For Nougat Magazine’s December, 2006 issue, I wrote “Love and Joy Come to You,” about our family’s tradition of making complicated foods together during the year-end holidays. Here are the recipes I describe in the article: New Year’s Eve Pot Stickers and Holiday Croquembouche. Enjoy!

Local or nearly local products, carefully grown and marketed directly between the grower and the end buyer, suddenly seem like the smartest recent development in the U.S. food system. (It has not been sudden for the growers who have been earning a skimpy living for decades - but maybe the financial rewards are finally beginning to appear.) Today’s New York Times included a special section devoted to small business. In the lead article Kim Severson describes the growing demand for local foods and describes research demonstrating customers’ willingness to pay more for the safety and quality much locally grown food offers. Read the rest of this entry »

All this week, Blue Moon’s beautiful giant garlic braids gleam behind the frantic antics of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and the clutch of cooks-in-training on either side of him, otherwise known as the anchors and hosts of the NBC Today Show. Ignore the cooking and admire the perfection of those garlic braids. They combine sensual curves with orderly rows, chaste white with the promise of fiery taste. Quite rich, those braids.

Michelle Slatalla, the savvy writer of the New York Times weekly column Online Shopper, today encouraged her readers to order a Kentucky favorite, Derby-Pie, partly because of its unusual quality of keeping well when frozen. Slatalla gamely makes sure to spell it “Derby-Pie,” with a hyphen. This pie is one of those food products that picks up advertising and name recognition partly through taking a pugnacious posture on trademarking.

I like Slatalla’s fine, clean writing a lot better than I like the pie she recommends. I find the “bought” version of Derby-Pie over-rated - kind of dry and dull. (Its dry texture does make it freeze well, though, and that’s Slatalla’s point.) But plenty of home cooks and restaurants in Kentucky make astonishing versions of a great pecan or walnut pie with add-ins of first-rate chocolate chips or chunks. When Homeland Security is not listening, we just call these plain old un-hyphenated Derby pie. Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Moon Farm co-owner Leo Keene wrote:
“Jean and I have been hard at it making these braids for the TODAY SHOW. Apparently, next week they will be doing a Jamie Oliver (the Naked Chef) feature each day, topic- Italian Cooking School. It was almost harder packing them than making them, but we were glad that we had the garlic to work with and that they thought of us.”

The Today Show first called Blue Moon in July, 2004, asking for a nine foot braid and a couple of others. Repeat business is good! I am so proud of these wonderful Kentucky growers, their commitment to our land and to sustainable farming — and their beautiful garlic and other vegetables. I wrote an article about Blue Moon for Nougat Magazine’s November, 2006 issue, which had thanksgiving as its theme. See a larger version of the 2006 photo.