Lionette's Market

Greetings, this is the July Lionette's Market Newsletter. 
Enjoy your summer!

I had the opportunity to see Food Inc., last night.  I would highly recommend it.  It comes out in the theatres this Friday.  This movie should change how all of us eat.  I thought that all the salmonella and e-coli outbreaks, climate change, pollution, diabetes and outrageous obesity rates would change how we eat, but they have not.  So maybe a movie will do the trick.  Definitely take the time to watch it.

New Products

We are in the middle of Strawberry season so eat them up!  Ask and we will gladly get you a case of strawberries (or any other fruit in season) and make Strawberry jam at home.  Jamming and canning are really easy.  You need only strawberries, sugar (optional), pectin (we sell Pomona ’s Pectin), some mason jars (sold at every hardware store), tongs, water, a large pot and a stove.  Inside the pectin packages are really simple recipes and instructions.  All the staff at Lionette’s can and jam, so feel free to talk it up while in the store.

We have been getting is some amazing flavored goat cheeses from Valley View Farm in Topsfield, MA.  They will go great on a salad (different salad greens coming in everyday from local farms!) and local radishes.

Greens, Greens, Greens!  Almost every day we get greens from several local farms (Blue Heron, Natural Way , Pete’s Greens and more!).  For salad greens try Pete’s Mesclun mix, some forty different types of edible greens could be in the mix.  Also try the wonderful sour (in a good way, like vinegar) qualities of the various Sorrels coming in, also delicious bitter quality of Mizuna, or pepperiness of Arugula and Upland Cress, also the lemony zest of the Mustard Greens.  And of course heaps of varieties of head lettuce.  So many options for a delicious salad.  Baby carrots, baby beets, radishes, summer turnips all fresh from the ground are all available now and are ideal for salads.

For cooking greens, Pete’s makes a killer mix called Braising Greens full of over a dozen rustic greens perfect for dinner.  Blue Heron Farm (Lincoln, MA) is bringing in wonderful bunches of assorted Kales (Russian Red, Lacinato and Siberian), as well as gorgeous Rainbow Chard.  Look out for Local Collard Greens too, perfect with sautéed onions and bacon.  Also coming in is Boc Choi, perfect steamed with soy sauce and sesame oil.

Tomatoes.  Soon enough, we are almost there.  For those of you unable to wait until tomato season begins, we do carry some Brandywine variety tomatoes green housed in Springfield, MA.  Slice some up with Fiore Di Nonno’s Mozzarella, made all the way across the river in Somerville.

Throughout July look out for new produce as the predominantly green colors turn to rainbow.  Tomatoes, summer squashes, raspberries, blueberries, eggplants, carrots, string beans and so much more!

Cheeses of the Month.

West River Creamery, Cambridge Reserve Cloth Wrapped Cheddar.  So much tang, a hint of earth and some pleasant sharpness all makes for one wonderful cheddar from one of the world’s greatest cheese producing regions; Vermont.  West River creamery is located in Londonderry, just down the street from another glorious cheese producer, Taylor Farm.

Dancing Cow Bouree.  Also from the world famous cheese region of Vermont.   Dancing Cow Cheeses are raw milk and from pure grass fed cows of several different breeds.  The bouree is aged in the cheese cellars of Jasper Hill (Another Vermont Cheese producer).  Bourree is washed rind cheese with an earthy aroma, supple paste and a rich, creamy texture that melts into a beautiful smoky, meaty, lingering finish. Bourree is made from raw cow's milk, un-cooled, from only a single milking.

MEATS.

Grilling Steak? We have every cut of steak, all grass fed, local and clean.  (After you watch Food, Inc, be sure to know that our ground beef contains no Ammonia filler at all, we are one of the few sources left of ammonia free ground beef. And our beef is grass fed, so no fear of e-coli problems.)

Burgers:  We have ground beef from North Hollow Farm and Millbrand Farm (Hardwick Beef).  Both of which are 80/20 and fully grass-fed in Vermont.  We also carry Massachusetts legendary River Rock beef, they are fully pastured animals but not grass fed (There is some corn/soy fed out on pasture, but theses steers were never raised on a CAFO.)

The Easy Steaks.  These steaks need only Sea Salt, Olive Oil and pepper.  To marinade them would be criminal, just enjoy the flavor.

Filet.  Yep, if you want no fat, and to be able to cut your meat with a plastic knife (or one of those corn & soy made biodegradable knives) then this is the cut for you.  Though generally cooked inside, we would not talk you out of grilling it.  Toss some Chatham Ewe’s Blue cheese on for flavor.

New York Strip. Almost as tender as filet, almost as lean, but more flavorful.  A small cap of fat is left on the top.  You can cut our strips steaks with a butter knife.

Rib Eye.  Commonly considered the best grilling steak.  Put away the butter knives and pull out the steak knives.  The fat marbling makes this steak more rugged than the filet and strip, but it is still tender, and needs nothing done to it.  I hardly even cook it.  If you really want to treat yourself, I mean you did something really special, get a River Rock Rib eye, easily the best steak in the city of Boston.  We get a full River Rock rib eye loin every other Thursday; next RR Rib eye day is June 25^th.  We have Grass-fed beef rib eye from local farms usually everyday.

Hanger steak (or Hanging Tender).  The ugliest yet tastiest steaks there is.  A loose fibered cut with a line of grizzle down the middle, this steak just looks awful.  But it is the most special of all steaks.  As most cuts of beef taste the same more or less, they differ only in tenderness and fat quantity, the Hanger just has a bolder and more intense flavor.  Do not marinade it, don’t even think about it.  Cook it with the grizzle on and cut around it after grilling.  This is the polar opposite of filet mignon.  Not for beginners.

The Marinades.  These steaks are delicious and take in the flavors of marinades.  The marinades also soften them up for a more enjoyable meal.  Each steak need different minimum amount of time to marinade (I give an estimate for each one), and no steak should really marinade for more than two days.  If you do not have a marinade in mind, we make up our own marinades which are available at the market.

Sirloin.  (or New York sirloin).  Often mistaken with New York strip, this is a very different cut as it is not as tender as a strip steak.  There is a nice bit of fat marbling for a wonderful flavor, perhaps even more flavorful than a strip steak.  Marinade for a minimum of thirty minutes.

Flat Iron.  Once called blade steak, it is cut from the shoulder.  A skinny (when the grizzle is cut out) steak that sucks up marinades perfectly and grill quickly.  Marinade for at least twenty minutes.

Shoulder Steak.  The only other steak for the grill from the shoulder.  These look like mini tenderloins (the same cut from veal is known as faux tender) and cook up nicely on the grill.  They are usually around 10-12 ounces and are modestly priced.

Tri-Tip.  This cut is famous in California and unheard of on the east coast.  I don’t know why that is.  It comes off the top butt (where the Sirloin comes from).  This steak fattens up on the grill and is really juicy; make sure you have a baguette to sop up the juice from your plate.  Probably not the best choice if using paper plates.

Flank Steak.  This was once the most common cut for London Broil, but marketing from the Beef industry has made it one of the more coveted cuts.  It is a very tight piece of meat, so marinade at least two hours if you plan on grilling.  Feel free to use wild and strong marinades for this extremely lean cut of beef, it will take on anything you soak it in.

Skirt Steak.  A long and skinny cut peeled off the ribs.  I usually Sautee this in a frying pan to make amazing tacos, but you certainly can grill this cut.  It can be considered a little chewy without marinade, but nothing to be scared of if you want to grill it as is.  Get some of Claire’s Corn Salsa (from Alburgh, VT), toss a few tortillas on the grill, and shave some Grafton village cheddar, and make a killer grilled taco.

Next newsletter will cover pork, lamb and sausage grilling!

Jamey’s Diatribe On Sustainable Food.

 As every major corporation in the global food industry is quickly scrambling to mass produce food and market it as sustainable, organic, local, green, organic, naturally raised, whatever, it becomes increasingly difficult to figure what is real and what is just crass marketing from the criminal class of the big corporations.  Our culture has crashed so quickly over the last fifty years that most Americans have a severe disconnect with their food supply.  Aside from some tokenistic local tomatoes at a fancy restaurant, most people in Boston will go another season without really eating anything from New England.

 As much as we want to keep our privileged lifestyles, unfortunately the idea of eating what you want when you want it has to be over.  Tyson, Whole foods, Trader Jo’s, Earthbound and Stoneyfield may try to sell you otherwise.  It is a false compromise. America is waking up to a devastating and dangerous food supply, (the first time ever in human history a food supply has been dangerous).  It is shocking to see our desperate attempts to compromise sustainability with entitlement.  It is exactly the same asinine strategy we are using with climate change.  We feel that somehow and someway nature will have to compromise with us.  Such absurd and futile notions that carbon offsets will appease the climate gods are similar to ‘uncivilized’ people of the past who made sacrifices to the rain gods.  The ever burning climate will not ignore the carbon emitted from fresh figs flown into Boston because you recycle.  Mutated e-coli and Salmonella do not understand your argument that recovering the economy takes precedent to a safe food supply, nor do they care about unemployment rates.  Obesity and Diabetes do not comprehend the injustices of a class based economic system.  And the devastating pollution from our factory farms is not interested in an argument of a kinder, gentler and more reformed capitalism.

People can put up arguments that at present we cannot feed the world with a sustainable, local and decentralized food supply.  This is argument is as arrogant as it is ignorant.  For the ten to twenty thousand years of human history, our species had a local and decentralized food supply.  It is only in the last fifty years that our commodity based, mass-produced, corporate controlled food supply has existed, and all it has done is made food dangerous, scarce, taken out of the hands of farmers and extremely expensive (you have to stop looking at only the price tag when buying foods, the hidden costs of cheap food are enormous.)  According the WHO, in just a decade or so the planet produced enough food for twelve billion people.  Last month National Geographic reported the world no longer produces enough food for our six billion people.  There is a direct connection between the globalization of food and food shortages.  The IMF and World Bank rules have made it so that rich countries can subsidize their commodity crops to be cheaper than developing countries.  So now civilizations that had the ability to sustain and feed themselves for thousands of years cannot even grow their own food.  Worse, they are dependent on the criminals from Monsanto and other ‘western’ corporations.  These corporate leaders are as incompetent as they are malevolent.  If it were not for how dangerous they are to all of humanity, they would be the laughing stock of the world for what they are doing.  When wondering why so many people ‘hate’ Americans, you have no further to look than what this country has done, both directly and through its policies and persuasion, to the planet’s food supply and ecosystem.  There were food riots and disturbances in over three dozen countries last year.  Let’s hope we can regain control of our food system quickly or else civil unrest will be a common reality, and it will hit home.

In the USA we are doing ‘soul searching’ about how we approach capitalism.  We created anti-trust laws so that we no company could have a monopoly on any industry, and so that a few companies could not control all the resources and industries.  That was over a hundred years ago.  Recently our leaders of capitalism really screwed up the system.  We now bail out companies that are ‘too big to let fail’.  Our economic ‘soul searching’ makes us wonder if we should allow companies to get so big that we cannot allow them to fail (see the Boston Globe Sunday Ideas section, Sunday, June 14.).  Now a hand full of companies pretty much own the whole food supply from seeds to land and everything in between.  They have made food dangerous over the last fifty years, helped ruin our climate and pollute our world, not to mention the ghastly manipulations to nature.  Are we going to let these companies be so big we cannot let them fail?  Because it is quite clear they have already failed us.  They did not make food cheaper; food is now the most expensive it has ever been.  We are a critical point now.  The companies do not farm food, they manufacture it.  The people who farmed food (known as farmers) are pretty much wiped away or are factory managers for the corporations.  This pathetic food supply for the sake of profit for a few corporations is now the status quo for the whole world.  Contrary to our current approach of big business, we must let these businesses fail; in fact we must be the ones who make them fail.  If we allow nature to determine the fate of the few corporations controlling our food supply, then we will have no food.  It is that simple.  We must realize that nature is far more important and powerful than the ‘market’.  We do not need the market to be on our side to survive, we do, however need to be on the side of nature to survive.

And so the argument that a local and decentralized food supply won’t work? HA! What we have now is a definite failure, resort to what worked for the past ten to twenty thousand years.  There were no Whole foods, Stoneyfields, Peruvian asparagus nor year round vine-ripened tomatoes until the last few decades.  So let’s be smart about this.  The ‘green’ companies (or whatever you want to call them) are merely trying to capitalize on a new market, green, naturally raised, organic, sustainable etc…  They use marketing to convince you to buy their product, but they still are using the same form of production; mass production.  And for globalizing food, it might sound like a good idea for foreign people to grow our food, because aren’t we giving them jobs and welcoming them to the world economy?  These people who used to be able to produce their own food and sustain themselves, this is another example of our arrogance and ignorance.  We are doing no one around the world any favors by making them grow exotic, out of season, and cheap food for us.

So I went to some pre-screening of FOOD INC, the movie, and after was a brief Q&A with the documentary’s director Robbie Kenner.  As per usual with Q&A’s the first question was something like “Where do our Senators stand on this?  What can I do as a concerned citizen?”  It is generally a middle class person who makes such statements.  I have never heard a poor person say “Oh my god, does Senator Kerry know about e-coli yet!  Someone has got to tell him!”   It is quite right to be concerned after seeing Food, INC.  We should all be very concerned about the state of our food supply and not only the complacency, but actual assistance our government has given in bringing us to the awful mess we are in. 

President Obama put former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as head of our department of Agriculture.  Real brief, Vilsack is an agribusiness man, a corn man who ran a corn state, who has the blessing and support of Monsanto (probably one of the most evil companies on the planet, worse than tobacco).  What should we have expected from President Obama?  He, after all, was a Senator of another corn state, and is now the President of a corn country!  Michael Pollan says this in an interview with Mother Jones magazine on the subject of Vilsack, “Putting the most positive spin I can on it: he’s no longer governor of Iowa, and I’m hoping that as a politician, when he senses where the wind is moving, he’ll move with it.”

I understand Pollan’s point.  Let’s be honest with ourselves, the way our government works is to basically do whatever it can to help out a few rich people do things that the public would generally perceives as dangerous, unsavory, illegal, self-indulging, and downright wrong.  Then when the public (all of us) catches on and is outraged, our government then works with specialists (usually from those same rich people’s corporations) to come up with a law that appeals to the concerned and outraged public.  But really the law just compromises a little bit on what those rich people have been doing.  Every few years people vote for one of the two parties and think there is a change, when in fact, Clinton, Bush, and Obama all seem to be doing the same thing.  This is exactly what is going on with our food supply.  Our food supply is now dangerous and devastating our planet, all so a few rich people (who have little to no background producing food) can get richer.  That is exactly what is going on.

So if you want to call your senator, sure go ahead, maybe it will help pass a law or two.  But if you really want to change do this: Change your habits.  Do not ever again eat at a fast food restaurant, do not ever again shop at a chain supermarket (the fast food of retail food) and yes that includes the biggest supermarkets: Whole foods, Trader Joe’s and Wal-Mart’s, the evil trio.  If you go out to eat, only patronize a restaurant that is putting in a real effort to purchase local and sustainable foods, you will be surprised at how few restaurants buy local.  Buy your food from within your community.  There are a few of us left that have not been washed away by chain supermarkets.  Talk with your neighbors, get organized, talk with local shop keepers and ask for local food.  Learn where your food comes from.  We must regain control over our food again. Remember if only a small percentage of us are eating in a sustainable manner, it means that the majority of people are not eating in a sustainable way.  That means we are all still in danger.  Remember we all share this planet, and thus share a changing climate, polluted land and devastated water.  The sooner we put every major supermarket, factory farm, and agribusiness out of business the better chance we have a future where we can eat food every day.  Also remember, for ten to twenty thousand years we had a local and decentralized food supply, it has only changed for the worse in the last fifty years, so do not buy into the arrogance of agribusiness, government and supermarkets that we would all starve without them, because at present we are all in some serious peril because of them.

-       Jamey Lionette

Until we can make the market see all the costs of unsustainable farming, and until we learn how to temper its obsessive focus on ever greater efficiencies, market-driven sustainability will fail.  This reality became evident last August, after Whole Foods recalled ground beef due to an E. coli scare.  The problem was that Whole Foods’ supplier, Coleman Beef, processed its meat at Nebraska Beef, a large, low-cost plant infamous for health violations (including a 5-million pound beef recall in July for E.coli.) In essence, Whole Foods sought to create a new value- sustainability -without changing the food supply.

Paul Roberts