of pounds of produce, is more of a distraction from their work than anything else. Selling directly might save them a couple of dollars, but the opportunity costs for that sale are pretty high, too.

The solution to fixing our broken food system is a new system of middlemen. We have great little grocery stores in Chicago that are driven by this spirit: the GreenGrocer, the Dill Pickle Coop, Provenance Food and Wine.
But if we want to really change the system, those efforts can only be a start. We will need a system of middlemen on the distribution level designed to deal with small farmers and with heritage crops (JDY Gourmet is a great local example of a company making a difference to small farmers). A system that will not reject tomatoes with little "clawmarks" as seconds, a system that will not let a farmer down because of a lower yield in one year. We need those middlemen with a new thinking both in handling fresh produce, meat, poultry & dairy, and we urgently need it in creating processed foods, too.

Writing off the middleman and discouraging the consumers to buy at the grocery stores is the wrong approach. Change can only come through demand pressuring supply on a larger scale.

Best regards
M. Lee Greene
Owner
The Scrumptious Pantry

What do you think? Does cutting out the middlemen really help the local farmers in the long run? I am very interested in hearing your opinions!

You might have heard about the "October:Unprocessed" challenge (it is actually kind of sad that it is considered a challenge to eat unprocessed food). Through the month of October 400 people (as of now) have pledged to be eating unprocessed foods and only diverting to store bought if the packaged food could have been prepared at home (like, if you had your coffee roaster or olive press or grain mill). It is a great way to make people aware of the quality of most foods out there in the supermarket aisles.

We are very honored to have been asked to share our thoughts on unprocessed foods on the project's website. Hop over to eatingrules.com to read what we got to say! And while you are browsing their page, sign the pledge!

I have been thinking about this for a while now. You remember, like six weeks ago? New decade, big thing, Person’s of the year and the decade all around. Internet people, business people, politicians. Even wine person of the decade. No food person – at least I did not come across one.

Who are the people that left a significant mark on our food culture in the past ten years?

The TV/Celebrity Chef? We certainly had a lot more of chefs on TV, talking about food, preparing food, showing the average viewer how to cook up a storm or broil a simple roast. Anthony Bourdain traveled around the world, and the couch potato traveled with him. Gordon Ramsey had short-tempered outbursts on TV screens on both sides of the Atlantic. Yep, they were everywhere, but rather than taking the inspiration to their home kitchens, viewers settled in their sofas, watching Celebrity Chefs as you watched the Gladiators in the Roman circus. Only that in Roman time the snack food served was certainly better than the chips, dips, and drinks coming with today’s TV evenings. If anything, these Celebrity Chef’s provided great entertainment, but their impact on revitalizing our food culture is very questionable to me. So, out goes the Celebrity Chef.

And in steps – a first Lady and her garden. How can someone become a food person of a decade if she was only in the public eye for eleven months of it, you ask? Well, if you can win the noble peace price after nine months, why not food person of the decade after eleven? The public stunt of an organic garden in the White House was certainly a masterpiece to get food on the political agenda. But only creating a forum is not yet enough for winning this noble title, cause as all things politics it is easy to announce a vision and much more difficult to pull it through. Especially in this complex system of big industries, lobbyists and political deals. I surely hope we will see Michelle Obama involved in education and actions towards better food supply for years to come, so maybe in 2020?

So how about all those bloggers and writers that cooked their heart out for a year and taking us along on their journey: eating locally, growing their own food, grilling the roadkill as a Sunday roast: Barbara Kingsolver (“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”), Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon (“Plenty”), Gary Paul Nabhan (“Coming home to eat”). Certainly admirable projects they pulled off and great learnings involved for bystanders looking on. These projects were fueled by a lot of effort, but although I admire them and personally have had great take-aways from their books, I wonder if their accounts have not scared the biggest part of the population. If you do not happen to be a writer by profession, with the current day job of writing a book about your experience, spending a day driving through the countryside looking for locally grown wheat does not sound very feasible to most of us. Which might result in de-motivation rather than the revolutionary spirit of “we can change our food culture”. In light of this doubt, the blogging localvore is not receiving this decade’s award, although I acknowledge that their efforts might have an important impact when discussing and shaping the supply-side of REAL FOOD FROM REAL PEOPLE. But that will have to be evaluated in 2020.

Another spokesperson for real food is journalist Michael Pollan. With his books he has been going full circle. He clearly analyzed the problems we are facing when it comes to food production and presents them in a way everyone can understand. Not only has been an advocate for changes in the way we produce our food, he has stimulated consumers to make fast changes to how they were eating, giving them easy and simple indications to follow. His last book “Food Rules” is certainly a great tool for the consumer needing some guidance and a driver for changes in our food culture. All these achievements make him almost the Food Person of the Decade.

The Food Person of the Decade in my opinion is the family farmer. Whose sheer existence and daily struggle tended the fertile ground on which all other ideas can now grow. It is the family farmer that has not given in to big agribusiness, that stood tall on his land and defended real food. Without them manning the fortress of real agriculture over the last decades - and especially the last one if we consider all the developments like GMO etc – no White House garden would have been possible. Michael Pollan would not have had no one to write about, and the blogging localvores would have starved a couple of weeks into their projects.

The Food Person of the Decade is the family farmer: the Barbaras & Fabios, Carlos, Martys & Krises, the Veras and Vickis, just to name a few. Their hard work, their sweat, their risk taking, their crop planning, them in their fields and on their pastures for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, on Sundays, holidays, birthdays – they are what keeps our society alive. It is the family farmer that brings taste to our kitchens, in restaurants and homes. It is the family farmer that does the magic of awakening tastebuds. I am grateful that I am so lucky to call some of them my friends and be inspired by them.

Picture yourself in the Tuscan countryside. With a glass of wine in your hand. On the terrace of a small farmhouse surrounded by vineyards, you take in the beautiful countryside, the vines standing in perfect formation, just like disciplined miniature soldiers (of the peaceful kind). Your gaze wanders over the rolling hills, you watch people harvesting grapes, happily bringing the fruit in the cellar. You hear children laughing loudly, as they play hide and seek in the vineyards, their hiding places being told by their dogs which are curiously running back and forth. What a happy scenery! Then you glance at one of the old olive trees mightily lining the estate

**Screetch **

And that is when all happiness comes to an abrupt hold. Because what you see are shriveled somethings, shadows of what the olives should be like at this time of year. Weak and tired they struggle to hold onto the branches that should nourish them, feed them water, make them grow until their green skin seems to be bursting from the juice that has build up inside.

Not so. This summer of 2009 was hot. Too hot. And dry. Too dry. And it is not only the olive trees suffering. After all, these are the strongest and most independently minded plants around. Peppers have been practically burned up before they ever had a chance to grow. Eggplants dried up on the vine. Berries never reached maturation. Water is life. And without water, we are in serious trouble.
Why no irrigation you might ask? Well, yes, irrigation would solve a pressing situation in a year like 2009 has been. But what are the long term impacts of irrigating? Of lowering the levels of the ground water? Because irrigation always also means pumping water out of their safe wells. None of the water used for irrigation ever finds its way back into the depth of the soil.

What is worrying us farmers here that there are no “normal” years anymore. Seasons have merged or plainly disappeared. There are no weather patterns to count on anymore. It is, as if we had completely lost touch with nature. And nature is our vocation, our life, not just what feed us (and you).

I surely have no answer, I surely do not know where to start to resolve this problem. So if you were expecting a solution from this post, I am sorry to disappoint you. But maybe this post is increasing awareness among all those of you who live in environments that lack the intense daily contact with nature. And maybe one of you has an idea, the solution, our salvation?

Back from the "Fancy Food Show" in New York, the leading marketplace for specialty food in the US. Back with a huge sense of disappointment.

Specialty food seems to be reduced to chocolates, tea and various salsas and sauces. But the sad thing is that it seems that there is no difference if they were made in Maine, Florida, Texas or California. Peach salsa everywhere… Chipotle everywhere...ah yes, and now everything is "natural".

How come that in a country as vast as the US with all the different zones, climates, ethnical influences and heritages those producers who call themselves "special" predominantely have these standardized products? How come that there is more industrial made food at a show like that than artisan one? Is calling your product "natural" or targeting it to a special diet group all that it takes to be special? Is it not about being different from the mass-marketed, processed food products? Of creating food that tastes of terroir?? That tells a individual story???

There has to be someone in the Midwest making a unique yambutter and someone in California that catches the Mexican and Asian influences and interprets them in a novel way. The question we have to ask us: What is the signature crop/produce of an area/state? What are the signature tastes? Who puts it together in a jar/bottle/box? Does anyone?

When we think about movies on food, we think of romantic comedies such as “Bella Martha/No reservations” or of documentaries like “Supersize me”.

As the second edition of the Slow Food Film Festival in Bologna successfully demonstrated, there is a huge number of interesting, heart warming, heart wrenching, agitating, documentaries about the state of our foodworld out there waiting to be watched and talked about!

In three days of festival alone I caught 22 documentaries and most of them were totally worth watching them. Only challenge: to remain cheerful and happy on day three. Cause all these films present the world of agriculture, farming and eating with all its dysfunctions and very little things that seem to go right.

My personal favourite was the film “Over Land” by Steve Sudermann, who follows the decline of his family’s farm in Quebec, Canada, over a period of more than two years, until the moment when they have to sell, leaving the soil they had worked for generations.

Another great film was “La Vie Moderne” not only for content, but also for the camera - the director, Raymond Depardon, is a magnum photographer and that tells. But it is another story of families that leave the soil (this time in France), cause the hilly land does not permit high density farming and hence does not bring economic return to those working there. Depardon shows a young farmer who cannot wait to run off the land and work in a nearby hotel, an old farmers who sell their last cow, cause at the age of 94 tending for a cow is a difficult thing to do, and who suffers terribly, as the cow was the farmer’s reason of being, his life. And all these stories make you wonder: is there no hope? How are we supposed to feed the world, if small scale quality farming becomes unattractive?

Not even large scale farming necessarily helps to make ends meet, cause as the story from Canada shows, you can work hard, achieve great results, even being nominated “top 8 supplier” to McCain French Fries, but the numbers do not turn nevertheless…. 2,000 farmers close their farms in Canada every year.

Last film deserving special mention: Goede Vissers (The Good Fishermen), portraying a Dutch couple dedicated to sustainable fishing. Great people that were also present at the screening to discuss, debate and taste their delicious products (see picture).

We, the consumers, need to start demanding real food from real people, hoping that market logic does apply and demand will create supply, as the initiatives of large scale retailers pushing into organic food show. Not that organic necessarily supports small artisan farming, but it is a first step as it demonstrates an increased awareness by the consumers.

In this sense, the Slow Food on Film Festival was a great event to create awareness. Cause on thing is to read about the sad state of agriculture and farming on the news – even if I experience every day myself how difficult it is to make ends meet in quality farming – and another to have numbers turn into stories and stories to have faces.

Everyone pondering over the question which book to read next, here is your answer: Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a brilliant account of our nation's food politics, eating habits and challenges of small-scale, sustainable agriculture. You will be surprised when Pollan (Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley) traces down all the components that hide behind the unfamiliar sounding ingredient list of packaged foods, amused when he buys a steer to better understand the food chain and feeling hungry when he convinces a San Francisco friend of Italian origin to take him hunting in the San Francisco woods for wild pigs to be turned in home cured prosciutto.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma - a natural history of four meals" gives a deep insight into today's way America is eating by following three food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer.

A must read for every food conscious eater!