It’s hot …

… and cooking is the last thing on my mind.

Thank heavens for the farmers’ market, and for that magic moment at the height of summer when all the berries converge.

On Saturday, our market still had strawberries – last of the crop, according to the vendor who had sold out by 11. Raspberries were everywhere, the first fat blueberries had arrived, and one vendor even had early Marionberries. Another had ripe, tart red currants, glowing like rubies. I bought some, though I have no idea what to I’ll do with them.

There were also loads of cherries – this seems to be a bumper year for the cherry crop. I bought a bag of those to take to a barbecue, but I saved the berries for myself, and I’ve been eating them by the handful and the bowlful – mostly just as they are, sometimes with a little cream and (in the case of the Marionberries, which haven’t reached their sweet peak yet) a sprinkle of sugar. I did make an easy cobbler with some of the blueberries this morning, heavy on the berries and light on the sugar. That’s breakfast for the next few days.

I’d live on fruit alone right now if I could, but my body has a protein habit. Finding a way to satisfy that with a minimum of kitchen time can be a challenge. Not so this week; the young fisherman who’s been bringing live crab to market also had smoked tuna loins. I threw together a simple rice-and tuna dish that’s a distant cousin to the tuna noodle casseroles I grew up with. You don’t need a recipe for this kind of thing, just a general method.

Last night, after the coastal breezes blew the heat away, I cooked up a pot of brown Basmati rice and put it in the fridge overnight. This evening, I mixed it with some finely diced onion, fresh peas, and about half of the tuna, shredded with my fingers. To boost the smokey flavor, I crumbled up an ounce or so of Rogue Creamery’s Smokey Blue cheese, mixed that in with the tuna and rice. The zest and juice of half a lemon and a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise to keep everything moist, a sprinkle of parmesan and half an hour in a 350 oven and I’ve got dinner (and a couple of days worth of lunch).

These are the kinds of dishes summer calls for: things you can throw together quickly, filling but not heavy, and full of flavor. Not to mention endlessly adaptable. No peas? Dice up some summer squash, or broccoli, or whatever you find at the market. No rice? Use pasta. Trying to watch the fat content? Moisten the casserole with stock instead of mayonnaise.

And then have berries for dessert.

“The season of bounty …

… is here.” That’s how one of the vendors at the Albany Farmers’ Market put it this morning, grinning as she tucked my purchase into my backpack for me. Looking around at stalls brimming with variety, I couldn’t argue: Snap peas and sugar peas, lettuce and leeks on one table, flats of berries and cherries on another; late asparagus over there, jams and jellies and honey over here, fresh-baked bread nearby. We’ve finally reached the season of more food than flowers – not that I have anything against flowers, but they aren’t why I go to the market.

Never mind that the weather is still cloudy and cool (the farmers don’t). It’s summer. Just look at the calendar: Solstice falls tomorrow, and while we in North America tend to call it the first day of summer, I like the older traditions of people who marked the start of summer and planting season in May, and thought of the solstice as mid-summer. Which makes tonight Mid-Summer’s Eve, a night to frolic and feast and enjoy the longest day of the year.

Which seems as good an excuse as any to do something special but easy with the gorgeous cherries I brought home from the market today, in a mixed flat with strawberries and raspberries (which will probably get eaten plain, by the handful, if my berry-red fingertips are any indication.)

Really good fruit doesn’t need much help. A simple preparation that focuses on the flavor (and doesn’t tie you to the kitchen on a summer’s day) is just the thing. I thought about cherry pie, with the ruby-red fruit bubbling up in the interstices of a latticed crust, but that takes work, and who am I out to impress today, anyway? Still: Cherries … pie crust … hmmm… ooh, ooh – cherry galette!

A galette is just an easy, rustic pie. Instead of laying the crust in a pie pan and fiddling with a top crust, you center it on a baking sheet, mound the fruit in the center and pull up the dough to partly cover the top. The filling needs less liquid than you might use in a pie – otherwise it tends to leak out before it sets. Bake and serve as you would any old pie.

This recipe makes a small galette – big servings for two, or small ones for four. The almonds and kirshwasser are chosen to punch the pure cherry flavor, and that they do!

Mid-Summer Cherry Galette

Ingredients

• Crust for a single-layer pie. Make your own, or buy it in the refrigerator case
• 2 pints ripe local cherries, pitted and halved. (A cherry pitter makes this a snap!)
• 2 tsp kirschwasser (cherry eau de vie) or lemon juice
• 1/4 cup + 1 tsp sugar, more or less, depending on the sweetness of your cherries. I like to taste fruit, not just sugar.
• 1/4 cup almond meal. I use Bob’s Red Mill, but it’s easy enough to grind up a handful of raw almonds in the food processor.

Method:

Preheat oven to 375F.

Roll out pie crust on a baking sheet (I used a tart pan because it was handy).

Toss cherries with 1 tsp of the kirsch (or lemon juice, if your cherries are especially sweet).

Mix 1/4 c sugar and almond meal; toss that with the cherries. I chose almond meal as a binder for the juicy cherries because almond and cherry are well-matched flavors – and because typical fruit pie thickeners – corn starch, tapioca – can result in a gluey filling. Besides, I had almond meal in the pantry.

Mound filling in the center of the crust; pull up the edges, pleating and pinching as you go, to mostly cover the fruit. Don’t worry if it isn’t symmetrical – galettes are supposed to look rustic!

Brush crust with remaining kirsch or lemon juice; sprinkle with remaining tsp sugar.

Bake 30 minutes, or until golden brown. Some juice will invariably leak out.

Serve warm or cool. Top with ice cream – or creme fraiche!

Happy Solstice!

Farm shares: Investing in local growers

If you’re my age or younger, you probably grew up thinking of food as something that came from a store, and shopping for food as a matter of making a list (well, if you’re organized), getting in the car, going to the supermarket and filling your cart mostly with boxes and cans and other pre-weighed, packaged stuff. When you bought produce, you expected it to be washed and trimmed (and sometimes waxed) and perfect looking. A dark spot on an apple, a hint of green on an orange, beets and radishes with the leaves still on – these were all to be avoided. If you found asparagus in December or strawberries in March, you didn’t pause to wonder where they came from. Maybe you thought tomatoes were meant to be flavorless and kind of crunchy.

What a revelation it is, then, to discover the pleasures of locally grown food, even if it takes a bit more work. The flavors, of course, but also the sheer tactile pleasure of working with food straight from the farm: The rich golden yolks of eggs from free-range chickens, the delectable greens, the new forms of old friends such as garlic; the juicy, acid-sweet bliss of a truly ripe heirloom tomato. Strawberries that are red to the core. Lettuce so fresh it hardly needs dressing.

Bringing all these good things to market isn’t easy. It takes a certain kind of person – or family – to rise, pick and clean the produce, load the coolers and the truck and haul it – sometimes quite a distance – from farm to market, hoping the weather will be good and the shoppers will come and be in the mood to spend.

It’s not cheap, either, and that’s one reason increasing numbers of growers are adopting new strategies for keeping the farm going and connecting with the buying public.

You’ve probably heard of CSA – Community Supported Agriculture – and the typical CSA subscription service, which involves paying a set amount at the start of the season to receive a weekly box of whatever’s fresh and in season. Here in the mid-Valley, a growing number of farms are offering CSA boxes, usually delivered for pickup at specific locations on a given day of the week. And that can be great for those who are happy to eat whatever they get, who have big families or who have the time and energy to preserve an excess of, say, cucumbers or beans.

For others – those feeding picky eaters, or single people like me who can’t get through a whole box of food in a week – there are other options. One is the farm share, a sort of pay-ahead investment in a grower and their food. Farm shares (usually) differ from CSAs in that you pay a set amount at the start of the season, and then get to spend that credit as you please at the grower’s market booth.

Ive just bought a farm share from Wood Family Farm, the family meat-raising operation in Stayton. An unabashed carnivore, I love their lamb in particular, and have considered but never quite got ’round to purchasing an entire lamb’s worth of meat at slaughter time. This year, I opted for the farm share: A $180 payment that gets me $200 worth of meat over the course of the season. I can spend it from week to week, or – as I plan to do – fill out an order form in August and spend the whole amount on the cuts of lamb I prefer.

Other mid-valley growers have come up with similar schemes. Among them:

• Denison Farms, which in addition to a conventional CSA offers a Market Coupon plan (a $90 investment gets you $100 worth of coupons to spend at their farmers’ market booths)
• Midway Farms, between Albany and Corvallis, has a “Personal Shopper CSA;” pay in advance and you can fill a specific-sized box with whatever you prefer from their farmstand.
• Deep Roots Farm has a “Market Advantage CSA” program that works much the same way at their farmers’ market booths.

One advantage of farm shares over traditional CSAs, besides the aspect of choice, is that they are often available for purchase well into the season, whereas CSA subscriptions are usually available only at specific times of the year.

Farm shares, CSAs and similar schemes are the most direct way consumers can help out local growers. By paying at the start of the season, we provide the farms with capital to help cover their expenses. This is no small thing; small farms often have a difficult time getting contentional financing for the seed, feed and other costs of growing food and bringing it to market. It’s also a great deal for those of us who love fresh food.

When I can’t run away to the coast …

Scott Penter gets ready to weigh a crab

… the next-best thing is having the coast come to me – in the form of impeccably fresh seafood at my local farmers’ market.

And now it has, in the person of Scott Penter, an entrepreneurial young fisherman from Newport who’s invested in a state-of-the-art traveling seawater tank and chiller in hopes of expanding his market beyond the Newport docks.

I got a heads-up a couple of weeks ago from market manager Rebecca Landis that Scott had signed on to sell his catch at the Albany farmers’ market. As a passionate pescivore, I got very excited, and was crestfallen last weekend when he didn’t turn up. Communication problem, evidently, because he was there yesterday with his bright blue tank and a big sign proclaiming in red letters: LIVE CRAB.

Dungeness crab is at the top of my personal favorite seafood list, and Dungeness crab pulled out of the Pacific this morning, loaded into a tank full of chilled sea water and trucked over the Coast Range to what might as well be my front door is a wonderful thing, indeed. Especially this weekend: I’d spent Friday in Newport at a working meeting, and evening commitments drew me back inland long before I was ready to leave. Finding Scott and his rolling Seafood Outlet business at the market Saturday morning was pretty good compensation for not being able to spend the night at the coast.

So I watched (and shot pictures) as Scott fished a feisty four-pounder out of his tank, weighed it out and accepted my money, to the vast entertainment of a crowd of small children who materialized the minute Mr. Crab emerged from the tank.

Meet Mr. Crab

In minutes, I was on my way home with a fairly irate crab in a sturdy plastic bag, which got deposited immediately in a sinkful of cold water while I put the kettle on to boil.

If you’re accustomed to buying your crab pre-killed, pre-cooked and served on a platter with a little lemon and a mess of melted butter, the thought of dealing with a live one, with all claws waving and trying to grab you, may be daunting. Me, I learned to kill crustaceans quite literally at my mother’s knee: we lived in Newfoundland when I was barely out of toddlerhood, and some of my earliest memories involve going out with my dad to buy live lobster straight from the fisherman, bringing them home and dumping them in the bathtub (where their scuttling greatly amused me and my little brother) and then watching my mom use long-handled tongs to transfer them into a giant pot of boiling water. Children are ruthless, and any trauma I might have suffered was quickly assuaged by the gustatory joy of eating lobster as the butter dripped down my chin.

I’ve grown up to be what I think of as an ethical omnivore; part of that includes not merely being aware of where my meat and seafood comes from, but being willing to deal with the bald fact that eating animals inevitably involves (someone) killing them.

If you don’t know what to do with a live crab, allow me to recommend Catching, Cleaning and Cooking Bay Crabs, a free, downloadable .pdf version of a publication from Oregon Sea Grant, which happens to be my employer. It includes instructions for killing and cleaning the crab before cooking, or (for the squeamish) cooking it first and then cleaning. The former process produces a superior result, in my opinion, and that’s what I did as soon as I got home from the market.

Crab dinner

After chilling the cooked crab for a few hours, I hauled out the butter and lemons, some crusty, locally baked Italian bread and a bottle of crisp, fruity Evolution wine from Oregon’s Sokol Blosser winery. A simple salad of baby spinach and arugula from the market with a smidgen of Rogue Creamery Smokey Blue cheese crumbled over it and I had a fabulous hot-weather supper. Half a crab is plenty for me, so I got to repeat (and photograph) the experience for lunch today.

If you shop the Albany market, check Scott’s tank next weekend. He also sells albacore tuna he caught and had canned by one of our region’s specialty canners; ask him, and he can probably tell you where he caught the fish, how much it weighed and for all I know, what the weather was like. That’s one of the joys of buying locally: You’re not only getting great fresh food, but you can learn about it from the people who produced it. It puts us closer to the food chain, and may even make us more mindful about what we eat.

I know I was mindful of that crab. I even thanked him for feeding me before I turned him into dinner.

Too busy to cook, let alone blog

A busy theater rehearsal schedule and seasonal allergies have stolen my time and my brain; even when I manage to make it to the market I do little more than throw a salad together, and it’s been so long since I’ve spent time in my kitchen that the dishwasher is full – of nothing but coffee cups. My garden? Let’s not talk about it.

Don’t let that happen to you. The summer produce season is drawing near, and if you find yourself without the time or opportunity to grow your own, that shouldn’t stop you from harvesting your own – not when there are Web sites out there that tell you where to go pick.

Like, for instance, the Oregon section of PickYourOwn.org, a nifty directory of U-pick farms all over the country. I see half a dozen within a 20-minute drive of my front door, offering everything from berries to beans.  Combine the list with the useful “what’s in season right now“  chart from Heavenly Harvest Farms, just down the road from here, and you’re set!

I’ll be back to blogging – and cooking, and who knows, maybe even planting – in a couple of weeks.

An Internet recipe box?

Quick one: I just stumbled across a potentially nifty new tool for those of us who have unmanageable lists of bookmarks – or worse yet, heaps of print-outs – of all the great recipes we’ve found on line.

http://www.food.com bills itself as an all-in-one Internet recipe box. It’s still in beta, but it seems to work well: You set up a free account, log in, and start adding recipes from your bookmarks, by searching, or by uploading your own. You can categorize them (I’m starting with an “Eating Locally” and a “Decadence” category, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about me), search, sort – and if you use the right browser*, you can even install a toolbar that will let you instantly add recipes to your box as you find them on the Web.

What it doesn’t do: Let you print, or even see the full recipe, straight from the recipe box, at least with recipes searched from the Web. In some ways, it seems to be a fancy bookmark list.

The “upload your own recipe” feature could be more accurately labeled ‘type in your own recipe.” You can keep them private or release them for others to use. However, it does provide a printable version of the recipe.

Looks useful. I wouldn’t enter my entire recipe collection in it (think of the data entry time!), but I’ll probably start using it to collect new recipes as I find or develop them.

* Don’t get me started about systems that support Firefox but don’t recognize that my preferred browser, SeaMonkey, is built on exactly the same code. Grrr …

Greens for body and soul

Nature's Fountain Farm

The farmer’s market’s been open for three solid weekends, and not a recipe out of me yet. Blame a busy life, interrupted by a bad cold, both of which left me with neither the time nor the inclination to cook anything more complicated than canned soup and oatmeal.

Still, that didn’t keep me from grabbing a couple of pretty bunches of rapini from Nature’s Fountain Farm this past Saturday. It was getting near closing time, and from the size of the pile (as compared to, say, the lone bunch of radishes left on their table), I’m guessing sales of these lovely greens suffered from a collective case of “but what the heck is it, and what do you do with it?”

Clearly, not enough folks here in Western Oregon grew up with mothers from the South – of the US, or of Italy. Because those mothers know what to do with greens.

Rapini (Brassica rapa) is sometimes called broccoli raab or rabe, because its small flower heads look slightly like wee broccoli heads. It’s more closely related to mustard greens, but not quite as pungent. Personally, I’d put it midway between the mildness of kale and the pungent bitterness of mustard or turnip greens, with a nutty quality I find quite appealing. Young rapini is quite a bit more tender than kale, and doesn’t need long simmering to make it palatable.

The Italians love rapini, and feature it in fresh spring pasta dishes, typically chopped in bite-sized lengths – stems and leaves – then blanched, drained, wrung dry and sauteed in olive oil.

That’s generally how I cook it, sans pasta, and it makes a lovely side dish. Try this:

Sauteed rapini and mushroom

Ingredients

• 1 bunch rapini
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced
• Half a dozen crimini mushrooms, coarsely chopped
• 1 Tbsp currants (optional)
• 1 Tbsp pine nuts (optional)
• Grated parmesan or romano cheese

Method:

Trim root ends from rapini; chop stems and leaves coarsely.

Bring a quart of salted water to a boil in a medium saucepan; add rapini, and blanch for 2-3 minutes, until bright green and tender. Drain in a colander and run cold water over it to stop the cooking. Drain well, then wrap in a clean dish towel and squeeze out excess water.

Wipe the saucepan dry and return to heat. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, the minced garlic and mushrooms; cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms begin to shrink. Add the currants, pine nuts and rapini; stir well to coat with oil, and continue cooking until hot and fragrant.

Toss with a little grated parmesan or romano, and serve as a side dish. Or, if you’ve been feeling puny and craving greens, eat the whole mess for dinner.

Market season begins!

The farmers’ markets here in Albany and nearby Corvallis open tomorrow! After such a long, cold, dreary spring, you can bet I’ll be there with cash in my pocket and camera in hand.

Although it’s still very early in the local produce season, market manager Rebecca Landis’s latest email to her Market Friends list (subscribe here) promises new vendors, including Cinco Estrellas organic farm from Junction City, and treats from last growing season (filberts, blueberry products from Sunset Valley Organics) and lots of plant starts. And a couple of market stalwarts – the Salad Farm, with their lovely mixed greens; Steffan Farms, which always gets an early start by growing almost everything under cold frames – should be on hand.

I can hardly wait…

Adventures in dairy

Dairy trio

“When denatured in acid conditions, with relatively little casein around, as in cheese whey, lactoglobulin molecules … bind to each other and coagulate into little clots, which can be made into whey cheeses like true ricotta.” – Harold McGee, “On Food and Cooking”

I’ve been having a week of dairy experiments. It all started with a pint of heavy cream bought as a treat for guests who take their coffee light (I take mine black). They didn’t use much of it, so I decided to use the rest to make créme fraîche, that thick, tangy, cultured cream that’s far superior to sour cream in almost any use.

It’s as easy as can be: Heat a pint or so of cream until steam rises from the surface and bubbles form around the edge, stir in a few tablespoons of cultured buttermilk, pour it into a glass jar and let it sit on the counter, loosely covered, until it’s thick (roughly overnight). Refrigerated, créme fraîche keeps for a week to 10 days, and can be substituted for sour cream in virtually any use; it also makes a superior base for cream sauces, because the culturing prevents it from separating and curdling when heated. And it’s lovely on a biscuit, with just a dab of jam.

However, that meant buying buttermilk, which around here comes in nothing smaller than a quart container. I don’t drink buttermilk. I do bake with it (buttermilk biscuits are wonderful!), but I wasn’t in a baking mood.

So I decided to experiment, and that led me to ponder the wonders of milk and milk products, and how the same basic ingredients, treated differently, can produce remarkably different results.

I could write a treatise on the subject, but I’d rather point readers to Harold McGee and his fascinating book, “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.” First published in 1984 and revised in 2004, McGee’s is not a recipe book, but it’s the text for the cook who wants to know why and how food behaves the way it does, from “why do beans cause intestinal distress” to “why can’t I make a decent meringue on a stormy day?” And the very first chapter is all about milk.

In short, McGee tells us that how milk behaves in cooking is based on its complex chemistry of microscopic fat globules and protein bundles, along with dissolved salts and sugars, vitamins, minerals such as bone-building calcium, and other compounds suspended in the water that makes up most of the fluid. The most important components to cooking are fat, protein and milk sugar, or lactose. (I’m among the majority of adults who no longer produce the enzyme necessary to digest lactose, and am grateful for the over-the-counter tablets that allow me to enjoy dairy products without unfortunate consequences).

A serendipitous aspect of milk is its relationship with a friendly little bacteria known as Lactobacillus. The bacteria renders milk slightly acidic, which helps keep it from spoiling – but it can also be introduced to fresh milk to increase the acid level and create cultured milk products such as yogurt and fresh cheeses.

I’d like to say a word here for whole milk, and against the reduced-fat varieties that threaten to crowd it out of the supermarket dairy cases. Drink 2 percent or skim milk if you must, but understand that cooking with it will produce inferior results. The *behavior* of milk in cooking depends to a large degree on its fat component, and how the tiny globules of fat suspended in the liquid interact with other ingredients. Among other things, McGee points out, “Interactions between fat globules and milk proteins are … responsible for the remarkable tolerance of milk and cream to heat.” A sauce made with cream can be simmered and reduced to velvet smoothness; make the same sauce using low-fat milk and it’s likely to curdle and develop a grainy texture.

Enough chemistry. On with the buttermilk cooking. My little Donvier ice cream freezer has been sitting empty in the freezer for far too long, and the notion of buttermilk ice cream seemed appealing. I had a bunch of lemons in the fridge. So I tweaked my standard ice cream base recipe to come up with:

Buttermilk-Lemon Ice Cream

Ingredients:

• Juice and zest of one large, well-scrubbed lemon
• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 4 large egg yolks

Method:

In a small, non-reactive saucepan, combine lemon juice, half the sugar, and the finely grated lemon zest. Heat over medium-low heat and stir until sugar dissolves. Take off heat and allow to cool.

In a medium, heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the buttermilk, cream and remaining sugar. Heat until steam rises from the surface and tiny bubbles appear at the edge of the pan, stirring occasionally to keep the bottom of the pan from scorching. Remove from heat.

In a medium mixing bowl, whisk the eggs until well-blended. Keep whisking and slowly drizzle in about a cup of the hot milk mixture to warm the eggs. Pour yolk mixture back into the saucepan of milk, return it to the burner on medium-low heat, and stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture has thickened slightly.

Strain into a bowl and place in a bowl of ice water to cool. Once cooled, whisk in the lemon syrup and stir well. Transfer to ice cream maker and freeze according to manufacturer’s instructions.

Makes about a quart of tangy, lemony ice cream that reminds me of lemon cheesecake. I can’t wait for strawberry season so I can try this again topped with fresh local berries!

I still had just over two cups of buttermilk remaining. What to do, what to do? A friend recently described a method for making home-made ricotta cheese, using lemon juice to acidify the milk and transform it into curds and whey. Hm. Buttermilk is acidic, too. Google revealed several recipes for buttermilk ricotta. Oh, hell, yes.

This is so easy you’ll wonder why you never tried it before:

Buttermilk ricotta

Ingredients:

• Four parts whole milk, or part-skim milk plus cream. Do not used ultra-pasteurized milk products for this recipe; the prolonged heating of the pasteurization process will prevent it from making curds. Reduced-fat milk will curdle, but it won’t produce enough cheese to bother with.
• One part cultured buttermilk
• Pinch of salt

Method:

Have ready a large bowl and a strainer lined with dampened cheesecloth. (Have you tried to find cheesecloth in a supermarket lately? I couldn’t – so I used a Handiwipe ™ having run it through the washing machine to get rid of the fragrance the manufacturer insists on adding to the things. Worked like a charm.)

In a large, heavy bottomed saucepan, combine all ingredients and cook over moderate heat, stirring constantly until the milk begins to steam and curds start to form. Stop stirring, but continue heating until the mixture reaches 175F and has formed fine curds. Remove from heat and pour carefully into the cloth-lined strainer. Allow to drain until most of the whey is drained off, then gather up the curds in the cloth and hang it from the faucet, or from a spoon laid over a bowl, to continue draining until it’s as dry as you want it. Pack into a clean refrigerator container. Keeps as long as commercial ricotta, but tastes sooooo much better.

The amount this makes depends on a lot of variables – the fat content of the whole milk, the acidity of the buttermilk, and other factors that are hard to judge in advance. I used a pint of buttermilk to two quarts of whole milk, and got almost two cups of cheese – enough for the artichoke-and-pea lasagne I plan to make tomorrow night.

What about all that whey? I confess that I tossed it, but there’s still a good deal of food value there, and I’ve used it before to enrich home-made soups, or to substitute for water in bread recipes.

These recipes would be even better with fresh, whole, local milk. Midway Farms, on Highway 20 between Albany and Corvallis, sometimes carries local milk. I’ve also heard that several local farms offer fresh goat’s milk, which also makes a nice ricotta, but I haven’t investigated.

Four weeks till the Albany Farmers’ Market opens!

PSA: Small Farms Conference

It’s not too late to register for the Oregon Small Farms Conference tomorrow (Feb. 21) at the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis. Registration’s cheap (just $35/person on line, $40 at the door) and the conference features a great program of speakers and topics, including sessions on:

• Simple Ways to Promote Your Farm
• The Community Food Security Coalition
• Size Matters: Successful Markets
• Building a Sustainable Business
• Renewable Energy
• Simple Ways to Promote Your Farmers’ Market
• Secrets to Farmers’ Market Success
• Food Safety

You don’t have to be a farmer to register and benefit. The OSU Extension Service (yay, Extension) is also encouraging market managers and community food advocates to attend.

Registration information is here – although since it’s tomorrow, you might want to  calling the campus Extension office at (541) 737-2713 before registering on line, just to make sure they have room for you.

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Market opening countdown:

Just 10 weeks to go!

Albany Farmers Market: Saturday, April 18, 4th and Ellsworth, downtown Albany
Corvallis Saturday Market: Saturday, April 18, First and Jackson on the downtown riverfront
Corvallis Wednesday Market: Wednesday, April 22. NEW LOCATION: 2nd and B Streets, near the Marys River-Willamette River confluence downtown.
More information here

(Meanwhile, you can still hit the Winter Market on Feb. 28, March 14 and March 28 at the Benton County Fairgrounds … and the Midway Farms farmstand on Highway 20 between Albany and Corvallis is open year-round.)