Win a Gift Box!!

Win one of our rice/almond gift boxes! We're having a slogan contest--comment here or on our Facebook page with your most creative, funny idea for selling rice at a farmers market. How would you get customers to approach our market stand? We'll pick our favorites and send gift boxes to the top three entries--a $25 value! Photos of your sign ideas welcome! Good Luck!

Easy Almond Butter Cookies

I made cookies last night! This is very rare for me, but I was intrigued by a very simple recipe that I saw posted to Twitter by @katmulkey. Here it is, in it's entirety:

Easiest almond butter cookie recipe ever: 1 cup almond butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg. Bake at 350. Eat. Share.

So I did. Super easy, very yummy. Enjoy.

Organic Almond Harvest

We started almond harvest today with our "new" shaker and a crew of 5 helpers. Normally almonds are shaken onto the ground and then swept up after drying on the ground for about 10 days. This is very efficient, but the tractor-mounted sweepers make a terrible amount of dust! We're shaking the nuts onto tarps, which are then dumped into carts. We take the nuts to an area out of the orchard to dry, then pick them up using shovels and rakes. It's more labor intensive to do it this way, but creates more jobs and MUCH less dust! This is our first year harvesting with a mechanical shaker, but it's going well, and in the end I think it will be just as efficient as fully mechanized harvesting. Note in the video that harvest takes only one minute per tree!

Pancakes!

Ever since we started grinding our wheat berries into flour, our family's favorite breakfast has been whole wheat pancakes. We use a simple recipe from a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, scaled up for our family of 7 of course! Here's the basic recipe, which makes about 12-15 pancakes. We triple it and usually end up with 40 or more, which the kids promptly devour! I often add an extra couple of eggs from our home flock of chickens, just to add a bit more protein. Enjoy!

Whole Wheat Pancakes

1 cup Massa Organics whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon brown sugar, packed

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

1 cup milk

2 tablespoons cooking oil

In a mixing bowl stir together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt. In another mixing bowl combine egg, milk, and cooking oil. Add to flour mixture all at once. Stir mixture until blended.

Pour about 1/4 cup batter onto a hot, lightly greased griddle. Cook till pancakes are golded brown, turning to cook second side when pancakes have bubbly surfaces and slightly dry edges.

Whole Wheat Baguette Recipe

For those of you who have tried our flour, here's a simple baguette recipe from Theo, a customer in Berkeley:

1 lb Massa Organics whole wheat flour,
1 heaping Tbsp wheat gluten,
1 Tbsp salt,
1 Tbsp yeast;

Combine dry ingredients, then mix in 2 cup cool water until the
consistency of cookie dough; let the dough autolyze (sit for a while while
the gluten forms), then knead; roll into baguettes and coat with poppy
seeds; bake 25 minutes at 400°F.

Meet Us in "Earthbound"

Raquel and I are featured in a new video series called "Earthbound: Created and Called to Care for Creation" from Seraphim Communications. Well, actually Mason and Lily, our 4-year-olds, are the stars of the show, but we're in it too. Earthbound is an educational DVD funded in part by the Lutheran Church (ELCA). The producers, who did a masterful editing job, were kind enough to post our segment online so that we could use it. It provides a really great overview of what we do and why. Check it out!

And if would like to see the rest of the Earthbound series, it is available for purchase at the Seraphim Communications website.

EarthBound: Massa Organics from Seraphim Communications on Vimeo.