Ground Rules

Follow these simple guidelines to enjoy locally grown produce year-round

Fall is a great time for enthusiasts of fresh and local food. Farmers markets are overflowing with tasty produce at harvest time and, if you’ve worked long and hard on your home garden, it’s time to reap the rewards. Fresh food is harder to come by once the last leaves fall and the frost sets in, but there are still a number of ways you can keep your commitment to eating locally alive year-round.

While getting fresh produce from nearby sources isn’t a year-round option for many Americans, it’s still possible to continue to enjoy healthy regional, seasonal food in a number of other ways. Whether it’s buying a basket of fresh tomatoes, green beans or peaches, and canning or blanching and freezing them for future use, or dining at a restaurant that focuses on using local ingredients, it’s possible to continue your green dining habits throughout the year.

Engaging people who are interested in living healthier and greener, Good Housekeeping magazine partnered with LG Electronics this fall on a “Living Greener” initiative, showing consumers across the country how to make the most of local produce and other healthy foods. The program encourages a greener lifestyle, providing consumers with tips and ideas for efficient products, such as LG’s new refrigerator. The refrigerator recently earned the Good Housekeeping Seal, and includes a Smart Cooling System that maintains superior humidity and temperature levels to help keep food fresh longer. And at 31 cubic feet, it has the largest storage capacity available in its class and can easily accommodate bushels of produce.

Susan Westmoreland, food director of the Good Housekeeping Research Institute, offers these tips to keep eating local even after the growing season is done:

• Support year-round CSAs and farmers markets. To join a Community Supported Agriculture group you pay a set amount of money for a portion of what the farm or group of farms produce, usually delivered every week or so (see accompanying story). Farmers markets may feature meat, cheese and eggs in addition to colder-weather vegetables that keep well, like winter squash and onions. Since both of these are relatively new concepts, you may not be fortunate enough to have both options in your neighborhood. Check out localharvest.org for more information. Then, embrace your luck, shop and eat well.

• Make good use of your refrigerator and freezer. When you are bringing home a bunch of produce, you know the importance of finding space in your refrigerator to preserve the veggies you won’t use right away. But at the end of the season, a great way to make your produce last longer is to blanch (cook in boiling water for 1 minute), then cool completely, bag and freeze them for later use in stir fries and pasta dishes. To freeze berries, simply rinse and place in a single layer in a cookie sheet in the freezer until hard, transfer to zip seal bags and store for desserts or add a handful to brighten any winter cereal bowl.

• Can and preserve. Another great way to preserve your fresh-picked produce for the colder months is to can, pickle or process it. Your surplus tomatoes can be turned to salsa or tomato sauce for winter and your bounty of cucumbers can be transformed into tasty dill pickles. For both freezing and canning, do some research to make sure you are safely preserving your food. In addition to some great books on the subject, Internet resources such as thedailygreen.com are a great place to start.

• Stock up on hearty vegetables. Vegetables like onions, potatoes and squash are not only some of the last to be picked during the growing season, but also some of the heartiest and longest lasting produce available.

Even if you don’t have a root cellar, you can extend the life of these vegetables even further by storing them in a cooler part of your home such as the basement or a garage.

• Frequent restaurants that focus year-round on the freshest, healthiest ingredients. These days, many restaurants aim to get as many ingredients as possible, from vegetables to fish and meat, from local sources. Visiting these restaurants is a great way to help sustain your local food industry.

By firming up your commitment to eating local throughout the year, you’ll help your local economy while also decreasing your carbon footprint. And on top of it all, you’ll be rewarded with delicious meals for every season. —Courtesy ARA Content

Here’s a recipe from Animal, Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Harper Collins, 2007), Barbara Kingsolver and her family’s quest to eat local from their Appalachian farm.

1 1/2 cups dried white beans, soaked overnight and drained
3 medium portabella mushroom caps, sliced (optional)
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tablespoon thyme
1 tablespoon sage
4 teaspoons rosemary
2 butternut or hubbard squash, halved lengthwise and seeded Olive oil

Combine beans and spices in a large sauce pan, add water to cover amply, simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, until beans are tender and most water has cooked off. Add mushrooms toward the end.

While beans are cooking, drizzle a large roasting pan with olive oil and arrange squash skin-side-down. Cook in a 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes, until fully tender when pierced with a fork. Remove from oven and serve each half squash filled with a generous scoop of bean soup. Makes 4 servings.

CSA At YMCA

For urban residents who might find weekly trips to grocery stores difficult, the Downtown YMCA’s new Downtown Y Organic Program may be the answer. The program, headed by Juanita Welnicki, a Syracuse pediatrician, allows customers to pick up produce ordered through Grindstone Farm in the YMCA’s lobby, 401 Montgomery St.

Since its inception in May, the program has aimed to help busy workers who can’t visit a grocery store as frequently as they wish due to time constraints, as well as low-income residents who may not have easy transportation to grocery stores because they do not have cars. “We have a very diverse population at this Y,” said Welnicki. By bringing produce into the city, Welnicki, a self-proclaimed organic food lover, hopes to improve Syracuse’s eating habits.

Welnicki also believes food education is an essential part of that. On Thursdays from 4 to 6 p.m., she hosts a table providing nutrition information about fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as unique ways of preparing these items.

Often, Welnicki focuses her educational efforts on an item arriving in that week’s delivery from Pulaski-based Grindstone Farm. “I picked blueberries for the last information table I had, and we taught people about the benefits of eating blueberries and novel ways of eating them, like putting them in salads,” she says.

Participants interested in ordering produce can choose from Grindstone’s two different programs: a healthy box program, and a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Grindstone’s healthy box program allows customers to pay weekly for a collection of organically grown food. A variety of boxes are available, including a fruit box, a local box, and a healthy box—which is similar to the weekly CSA box but may also contain items that are not local. The CSA box is all locally produced foods.

Boxes cost between $20 and $30 and can be ordered online (at grindstonefarm.com) or through Welnicki. The majority of people who order at the YMCA choose the healthy box option. Customers also have the option of ordering through Grindstone’s CSA program, CSA-CNY, which allows them to pay in advance for a certain number of weeks of produce from Grindstone, which delivers the foods to “pods,” such as the Y location. CSA-CNY has other pods throughout the city in areas where several customers live, and customers can request that a pod be placed in their neighborhood for the following season. Customers can also have their shares delivered directly to their homes.

As a volunteer, Welnicki receives no sponsorship from Grindstone. She has selected Grindstone because she knows they are organic, and she is a firm believer in the health benefits of organic growing. “I always feel if I find someone like Grindstone {that grows organically}, that puts me at ease,” she says.

Welnicki does not focus solely on persuading YMCA-goers to switch to organic, but rather emphasizes healthy eating through incorporating more fruits and vegetables into a diet. “You kind of have to take people where they’re at,” she says.

Some of Welnicki’s visitors have limited knowledge of what fruits and vegetables exist. To help with produce recognition, Welnicki has compiled a binder filled with photos and facts of every item Grindstone has sent. “I had a couple of people say they’d heard of asparagus but they’d never seen it,” says Welnicki.

For more information, call Welnicki at 447-6369.

—Sarah DeSantis