Aloha and happy eats this week. This week we’re featuring a new farm to our bag from Hawaii Kai, Otsuji Farm!
In this week’s bag we have:
Try out these recipes!!
Roasted Beets & Sauteed Beet Tops: Thats right, you can use every part of the beet!
Hey Oahu Fresh Members! Here’s a great event this weekend you may be interested in attending. Put on by Island Foodscaping, as part of Kanu’s Eat Local Challenge, you can come join in on Sunday, September 11th from 2:30-5pm to learn everything about Urban Farming, from how to design a foodscape, composting, food forests and trial and errors from your fellow Kanu members! All ages welcome $10 at the door, keiki are FREE. Please go to the events page (http://islandfoodscaping.com/events) to sign up and you will be sent directions to the workshop in Kahala! More information is also available on the Kanu events website.
aloha and thank you for supporting local!!
OK, we covered the very (very) basics of knives in our first post. But professional chefs take knives to a whole ‘nother level. Here’s a New Yorker piece about a chef who got a custom-made knife case from Louis Vuitton. (On a side note, who knew there was such a thing as a trunk that unfolds into a shower?? Very French indeed.)
Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the airport security scanner, and an alarm started beeping. “Oh,†Ripert recalled thinking. “My knives.†In his bag was a collection of knives that he’d used at the benefit—paring knives, and long fish knives that resemble machetes. Ripert tried to explain; the guards looked at him suspiciously. Fortunately, he was travelling with another chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, who produced a copy of the Washington Post with a photograph of the chefs at the benefit. “We all laughed, and that was it,†he said.
This was, obviously, before September 11, 2001. Now, Ripert said, he wouldn’t dare bring his knives in his carry-on. But he still has to travel. “Chefs don’t share their knives,†he said. “It’s part of the ABC of being a chef.†He usually folds them between layers of clothes and packs them in his suitcase. Ripert explained all this one day last fall in the Louis Vuitton store on East Fifty-seventh Street, where he’d come to work out the details for a custom-made knife suitcase. Louis Vuitton has a history of making special-order trunks: there was a trunk that transforms into a shower, and an iPod trunk commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld; a British lord had a trunk made for his special rubber ducky. Not long ago, Ripert said, he’d been summoned to the Vuitton store for a birthday party that Alicia Keys was throwing for her future husband, the hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz. She’d bought him a “fantastically magical†trunk that unfolds into a bed. Ripert cooked dinner for the guests in the store, on a rented stove, and then Ferraris ferried everyone to an after-party at the Guggenheim.
We found this list and thought it was pretty nifty. Some of the tips are common knowledge and some we’d never heard of before, but we wanted to share. We’re nice like that.
Burned a pot of rice?
Just place a piece of white bread on top of the rice for 5-10 minutes to draw out the burned flavor. Be careful not to scrape the burned pieces off of the bottom of the pan when serving the rice.
To keep potatoes from budding in the bag, put an apple in with them.
When making a soup, sauce, or casserole that ends up too fatty or greasy, drop in an ice cube.
The ice will attract the fat, which you can then scoop out.
Don’t store your bananas in a bunch or in a fruit bowl with other fruits.
Separate your bananas and place each in a different location. Bananas release gases which cause fruits (including other bananas) to ripen quickly. Separating them will keep them fresh longer.
If you manage to have some leftover wine at the end of the evening, freeze it in ice cube trays for easy addition to soups and sauces in the future.
You’ve probably noticed a new item in your O‘ahu Fresh grocery bag: Mushrooms. And maybe you were wondering where they came from and who grows them. Well then, let us tell you a little bit about Small Kine Farm in Waimanalo.
Small Kine Farm is run by Fung Yang, who also owns/operates Green Glove Recycling (formerly Oahu Community Recycling). While sorting through his clients’ trash, he noticed that they were throwing out more than glass, plastics and paper. They were getting rid of a lot of organic waste. This led Yang to composting and composting eventually led to…mushrooms.
All of his mushrooms grow in compost that goes through a pasteurization process to make sure it is “clean” and to kill off any insects or pest fungi that might have been in the compost. The entire process, from preparing the compost to harvesting the mushrooms, takes several months. That’s the very condensed version of mushroom farming; there is a longer version for those who are really interested.
Yang started growing mushrooms about four years ago, and was recently awarded a grant to study the feasibility of mushroom farming on Oahu. He’s in the very early stages of mushroom farming, but has big plans for the future, plans that will hopefully include expanding his mushroom farm to more than double its size in the next few years.
His latest harvest yielded about 800 pounds of crimini/portabello mushrooms. That sounds like a lot, but he estimates that on Oahu, more than a million tons of mushrooms are imported annually.
In addition to your Oahu Fresh grocery bags, you can find Yang’s mushrooms in dishes being served at Town Restaurant, 12th Ave Grill and the Turtle Bay Resort.
Mushroom Tips
• Store your mushrooms in a cool, dry place. Before refrigerating them, put them in a paper bag. Plastic bags attract moisture, which can leave your mushrooms mushy.
• Mushroom stems, which are firmer than the caps, can be sliced lengthwise and grilled or roasted.
• Cooked mushrooms can be frozen and will keep for several months. Place in a freezer container or bag, excluding as much air as possible (uncooked mushrooms don’t freeze well).
Psst….Want to learn even more about mushrooms? There’s the Mushroom Council (hint: they have a page of tasty mushroom recipes) and the American Mushroom Institute.
