I hope that all of you enjoy Fall Vegetables as much as I do. What’s fun about the change of seasons is that we are forced into creative ways to cook with the new bounty of the season. In this way, your food is never boring and you don’t get stuck eating the same foods day in and day out.

Here are 3 recipes and buying tips featuring some fall vegetables:  beets, parsnips and pumpkin.

Roasted Beet salad in Orange Dressing

A zero waste salad where every bit of an ingredient is used. Not only do I love the beets deep red hue, and their sweetness, but I really get a kick out of using the whole vegetable, root and the greens. In this salad the beets along with the greens are used and for the dressing, the orange zest along with the oranges are used as well.

You can forgo boiling beets by roasting them in foil and avoid the mess that comes with the red staining on the pots.

Buy beets that are firm with smooth skins and tops attached. They should have a deep, rich purple-red color. Choose small to medium beets as they are usually sweeter and more tender. Beet tops should be fresh looking and dark green, not wilted or slimy.

Adapted from Bon Appétit, January 2004

Ingredients

6 medium beets with beet greens attached
2 medium oranges
1 small red onion, finely diced
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
Sea salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper

1      Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut the greens from beets. Remove and discard stems. Chop the leaves coarsely and set them aside. Wrap each beet in foil. Place beets directly on oven rack and roast for about 1 hour, until tender when pierced with fork.

2      Let beets cool. Peel beets and then cut each into 8 wedges. Place beets in medium bowl.

3      Cook beet greens in large saucepan of boiling water just until tender, about 2 minutes. Drain and cool. When greens are at room temperature, squeeze them to remove excess moisture. Add greens to bowl with beets.

4      Zest the orange, then cut peel and white pith from oranges. Working over another bowl and using a paring knife, cut between membranes to release segments (this is called supreming).

5      Add orange segments and onion to bowl with beet mixture.

6      Whisk oil, garlic, orange zest in small bowl to blend; add to beet mixture and toss to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Let stand at room temperature 1 hour. Serve.

Maple Roasted Parsnips

The parsnip is a root vegetable that is a relative to the carrot, although much paler they do resemble each other. Typically parsnips are part of the main ingredient in a soup base or roasted for a richer flavor. For this dish the parsnips are roasted into a caramelized deliciously sticky texture, which makes them so moreish. You will not be able to resist them.

Choose parsnips that are firm, unblemished and small or medium in size (about 8 inches long). Large parsnips may have woody centers but, unlike carrots, broad tops are not an indication of woody cores. Parsnips range in color from pale yellow to creamy white. Avoid limp, shriveled or blemished parsnips with moist spots or a lot of tiny hairlike roots.

Ingredients

2 pounds parsnips, peeled and sliced

5 tablespoons olive oil

6 tablespoons maple syrup

2 tablespoons wholegrain mustard

Salt to taste

Serves 4

1       Preheat oven to Roast at 375F

2      Parboil parsnips in a stockpot under a medium high flame for 4 minutes.

3      Drain, then put in an ovenproof dish, and toss with olive oil and salt. Roast 45 minutes.

4      In a bowl, mix maple syrup and mustard together, and pour over parsnips when done. Roast for another 5 minutes more to set the taste.

Pumpkin Soup

The original recipe for this soup was made famous by the Jerusalem Ramada Renaissance Hotel, however I added more depth to this by adding some warming ingredients like cinnamon so that it would be more suitable for the Northeast climate.

Choose pumpkins that are heavy for their size and free of blemishes.

Ingredients

2 large yellow onions, diced

1 inch fresh ginger, grated

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

7 cups water

1 ½ pounds pumpkin, cubed or 1 ½ 15- ounce cans of pumpkins

1 medium white potato, peeled and cubed

2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed

½ cup apple sauce

3 tablespoons maple syrup

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon vegetable soup mix (Gluten Free)

1 tablespoon salt

¼ teaspoon white pepper

½ cup half &half creamer

pine nuts for garnish, optional

Serves 10

1. In a stainless steel pot under medium high flame, sauté onions in oil until golden.   Then stir in ginger.

2. Add the water, pumpkin, potato, applesauce and sweet potatoes. Bring to a boil. Cover, lower heat, and simmer for about 35 minutes. Let it cool.

3. With a hand blender, puree vegetables until smooth.

4. Add soup mix, salt, cinnamon, pepper and maple syrup and continue simmering for an additional ten minutes.

5. Stir in creamer and remove from heat. Serve sprinkled with pine nuts.

California is  ideal for olive growing, though the potential for making olive oil is not being reached by the community due to the cost and labor involved.  Andy Dale has decided to take matters into his own hands by using Kickstarter.com to raise the money needed to create a community olive oil press.  With olive trees already growing, the idea is that people will be able to put the fruit to use in creating natural, local, fresh olive oil.  Dale has calculated that with the oil press charging either a fee or a percentage of olive oil, it will be able to sustain itself and even grow, eventually becoming a fixture in the Bay Area community.

Dale has found a press for his project at a fraction of the usual cost, though he still needs money to make this dream come true.  His vision for the press as a way to turn a prohibitively labor and fund intensive process into a way for a community to become greener and more sustainable is a great example of a how to use a resource creatively.

Take a look at his project and consider making a donation.  Each donation level has an incentive, for example, $10 will get you a 375ml bottle of fresh pressed olive oil.  If the necessary $2,500 are raised by September 5^th, the project will be backed.  If not, donors will receive their money back and the community press will remain an unfulfilled dream.  Supporting initiatives like these is a great way to promote sustainable food.  Bringing self-sufficient olive oil (and other oils too) would bring the meaning of the word “local” to a new level in Berkeley.

Last Sunday, July 25, 15 people gathered at Oregon’s Museum of Science and Industry for Portland Tuv Ha’Aretz’s 2nd annual Jewish edible garden bike tour. Portland is laid out in grids, like Washington, D.C. Last year’s tour covered NE Portland; this year we set off to explore neighborhoods in SE.

Our ride leader, Tuv member Beth Hamon, is an old-school bike geek. Last year she created spoke cards for our ride (when you do something for the first time, it’s an innovation; twice is minhag) So of course she made a new one for this year’s ride. Here’s a picture:

Our route took us through the Sellwood, Mt. Tabor and Hawthorne neighborhoods. We started with a trip down the Springwater Corridor, a 40-mile multi-use trail that runs partway along the Willamette River and goes past some fantastic bird habitats.

We visited four gardens, ranging in size from a single raised bed to an urban micro-farm, complete with bees and a small orchard. All the gardeners talked about what they grew, how long they’d been growing food, and some offered perspectives on how their Judaism informs their gardening. For some, the conection is simply that they are Jewish and enjoy putting their hands in the dirt. Others talked about earth stewardship and one gardener deconstructed the Hebrew word pardes (orchard), as a way of explaining his approach: “Pardes begins with a Peh, which stands for p’shat, a simple explanation for things (what you see is what you get). The next letter, Reish, stands for remez, which means “hidden,” and suggests all that goes into making the plants grow: water, healthy soil, air, sunlight. Daled is drash, a commentary, and the final letter, Samech, stands for sod, which means “secret”, as in ‘The Secret Life of Plants,’ something you have to study and understand over a period of years.”

We ended our 14-mile loop with a picnic lunch at Sewallcrest Park, next to an enormous community garden. It’s worth mentioning that community gardens are very popular here; we have a three-year waiting list, with more than 1,000 people waiting for a plot.

Here’s a link to our Flickr page for more pictures of our ride. One rider used a nifty little GPS device he wore on his wrist like a watch to map our route. Here’s another link that shows where we went.

If you’d like to plan a similar event, please feel free to contact me for information.

Originally posted on Food Forever – The AJWS Food Justice Blog.

When I think about international food aid, what comes to mind are the challenges of distribution—who’s getting what and how much of it? But then there are the hidden costs of shipping. A recent IRIN article discusses the results of a Cornell University study that revealed the alarming fact that U.S. taxpayers spend about $140 million every year on non-emergency food aid in Africa. They spend roughly the same amount to ship food aid to global destinations on U.S. vessels.

$280 million. That’s a LOT of money. And the truth? It only benefits a very small constituency at the expense of taxpayers and recipients.

The article explains:

“Little has been written about the costs and effects of a policy called the Agricultural Cargo Preference (ACP), which affects the shipping sector of the “iron triangle” [comprised of agribusiness, the shipping sector and some NGOs] and USAID, the world’s largest food aid programme. The ACP requires that 75 percent of US food aid be shipped on privately owned, US registered vessels, even if they do not offer the most competitive rates. Some of these costs are reimbursed by the Department of Transportation’ Maritime Administration, but ultimately the US taxpayer foots the entire bill.”

It’s clear that there’s an urgent need to reform our food aid policy. Most donors have moved toward cash transfers or vouchers so that recipients can buy food, instead of providing food as aid, but the study points out that most countries have agribusiness and some NGO interests to contend with while reforming their food aid policy.

Just think: The $280 million we spend could be a game-changer to help many more people grow and distribute their own food sustainably. We could help local farmers invigorate their livelihoods and stabilize local markets.

To this end, we’ve been by calling on friends and supporters to encourage their senators to pass the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act—a piece of proposed legislation that clearly articulates U.S. aid priorities for the $2 billion committed in U.S. aid to Haiti, sets up benchmarks for success and requires local procurement. It also includes a transparent reporting and accountability system so both U.S. taxpayers and Haitians can see where money is going and whether or not it is achieving the desired impact.

There is absolutely no reason why we should be wasting our tax dollars on the cost of food shipments that are benefiting so few. We need to start getting money into the hands of those who have the knowledge, skills and creativity to make sure food is produced equitably and is distributed fairly.

Today is the six-month anniversary of the Haiti earthquake and, even though the world’s attention is fading, there’s been a lot of news and blog coverage about the work that lies ahead. Most of the focus has been on Port-au-Prince and, while the earthquake took its major toll on an urban center, we can’t forget about the devastating impact it had on rural communities, agriculture, and Haitian farmers.

A fantastic article from Agence France Presse about Haiti’s food security echoes many of the concerns we’ve raised before about aid distribution and food aid policy. The article emphasizes a need for “technical culture” and “training of farmers.” Which begs the question: what sort of training do Haitian farmers need the most? Irrigation? Tilling?

Meanwhile, our friends over at ActionAid wrote about Haiti’s housing crisis and reconstruction plans. Jean-Claude Fignolé, ActionAid’s Haiti Country Director, said:

“The Haitian people must be included in the reconstructions plans. At the moment the plan is more reflective of donor country interests and that is wrong. It is imperative that Haitian people be directly involved in their own recovery and lead the reconstruction process.”

We couldn’t agree more. Haiti’s future should not be determined by the international community, but by Haitian people themselves who can inform decision-makers about what they need most.

In recognition of the six-month anniversary of the earthquake, we’re asking our readers to support the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act, which aims to create a transparent reporting and accountability system for the $2 billion in U.S. aid that has been committed to Haiti.

And, as part of AJWS’s commitment to transparency and responsible grantmaking, we invite you to review our three-phase, four-year strategy for working in Haiti, which includes our work to revitalize Haitian agriculture and ensure that the Haitian economy can thrive by enabling local production and procurement of goods.

AJWS stands by the people of Haiti as they continue to recover and rebuild. Their resilience and courage inspires and motivates us in our work around the globe to confront disasters with tenacity and challenge adversity with hope.

Originally posted on Food Forever – The AJWS Food Justice Blog.

Today’s heart-breaking New York Times story about Haiti’s orphans is a painful reminder of the earthquake’s enduring devastation. The article offers a harrowing portrait of Daphne, a 14-year-old girl who watched her mother’s mangled body get carted away in a wheelbarrow from a shattered marketplace. Daphne then lived in a makeshift orphanage founded by Frades—a grassroots collective that specializes in microloans and began supporting abandoned and orphaned children after the earthquake. Daphne was just beginning to feel at home until she was claimed by a distant relative.

The article goes on to profile other children who have faced similar hardships—a 13-year-old named Michaelle who lost both of her parents in the earthquake and resides at Frades, cooking for the younger children with whatever food she can procure.

Frades’s board members and volunteers all shared similar thoughts: that even with so many international aid groups in Haiti, sustained help is hard to find. Mattresses, latrines, showers, medical care, psycho-social counselors and, most importantly, a consistent food and water supply are profoundly limited.

Nearly six months after the earthquake, cries for help are falling on deaf ears and efforts to hasten Haiti’s reconstruction have been stalled. It is absolutely unthinkable that countless other Haitian orphans could be profiled in the New York Times six months from now.

Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. Tell your senators to pass the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act to ensure that Haitians get the long-term aid and attention they need to build a sustainable future.

By Timi Gerson, Director of Advocacy of American Jewish World Service. Cross-posted on Food Forever – The AJWS Food Justice Blog.

African countries aren’t spending enough on agriculture, IRIN reported last week. And that’s a bad thing:

“Spending money on food production is critical in Africa, where 70 percent of people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for food and income. There are also going to be more people to feed in Africa in the next few decades. Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is expected to grow faster than elsewhere by 2050, increasing by 910 million people, or 108 percent.”

It is a bad thing, but the article and cited reports don’t go into much detail as to why these governments aren’t investing in agriculture programs. One key reason is that they don’t always have the choice. Powerful International financial organizations (IFIs) like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund frequently required developing countries to cut back government spending – including farm programs – in order for countries to receive desperately needed loans while global trade rules enforced by the World Trade Organization make many types of domestic agricultural policies that protect local farmers from unfair foreign competition “illegal.” This was all done in the name of creating more “open” global markets, yet the United States and other rich countries still heavily support their corporate commodity sector, which then dump products on   developing countries – competing with local farmers who now find it harder to sell their locally-grown food.

Food and Water Watch describes the devastating consequences of this cycle in its report What’s Behind the Global Food Crisis? How Trade Policy Undermined Africa’s Food Self-Sufficiency:

“This low level of agricultural investment cannot generate sustained growth in the farm sector that can provide a base for broader economic growth. Countries reduced or eliminated support for farm credit, seed and fertilizer subsidies, and crop distribution and reserve programs. These programs helped farmers increase agricultural productivity, invest in their operations and promote their crops in regional and export markets. When African governments rapidly withdrew from supporting these farm programs, agricultural productivity declined, as farmers were unable to secure loans, afford high-value seeds and fertilizers, or deliver their crops to more distant markets.”

People in Africa and other countries around the globe aren’t hungry because the world isn’t producing enough food. Along with poor infrastructure and inefficient aid policies, decades of unfair international finance and trade deals are part of a flawed global system that prevents the world’s vast surplus of food from making it to the mouths of hungry families.

Release Your Passion For Stew

Not long ago, at a party, I met a dark-eyed Peruvian woman with a sultry accent who had just discovered her slow cooker. She’d owned it for two years before a visiting friend released it from confinement in the back of the kitchen cabinet. That whole week they ate nothing but stews. After years of indifference toward it, my new friend had fallen in love with her slow cooker because “it giff so mush flavor!” When I told her that good, complex flavor means good nutrition, and that she should use it as often as she wants, she fell in love with me.

It is a little known fact that when a chef talks about flavor, he’s also talking about nutrients. When he says some flavors take time to develop, he’s saying sometimes you have to wait for certain nutrients to be released. Cooking meat slow is the best way to turn an ordinary meal into something extraordinary—in terms of taste and nutrition. The potential flavor of meat, or any food, derives from its complexity. Depending on the cut, “meat” may include muscle, tendon, bone, fat, skin, blood, and glands—each a world of chemical diversity. When that diversity is released on your tongue you can taste it, and the rich, savory flavor means a world of nutrients are on their way.

You don’t actually need a slow cooker to cook meat slowly and enjoy all the same benefits. All you need is moisture, time, and parts (as many different tissue types as possible: ligament, bone, fat, skin, etc.). Making soup, stewing, keeping a top on to trap the steam, basting often when cooking in the oven—all these techniques keep the moisture inside the meat, enabling water molecules to make magic happen. Here’s how.

The transformation of, say, a cold and flavorless chicken leg into something delicious begins when heated moisture trapped in the meat creates the perfect conditions for hydrolytic cleavage (see figure). At gentle heating temperatures, water molecules act like miniature hacksaws, neatly chopping the long, tough strands of protein apart, gently tenderizing even the toughest tissue. And because water also prevents nearby strands from fusing together, keeping meat moist prevents the formation of the protein tangles that make overcooked meat so tough.

Perfectly done: Hydrolytic cleavage clips proteins strands releasing peptides, making meat tender and savory

How does hydrolytic cleavage translate into taste? It’s simple. Taste buds are small. The receptor site where chemicals bind to them is tiny. So things that impart taste (called flavor ligands) must be tiny, too. If you were to take a bite of a cold, raw leg of chicken, you wouldn’t get much flavor from it. Cooking releases trapped flavor because, during the process of hydrolytic cleavage, some proteins are chopped into very small segments, creating short strings of amino acids called peptides. Peptides are tiny enough to fit into receptors in our taste buds. When they do, we get the sensation of savoryness food manufacturers call the “fifth flavor,” or umami. (Sour, bitter, salt, and sweet are the other four major flavors.)

How does having additional parts (skin, ligaments, etc.) create additional nutrition? Water molecules tug apart the connective tissue in skin, ligaments, cartilage and even bone, releasing a special family of molecules called glycosaminoglycans. You will find the three most famous members of this family in nutritional supplements for joints: glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate, and hyaluronic acid. But these processed supplements don’t hold a candle to gelatinous stews, rich with the entire extended family of joint-building molecules. What is more, cartilage and other connective tissues are nearly flavorless before slow-cooking because (just as with muscle protein) the huge glycosaminoglycan molecules are too big to fit into taste bud receptors. After slow-cooking, many amino acids and sugars are cleaved away from the parent molecule. Once released, we can taste them.

Slow-cooked meat and parts are more nutritious than their mistreated cousins for still another reason: minerals. Mineral salts are released from bone and cartilage during stewing, as well as from the meat itself. These tissues are mineral warehouses, rich in calcium, potassium, iron, sulfate, phosphate and, of course, sodium and chloride. It turns out our taste buds can detect more of these ions than previously suspected, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, and possibly iron and sulfate, in addition to the sodium and chloride ions that make up table salt.

Overcooking traps these flavorful materials in an indigestible matrix of polymerized flesh that forms when meat begins to dry out. You can only taste, and your body can only make use of, minerals that remain free and available.

A word about flavor complexity. Although we’ve been told that some taste buds taste only salty, others sour, others bitter, and others sweet, studies have revealed that, though taste buds may taste one kind of flavor predominately, one bud can in fact detect different flavor ligands simultaneously. It turns out, the more, different kinds of flavors there are, the more we taste each one. When peptides and salt ions bind at the same taste bud, the result is not a doubling of flavor, but a powerful thousand-fold magnification in the signal going to your brain.

In this way, our taste buds are engineered to help us identify and enjoy (nutritional) complexity. (This is why hot dogs, for instance—or better yet, actual sausage—taste better with sauerkraut and bittersweet mustard.)

Now, some of you might still pine for your Arby’s or your Big Mac. But keep in mind, the MSG and free amino acids in fast foods are tricking your tongue. The artificial flavoring MSG (a free amino acid, called glutamate) binds taste receptors just as peptides in slow cooked meat would. MSG and other hydrolyzed proteins are manufactured by taking hydrolytic cleavage to its completion, fully breaking down plant or animal protein products into free amino acids while refining them away from other cellular components. Health food stores sell these taste-enhancers in the form of Bragg’s Aminos, which is no better for you than hydrolyzed soy sauces. (Brewed soy-sauces derive flavor from peptides, which are safe.) The problem with these products comes from the fact that certain free amino acids have neurostimulatory effects that can lead to nerve damage (amino acids glutamate and aspartate are the most potent). When consumed in small amounts as part of a meal containing a diversity of nutrients, free amino acids are actually good for us. But when consumed in large quantity without their normal complement of nutrients (most notably, without calcium or magnesium), these amino acids can cause temporary memory loss, migraines, dizziness, and more. This is why the concept of whole foods must be applied to animal products as well as plants!

Cross-posted on Food Forever – The AJWS Food Justice Blog.

A piece recently published in Newsday(a Zimbabwean newspaper) poignantly expresses what we’ve been discussing a lot lately, particularly-with regard to sustainable agriculture in Haiti: that food aid alone does not alleviate poverty.

Though Zimbabwe has been plagued with food insecurity for quite some time, this year most farmers in northern Zimbabwe produced a bumper harvest of maize, while those in the southern region succumbed to a dry spell. The Famine Early Warning System Network (Fewsnet)’s prognosis of Zimbabwean farmers’ 2010 harvest shows an increase in food production compared to 2009. That’s good news! Thankfully, the country is mostly out of an emergency phase and farmers hope to break the cycle of aid moving forward. As the article explains, this year’s bumper harvest has done a lot of good:

“The bumper harvest presents an opportunity to introduce ways that promote human dignity and economic development tapping from resources in the aid industry – Human beings are not engines that run on the same type of fuel and giving food aid in a situation where food is locally available is denying people the dignity of dietary choice and missing an economic growth opportunity. There is no doubt that food aid saves lives but doesn’t alleviate poverty or contribute to the economy. In fact it can be corrosive to the economy as it creates dependency. The money goes mainly towards consumption.”

So true! Check out the article to learn more.

A long-time reader of The Jew and the Carrot, it’s easy for me to see the importance and power of conversations within the Jewish community regarding eating, nutrition, food politics, and sustainability. However, the Jewish imperative for justice does not allow us to stop at environmental or personal levels. Rather, we have to continue our pursuit of justice to ensure that everyone has access to fresh, seasonal produce, healthy food options, and the skills to prepare healthy meals. The Nourishing Kitchen of New York City is an organization working to do just that for the East Harlem community.

Founded in 2008 as a “healthy soup kitchen,” The Kitchen is the only emergency food organization providing nutritionally balanced food for immune-compromised individuals struggling with diabetes, obesity, and malnutrition. East Harlem has one of the highest rates of hunger as well as the highest rate of obesity in New York City, with 62% of the population reported overweight or obese. The East Harlem community also has the densest concentration of diabetes in any borough. These apparent contrasts can be explained by the heavy presence of affordably-priced yet nutritionally void fast food and the scarcity of affordable fruits and vegetables.

The Nourishing Kitchen has expanded its mission in an effort to incorporate healthy eating into clients’ everyday lives. In addition to a hot meal service, The Kitchen offers a food pantry, produce distribution, nutrition classes, and yoga classes – all free and open to the community.

A foundation stone of The Kitchen is not just providing food for low-income clients, but connecting an otherwise marginalized and underserved community with the green movement. As the only certified green soup kitchen in the country, The Kitchen does this primarily through the use of a number of community garden plots. The produce harvested in these plots is served in our hot meals and distributed in our Urban Free Produce program. The Kitchen also runs educational programs and events that expose the community to recycling, composting, seasonal eating, and growing their own produce at home.

One of The Kitchen’s most important projects is the Junior Chef program, a summer program that takes kids ages six to thirteen and gives them hands-on culinary and nutrition workshops. This program was created to connect underserved and undernourished youth to the culinary arts while educating participants and their families on issues of nutrition and wellness. In addition to direct training, participants receive ingredients and recipes to prepare meals at home with their families, plus a local gym membership to engage in physical activity. Through this curriculum, participants learn how to protect themselves and their families from the threat of diabetes and obesity raging in their neighborhood while having fun and gaining comfort in the kitchen.

I’m writing about this organization today because The Nourishing Kitchen (specifically the Junior Chef program) needs your help. The Kitchen is currently a finalist in the national Post Grant for Good Health for $25,000 to support and expand the Junior Chef program. The catch is that it all depends on votes. Each person can vote once per day until July 12 and the winner will be announced on July 22. It takes less than a minute of ‘e-volunteering’ a day, just one click and you are on your way to pursuing food justice for all. Click here once a day to help.