http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/RECIPES/old_fashioned_recipes/beans_grains/new_eng_baked.html
Old-Fashioned New England Baked Beans
From Shari’s collection of old recipes. This recipe is 150 years old.
+ 2 pounds yellow eye beans
+ 1/2 pound salt pork
+ 3/4 cup sugar
+ 1/4 cup molasses
+ 1/2 cup Vermont maple syrup
+ 1/2 teaspoon ginger
+ 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
+ 2 teaspoons salt
+ Dash of pepper
Method
Sort and wash beans; place in kettle. Cover with water; soak overnight.
Drain off most of the water; add enough cold water to cover beans. Bring to a boil over low heat. Simmer for 2 hours and 30 minutes, adding boiling water to keep beans well covered.
Scrape rind of salt pork; cut through fat to rind in 1/2 inch cubes. Scald pork with boiling water; drain. Place in center of beans. Pour 2 cups water in saucepan. Add remaining ingredients; mix well. Bring to a boil; stir into beans. Add enough boiling water to cove 1 inch over beans.
Bake in preheated 325F oven for 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Makes 12 servings.
Contributor: shari dewey
http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/RECIPES/old_fashioned_recipes/seafood/lob_short.html
Old-Fashioned Lobster Shortcake
From Shari’s collection of old recipes, this is over 100 years old.
+ 1/4 cup butter
+ 4 cups lobster meat
+ 2 cups cream
+ 1 tablespoon flour
+ 1/4 cup milk
+ Sugar to taste
+ Dash of paprika
+ Salt and pepper to taste
Method
Melt butter in large skillet; add lobster meat. Fry until lobster turns pink. Add cream; bring to boiling point. Stir in flour; cook until slightly thickened. Stir in milk until smooth. Add seasonings. Serve over split and buttered biscuits.
Contributor: shari dewey
http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/RECIPES/old_fashioned_recipes/seafood/salm_peas.html
Old-Fashioned Salmon with Peas
From Shari’s collection of old recipes, this is over 100 years old.
+ 1 medium tin red salmon
+ 3 eggs
+ 2 tablespoons (heaping) cracker crumbs
+ 1 slice onion, chopped fine
+ Salt and pepper to taste
+ 1 medium tin small peas, drained
+ 2/3 cup milk
+ 1 pat butter
Method
Combine salmon and 1 slightly beaten egg; add cracker crumbs, onion, salt and pepper. Shape into a round loaf in center of casserole. Pour peas around salmon.
Combine 2 remaining eggs, milk, slat and pepper; beat well. Pour over peas. Place butter on top of salmon. Bake in preheated 300F oven for about 25 minutes or until set. Serve with a slice of lemon and parsley.
Contributor: shari dewey
http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/RECIPES/old_fashioned_recipes/seafood/fish_balls.html
Old-Fashioned Fish Balls
From Shari’s collection of old recipes, this is over 100 years old.
+ 1 pound fresh salmon
+ 1 pound fresh halibut
+ 1 medium onion, sliced
+ 1 carrot, quartered
+ Salt and pepper
+ 3 eggs
+ 3 slices white bread
+ Milk
+ 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
+ 1 teaspoon lemon juice
Method
Remove skin and bones from fish; place in large kettle. Cover with large amount of water; add 2 slices onion and the carrot. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour, then strain and set aside.
Force fish and remaining onion through food chopper 3 times.
Beat eggs; add 1/2 cup water. Stir until well mixed. Add to fish mixture.
Dip bread in small amount of milk; squeeze lightly. Combine fish mixture, soaked bread, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, nutmeg and lemon juice; mix well.
Shape into 1 inch balls; let set on cookie sheet in refrigerator for 1 to 2 hours. Bring reserved broth to a boil; place several fish balls in broth. Bring to simmering point; cook for 3 to 7 minutes. Repeat until all fish balls are cooked.
Prepare favorite recipe of white sauce using broth for part of the liquid. Pour over fish balls. Garnish with chopped chives or parsley and cooked diced carrots. May be served hot or cold.
Makes 12 servings.
Contributor: shari dewey
http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/RECIPES/old_fashioned_recipes/meat/mtbl_spag.html
Old-Fashioned Spaghetti and Meatballs
From Shari’s collection of old-fashioned recipes, this easy recipe is about 70 years old.
+ 1 1/2 pound ground beef
+ 2 tablespoons oregano
+ 2 tablespoons grated cheese
+ 2 cloves garlic, minced
+ 2 eggs
+ 1/2 cup bread crumbs
+ 2 cans tomato paste
+ 1 quart tomatoes
+ 1 tablespoon salt
+ 1 teaspoon sugar
+ Mushrooms to taste
+ 2 lbs spaghetti, cooked
Method
Combine first 6 ingredients in bowl; mix well. Shape into balls. Cook in skillet until brown.
Combine remaining ingredients except spaghetti in saucepan; bring to a boil. Add meatballs; simmer for 4 hours, stirring occasionally. Add spaghetti, mix well. Serve.
Makes 6 servings.
Contributor: shari dewey
10 Reasons to Plant a Garden
March 28, 2009
By Elise Cooke
Contra Costa Times
Every year, you plan to grow a vegetable garden. And every year you just can’t muster the motivation. Well, this year’s going to be different. Here are 10 reasons to grow some of your own food.
SEED DIVERSITY
We can thank large commercial farms for growing enough food for all of us, and for keeping it affordable. Unfortunately, mass production comes at a price. Seeds developed to produce crops with traits best for large-scale cultivation — such as better disease-resistance, easier harvest and more shipping durability — lose genetic variability in the process. The fewer strains growing, the greater the chance that one “superbug” could wipe out a whole crop.
If you think this Doomsday scenario is a little far-fetched, consider the Irish potato famine. In the early 19th century, about a third of Ireland’s desperately poor citizenry depended on the potato for most of their food. No type of potato that they grew was resistant to a particular fungus menacing European farmers for some years. With the stage set for disaster, winds from Southern England brought phytophthora infestans, variously called “late blight,” “wet rot” and “potato blight,” to Irish family farms. Affected plants shriveled and blackened. In just eight years, Ireland lost about a quarter of its population as a million people starved and another million fled the country.
As a home gardener, just by buying seeds for crops well-suited to great taste, good nutrition and small-scale cultivation, you’re doing your part to maintain a viable market for genetic diversity in our produce. You’ll be keeping the world safe from crop monocultures, one cucumber at a time.
SELF-SUFFICIENCY
With the economy and California itself being on shaky ground, it just makes good sense — and cents — to have fresh and preserved produce to rely on no matter what the market or the Hayward fault might deliver.
Growing your own produce is a hedge against one and a help against the other.
THOUGHTFUL GIFTS
Not sure what to give that someone who has everything? A vegetable garden yields numerous possibilities throughout the year.
In the spring, tie a bow around potted plants that you started inexpensively from seed. Give at least two if they need to cross-pollinate to produce food. Be sure to include easy care instructions. Even non-gardeners enjoy having a food plant or two growing in their yards. Even the most black-thumbed can grow a low-maintenance herb or two.
In the summer, your surplus will be treasured by those who don’t often experience the taste explosion of produce that’s actually ripe, so take pity on the supermarket-bound and share.
In the fall, one trip around a commercial pumpkin patch will tell you how grateful others will be when you present them with their own winter squash. If your intended recipients aren’t the jack-o-lantern types, they’ll surely love your pies and thick, hearty purées. If you’ve got fruit trees, give crisp and delicious apples, by themselves or in pies and butters.
Dried or canned, or as flavoring in oils and vinegars, your garden harvest still makes wonderful gifts even in the winter. Tuck your handiwork into stockings, or offer a selection in a nice box. You even can give those special gardeners in your life their own seeds, saved from your harvest and attractively packaged. The homemade touch is a nice respite from the commercialism of the season.
EXERCISE
Do you sometimes feel just a little silly walking or running nowhere on a machine like an overgrown hamster? Gardening is exercise with a purpose.
Image: (Sydney Fischer/MCT)
For a rigorous workout, double-dig a plot and feel the burn. Bending down to plant something is called a “squat” in jock-talk and “future food” in garden-jargon. Turning compost works your back and biceps. Pulling weeds by hand works those triceps. What’s more, you’ll have so much fun accomplishing something, you won’t even know you accidentally strength-trained until you wake up with sore muscles the next day.
CUT FOSSIL FUEL USE
Anything we can do to use less oil helps to lower our nation’s foreign trade deficit and decrease pollution. Vegetable gardening aids in that objective in three valuable ways.
* Fewer globe-trotting groceries. Perhaps it’s a little different in heavily agricultural California, but some studies indicate that on average, our produce travels some 1,500 miles from the farm to our dinner table.
* There’s a little-farm advantage in plant nutrition. As you’re not a large commercial farming concern, you can fertilize easily enough without relying on petroleum-based fertilizers. Anything from manure, fish emulsion or finished compost all provide plenty of nitrogen to grow a productive crop.
* Cut your own travel, too. You can avoid many trips to the supermarket when fresh produce is just outside. Isn’t it great that gas prices peak at the same time the harvest does?
SAVE TIME
If you think you don’t have enough time to garden, consider this: When seeds or plants find themselves in fertile, moist soil where the sun can see them, they can grow all by themselves. Hover over them if you like, but you’re just blocking their light.
If you’re always growing something, your typical morning will consist of going out and picking the day’s tasty fiber, bulk and vitamins. The meals practically plan themselves.
LESSONS FOR KIDS
Working in the garden with kids is truly quality time. They’ll gain hands-on experience in botany, entomology, horticulture, nutrition, ecology, geology and biology. A garden teaches investment, savings and meal-planning. Your children will grow character along with the plants, learning patience, self-sufficiency, a strong work ethic and the sense of responsibility that comes from nurturing vulnerable seedlings.
Do they need a timeout? Send them to the garden to pull weeds. You’ll get real time together away from the video games and television sets. All this is worth a little dirt tracked into the house, right?
NUTRITION
Mounting evidence suggests that a healthy diet is the most effective in preventing many chronic diseases; multivitamins can’t make up the difference.
Produce at the supermarket loses much of its vitamin potency because it’s often picked before ripeness, then transported for long distances to sit for days on the display shelf. In contrast, your garden produce is ripe, crisp and chock-full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants at their peak of freshness.
Growing your own vegetables is one of the best healthy habits you can do for your family.
HARVESTING
When your cranky snowbound friends call you a Zone Niner, it’s not an insult. They’re referring to the United States Department of Agriculture Plant Hardiness Zone, where we live.
Our temperate Bay Area climate is the envy of gardeners who lose valuable months out of the year waiting for the ground to thaw. Here, we hardly know what “hard frost” means. Even in January, you can be picking your own fresh carrots, onions, chard, snow peas, parsnips, lettuce and more.
In a lot of ways, winter gardening beats summer labor hands-down. The dew, rain and general cold temperatures ensure that your crops will need almost no water — a real plus in our drought-conscious region.
Most garden pests, such as aphids and snails, are sitting out the low temperatures and waiting for spring. Even weeds slow down during the winter months. Is it any wonder why our farmers’ markets are open year round?
SAVE MONEY
That $1.69 package of seed typically will grow at least 10 times the value in wholesome, organic vegetables, even accounting for the cost of water and reasonable germination failures. Let’s do a little math to try to quantify how far your food bill could drop.
Suppose each member of your family eats about a pound of produce a day, in keeping with the Centers for Disease Control recommendation. A small year-round cultivation plot conservatively can produce half of the vegetable needs of a family of four.
Now suppose that the average cost of fresh, pesticide-free, organic produce is about $2 a pound, which means you’d be spending $8 a day for produce you buy. Your bed yields an average of $4 worth of food each day, or $3.60 after expenses. Your savings during the course of a year would total $1,314. That’s a “raise” of more than $100 a month, tax-free.
So there you have it; 10 good reasons to put down the remote and pick up a shovel. What are you waiting for?
http://www.millennium-ark.net/NEWS/09_Food_Water/090329.10.reasons.2Gardens.html
Victory Garden Group Gains Ground in Town
Last year in March, we hadn’t had one request. Now we’re getting probably 10 requests a week. –Charlotte Anthony, founder of Victory Gardens for All
March 29, 2009
Sherri Buri McDonald
The Register-Guard – Eugene, OR
During World War II, an estimated 20 million Americans planted Victory Gardens in yards and on rooftops to help boost morale, feed their families and conserve food and fuel for the troops.
Locally, the gardens began to make a comeback last year thanks to Victory Gardens for All, a small Eugene nonprofit group founded in late 2007 by Charlotte Anthony.
A lifelong gardener, Anthony had volunteered with relief efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and she was dismayed by what she witnessed.
“The people living there didn’t have ways of dealing with what was happening,” she said.
So when Anthony returned home, she brainstormed how she could help this community grow more of its own food and be more self-sufficient if its food supply were ever disrupted. She also wanted to encourage residents to grow more food locally, reducing the number of miles it had to travel from farm to table, which would help reduce global warming, she said.
With not much more than her van and her garden tools, she set a goal of creating a Victory Garden for anyone who asked for one.
To date, the group has planted more than 380 gardens, and Anthony said she’s anticipating 1,000 requests this year.
“Last year in March, we hadn’t had one request,” she said. “Now we’re getting probably 10 requests a week.”
With so many families being affected by layoffs, wage cuts and other hardships related to the recession, the group’s mission has taken on even greater urgency.
The Willamette Farm & Food Coalition recently gave $1,000 to Anthony’s group, which she plans to use to create 20 garden plots for people who’ve recently lost their jobs.
The Whiteaker Community Council in Eugene’s Whiteaker neighborhood is distributing fliers and putting out the word to try to find those people, said Anand Keathley, a council board member.
Anthony said she’s excited to reach out to people who’ve been laid off because they may have more time to tend their garden and to make social connections through the garden project that may help them find other work.
“I don’t want to see people be victims. I want to see people take the bit in their teeth and run for it,” Anthony said.
Victory Gardens for All asks those who receive a garden to later volunteer on a team to create a garden for someone else. Except for participants in the grant-funded programs, people who receive a garden are asked to make a $50 donation.
“If they don’t have that money, we find other donors,” Anthony said. “We don’t turn anyone away.”
North Eugene resident Kristina Miller said her family was eager to turn their large backyard into a garden with help from Anthony’s group.
Miller’s husband, Daniel, has a steady, well-paying job with Pacific Rubber & Supply Corp., but, she said, “we have a lot of friends and family in the area that don’t have the luxury of a good-paying job with good hours. We thought we’d put in a huge garden and feed some people.”
The Millers hope to supply their own family of six and about six other families with fresh fruits and vegetables. They also hope to continue to grow and share food when the economy improves.
“We had the idea to do it way before (the economic downturn), and this just seemed like perfect timing,” Miller said.
Even the First Family is planting a garden on the South Lawn of the White House this year. First Lady Michelle Obama has said she plans to use the organic garden as a way to educate children about the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables.
http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/10180819-57/story.csp
Investigators Find Source of Many Foods Untraceable
March 25, 2009
By Gardiner Harris
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Most food manufacturers and distributors cannot identify the suppliers or recipients of their products despite federal rules that require them to do so, federal health investigators have found.
A quarter of the food facilities contacted by investigators as part of the study were not even aware that they were supposed to be able to trace their suppliers, according to a report by Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The report, expected to be made public Thursday, comes as President Obama and a bipartisan chorus of lawmakers have promised major changes to the nation’s food-safety system.
And it may help explain why many small food makers continue to issue peanut-related recalls more than two months after the Peanut Corporation of America was identified as the source of a salmonella scare that has sickened at least 691 people and has been linked to 9 deaths. The New York Times obtained a copy of the report.
As late as Monday, the Food and Drug Administration formally asked Westco Fruit and Nuts Inc., based in Irvington, N.J., to recall all of its products containing peanuts made by the Peanut Corporation. Jacob Moradi, Westco’s owner, could not be reached for comment, but he told ABC News that the F.D.A.’s recommended recall — the agency does not have the power to issue food recalls on its own — could ruin his company.
“They are asking me to commit suicide based on presumption,” Mr. Moradi said in a broadcast interview. “They have shown no proof.”
An F.D.A. official said Mr. Moradi hid from investigators at his plant.
On March 14, Jay Robb Enterprises of Carlsbad, Calif., announced a recall of peanut-butter-flavored JayBars. Alana Weber of Jay Robb said in an interview on Wednesday that although the company knew the peanuts in the bars came from the Peanut Corporation, it believed until recently that its bars were not part of the recall.
The inspector general recommended that the F.D.A. seek greater authority from Congress to require and ensure that food facilities maintain adequate records. In an official response in the report, the agency said that it largely agreed with the recommendations. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who is holding a hearing on Thursday where the report will be issued, said the recommendations would be included in reforms passed by Congress.
“Traceability is a critical tool in our ability to identify the source of a food-borne illness outbreak and locate where contaminated products were sold,” Ms. DeLauro said Wednesday.
To test compliance with the rules, federal investigators bought 40 products — including tomatoes, oatmeal and yogurt — from retail stores in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington and tried to trace them to farms or to the border. Foreign firms are not required to maintain supplier records.
Investigators successfully traced the source for only 5 of the 40 products, the report stated. Three of the traced products were egg cartons whose supply chain included only a farm and a retailer. For a tomato, a bag of ice, a bottle of fruit juice and a bottle of water, investigators were not able to even guess the product’s supply chain. For 31 other products, investigators were able to identify only the likely suppliers.
The investigators contacted 220 food facilities to ask about their supplier records. But only 118 of these businesses were included in the study because the rest were not required under rules adopted by the F.D.A. in 2005 to maintain supplier and recipient records. Of those 118 firms, 70 failed to provide investigators with required information about suppliers or customers, with 6 of the companies failing to provide any information at all.
One vendor told investigators that it kept no records of tomato purchases. Tomatoes have repeatedly been implicated in nationwide food contamination scares, including one last year. Fifteen facilities told investigators they mixed raw products from more than 10 farms.
“According to an estimate from a manager at a grain storage facility, if grain from one farm were contaminated, millions of bags of flour would be at risk and might have to be removed from retail shelves,” the report stated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/health/policy/26fda.html