farm on wheels: high-quality, affordable, organic meats

Just wanted to hack out a quick post to highlight the delicious offferings of Farm On Wheels, a popular St. Paul Farmers' Market vendor offering the best in organic beef, poultry, pork and I believe, lamb. I recenlty purchased a one pound sirloin steak (grass fed) for $6.50, which feeds two, and it was simply delicious seared to medium rare in a very hot cast iron skillet (or charcoal grill).

Who can compete with $5.99 per pound for sustainable (and juicy) steak? I'll soon wish I could run my car on grass fed beef.

can't find tasty, all natural sausage? make your own

For Christmas my parents gave me a book I've wanted for some time: Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. Anyone interested in making sausages, among other juicy things, at home would die for this book. I've only made a few recipes thus far, but I've already read the whole thing cover-to-cover. From duck confit to chorizo, these dudes tackle it all.

For my daughter's first birthday, I decided to make a huge batch of traditional German bratwurst for the party we planned. I'll try to post an abbreviated version of the recipe, but you may just have to purchase your own copy. Check out the flickr photo set for more pix from this session...

Wow: The average mother of a child under 15 spends more on fast food every year than on books, music, movies and video games combined

From the NYT:

Fast Food's Portion of Parent's Dollars

two tools to help you find seasonal, local food

I recently found two web sites that any locovore should consult when trying to locate sustainably produced, seasonal, local foods.

Epicurious Seasonal Ingredient Map
Very slick online map that displays foods grown in US by month and state. For instance, Minnesotans should be eating asparagus, raspberries, and rhubarb in June.
http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/seasonalcooking/farmtotable/seasonalingredientmap

Local Harvest
This is a social networking-type site for small food producers, farmers markets, and CSAs. Each of these groups can create profiles about their company and products, which is aggregated on a US map via Google Maps. Users can then locate producers in a specific area.
http://www.localharvest.org/