Eat. Drink. Better.

One of the more delicious ways to eat locally is to drink local milk. For most of us, this means raw (unpasteurized) milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy or sell in many U.S. states.

But often there’s a way around it: A herdshare program. Drinking raw milk from a cow you own is not illegal. When a milk drinker joins a herdshare, he’s buying a part of a cow — usually 1/25th of a cow — and paying each month a fee for that partial-cow’s board and care.

I own 3/25ths of a cow (a Jersey named Cinnamon), which I purchased from a local dairy farmer for $50 per share. (If I ever decide to sell my shares, the farmer will buy them back from me for the same price I paid.) Each month, I pay my farmer $22 per share for my portion of the costs of Cinnamon’s care, and each week I drive out to the farm (in Ohio, it’s illegal for my farmer to deliver my milk to me) and pick up 3 gallons of beautiful whole unpasteurized milk. It works out to $5.08 per gallon, which just a few months ago might have seemed like a lot to pay for milk. It was worth it to me because I wanted to buy my milk from a local farmer raising cows on pasture without rBGH — cows living the way cows are supposed to live — and in my area that means raw milk. It’s worth it to others because they want raw milk in particular.

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Happens every year here in the Midwest — that week when the mercury peaks, the garden wilts and everyone droops and sweats. My motivation to harvest produce, much less cook it, fades as fast as an ice cube on the driveway.

Wait — save that ice cube. As a matter of fact, bring out all the ice trays. When temperature and humidity rise, there’s only one word that inspires us through: blender drinks. And look no further than the humble rhubarb for cocktail inspiration that frappes local flavor with a new twist on happy hour.

You have to admit, rhubarb could use a new recipe twist, something other than pie or cobbler. For the gardeners with prolific rhubarb patches, bet you could use a recipe that uses twelve cups of this vegetable that thinks its a fruit.

This cocktail recipe uses a rhubarb-sugar syrup as the base, blended with ice and rum. If you’re in more of a margarita mood, blend with tequila. For a non-alcoholic version, mix equal parts of the syrup with plain seltzer. The syrup readily freezes and is easiest (and most energy efficient on a hot day) made in the crock-pot.

Here’s the Rhubarb Cocktail recipe, using the sugar syrup Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I wrote about no/low-cal ways to dress up your water, providing you with variety when you need hydration the most.  But what about when the summer heat is so hot, you don’t even feel like a meal?  My husband and I play tennis every morning, and a berry smoothie is perfect before or after a match, or if you need nourishment and energy, but don’t want to eat something heavy.  Even Starbucks is getting into the smoothie game, but why drink their inevitably processed concoctions when you can make your own from fresh, unprocessed ingredients?  Blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries are all over the farmer’s markets, or, if they’re available, gooseberries, lingonberries, loganberries, or bilberries make unique additions to a smoothie.  Berries are also full of vitamins and antioxidants; you can’t beat them for a sweet treat that’s good for you as well.  Megan included them in her top ten quick, healthy, sustainable snacks, and the Green Diva mentioned them in her five ways to enjoy berries.

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It’s getting hot in St Louis.  Not just hot, but stiflingly humid.  It’s impossible to not sweat. It’s days like this where it’s more important than ever to remain hydrated, but plain water just doesn’t cut it sometimes, and it doesn’t have to.  You don’t need to turn to a HFCS-laden soda to find a tasty summer beverage.  Here’s five easy, refreshing, and practically no-calorie ways to dress up your refrigerator’s cold water pitcher, providing much-needed flavor when you’re trying to beat the heat.

1. Add a sliced cucumber and lemon to your water pitcher for a subtle, yet incredibly refreshing, flavor.

2. Slice a tablespoon or two of fresh ginger and two small limes into your water pitcher for a cooler with a kick to it.

3.  You absolutely can’t go wrong with mint tea.  Add three mint tea bags to a pitcher of water.  Let steep in the sun for a few hours.  Chill in fridge.

4.  Muddle a sliced orange in a large pitcher.  Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract.  Add water and ice.  Reminisce of youth spent eating dreamsicles.

5.  Check out Jennie’s Lavender Lemon Soda recipe for a carbonated treat.

Need something sweeter?  Add a touch of honey or raw sugar to any of the above.

For another tasty summer beverage, check out Megan’s Lavender Lemonade.

Lovin’ Fresh is a series of recipes designed to showcase produce gathered from local farms or grown in my own garden. 

“Hot. So very hot.”  These words, or some variation of them, echo through my head at least a dozen times a day now that summer is officially here.  Interspersed among them are a sundry of other fleeting thoughts, most prevalent among them being, “Is it lunchtime yet?”   You see, laboring as I do outside so much of the day in my horticulture work, I tend to quickly get a little parched and hungry.  Concocting refreshing icy beverages has become a priority.

This desperation for refreshment brings us to a truly revitalizing Lavender Lemon Soda that is the ideal remedy for a sweaty brow.  It is downright cleansing with its effervescent flavors. I have been intrigued by herbal sodas since last summer when I had one at a local café, but I surprised even myself with how tasty this particular combination turned out to be.  

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Americans drink 400 million cups of coffee each day, which contributes to the coffee bean’s status as the second most globally traded product after petroleum. Now, a recent report from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid has found that regular coffee intake can actually prevent heart disease in women. Coffee is a much needed cash crop in many countries with few other exports such as Ethiopia, Guatemala and Papua New Guinea, but the industry has also been plagued by reports of worker abuse and corporate rip offs. Rainforest and other endangered species habitat is often cleared for coffee plantation, making it an environmentally dicey purchase, as well.

So how do we get our morning cup without a side of guilt? How to decipher real world impact from a multitude of coffee labels after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Willie Nelson and wife Annie are joining the campaign to help dairy cows, who are all too often living in extremely in-humane conditions. They are working with the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) to help bring awareness to the plight of these animals and work to end the harmful practices used by industrial dairy farms, such as the Mendes Ranch in California. You can join in by going to the Free Baby Mendes website - read more about the issue, sign the petition, share it with friends.

The Nelson’s on sustainable biodiesel:
I had the privilege of interviewing both Willie & Annie last Fall while they were in NY for Farm Aid. They hosted a rockin’ event at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square to benefit Annie’s Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance.

Check out the interview with Willie & Annie Nelson and see what Woody Harrelson, Daryl Hannah and others had to say about sustainability.

Beautiful green and brown eggs are dwarfed by the huge goose eggs. Some farms also offer duck eggs for interested buyers.

Want some of the most beautifully colored eggs this Easter, but don’t have time to dye them? No problem, you can get eggs in all colors from soft, warm brown to light sage, blue-green and olive or even pink. The best part? The chickens do all the work.

Different breeds of chickens produce different egg colors. This shell color is a result of pigments that are secreted by the hen and deposited on the eggshell’s outer layers during formation in the chicken’s oviduct. Brown eggs are from the pigment protoporphyrin, a breakdown product of hemoglobin. Blue and green hues are caused by the pigment oocyanin, a by-product of bile formation.

I was a bit skeptical of some of the information I found from the Egg Nutrition Center. The Center reported that the color of the eggs a chicken lays is related to the species of the chicken and the color of the chicken’s earlobes. Chickens have earlobes? (Tips on buying eggs and what the labels mean after the jump). Read the rest of this entry »

I guess Thursday is Bad Cow Day. Sorry cows! I love your sweet, cud-chewing faces, but your owners have issues!

According to the Humane Society, 17% of the U.S. beef supply comes from spent dairy cows. These cows no longer produce financially viable quantities of milk and are sold at steep discount to slaughterhouses. In fact, prices for dairy cows can be as little as one-tenth the price of a well-fed beef steer on the meat market. This partially has to do with net meat gain: the dairy cow is bred for optimum lactation, not muscle mass. The price differential also has to do with condition: the dairy cows tend to be older and more feeble, depleted of calcium and afflicted with a multitude of bacterial infections, the result of sedentary, unifunctional lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Um. Look I don’t want to be an alarmist or anything. But. Um.

See, I’ve got kids? And, see…they’re kind of…energetic enough? I mean really, truly. Spend five seconds in my house and you will see: they are doing just fine bouncing off the walls of their own accord. So, I’ll thank the world for not encouraging them to bounce off the ceiling, as well.

Oh, but I can‘t thank the world, because apparently the world is instead choosing to fill them with caffeine when I’m not around.

As this great article from Metroactive explains, “these days, constraints on caffeine consumption for kids and young teens are nonexistent. Kids are having caffeine early and often.” It’s not just in their drinks, apparently. Candy bars? Increasingly filled with the stuff.

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