From Rosalind Creasy

Early Americans welcomed the greens of spring, either from the garden or growing wild, such as dandelions and violets (Viola Odorata).

6 small organic eggs
8 cups lightly packed greens such as spinach, dandelions, mâche, or violet leaves*
1/3 pound thick-sliced bacon, cut in 1-inch pieces
1 small onion, minced
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon cornstarch
1/4 cup cider vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper

Place the eggs in a saucepan of cold water bring to a boil, and immediately remove from heat. Let the eggs sit for 15 minutes, drain the water from the saucepan, then run cold water over the eggs. Let them cool, and then peel them and set them aside.

Wash the greens well and dry them in a salad spinner. Break leaves into bite-size pieces and refrigerate.

In a large pan, sauté the bacon until crisp. Drain the bacon on a paper towel. Remove all but 1/4 cup of bacon drippings from the pan. Over medium heat sauté the onion until transparent, about 5 minutes.

In a small bowl, blend together the sugar, mustard, and cornstarch. Add the vinegar and 2/3 cup water and whisk together. Add the mixture to the onion and blend, cooking over low heat for 1 minute, until it starts to thicken.

Cut the eggs in half. On four salad plates equally divide the greens to form a bed. Drizzle a quarter of the still-warm dressing on each plate. Garnish with the bacon pieces and 3 egg halves. Grind pepper on top and serve.

Serves 4.
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See also Jesse’s Bitter Green and Egg Salad Recipe
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*Edible Flower Disclaimer
Rosalind Creasy is author of Rosalind Creasy’s Recipes From The Garden: 200 Exciting Recipes from the Author of the Complete Book of Edible Landscaping.
Image Credit: Rosalind Creasy
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From Jeff Cox

It’s vitally important to know your growers and suppliers. Here are several correlates if you want truly great-tasting, fresh food. Like all generalizations, there are exceptions, but for the most part these rules hold true:

The Smaller the Farm, the Better the Food
Chances are that at small family farms, more care will be taken with the produce, the meat and milk animals, and the farm itself. At very large factory farms, produce and animals are commodities. There’s a machine designed expressly to machine-harvest every crop. Things are done by a schedule, including the application of agrichemicals. Small farmers, on the other hand, are much less regimented. They get “up close and personal” with their crops and animals. Their chickens are more likely to live in a pen by a henhouse, eat vegetable scraps and insects they find by scratching in the soil, and enjoy their lives than to live crammed together into cages under round-the-clock lights like agribusiness chickens. Which eggs do you think make the best omelets?

The Closer the Farm to Your Table, the Better the Food
The more local the food, the better, for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s going to be fresh and in season; it’s going to exhibit all the flavor it’s capable of. Because it doesn’t have to sit in trucks and railcars and on supermarket shelves for weeks, it can be one of those delicious but fragile varieties that doesn’t ship well. It can be picked ripe, instead of harvested hard and green and then gassed into obtaining color (but not flavor) on the long journey to the supermarket.

Also, the shorter the distance from the farm to your table, or at least to the market, the greater the chance you’ll meet the person who actually grew the food. You’ll be able to ask him or her questions about how the food is grown.

The Smaller and Closer the Farm, the Better the Effect on the Environment
There are environmental benefits to shortening those supply lines: Less fuel is used in transporting and storing the food. And local small farmers tend to be organic because they’re farming their own land, and they don’t want to expose themselves and their families to noxious chemicals. They also tend to be your neighbors and can be held accountable for their practices by their fellow citizens. If your neighborhood dairy is polluting the local creek by spreading raw manure on frozen soil (which allows it to run off into the local watersheds), you can do something about it. If your milk comes from cows penned on a thousand acres a thousand miles away, you won’t even know about its environmental problems.

Small farmers who own their own land also have a deep relationship with that land and a regard for it. They know where the pheasants nest and may decide not to plow there during those times of year when the birds are raising their young. They can see the effects of their husbandry on the ecology of the natural world and the farm world as these worlds intertwine and affect one another. Factory farms tend to plow every inch that can be plowed, from fencerow to fencerow, without regard for the niceties of nature. Small farmers can be held accountable if there’s something wrong with their produce. If there’s something wrong with the crops from factory farms, and you try to talk to the person responsible, you’ll be passed up the ladder of command until you reach someone who’s either unavailable or surrounded by platoons of PR people to smooth-talk you or lawyers to sue you if you get too close.

The Shorter the Time from Harvest to Eating, the Better the Food
Although you may want to age your beef, cheese, and wine, and hang your game, most foods taste best and have the most nutrients when they’re just picked or freshly killed. They taste better and have the most nutrients when it is allowed to develop fully on the plant it grows on. If you could graph the flavor development of a tree-ripened peach on a bell curve, the very highest point of the curve would be the moment it’s picked dead-ripe from the tree. If that moment closely coincides with the moment you bite into it, well, it doesn’t get any better than that. This doesn’t hold true for every food. But we all know from experience that vine-ripened tomatoes taste better than supermarket tomatoes, and people who plant tomatoes in their gardens know that a tomato picked ripe and eaten on the spot tastes even better than a vine-ripened tomato from the store. Consumers put a premium on freshly picked corn because the moment an ear is snapped off the stalk, it begins to lose sweetness and flavor.

Enzymes are the catalytic agents in fruits and vegetables responsible for these swift changes in flavor after picking. But enzymes are evanescent molecules without a great deal of persistence, especially after their work is done. One of the reasons fresh food tastes so bright and complex compared to food that’s been trucked around for many days is the presence of enzymes, phenolis, and other plant substances that will wither away with every passing hour.

One of the best ways to shorten the distance and time from the farm to your table is to visit local pick-your-own operations. In Connecticut, a typical northeastern state, about 30 percent of the state’s fruit and vegetable growers have pick-your-own plots. The crops from these plots are usually sold at reduced prices because the farmer doesn’t have the expense of picking the crop. Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a gradual move by small farmers away from sales to wholesalers, who offer low prices for their crops, to direct-to-consumer marketing, where the growers get a fairer price (although higher for you, the consumer). A recent survey by the Connecticut Department of Agriculture identified about 560 state growers who market their produce through farm showrooms and roadside stands.

Visit PickYourOwn.org for a list of such farms in every state.
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Organic Radish Salsa Recipe

Makes about 1½ cups

The radish adds a different kind pf pungency to the peppery heat of a typical salsa. It also adds a nice crunch and color when red radishes are young and crisp.

Use for a topping for chicken, pork, or fish tacos; as an addition to meat, rice, and beans in burritos; or eat with chips.

½ cup finely diced organic radishes
½ cup seeded and diced ripe organic plum tomato (1 large tomato)
¼ cup finely chopped scallions (white parts only)
1 teaspoon minced garlic
2 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice
1 teaspoon minced jalapeño or serrano pepper
2 tablespoons roughly chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Gently stir all ingredients together in a serving bowl.
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See also Small Farms Best Chance Of Feeding The World
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Jeff Cox is author of The Organic Cook’s Bible and The Organic Food Shopper’s Guide and lives in Sonoma County, California.
Image Credit: © Milosluz | Dreamstime.com
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From Greg Atkinson

Seattle’s “culinary diva,” Kathy Casey, introduced me to these tasty, bite-sized morsels, which she discovered in an old issue of Sunset magazine, improved, and appropriated as her own. Once I became aware of them, I started seeing olive poppers everywhere. They can be made with all different sorts of olives and all different sorts of cheese. I like them best with a snappy cheddar from Oregon and a soft green olive from California. After making them for large parties, sometimes hundreds at a time, I’ve found a couple of timesavers. First, press the dough into the shape of a log and cut it into exactly the number of rounds you need to wrap your olives. To make short work of the wrapping job, use the thumb of one hand to press each round of dough into a flat pancake in the palm of the opposite hand, and then wrap the dough “pancake” around an olive.

Makes about 24 poppers

1 cup (4 ounces) finely grated organic sharp Tillamook cheddar cheese
2 tablespoons organic olive oil
1/2 cup sifted organic unbleached white flour
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
24 medium to large organic green olives, pitted

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and line a baking sheet with baker’s parchment

2. In a food processor, or in a medium mixing bowl with a fork, combine the cheese and olive oil, then stir in the flour and smoked paprika.

3. Shape 1 heaping tablespoonful of dough around each olive, covering it well and shaping the dough into a ball.

4. Place the balls on the prepared baking sheet and bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Serve hot.
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Greg Atkinson is author of West Coast Cooking and lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
© Copyright Greg Atkinson
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