Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

I try very hard to "eat fresh, eat local."  It's a really big deal to me.  So this year, I decided to take it a step further and actually work on a farm.

My friend John Biscoe tired of his desk jockey job a few years ago, so he returned to his farming roots.  He grows produce on the family homestead, land his ancestors started farming 150 years ago.  Most of the 900 acres is devoted to dairy production, and the hay fields that support it, in the hands of his older brothers.  John works as much as 10 acres for produce, selling to restaurants, farmers markets, and CSA customers.  Not long after he returned to farming, I spotted his name on the menu at Bistro Bethem, my favourite local restaurant.  This made me very happy.

He also sells to FoodE, which takes its local sourcing very seriously, and a company that distributes his microgreens to restaurants throughout the D.C. area.

It's early in the season, but things are already underway in the greenhouse.  This week, I planted seeds.  Lots of them.  Like, more than I could count.  I stopped counting the tomatoes when I hit 72 dozen, then moved on to chervil and fennel.  They're both quite trendy on all the cooking shows right now, so I'm hoping they'll do well at the markets this summer.  While those seeds are germinating, they'll be under the close supervision of the farm manager, Sophie.

Right now, microgreens are what's keeping John busy.  They're all the rage in restaurants, including my lunch today at Bistro Bethem.

I adore beets, especially with goat cheese, so this salad was right up my alley.  But it gave me a special thrill to know that it came from a local farm, especially since it's where I get to play in the dirt.

John keeps busy in the off-season with peppers.  Dried, he can fit quite a lot into a flat-rate box, and pepper afficiondos are willing to pay good money for crazy, hot, and/or new.  While they'll be sold primarily in the winter months, they're already underway in the greehouse.

Some of them are a good deal farther along than those seedlings.  He's been watching one plant for months, watching a still-green pepper sit on the plant since at least October, waiting for it to turn its promised yellow.  And finally....

Whoops.

I'm only working there once a week, and I asked to be paid in produce.  I'll experiment with whatever's in season that week, approaching it the way an Iron Chef approaches that week's secret ingredient.  This week's take included watercress, which I hadn't had in far too long.

It made a fantastic soup from a recipe I've been dying to try.  And yes, it should've been pureed more smoothly, but my immersion blender chose that particular moment to die.  It was still delicious.

I also brought home a bunch of microgreens, which are destined for salads tonight and this weekend, some radishes and onions, and some pea shoots.  The pea shoots went into a salad loosely based on this Jamie Oliver recipe.  Alas, I was too busy eating it to take a picture.  You'll just have to imagine how delicious it was.

Which brings me back to my point about "eat fresh, eat local."  You really can't beat the taste of vegetables that were pulled out of the ground very recently (in this case, just hours earlier).  They will always taste better than a hothouse tomato trucked in from the other coast, stored in a warehouse for who-knows-how-long, and then set on a shelf in the store for another indeterminate period.  I'm not pushing arguments about biodiversity, farm policy, or globalisation.  Not today, anyway.  It's as simple as this:  if it's fresh, and it's local, it just plain tastes better.