Locally Grown - Availability for February 11th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

Next weekend in for Lovers, or as they like to say on the Holiday Calendar, Saint Valentine’s Day. Since virtually nothing is known about the real St. Valentine, and the holiday celebrating “romantic love” in his name was a poetic invention by Chaucer the Father of English Literature, I’m going to take creative license and tell my own story of Saint Valentine and the holiday we all know and love.

Saint Valentine, though having pledged his life to the priesthood, found himself one day ridiculously in love with aura of a young lady farmer. Each day he did most of the gathering of food in the market to be served for the other priests, and for special occasions, an errand he most deeply appreciated as he enjoyed the smells of fresh harvests from the field, the best chicken freshly plucked, and the fine breads and cheeses made by the artisans of the village. But above them all he was entranced with the young lady who seemed to do it all. At her stand she had every vegetable known in the village, but the best grown, without a blemish. She stacked them all in a rainbow palette that caught the sunlight as he walked forth. She cut fresh herbs and instructed each passer of what they were and how to use them in cooking. Her very hands smelled of the rosemary cut that morning. Fresh flowers adorned her farm, her stand and her very hair which always had the most recently bloomed flower tucked behind her ear, reminding one of the season, and the beauty of the season.

Since Saint Valentine was wed to the church he decided to express his love by loving what she loved, the beauty, bounty and abundance of the living Earth, carefully studied and cultivated so that others may live and enjoy it more deeply. And so Saint Valentine engaged every farmer at the market and learned what special skill they had and good morsel they produced that might enrich his meal and his life.

As he fed this newfound love, he found it grew quickly. There was the farm of the Mountains and the Earth that grew fine fields of fresh Spinach that were exquisite in a soup. Their swiss chard always harvested young and tender were bright and pretty as spring flowers but grew in the wintertime. The O’shanna Fofanna farm known for their lettuce and pork would occasionally bring fresh Parisian Cookies with white chocolate and strawberry jam which always made him feel more sophisticated than he actually was when eating them (and his typical sneeze after eating baked goods was absent as well).

The freshness of the eggs spoke for themselves as the days he didn’t arrive at the market super early, he found every last egg had been sold.

In the month of February when the dreariness of Winter needed some cheer he would sweeten his life with Honey in his tea in the mornings from a sweet mountain bee keeper, and each evening a stick of hot cocoa would go in a tall glass of milk. For breakfast he’d have blueberry or fig jam on his biscuit from the farm with the shady creek to remind him that these fruits would begin to grow again soon. After dinner a vegan apple pecan cake

As a way to thank the Lady Farmer that had spurred this new and profound love, Saint Valentine would occassionally bring a small gift. He knew of an amazing chef up in the mountains who had written his own cookbook, that included recipes that had been cooked with her very fruits of the field. So he brought her a copy and with it a soup he had made with her own jerusalem artichokes, a specialty of her farm. She knew not what to think so rarely being thanked in such a generous way. He did not linger too long at her table, but she forever noticed his love too for the people and the food that came from the Earth. This very particular piece of Earth, that thankfully had people who lived and worked on it, showing that the Earth provides when cared for.

So this is the true origin story of VALENTINE’S DAY. If Chaucer can have a go at it why not we!

Eat Well our Dear Friends! And be in love!

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew