riverbend farm

Kicking Off Riverbend Farm Days on April 24: Come Help Us Plant Onions!

Spring is such an exciting time! Although it's too early to start planting right now (apparently, winter might not be over yet), it's not too early to start thinking about the work that needs to get done to make this summer our most productive and fun ever. For me, that means warming the soil for our backyard farm, experimenting with different homemade mustard recipes, joining a CSA, and looking for ways to help my kids understand where our food comes from.

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April Local Food Event at Common Roots

Common Roots Cafe in Minneapolis has made a big impression in a short time. A business committed to knowing its farmers and connecting with the larger community, Common Roots had a big 2009, starting a community garden, creating 8 new full-time living wage jobs, and making 88% of its purchases from local, organic, or fair-trade sources.

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School Lunch Contest: Eat Lunch With Your Kids, Send Us the Pictures, Win Prizes!

Last week's school lunch post, our "Open Letter to Our Children," was a direct response to the sixth graders at Minneapolis' Sanford Middle School who I'd met with the month before. Their question was simple and heartbreaking: if our communities love us, why do they knowingly feed us this junk?

The response to this post was fantastic. Many of you provided explanations, made suggestions, and shared your own views, and we at SGT were reminded once again of how much we love this community. For example, Laura wrote:

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Upcoming Workshop Helps Chefs Put More Local Food on Their Menus

My first cooking job was at a small German diner on my hometown’s Main Street in Northern Minnesota. It was a hybridized place; we hand-pounded schnitzel cut from pigs the chef had raised, but we also served a dizzying number of filet-o-fish sandwiches. And when we ran out of green beans we opened up a jumbo can.

I remember a farmer knocking on the back door one day, carrying a lumpy paper grocery bag overflowing with fresh green beans. As the chef was shaking his head no, a few of us young cooks came up behind him and said, “We’ll clean them, chef!” The farmer, who was practically giving them away, handed them over. They were delicious, but the chef hated them because of the time it took his minions to top-and-tail their way through the bag.

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Sweet Cheeks Baby Food Makes it Local, Organic, and Healthy

It's not terribly unusual for me to come home from a meeting with food. Whether it be Surly cupcakes from the Salty Tart bakery, Fisher Farms bacon from the Birchwood Cafe, or a whole heritage chicken from Jackson Hollow farm, I spend a lot of time talking about food, surrounded by food, and tempted by food. Still, even for me, it felt a bit strange to leave a meeting with my arms full of frozen, organic baby food: sweet potatoes, apples, a carrots/beets and rice combo, and more.

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Super Fun Local Food Dinner at Brasa Last Night

A huge thank you to our family, friends, farmers, neighbors - and the terrific folks at Brasa - for making Simple, Good, and Tasty's January 2010 local food dinner one of the best yet. From the time we sat down to the time we left 3 hours later, the nearly 100-strong crowd was fed a menu of - well, nearly everything on the menu. Here's what was served:

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Looking Back and Looking Ahead: Our 2009 Simple, Good, and Tasty Recap and 2010 Resolutions

What a year it's been! Between our first post - proudly proclaiming that we joined a CSA - and our recent letter to Santa Claus, we've grown gardens, pickled dilly beans, and made lifelong friends. Here are just a few highlights from 2009:

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Sneakers Not Required: Good, Local Food Provides Inspiration in a Suburban Health Club

Try to guess what suburban restaurant serves locally-raised, grass-fed, beef short ribs with caramelized-onion potato puree, and horseradish gremolata;  baked, free-range, Larry Schultz chicken with herb filling, wilted spinach, and caramelized-shallot, marsala, pan sauce; pastured pork, braised in apple cider and served with red cabbage, local apples, and ginger yams -- plus three kinds of burgers: bison, yellow-fin tuna, and walnut wild-rice.

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Celebrating Our Community and Our Co-ops

Providing natural, fresh, organic and local foods has been at the core of Mississippi Market Co-op’s offering since they opened their first store in 1979. This past weekend, the market celebrated their 30th anniversary and an official grand opening at their newly opened West 7th Street store in St. Paul. It was also Annual Meeting time for the market’s 9,000-plus cooperative owners and the event brought together members, a distinguished speaker panel, and the co-op leadership to talk about the future of co-ops and how Mississippi Market can lead the way.

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Pure Market Express Offers Raw Food to Go

Quentin and Rebecca IreyQuentin and Rebecca Irey"We want to change people's lives," Quentin Irey tells me, "we want to bring raw food to the masses." I'm trying to listen while eating a plate of food on which nothing is what it sounds like. Quentin and his wife Rebecca, the Twin Cities entrepreneurs who recently founded Pure Market Express, have just served me samples of four raw foods, and they won't say any more until I've tried what they're calling a bacon jalapeno popper. What concerns me is that the "bacon" they're serving is made from eggplant, and the "cheese" is a mixture of pine nuts, chives, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

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