Stuffed Jersey Tomato with Sweet Corn - My Delightful Farmer's Market Dinner

Tonight I made another dinner I'm proud to write about.  It was flavorful, bright, and pretty to look at! And this time, I successfully avoided highly processed ingredients.  It was a ripe, juicy New Jersey tomato stuffed with herbed BBQ'ed chicken salad, sautéed organic baby spinach and fresh Jersey sweet corn.  Here's a picture:

 





The nice thing about this dish is that the tomato can be stuffed with just about anything. It can be vegetarian or even vegan if you wish.  I made the chicken salad with BBQ'ed Amish Market chicken breast, onions, celery, finely chopped herbs from my yard (oregano, thyme, rosemary and parsley), high quality, cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt and black pepper.

The tomato is a medium-large New Jersey tomato from the farmer's market by my home.  I blanched it in boiling water, peeled it, cut it, scooped the inside out, and sprinkled with salt and pepper.  It was the perfect little vessel for my chicken salad. It's on the plate with simple veggies - spinach sautéed with a little salt and pepper, and sweet farmer's market corn that was just boiled for about 2 minutes and dressed in butter, salt and pepper. 

I'm convinced that this is how you stay healthy. That if you eat like this, you can enjoy satisfying portions without feeling stuffed.    The naughtiest thing on this dish was the 1/2 oz pat of butter I used on the corn, and that's just because it was conventional grocery store butter (not farm-raised).  But that step is coming for me.  I am already buying my milk and eggs from the Amish dairy.

Farmer's Market Spaghetti

As you know from a prior post, I love to shop at the Amish Farmer's Market in my town.  This weekend I bought meat and veggies, and made this delicious concoction.  It's whole wheat spaghetti Bolognese made with grass-fed, farm-raised beef, tomatoes, carrots, onions and celery, all purchased at the farmer's market.  The herbs were grown in my yard.

Overall, I try to avoid highly processed ingredients.  The worst here is that I used a boxed whole wheat pasta that contains refined white flour.  I don't know if I can give everything up.  Like most people, I'm trying my best.   

Bruce Bradley - His blog is worth a read

I came across Bruce Bradley's blog about a year or so ago and have been following him since.  Very insightful, and loaded with first hand information about Big Food companies and their true intentions when it comes to marketing.  Mr. Bradley is a former processed food company marketing exec turned real food advocate and author.

Check him out at www.brucebradley.com

Wellness, Work and Everyday Food

In my opening post I wrote of my recent career change from corporate America to the food industry.  I spent years as an operations manager and a recruiter for a medical company and in the financial industry.  During my last year in the medical company, we had access to an employee wellness program that encouraged you to maintain healthy weight, quit unhealthy habits, reduce stress or get more exercise.  If you joined the program you saved something like $50 on you monthly health insurance contribution. 

I joined the "Steps" program.  They gave me a pedometer, and my goal was to achieve 10,000 steps a day.  I learned that 10,000 steps is really hard to achieve for the average person who sat 8-10 hours a day in an office and spent up to 3 hours a day commuting.  On my worst days I'd log 2,500-3,000 steps. Better days I'd log 5,000-6,000.  I mean, when you're real busy you can only make so many trips to the copier! 

My favorite was when a group of us would "get healthy" by walking for lunch.  The closest, most convenient places were a fast food restaurant across the street and a small deli/sandwich shop.  Everything else was driving distance. The irony was that if you wanted to walk for your lunch to get healthy, you had to eat garbage.  You didn't get any credit in this healthy program for preparing a farmer's market salad with quality ingredients in the morning and packing a truly healthy, nutrient-rich lunch for yourself every day.  Some who brought their lunch would, after eating, walk aimless laps around the parking lot to bulk up their steps.  I always felt stupid walking around the campus without a purpose, thinking of the phone calls and emails piling up in my office.  And, at the end of the day, after enduring a 1 1/2 hour commute home who feels like cooking dinner?  Five days of this each week just led to frequent unmotivated do-nothing weekends.  You eat crap, get no exercise, feel like crap, which leads to crap performance at work.  So you get depressed, which leads you to eat crap, etc . . . See the pattern?

In the few years that I've been cooking for a living my outlook on wellness, work and everyday food has changed.  I work in a restaurant.  There's no health insurance, much less a wellness program encouraging employees to be healthy. We're a high-end farm-to-table place that sources a majority of ingredients from local farms and purveyors.  From late Spring to late Fall we grow most of our own produce.  Meat, poultry and eggs are farm fresh. The fish also comes from high-quality sources. It's a little expensive to eat there, but that's because we spend money and effort sourcing the best ingredients. Not to mention the time and skill that goes into expertly preparing it.

All employees are entitled to one free meal during their shift.  Usually two cooks make this meal from whatever we have available in house that creates the least possible expense to the restaurant.  For example, on a day we break down chickens there are tons of legs that won't be used for dinner service.  They are cooked up for the staff.  Along with a vegetable side and a salad.  Something like that.  Every single day, my lunch is an expertly prepared meal of farm-fresh, unprocessed ingredients (with the exception of occasional flour, dried pasta, or some kind of condiment).  That, plus the physical activity you are forced to maintain every day just to complete the job led to me losing 15 lbs in my first few months there without even trying.  One day, just for fun, I wore the pedometer and noticed that I cleared 19,000 steps before my shift was over.  Nearly twice what the wellness program at my last job recommended!

Funny thing is that everyone around me is surprised to see that I lost the weight.  I always get comments like "If I was around food all day like you, I'd gain a hundred pounds!"  But my new life of working with food has actually put me in a better position to be healthy long term. I live and breathe food now.  I understand so much more about where it comes from, how it's produced, and the difference between fresh vs processed. And it's not just at work.  It's part of my everyday life now.  The more I practice my cooking skills at home, the better I eat.  I'm always looking for the best food to cook with and making preparations from scratch.  Like chicken stock, a staple that any good scratch cook has on hand all the time. No stock in a box for me! 

Below is a grilled farm-fresh vegetable and chickpea salad I recently made for lunch on a day off. Way better than the crap I used to eat on a daily basis!

Supersize Me

I can't believe I forgot to include this one in the list of recommended views.  Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me. See what happens when a healthy adult eats nothing but food from McDonald's for 30 days straight. Below is the link for free viewing on Hulu.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63283

Supermarket vs Farmer's Market

Supermarkets are a conundrum.  I've always thought so.  Thousands and thousands of products available. In one huge room.  Raw stuff, cooked stuff, frozen stuff, stuff in cans, bags and boxes.  Aisle after aisle, shelf after shelf.  You can go in for a half gallon of milk and end up spending an hour there. They seem so convenient - always open, have everything you need, etc.  Why go in search of food?

The early chapters of Marion Nestle's What to Eat provides a great, in-depth description of the American supermarket and the role it plays in our Big Food system.   The average consumer walks around the store, actually believing that he or she is making independent decisions about what to buy.  When, actually, the store's layout is carefully designed based on product and consumer research to maximize your spending.  The aromas, sights, lighting, and background music are all selected to work in concert to make you forget about the outside world. This will lead to you spending more.

I'm sure you have heard (or noticed by now) that supermarkets strategically place the most highly profitable items to entice you to buy them.  In my local store, I have to walk through the bakery section and past the ice cream/frozen desserts and boxed cake treats to get to the milk and eggs. And then there's all that candy, soda and gum right at the checkout line.  Impulse central. But did you know that the food manufacturers pay the market for their shelf space?  That's why the biggest brands are mid-shelf, eye level.  Prime real estate.  Items that appeal to kids are purposely placed at kiddie eye level.  Don't believe me?  Just look in the cereal aisle.

Everything in the supermarket is clean and shiny.  Look in the produce section.  Waxy, colorful, mist-sprayed fruits and veggies gleaming under fluorescent light.  Heck - for a little more money, some of it is even already peeled and cut up for you. All beautiful and colorful. 

But since I've been doing my reading of late, an eerie feeling comes over me in the supermarket.  One that says "Where the Hell does all this food actually come from?"  Sure, there are hints - brand names, stickers on the fruit that say 'product of  _____', websites on the packages, corporate addresses you can write to, emails, etc.  But just because a carton of eggs has a mailing address on it for a distribution center in Landover, MD, is that where they came from??  Your guess is as good as mine.  Oh, and this really irks me.  I live in NJ, which in the summer months is arguably the tomato capital of the United States.  So when I go to my local supermarket in July, why are the "vine-ripened" tomatoes sporting little stickers that say "product of Mexico"?

The farmer's market is so different.  What they lack in variety, they definitely make up for in quality. If you've ever eaten a Mexican supermarket tomato, and then a local farmer's market tomato, you know exactly what I mean.  There's no mystery around the farmer's market.  Most of the food is raised or grown right there, or at least the person selling it is willing and able to tell you exactly where it came from.  Farmer's markets are usually small, friendly, and carry a minimum of processed products (maybe some jams, cheeses, crackers, treats made from honey or maple).

There's a large farmer's market in my town.  It's a PA Dutch market (we all call it the Amish Market).  Several Amish farmers pack up what they produce on their Lancaster, PA, farms and come to town.  It's only open three days a week, but the quality of everything they sell is far better than anything you can get at the supermarket. The market is like a large commune of several farmers, and it includes a butcher, poultry, dairy, produce, bakery/dry goods, pickles/jams, and a snack bar with house-made pretzels and ice cream.   If you talk with the employees they can tell you where almost any item came from-with the exception of a scant few packaged products they sell like crackers or candy.  The animals are all raised in species-appropriate environments.  Last Christmas I bought this beautiful fresh ham from the butcher there.  It was so good.

I'm trying from now on to buy as much of my food as possible at farmer's markets and avoid the supermarket.  Sure, the farmer's market is not pretty and pristine, and there may be bugs and dirt and imperfect-looking fruits and veggies.  But I like having that veil of mystery lifted.  I mean, wouldn't you rather buy Swiss chard that was this a few hours ago, instead of being loaded onto a truck a few days ago?  Just sayin'.

There's WHAT in the meat?!

I've been interested in the topic of food production and preparation for a few years now, but just about 2-3 weeks ago I completed reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. I think this was the straw that finally started to nudge me over the edge. 

After providing an in-depth history of the origins of the fast food industry, Schlosser delves into the conditions that exist in the Big Food meat packing industry.  Quite alarming. Although it's a little disturbing and tough to get through at times thanks to vivid descriptions of what Schlosser saw with his own eyes, I highly recommend this read.

In this book, Schlosser reiterates what I had already learned through other sources (books and blogs by Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle, Food, Inc. etc.).  When meat is cheaply mass-produced, cattle are fed unnatural, species-inappropriate diets.  These diets contain all kinds of stuff other that the grass and occasional fresh organic grains that ruminants are supposed to eat.  At the time Fast Food Nation was written, there was evidence that this feed mix included such things as corn and soy by-products, chicken waste such as feathers and poop, and most disturbingly ground up carcasses of other cows that dropped dead in the feed lots.  Eeew.

Through these readings, I learned that when cattle do not eat the grass and plants as nature intended, their digestive systems do not form the necessary natural resistances to harmful bacteria like E. Coli 0157:H7.  After this was detected, the remedy for this was not to start feeding cattle a normal grass-based diet.  No.  It was to treat the cattle with large quantities of antibiotics and keep feeding them the same crap.  So, antibiotics were added to the feed.  As well as growth hormone to make them grow faster.

According to these sources, large meat-producing companies have a history of employing cheap, unskilled labor in their processing plants to save money. Part of the process is to disembowel the carcass after slaughter.  It's not unheard of for an unskilled worker to puncture the digestive tract in this process, spilling its contents onto the muscle tissue that will be cut up and packaged for consumers.  See where I'm going with this?

Eric Schlosser flat out says it in Fast Food Nation.  "There's shit in the meat." 

A factory farm hamburger - think fast food or chain restaurant, boxed burgers at the supermarket, cheap supermarket ground beef in genera, school lunches - can contain the ground up muscle tissue of many, many cows.  If one of those cows is positive for E. Coli 0157:H7, think of how many burgers have the possibility of being contaminated.  And putting E. Coli 0157:H7 aside for a second, think of the spilled intestinal contents (manure) spewing out all over the meat that is about to be ground up into burgers.  ~shudder~

Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation in 2001. It definitely raised eyebrows. I was hoping a few weeks ago to learn that much has changed in the years that followed.  According to this follow up article by Schlosser "Still a Fast Food Nation" about ten years later, not much has changed. 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/12/still-a-fast-food-nation-eric-schlosser-reflects-on-10-years-later.html

I don't know what current conditions are in the Big Food meat packing industry.  I'm in no position to speculate good or bad.  Right now, I'm just commenting on how it made me feel to read that there was ever shit in my meat, even if it was 12 years ago.

Oh!  And if you're wondering about the occurrence of E. Coli 0157:H7 in the burgers, this article hit the news just a few days ago regarding a 50,000 lb ground beef recall due to possible contamination: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/beef-recall_n_3685744.html