emptying the larder

I took out last year’s calendar just to look at the blank spot that ran through the last week of February into the first week of March of two thousand and ten. So clean and unmarked it was except for the straight line I’d drawn through it with the words “to SJU”. That is travel agentese for San Juan. Every last week of a Vermont February should have a similar line drawn through it, indicating that we are off having adventures, exotic or not. A certain energy is released when one goes journeying, certain plugs are exploded, a freshness in one invites new energy back. Lives change when adventures are spun.

My calendar this year does not sport that line through a couple of weeks, though it doesn’t have much else, either. So I have been enjoying my own home and village and walks as though I were a visitor, hoping for new eyes and appreciation. It almost works, and it has some enjoyable side effects.

The weather has cooperated. This is one of the more exciting winters that I can remember, with temperatures into the negative numbers and not single digit ones, either. There is a certain sense of accomplishment when your car thermometer shows -23° and you  have made it out for early breakfast with the governor. Or when you get to the Paramount in spite of heavy, wet, crunchy snow all day, to hear The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, whose music is simply magnificent.

We were in our own private world there with those eight people on stage working as hard and perfectly as hummingbirds, with their wands and violas and violins and cellos to give us music that just smacked us in the face like a lovely Olympian ruffle – so powerful and transporting it was.  After the Shostakovich came intermission, when nature gave us just as powerful a rendition as the thick snowing sky turned to pouring February rain, pelting like liquid icicles on the street, and lightening and thunder, great rolls of it, blasted us back to the Academy for the mesmerizing Mendelssohn in the second half. The whole night was something like ecstasy.

We are some of the lucky ones: Everything works – though there have been some major complications – and our house is warm and the larder stocked.

That larder is being slowly depleted, which is as it should be: The growing season is coming again – we’ll soon be prying ramps out of the rocky ground and steaming fiddleheads – and it’s time to spend the luxurious currency we put up last summer.  The roasted corn we froze last August  is so incredibly sweet and tasty now! It’s as though our tongues had been blanded down over these white months to be shocked awake at what we took for granted in August. All those times that I threw twice as much corn as we could eat on the grill, all those times that Leo shaved the rest of it off the cobs and I froze it? Little chunks of time with a great payoff now!  I simply mixed it with faro one night, to side some grilled chicken breasts. Now there’s a nice combination – so nutty and so sweet.

I roasted broiler pans full of tomatoes last summer, and ladled them into freezer bags. When I thawed some the other day, took an immersion blender to them in the pan just to break up skins and seeds, and tasted, I was petrified with delight!! So vibrant, so sweet, that I simply ladled them into little bowls, put a spoonful of garlic olive oil on top, and imagined we were sitting on the August porch.

Then – it just keeps getting better – one very snowy Saturday we saw the signs for the Maine shrimp truck and scored 5 pounds of them. After beheading them and shelling them, 5 pounds of Maine shrimp is not an impressive amount. Nevertheless, they are delicious little things, and combined with the roasted corn and the roasted tomatoes, cilantro and chopped avocado, on a few leaves of mesclun, some lime juice squeezed over – they made a totally decadent and delectable salad.

Playful salads are our counterintuitive choice these days for supper –  a bed of mesclun, locally grown and available at the co-op, along with the micro-greens from the Farmers’ market, some leftover shredded chicken or pork, sometimes beef (also from the Farmers’ Market), perhaps some homemade fried croutons for crunch, a scattering of walnuts or pecans or pumpkin or sesame seeds that have been roasted or at least warmed in some butter, and some dried cranberries or diced dried apricots, or slices of fresh mango, come to that. A little vinaigrette of sherry or balsamic vinegar and garlic olive oil. Salt and pepper, sometimes some shavings of parmesan or cubes of mozzarella. These just totally hit the spot, full of intriguing tastes and textures.

We’ve started on the second batch of sauerkraut, too, and it’s wonderfully refreshing – tangy and crunchy yet, and full of microbes and live cultures that help our guts populate themselves with healthful things.. I dig out a dish of it in the morning and leave it on the counter to snack on all day. 

The pile of New Yorkers (not people, Silly, the magazine!) that I was too busy to read last fall is slowly diminishing, too, as I take some of these white hours to peruse them, finding some gems as I go along.  One of them was a fascinating article by Burkhard Bilger in the November 22 issue called Nature’s Spoils, which followed Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation, on his rounds of making fermented foods such as my sauerkraut and along the way had some amazing things to say about the idea that “Americans are killing themselves with cleanliness,” as he quotes Katz saying.  Somehow Bilger segues from fermented sauerkraut to raw milk, and his discussion of that timely topic is perhaps the most balanced and unbiased that I’ve ever read. It’s too long and too complicated to summarize here, so I hope you’ll find the article and read it for yourself.

I say ‘timely’ topic because you may or may not have heard that the excellent organization, Rural Vermont, was stopped by our new  (and, we hoped, farmer-centric) Agency of Agriculture from conducting workshops teaching people how to make yogurt, butter, and cheese from raw milk. The Agency cited some confused wording in the raw milk law that prohibited farmers from selling raw milk to people who would use that milk in any but its fluid form. The solution would seem to be a simple one – the Agency should clean up the wording so that it makes some modicum of sense and get themselves out of our pantries – where they most obviously do not belong. Because it is none of their business (or my farmer’s business) if I drink my gallon of raw milk whole or skim the cream to make butter or heat it up to make yogurt.

Making yogurt from raw milk is something that I often (and illegally?) do. And there’s nothing simpler, really.  This is my technique.

***
Yogurt

• 2 quarts raw whole milk
• ½ cup good unflavored, whole milk yogurt (Butterworks Farm is a good one)

Ladle the milk into two quart jars and pour into a pan. Heat the milk slowly and carefully to 160° to 180°and let it cool to 115°. (Some recipes call for just heating the milk to 110° in the first place, but I do not have good results with that technique.)

Meanwhile, take a small hard-sided cooler (that the two quart jars can fit into) and fill it with hot water. Close it and let it warm up while you make the yogurt.

When the milk has heated and cooled to 115°, stir in the yogurt. and pour back into the quart jars. Screw the caps on loosely.

Empty the cooler of water, put the jars of milk/yogurt into it, close it, and place somewhere warm and out of drafts for 8 hours, at which time check the consistency and taste.  If it is still too thin, without any sign of setting, you can leave it for a few more hours or overnight. If it seems to be setting, put it in the fridge, and it will continue to thicken.  If you leave it for too long in the ‘cooler’ the tanginess will cede to sour.

Voila! That’s it.

***

Mark McAfee, C.E.O. and founder of the country’s largest raw-milk dairy, Organic Pastures, is quoted by Bilger in the aforementioned article as saying that dealing with the live cultures in any food, but in this case, raw milk, forces dairies to do what all of agriculture should be doing anyway: downsize, localize, clean up production.

“We need to go back a hundred and fifty years,” McAfee told Bilger. “Going back is what’s going to help us go forward.”

My question to the new head of the Agency of Agriculture, Chuck Ross, on VPR’s Vermont Edition one day was,

“Sustainable dairy –  meaning smaller herds, grass and pasture fed, sustainably milked, minimally and locally processed... How do we make this happen, and how do we quit encouraging farmers to get bigger at all costs, and how do we transition big farms to sustainable farms?
Thanks. I'll take the answer off the air.”

The recent action of the Agency of Ag was not the answer I was looking for.

published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald 01 MAR 2011

for all Pratico purposes

In a few weeks, we’ll have apples and winter squash littering our kitchens in bountiful and pleasant ways. But if the latter two descriptives are true, then the word ‘littering’ is not quite correct. Change that to ‘gracing’. But whatever. Today, what litters and at once graces our porches and kitchens is tomatoes. And really, it’s only the lucky ones of us – the ones whose gardens didn’t go into an extended sulk at the unprecedented amount of rain they were required to soak up – who have a litter of tomatoes to at once glory in and feel responsible to do something with.

...The Pratico tomato...

There are, as usual, exceptions to that rule, and I am one. My garden DID sulk, but I was the grateful recipient of a basket of Pratico tomatoes, which I talked about last year in an article called “Sex in the Garden” which dealt with, among other things, the Menduni and Pratico tomatoes.

If you’ll remember, the Pratico came from seeds given to Stephen Chamberlain of Dutchess Farm in Castleton by an elderly person at the Farmers’ Market one summer day, in the hopes that Steve would propagate an old family favorite. S/he said he’d developed them, part beefsteak, part paste tomato. Luckily, Steve did propagate them, thereby saving an incredibly ugly but luscious tomato. It’s a fat, long tomato tapering to a pointed blossom end. It has very little core, the shoulders are as tender and meaty as the rest of it, it has few seeds and jel, and lots of flavorful flesh.

...patsy...

After that article was published Ray Pratico, Jr. called me and offered this conjecture.

He thinks it was his great-uncle, Pasquale (Patsy) Pratico who developed – hybridized – the Pratico tomato. Patsy was the brother of Ray’s grandfather, Anthony Pratico, who started Pratico’s Barber Shop on Strongs Avenue next to Gill’s Delicatessen.

The brothers came from Reggio in Calabria, Italy, Patsy in 1918 and Tony in 1920.

Back in 1918, Pasquale escaped a horrendous depression in Italy and worked hard so that he could send back $35 for his brother’s passage. The depression taught him well. Ray remembers fishing with his Uncle Patsy on Lake Champlain, and when they caught an eel Patsy would bring it home to eat. “Fish that you and I would never consider eating, he would consider a delicacy.” He was a champion skeet shooter – learning when he was in Italy by being charged with taking a shotgun and shooting robins for the family’s dinner, “and he wasn’t to waste a shell by shooting only one robin, he had to shoot six at a time.” We imagined that they’d taste pretty good with a little tomato sauce.

Ray says that Uncle Patsy had a beautiful garden in his back yard at the south corner of Union and Forest in Rutland where he grew, not so much broccoli or cucumbers, but peppers “as big as my head,” and tomatoes – presumably developing, along the way, our precious Pratico – onions, garlic and eggplants, all the ingredients for a great sauce and parmesans. “And you did not want to be caught playing out in that back yard.” I did some exploring, and if what I found was Pasquale’s backyard and it is the same size it was then, I have to say it is truly tiny. But apparently Patsy planted every nook and cranny of it.

Anthony Pratico died in 1999, close to a hundred years old. Pasquale died in 1990.

Do they still have seeds for the Pratico tomato? Still grow it? Ray is uncertain, but he says, “Everyone buys Ragu, it’s cheap and it’s easy.”

I think I know where you could get some seeds, Ray, and continue carrying on a tradition.

...and grandmother menduni...

The Menduni had been saved from extinction by Claire Clarino, whose grandmother Menduni had brought seeds from her town in Italy called Chella, and had grown them until she died, when Claire took them over. “Claire saves seeds each year and grows them in her mother’s garden in Rutland, her ex-husband grows them in Key West where they climb to six feet or more, and a market gardener in Grand Isle grows large crops of them for sale,” I wrote then. They are a large, meaty plum shaped tomato, with excellent taste. Apparently they take a little longer to ripen, for I have not yet got my first taste of them this year.

...spreading the seed...

I saved seeds from the Menduni and the Pratico, and gave some to Paul Horton at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson – he who was the giver, this year, of the basket of Praticos – and my friend Dana Squire in Virginia – she with a climate which allows her to plant the seeds directly into her – prolific – garden! – and Marilyn Burnham, gardener and cook extraordinaire, in South Wallingford.

Marilyn had no luck with them. They were fine until she put them into her rainy garden, and then they just stood right up and died. Dana, on the other hand, emailed me photos of her “thrilling” crop, saying, “I processed some last night – I don't usually grow plums – and what bliss to not have squirts going off in every direction. Delicious flavor. They will be featured all next month. They are huge – like 6" long!”

Paul Horton had good luck with germination, and planted about 20 plants, from which he and his partner, Sally Beckwith have “probably put up 40 pounds, and maybe we’ll get another 30 pounds.” They will not be widely available at the Foggy Mountain Farm stand at the Farmers’ Market this year, but he hopes for a larger crop next year.

In a couple of serendipitous asides, a friend gave Paul some tomato plants this spring that hailed from Providence, Rhode Island. By the time he got them they were rather sickly looking plants that he’s nursed along until they are producing some fruit that is now almost ready to taste. They are, he thinks, both a red and yellow Sergi Sicilian tomato, the red called Doro Rossi Lunghi, and the yellow P. Lunghi Gialli, and they are in appearance remarkably like the Pratico. Googling does nothing on this subject, but we wonder if they could possibly be from the same town in Italy, Reggio, each brought by different émigrés, a supposition that might hold a little more water if we did not already think that Pasquale Pratico ‘developed’ his tomato from beefsteak and plum tomatoes.

At the same time, a neighbor brought Paul some Jimmy Nardello pepper seeds, a multi-dimensionally sweet and intensely flavored banana-shaped pepper. They came originally from Seeds of Change, a company that was founded to save heirloom seeds that were in danger of dying out.

“This to me is really fascinating,” Paul told me, “because I think it’s really important that we have crops that we can save and share the seeds of, to reproduce these older varieties, because they’re reliable, and delicious, and because we need our own source of seeds without relying on seed companies.” Seeds of ordinary plants, like green beans, for instance, are getting much more expensive and even hard to get, other farmers have told me. Paul elaborated on that thought by saying, “More and more seed companies are being bought by big companies and the seed being hybridized and sold back to farmers.” It’s not good, we agree, when the seeds for our foods are all owned by industry!

That was the thought of Tom Stearns, the founder of High Mowing Seeds in Hardwick. In an article in the 9/03 Seven Days entitled Hungry Hardwick, Suzanne Podhaizer writes, “In 1995, [Stearns] began saving the seeds from his garden. ‘I was interested in having as self-sufficient a home garden as I possibly could,’ he recalls. After moving to Vermont, he realized he had more seeds than he could use, so he put together a miniature catalogue. In 2000, Stearns quit his day job to focus on his seeds full-time, and in 2005, decided to take the business national; with the economy in a slump and more people aiming to grow their own food, the move is paying off. ‘There’s a lot of people gardening who weren’t before,’ Stearns suggests.”

A little aside here – if you don’t follow Suzanne in either the online http://www.7dvt.com/ or the free hard copy of Seven Days, you should! She’s an indefatigable food sleuth, and what she doesn’t write about food from Middlebury to Montreal probably doesn’t merit writing about.

...saving tomato seeds...

Saving seeds, though, is a laborious process, especially if you want to save enough to take the product to market. So far, Sally and Paul are keeping most of the Praticos (the Mendunis aren’t quite ready yet) for their own use. Steve and Julia Chamberlain, too, keep most of their Praticos, though a few show up at the market. “Aren’t they the best tomatoes!” exclaims Julia, adding that it’s lucky for her that the tomatoes aren’t the gorgeous things that buyers expect. Steve adds that they’re poor yielding, too, and he can’t afford the time to train people to buy them for the taste. He mentions, though, that a Pratico relative from the Midwest, after reading the Sex in the Garden article, emailed Steve for some seeds.

Saving tomato seeds is a process of fermentation. Since Pratico tomatoes have very few seeds and little gel, lots of meat, you’ll have to do some digging. Slice the tomato in half lengthwise, maybe even into quarters. With a spoon, scrape the jel and seeds into a small bowl. Add a couple of tablespoons of water to the seeds. Cover the bowl with a piece of plastic wrap and then poke a small hole in it to allow for transpiration. Place it in a warm spot for two or three days, removing the plastic wrap each day to stir the mixture, then replace the plastic. There will be a layer of scum on top of the liquid when the fermentation process has separated the jel from the seeds, and destroyed many of the possible tomato diseases that might be harbored there. When this happens, pour the seeds into a fine kitchen sieve and rinse with water several times. Drain well and place on a piece of parchment or waxed paper and spread them into a single layer. Let them dry for maybe a week, stirring often. When they’re dry they do not stick to each other. To store them, wrap them envelope-style in parchment paper and label them with the name and the date.

...mfk symposium...

Lots of readers here seem to like MFK Fisher’s writing, and since this year she would have been 100 years old, the New School in NYC is hosting an MFK symposium on Sept. 22. It’s free for all students, only $8 for others, as I read it. Thought some of you MFK diehards would grab the chance. More details: A panel of distinguished guests celebrate the life of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, master food writer, and discusses her relationships with other American food celebrities, including Julia Child, James Beard, and Alice Waters. Panelists include Amanda Hesser, food writer for the New York Time; Judith Jones, editor and author; Joan Reardon, author; and Kennedy Golden, Fisher’s daughter. Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, moderates. This event is offered in conjunction with a short course, MFK Fisher: Poet of the Appetites, beginning September 15; please visit www.newschool.edu/food studies for more information. Tickets: 212 229-5488 or boxoffice@newschool.edu

...didn’t i already mention marilyn...

My friend and neighbor Marilyn Burnham will be the next guest chef on What’s Cookin’ Rutland at Peg TV on Monday, 9/15. Marilyn is the superintendent of the Vermont State Fair’s culinary competitions, among other things, and she will introduce this year’s apple pie winner, Barbara Taraska, of Wallingford and points south, chat with host, Whitney Lamy, about the pleasures and tribulations of baking for, organizing, and judging the fair’s food contests, and show us how she makes her own apple pie. Studio guests will taste apple pies from Marilyn, Barbara, and Whitney.

What’s Cookin’ Rutland is taped from 6:00 – 6:30 PM, doors open at 5:30, and members of the audience must be seated by 5:45. You may bring your own beverages, if you like, a $10 donation is suggested, and for reservations call the Chaffee Art Center at 775-0356.

...hungry bikers wanted...

Got this note from Shelby Hammond of Rural Vermont about the TOUR DE FARMS event that Rural Vermont is hosting with the Addison County localvores and VT Bike-Ped Coalition. Choose a 10, 25, or 30 mile bike tour with stops through Shoreham at various farms and orchards to sample farm fresh goods. It's on Sunday the 21^st at 10:30 a.m. meeting in Shoreham. It’s $15 per adult and $8 for 15-and-unders, and you pre-register by calling (802)223-7222 or email Shelby@ruralvermont.org.

I’ve just done some investigation into Shoreham’s vital farm scene, and hmmm, wonder if my old bike still works...

The article “sex in the garden” can be found at http://thriceshy.blogspot.com/2008/03/sex-in-garden.html

This post was published As Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald here.

Plethora Again

“This is the time of year we’ve been waiting for... the first field tomatoes are coming in, there are beans, and the beginnings of peppers, eggplant soon, all sorts of zucchini and summer squash. And corn – both Grabowskys and Browns will have trucks full of corn Saturday! The old standbys, such as beets, are better than ever... This is summer as we think of it in February.” Greg Cox of Boardman Hill Farm.

...that first ripe tomato...

A million times I’ve written this, in various permutations, over the years: That first ripe tomato? Eat it in the garden, while it’s plumply sun-hot and the green scent of tomato vine curls to your nose. Perhaps you’ve carried along a shaker of salt. Use it. But first you must heed the advice of our artist friend – feel it first, heft it in the curve of your palm, notice its full-to-bursting skin and the way it glints its different shades of red in the light.

...the question of pasta...

But the morning after that first garden-fresh, ripe and juicy tomato, make the tomato sauce. Go out into your dew-wet but already simmering garden and pick several tomatoes – half a dozen small ones – and a good handful of basil leaves. Pull a bulb of garlic and knock the dirt off it. In the kitchen cut up the tomatoes into a pretty bowl. Tear the basil leaves over them, smash two or three cloves of garlic – or more, to taste – and add them to the mix. Then, as Elizabeth Romer suggests, for this is her recipe called Spaghetti al Salsa di Pomodoro Crudo, from her book The Tuscan Year – take “one teacup of the best green olive oil, no other sort of oil can be used” and pour it over and toss the whole mixture together. Let that bowl sit, covered, in a cool place if you can find one, but not in the refrigerator, to let the peppery flavor of the good oil and basil, the sweet/tart ones of the tomatoes and the sharp and unmistakable garlic flavors marry all day, to transcend each individual taste into an amalgam of them all. And when you’re ready to eat later on that evening, cook some spaghetti al dente and drain it well and pour the hot pasta into the sauce, which has been salted, and toss together. Top each serving with coarsely ground pepper. Parmesan? Only if you must.

This is, of course, a wonderfully leisurely kind of recipe, technique, celebration, meant for a simple hot mid-summer’s day when the tomatoes are ripe and the basil is yipping in the dooryard, and perhaps a couple of friends will stop by for a glass of wine and a bite to eat. Leave it to me to make it difficult by planning it too early, then racing all over hell and gone trying to gather really fresh ingredients – for that is the beauty of it, too, the simply peak and simmering gift of food from your garden or your farmer’s. It’s paradisiacal, actually, in its essence.

I might make it once a summer, just as I might make a thought from my old compatriot, John Thorne, whose Simple Cooking is one of the best foodletters, and longest running, in existence, once a winter. That thought would be a midnight snack of pasta topped with a fried egg. I’m speaking from memory, here, and there might be more to it – like crumbled cooked side-pork or pork belly on top of it (yummmmm!), or a chopped parsley sprinkle – but there needn’t be anything more to it than a fried egg slid onto a bowl of hot pasta, mixed up, salted and peppered, and you’re good to go. Of course I would serve it for Sunday supper, never at midnight or I might’s well forget sleep for that night, at least.

Why only once a year for either of these two intriguing and delicious dishes? Well, I don’t see the point of pasta. It’s not that I don’t like it, although it’s not my favorite thing in the world, but you could spread cream and anchovies and tomatoes and garlic and olive oil on a clean kitchen sponge and it would probably have about as much taste as pasta. That’s what it is, a cheap way of spreading a few hard-won ingredients over many plates. A filler.

Well, at least that’s what I think. What does Larousse Gastronomique say about it? “A dough made from durum-wheat semolina, water, and often eggs. Pasta is shaped in various ways and sometimes flavoured... Marco Polo introduced pasta into Italy from China...” Or at least it had always been thought to be true, but it can also be traced to Sicily in the middle ages “when the island was under Arab domination.” Monsieur Gastronomique also points out that different shapes of pasta, made with different grades of flours, make a difference not only to texture but to taste, as well. How much does the tender but crisp bite of Wendy Jackson’s Tagliatelle at the Red Brick Grill contribute to our perception of its deliciosity? What about my favorite (besides Wendy’s tagliatelle), which is the tiny little hand-twisted Trofie that I find at the Co-op? No doubt the thickness of those little bits, and the fact that it’s air-dried in the sweet air of the mountainous Abruzzo region of Italy, after it’s shaped by the delicious little hands of Italian ladies all sitting together in a flowery meadow (my imagination runs away with me), has something to do with making it so sumptuous.

Okay, so it can be delicious, but the fact remains that it’s flour. It’s all flour, and it’s mostly over-refined white flour that not even mice want to get into because it’s got no nutrients; and which is blamed in large part for the diseases of the western diet. Why, again? Well because when we snuff it up it’s like a drug, that super-refined carbohydrate, and shoves our blood sugar sky high, and our insulin has to get up from the table and shoot up and drag it back down again, and pretty soon our insulin gets tired of doing that, and then all hell breaks loose. At least that’s the way I understand it. A little here and a little there ain’t gonna kill you, but some people eat this stuff every day of their lives.

But then another deeply beloved staple of our diet is all flour, too, mostly white flour, and that would be... bread! And what could be more delicious to eat than good bread, or more satisfying to make, or to buy from our beloved favorite bakers? Taking pot-shots at bread is akin to kicking a puppy.

And that reminds me that another wonderful thing to do with that third tomato is to make a sloppy tomato sandwich, with good white bread slathered with mayo and enclosing slices of a tomato that still holds the heat from the garden. Maybe a few arugula leaves before clapping the top slice of bread upon the whole.

And, as my heroine, of food the doyenne, the great Julia Child – who ate her share of pasta and especially bread, and a great deal of fat, both olive and animal, and died at the age of 91 – might say, and most assuredly did say, “Bon Appetit!”

...odds and gifts...

My young friends Cyrus and Kristin traveled home to Burlington for their wedding from Fort Collins, Colorado, where they live, and though we had gotten an invitation we did not get a list of stores and websites where we might buy their selected gifts. I was grateful for that – is there anything more distasteful about modern weddings? – and so had to wrack my brain for a suitable gift. For my last wedding gift I carefully chose a beautiful casserole hand-thrown by my friend and neighbor, Carl Buffum, wrapped it well, but not, as you might surmise, well enough, and sent it down south where it arrived in shards. So fragile was out. Also, it seemed almost a thoughtless act to give them something they’d have to pack and send home, or carry home on the plane. So I googled “Co-op Fort Collins Colorado” and gave them a membership to their co-op and a gift certificate. I might – or not – have given a more thrilling gift, but they seemed to be genuinely tickled with it. Turns out they can walk to the Co-op from their house, and do, but had not yet become members.

For my friend Kathi’s November birthday last year I wrapped up a gigantic turnip in sheets of paper that, when smoothed, were typed over with turnip recipes – because Kathi had never cooked a turnip. And she should, you know? Okay. All right. It was a joke. But she loved it! You have to know your friends.

For a gift for a foodie closer by, I noticed all kinds of suitable things at the Farmers’ Market Saturday.

Start with a Garlic Grater and Dipping Sauce Bowl from Pizzazz Pottery. This is a shallow 4 inch flat bowl with ridges on the bottom over which you rub a clove or two of garlic. It renders them juicy and squashed. Then you pour in some good olive oil, perhaps some coarse-ground pepper, maybe some grated parm, all for dipping some of that good bread you just bought, or made. I cherish mine, and use it, literally, constantly.

You can build on that – along with the garlic bowl, add a couple of plump heads of garlic, and then maybe a nice bottle of olive oil – which is not, so far, available at the Farmers’ Market, though there are rumors and expectations.

A bottle of balsamic vinegar, aged by the people at Gordon’s Pond in Shrewsbury, who also make a great sesame dressing and a marinara to die for, would go nicely in this package, as would a loaf of Bear Mountain Bread if the event was to happen in the next few days. If it were that very day, then throw in some rich and delicious hard-boiled quail eggs the package – you can get them from Nancy at the Tweed Valley Farm Mushroom stand. She hard boils the little things herself, and peels them for you!! No easy chore. This Saturday, she tells me, she will be selling quail, already dressed. We’ve been waiting for that!

A bottle of Montcalm Lacrescent wine, a nicely balanced white “with delightful citrus-lime character with hints of pineapple and peach” bottled by Champlain Valley Vineyards in Benson would be very much appreciated. You serve this icy cold and it is glorious!

Maya Zelkin occasionally shows up with her pottery at the FM, and I happen to know, having traveled up to her
studio in Shrewsbury to get mine, that she has several Kimchi pots just thrown and kilned. They’re gorgeous, and so utilitarian, my favorite combination. A nice gift for someone very special. And if you’re very lucky you might get to say hello to Manolo.

That’s all the gifts I’ve got time for now but, as you can see, the Farmers’ Market is a good place to start gift shopping.

...fyi...

On August 6, Rural Vermont will host one of their famous Ice Cream Socials – Rutland finally made it!! – in the grassy space beside the Co-op on Wales Street, starting at 6:30PM. Rain space will be in the Winter Farmers’ Market in the back of the Co-op. So come and lick a cone made of Farm Fresh Cream, meet some of the fine people from Rural Vermont and the Co-op, and your friends and neighbors. It’s Leo’s birthday, so be sure to say HB2U!

...slow food...

“For dinner I had a pork chop from the pigs I raised, sautéed with a little mustard, and some crushed fresh sour cherries added when the chop was turned over. Oh man. Got to go pick more cherries for sure.”... My friend and pork supplier, Joyce Sabo.

For Governor: A Man with Food and Farm Savvy

For someone who grew up in New Jersey, “in farm country but not on a farm,” Anthony Pollina has certainly been successful in facilitating a voice for Vermont’s farmers in the time that he and his wife, Deb Wolf, have made Vermont their home, some 30 years now.

And on the other end of the food chain he’s not a bad cook, either, though he hastens to say that he and Deb both cook, and she does the bulk of it. But when Deb took their daughters, Maya and Allessandra, skiing on winter Sunday afternoons, Anthony, who says he’s “not really big on downhill skiing,” would stay home and cook for them. On the way home from the slopes, famished, they’d often call to see what he’d made them. “They’d be greeted by the smells of roast chicken as they came through the door,” he told me recently. “Food is culture,” he says, “Comfort. Food has the ability to help us transcend bad moods and problems. While the girls were growing up we always sat down to dinner together. Lots of times when I had meetings or the campaign trail kept me going late, I’d arrive home and they’d be waiting supper for me.” There’s a little wonderment in his voice at that moment. Gratefulness. It’s a good memory.

The girls have grown up and are off on their own now, but they still return home and, taking after the examples of both their parents, esteem the culture of food, often cooking meals for the family on their visits, especially now when both Anthony and Deb are hot on the campaign trail for Governor.

I first met Deb and Anthony a few weeks ago at an open house in Pawlet and found them both sincere, warm people, passionate in their quest, calmly telling stories about consensus – helping farmers get together to work for their own greater good; and telling of the role Anthony played in starting The Vermont Milk Company – a farmer-controlled plant that skips the middleman to produce real Vermont ice cream, cheddar cheese, and yogurt.

Anthony founded Rural Vermont, as well, a statewide farm and rural-advocacy organization that has been a national leader in dairy policy and free trade, working to outlaw GM seeds and bovine growth hormone. Rural Vermont is the reason you can buy a chicken to roast directly from the farmer; the reason that Vermont farmers will be well-situated to grow the valuable crop of hemp as soon as the federal government allows it, if the governor signs the bill. The hemp bill was enthusiastically endorsed by the legislature but is sitting on the present governor’s desk right now. If he doesn’t sign it, it’s just another veto, another of his passive votes against Vermont’s farmers.

Rural Vermont is the reason the excellent Vermont dairy farmer can sell up to 50 quarts of farm fresh milk each day directly to the consumer who wants it.

As we drove down to Pawlet I was happy to be about to meet the person who was so instrumental in working on these important food and agriculture programs, and also remembering an interview in Salon.com with Alice Waters I’d read just a few days before. She was disappointed that none of the presidential candidates were talking about exactly those subjects – food and agriculture. “They're talking about the diets of children, but they're talking about Band-Aids. We're not seeing a vision,” she said, and the reason for that was, “because we have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that food is not important.” I suspected that Anthony Pollina did not fit into that category, and I wondered what changes he would make in the system if he was elected Governor.

I didn’t have time to talk to him a great deal at the open house, but when I called him a few days ago he was forthcoming in his easy-going, conversational way. He’s the kind of guy you feel like you’ve known all your life. I peppered him with questions.

“I want to work with the dairy farmers to find a way to take some of the milk off the commodity market and keep it in Vermont.” He stressed that this is not something the state would finance, but would facilitate the farmer/entrepreneurs to do themselves. “We’ll find ways to invest in infrastructure so farmers can process their own products and retain more value in what they sell. And not just in dairy. We need regional meat processing plants. We need a distribution network.”

He talks about establishing a Vermont Fair Trade Label for products that people in the big northeast cities would look for, knowing that it appeared on excellent products for which farmers received a fair price. “A market study was done on Fair Trade fluid milk which found there was a significant market in Boston, for which people would pay significantly more because it would be locally identified, free of synthetic hormones, and priced fairly, just as they do for Fair Trade chocolate and coffee,” he told me.

So Monsatan is not your idea of a good company? I asked slyly.

“Monsanto would have no place in our Vermont. They want to bend nature to their liking, and they want to own and control food,” he said. “Bigger is not necessarily better,” he mused. “What we are relearning in Vermont is what worked and came naturally years ago. Nature works, and if we work with nature we will have a food supply that is adequate and healthy.”

The Pollina’s vegetable garden used to be quite substantial. It’s smaller now, and Deb does most of the gardening. But the girls are grown, their lives are busy, and there’s always the farmers’ market. “We go to the farmers market every Saturday if we’re not involved in something else. It’s a cultural thing. Social. We see a lot of our friends there, many of whom are farmers. It’s the thing to do.”

Like many Vermonters I know that it’s essential to move our present governor out from under the golden dome in Montpelier. Vermont stands still while he’s there. I didn’t talk directly to Anthony – Governor Pollina, I trust – about health care, the economy, energy, or anything, really, except farms and food, but the health of our farms and food economy has direct implications for everything else in our little rural state. Which brings me back to Alice Waters: “’The destiny of nations depends on how we feed ourselves’" she quoted Brillat-Savarin, then continued, “That's a really important thing. I want whoever's running for president to say that. The destiny of our nation depends on how we nourish ourselves.”

I want whoever is running for Vermont’s governor to say that, too, and Anthony Pollina obliges, in spades, and with history to back him up.

...plethora...

Most years these first few weeks of the Farmers’ Market in Depot Park are pretty sparse. There used to be a ceremony of one or another city notable throwing out the first radish. I believe it was discontinued because there were never any radishes, but this year it might happen again!

Besides planting fall crops to keep the winter Farmers’ Market going all year, farmers are learning they have a bigger customer base and how to provide for it. Other reasons there’s so much produce at the beginning of the season? Greg Cox tells me “Farmers are pushing the envelope, growing in sealed tunnels, using remay to protect the seedlings, all because there’s a lot more consumer demand. Local food is becoming competitive in price again, as well as being far fresher and better tasting. All because of energy and transportation costs.”

As well as fat red radishes there are baby beets, full-blown lettuces as beautiful as flowers, micro-greens, and all kinds of cheeses, meats, real flowers, bedding plants and breads and baked goods. The Rutland Farmers’ Market is bigger than ever, too, extending another fifty feet north, to accommodate the growing number of vendors. Be there or be square!

... a humble pie for gentler chiders...

It wasn’t with a great deal of excitement that I wrote about fiddleheads several weeks ago, and I’ve been gently chided for that (thank you, Gentle Chiders), but later I did make a fiddlehead quiche and it was extraordinarily good. Of course, I did have some ramps. I sautéed them to put beneath the fiddleheads, and their flavor permeated the pie, making it at once elegant and humble. If you’re not in a microclimate in which you can still get fiddleheads, the Co-op does have them, and they also have copies of this recipe:

Make a single 9 inch crust: (I always make crust in the food processor.)

1 cup (5 oz) all purpose flour
1 scant teaspoon sea salt
1/3 cup butter or lard or mixture (3 oz)
2 tablespoons +/- cold water

Whisk the flour and salt together, then cut in the fats until pebbly, and stir in enough water to allow it to come together into a smooth ball. Roll out and fit into a large pie plate (mine is 10" in diameter and 1" deep). Set aside or in the freezer.

To Make the Filling:

The formula for any kind of custard is 1 egg +1 yolk + 1 cup whole milk or mixture of milk and half and half. I used unpasteurized whole milk, and it was very creamy. I also added an extra yolk to help with that extra 1/2 cup of milk. The finished quiche had that wonderful custard that separates into soft rectangles of goodness. That has a lot to do with the egg/milk quality plus the regulation of temperature.
Bring the oven to 450 degrees.
1 dozen ramps OR 1 large shallot or 1 dozen scallions + 2 cloves of garlic
butter and olive oil
2 ½ cups cleaned fiddleheads
1 cup grated cheddar cheese (or more)
¾ cup sliced spicy sausage, or crumbled bulk, cooked rare
1 large egg + 2 yolks
1 ½ cups creamy milk
½ teaspoon sea salt
grating of nutmeg

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

In a sauté pan, over low heat, sauté the ramps or scallions and garlic in butter and olive oil until limp and slightly golden. Add a little water or white wine if they’re browning too fast and aren’t getting soft fast enough. Remove from heat and let cool a bit.

When the pot of water is boiling dump in the fiddleheads, partially cover, bring back to the boil and boil for 3 minutes. Drain in a colander and spray with cold water. Shake the colander to get any excess water off, then let drain over the sink until ready to use.

Whisk the eggs together so they are well combined but not frothy, then whisk in the milk, salt, and nutmeg.

Scatter the cheese over the bottom of the pie crust, spread the ramps or onion mixture evenly over the cheese, scatter the sausage and then the fiddleheads over that, then pour over the milk/egg mixture.

Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes; then turn the oven down to 325 degrees and bake for another 20 minutes to half an hour. A silver knife will slide in and out cleanly when done.

...5 Mondays with Peter in June...

When I walk into the Co-op and see Peter McGann behind the cash register my eyes immediately flash to the counter to see what goodies he’s prepared for his customers today: Will it be his famous potato omelette, Tortilla Espagnola? Jalapeno Cornbread and salsa? Guacamole? Whatever it is you know it’ll be delicious. Peter has studied Japanese cooking with Elizabeth Andoh, Mexican with Diana Kennedy, Far Eastern with Paula Wolfert, and others. Somehow he’s learned all their tricks, and if you’re quick you might learn them from him. He’ll be giving cooking demonstrations and hands-on lessons in the Co-op’s new kitchen on the 5 Mondays of June, Starting with Spanish, and traveling on through Japanese, Mexican, Moroccan, and Italian. There’ll be 8 to 10 lucky students in each 5PM to 8PM class, which are filling up quickly. $25 per session or $100 for the series.

...local or organic...

I love this pin! “Know Your Chicken,” it says. People are puzzled by it, but it means, know where your food comes from.

Joel Salatin, the dynamic speaker at the Rural Vermont Annual Meeting a few weeks ago in South Royalton, the Virginia farmer of Polyface Farm made famous by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, sheds some light on this matter: “We never called ourselves organic – we call ourselves ‘beyond organic.’ Why dumb down to a lesser level than we are? If I said I was organic, people would fuss at me for getting feed corn from a neighbor who might be using atrazine. Well, I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get ‘pure product’ that’s really coated in diesel fuel. There are a whole lot more variables in making the right decision than does the chicken feed have chemicals or not. Like what sort of habitat is going to allow that chicken to express its physiological distinctiveness? A ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass every day? Now which chicken shall we call ‘organic’? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government, because now they own the word.”

The Right to Choose

For a few of us, drinking a tall glass of milk from the cow we or someone close to us milked last night is as natural as eating the green beans we just picked from our garden. And if we don’t drink milk, then ladling off some cream to pour over our oatmeal or into our coffee is just the way it is. Goldie’s out there in the barn getting ready to have a little snack and to give milk again, and we’re eating breakfast and will shortly pull on our barn jacket and step into our barn boots and get on with the business of the day. Or our neighbor will. We don’t even think about it. It’s just the way things are, and it’s just the way they should be – down home, close to the bone, not even a conscious choice.

But for the majority of us that’s not the case. We get our milk or our coffee cream from the refrigerator case from the store, and for the majority of us that’s not a choice, either. It’s just the way it is. We don’t give it a thought.

Given a choice between store-bought and farm fresh milk, most of us would continue on our well-trodden path, that way of doing something that is so familiar we don’t need to take any of our scarce-afforded, already chock-full time to think about it. But, forced to make a choice? Now that’s another thing. The two sides part from the mainstream, and that’s good – it’s good to be informed and to make choices for one’s self and demand to be able to make those choices. But some swerve so drastically they become a fringe, a lunatic fringe given to hyperbole – which doesn’t prove their point – and hatefulness. That’s when we’re apt to get pompous about it, authoritarian and paternalistic and bossy and worried about others who didn’t make the same choice we did. Those people are doomed, we say – either from drinking the milk of many cows from many farms that has had the last vestiges of life boiled out of it, or from getting so dewy eyed about sweet little Bossy they don’t realize the deadly germs that may lurk in her milk.

...not a song, but a thread...

But the important thing here is to protect our right to choose. And that’s what the Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act of 2008 attempts to do. The name sounds like a song by Bruce Springsteen or an essay by Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t it? But no, it was written by Vermont farmers in cooperation with Rural Vermont, an organization that works ceaselessly in its quest to keep Vermont green and covered with farms, more power to them, and may they succeed. They’re the ones who worked with George Schenk, my old and revered friend of American Flatbread fame, a poet and an entrepreneur, a baker and a earth hearth maker, to allow your neighbor to sell up to 100 chickens to you and your favorite restaurant without the state or federal inspection which is prohibitive to small farmers. A preferable chicken any day to one stuffed into a cage under a roof all its born days.

But the main responsibility of the Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act of 2008 is to the farms, to help them become more viable and successful, which means producing good and healthy food to satisfy demand. If a dairy farmer who is pinched in all her dealings with middlemen and state and federal agencies when she sells her milk to be pasteurized and homogenized by Big Dairy interests, had the chance to sell unpasteurized milk right off the farm at an average of $5 per gallon to people who are clamoring for it, wouldn’t that make her life business a heck of a lot more satisfying? And wouldn’t that satisfy a demand in the community for farm fresh milk? Yes, indeed, it would.

So Rural Vermont and the farmers designed this bill to allow the farmer to sell as much unpasteurized milk as he could to people who came to his farm to buy it, and he could advertise, and he would abide by a set of standards to ensure milk quality and safety and submit to inspection twice a year by a committee of his peers and experts, who would in turn report to a state committee – neither of these committees to be governmental committees.

And here’s what happened to it, as far as I can gather. The House Committee on Agriculture took a really good look at it, listened to lots of testimony both pro and con, much of it from people who said raw milk will kill you or raw milk will cure you, then doubled the amount of unpasteurized milk a farmer can sell – to 50 quarts a day. In the process they realized that the ban on advertising was unconstitutional – First Amendment stuff, freedom of speech – so up go those roadside signs and notices on bulletin boards.

But the real sticking point was they could not decide if the Agency of Agriculture – whose charge it is to protect the public’s health – MUST be involved in oversight, at least by a thread. And then the bell rang, and it was time to send this bill to the Senate. And nothing, NOTHING, must interfere with that transferal.

So what we have is not enough to free a small farmer from Big Dairy interests, but just enough to enable an even smaller farmer to sell enough milk to get by. All, though, every last one of them, want an overseer made up of their own peers, to make sure that a “dirty” farmer does not cast shame upon all of their good efforts by causing illness. They so totally distrust government bureaucrats, who often act as bullies, but they will sooo have to get over it, because it looks like the Agency of Ag MUST and WILL be involved, at least by a thread, not that the agency, itself, is all that keen on adding a whole new level of jurisdiction to its manpower and budgetary duties. So. Let it be a thread.

...those who care...

Not everyone is worried and disappointed. “I would be mortified,” said Stacey Elliot of Chittenden, “if anyone got sick from MY milk! We’re so careful about how we milk, how we take care of the animals and their health, and most small producers feel the same way. So the lack of oversight doesn’t really bother me because I know I’m doing a really good job.” Stacey and her husband, Tim, have a tiny but busy farm in Chittenden, with chickens, pigs and, since the promise of doubling the amount of milk and the right to advertise, TWO cows. “We’re almost selling out of Godiva’s milk, so we went out and purchased a new Jersey last weekend.”

At the present average of $5 per gallon charged by most farmers for unpasteurized milk, even 87 gallons could bring in close to $500 extra per week which, though a pittance in farm money parlance, could go some way towards healing the sting of those constant breakdowns of machinery that are such an aggravation in the farmer’s life.

“But,” says, Lisa Kaiman of Jersey Girls Dairy in Chester, who is the sine qua non of the unpasteurized milk revolution in Vermont, “it doesn’t go nearly far enough.” Lisa milks 20 to 22 Jerseys morning and night, 4 at a time in her pristine milking parlor and sells most of the milk to an organic dairy – “And I don’t make a cent,” she claims – and the rest to enthusiastic customers who drive up her rutted road to buy the milk Farm Fresh. Lisa spent an enormous amount of time working with Rural Vermont formulating the Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act of 2008 over the last 3 or 4 years, and she is desperately disappointed that she won’t be allowed to convert to selling all of her milk from the farm. At least this year. Everyone concerned is hoping against hope that ALL of the Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act of 2008 will become a reality in 2009.

Lisa’s little Jerseys are beautiful and calm and friendly. Perhaps I became overzealous as I petted one’s big golden head and neck, for she wrapped them right around me and nearly lifted me off my feet. Lisa laughed. “She wants to climb right into your lap,” she said.

John Pollard’s story is slightly more dire. He plunked his dozen or so sweet little hand-milked Jerseys down on an isolated Mount Holly farm last year, and does not sell their milk to Big Dairy, but only to his own so-far-short list of farm fresh milk customers. His milking parlor is so clean I wondered where he milked his cows! I would have no qualms about spreading a gingham cloth and picnicking there.

But he doesn’t seem discouraged, and he does have hope for next year. “Legislators are hearing that more and more people are demanding the personal freedom to choose their own food and a year from now I think they’re going to hear it even stronger.”

I spoke to some passionate drinkers of unpasteurized milk. Jaynie Smith in Springfield, told me, “I buy my milk from Lisa because I know how she treats and feeds her cows and also how careful she is when she milks.” Jaynie was a registered Sanitation and Health Inspector in Massachusetts before she moved to Vermont, and it’s ironic that she describes herself as “... a bit of a germaphobe before I got trained. But the more I learned, the more I realized how important it is to build up our immunity, both by eating live foods and by exposing ourselves to the real world and not this sterilized world so many people embrace.” She’s not happy that the testing and standards have been stripped from this year’s milk bill. “I think that the testing was the public's safety net from preventing just any farm from selling their milk. There are many many farms that I have visited that I wouldn’t think of drinking milk out of their bulk tank.”

That observation is worth following up. “Pasteurization ... gave farmers license to be unsanitary,” Nathanael Johnson writes in his excellent article in the April Harper’s called “The Revolution Will Not be Pasteurized”. Read it to get a new perspective on the synergy between human bodies and microbes, especially those provided to us by raw milk, which Johnson calls the “ur-food”. He quotes an expert as saying, “bacteria are... so important (to us) that researchers studying the microbes living inside us say it’s unclear where our bodily functions end and the functions of microbes begin.” Think about that. Does a wound heal, does an eye blink, because our body functions that way or because it benefits a body of microbes – those very microbes that are being pasteurized out of our food supply – to make it happen?

Jaynie has a nice perspective on pasteurization. “Pasteurized milk is a mixed bag,” she says. “It’s like a Petri dish – you’re basically sterilizing everything, and hoping that it won’t get contaminated after sterilization, because it’s a bacteria breeding ground, there’s no competition. Raw milk has it’s own fighting-back capability.” And that’s no laughing matter: two people died in Massachusetts just after Christmas from drinking contaminated pasteurized milk. This is liable to happen more often as we continue to put more trust in zapping our food to kill bad bacteria, and pay no attention or little to the processing of it.

David Gumpert wrote an article for the Sunday Boston Globe a few weeks ago called “Got Raw Milk?” and conducts a lively conversation about the subject on his blog, thecompletepatient.com, He says, “The CDC doesn’t seem to know which foods cause the 76 million (annual, food-borne) illnesses, but based on various studies, the main culprits are deli meats, hamburger, seafood, and various prepared foods from restaurants and fast-food outlets. I don’t hear anyone proposing to prohibit children from consuming any of these foods.”

Why do some continue to see only danger instead of benefit in unpasteurized milk? “Our public health and medical establishments continue to operate under assumptions stemming from outbreaks of illness a century and more ago,” Gumpert writes. “The reality today, thanks to refrigeration, improved sanitation, mechanization, and a serious commitment to quality by a segment of dairy farmers, is much different, and much less threatening.

“Of the benefits of raw milk, most proponents agree that milk in its natural state is full of beneficial enzymes, vitamins, proteins, and bacteria - most of which are altered or killed off by pasteurization. A growing body of evidence from university research conducted around the world suggests these nutrients help counter conditions as diverse as asthma, allergies, colitis, and diabetes.” In other words, all the chronic illnesses that have crept up on us over the last fifty to 100 years.

One of the tenets of the original Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act of 2008 stipulates that consumers should buy their milk directly from the farmer, and suggests some guidelines to look for when you visit the farm. Make sure that cows graze on pasture when possible and are fed hay when in barns during winter; that cows receive minerals as supplements or from mineralized soils and plants; that grain feeding is a minor dietary component; that teats of cows are clean and dry before milking; that cows are milked in a clean barn or milking parlor; that milk is kept chilled; and that farmers are working “in tune with nature” to ensure the absence of pathogens – that is, cows are not pushed to produce large quantities of milk, the soil is fertile, and cows live in a low stress environment.

Indeed, when I spoke to Chuck Gregory, who has written several letters to the editor of the Herald warning of the dangers of raw milk, he said that he had grown up drinking raw milk and had never been ill from it. His concern, he said, “is for young parents who latch onto the latest fashion, thinking it sounds cool, and say ‘oh, let’s go get some raw milk,’ never thinking to inspect the cows and the milking process.” Which of course we all agree with, but it is a good reminder.

As is this: the goal of increasing the amount of raw milk that can be sold in Vermont is not to take pasteurized milk off the shelves, or to convert pasteurized milk drinkers to unpasteurized, but to give consumers the choice and the right to buy from their local farmers those foods they choose to consume. Prohibition of any food, whatsoever, creates cognitive dissonance in this brain!

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the Senate approves the slim bill this year, and that both Houses buckle down with Rural Vermont to finish it next year, to provide a wholly satisfying Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act of 2009!

Thank you, Rural Vermont.

this column originally published in the Rutland (Vt) Herald on 4/01/08