Last Saturday was raw cold in Lexington, with little ice pellets in the air — but the Lexington Farmers Market Winter Session got underway just as planned in Victorian Square. I had a cold and wasn’t there, but I know about it because of the excellent Lexington Farmers Market weekly email newsletter. (Subscribe on the website; scroll down a little and you will see the subscription box in the left column). Market Manager Jeff Dabbelt prepares and sends the newsletter faithfully every week, in every season.

This Saturday, farmers at Victorian Square plan to offer amaryllis bulbs, apples, beef, bison, fine handmade chocolates, homemade dog treats in flavors (peanut butter bones…), eggs, garlic, gourds, goat cheese in several flavors and styles, hickory nuts, jams, lilies (cut), onions, spinach, sweet potatoes, turnips, sourdough and sweet breads, wild sassafrass root, and more.

Bleugrass Chevre and Viburnum Valley Farm Confections will be at Vic Square Saturday with plenty of fresh goat cheese and premium Kentucky chocolates (made with European skill). Susan Miller gave me permission to quote her entire message here, so you can start planning your Saturday morning trip:

We’ll be at the market with plenty of cheese, but our does are still on maternity leave. They have knit so many booties, they have had to switch to knitting sweaters now. We think Mother Nature might be playing around with us a little bit on their due dates, but we are grateful that the newest goat dairy in Germantown has extra milk to share with us for the month of December. We just have a feeling that all these babies might arrive on Christmas Day. But what could possibly be more fun?

This week there is plenty of fresh chevre in several flavors - garlic chive, chipotle and cracked pepper. We’re also experimenting with some fresh chevre balls rolled with bourbon-soaked pecans, dried cranberries and curry, so stop by for a sample. In addition, there will be plenty of feta, plus our holiday rounds decorated with sundried tomatoes and basil leaves.

We’re also doing holiday gift boxes with your choice of three cheeses and two or three of those heavenly goat cheese truffles. Just let us know in advance and we can bring it to the market for you. 859.421.6983

Viburnum Valley Farm Confections will have all of their truffle flavors (go to www.vvfconfections.com), plus their new Christmas Truffle with all the holiday spices (nutmeg, cinnamon and more). In addition to individual truffles, they are offering gift packages that are perfect for stocking stuffers, host/hostess gifts and general gift giving. A package of two is $4.50, five is $9.50, six is $11, twelve is $20, and 24 is $38.00 - all in any flavors you choose. If you would like truffles pre-packaged without a wait or want to place a gift order that can be picked up at the market, please call Elaine (859.312.1157) or Marianne (859.494.4905).

As always, their truffles are additive and preservative free.

Thanks for buying local, and hope to see you at the market!

I hope so! Here’s to less headcold and maybe a bit more Fahrenheit, just for Saturday morning.

[Show as slideshow]

The BBC reported it, so it must be fact: “Foodies were interested in recipes for cupcakes, meatballs, lemon posset and pork belly.” In 2008, that is, these are the food search terms we used more than any other when querying google. Think of these as the food world’s equivalent of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, only tastier.

I did a little googling myself and offer here a recipe or two for each of the four Most Queried Foods of 2008.

Cupcakes. How about these Sunken Chocolate Orange Cupcakes? I plan to take these to our annual Christmas Carol Singing Party this year. They seem simpler to make and more “accessible” than the gooey flourless chocolate bourbon cake I have made in past years. If you would rather look than cook and don’t mind cute, scroll down this page of google images of cupcakes both edible and purely decorative (knit cupcakes?) from a self-confessed addict of cute.

Meatballs. Written recipes for nouvelle meatball styles did not have much tummy appeal, and recipes for regular old meatballs have to be suspect because each family has its own favorite style. This mildly innovative (pinenuts, currants) Spaghetti with Sicilian Meatballs seems a reasonable compromise between tradition and novelty, especially given the coveted four forks it received from 158 commenters at Epicurious.com

Maybe the prominence of meatballs on the query list signifies both a longing for comfort and a commitment to frugality. In that regard, I recommend, again, Gourmet’s Unstuffed Sweet-and-Sour Cabbage, subject of a recent Savoring Kentucky post.

Lemon Posset. This food sounds like something out of Lemony Snicket, but after learning about it today for the first time, I am completely interested in trying it. Here’s what Elaine Lemm says in introducing her recipe for Lemon Possett on britishabout.com: “A posset is a drink made from hot milk and honey and often spiced and laced with ale or wine. It was popular in the Middle Ages as a remedy for colds and minor ailments and to aid a good nights sleep. Possets appeared in Shakespeare’s Macbeth when Lady Macbeth used poisoned possets to knock out the guards outside Duncan’s quarters. Later it became a thickened cream, flavored usually with honey and lemon and served as a dessert.”

The recipe contains three ingredients: heavy cream, lemon juice and a tiny bit of honey. Compare that with what must be the American version since it contains about ten times as much sugar. Like these two, the Los Angeles Times’s luscious sounding Meyer Lemon Posset involves bringing heavy cream, lemon juice, and sugar to a boil, and then chilling it to a mousse-like consistency. Yummmm!

Pork Belly. I offer two recipes chosen primarily because the names of their blogs made me laugh. Cook Almost Anything At Least Once offers Slow Roasted Spiced Pork Belly, with decent pictures depicting the somewhat complex preparation. Complexity is an understatement for the boiled-twice-then-fried pork belly at Wino Sapien. None of the pork belly recipes I found made me want to cook this part of the pig. At least for now, bacon sounds like a fine way to enjoy Kentucky pork bellies. No recipes required.

Photo Credits: Portishead, Westmacott Photography, Freelancebloke, Juanmonino — Thank you!

That’s cold cherry soup in the champagne glasses, second course for this year’s Campsie Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll come back to the soup below.

I have a special relationship with cherries. Sour Kentucky cherries - the Montmorency variety, ideally — the kind that ripen in June and make Kentucky’s most delicious pies.

Counting some of the ways:

Favorite childhood dessert: Homemade cherry pie

Favorite childhood Lifesaver flavorr: Cherry - even fakey as it was

My mother-in-law’s fondly remembered childhood treat: Cold cherry soup — and I’m still coming back to it below

Last dish I cooked, with my fine brother and a beloved friend, for my father in his last days six months ago: Homemade cherry pie from his own cherry trees — and he ate two big pieces

Ecstatic early summer 2008 experience, repeated and repeated and repeated: Picking Montmorency cherries from my dear friend’s tree in the heart of Lexington, eating cherries straight and tart from the tree; sometimes picking cherries while sitting on her garden bench, sometimes picking with my back aching from bending over — not the usual cherry-picking posture — such was the abundance of the weighted cherry tree branches Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a little bit recently — but not enough — about the sustainably grown lambs available from Larry Swartz and Genia McKee’s Windhover Farm in Garrard County. Since then I have learned more from a long talk with Larry and an email from Genia, who sent nine magical farm pictures, including the goats in the photo. (No, I did not think they were sheep!)

Larry and Genia still have lambs available — which means you can have sustainably grown local lamb for any holiday meal — and you can have it delivered direct to your door. The lamb will be butchered (locally), cut into an array of meal options (see below), packaged and frozen. Call (859) 339-4189, and don’t use the 859 if you are in Lexington. You can buy lambs until all have been sold, so there may still be some available in early 2009. More on contacting Larry and Genia below.

If you are new to the idea of buying important food from a trusted Kentucky farmer instead of from a supermarket, you may want to know more about how it works.

Genia says, “Our breed of sheep is Cheviot, which originated in the Cheviot Hills on the border of England and Scotland.  They are a medium-size, very hardy sheep which also produce wool.  The price of a lamb processed (and frozen) delivered to the customer’s door and/or freezer is $250.  Half a lamb is $135.

Here is a list of what you get (if you buy a whole lamb):

One whole leg of lamb

Three 2-2 ½ # leg roasts

Two packages (2 each) shanks

Two sirloin chops

2-3 packages lamb liver

2-3 packages ground lamb

2 packages lamb stew meat

4 boned and rolled shoulder roasts

2 4-rib rack of lamb.

4 packages (2 each) rib chops

4 packages (2each) loin chops

1 package lamb fries, (ram lambs only)

Tongue, kidneys, heart available if requested at time of order (pre slaughter)”

Genia continues: ” The lambs weigh 95-105 pounds live, and the hanging (carcass) weight is 45-55 pounds.  This usually translates into about 38-42 pounds of actual lamb cuts into the freezer, or roughly $6.00/lb inclusive for all cuts average.  A bargain for sure, and we probably will need to raise our price for 2009 lambs. All our costs are up.”

More about contacting Larry and Genia: Here’s the phone number again: (859) 339-4189. And here are three points I’ve learned or others have shared about buying directly from fine farms:

1. Practice patience. Plan a bit ahead, and be patient about getting in touch. The people you are trying to reach are busier than you can imagine, and often their work outdoors keeps them away from their phones.
2. Pay the asking price. If you choose to buy fabulous, local, carefully grown food that is good for the land, the local economy, and your health, pay the farmer’s price gladly. In this way you can be part of a virtuous cycle. The price for this lamb is outstanding, in my view, but even if it were not….Savoring Kentucky tries not to preach, but on this one point — Warning: Some preaching ahead. Sometimes without thinking through the extra value we are getting, we consumers expect hand-grown and processed organic and sustainable food of top quality to compete with discount grocery prices for factory food. Talk to any committed organic/sustainable farmer for a few minutes and that view changes. Sometimes we cannot afford the great food our farmer neighbors can produce. in that case — we have to do without or choose an alternative. But it’s not good form (and it’s hard on farmer well-being) to complain about a price or try to bargain. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in a different context. Sermon over. For now.
3. Plan far ahead for real customization. If you want something different or like to customize what is standard, call ahead and leave plenty of time to work out a plan that will not require the farmer to do a lot of extra work. If it turns out your requests WILL require extra work, renegotiate the price happily. See point 2 above.

That’s it - a beginning list of Local Food Manners for Buyers. I welcome others’ comments about what constitutes good manners in the local food world.

Photo credit: Swartz/McKee - Thank you!

Working on my part of tonight’s dinner, using James Beard’s recipe for Cornmeal Spoon Bread, I came to the part that offers an option NOT to separate the eggs in order to beat yolks and whites separately. Usually I use the whole egg approach without a thought. Tonight, though, I reached for two bowls and did the light thing.

Three reasons for doing a bit more came to mind. One, after the intense, happy week of cooking for the Thanksgiving holiday, the slightly more elaborate version of this little dish seemed easy to prepare.

Second, the rest of this Sunday night dinner — pan-fried Elmwood Stock Farm organic chicken livers and my cooking partner’s famous Brussels Sprouts — was in other capable hands. Cooking with others is my all-time favorite form of cooking, and dividing up  cooking duties is almost as good.

The third reason is a cooking tool for which I am finding many uses. This summer I bought a KitchenAid hand-held blender to take on vacation, ending a foolish habit of (others) lugging an 11-year old Braun 5 in 1 machine 2,000 miles round-trip, and then up (and down) three flights of stairs. The new blender came with a whip attachment that I use a good deal, sometimes with splattery results, but I’m learning. A small fine tool, easy to pull out of a drawer, makes a difference, compared to the still excellent but more awkward Braun 5 in 1 base, mixer, beater, beater guide, and lid. I like the immersion blender, too, and so this vacation tool has become a Campsie kitchen standard.

The spices we love in Molasses Crinkles — ginger, cinnamon, cloves — are far from locally grown for those of us in the Bluegrass State. Yet they taste like home.

When I lived literally on the other side of the world in the Philippines, I asked for and received cinnamon bought in Kentucky so I could make a few familiar tasting foods. That cinnamon, perhaps grown in Sri Lanka, may have circled the world twice to reach me.

Spices, citrus, coffee, tea, sugar - I treasure these precious foods from “away,” even as I eat more and more foods that are locally grown. It is odd to realize that cinnamon and apples do not grow in the same parts of the world, yet taste as if they were literally made for each other.

Similarly, Kentucky’s sorghum tastes wonderful with spices from the other side of the world. In fact thanks to a tip from a beautiful niece, I learned that Kentucky Living magazine has declared “Molasses Cookies” the best of 299 favorite cookie recipes readers submitted.

And while we are avoiding worries about food miles for a few minutes — and thinking about holiday cookies — visit Gourmet Magazine’s wondrous listing of the best cookie recipe from every year since the magazine began in 1941. Will anyone try baking every one of the 67 recipes? Perhaps that’s a recipe in itself for a fun community event or fund raiser for some good cause.

Photo Credit: MAR — Thank you!