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Today Analiese Paik, Founder and Editor of the Fairfield Green Food Guide, was a guest on WTNH’s Good Morning Connecticut show with host Ted Koppy where she discussed the America’s Favorite Farmers’ Market Contest, the 2nd Annual Easton Farm Tour, and The Farmer’s Cow’s just released, made-from-scratch line of premium ice creams.

(Bracelets courtesy of 3-OMjewels.com)

Do you love your farmers’ market?

America’s Favorite Farmers’ Market Contest, run by American Farmland Trust, concludes on August 31 so vote now for your favorite market. Not a single CT farmers’ market is among the top 20 right now so your vote matters!

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food!

It’s a beautiful day to head over to Easton for the 2nd Annual Easton Farm Tour being held from 10-2 thanks to Citizens for Easton. Start this self-paced, self-guided tour at the Firehouse Green where you can enjoy a slice of wood fired pizza with local toppings and listen to  live banjo music before  picking up an Easton Farm map to plan your visits.

There are 12 farms participating in the tour, many of which are planning special activities for the day. Top picks: Gilbertie’s Herb Gardens, the largest grower of USDA Organic herbs in the US, and Sport Hill Farm, an organic family farm with a CSA and brand new barn where you can shop for just picked produce, eggs, honey and honey products from Red Bee Honey in Weston, fresh-baked artisan bread from Fairfield Bread Company, granola from the Unquowa School, locally-grown fruit, and local grass-fed beef.

It’s August and one of the best ways to cool off is with a refreshing bowl of local, premium ice cream!

The Farmer’s Cow has just released their made-from-scratch line of premium ice creams. Available in eight different flavors at Stop ‘n Shops throughout the state, these ice creams are made the old-fashioned way, with farm-fresh ingredients including milk and cream from the Farmer’s Cow cooperate of six family-owned dairy farms, plus real fruit and sugar and no artificial flavors,  colors or stabilizers. No preservatives are used and in some cases, organic ingredients represented the best choice to reach these goals, like the organic cookies in the Cookies ‘n Cream ice cream.

The Farmer’s Cow held an ice cream naming contest and the lucky CT residents who won each received 20 pints a month for three months of the flavors of their choosing! Over 3,000 names were submitted and eight were chosen, one for each flavor. Winners of the ice cream naming contest include a 90-year-old woman who named Black Raspberry Moo Chocolate Chip. The winning names are: Hay! Hay! Hay! Vanilla, Cow Barn Chocolate, Farm Stand Cherry Vanilla, Fields of Mint Chocolate Chip, Black Raspberry Moo Chocolate Chip, Milking Time Cookies & Cream, Heifer Nutter Peanut Butter Cup, and Up Early Coffee.

The Farmer’s Cow is a cooperative of six family-owned dairy farms in CT supplying milk, cream, half and half, eggs, seasonal beverages and now 100% made from scratch ice cream to CT retailers. These family farms are:

1.       Fairvue Farms, Woodstock (NE “Quite Corner” of CT) Windham County

2.       Hytone Farm, Coventry (Tolland County)

3.       Mapleleaf Farm, Hebron (Tolland County)

4.       Fort Hill Farms, Thompson (NE “Quite Corner” of CT) Windham County

5.       Cushman Farms, Franklin (New London)

6.       Graywall Farms, Lebanon (New London)

When combined, these dairy farms  comprise 10,000 acres of farmland, 40 percent of which is woods, wetlands and wildlife habitat according to Robin Chesmer, Managing Director of The Farmer’s Cow. “We crop 6,000 acres for dairy farming – grassland, pasture and crop land. It takes two acres of land to feed one cow”  explains Chesmer.  “We place a lot of emphasis on conservation. Cow manure is used to fertilize the fields and we grow cover crops to reduce soil erosion from water and wind, which also serves as green manure.”

When asked about what the cows eat, Chesmer underscored that “the cows eat what’s grown on the farms including timothy, clovers, alfalfa and corn, not sweet corn. We feed the whole plant to the cow after it’s chopped up and fermented to make silage. Grasses are grown to make dry hay and they are on pasture when weather permits. The cows like it cool, around 30-40 degrees.”

“Our cows are not administered any growth hormones (rBST) and there is  no routine use of antibiotics and no antibiotics in the feed” stressed Chesmer. “When an animal has an infection or respiratory problem, it is segregated from the herd and may have to be treated with antibiotics. The milk is sampled to make sure there are no antibiotics present” before she is returned to the herd.

The milk is so fresh and rich tasting, even the skim and low-fat versions, and I wondered why. Could it simply be that it reached stores within 24-48 hours of being packaged? When I asked Robin Chesmer why their milk tastes so good he explained that “most milk available at retail is pasteurized by heating the milk to 270 degrees. The  Farmer’s Cow uses a traditional method which only heats the milk and cream to 164 degrees. We believe this affects the taste of the milk and certainly gives it a shorter shelf life. Also, the half gallon size milk is packaged in paper cartons with screw caps to seal out refrigerator odors. It’s more expensive than plastic bottles, but I think it tastes better.”

The Farmer’s Cow milk is widely available at CT retailers including small independent stores, Stop ‘n Shop, Big Y, and Whole Foods and is served in restaurants, inns and schools throughout the state. Click here for a complete list of retailers. Currently, their ice cream is available exclusively at Stop ‘n Shop stores throughout the state. The full product line includes: milk, cream, half and half, eggs, iced tea, lemonade, apple cider, and ice cream.

The Farmers’ Cow will be sampling their ice creams around the state so be sure to follow the Fairfield Green Food Guide to hear about these special events.

Robin Chesmer and the other members of The Farmer’s Cow run a transparent operation. Anyone can visit the farms during their regularly scheduled tours and special events and see firsthand the cows that produce the milk. Click here for Upcoming tours and events at The Farmers’ Cow

The Farmer’s Cow has just announced the winners of their ice creaming naming contest. The ice cream should be in stores by Memorial day.

“The winning names and those who came up with them for our “Name the Ice Cream” contest. We had winners throughout the state and they ranged in age from a high schooler to a person in their 90s! Way to go everyone!

The winners are:

“Hay! Hay! Hay! Vanilla” – Tracy Shortell, Wallingford
“Cow Barn Chocolate” – Sebastian Tonewo, Franklin
“Farm Stand Cherry Vanilla” – Karen Provoncha, Storrs
“Summer Meadow Strawberry” – Kip Kolesinskas, Manchester
“Up Early Coffee” – Jim Orffitelli, Manchester
“Heifer Nutter Peanut Butter Cup” – Sam Hinckley, Windsor
“Fields of Mint Chocolate Chip” – Jennifer Gaskins, Newtown
“Milking Time Cookies & Cream” – Marc Sanchez, Manchester
“Black Raspberry Moo Chocolate Chip” – Barbara Hambach, Broad Brook
“Muddy Boots Chocolate Chocolate Chip” – Zak Nadeau, Moosup

Additionally, one name was picked at random from all of the entrants. That person was Allen Patenaude of Torrington.”

I can’t wait to taste this premium, local ice cream!

April 11, 2010

Analiese Paik of the Fairfield Green Food Guide was interviewed by Matt Scott on News Ch. 8′s Good Morning Connecticut Show about green food for Earth Day.

One of the easiest ways to make Earth Day every day is to green your kitchen. Here are some delicious and fun ways to reduce your family’s “foodprint” while eating well.

Buy locally grown food from a farmers’ market and learn to cook with the seasons.

Best-selling author, restaurateur and Wholesome Wave Foundation founder Michel Nischan’s new cookbook, Sustainably Delicious, presents over 100 recipes for home cooks looking for delicious and nutritious ways to prepare seasonal food that is good for the environment, for animals, for farm workers, and for our tables. Michel advises us to “Eat what’s available in season, celebrate variety, respect the land and eschew waste”. His mission is to show that choosing local and sustainably grown food offers innumerable rewards, including some of the very best flavors Mother Nature has to offer. Who thought a humble parsnip could be this delicious?

Choose locally produced food from specialty or grocery stores.

The Farmer’s Cow milk is humanely-produced in Connecticut by a cooperative of six family-owned dairies and is free of artificial growth hormones (rBST). When you choose this fresh milk you support local farms, lower your carbon footprint by reducing food miles, support the local economy and ensure farmland preservation.

Choose organic where it matters most.

Download the Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides or iphone app from Environmental Working Group, familiarize yourself with the worst offenders (the Dirty Dozen), and commit to buying organic instead. Lettuce is a among the worst so choose organic from 2 Guys, a hydroponic greenhouse farm that produces year-round gorgeous vegetables for chefs, retailers and consumers. They are at many area farmers’ markets.

Choose eco-friendly wines.

Parducci Wine Cellars, America’s greenest winery, uses farming practices that result in healthier soil, balanced grapes and higher quality wines. Try their Sustainable White and Paul Dolan Vineyard’s Pinot Noir, made from organic and Biodynamic® grapes grown in certified vineyards. A vineyard that is certified biodynamic meets and typically exceeds the standards and regulations for organic certified farming. Biodynamic agriculture began in the 1920s, predating organic agriculture by 20 years.

Choose organic, fair trade chocolate, coffee and tea.

Kallari single origin, USDA organic, Rainforest Alliance certified chocolate is truly a chocolate lover’s dream and possibly the greenest chocolate available. 100% of the proceeds go to the Kichwa farmers in Ecuadorean Amazon who both grow the cacao and manufacture the chocolate. Available online and at Whole Foods Markets.

Use reusable lunch bags instead of single use plastic lunch and snack bags.

Lunch Skins are a completely food and dishwasher safe alternative to single use plastic lunch and snack bags. Use this coupon code for a 10% discount off your online purchase of Lunch Skins: FGFGED10. They’re a hit with the kids and you’ll love knowing that every time you use them, you’re avoiding throwing away a plastic bag.  LunchSkins has an attractive co-branded fundraiser program perfect for any school or organization.

Swear off bottled water.

Plastic water bottles are made from petroleum and are designed to be used once, resulting in a product that is thousands of times more expensive than tap water and no safer, according to a report by Food & Water Watch. Most of these bottles wind up in landfills where they take hundreds of years to break down and can leach harmful chemicals into the ground. Carry a stainless steel thermos instead. I love this wide mouthed one from Thermos that lets you guzzle the water and keeps the water cold even in blistering heat.

On Friday, April 23, Audubon Greenwich is pleased to host a very special screen of  “Tapped“ an unflinching, award-winning documentary about the bottled water business. As a special bonus, Stephanie Soechtig (the Director) and Sarah Olson (the Producer) will be there to field questions from the audience. Reception at 7:00 pm / Movie at 8:00 pm. There will be a bottle exchange during the reception so bring an empty plastic water bottle (… hopefully your last) and get a brand-new steel water bottle from the film’s producers (while supplies last) Click here to RSVP.

Grow at least some of your own food.

Buy a potted herb or vegetable plants to start an edible container garden and invite your children to join in the care and harvesting. The one show here is from Moorefield Herb Garden, a vendor at the Fairfield farmers’ market at the Fairfield Theater Company. One easy and inexpensive way to grow what you love is to buy organic vegetable bouquets from Two Guys from Woodbridge at a local farmers’ market and give them a second life. After removing the edible portion of the vegetable, plant the root ball in a raised bed or container where it will produce a second harvest.

Choose sustainable seafood.

Download the Sustainable Seafood Guide or iphone app from Seafood Watch and commit to limiting your consumption to sustainable seafood choices under the Best Choices and Good Alternatives categories. You call learn all about sustainable seafood in a fabulous new exhibit called Go Fish! at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk. Pick up one of Seafood Watch’s pocket guides to take home and don’t miss the movie  in the sustainable seafood theater, sustainable seafood “cafe”,  and the tank of LI fish including cod, striped bass, Atlantic salmon and wolfish. It’s perfect for adults and children.

Analiese Paik, Founder of the Fairfield Green Food Guide,

Presented Green Food Resolutions for the New Year

On News Ch. 8′s Good Morning CT

with Chris Velardi at 7:45 am on Sunday, January 10, 2010

Click here to watch the video and comment

Resolution #1

Recycle your #5 containers. Most eco-conscious consumers have already sworn off bottled water, wouldn’t be caught shopping without a reusable bag, and are in the habit of recycling their metal, plastic and glass containers. But #5 containers, which are used to package foods like yogurt, hummus and cottage cheese, are not recycled by many municipalities.  Whole Foods Markets collects #5 containers in their stores for recycling into new consumer products under their Gimme 5 program. So save your #5 containers and recycle them at the store instead of letting them end up in a landfill. If you don’t live near a Whole Foods Market, you can ship them directly to the recycling center.

Resolution #2

Don’t buy more than you’re going to cook. Stop buying fruits and vegetables in bulk if you frequently find them in your refrigerator or on your counter going bad. We think we’re doing right by our family by saving money from buying in quantity, but throwing out food is just wasteful. To avoid spoiled leftovers, portion and freeze food that will not be eaten in the next few days.

Resolution #3

Make your own vegetable stock with vegetable trimmings. Save vegetable ends, peelings and trimmings to make homemade vegetable stock.  Simply add raw vegetable trimmings to a container as your create them, and keep it refrigerated or frozen until you’ve accumulated enough to make a vegetable stock of your own. Vegetable stock is easily prepared in 45 minutes, is more delicious than store bought, and provides you with a great start to a soup, sauce, gravy, braise, rice pilaf or risotto. Celery (stem and leaf), carrots, onions (peel too), leeks, parsley stems, turnips, garlic and mushrooms make great stocks.

Resolution #4

Compost your unusable vegetables and fruits, coffee grounds, tea bags and egg shells. Get yourself a compost pail, line it with a BioBag (fully compostable and biodegradable), and accumulate your raw food waste for use in a composter. Many people have a composter in the backyard, but new composters in the form of small electronic kitchen appliances allow you to compost right in your own home without the use of soil, leaves and worms. The Wall Street Journal did a nice review of home composters recently and the bottom line is it’s never been easier or more convenient to compost at home. Important note: food waste that winds up in landfills is trapped in an anaerobic environment where it is unable to decompose and return nutrients to the soil.

Resolution #5

Choose post consumer recycled napkins, paper towels, and aluminum foil and biodegradable kitchen garbage bags. There’s a double bonus to using post consumer recycled products. Recycled content means the waste that would have wound up in our landfills (or incinerated) is now being repurposed into a consumer product. As a bonus, fewer trees need to be cut down and less of our precious natural resources like aluminum are required to make additional product.

Resolution #6

Choose glass containers to safely store and reheat leftovers and make ahead foods. By avoiding the purchase of storage containers made from petroleum-based plastics, we achieve the twin goals of safely storing our food and avoiding a product made from a non-renewable resource which requires a lot of energy to refine and when burned, emits CO₂, the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Resolution #7

Allocate at least 10 percent of your food budget to locally grown and made foods. Shop the farmers’ markets, ctffe.com, and independent and specialty stores which support local vendors. Buy your wines directly from the wineries or a wine merchant that carries local wines.

Shop the Winter Farmers’ Markets on Saturdays from 10-2

1) Fairfield at the Fairfield Theater Company on Sanford Street

Beltane Farms (Lebanon) makes artisanal, farmstead goat’s milk cheeses. The chevre is their fresh goat cheese and it is sold plain or dressed in fresh herbs.

Video from opening day at the farmers’ market is available for viewing on YouTube: Beltane Farms and Starlight Gardens.

2) Norwalk at 61-65 Wall Street (across from the Garden Cinemas)

Greenscapes (Danbury) carries fresh produce and a wide variety of pantry staples including jams, jellies, and honey.

Shop CT Farm Fresh Express

This online retailer of exclusively CT-grown and made foods provides the convenience of online ordering with home delivery each Friday. www.ctffe.com. Choose from CT grown fruits and vegetables, grass fed meat, cheeses, dairy products, bread and other baked goods, and a wide variety of organic products. Urban Oaks(New Britain) organic braising greens were featured on the show.

Local Beverages

1.       The Farmer’s Cow milk is produced by a group of 6 family-owned dairy farms and is free of added growth hormones. The cows eat grass and corn grown on the farms. The milk has a very fresh and rich flavor not only due to the grass, but also the fact that it’s traditionally rather than ultra-pasteurized. The Farmer’s Cow products are widely available in supermarkets and specialty stores. Visit their site for a complete listing.

2.       Twelve, a sophisticated, non-alcoholic beverage made by a Fairfield, CT company. This all natural, no sugar added, lightly carbonated drink is sophisticated, festive, and food-friendly. Created by the legendary chefs David Burke and Alfred Portale, it is now made by a company headquartered in Fairfield which outsources production to a winery in Ohio. The clever and catchy name is derived from the 12 hours which span the drink’s recommended consumption time – from noon to midnight. The base is white grape juice to which organic teas, herbs, spices and citrus essence is added, along with a light carbonation. Twelve makes a great base for mixed drinks too -try vodka or dark rum. You can find Twelve at Whole Foods Market, Palmer’s Market in Darien, and Balducci’s in Westport.

3.       Hopkins Vineyard’s (New Preston) fine sparkling wines made using the same methods and grapes (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir) that are used to make Champagne. Multi award winning wines in both American and International competitions. A 30-year-old winery on a 200+ year-old family farm.

4.       CT Valley Winery’s (New Hartford) Black Bear (a port-style wine) and Black Tie Cabernet Franc, an elegant and sophisticated red table wine. Jason Ferraro and his father are the team that run this CT winery that was voted Best Small Winery and won ten medals in the 2009 Big E Northeast Gold Wine Competition. The Black Tie is their most awarded wine.

Local Artisan/Specialty Foods

1.       Sankow’s Beaver Brook Farm’s (Lyme) premium ice cream (Lyme) (Walter Stewart’s)

2.        Bear Pond Farm’s (Glastonbury) line of nut-free pestos made with organic basil and non-GMO canola oil. (Walter Stewart’s, Whole Foods Markets and )and new line of Skinny Dips – Greek style yogurt based dips are made from grass fed dairy and organic herbs. Choose from Kalamata Olive, Blue Cheese and Dill-Chive.*

Please visit www.fairfieldgreenfoodguide.com for continued support in your New Year’s Green Food Resolutions. Happy New Year!

*Samples of the new product line (Greek style yogurt based dips) were provided by the company.

by Eileen Weber

Many people don’t realize that a dairy farmer’s job is never done. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or New Year’s Day. The cows need milking. And nobody knows that better than the folks at The Farmer’s Cow.

A group of six Connecticut family-owned farms teamed up to provide milk to Connecticut and parts of New York and Massachusetts. Combined, they milk 2,300 cows on nearly 7,000 acres of land. Their collaboration has been so successful that they’ve branched out into other products like eggs, half and half, and cider. Now they even offer heavy cream. And with the holidays coming up, it’s none too soon.

The Unquowa School in Fairfield got the jump on the heavy cream this year, too. They made a Thanksgiving meal made in part by the product’s debut. “Unquowa has been with us since Day One,” said Robin Chesmer, Managing Director at Farmer’s Cow. “They buy our milk because they liked our concept.”

And they’re not stopping with just heavy cream. The company is looking to expand their product line to include ice cream. They are planning for an April launch of six flavors. Besides the ubiquitous chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, they’re planning on including other popular flavors like chocolate mint chip and cookies and cream.

When asked if they were planning on selling butter any time soon, Chesmer replied they like to build their clientele base with each new product first before they move on to a new one. “No butter yet, but there has been a lot of interest,” he said. “Every product is an investment.”

The four-year-old corporation boasts its local heritage and its hormone-free approach to dairy farming. On their website, they will gladly tell you that in a sing-song cadence à la The House That Jack Built: “We are the farmers who works the land and grow the crops to feed the cows that give the milk for you to enjoy.” They even have a cute commercial jingle, although I wouldn’t put it on your iPod.

Their happy-go-lucky attitude makes it all sound so easy. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In Connecticut alone, farmland has disappeared at a rapid pace. According to a poll published in The Norwich Bulletin on July 20th, the number of farms have dropped from about 500 in 1990 to 151 in 2007. And much of our $2 billion agriculture industry in this state includes dairy farms.

That number is even lower in other states like New Jersey. According to an article in The New York Times on November 16th, there are less than 100 farms in the state. For those states where it is not illegal, dairy farmers are trying to sell their milk “raw”, or unpasteurized, because each bottle can fetch up to as much as $7 per bottle. A gallon of milk in New Jersey sells for $1.11. Unfortunately for many dairy farmers in the state, New Jersey does not allow the sale of unpasteurized milk.

If you are interested in raw milk, it is available in parts of California, Connecticut, and New Mexico. RealMilk.org gives a listing of unaltered dairy products including cheese and yogurt.

The Farmer’s Cow uses what they call “traditional pasteurizing.” They heat the liquid to 165 degrees, which effectively kills the bacteria. The milk you typically find on the supermarket shelf is “ultra-pasteurized.” That means the liquid has been heated to well over 200 degrees. It gives the milk a longer shelf-life, which retailers love. But The Farmer’s Cow believes it takes away from the overall taste.

“It takes the milk out of the milk,” said Chesmer. “It takes away from the flavor and the goodness of what milk is all about.”

While taste is one of their primary concerns, they also take other things very seriously. They strive to be energy efficient with all of the equipment they use. The cows’ manure is recycled and used to fertilize the grass and corn the cows are fed. They are conscious of their soil and water quality. But most importantly, each of the farms in the conglomerate is very focused on preserving the land and wildlife habitat.

“We need to preserve it for future generations,” said Chesmer. These farmers work to keep the land they produce from in tact. Like a popular bumper sticker says: No Farm. No Food. He went on to say that The Farmer’s Cow offers farm tours. Chesmer said what was special about that is “not many people get the chance to visit what they eat.”

On their web site, the company lists where consumers can buy their products. Farmer’s Cow is available locally in Westport at A&J’s Farmstand, Whole Foods Market, and The Fresh Market, which recently opened in October. In Fairfield, Shaw’s on Black Rock Turnpike and Stop & Shop on Kings Highway Cutoff carry the milk. You can also find it at Stop & Shop’s Bridgeport location on North Main Street. And if you find yourself in Trumbull, stop by Plasko’s Farm Market and pick up a carton there.

So the next time you’re at the store, pick up a carton and support your local farms!