From Lisa Barnes

What did you do last New Year’s with small children and no babysitter?  We had a family party to celebrate the New Year on East Coast time. Although you can use Australian time, or any other time that suits your needs and bedtime. We were hoping to celebrate with friends and their kids, however we were getting over the flu and didn’t want to spread the “cheer”.

However the good thing about kids (at least little ones) is that they really don’t know much about time.  So blowing a noisemaker and putting on silly hats at 8:30 p.m. works for them.  This can be effective for any celebration or get together with little ones.  A few festive foods and decorations and it doesn’t matter what time it is. Plan for all ages to be awake and be able to celebrate with sparkling drinks and party snack foods for your next celebration. With Tivo and other recording devices the New Year’s Eve ball drop can happen anytime – day or night (or more than once a year).

Our menu (recipes below) was fun because we ate our New Year’s dinner with our fingers – like a real h’ors d’ouvre party.  Some other easy and kid fun “bites” include threading things on toothpicks like cut sausage (serve with mustard or ketchup dip of course), or grilled shrimp or chicken pieces.  Happy 2012!

Organic Juice Sparkler

This is a fun and healthy way for children to join in on a fancy toast with a sparkling drink of their own. This recipe is really simple and can be made with any kind of fresh, organic juice such as orange, pear, or apple. At holiday time I like pomegranate juice because of the bright and festive color. Pomegranates are a rich source of antioxidants and flavonoids. The juice can be found year round in the fresh refrigerated juice section of most supermarkets.

Makes 1 cup

¾ cup sparkling mineral water
¼ cup fresh pomegranate juice

Combine water and juice in a glass.

Variation More…

From GENE LOGSDON

Yes. I was reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer the other day when I came across the most intriguing photograph. It was of a dark-skinned woman in colorful clothing with a huge basket of fresh vegetables balanced on her head. Behind her was a large, immaculately neat and verdant garden. Probably someplace in Africa, I thought, but why on the front page of an American newspaper? Then I did a double-take. The caption under the picture said the locale was near downtown Cleveland, and the woman in the picture was a Clevelander from Burundi, Veronika Inabigo, who works with the Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program. REAP helps refugees adjust to new communities. These refugees were doing what they did in their homeland, that is raise their own food. Their example was helping native Clevelanders understand that they too can gain food independence, even in the city.

I think this is good news, good tidings of great joy this Christmas. All over our cities, vacant lots and deteriorating residential areas are being returned to food production and verdant landscapes. There are the naysayers who worry that some of this soil might be tainted with too much lead or other contaminants, but tests can easily find that out. Although it is rarely pointed out, much of this soil is fairly pristine, not ever having been farmed and not even disturbed except right around cellar excavations. Much of this land went from forest to city with little disturbance except for lawns and landscaping. More…

From DEBRA DANIELS-ZELLER

One of the best things about baking for the holiday season is that so many of the ingredients can be sourced locally.  But that wasn’t always true. Five years ago at farmers’ markets, eggs were scarce, butter was hard to find, and freshly ground flour was just a pipedream.

With the increasing demand for everything local and with more farms diversifying, growing everything from seed crops and test trials for WSU, to quirky crops that chefs love, we’re seeing crops that haven’t been grown in the Northwest for decades.

One of those crops is wheat. But mention wheat and many people conjure images of Montana or even the Palouse in eastern Washington.  You don’t usually think of the Olympic Peninsula.

That’s changing thanks to WSU extension center and farmers like Nash Huber in Sequim who have been growing test trials of wheat to determine the varieties of wheat that grow best here.

Nash Huber’s Organic Produce

Sequim lies in a rain shadow and it’s possibly one of the best places to raise wheat west of the Cascades. And Nash’s Organic Produce has been growing the whole-meal-deal—from row crops, apples, and berries, to eggs and pork, beans and grains.

Patty McManus-Huber, Nash’s wife, recently told me “What Nash really wants is to have a farm like the one he grew up on in Illinois.” More…

Westcott Bay

From GREG ATKINSON

Start with  the best ingredients and you can’t go wrong. But what are the best ingredients and why are they the best? More often than not, the best ingredients are the ones that are grown nearby, harvested at their peak, and eaten within a reasonable distance from their source. Certainly that’s true here in the Northwest. We’re very fortunate. Our region is home to some of the most compelling native ingredients found anywhere in the world, and the local climate supports a wide variety of things from far away. The harvest season is long, and the yiels are abundant.

The best ingredients may also be defined by a kind of alchemy that comes with familiarity. As we eat and cook with the plants and animals that thrive all around us, our own experience with these ingredients adds to their inherent value. Stopping at the same farm stand for raspberries or fresh corn first as a young couple, then with kids in the car, lends a ritual significance to the ordinary rhythm of the season. Visiting the same mushroom patch year after year, or fishing from the same special spot on a mountain stream, gives each year’s harvest a kind of poignancy, and each summer’s catch a kind of relevance that would never come to the one-time forager or the casual diner. Ingredients become essential when they link us to the rest of our lives.

The first time I tasted a pacific oyster, it made me long for the oysters of my childhood, the Apalachicola oysters of the Gulf Coast where I came to know the taste of the sea. I could hardly appreciate the local oyster for what it was, because I was so keenly aware of what it wasn’t. Now, after two decades of tasting Northwest oysters, I appreciate them more. Each one reminds me of a place, a time, a particular occasion. How much more local oysters mean to me now than they did when I brought that first quivering mollusk to my mouth! More…

From GENE LOGSDON

I used to think a lot about starting a Christmas tree farm. Hilly cheaper land could be used and I had some, machinery investment would be low, or so I thought, and the customer would maybe do the work of harvesting.

What stopped me was what I took to be the insane human desire for the “perfect” tree. Every true American is convinced that a Christmas tree must be shaped in a perfect, pyramidal form and so thick with foliage that a flea can’t fly through it. To prune an evergreen tree to this kind of perfection requires hours of hand trimming, often in the heat of the summer. It also requires sprays to combat bugs and sometimes fungal disease, and almost constant mowing around the trees. Instead of a natural grove, a Christmas tree plantation is almost as environmentally hazardous as a corn field.

Then there is consumer fickleness to deal with. Right now in our area, everyone seems to think that the perfect tree is a Canaan fir, which I never heard of until a few years ago. If I started a tree farm now and planted Canaan firs, how do I know but what they’d be out of style by the time I shaved and groomed them to the proper perfection. A blue spruce will grow to near perfection without trimming, but no sir, most of the American public does not, will not, buy a blue spruce. Beats me. (more…)