Rabbit Food

Spring Creek Farm

Over the past three months, I've been volunteering at a really wonderful organic vegetable farm called Spring Creek Farm.   Spring Creek is located just outside Baldwin City, Kansas and is run by an incredible couple, Stephanie Thomas and Tom Maiorana.  The two started the farm in 2005 and specialize in heirloom melons, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes.  They sell to local restaurants, at the Downtown Lawrence Farmers' Market, and host an 18 week CSA, Community Supported Agriculture program.  

If you don't already know about CSA programs, read up on them!  I'm enamored with the idea of directly supporting local food and farmers, cutting out the middlemen, and receiving fresh, seasonal produce weekly.  Perhaps you have a program in your area.

A view of hoop house one.  Stephanie and Tom have two hoop houses that shield crops from strong winds, heavy rain, and raise temperatures 5-10 degrees!  These nice protective nests create a cozy space where romaine, buttercrunch, arugula, swiss chard, radishes, carrots, turnips, beets, tomatoes, celery root and other tasties flourish.  I find it really difficult to work in the hoop houses without wanting to eat up half of what I'm suppose to be watering or weeding!

 

Big, beautiful heads of buttercrunch lettuce.  

 

  Carrots and more buttercrunch growing like crazy.  Stephanie keeps improving my knowledge of different type of greens.  My favorites are komatsuna (I like to call it "the sexy plant," since it sounds like kama sutra,)  her arugula (spicer, and more delicious than any other kind I've tried,) and lamb's quarter (usually thought of as a weed, but really delicious and higher in vitamin A than spinach!)

 

 A field of delicious onions, almost ready to harvest.

 

The gorgeous herb and flower garden.  Fellow volunteer Juda works on the plot every Tuesday morning.  We swear, Juda hides some serious fairy dust up her sleeve.   Her pixie ways make chocolate mint sprout out of the woodwork, beautiful strawberries ripen, and the chives, oregano, and lemon balm taste a little extra special.

 

Here is half of the power-couple that makes all this happen.  The day I brought my camera out to photograph the farm, Steph and Tom seemed too hard at work to be bothered with a photograph.  This photo is borrowed from the Growing Growers website, a great program that connects apprentices with host farms, holds monthly workshops, and inspires the local food movement to grow.  Stephanie was both an apprentice of the program and is now a host farmer. Pretty nifty, huh?

What else can I say?  Even more amazing than their dedication to growing organically and with environmentally-friendly, sustainable methods, even more incredible than their involvement in their community, Stephanie and Tom are just really great people.  They are kind, generous, and infuse their farm with the same happy, inspiring energy.   

  

Goodbye Dear Friend

Dear Lawrencians,

I have sad, sad news.  If you haven't heard the word yet, our beloved Casbah Market is closing its doors for good.  

I know, take a deep breath.

For those of you that don't live around these parts:

The Casbah Market is a great (great, great!) grocery that specializes in local produce, organic foods, and the sweetest, radist, grocers that ever sipped some hemp milk.  Nice Cafe is located in the back of the shop and makes the most rockin' salads, soups, smoothies, and patties.  Their patties are probably their most popular item and for good reason!  They're kind of like ginormous, whole-wheat empanadas stuffed with the tastiest combos of ingredients under the sun.  

Oh my god.  No more patties!!!  

Many of the items at Nice Cafe are vegan and my weeks never really feel complete without dropping in for some tasty treats.

(The timing of this post is quite shameful.)  

A little over a week ago, I waltzed into The Casbah to get my patty on, and I thought "Wow, why haven't I posted about The Casbah on my blog yet?  I mean, their food is amazing.  They feed me constantly.  They have an art gallery in their f-ing basement for christ-sakes.  Yeah?  Yeah.  Yeah!  I'll ask if I can take some photos."

I'm about to open my mouth to inquire about a photo-shoot when one of The Casbah's lovely ladies asks, "Have you heard yet?"

She spills the proverbial beans.

Tears start to well up and I manage to blubber, "I think, I mean, I think I'm going to cry."

She assures me I'm not the first.

So, rather than my planned gloat about the awesomeness that is The Casbah, I'll let this post act as an homage and goodbye to the market that meant so much to so many.

Goodbye amazing bulk section.

 

Goodbye vegan pies!

 

 Goodbye local produce.

 

Goodbye my delectable, delightful...wait, no really, how can I go on living without patties? 

 

There isn't an official closing date yet, but I've heard anywhere between a week and a month.  So Lawrence, let's show some support!  Get yerself out there, stock up on patties, and kindly thank the good folks that have been rockin' The Casbah for the last two lovely years.  

Winter Squash Apple Risotto

A few nights ago, Jordan and I decided to have a hot-night-in and celebrate ourselves with a decadent dinner-date for two.  We had both been ogling the risotto recipe in the most recent issue of Bust, so we decided to give it a go.  The recipe is, once again, by the fabulous Isa Chandra Moskowitz of The PPK.

As seems to be the trend of the most recent dishes I've made, the cooking time was really, really long.  There were about akabagillion steps to follow and a lot of slow simmering.  We may not have actually eaten the food until 11:30 p.m., but hey, it was well worth it.

 

The recipe allowed for any winter squash, so we just used what we had on hand: acorn, delicata, and pattypan.  Add some crisp, green apples, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and garlic and you have some mighty fine risoto.  Some alterations we made to the recipe was uping the ante on all of the spices and adding some brown sugar and salt right before serving.  The additions seemed to bring out the rest of the flavors and made everything just a bit more balanced.

Yum! 

P.S.  I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Portland!!!  Robert and I are going for my birthday for a couple of days to chillax and eat a ton of amazing vegan food. 

I shall return with food porn aplenty.

Anita The Pretty

If I do say so myself,  I live with two of the loveliest gals out there. 

Having good roommates is so important for a nice living arrangement, but when you have three great friends under one roof some serious cuteness is bound to happen.

 

My roomie Anita is a really great cook and a baking fool!  A lot of the stuff she makes is vegan, so I'm always excited when I find her in the kitchen.

She recently made some really delicious Coffee Banana Bread With Chocolate Chips with a recipe from VegWeb. 

Coffee, Banana, Chocolate!!!!  Three of my favorite things in one yummy, soft and not-too-sweet bread.  While we both thought the recipe could use more coffee and chocolate chips the next go around, this batch was still quite good.

Here is the recipe:

Coffee Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips
Ingredients:

    Dry Ingredients:
    2 c flour
    1 1/4 c organic sugar (I use part brown sugar if I have it on hand)
    3/4 tsp baking soda
    1/2 tsp salt
    1/8 to 1/4 tsp baking powder (depends how fluffy you want it)
    1/2 c chocolate chips
    Wet Ingredients:
    3 very ripe bananas
    1/4 c very strongly brewed coffee
    3/4 c soy yogurt, vanilla or plain (typical 6 oz. container)
    1/2 c Earth Balance or other soy margarine, melted and cooled
    Topping:
    2 tbsp. sugar
    2 tsp. ground coffee

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease pan. Use a normal loaf pan, which I think are 8x4 or 9x5 inches?

2) Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl.

3) Mash the bananas and combine all wet ingredients in a separate bowl.

4) Add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined.

5) Pour batter into greased pan. Mix sugar and coffee together and sprinkle over the batter. Topping should completely cover the bread.

6) Pop it into the oven and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes. I check it 1 hour just in case, but it usually needs another 10-15 minutes, depending on the oven. Bread is done when it gently pulls away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

7) Remove from oven and let sit for 5 minutes. Then remove from pan and allow to finish cooling on a wire rack.

After tasting a bit of her yummy bread I tried to take a picture of her lovely face. 

Unfortunately, this is how Anita feels about having her photo taken:

Ha! 

I'm sneaky though.  

After just a little time rummaging around my external, I found a couple of nice shots of her. 

Here's a picture taken just a couple days after we met.  We studied abroad in Spain together a couple summers ago and it was love from then on.  Here she is in San Lorenzo with our good friend Matty. 

  A marvelous cook and a face that pretty?

  Yup, I'm quite a lucky girl.

Makin' The Kitchen That Much Hotter

        I think it might be a fun idea to feature little write-ups about the food my friends and family make when they must venture on into the bright side and cook vegan.  I love when one of them is cooking for me and has to modify the food they normally make, or decides to create something completely new, and end up loving the result.  I almost always hear an utterance along the line of "this is so good, and it's vegan." 

Um, Duh?

        I cannot think of a better lovely to start with than a man that definitely knows his away around the vegan kitchen.  While he spent his youth gallivantin' in the vegan-friendly punk scene, he is now an omnivore.   But oh man, he can still whip up some tasty tofu.

So without further ado, here is my love, chef extraordinaire, and ultimate partner in crime, Robert!

   

I adore this photo of us.  It was taken by one of our best friends, Melissa Madison Fuller.  She is a really, really fantastic photographer.  Check her out on Flickr.

    Despite what the image might suggest, we are really happy people.  (I think it looks like we are about to jump off that couch and throw down, or something.)  But we're sweet, I swear!

P.S. Don't you worry, the fur on my coat is fake.

 

Anyway, the babe can cook.  He is one of those people that can throw together a few ingredients that happen to be around, say a little hocus pocus, shake his leg three times, and poof! amazing food. 

But really, he has a really great sense of flavor and is crazy creative...really great at spicing up basic ingredients. 

This photo is from a night when a few of us got together and ate up some Mediterranean wraps Robert made.  The dish closest to us had some faux ground beef, red and yellow peepers, spinach, and onions all sautéed together.  Then we had some raw veggies for munching and wrapping, and the wraps themselves.  There was also some local hummus, olives, and feta for the cheese-eating folk.

 

 

This photo is from forever ago.  It reminds me so much of the crazy parts of college when I would spend something like forty-eight hours straight in the Art and Design Building, hobble zombie-like across campus to his apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, and find a lovely little dinner like this waiting for me.

    Too good.  We pretty much survived last year on the big batches of curry he made.  They would last us all week, and were eaten half-awake while watching cartoons at some ungodly hours of the night.  I'm starting to miss college (kinda.)

   

This was just a simple salad he made for a summer pot luck at a friends house a few weeks ago.  It had a bunch of yummy fruit, nuts, and a berry dressing he made.  I really like how he can get away with making such blatant "chick-food" and still get so many compliments on it from his guy friends.  Must be the mustache.