Summer Fiesta Salad

We got a jump on summer with the sample dish we served at the Chico farmers market this week. I've had a few requests for the recipe, so I'll post it here. It's a bit out of season for some of the ingredients still, so let me extend an apology to all the locavores out there. Unless you canned some fresh corn last summer, you may have to wait a while to make this dish.

Summer Fiesta Salad

2 cups Massa Organics brown rice (uncooked)
2 cups fresh corn (off the cob)
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
1 Jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
½ red onion, chopped

Dressing: Combine together:
1/3 cup olive oil
¼ cup cider vinegar
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp, crushed garlic
Salt and pepper to taste

Cook rice according to directions. If using fresh corn, boil for 3 minutes and cool. Combine ingredients in bowl and mix with dressing. Chill for at least 2 hours for flavors to set.

Recipe by Karen Avis, Fresh Approach Catering

Recipe from the Ferry Plaza

Today's sample recipe from Boulettes Larder, served at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, is fairly simple, but very delicious:

Massa Organics rice
Carrot tops sauteed in butter
Piment d’ Espelette, crushed

I had to do a bit of research on the Espelette pepper, as I hadn't seen it before. Apparently it is a "cultural and culinary icon" of the Basque region of Southwestern France. The taste was described to me as sweet and mildly spiced. Enjoy!

New review of our rice!

I guess we're not very good at keeping up with this blog! I have lots of ideas for posts during the day, but by the time we get home, get the kids fed and in bed, I just don't seem to have the energy left to sit and write. Sorry about that!

Anyway, we got a nice writeup in the food section of the Sacramento News and Review yesterday. Here's the link:

Nice rice Palatable rice and farming practices. By Kate Washington, SN&R, 03.27.08.

Ensalada de Tricia

Our good friends Tricia and Kari came over the other night with a great tangy rice salad of Tricia's creation. Here's the recipe:

2 cups uncooked Massa Organics brown rice
3 or 4 Tbsp pesto
Olive Oil
3/4 cup diced walnuts, toasted
1/2 cup Chopped julienne cut sun dried tomatoes
1/2 cup artichoke hearts (in water), chopped
6 green onions, chopped
4 oz. feta cheese, crumbled

Cook rice according to package directions, and then cool. Mix in the other ingredients, and drizzle with olive oil to taste.

MO brown rice with puntarella and sesame

Here are the ingredients for the sample dish served at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on March 1, 2008:

Massa Organics brown rice, cooked
braised puntarella chicory, chopped
black sesame seeds
butter

Puntarella is an Italian chicory, and had something of a broccoli flavor to me. If you can't find puntarella, I think you could easily substitute broccoli de cicco, which is a slender, heirloom variety of broccoli from Italy that is pretty common in farmers markets now. Enjoy!

Brown rice in the NY Times

Mark Bittman, who writes a column for the NY Times called the Minimalist, wrote a piece on brown rice this week. The website includes a 5 minute video of his method for cooking brown rice more quickly (one of the most common complaints about brown rice is that it takes 45 minutes to cook). Essentially he partially cooks it ahead of time, then finishes it off while preparing the rest of the meal. It's not really faster--the cooking is just broken down into two steps. Still, it could be useful when you need to make dinner quickly. Personally, I think it is easier to just cook extra when you have time and then reheat it in the microwave. Other people have told me that brown rice cooks very quickly in a pressure cooker--only 10 minutes!

Farming with Wildlife II

Here are some recent photos of wildlife on the farm. We had two weeks of stormy weather earlier this month, and had huge flocks of swans, ducks (mostly widgeon), and sandhill cranes that stayed on the farm. It was really fun to wake up and see the swans out of the kitchen window every morning. Not so much fun was chasing 300 geese out of our young wheat before they trampled and ate it all--one morning I went after them five times during a 90 minute period. I'd scare them up, and they would wait for me to leave and then go back to eat breakfast in the wheat. However, last week the weather turned sunny and warm, and most of the birds have left us again, on the way to their breeding grounds in Canada and Alaska. It's sad to see them go...

The photos are mostly swans, with some mudhens (coots) and a river otter thrown in.