Whole Green Love

Rhubarb is one of those foods that people usually love or hate. I grew up eating it raw, straight out of the garden. I know. A little extreme, seeing as most people pair it with a sweet fruit in a baking dish, but we enjoyed the straight up version just as well. We’d use a paring knife to peel the fibrous skin off the outside and then we’d dip it into a sprinkling of salt on a plate.  It was juicy, crunchy, mouth puckering goodness. It was a routine my mom and I had, so as you can imagine I have a special fondness for this tart treat.

Every time Spring rolls around I start thinking about rhubarb…I know, the life of a foodie, right? I don’t have a garden with this lovely plant anymore, so I headed straight to the co-op. Sure enough they had some beautiful stalks ready to go. I was going to be meeting up with Laura for some blogging fun and thought a strawberry rhubarb crumble would be a great spring treat for our get together.

When your crumble is done it will be golden brown and the fruit will be bubbly and roasted. We served ours with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I have to say, you really should serve it with ice cream to get the full affect. This treat is sweet, tart, creamy, and crunchy…a whole flavor explosion with every bite. We dug right into our dish straight from the oven, but it probably would have been best to let it cool just a bit so the liquid can thicken up a bit. The strawberries made it a little juicy, which actually was great seeing that it created a “sauce” for the ice cream. I may explore next time with using a little arrowroot to thicken it up just a little more. If you plan on having any left over, be sure to throw it back in the oven before serving so the crumble can crunch up again. Also, make sure to read your labels! We were spoofed by a local ice cream company and found carrageenan on their ingredient list! We couldn’t believe our eyes!

I hope you enjoy this tasty Spring treat! What to you use your rhubarb in? I’m looking forward to using it in more dishes.

I was hitting up Trader Joe’s the other week and I came across these cute little guys.

Kumquats.

I’d never had them before. They were too cute to pass up. I often come across different foods that I haven’t tried before (this usually happens at the farmers’ market) and I must buy them to experiment.

These little cutie kumquats are seriously sour though! They are not a snack food, like I was hoping they would be. I was hoping I could give them to Lyla to try something different than the clementines she’s obsessed with. Too too sour!

So when you don’t know how to eat a food, turn it into an alcoholic beverage. Duh.

Kumquat Lime Margaritas

Serves 4

1 pint of kumquats, cut in half and seeded

½ cup water (or enough water to get your blender going)

1/2 – 3/4 cup tequila

8 oz lime simple syrup (see recipe below)

8 oz club soda

Ice

Course salt for the glass rims

Combine kumquats and water in a blender (or use your immersion blender) and blend until smooth. Pour through a fine mesh strainer to remove the pulp. Set aside.

Combine the tequila and simple syrup in a pourable container.

Rim each glass with salt and add a small handful of ice to each glass. Scoop 3 tablespoons of kumquat puree into each glass. Divide the tequila mixture between all glasses. Pour about 2 oz of club soda into each glass. Stir to combine.

Lime simple syrup:

¼ cup water

½ cup cane sugar

The juice of 3 limes

1 tsp lime zest (optional, for a little extra zest. Ha! Get it? Zest?)

Combine water, sugar, and lime juice in a small saucepan on the stove. Heat and stir often over medium high heat until the mixture boils. Stir to dissolve the sugar and then remove from heat to cool. Add in the zest after the mixture has cooled.

This margarita recipe would be fabulous with a different fruit puree too! Kumquats may be hard to find and I’ll be honest, they aren’t the quickest fruit to prepare for a puree with the cutting and de-seeding. This margarita would be equally as delicious with strawberry or mango as well. Give some other flavors a try!

Do you have a favorite margarita recipe?

I am a dip fanatic. Some people have more of a sweet tooth, which don’t get me wrong, I do have that tooth as well, but most of the time I’ll opt for a savory and salty treat. That being said, I’ve always had to control myself around a bowl of dip. Once you get started it can be a challenge to stop! Whether it’s crispy crudité or crunchy potato chips with a sprinkle of sea salt, you can’t beat dunking them in to a rich and creamy homemade dip. This recipe that I threw together doesn’t have too much prep and you’ll have yourself an awesome homemade dip or dressing afterwards.

Roasted Garlic & Parmesan Dip

1 head of garlic, roasted

½ c sour cream

½ c mayo

½ tsp Worcestershire

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tbsp fresh parsley, minced

½ stem of green onion, finely minced (reserve the green ends for garnish)

¼ c Parmesan cheese

¼ c buttermilk

Salt & pepper to taste

The longest process in this recipe is roasting your garlic, but if it’s pre-roasted you’ll have your dip ready in no time! Preheat your oven to 350°F. Take the whole head of garlic and on the wide flatter end of it, make one thin slice off the end exposing the garlic cloves inside. Place it face down on top of a small pat of butter and roast in your oven for about 40 minutes. Your house will smell so fabulous afterwards and you’ll have to refrain from eating all of the delicious garlic you just roasted.

Squeeze your soft, roasted garlic cloves out onto a cutting board. Cut into small bite sized pieces so it can be evenly distributed throughout the dip. Scrape your garlic into a medium sized mixing bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix well so all of the ingredients are able to marry well. At this point I transfer it to a sealable glass dish for easy storing in the fridge.

Your dip will taste great the first day you make it, but will taste even better the next day, after it has had time to develop a nice full flavor. This dip is perfect to keep around to serve with crudité, potato or sweet potato chips, chicken strips or wings, hamburgers or homemade veggie burgers…the list goes on. You can always add just a little more buttermilk to thin it out for a nice, pourable dressing. It’s great on top of a big fresh salad that is loaded with cut up veggies, hard-boiled eggs, and nuts.

I like making this dip instead of buy dips or dressings from the store. You have control of the quality of ingredients you are putting in it, and don’t have to worry about any hidden ingredients that might be trying to sneak into your home. I’ve found that this lasts for a week in the fridge, I haven’t tried it longer only because it is usually gone by that time!

Any easy, homemade dip recipes that you serve your family?

We are excited to share with you our first guest post! Woot Woot! Chris Michael from Bright Agrotech discusses his company’s sweet produce growing systems. It’s so cool to hear about new and innovative ways people are accessing fresh and healthy produce. We want to thank Chris for sharing this with us! We hope you learn something new!

“Towards a Brighter Future of Food”

Chris Michael

It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of food in this country… But we are!

We’re growing food that feeds our local community and we’re doing it vertically, sustainably, and profitably!

The Bad News:

Let’s face it. When we look at the state of our agriculture system today, it can be very disheartening. Each day we’re bombarded by headlines about E-Coli, Listeria, and other food-borne illness outbreaks from tainted irrigation water or poor quality processing facilities.

We have no idea what’s really sprayed on the fields and how these pesticides and herbicides affect the health of our families and our environment.

It’s said the average American dinner travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to plate. Studies are also showing that our food loses nutrients as soon as they’re picked, plucked, or harvested from the fields.

With that in mind, how on earth are we supposed to get the vital nutrients, vitamins, and nutrients that we’re trying to glean from eating “healthy foods?”

And, when we add in increasing urban sprawl, loss of precious topsoil, and a rapidly aging farmer population, things look pretty bleak, right?

But, in spite of all this gloom and doom…  

We’re hopeful and excited.

The Good News:

At Bright Agrotech, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges of being in agriculture today. We’ve seen the farms of our family and friends suffer from drought and crippling debt. Doing research at the University of Wyoming, our Co-Founder and CEO Nate Storey, Ph.D wanted to invent a more efficient method of growing healthier, more nutritious food that also helps farmers live better.

Before you write us off as deviant pot-peddlers, hear us out!

While it has an unfortunate stigma, hydroponics merely substitutes soil nutrients for a more potent, concentrated nutrient solution mixed with water. It’s WAY more efficient at giving your plants what they need to grow up big and strong, which increases the productivity of your farm or garden.

The type of hydroponics we use is called aquaponics.

This method of growing food is a more organic type that simply replaces a cleverly concocted nutrient fertilizer solution with fish!

That’s right, we use fish to grow [lots] of food!

Aquaponics is by no means a new concept. In fact. it’s been around for a long time. As cool as it is though, it’s having a difficult time transitioning from a backyard hobby to an economically sustainable commercial venture. Until now.

Practical Vertical Farming

You read that right. We’ve developed some kick ass vertical farming technology that provides some serious value across all three levels of food production and distribution (i.e. farmer, grocer, customer)!

The ZipGrow^TM Tower, our patented vertical farming tower that’s enabling a fresher food future, is the product of seven years of rigorous academic research.

Not only does it allow us to see some serious yields in our aquaponic greenhouse (Catch a video tour here!), we’ve designed it to transport live to market!

In the not too distant future you could be going to the store to cut the freshest produce from living walls.

Live Sales Model

About 60% of a farmer’s costs come from harvest, post-harvest labor, and packaging. Nate’s research confronted this massive cost head on and sought to eliminate it. Here in Laramie, we grow our towers and drive them a mile to the local grocer in which we have a specially designed and patented living green wall. The customer simply clips exactly what they need (helping to drastically reduce post-consumer waste), bag it themselves and take it to the checkout counter to be weighed and purchased. That means fresher food, more taste and better nutrients for the customer and the customer’s family!

Healthier food grown in YOUR KITCHEN

As you can see, we’ve been realizing the benefits of vertical farming for a few years now and we’re going even one step past the living green wall. We believe that growing and harvesting is so innately human that we want everyone to have the opportunity to grow healthier, more nutrient-dense food in their homes.

The Spring is our home version of our innovative vertical farming system that consists of everything you need to plant and grow delicious food in your home without taking up much space. You may have seen our Kickstarter project that we launched a few months back and we’re now in the final steps of bringing it to life.

But there’s more…

The coolest part about The Spring is that not only does it allow anyone to simply grow food in their kitchens and patios, it also enables an even fresher farming distribution model. Instead of your farmer taking their towers of living produce to the local grocer, they now take it directly to your home (like a milkman used to do!). To learn more about that, see our “Bright Future of Food” here!

The Future of Food

Relax! Do yourself a favor and turn off the evening news declaring another food-borne illness contamination. Put down the newspaper and the headlines about the skyrocketing price of corn.

The future of food isn’t all doom and gloom.

That said, it is a future waiting to be enacted and adopted by those who see the bigger picture. The fresh food revolution isn’t going to magically appear, sadly. We need advocates and early adopters with that innovative eye constantly looking out for the health of their families and their natural world.

We hope you’ll help us spread this message of hope to your friends, family, local Co-Op, or grocery store and demand healthier, locally-grown, nutritious food!

- Chris Michael

If you want to learn more about Bright Agrotech feel free to click on the links below! We hope you find yourself in your garden this upcoming growing season, whether it’s horizontal or vertical!

Find more from Bright Agrotech:

Website: www.brightagrotech.com

Blog: www.verticalfoodblog.com

YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/user/BrightAgrotechLLC

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrightAgrotech

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrightAgrotech

I made an executive decision for our family this week. Best decision I’ve ever made. Thursdays from here on out will be Mediterranean Night. What does this mean? This means we will eat things like nuts, delicious crusty bread with olive oil, cheese, red wine (not for Lyla), olives, and cut up veggies like colorful peppers and slices of tomatoes in the summertime, and fresh or dried fruit.

I should clarify. There are plenty of wonderful cooked and prepared dishes that are a part of a Mediterranean way of eating, like seafood, certain grains, meat, and cooked vegetables. I’m looking to accomplish two things with our new Thursday theme night: I want (1) unprocessed foods (2) that do not require any cooking. Plus, Thursday means it’s almost Friday, which calls for a glass of wine. HELLO! That’s why I didn’t make it Mediterranean Monday (which sounds cooler), but I don’t always feel like I’ve earned a glass of wine yet on a Monday. By Thursday, it’s easy to feel burned out and not want to cook anything.

I don’t need a bunch of research and studies to help me figure out what I like about a Mediterranean diet. It’s delicious, it’s unprocessed, it includes plenty of yummy fat, and it includes some great fruits and veggies. Many people put their focus on the olive oil as the reason people eating a Mediterranean diet are a healthy bunch, but wait a second. A New England Journal of Medicine study from 2003 found that it could be the synergy between all of the food and not just the olive oil that promotes optimal health.

I do most of our grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, which is the perfect place to shop for new specialty cheeses. Plus, their wine section. Totally fab.

Here is what our Mediterranean Thursday looked like: red wine, mixed nuts, kalamata olives, crackers, bake Brie topped with homemade raspberry jam, sourdough bread, and olive oil. Such a relaxing and satisfying meal. And when I say relaxed, I mean buzzed from the red wine. Just kidding. Sort of. It was actually a great pre-workout meal. I got in a nice run after I let it all digest a bit.

Do you and your family have any type of themed foodie nights at your house?