Weekly Recipe #72: Fourth of July Favorites from the Staff

In honor of tomorrow's holiday, we polled some of the staff about their favorite Fourth of July food:

Gwen Hill, Registered Dietitian: "Watermelon."
Jeff Langaard, Finance & Administration Director: "Grilled burgers."
Susan Pagani, Communications Director: "Roasted corn with a chili cumin rub."
Tim Reardon, Executive Director: "S'mores."
Pete Fischer, Volunteer Services Coordinator: "Potato Salad."
Sara Walter, Cook/Baker: "Bratwurst. I'm from Wisconsin, what else would I say?!"
Elizabeth Polter, Client Services Director: "Barbeque."
Sarah Leonard, Sous Chef: "Strawberry shortcake. Gotta go for the desserts!"
Shawn Brown, Finance Assistant: "Hamburgers."
Kent Linder, Operations Director: "Coleslaw. Not the kind with mayo -- has to be vinaigrette."
Lila Gilbert, Volunteer Services Coordinator: "Deviled eggs."
Ben Harrelson, Cook/Prep: "Baked beans."
Caroline Olsen, Client Services Assistant: "A red, white & blue Jello jiggler with whipped cream."
Rebecca Tofte, Development Director: "Corn on the cob and bratwurst."
Cassie Mead, Sous Chef/Baker: "Pasta salad."
Kelly McManus, Creative Director: "Sangria for adults, root beer floats for kids."
Nancy Benedict, Events Director: "I make this corn salad every year that I just can't stop eating!"


Nancy was so enthused, she shared her recipe with us! If you need a last minute idea for your 4th feast, give it a try.

Nancy's Sweet Corn Salad

5 ears of sweet corn, boiled for three minutes or grilled 
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
3 tbsp. olive oil
3 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
salt
pepper
a few leaves of basil, cut into a chiffonade (fine ribbons)

1. Cut corn from the cobs and mix with red onion.
2. Mix together oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Toss with corn and onion.
3. Add basil to taste.


Tell us YOUR favorite Fourth of July food in the comments!

Weekly Recipe #71: Shaved Radish Sandwiches with Herb Butter

You may not think of radishes as capable of playing a starring role in a sandwich, but with a fabulous DIY herb butter in the supporting role, those little red root veggies deliver a memorable performance in this summer sandwich.


Shaved Radish Sandwiches with Herb Butter
Adapted from Bon Appétit

(Makes 16 servings)

1/2 cup (1 stick) room-temperature salted butter
5 anchovy fillets, mashed and drained
1 small garlic clove, grated
3 tbsp. fresh chives, finely chopped
3 tbsp. fresh tarragon
2 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
32 slices of baguette, diagonally cut 1/8" thick
12 radishes, very thinly sliced
16 arugula leaves

Herb Butter:
1. Mix butter, anchovy fillets, garlic clove, chives, tarragon, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a small bowl. Season with sea salt and black pepper.

Sandwiches:
1. Spread herb butter generously on one side of each of the 32 baguette slices.
2. Toss radishes with salt and pepper in a medium bowl.
3. Top half of bread slices with radish slices and arugula. Top with remaining bread slices, butter side down.

Weekly Recipe #70: White Bean & Garlic Scapes Dip

By Jeanne Foels, Marketing & Outreach Coordinator

Last week at Open Farms, our garden in Belle Plaine, volunteers harvested bunches of garlic scapes, a special June visitor that mystifies CSA shareholders and delights garlic lovers. What are these curly green tendrils appearing on farmers market tables?

Garlic, like leeks and onions and the rest of its relatives in the allium family, grows underground. Farmers plant cloves in the soil during the fall, right after the first major frost, and cover them with mulch. In the springtime, bright green shoots poke up from the hardening bulb -- the garlic scapes! These shoots draw energy away from the bulb, so farmers trim the scapes, which then become an early summer treat for cooks in the know.

Scapes definitely taste garlic-y, but their flavor is much smoother and lighter than full-strength cloves. You can add garlic scapes to stir frys, throw them in egg scrambles, or whiz them into garlic scape pesto. This recipe combines them with white beans to make a simple, creamy dip. Pair it with chips, carrots or celery sticks for your next summer picnic.


White Bean & Garlic Scapes Dip
Adapted from NYTimes.com

(Makes 1 1/2 - 2 cups)

1/3 cup garlic scapes (3 to 4), chopped
2 tbsp. lemon juice, to taste
1/2 tsp. sea salt, to taste
black pepper, to taste
1 can (15 oz.) cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1. In a food processor, process garlic scapes with lemon juice, salt and pepper until finely chopped. Add cannellini beans and process to a rough purée.
2. With motor running, slowly drizzle olive oil through feed tube and process until fairly smooth. Pulse in 2 or 3 tablespoons of water, or more, until mixture is the consistency of a dip. Add more salt, pepper and/or lemon juice, if desired.
3. Spread out dip on a plate, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with more salt.

Weekly Recipe #69: Berries & Cream Scones

 By Jeanne Foels, Marketing & Outreach Coordinator

This June, I'm celebrating the confluence of National Dairy Month and the spring abundance of berries with these buttery, biscuit-like scones. The recipe is pretty simple, allowing the berries to shine in a creamy setting.

Use whatever combination of berries you like -- are those blackberries at the grocery store calling your name? Did you just pick some tiny strawberries from your garden? Are those raspberries from the farmers market going soft in your fridge? The riper and mushier the berries are, the better -- they'll sort of melt in the batter and ooze out while cooking. Mmm!

The secret to great baked goods is to keep that butter COLD, so that you get flaky layers instead of a tough, homogeneous texture. Make sure your butter is well-chilled, don't worry about mixing the batter too much, and try to use your hands as little as possible so the butter doesn't go soft.

Berries & Cream Scones
Adapted from the Smitten Kitchen

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tbsp. aluminum-free baking powder
1/4 cup granulated sugar
6 tbsp. butter
1 cup very ripe berries, chopped
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In the bottom of a large bowl, whisk flours, baking powder and sugar together. Add butter, either with a pastry blender or by cutting it in with two knives, breaking it up until the mixture resembles a crumbly meal with tiny pea-sized bits of butter about.
3. Gently stir in the strawberries with a spatula, so that they are coated in the flour mixture.
4. Fold in the heavy cream just until it creates one mass -- make sure not to overwork the dough.
5. Generously flour your counter. Transfer your dough to the counter, generously flour the top of the dough and roll or press it to a 3/4-inch thickness with your hands or a rolling pin. Cut into 2 1/2-inch circles with a floured biscuit cutter or top edge of a drinking glass, pressing straight down as you cut. Carefully transfer scones to prepared baking sheet, leaving a couple inches between each.
6. Bake the scones for 12 to 15 minutes, until bronzed at the edges and the berry juices are trickling out of the biscuits in places. Cool on the pan for a minute, then transfer to a cooling rack. Serve warm or at room temperature, preferably the same day you make them.

Weekly Recipe #68: Curried Coleslaw with Green Onions and Cranberries

By Jeanne Foels, Marketing & Outreach Coordinator

This weekend, after picking up some beautiful green onions at the farmers market, I embarked on a quest to make a coleslaw worth getting excited about. Usually I skip right by the mayonnaise-drowned dish at picnics, so I tried to whip up the most colorful version I could.

Far from your typical listless slaw, this recipe is lively and fresh, full of pop from the cranberries, curry powder and those pretty green onions. For even more color, use red cabbage.


Curried Coleslaw with Green Onions and Cranberries
Adapted from a recipe on Epicurious

(Makes about 6 servings)

3 tbsp. fresh lime juice
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 1/2 tbsp. curry powder
1 tbsp. peanut butter
5 cups finely sliced green cabbage (from about 1/2 large head)
2 carrots, peeled and either chopped into matchsticks or coarsely grated
3 green onions, thinly sliced
1/2 cup peanuts, chopped
1/2 cup cranberries
1 small jalapeno chili, seeded and minced


1. Whisk lime juice, mayonnaise, curry powder and peanut butter in a small bowl to blend.
2. Toss together cabbage, carrots, green onions, peanuts and cranberries in a large bowl.
3. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss well to blend. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

International Program Updates from South Africa

By Kent Linder, Operations Director

International Committee member David Plante and I visited Open Arms’ international projects in South Africa, and we saw some terrific impact.

One of the partnerships we support, the Social Justice Coalition, is making huge strides in their work of promoting clean sanitation in the townships around Cape Town. They’re involving more and more community members in their advocacy and education, and because of their work, the city has begun to hire employees to oversee sanitation projects.

Our support for another of the programs, Ikamva Labantu, is sponsoring the five gardeners who care for a number of the gardens surrounding several of their centers. They have recently started employing the gardeners full-time, which has completely changed the outlook of the gardeners, and their increased dedication is visible in the beautiful gardens that they keep.

Thanks to these gardens, 184 families in the surrounding community get boxes of fresh vegetables every other week, an important source of nutrition in this township where 1 in 4 people are living with HIV. Ikamva Labantu also uses some of the veggies in cooking demonstrations and wellness classes. While the gardens are a very new addition to their program, they see the benefit it is having in the community. It's clear how similar their progress and success has been to our own Open Farms project in Minnesota; it's a very wonderful thing!

The international program will be funding the gardeners again this year. We hope their new season is as successful!

If you’d like to support the work of these programs, please consider making a gift to Open Arms’ International Program.

State of the Plate: The Food System

By Gwen Hill MS, RD, LD

In January, I attended a conference called State of the Plate: Minnesota Healthy Food Futures, which was focused on the state of our food system. It was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control, Blue Cross Blue Shield of MN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and, although this type of conference has been happening on a national level at the CDC, Minnesota was the first state to host a meeting of this kind. Other states are following suit, and from what I gathered at the meeting, it will be an annual event in Minnesota.

As I walked into the meeting hall, a very simple but big sign jumped out at me. It said, “We fought big tobacco and won. Obesity, you’re next.” Yes. Let’s fight it.

Here's the situation: A new study came out last week in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine stating that by the year 2030, 42% of our nation will be obese — up from 35%. The Institute of Medicine came out with a report this week stating that national obesity-related healthcare costs are estimated at $190.2 billion annually. To break it down, that’s $520,547,945 per day. Think what we could do with that money!

Obesity increases a person's risk for illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. One-third of US children are overweight or obese, so we are currently raising the first generation of kids who are not expected to live past their parents’ age, due to health-related problems.

In light of these statistics, obesity is being referred to as an epidemic, one of too much food and too little exercise. And those are things we can fix — with a little work.

The keynote speaker at the State of the Plate conference was Dr. Kelly Brownell from the Yale Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He is a strong advocate for changing our food system. He introduced the idea that, if we want to promote healthy dietary changes, we need to stop focusing solely on changing individual habits and start focusing more on influencing the food system. Think of it this way: today, foods like cheese puffs and Twinkies are cheap and infinitely accessible. If you make healthy food as accessible and cost-effective as "junk food," you will without a doubt promote change. In order to make that kind of change in the food system, we need help from the big businesses that supply our food system. We need them to make the decision to help our country decrease the obesity rate and the amount of money we spend on obesity-related health issues. These changes will make our food system healthier and cascade into positive changes for our cities, states, and country.


How do we support a healthier food system at Open Arms?

As Ben commented in his blog earlier in the month, we are fortunate to have an organic farm that provides a healthy portion of the produce needed for our client's meals throughout the summer. Our chefs cook every meal from scratch, limiting the unhealthy ingredients -- such as salt, fat, and sugar -- and including as many healthy, whole, fresh ingredients as possible. We continuously work on putting healthy snacks into the brown bags that we send out, including fruits, veggies and low-fat dairy. In house, we have recently replaced some of the sweets on our coffee bar with fruit. We also celebrate good food through national events, such as Food Day in October and National Nutrition Month in March.

There will always be healthier changes that all of us can make in our lives, and none of us can make all of those changes at one time. But making one change will make it easier to make another change. Soon, changing your diet will be less about choosing a healthy orange over a cookie and more about variety -- how about a mango instead of that orange?


What can you do to motivate this change?

Get cooking: Cut down on the processed foods high in fat, sugar and salt by buying fresh, whole foods and cooking them at home.

Get involved and be a positive influence: When you provide snacks at work or for your kid’s class, bring fruit and veggie-based treats. Save the sweets for special occasions, like birthdays or other celebrations. Encourage schools to limit the sale of processed snacks in their cafeterias and support them in finding other, healthier ways to make money.

Get informed: Join one of the many groups that support a healthier food system, such as Healthy Food Action and Healthy Eating MN Network. You could also check out the new series, The Weight of the Nation, on hbo.com.

Get voting: Support the politicians — local, state and national — that support the legislation that will lead us to a healthier food system.

Get vocal: Motivate the big players in the food system to change: If they hear from enough consumers who want change, they will eventually change. Support them in their changes.

Get involved! Let's make a healthier future for our country.