Wild Mushroom Foraging Law

The Maine Sunday Telegram has published an update on the Maine mushroom foraging law.

But eight months later, the law still has not been implemented. The program to certify wild mushroom foragers and brokers has not been put in place. An advisory board established by the law has yet to be formed.

Meanwhile, wild mushrooms are still being peddled to restaurants and retailers — unchecked and unsupervised.

Food Gift Ideas, Slow Food Delegates, Butchering Workshop, Restaurant Inspections, Pirates Cooking

The Food & Dining section in today’s Press Herald includes a set of holiday food gift ideas,

Think of these items as hostess gifts you can take to all the holiday parties you’ll be attending this year, or as not-so-last-minute stocking stuffers. Some of these ideas are things I’ve written about earlier in the year, while others are brand new items I have given as gifts myself.

The common denominator: I promise you I have tried them all and liked them.

an interview with the Maine delegates who attended the Slow Food conference in Italy in October,

Fellow farmer and Maine delegate Sarah Bostick works for the New Americans Sustainable Agriculture Project at Cultivating Community, where she teaches Maine farming techniques to immigrant farmers from warmer climates. In addition, she runs a permaculture design business.

Bostick went to the conference looking for specific ideas that could help her in her work with immigrant farmers.

a report on a hog butchering workshop scheduled to take place at Local Sprouts in December.

Also in today’s paper is an update on restaurant health inspections,

The Wok Inn, which was shut down after failing four health inspections since April, is among four Portland restaurants to be closed in the past two months for health code violations. The other three — Sapporo Restaurant, The Loft and Mekhong Thai — have reopened after correcting violations.

and a report on a program that’s teaching Portland Pirates players how to cook healthy meals for themselves.

Chris Brown, a 21-year-old forward from Flower Mound, Texas, who calls himself “a sometimes cooker,” credited his ease with a knife to a lifetime of hunting deer. “I’m not a big vegetable person, so all these greens are freaking me out a little bit,” he said.

Brown said he is trying to eat better, and hopes the cooking class will help.

Growing Ginger in Maine

This week’s food Portland Phoenix reports that several farms in Maine are now experimenting with raising ginger which is normally a crop for warmer climates.

Most ginger comes from Asia. Hawaii is the only US state with a real commercial crop. So when I recently relocated from Oregon to Brunswick, I was surprised to find Kennebec Flower Farm selling tropical ginger — and its cousin, fresh turmeric — at my local farmers’ market. But at least half a dozen farmers with that good ol’ Yankee gumption here in Maine, and farther south, down the East Coast through Florida, are warming up to this novelty crop.

Scarborough Winter Farmers Market

Today’s Press Herald reports on a new winter farmers market that has started up in Scarborough.

The owner of Highland Avenue Greenhouse and Farm Market has filled one of his greenhouses – usually empty this time of year – with trays of 30 varieties of winter greens, all bound for local restaurants. In another greenhouse he’s started a winter farmers market. It opened Nov. 4 with six vendors selling beef, goat cheese and milk, preserves and crafts.

Taste, Memory and David Buchanan

The Press Herald has published an article about the upcoming book Taste, Memory and it’s author David Buchanan.

Published by Chelsea Green and due to hit bookstores Nov. 5, the eloquently crafted book is part memoir, part food history and all delicious romp through the modern day renaissance of agricultural creativity and culinary adventurism sweeping the nation. Buchanan takes readers along with him as he searches out a diversity of fruit and vegetable varieties beyond those that dominate supermarket displays. It’s a tale bound to appeal to those with an appetite for alternative food and farming systems.

Stan Brown, Beekeeper

The Huffington Post has published an article about Stan Brown who runs Brown’s Bee Farm in North Yarmouth Maine.

Stan Brown of Cumberland, Maine, is nearly 93 years old, one of America’s oldest registered beekeepers. Brown, who turns 93 on October 13, has kept honeybees on the same one-quarter mile of road since 1931. Semi-retired, he maintains 55 hives and produces around 1900 pounds of honey a year with the help of his assistant, Karen Thurlow-Kimball.

Taste, Memory by David Buchanan

Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors and Why They Matter, a book by Portland resident, local farmer, and expert on heirloom fruits and vegetables David Buchanan, is being launched later this month.

In his Forward for Taste, Memory Gary Paul Nabhan writes,

Taste, Memory may well be the most beautiful book ever written about food biodiversity and how it has “landed” on earth, in our mouths and in our hearts. Once you have read and digested David’s book, you will never again regard this two-word phrase as an abstraction, but as a essential element of our common food heritage, one that continues to nourish and enrich our lives. In turn, we must nourish it, or it will surely fade away. As Poppy Tooker famously says, “You’ve got to eat it to save it.” Taste, Memory offers the rationale and the inspiration you need to embark upon your own voyage of food discovery.

SPACE Gallery is hosting a launch part for Taste, Memory on October 24.

We’ll set up cider pressing equipment and taste a variety of apple blends, as well as samples of hard ciders from David and Eli’s fermentation experiments (feel free to bring apples if you’d like to press some of your own). David will read passages from his book about collecting rare fruits and working with Eli, and the movement to preserve biodiversity and traditional foods. Acoustic live music by Jake Hoffman and Tyler Leinhardt of Sugar Shack.

A pair of excepts from the book (Seeds of an Idea and The Cider Tree) are available on the publisher’s website.

NYT: Common Ground Fair

The New York Times has published an article about last weekend’s Common Ground Fair in Unity Maine.

Organic food may not be feeding the world yet, but it was feeding thousands of people at the Common Ground Country Fair last weekend.

They lined up at 10 a.m. to pay $4 for Steve’s Organic French Fries, made with organic potatoes fried in cold-pressed safflower oil for the vegetarian crowd. Although “beef tallow is better,” said Steve Aucoin, 61, who has been selling fries here since the first fair, in 1977.

Food Sciences, Wine Storage and MOO Milk Documentary

Today’s Press Herald includes a front page article on the Food Science program at the University of Maine,

At a time when enrollment at UMaine is down overall, a record number of students is enrolling in the university’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition.

advice on how to best  store your growing home wine collection,

How should you store the wine you keep at home for dinner parties or your own drinking pleasure? Do you really need one of those wine refrigerators that are so popular these days? And when should you take the leap to a real wine cellar?

and an article about a documentary on MOO Milk.

In a film that is at turns humorous, heart-wrenching and very humane, Pingree and Mann follow three farm families in Aroostook County and Downeast Maine as they and seven other farms strike out on their own to create Maine’s Own Organic Milk Co., better known as MOO Milk.