November 10, 2010 carrello d’carne

look.  i’m from jersey, and i know diners.

as i’ve traveled most of the good ol’ usa in my time, and a healthy amount of foreign soils, i have always been convinced that jersey was the one and only true home of the diner.  in fact, the jersey diner, should be referred to as such—the jersey diner—so as to differentiate it from all the other greasy spoons, box cars, and drive-ins guy fieri might shovel down his gullet. 

and then, we went to italy, drove into reggio emilia just as sunday service was letting out, and walked into trattoria canossa.  on the recommendation of a local, we were in for some “typical reggiani fare”.  a half hour from modena, birthplace of true balsamic, and a half hour from parma, home of the globally famous aged cheese, and a half hour from bologna, stomach of italia, traditional fare sounded pretty righteous.  we walked into the restaurant, i looked at her with my big goofy smile, and said the first thought that came to mind:  “it’s a diner!”  the smells, the uniforms, and hum of the staff and the diners—i was instantly transported to a jersey diner circa two thousand ‘one, cutting school, and high as a kite.  perfection.

mere seconds after “non parlano italiano” stumbled out of my mouth to the fast talking waiter who approached us, and a steaming slab of lasagna with a half bottle of the house red wine was slid in front of us.  literally, seconds.  when it comes to food, language matters not.  with a view of the italian grandma cooking in the open kitchen, and with the first bites of seriously home cooked lasagna touching my tongue, i knew the jersey diner’s supremacy was instantly up for contention.  and once my plate went from saucy red, to bread swept white, two sweet sweet words put the nail in jersey’s coffin:  corello d’carne?  that’s right—meat cart. 


compartmentalized tubs of boiling meats pushed on a cart by a jolly knife wielding server.  submerged in liquid, and raised up with a lever for slicing tableside.  little of this.  oh, some of that.  yes, please the rabbit, too.  tongue?  sure.  some of that bloody tube there, please.  pig leg….mm hmm.  this is no diner i’ve known.

the cart of meat would have made the crew back at farm255 proud.  all sorts of odds, ends, and insides.  the types of cuts butchers in brooklyn are becoming famous for serving, presented in the most regular and common setting these people know.  totally normal.  just life. 


it should be no surprise, i suppose, that the birthplace of so many other things, has been crushing the jersey diner scene for millennia.  hats off.

p.s.  when farm’s sous farmer chef francois and i saw this little beauty at the salone del gusto, we were excited.  when we sat it at torino’s eataly, we twirled its wheel and marveled at its craftsmanship like giddy school girls.  and now, after seeing it in almost a dozen trattorias, hosterias, and macellerias across italy—i’ve become convinced that this stunning meat slicer is in the five year plan.  love me some berkel.  


Tags: meat cart,   italy,   berkel slicer   jersey diner   guy fieri   eataly   diners   salone del gusto   farm255   the meat hook    |  

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March 16, 2010 norm peterson, the dream

ever since i moved to athens, i have essentially stopped cooking.  not entirely, but just creatively.  im not sure why really, maybe a combination of things.  maybe its since now i’m surrounded by professional chefs and cooks i’ve just sort of turned into more of a spectator.  my original motivations to cook were to provide myself with a diet that consisted of quality food from quality sources.  to truly secure that in brooklyn, i had to take things into my own hands, and cook all my own food.

down here, my preference for thoughtfully sourced ingredients is succulently provided by farm255, our farm’s restaurant.  how can i be expected to come home from a long day in the dirt and create some culinary delight when my housemate can serve me a grassfed hamburger topped with house corn beef, romaine, aioli, and tillamook cheddar melting down the sides?

you don’t even have to know what tillamook is and you want some.  go ahead, say it out loud.  till a mook.  what a good name.  when i was eating this burger i started thinking about naming my first born son tillamook.

anyways, the point is, it’s crazy how my interest in cooking led me to farm in athens, and farming in athens has led me to stop cooking (cue twilight zone theme) 

i guess i just like eating at the restaurant.  its hilarious.  my four housemates swirl around, two and fro, running a restaurant, and working their asses off.  i sit there, often tired, starving, dirty, and a little sun burnt from a day outside and enjoy lavish feasts and usually a bit of wine.  the head chef walks over to my table and let’s me know the pig belly i had left the day before has been smoked and is good to go home. last week, my housemate, and sous chef, concocted a charcuterie platter of every house made meat product in the kitchen—liver, hams, sausages, marrow butter, pastrami, and a handful of others—for me on two massive butcher’s boards.  we haggled over price for the off-menu delight.   so basically, i’ve finally found my cheers.  i’m a hundred pounds away from befriending the mailman and never leaving. 

pictured here is some berkshire pig belly from an animal i helped care for and also drove to slaughter.  we rubbed it down earlier this week with salt, crushed pepper, garlic, rosemary, and maple syrup and let it cure in the fridge.  yesterday i dropped it off at the restaurant and as a favor the chef smoked it for me. 

pork.  salt.  heaven. 


Tags: athens,   farm255   full moon farms   berkshire pig    |  

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March 15, 2010

everybody likes a field trip.  five year olds, and forty five year olds.  fossil dig at the quarry, whale watch, science center?  in.  natural history museum, fish market, recycling center?  here’s my ten dollars.  only three extra for a bus snack?  ok, sold.

when my housemate, and part owner of farm255, asked me if i was interested in escorting (legitimate) her friend from atlanta to a farm in north georgia, all i really heard was field trip and was immediately game.  at some later date, i actually looked into what i had agreed to do, and the story got good. 

the pickup in atlanta was a lady named severine von tscharner fleming, who is directing a forthcoming documentary, greenhorns, about the growing movement of young beginning farmers across america.  a young farmer, herself, severine tells the story of a simmering revolution that is brewing in small batches across the nation.  their film has developed into a full scale network of young farmers of all kinds from all places who have each made the same choice to devote their lives to producing healthy relationships with both people and land.  this energized collective of young farmers is something i had little insight into before moving to athens.  my road to farming felt very insular and personal.  but coming here, and meeting people who own these farms, own these restaurants, and make this film (trailer), i’ve heard so many different people feel the exact same things i do.  that’s powerful stuff.

the field trip was eye opening.  seeing another farm besides ours for the first time since i’ve been farming made me instantly realize the endless nuances, innovations, techniques and personal touches that must dot this landscape.  the farm we visited was riverview farms, in the foothills of the appalachian mountains, northwest georgia, in the bottomlands of the coosawattee river. 

every mile i drove out of town layers of georgia seemed to peel away until i found myself in a place that for one reason, or a dozen, just felt deeper.  i had gone deeper into georgia in ways that can only be peripherally felt, let alone described. 

the swancy family owns and operates a few hundred acres of organic farmland offering  vegetable, grass fed cow, pasture raised berkshire pork and organic grain production.  they sell to the public through a csa as well as farmers markets and supply food to many of atlanta’s restaurants.  that’s a large market, and the demand is met with a farm that looks a lot to me like the so called medium scale agriculture people point to as a solution in the argument for a systemic overhaul of food production and a shift towards local food economies. 

to compare sizes (speaking of sizes, look at the size of these boar testacles).  right now our pig herd only has one sow (breeding female), while the swancy farm maintains fifty sows.  fifty sows each producing healthy litters on regular cycles.  eight, ten, maybe twelve or more piglets in a litter.  the eye opening part of seeing this operation was recognizing the power of scale.  scale is everything. 

higher production carries with it more gross income as well as more financial and infrastructure investments upfront.  certain aspects of farming on this scale require large buildings and structures.  harvesting, roasting, and storing grains to make feed, for example, requires large harvesting machines, expensive elevators to store them, and expensive equipment to deliver them to so many animals consistently throughout the day. 

there are countless examples of these scale tradeoffs that come with meeting different market demands.  it became obvious to me that this is something i really have to weigh when choosing a potential farm/business/home location.  what scale is right for me?  for you or for him?  it’s as personal as questions come. 

the sky was wide open, bright blue, and it was the warmest day of the season.  the swancys broke ground and started at the task of planting twenty thousand onion shoots for their csa.  barefoot, for comfort on the freshly tilled soil, they took each shoot and pressed its roots into the ground.  an inch deep, and six inches apart. 

they have a seventeen acre garden.  that’s a lot of inches.

after a few minutes of watching on the sidelines i too removed my boots and began planting.  the sun going down, hunched over, and barefoot.  their would have to be skis involved for me to be happier.   

before heading home to athens i was treated to a hearty dinner of their own beef and pork, a friend of their’s sweet potato, and some fresh baked corn bread.  a gift of five bags of their own hand ground grits and i was on my way.  what a great field trip.   

want to read the director’s statement?


Tags: greenhorns,   begining farming   riverview farms   farm255   severine von tscharner fleming   full moon farms    |  

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March 12, 2010

a lot happens in ten days.  first off, and most exciting off, she came down for another visit.  a vacation from what still feels like a vacation.  she got her hands dirty too, power tools and all.  although it may seem odd that her first two pictures on the blog—pictorial debut!—are showing her backside, its actually quite explainable.  in an effort to raise some extra cash to support my apprenticeship, we (i) have decided to release the “perfect asses with farm equipment” calendar for the next year’s growing season.  calendars will be nineteen ninety nine and shipped nationwide.   order here.

i got to spend a day with pastured chicken farmer dan dover, who is responsible for raising all the chickens for the restaurant this coming season.  the day was spent removing trees from the new chicken pasture so the portable pens can traverse the fields with ease and efficiency.  this gives the chickens clean and fresh bedding and forage each day while simultaneously naturally fertilizing and improving the pasture. 

thanks to recent popular books and documentaries most people are aware of the factory conditions in which the overwhelming majority of all chickens are raised in this country.  spending a day with a farmer who is raising thousands of chickens properly, humanely, and profitably leaves me hopeful that the industrial chicken model will one day prove unsustainable as more small producers take hold.

right now there are two groups of chicks on the farm.  two hundred freedom rangers (that’s their breed.  awesome name) are pictured above inside what’s known as a brooder.  these chicks are about a week old, and in order for them to be able to eat and drink they must have the dryness and warmth that their mother provided for them.   

as soon as possible, depending on weather conditions, they are moved out of the brooder and onto the pasture.  the slightly older birds pictured above, which are already out on pasture, are rhode island reds.  they are the egg layers.  unlike factory raised birds which are born, live, and die covered in toxic fecal matter, kept barely alive with drugs, these birds thrive on a fresh buffet of forage, worms and insects. 

and now, another special blog pictorial debut.  introducing the architect behind countless past and future design masterpieces, most recently this wooden shed pictured below:  sparrow, of sparrow designs.  upon realizing this photo would in fact be on the blog, sparrow immediately engaged into the power stance shown here.  good guy though, nonetheless.

a small team of us, her included, used muscle, wit, and tractor to raise the literal roof.  this task, like most down here, involved several firsts for me.  first nail gun.  score.  first time standing on the hood of a moving tractor while supporting several rows of rafters.  i like.

 

first time achieving the fat guy in a little coat joke with something besides a coat.  big man, on a wobbly tiny man’s ladder. 

thud.  and apprentice goes down.   


Tags: farm255   pastured chicken   full moon farms   organic farm   athens georgia    |  

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February 23, 2010

so after two weeks of not getting a chance to speak with my brother, the first three sentences out of his mouth were:  “why’d you write a poem on the blog?” and “i think the blog is a little pig heavy.  can’t you do something with the cows?”  well brother, it’s good to hear from you too.

the fact is i’ve just been spending a lot more time with the pigs so far.  but, it’s only been three weeks since i’ve even been living here, working on the farm, and the future will be busy and diverse.  all in due time.

today we built a new fence for the next set of cow paddocks.  the cows move to a fresh paddock of grass almost every day, depending on how long it takes them to eat the grass down to the right height.  our pasture is divided by long electric fences that split the whole field into lengthwise lanes.  these lanes are then split by temporary cross fences which create the individual paddocks.  picture a chess board.

just like your eighth grade science teacher, the trick is to stay one lesson ahead of the class.  every day we move the cows we also put up another temporary cross fence to build the next paddock.  today, however, we had the job of building the next lengthwise lane.  a semi-permanent fence which spreads the entire length of the pasture.  it took about five hours.  five hours under the gorgeous georgia sun.  five hours walking through tall grass in tall boots.  five hours digging holes and pulling wires.  five hours of “work”.

a few fence facts.  the fence line, although generally straight, actually follows the natural curve of the land.  large contours in the landscape, like a sloping terrace (hard to make out, but look closely and it’s pictured above), are called key lines.  if you look closely at any hill really, at the top just as the hill breaks downward, or at the bottom right where the valley flattens, there is noticeable spot in the land where it more aggressively angles one way or the other.  this is the key line.  over time these key lines become filled with mineral packed sediments that sloooowly settle in place.  just a couple feet to either side of a key line the pasture composition could be significantly different.  by dividing the pasture in these natural lines, it ensures that one spot of the paddock won’t be repeatedly over or under grazed based on the cow’s preferences.  some grass is like an ice cream sundae to them.  some tastes more like dirt.  by keeping them on the move, and dividing the pasture along natural key lines, we can ensure that over time we won’t have an ice cream sundae-less pasture, full of weeds and dirt.

on either end, and wherever the fence turns on a key line, we dig holes and set wooden posts.  these posts give strength to the whole fence.  to dig the hole we use what’s called a post digger.  electric fence is wrapped around the post, through an insulator so the wire stays hot (electrified), and stretched to the next post.

every twenty steps or so in between each wooden post large metal poles called t-posts, for their t-shaped foot, are pounded into the dirt.

the pounder is a twenty or so pound hollow tube (closed on the top) that you can slam down on top of it until the t-foot is buried.  insulators are clipped on to these as well for the wire to pass through.  do that for five hours and you got yourself a fence.

the cows are always eager and happy to move to the next paddock.  once you open the temporary cross fence they immediately turn in to grass hoovering machines, searching for the greenest and most lush patch in the paddock.  searching for that ice cream sundae.  in this new paddock they all went right for a vibrant and tall patch of fescue which was lurking along the pine trees.  the extra moisture from the pine trees made this fescue particularly green, and these cows are smart.

watch the video again of oreo eating the fescue.  you can’t help but marvel at the process. sunshine, rain, and seeds that perhaps flew in with the wind turn into grass.  the cows eat the grass and slowly digest it in their multi-chambered stomachs, eventually turning it into meat.  meat means money.  true solar energy being converted right before your eyes.  sun becomes grass, grass becomes meat, and meat becomes money.  the only byproduct, manure, black gold, comes out the other end and fertilizes your pasture for free.  no store bought chemical fertilizers.  no huge machines to spread it.  cow pies.  money pies.


Tags: full moon farm,   athens georgia   fowler farm   farm255    |  

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