Posts Tagged Idaho
City Gardens 2012 CSA Details
Posted by castironidaho in Farm and Garden on November 21, 2011
City Gardens 2012 CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)
10 week season starting in late April ending around 4th of July
$250 subscription = $25 a week
Veggie pick-up Tuesday or Thursday from 4:30pm to 6pm at 3878 N. Adams
$50 deposit secures your share. Total due March 1st.
There are only 20 shares available and they fill up fast.
Let me know if you want to pick up on Tuesday or Thursday when you send your check. Delivery can be arranged for $50 a season.
City Gardens 2012 CSA will focus on the early season vegetables like lettuce, garlic, radishes, kale, cabbage, carrots, peas, beets, cilantro, carrots, spinach, new potatoes, basil, chard, turnips, spring onions… Guaranteed 8 to 10 items a week! We are going to start as early as possible (most likely the last week in April). I am also looking at doing a Fall CSA and the details for that will be forthcoming… I want to help extend the local food season by offering options in parts of the year most gardeners aren’t harvesting.
For the traditional summer powerhouses like tomatoes and beans, I hope you grow a garden. If growing your own isn’t your thing, Global Gardens has offered to pick up CSA members at the end of the City Gardens season, and will continue through September. With this option you will get 10 weeks of the famous City Gardens’ greens and 10 weeks of the bounty of the summer crops from Global Gardens. Global Gardens’ 10 week shares will also be $250. And if you want to continue the fresh vegetables into winter, you can come back to City Gardens for the Fall CSA.
If you need anything else don’t hesitate to contact me, Farmer Marty.
208-713-1675
Make checks payable to:
City Gardens
3878 N. Adams Garden City, ID 83714
Marty Camberlango
Finding food in the forest; Morels pt 2.
Posted by castironidaho in Foraged Foods, Hunting and Fishing, Recipes on June 10, 2011
Puff Balls!
We slowly crept down the mountain road searching the woods for our prey. Suddenly Alex screams out “Puff balls!” and I slam on the brakes. Before the car even comes to a stop the passenger door swings open. Alex is pulling his knife from his pocket before his feet hit the ground and he quickly charges the little white balls on the side of the road. I’m shocked at how similar mushroom hunting is to hunting game, only thing missing is the gun barrel resting on the floor board (at the ready). We even got the car stuck (twice) in a snow bank. Alex calls his fellow mushroom foragers mushroom nerds. Despite all the similarities of hunting and mushroom hunting, I can’t imagine Randy calling us all game geeks in elk camp.
Katie and I had another successful mushroom trip. Not as fruitful as Alex, but who’s counting mushrooms? Here’s what we made with our find.
Dexter Roast Beef with Morel Mushroom Gravy.
Like all good meat, the Dexter Beef was given to us by a really cool couple that raises this beautiful heritage bovine in Dry Creek about a mile from my Hill Rd. garden. Katie and I met the herd just as the calves were arriving. What a wonderful operation.
I cooked the roast “slow and low” in a enamel cast iron dutch oven like my mother and grandmother suggested.
250 degrees for 3 and 1/2 hours.
Salt, Pepper and fresh thyme. 1 halved onion.
At 2 hours remove onion and thyme sprigs. Drain drippings into a bowl. Let cool.
The Dextor Beef had no fat to spoon from the top!
Add beets, carrots and greens to pot roast to cook for the last hour.
In heated skillet melt butter and add morels. Salt, Pepper and garlic. Cook down until mushrooms are good and cooked and 1/2 the liquid is cooked off. Add a pinch of flour and roast drippings. Cook down until thick. Add a bit of crushed red pepper if you like.
How to Find Wild Morel Mushrooms
Posted by castironidaho in Foraged Foods on June 5, 2011
As a non-native Idahoan, I often don’t know whether to love or hate Idaho. This past memorial day weekend dawned rainy, nasty, cold, about 34 degrees or so. The rest of the country was probably basking in glorious sunlight, kicking off summer with barbecues and such, while we were still enjoying six more weeks of winter.
Marty and I were trying to salvage what we could of our Saturday, pulling some weeds in the garden, when our friend Alex Hartman showed up with a gift — fresh morel mushrooms, harvested from the forests of Idaho. Turns out that cold, dank, rainy springs are just what the morels love! With a few insider tips from Alex, we set off on our virgin morel hunting expedition the next day.
For the mushroom virgin, and/or non-Idahoan, hunting wild mushrooms is a mystical operation, shrouded in secrecy. I’ve heard stories of people taking people blindfolded into the forest, so they won’t be able to reveal a favorite morel hunting spot. Well, we found them easily enough, so let me fill you in on some basics.
Alex basically told us to go north on one of several roads out of Boise into the mountains, no higher than 4000 feet at this point in the season. As the weather warms, you’ll be able to find mushrooms at higher elevations. From another mushroom hunting expedition with Alex last summer, for porcinis, I remembered that we’d found most of the mushrooms on shady forest floors with little undergrowth. It would be hard to find them amongst too much underbrush anyway, so I headed for a shady, heavily canopied pine grove with its dark, rich soil mostly visible beneath my feet, and searched the ground for anything lighter in color than the surrounding soil. It wasn’t long before our first morel popped out at me!
Morels on the forest floor!
Once we’d found the first one, lots more popped into sight in the same area. Your eyes will begin to tune into the mushrooms and where you first didn’t see anything will now be mushrooms. We notice that the area also had lots of wildlife sign — poo, footprints, beds of deer, elk, and bobcat. Our area had recently had the underbrush cleared and burned and local lore tells us that morels come up after a burn.
The target morel habitat!
Once we’d identified our target mushroom area, we spent about an hour hunting and came up with almost a pound of morels. Not bad for first timers! But I’m sure we overlooked plenty, and only searched a tiny corner of forest! Which is why I don’t really understand why mushroom hunting must be kept a secretive process. The forest is huge! We don’t have time to find all the mushrooms that there are! There are some for you up there, too! Go find them!
We’re off on our second morel hunt this morning, so stay tuned for more updates and recipes!
–Katie
Mushroom Man Marty
Katie with our take!
Cloverleaf Creamery
Posted by castironidaho in Places we eat, Road Trips on April 2, 2011
I can’t say as I would recommend a trip to Buhl, Idaho. So much first class farmland wasted on feed corn makes a vegetable farmer shake his head in disgust. All this to feed cows confined to shit filled pens waiting for slaughter or heifers (udders in the shit) needing to be milked. No wonder vegan-ism is sweeping across America (Gernika had a vegan gluten free soup the other day, and it was good). Buhl is, like a big backyard of grass, a homogenized monoculture. And like the dandelion that pokes it’s yellow head up in this sea of green, Cloverleaf Creamery is a beautiful change of scenery.
Located in downtown Buhl, the creamery is a retail shop for a dairy farm in Buhl. The milk comes in old fashioned glass bottles, the butter’s fresh and packed right there in the back room. They have all the dairy fixings: cream, cottage cheese… But the main attraction is the ice cream. I recommend elk track ice cream. Huge single scoop cone for only $2.50. Cloverleaf Creamery gives me hope for rural Idaho’s future even in the face of huge mountains of manure and field after field of field corn.
The dairy geniuses at Cloverleaf pasture their Holsteins. They also keep the herd small (60 head) so as they can focus on a quality product. These guys handle the milk from cow to customer. There is an oasis in this culinary desert after all.
Cloverleaf Creamery: 205 Broadway Ave, South Buhl, ID, 83316.
–Farmer Marty
