RAINY DAY POTLUCK.
The weather cooperated enough on Sunday for us to host some friends/CSA shareholders at the farm. We had an incredible potluck meal (complete with ginger marinated venison....!), a hay wagon tour of the farm, and the inevitable swim in the creek.Hearing Eric give a tour of his farm, his vision for healing the land, the ram pump...it reminds me of the year I was an intern, of falling in love with the magic of this place. Seeing it through the eyes of visitors allows me to remember how amazing this all is.And how amazing it is that now, a few short years later, we can walk up the road to give a tour of our vision, our land, our growing farm.- Hannah.
NEED MORE ACRES FARM.
When we first met Michelle from Need More Acres we were lucky enough to be set up next to her at the Kentucky Green Living Fair. But that was decidedly not our first experience with Michelle. The previous fall, she and her husband Nathan had donated all the profits from one week of their market sales to our Cabin Campaign long before they'd ever met us. And we were floored. It was, without a doubt, one of the more generous gifts we'd ever received––to receive such a large amount of money from a farm, and from strangers. So you can imagine how reluctant we were to apply for their Planting Seeds Program, which offered young farmers a portion of profits from the sales at this past week's Heirloom Tomato Festival, to be used for a project the young farmer can't afford. But at the behest of Michelle we applied, and this week they raised a great deal of money, to be dispersed among some amazing people with big ideas.Put simply, Hannah and I are deeply inspired by Need More Acres. They are not only building community, but helping many young farmers along the way. They want to feed. They want to give. And I don't know if they set out to inspire, but they are doing that, too.We can't wait to get to a point where we can give and feed and inspire as they do. It's a goal of ours. It's a goal to join Need More Acres in helping to build community and strengthen Kentucky's small farmers. And it's nice for us, and for Kentucky, to have such a great model farm to follow.Thank you, Michelle and Nathan, your actions do not go unnoticed nor unappreciated.- Jesse.AND - as a PS....Need More Acres do, in fact, need more acres! They are looking for land opportunities (buy or trade) to grow their year-round Bowling Green CSA. What they currently do with just 2 acres is incredible, so I can only imagine how they will continue to grow. If you have any ideas or suggestions, let them know!
COOKED: A REVIEW.
"We are the only species that depends on fire to maintain our body heat, and the only species that can't get along without cooking its food. By now, the control of fire is folded into our genes, a matter not merely of human culture but of our very biology."-Michael Pollan, Cooked
I enjoy Michael Pollan's work and have read all but one of his books, but when I heard about his new endeavor, "Cooked" (published by The Penguin Press), I was skeptical. I was skeptical because of the name—which sounded to me like the title of a bad chef memoir—and I was skeptical because of the premise. In "Cooked," Pollan apprentices himself to "a succession of culinary masters," in sections themed Fire, Water, Air and Earth. But that wasn't necessarily the source of my skepticism. Where I became dubious, was at the focus of the first section: barbecue.It's not that I didn't care about barbecue—quite the opposite when offered a good plate of the stuff—it's that I didn't know if I really cared to read about it. I thought we simply didn't eat enough meat to necessitate an education on the subject. In my mind, barbecue was a rare and decadent event where, more often than not, we put aside our ethical leanings, dump sauce over some factory-farmed pulled pork and make a mess of our beards, ideals and shirts, respectfully. And to some extent, my definition wasn't far off. But what I hadn't considered before reading "Cooked" was that my relationship to barbecue wasn't just some moral confusion and a few ruined items of clothing, but that I actually cared a lot more about barbecue than I realized.If Hannah and I don't start a fire, we don't eat hot food. And I would say it's this necessity that's rendered me downright obsessed with starting fires. Every day, I watch each fire burn, transfixed by the magic like a child at a puppet show. I observe carefully how different woods burn and smell, how the fire dances, drunk on oxygen, gorging on carbon. I relish the flavor of a squash licked by flames, cooked by the hot coals of oak. I enjoy this act in some sort of primordial fashion that I'd never questioned until "Cooked", until barbecue.And it didn't end at barbecue. Pollan goes on to explain our need and love for wood-cooked food, for food cooked in pots, bread and, my personal favorite, fermentation. "Cooked" turned out to be precisely the kind of book I wanted it to be (title notwithstanding). It was a book that connected me, biologically, to the act of cooking food, which is all I ever ask for in a book. I love to know why. Why do we cook? Why salt? Why cheese? Why beer? I could read books that simply answer "why" indefinitely, and the more of them written by Michael Pollan, the better.You can find "Cooked" online, but all books read better when picked up at your local bookstore (except for mine, which is paradoxically only online).- Jesse.
