Welcome to the blog for Colgate University's interdisciplinary course on food. This is the place to keep up with what students in the course are experiencing in their work at Common Thread Community Farm and through their everyday encounters with food.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

American Values & the Agrarian Ideal in Country Music

I am a big fan of country music. It’s the only kind of music my dad would allow growing up—it was WYRK on the radio and CMT Sunday countdowns. My dad always said that country music was “good music.” I never fully understood why he thought this, until today’s class. In class, we talked about American values and the Agrarian Ideal. As a new country in the 1700’s, America deemed country and farming as good and virtuous. Thomas Jefferson said, “Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.” These virtues of agriculture came from farmers’ hard work, toughness, and self-sufficiency. And without these values and ideals, the nation would crumble. Teddy Roosevelt writes, “We were founded as a nation of farmers, and in spite of the great growth of our industrial life it still remains true that our whole system rests upon the farm, that the welfare of the whole community depends upon the welfare of the farmer. The strengthening of the country life is the strengthening of the whole nation.”
The Agrarian ideal and many of the American values (virtuous, good, self-sufficient, independent, sturdy, hard working, tough, wholesome, etc.) are in almost all of today’s country songs.   (I think this is why my dad considers country music to be "good music.") Take a look a just a few:

“Strong” by Will Hoge
Agrarian Ideal/American values: a farmer/countryman is strong, steady, reliable, trustworthy, loyal, and dogged 
Lyrics:
He's a twenty year straight get to work on time
He's a love one woman for all his life
He's a shirt off his back give you his last dime
He's strong

He's a need to move something you can use my truck
He's an overtime worker when the bills pile up
Everybody knows he ain't just tough
He's strong

Strong

He'll pick you up and won't let you down
Rock solid inside out
Somebody you can trust
Steady as the sun
Ain't nothing gonna knock him off the road he's rollin on
He's strong

It ain't what he can carry what he can lift
It's a dirt road lesson talkin to his kids
Bout how to hold your ground and how to live
Strong

He's strong

He'll pick you up and won't let you down
Rock solid inside out
Somebody you can trust
Steady as the sun
Ain't nothing gonna knock him off the road he's rollin on
He's strong

Strong
Like the river rollin
Strong
Gonna keep on going
Strong
When the road runs out
They gonna keep on talkin about

How he was strong
Strong

He'll pick you up and won't let you down
Rock solid inside out
Somebody you can trust
Steady as the sun
Ain't nothing gonna knock him off the road he's rollin on
He's strong

Everybody knows he ain't just tough
He's strong

“Red Dirt Road” by Brooks and Dunn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPcPEUBp-w
Agrarian Ideal/American Values: the country is pious and close to God
Lyrics:
It's where I drank my first beer
It's where I found Jesus
Where I wrecked my first car
I tore it all to pieces
I learned the path to heaven is full of sinners and believers
Learned that happiness on earth ain't just for high achievers
I've learned I've come to know
There's life at both ends
Of that red dirt road

“These Are My People” by Rodney Atkins
Agrarian Ideal/American Values: country/farm life has a sense of community—a special bond
Lyrics:
These are my people
This is where I come from
We're givin' this life everything we've got and then some
It ain't always pretty
But it's real
That's the way we were made
Wouldn't have it any other way
These are my people

“Fly Over States” by Jason Aldean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H0A4AFmZwM
Agrarian Ideal/American Values: the fly over states are holy with hard work invested in them 
Lyrics:
Just a bunch of square cornfields and wheat farms,
Man, it all looks the same,
Miles and miles of back roads and highways,
Connecting little towns with funny names,
Who'd want to live down there in the middle of nowhere?

They've never drove through Indiana,
Met the men who plowed that earth,
Planted that seed, busted his ass for you and me,
Or caught a harvest moon in Kansas,
They'd understand why god made
Those fly over states

“Amarillo Sky” by Jason Aldean
Agrarian Ideal/American Values: Farmers are hard working, virtuous people
Lyrics:
He gets up before the dawn;
Packs a lunch an' a thermos full of coffee.
It's another day in the dusty haze;
Those burnin' rays are wearin' down his body.
The diesels worth the price of gold;
It's the cheapest grain he's ever sold,
But he's still holdin' on.

He just takes the tractor another round,
An' pulls the plow across the ground,
And sends up another prayer.
He says: "Lord, I never complain, I never ask: 'Why?'
"Please don't let my dreams run dry,
"Underneath, underneath this Amarillo Sky."

That hail storm back in '83,
Sure did take a toll on his family.
But he stayed strong and carried on,
Just like his Dad and Granddad did before him.
On his knees every night,
He prays: "Please let my crops and children grow,"
'Cause that's all he's ever known.


“Dirt” by Florida Georgia Line
Agrarian Ideal/American Values: wholesomeness
Lyrics:

“You know you came from it and someday you’ll return to this...”

Monday, September 29, 2014

Noodle Kugel

Growing up, the Jewish Holidays were always an important time for my family to get together with our out-of-state relatives, embrace our Jewish heritage, and of course, eat. For many of our holidays, my Aunt Kathy would host the dinner at her house in New Jersey. My favorite part of the meal was always her "famous" Matzah Ball soup. When we were little, we would have contests between the cousins for who could eat the most bowls. If I recall correctly, I won the record at eleven bowls!! Needless to say, I ended up on the floor in agony, but every spoonful was worth the win.

In celebration of the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) last week, my roommate and I prepared a traditional Jewish dinner for fifteen friends. One of my friends brought the Matzah Ball soup, which I must say was almost as delicious as my Aunt Kathy's! My roommate and I served salad, brisket, chicken and Noodle Kugel. I had asked my mom to text me the recipe she always uses for her Noodle Kugel. In attempting to decipher the recipe's handwriting, I realized this was the very recipe my grandmother had used for her Noodle Kugel years ago. Knowing that I was following my family's tradition made the dish taste even better.

Since I wanted to learn more about the history behind this traditional dish, I did a quick google search and stumbled upon an interesting article from the NYT by Joan Nathan titled, "Kugel Unraveled." I learned that aside from possessing "special powers" in the Hasidic interpretations of Kabbalah, Kugel can come in many different forms. Kugel typically consists of noodles, eggs, oil, and cheese, but more recently people have topped their kugel with Kosher Japanese panko and cranberry sauce. Though delicious, it is by no means considered "healthy." Additionally, specialty store owners have noted Kugel's transformation over time with people's inclination to opt for processed foods instead of making the ingredients themselves (ie: boxed noodles instead of homemade pasta, etc.).n

To welcome the "sweet" new year, the Kugel we served at our dinner included pineapple, sugar, and cinnamon. Here is a picture of my grandmother's original recipe.

Enjoy!





Click on this link to find the brisket recipe I used: http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/holiday-beef-brisket-with-onions


Sunday, September 28, 2014

Pumpkinsteins

Since its almost October and pumpkins are now everywhere, I thought this called for a pumpkin-themed blog post.

On the news the other day,  I saw that a farmer has been experimenting with creating pumpkins in the shape of Frankenstein's head. His creations are a hit and his pumpkins are selling for lots of money.

Heres a link to the article about him :

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/28/pumpkins-shaped-like-frankensteins-head-are-a-hit/print/

And a picture of his pumpkins:


Staying on the topic of pumpkins, I did a little baking this weekend.  I made pumpkin white chocolate snickerdoodles.  If you are looking for a good cookie recipie, and prefer a softer cookie, I recommend using this recipie.  

White Chocolate Pumpkin Snickerdoodles (adapted from SallysBakingAddiction) 

-1/2 C unsalted butter
-1/4 C light or dark brown sugar
-1 C granulated sugar
- 6 tablespoons of pumpkin puree
-1.5 C all purpose flour
-1/4 teaspoon salt
-1/4 teaspoon baking powder
-1/4 teaspoon baking soda
-2 teaspoons of cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice
-1/2-3/4 C of white chocolate chips 

1. melt the butter, then combine the melted butter with 1/2 C of granulated sugar and the brown sugar.  mix in vanilla and pumpkin.  
2. in a separate bowl, combine flour, salt, baking powder and soda, cinnamon, and pumpkin pie spice. 
3. combine wet and dry ingredients until combined. 
4. fold in white chocolate chips
5. chill the dough for AT LEAST 30 minutes
6. roll dough into balls, and roll them in 1/2 C granulated sugar and  1/2 tsp. cinnamon.  
7. bake for 8-10 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees

pretty easy! 

Here is a picture of my finished product: 


Hope this has inspired everyone to embrace the pumpkin season!







Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Supermarket's Six Commandments

       This year, I’m a junior in college and it’s the first year that I must grocery shop for myself. My first trip to the grocery store—Price Chopper—was overwhelming to say the least. I walked up and down each aisle fifteen times, called my mom eight times, and went up to the cash register two times...only to leave the store with nothing. My second trip to Price Chopper was just as overwhelming, but for a different reason. This time, I had just read chapter 1 of Marion Nestle’s “What to Eat," where she describes the shrewd and skillful science behind the supermarket design/layout: product selection, placement on shelves, and display. “Corporations hire social scientists to study unconscious human emotions not for the good of humanity but to help companies manipulate people into buying products.” They expose us (consumers) to the largest possible number of items that we can stand to see, without annoying us so much that we run screaming from the store. To do this, supermarkets, including Price Chopper, follow a set of fundamental rules—all of them based firmly on extensive research: 
  • “Place the highest-selling food departments in the parts of the store that get the greatest flow of traffic—the periphery. Perishables—meat, produce, dairy, and frozen food—generate the most sales, so put them against the back and side walls.” 


(Fresh produce and frozen foods lined the back and side walls of Price Chopper) 
  •  “Use the aisle nearest the entrance for items that sell especially well on impulse or look or smell enticing—produce, flowers, or freshly baked bread, for example. These must be the first things customers see in front or immediately to the left or right (the direction, according to researchers, doesn’t matter).”
(The first thing I see when I walk into Price Chopper is the flower section) 
  • “Use displays at the ends of aisles for high-profit, heavily advertised items likely to be bought on impulse.”

(High-profit items like Goldfish, Hershey's, Reese's, M&M's, Oreo's, and Ritz-Bits are all placed at the end of the aisles) 
  • “Place high-profit, center-aisle food items sixty inches above the floor where they are easily seen by adults, with or without eyeglasses.”
(This entire section contains flavored water, but the high-profit brand of Poland Spring bottles are placed in the middle rows--60 inches above the floor--so that they are better accessible and seen) 

  •       “Devote as much shelf space as possible to brands that generate frequent sales; the more shelf space they occupy, the better they sell.”
(Coca-Cola takes up most shelf space in the soft drink aisle) 
  •   “Place store brands immediately to the right of these high-traffic jam items (people read from left to right), so that the name brands attract shoppers to the store brands too.”
(Price Chopper cereal is placed to the right of big brand-name cereal like Raisin Bran and Life) 
 










Thursday, September 18, 2014

Winter Squash Recipes

For our first day working at Common Thread Community Farm, my group spent most of our time cutting many different kinds of winter squash, such as Acorn, Delicata, and Pumpkin. Squash is packed with good nutrients such as beta carotene, lutein, and potassium and eating them can help protect our vision and control blood pressure (Nearing,http://www.besthealthmag.ca/eat-well/nutrition/6-reasons-to-eat-more-squash). You also don’t have to worry about these kinds of squash going bad because they can be stored for 3 to 4 months after being harvested. Besides pumpkin pie, I’ve never really eaten any kind of squash so I found some recipes using winter squash that I’ll hopefully get to try out in the next couple weeks:

From Allrecipies.com: Garlic Delicata, serves 8
Ingredients
3 Delicata squash
1/4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Oil a 9x13 inch baking dish.
2. Peel delicata squash, slice in half lengthwise, and remove seeds. Cut into 1/2 inch thick slices. Place in baking dish, and toss with olive oil, garlic, and parsley.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until tender.

From Eating Well Magazine: Southwestern Stuffed Acorn Squash, serves 6
Ingredients
3 acorn squash, (3/4-1 pound each)
5 ounces bulk turkey sausage
1 small onion, chopped
1/2 medium red bell pepper,chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 cups chopped cherry tomatoes
1 15-ounce can black beans, rinsed (see Tip)
1/2 teaspoon salt
Several dashes hot red pepper sauce, to taste
1 cup shredded Swiss cheese
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 375°F. Lightly coat a large baking sheet with cooking spray.
2. Cut squash in half horizontally. Scoop out and discard seeds. Place the squash cut-side down on the prepared baking sheet. Bake until tender, about 45 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, lightly coat a large skillet with cooking spray; heat over medium heat. Add sausage and cook, stirring and breaking up with a wooden spoon, until lightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes. Add onion and bell pepper; cook, stirring often, until softened, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in garlic, chili powder and cumin; cook for 30 seconds. Stir in tomatoes, beans, salt and hot sauce, scraping up any browned bits. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer until the tomatoes are broken down, 10 to 12 minutes.

4. When the squash are tender, reduce oven temperature to 325°. Fill the squash halves with the turkey mixture. Top with cheese. Place on the baking sheet and bake until the filling is heated through and the cheese is melted, 8 to 10 minutes.

Recipe for Scones

Here is the link to the recipe for the scones I brought to class the other day! Just in case you did indeed like them and were not just being polite. They are one of my favorites because they are so easy and because when you lack a food processor (like me) you get to kneed the dough with your hands like an edible stress ball. And if you happen to own a heart shaped cookie cutter (and not have to resort to using the rim of a Tupperware container to cut the dough) they end up look really fancy!

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/strawberry-and-rosemary-scones-recipe.html

Enjoy!


Monday, September 15, 2014

I love "Futomaki"!


I talked about "Big sushi roll (we call it "Futomaki")" former class.   I found a good website about Futomaki and I want to share with you what is it.  

http://www.allaboutsushiguide.com/futomaki.html

You can see first photo that is almost same as my grandmother made.   She just made it for special occasion and family gathering.  It take a long time for preparation to cook the ingredients and is difficult to roll it all ingredients put in the middle.  My grandmother always said to herself when she made it "why the ingredients isn't in the center?"   But I didn't care about the shape because it looked good and is very tasty for me.

She usually use "Sakura Denbu" (you can see what it is the website).   It is very sweet because it is used lot of sugar.  I have not had a sweet tooth when I was a little, I didn't like sweet food.  But I loved it when grandma use Sakura Denbu to Futomaki.  I think it becomes futomaki more tasty!

We usually cut it when we eat.  But once a year Feb. 3rd, we eat one roll of futomaki directly for celebrating "the day before the beginning of Spring", we call it "Setsubun".

This picture is my little one eat it at her big mouth!




Sunday, September 14, 2014

Common Thread Farming Hits Home

I began my internship last Wednesday at Common Thread Farm, and was surprised to find a personal connection during my day of harvesting ugly carrots and bagging sweet onions. Asher, an owner of the CSA, asked us all about where we grew up, what our families did and what it was like to live there. I’m from even further Upstate New York – Oswego County, near Lake Ontario – and have honestly always found it unremarkable. I have a very shallow supply of “fun facts” about my hometown. In theory, the first curveball was thrown right down the street from my house. The Oswego River, which flows through my hometown of Fulton, NY and empties into Lake Ontario, is one of the few north-flowing rivers in the world. Benjamin Franklin listed Oswego, our county seat, as one of the four would-be great cities of America, along with New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. We were the only area he was wrong about.

Oh, and we have a guy from our town that was in the NHL for a while, but that’s about all that’s ever really been notable.

Asher immediately started asking if I knew any farmers in the area as I was shucking onions and putting them in 50 lb. bags. My cousin, who grew up two houses down from me all my life, just married a son of the most prominent farmers in Oswego County. The Sorbellos, as I learned from their website (click here), came from Sicily in the late 1920’s and started working as a tenant farmer on plots in the Oswego-Fulton area. Today, the family has something of an “onion empire.” They even wear sweatshirts with the “Sorbello” name on them, the “O’s” drawn as onions.

When the first Sorbello came to Oswego County and bought his first muck farm on Route 48 in Granby, he didn’t know how lucky he was. Muck, or “black dirt” as it’s called in Orange County, is made up of between 20 and 80 % organic matter, which accounts for its dark color and its ability to yield a large quantity of diverse and healthy crops. It takes over 500 years to create muck 1 foot deep. Clearly the richness found in this type of soil is rare. According to this article, my cousin’s new family is farming onions and soybeans on 600 acres of muck soil in the Granby area.

But they aren’t the only ones who supported local agriculture or the small economy of Oswego County – it goes deeper and more personal than that.

According to an Oswego County agricultural planner, it was the Italian immigrants in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s that got the muck industry going. Suddenly I recalled long forgotten stories from my dad, a 2nd generation Italian, talking about his summer employment on muck farms during the 1960’s.  He started his day at 5 a.m., worked until the height of the afternoon in the searing heat, and bit into a head of freshly harvested iceberg lettuce as his only source of hydration for the day, just as his dad did.


Unfortunately the muck in Oswego County, and everywhere farming occurs, is disappearing. Soil erosion, land overuse, and flooding all contribute to the decrease in this remarkable resource.

Once again, I am reminded of the plight of my hometown – a small city plagued with poverty and unemployment, alcoholism and obesity, and a pervasive apathetic attitude. As soon as I learn about a remarkable natural resource found not far from where I played as a child, something unique that affects my family, something from home that I can be proud of, I am faced with the harsh realities of the dangers of exploitation. Maybe exploitation is too strong of a word, but what I’m really discussing is a lack of sustainable practices, and in many ways, the inability to take care of our own.

Fulton has had a hard go of it in recent years. Factories have shut down, our school systems have experienced dramatic changes in leadership, and language and art programs have been cut. The fertilizer from local farmers leaked into our small lake and blue-green algae has killed dogs and fish and geese populations. Maybe these issues are unrelated, but to me they all speak to a greater cultural habit – the attitude that we do what we can get away with, that we don’t have to worry about the next guy, or what happens tomorrow, or somebody else’s problem. Has competition left us unable to think about the long run, dependent on practices inherently bad for our communities and our environment?

I’m not trying to prescribe some Marxian solution to the complicated cultural, environmental, and economic problems of our time, but I do find some solace back at the Common Thread Farm. On Wednesday I worked, on Saturday I reaped the benefits from my farm share. They taught me what to do, I put faith in them by paying for a semester of goods, they put faith in me by letting me help harvest and sort, and together I think we helped take better care of each other and the community.