Plants Looking For New Homes

Organic and cheap -
Plants that I would like to pass along - for cheap! As in: Free! I have brought them all indoors but would like to free up some space. There are a total of five plants - two avocados (one tall, one bushier), one rubber plant and two big broad leaf tropicals - bird's nest ferns? The pictures were taken on December 8, 2011 - a warm day here in DC. I took the plants outside to spray them with a neem oil solution and a vegetable oil solution. They have also been treated for ants with boric acid. All inside now.


They are all tough plants - able to stand all sorts of stress although the avocados are thirsty. The rubber plant can withstand the strangest water regimen including drought, the big leaf things likewise. They are like camels; never know where the next drink will come from. The avocados do require water often. Otherwise very forgiving.


The following are two different plants - one in a red container the other in a black container. They are big.







I think the discoloration is from near frost - perhaps pest control oil - watching it now that it is inside.

Following are two avocados and a rubber plant:

Pathogens Everywhere

D.C. farmers markets highlight an array of food safety issues

By Esther French, Mattea Kramer and Maggie Clark, Published: July 22

Outside the Department of Agriculture headquarters on Independence Avenue SW, government workers and tourists shop for fresh produce, poultry, popcorn, baked goods and hot lunches.

Like farmers markets across the country, this one sponsored by the USDA is thriving, propelled by a national craving for fresh food and the perception that locally grown food is healthier than food mass-produced by big agriculture and sold in grocery stores.

But commercial tests found pathogens on raw chickens sold by a Virginia farmer at the USDA market; the pathogens could be harmful if the poultry is not properly cooked, according to an investigation by News21, a national university reporting project at the University of Maryland. The same was true of poultry sold by a Pennsylvania farmer at a Vermont Avenue NW market.

Both farmers were exempt from USDA inspections because they process fewer than 20,000 chickens a year, although farmers operating under the exemption are not permitted by USDA regulations to sell their products across state lines, officials said.

A USDA spokesman said the department has suspended poultry sales by the vendor at its market as it conducts an investigation.

The director of FreshFarm Markets, the nonprofit organization that operates the market on Vermont Avenue, said FreshFarm requires USDA inspection of all meat for sale at the market. Ann Yonkers, the director, said she was unaware that the farmer’s chickens were exempt from inspection and asked him to stop selling them.

The findings from both markets highlight seams in the federal government’s efforts to keep the country’s food supply safe through a maze of federal, state and local laws that can be confusing even for the people charged with enforcing them. They also illustrate the danger for consumers who think they can find refuge in markets selling food grown locally.

Despite the interest in food from local growers, scientists say small does not mean safe. “From a food-safety point of view, there’s no inherent reason why large production is, on balance, more dangerous than a small family farm,” said Bill Keene, a senior epidemiologist at the Oregon Public Health Division.

Benjamin Chapman, a food-safety specialist at North Carolina State University, said that in some cases small farms may be less safe. “We’re finding that there’s less pressure on a vendor at a [farmers] market to implement risk reduction because the perception is that the product is safe already,” he said. “At a grocery store, growers have all these specifications they have to hit, but that’s absent in the farmers market.”

Tests conducted for News21 by the Baltimore division of Microbac, a federally certified laboratory with locations nationwide, found salmonella in three samples of chicken being sold at the USDA market by J&L Green, a farm in Edinburg, Va.

“Our process as a whole is sanitary when operated correctly,” said Jordan Green, one of the farm’s owners. “Mistakes do happen.”

Green said he had recently noticed his plastic bags of fresh chicken leaking at the farmers market. He said it was hard to keep bags from tearing and, as a result, he was moving away from fresh and toward frozen poultry.

Leaky poultry juices present a cross-contamination hazard at a farmers market, where shoppers may also be buying peaches or lettuce and placing their purchases in the same canvas bag. Because produce is often eaten uncooked, pathogens would not be killed.

At the market on Vermont Avenue, Microbac found campylobacter on chicken sold by Garden Path Farms of Newburg, Pa. Emanuel Kauffman, the farm’s owner, said he believes his farming practices are safer than big agriculture’s.

It is not against the law to sell raw chicken with salmonella or campylobacter. Regulators instead have placed the responsibility on consumers to understand the importance of cooking thoroughly and avoiding cross-contamination of other foods. A USDA official said the department’s consumer education efforts are vigorous and ongoing.

But the government’s efforts have failed to reduce the number of salmonella infections in 15 years, even as other food-borne illnesses have dropped.

Salmonella, which doesn’t discriminate between small and large farms, is a pathogen sometimes found in the intestinal tracts of birds and other animals. On chicken farms, it can spread from bird to bird or can be introduced by wild animals. During slaughter and processing, salmonella on one chicken can contaminate many more.

Salmonella is invisible, odorless and tasteless, so even the most careful farmers might not know their chicken carries the pathogen, unless they test for it.

The same goes for campylobacter, which is even more prevalent in chickens. The pathogen is one of the leading bacterial causes of diarrhea in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Microbac also found salmonella or campylobacter in chicken parts sold by another local vendor and two grocery chains a short distance from the U.S. Capitol.

Altogether, five out of seven markets and grocery stores tested positive for campylobacter, and two of the five also tested positive for salmonella. It demonstrates how easy it is to find pathogens — no matter which market or grocery store a consumer patronizes.

In 2009, an annual Food and Drug Administration retail meat study found 21 percent of chicken breasts contaminated with salmonella and 44 percent with campylobacter.

The findings come at a time of increased federal concern over food-borne infections linked to the two pathogens, which the CDC says are two of the most commonly reported causes of food-borne illness.

A 2011 CDC study estimated that 1.8 million people are sickened, 27,000 are hospitalized and 400 die each year from both pathogens combined.

Because J&L Green, the Virginia farm selling chickens at the USDA market, operates under the exemption for small farms, no government inspector had looked at the way Jordan Green and his wife, Laura, raise and slaughter chickens, Green said. The USDA generally reviews exempt operations only if it receives a complaint.

Farmers decide whether they want to operate under an exemption from inspections. They do not, however, have to notify the USDA that they have claimed an exemption. The agency does not keep track of exemptions. However, state governments can have their own rules. Virginia, for example, requires farmers to fill out a two-page application, which Green said he did not know about but has now submitted. He also has paid for his own salmonella tests.

When the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service accepted J&L Green into its farmers market this year, officials failed to catch that he was not registered for the Virginia exemption he claimed and that he was breaking federal and state rules by transporting exempted poultry across state lines for sale.

The farmers market manager, Velma Lakins, said she was aware that J&L Green Farm labeled its chicken as exempt. She said she thought that exempted chicken could be transported across state lines, as did two regional USDA officials interviewed by News21.

Also at the USDA market, C&T Produce of Fredericksburg, another vendor, was observed selling unrefrigerated eggs, even though egg cartons bore USDA-mandated labels stating that they should be refrigerated.

Lakins said in an interview that she saw the eggs in coolers with ice packs. But Craig DeBernard, who co-owns C&T with his wife, Tracy, said he had not known the eggs had to be refrigerated and did not do so. C&T has stopped selling eggs at farmers markets during hot summer months and will sell them in an iced cooler in the fall.

Esther French, Mattea Kramer and Maggie Clark are fellows with News21, a university journalism program run in cooperation with the Carnegie Corp. and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-farmers-markets-highlight-an-array-of-food-safety-issues/2011/07/18/gIQAROXZTI_story.html

Food Truck Expansions

In D.C., the cart before the diner

By Danielle Douglas, Published: July 10

Farhad Assari had every intention of opening a restaurant in the District last year. After months of perfecting recipes for Mexican fish tacos and Indian butter chicken, the investment banker turned chef was ready to introduce his international cuisine to the world.

Assari toured sites along K Street and in Dupont Circle. He even commissioned local architecture firm Core to design the space. Plans changed once Assari was introduced to food trucks on a visit to New York City.

“The financial risks were substantially lower than starting a restaurant,” said Assari, who launched his mobile eatery, Sauca, in February 2010. Getting the restaurant off the ground would have run him a cool $1 million, whereas he launched the food truck for one- tenth of that cost. “It was a better way for me to confirm my concept.”

With 10,000 Twitter followers and six trucks under his belt, Assari was ready to pursue his original plan: to open a restaurant. A few weeks ago, he turned on the lights at Sauca’s first brick-and-mortar location, a 3,500-square-foot store at 4707 Columbia Pike in Arlington.

Assari is among a handful of mobile food providers turning to fixed sites to grow their businesses, while keeping the wheels spinning on their trucks. Their evolution comes as some established restaurants work the other side of the street. Austin Grill, Dangerously Delicious Pies and others have begun to roll out food trucks of their own. So is local restaurateur Bo Blair, who is readying his own food truck to serve chow based on two of his District-based establishments: Surfside and Jetties.

Burning both ends of the candle comes with its challenges, namely operating costs and management. Still, the food truck movement shows no signs of slowing down.

And why would it? Food trucks are a hot local trend — like cupcakes, burgers and frozen yogurt. Just stroll over to Farragut Square on a Friday, where you can expect a lengthy wait in line at any of the dozen trucks parked around the District park. Or check out Truckeroo, the monthly festival of food trucks founded by Blair that drew more than 18,000 people for its debut last month.

It’s difficult to peg exact sales figures for the nascent mobile-meals industry, but the rising number of trucks on the street is telling. Randy Shore, co-founder of the strEATS, has tracked 67 vehicles currently on the road, compared to 29 when he and Daniel Preiss launched their online truck tracker last August.

The proliferation of food trucks has drawn the ire of several neighborhood groups and the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, which are calling on the city to curb the growth and impose sales taxes on these vendors. Both sides are still hashing it out as legislation to update regulations surrounding food trucks snakes its way through D.C. government.

Alongside the influx of trucks, the nascent trend of operators launching mobile and stationary eateries is growing.

Pi Pizzeria, a St. Louis outfit, is gearing up for the August debut of its restaurant in Penn Quarter, six months after arriving in the District with a food truck. Owner Chris Sommers entered the market with plans for a fixed site, but figured a mobile operation would drum up business while the $2.1 million project was under way.

“We wanted the truck to be a marketing tool for our brick-and-mortar, build some excitement around our brand to open with a bigger bang,” said Sommers, who runs four restaurants and another food truck in St. Louis. “It allowed us to get our feet wet in the market.”

The District truck cost $30,000 and pulls in roughly $1,000 a day from sales of the deep-dish pizza. Judging by the endless posts in the blogosphere buzzing about the restaurant’s pending opening (there have been construction delays), Sommers seems to have achieved the desired attention.

The Internet, namely Twitter, has been a driving force behind the food truck evolution, and a useful tool as operators set up actual restaurants. Assari credits his strong following on Twitter with the stream of customers at Sauca’s Arlington location. Having an existing client base and revenue from the trucks helped Assari get off the ground, though he did sell two vehicles to finance the $750,000 opening.

Osiris Hoil, owner of District Taco, also used a portion of the sales from his food cart to finance the November launch of his 70-seat diner at 5723 Lee Highway in Arlington. Hoil debuted his cart in June 2009, thanks to a $50,000 investment from his neighbor, Marc Wallace.

With the success of the Yucatan-style Mexican meals, Wallace made back the investment money in a year and the two began scouting sites for a stationary operation. To keep expenses down, Hoil, a former construction worker, completed most of the $180,000 build-out himself.

He estimates the eatery serves about 700 people daily at an average tab of $10, while the cart is pulling in 180 customers a day. “I really enjoy both sides of the business,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the taco stand, the restaurant wouldn’t be successful.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/in-dc-some-food-truck-operators-begin-to-move-into-restaurants/2011/07/06/gIQAUF8M7H_story.html

The Politics Of Kosher

How kosher is D.C.’s kosher food truck?

By Steve Hendrix and Michelle Boorstein, Published: May 20

David Weinberg had planned to be first in line to buy a nice corned beef sandwich from the kosher food truck that opened Friday in Washington. The Web consultant has long lamented the lack of kosher cooking downtown and, as a foodie, was thrilled to hear that “Top Chef” contestant Spike Mendelsohn would have a hand in the deli on wheels.

But when a block-long line formed at the truck in its first hour, Weinberg was not in it. He had called the Vaad Harabanim of Greater Washington, the area’s main certifier of Jewish restaurant kitchens, to ask whether it was all right to patronize Sixth & Rye, the mobile eatery launched by the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.

“Unfortunately, they said no,” said Weinberg, 29. “I’m always excited to have a new kosher restaurant open up, and food trucks are just this awesome local food thing that is happening. But I assumed, wrongly, that it would be under the Vaad. Until it is, I can’t eat there.”

Perhaps it was inevitable when a hipster food trend crossed paths with 3,000 years of dietary tradition, but the debut of a van dispensing nouvelle slaw and high-end challah has caused a debate worthy of Talmudic scholars: Is the kosher food truck kosher?

For now, the silver panel van will not bear the blue and black “K” that would mark it approved by the Washington Vaad. The group supervises more than a dozen kosher restaurants in the region, including the cafeteria at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. But after several months of negotiations, the Vaad declined to certify the truck as kosher, according to the synagogue.

“The food is all completely kosher, but it seemed to come down to the ownership of the truck,” said Sixth & I director Esther Safran Foer. “We rent the truck from somebody who is not Jewish,” who will use it to serve non-kosher food the rest of the week. The Vaad was “concerned that he not be in the truck while we are serving. But he has to be. He owns the truck and holds the license.”

A spokesman for the Vaad wouldn’t speak about the group’s reasons for withholding approval.

“Unfortunately, despite our putting significant effort into the project, it ultimately did not meet the standards of the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington,” which oversees the Vaad, said Rabbi Binyamin Sanders, who runs the kosher certification program for the council.

But interpretation of kosher law is often in the rye of the beholder. Other scholars had no problem with the truck’s ownership and staffing. The synagogue found an orthodox rabbi in Baltimore to sign off.

“I have a lot of respect for the Vaad, and we hope to work with them in the future, but we had to get rolling,” Foer said as she looked at the line of several dozen waiting to order. “And we are!”

The truck served more than 350 orders in two hours.

Whose stamp to trust

For most of the inaugural diners noshing along the curb, the lack of a local kosher seal of approval was less important than the texture of the rye and the crunch of the home-fried potato chips. Even the Jewish customers seemed unconcerned by the dispute.

“I came for a corned beef sandwich,” said Zach Pleat, 28, who moved to the District two years ago from south Florida and has been tracking the food truck’s planned arrival on Twitter. “I haven’t had any good Jewish deli food since I came to D.C.”

His officemate, Leslie Rosenberg, 25, said the kosher tradition isn’t important to most of her Jewish friends.

“For my age group, I know literally one person who keeps kosher,” she said.

But for strict kosher keepers in Washington, the disagreement means they have to decide whose kosher stamp to trust.

Some, like Weinberg, said they won’t partake until the local Vaad gives the truck the all clear. Others said the out-of-town certification was just fine with them.

“I’m willing to trust Sixth & I,” said Sharon Beth Kristal, 38, a contractor for the U.S. Marshals Service who was in line at the truck. A conservative Jew who keeps kosher, she normally orders only fish or vegetables when she eats out. “I’m delighted to have another place to have meat other than at home.”

The synagogue, which plans to operate the truck each Friday, insists it will be run on strict kosher principles. Each Thursday, the truck will be thoroughly scrubbed with hot water, and the stainless steel counters will be covered with butcher paper. The utensils, all of which have been dipped in a mikvah, a purifying bath, will be segregated by use. Ingredients, all kosher, will be stored in locked cabinets and coolers in the synagogue’s kitchen.

A mashgiach, or supervising rabbi in the employ of the certifying rabbi in Baltimore, will keep the keys and be on hand to monitor the cleaning and serving. The synagogue will pay for his services, Foer said.

A choice of supervision

Some Washington area rabbis were outspoken in support of the truck’s kosher bona fides. In response to questions from several congregants, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom Synagogue in Northwest posted a message on his Facebook page saying Sixth & I was good to go.

“I’m eating there,” Herzfeld said in an interview. “In fact, I’m getting 12 or 15 sandwiches for the Torah class I’m teaching on Capitol Hill.”

Herzfeld also bypassed the local Vaad when it came to certifying the kitchen at his synagogue.

“They’re doing a lot of very good and informed and important work,” he said. “But they are not the only ones capable of providing supervision. My own kitchen is supervised by me.”

Some observant Jews said they could have predicted that the issue would become political.

“None of us are surprised that this was not easy,” said rabbi Shira Stutman, director of community outreach at Sixth & I.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/how-kosher-is-dcs-kosher-food-truck/2011/05/20/AFC1V27G_story.html

Should Street Vendors Charge Sales Tax?

Food trucks may lose their sales tax exemption

By Jonathan O’Connell, Friday, March 11, 10:56 PM

In almost any weather, food trucks trawl the city's commercial areas, greeted by hungry office workers in search of the lobster rolls, cupcakes and tacos that have become intensely popular since the mobile eateries recently began proliferating en masse.

The truck owners peddle their edible wares, however, without doing something the city's brick-and-mortar restaurant owners must do: pay sales taxes.

But that could change.

D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) plans to introduce legislation Tuesday, March 15, that would end the sales tax exemption for food trucks, requiring them to pay the same 10 percent tax as restaurants and other prepared food sellers.

“What the bill is intended to do is charge sales tax for all vendors, not just the food trucks but everybody,” Evans said.

The number of food trucks has grown dramatically in the last two years and Evans, chairman of the council's finance and revenue committee, said the system of charging them just $1,500 per year in fees, devised in the early 1990s, is obsolete. According to the city, there are now 488 “roadway vendors,” which include food trucks, ice cream trucks and other food sellers operating on the National Mall. There are an additional 642 “sidewalk vendors,” which include many long-running hotdog and T-shirt stands. All of the vendors currently pay the $1,500 annual fee, but Evans's bill would require them to all pay sales taxes instead.

Evans also said the current system is “no longer fair or working” for brick-and-mortar restaurants, which in addition to sales taxes also often pay for additional services from business improvement districts. But he said he was open to discussions about how best to both level the playing field and collect badly needed tax revenue from mobile vendors. “I recognize that there are a lot of issues involved here,” he said.

Kristi Whitfield, co-owner of the Curbside Cupcakes food truck, agreed that the guidelines are antiquated and need updating but said a sales tax would hurt her business -- and not just because of the costs that she would pass on to customers. Not having to compute a sales tax, for instance, allows her to only handle bills (no coins), keep her line moving and see many customers. “So much of what we do has to do with respecting people's time and operating efficiently,” she said.

Whitfield also called the idea that food trucks have a competitive advantage over restaurants an “illusion,” pointing to limits on the size of food trucks, where they can stop and how they can restock. “There are a myriad of benefits that restaurants have in regard to stocking and points of distribution that food trucks don't have,” she said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/capital_business/food-trucks-may-lose-their-sales-tax-exemption/2011/03/11/ABK1WXR_story.html

Organic farmer Heinz Thomet is fanning the flames in southern Maryland

By Tim Carman
Tuesday, January 4, 2011; 2:45 PM

At 6:45 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 11, when Heinz Thomet should have been harvesting product for the Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market the next day, the farmer noticed flames poking through a boiler-room wall on his Next Step Produce farm. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, but the gusher of flame-suppressing foam never materialized. Two other extinguishers were duds, too. Thomet finally read the fine print on his red canisters.

"If those things are sitting for two years, all the material inside can just settle on the bottom, and it really doesn't do anything anymore. So ideally, they say on the small print to shake that thing every other week," says the owner of the 86-acre farm in Newburg, in Charles County. "You have no idea how helpless I felt then."

Sixteen minutes after he spotted the blaze, Thomet called 911. Rather than wait for the trucks, the farmer decided to crank up his irrigation system and serve as his own volunteer firefighter. The real brigade, however, rolled into Next Step before he could get the water flowing. It was 7:13 a.m.; his boiler room and adjacent woodshed were engulfed in flames.

To Thomet, the crisis required radical thinking: At that point, he figured he would be better off letting the fire have its way, consuming the entire boiler-room structure and all 17 cords of firewood stored in the shed. That way, he would have to spend less time demolishing and removing whatever useless charred pieces remained of the wooden building, which housed the furnace that heated his home and his two greenhouses.

The Newburg Volunteer Fire Department viewed the situation from the opposite perspective: There was a fire, and it needed to be extinguished. The supervisor at the scene was not interested in Thomet's proposal to let the blaze die on its own.

A supervisor "basically says to me that I called 911, they're here to put it out, and I should step aside. And [because] I didn't jump, then he calls the police," Thomet recalls. "What I learned, in retrospect, is when you call 911, you have no more rights."

Clifton Butler, assistant fire chief with the Newburg crew, has a different recollection of events. Sure, Thomet asked the supervisor to let the building burn, he says, but the farmer's approach was, let's say, not so diplomatic. He was "yelling and screaming," Butler remembers. "He called us idiots and everything else. . . . Told us we're stupid. Everything he could think of, he called us." (Thomet, for his part, denies he treated the firefighters with such disrespect.)

Whatever the case, Thomet's request stood no chance against the hardware amassed on his property. Trucks and pumpers from Newburg, La Plata, Cobb Island, Bel Alton, King George County, St. Mary's County and even the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Va., all carefully maneuvered down Next Step's narrow, winding, uneven dirt-and-gravel driveway, more than a half-mile long, and converged on the scene. Together, the trucks had about 6,000 gallons of water. It still wasn't enough to extinguish the fire, Butler says.

"We can let this thing burn once we get it to a controllable stage, but right now [the fire was] too far gone for us not to calm it down, because then we'll have everything on fire. The woods and everything will be on fire," Butler recalls. "I mean, those flames were standing probably 25 to 40 feet in the air."

Several weeks after those flames finally were extinguished, tempers have settled, too. At least for now. Because even though Thomet might not still be spitting bullets over the fire departments' performance, he's still swimming against the current. The contrariness he apparently displayed on Dec. 11 is part of the same take-no-prisoners personality that fuels his continuing resistance to traditional farming practices in Southern Maryland.

Thomet, 51, and his wife, Gabrielle Lajoie, 33, run a certified organic farm amid a sea of conventional ones. They are outsiders here, in farming practice and in personal history. Thomet hails from Switzerland and Lajoie from Canada. He grew up on a farm that was "by default organic," says his wife of five years. "That's just the way things used to be." Lajoie, by contrast, studied natural science in college in Quebec but discovered she preferred the warm soil to cold calculations. She moved south in 2000 and went straight into farming in Maryland. Both developed their attitudes about farming outside the influence of American industrial agriculture.

Which apparently is obvious to the locals. As one resident told me with classic rural understatement, the people in the area describe Thomet and clan as "out of the ordinary."

The thing is, the locals probably don't know the half of it. They're aware of Thomet's unkempt appearance: the wild hair and the ragged, graying, Greek-godlike beard. They've probably even heard him rail about big ag (a favorite subject), and they've, of course, taken notice of Thomet's protests any time neighboring farmers want to spread sludge on their fields. But the locals might not know that the couple and their three young daughters are all vegans. Thomet, in fact, essentially hasn't touched meat since 1984, not long after he moved to America almost on a lark. "It's the only New Year's resolution I ever kept," he quips.

Their lifestyle flows right into their farming practices and products. Unlike many of the growers around them, Thomet and Lajoie show little interest in conventional Southern Maryland crops, whether soybeans, corn, wheat or that old standby, tobacco. Instead, they've researched and experimented with fruits and vegetables, trying to learn which will thrive on this unusual patch of land, where the weather and the tributaries of the Chesapeake combine to keep the soil warmer in winter. Over the years, the couple have found that their farm can grow ginger, persimmons, callaloo, Jerusalem artichokes, figs and even an occasional surprise such as cardoons.

Along the way, they've developed a loyal fan base among chefs, including Dean Gold of Dino and Nora Pouillon of Nora, and among customers who shop at Next Step's one and only farmers market outlet, at Dupont Circle on Sundays. Next Step's popularity, says FreshFarm co-director Bernadine Prince, lies in its broad mix of products and its practice of biodynamic agriculture, in which Thomet and Lajoie consider everything they do and how it affects the soil and environment. "It's a very holistic approach to farming," Prince says.

Gold e-mails that "My favorite product from him is his fresh young ginger. This is ginger before it develops the brown skin that allows ginger to be cured. No one else is crazy enough to grow it here, and it tastes better than the stuff I used to get in the Japanese supermarkets in LA."

Since the fire, FreshFarm has been collecting money for Next Step via a donation button on its home page at www.freshfarmmarket.org , and a number of Dupont regulars already have earmarked contributions to the Help Heinz Fund. As of last week, four donors had given $1,000 to the fund, which will defray the rebuilding costs not covered by Next Step's insurance. Thomet says his carrier will cover about half of the $40,000 needed to replace the old wooden boiler-room structure with a metal free-span, or pillar-free, building. He also needs to replace about $1,600 in seeds lost to the fire.

As he squats next to his rainbow chard in the larger of his two greenhouses, Thomet catalogues the injuries to this sensitive plant, which prefers a warmer environment than the one this boiler-less room can now provide. He yanks up a leaf and pulls the stalk apart to reveal cell damage: The chard has become rubbery and shriveled. This is not Dupont-worthy produce. Just as troubling, the bitterly cold temperatures in December damaged or slowed the growth of Thomet's winter greens in his unheated high tunnels. For the first time they can remember, Thomet and Lajoie will have little kale, collards, Swiss chard or spinach at market in January. They will have to sell off their stockpiles of sweet potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and butternut squash instead.

What's more, Thomet will not be able to start growing his transplant onions in the greenhouse until the boiler room is rebuilt. He probably won't even be able to seed his transplant tomatoes in mid-January if the structure is not in place by then. All of that could have consequences to his income, although Thomet says he has not fully considered the impact. In fact, he doesn't seem worried about it, as if this were another way he stands apart from his peers. He doesn't fret the bottom line.

"Yes, it is a financial loss," he muses, as if for the first time. "But will I have no bread on the table? No."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/03/AR2011010305513.html

Evolving Farmers Markets - How Local Is Local?

Farmers market or food court?

Correction to This Article
This article about "value-added" products at winter farmers markets incorrectly suggested that pasta from Smith Meadows Farm may not be produced with local ingredients. Nancy Polo, manager of Smith Meadows Kitchen, said the pasta is prepared with the Berryville, Va., farm's own eggs and with flour from Pennsylvania.

By Tim Carman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011;

The minute Fred Jackson steps away from our interview to serve a customer at his barbecue stand at the Smart Market in Gainesville, another vendor approaches me, her face tight and unhappy. She wants a moment of my time on this Sunday in January. When I finally make my way to her, she's almost popping at the seams with frustration.

She thinks I'm spending way too much time with Jackson, who sells some tasty smoked meats under the banner of Uncle Fred's BBQ Smoke Shack. And with Abbie and Ron Pence, a pair of semi-retirees who deal bags of kettle corn from their country kitchen on wheels. And with Tommy Venable, a former graphic designer with a stylish goatee who has found a second career hawking homemade salsas under the brand TommyV's.

As she talks, the vendor and I are standing in the middle of a circle of temporary tents pitched on this damp, wickedly cold patch of concrete in the Virginia Gateway shopping center parking lot. She admits that today is the first day she realized how few farmers are at the market: The kitchen dwellers - the barbecue man, the corn poppers and salsa pusher among them - have the land dwellers outnumbered by more than 2 to 1. She finds it appalling that a farmers market such as this can have so few of them. "You're looking at a food court here," says the vendor, a farmer, who requests anonymity lest she lose her spot at the market.

Whether she knows it or not, this vendor has hit upon one of the hot-button issues of winter farmers markets: How far are they willing to stretch beyond the farm to include "value-added" products? That question, of course, immediately raises two more: What exactly are "value-added" products, and who's reaping the benefits of all this added value?

The first question is slightly easier to answer.

As commonly defined, they are products created from raw agricultural ingredients that then have a higher market value. That definition is broad enough to cover both goat cheese and garlic pickles and even goods that have nothing to do with eating, such as soap and wool and tanned sheepskins. Then again, one market manager told me that, to her mind, a value-added product is simply one prepared in a kitchen, which would exclude soap and the like but would include Jackson's wood-perfumed 'cue, the Pences' salty-sweet kettle corn and Venable's line of gourmet salsas.

Definition aside, who benefits from added value? Some managers and vendors will tell you that everyone does. The farmers make more money by turning surplus summer inventory into entirely new items for the winter. In turn, the winter markets, those once-barren outposts yielding a skeleton selection of greens and cold-storage apples, now bulge with pastas, sauces, jams, jellies, breads, pies, soups, stews and other prepared foods. The public then has more reasons to venture into the icy streets for sustenance.

"Some people get real tired of seeing the kale and the winter squash and big greens and sweet potatoes," notes Bernadine Prince, co-director of the nonprofit FreshFarm Markets, which operates two year-round markets, one at Dupont Circle and another in Silver Spring. "If you only have one or two things down there [at winter markets], people are not going to come. You need to have that density of product."

The issue is, as the squawky vendor noted on that drizzly cold Sunday in Gainesville, when does a director begin to alter the very concept of a farmers market by including vendors with no connection to local animals or the region's soil? When does a "producers-only" market, a trendy term managers toss around to guarantee that no wholesale produce creeps onto stands, begin to expand its definition to include non-farmers? Some market directors, sensitive to that conundrum, have developed rules to make sure value-added vendors don't wander too far afield.

"We try to encourage anybody who's doing a value-added product, whether it be a farmer or someone like Chris Hoge [from Chris' Marketplace] who's making crab cakes and empanadas, that they be sourcing from local farmers and that they actually let us know who those farmers are," says FreshFarm's Prince.

Prince realizes that some products, such as the breads from Atwater's Bakery or the pasta from Smith Meadows Farm, probably will never meet that standard, so there is flexibility built into the guidelines. All value-added goods, she notes, must be made from scratch and prepared with "locally sourced ingredients when reasonable and possible within season."

Other directors waive the local-ingredient requirement in favor of other goals. "We are not nearly so strict as, say, FreshFarm," says Jean Janssen, founder and director of Smart Markets Inc., which runs two year-round markets. "We do not require them to use only locally grown ingredients or products, because then they would be out of business in the winter, too. . . . And part of our mission is to be an incubator for small food producers."

What these varying rules have created, then, is a kind of hierarchy of value-added vendors. At the top of the social order is someone like Mark Toigo, the owner of Toigo Orchards in Shippensburg, Pa. His family farm has been transforming raw ingredients into ciders and jams and butters since the early 1970s. Toigo still remembers when he'd walk into the house as a child and see his mom surrounded by "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pints of strawberry jam."

"I thought that was kind of normal growing up," he says, laughing at his own memory.

These days, Toigo is a value-added behemoth, with at least a dozen products for sale, from bourbon peaches to bloody mary mixes to basic pasta sauces, some of which are sold both at farmers markets and at retailers such as Whole Foods Market. "We're not burning down doors with our product at the farmers market," Toigo says. "It just helps; every little thing we do helps enough to keep us out there."

Because of his high sales volume, Toigo doesn't prepare his foods on the farm. It'd be too costly and too labor-intensive. Instead, he ships his raw ingredients to a small regional processor who handles everything. Jim Huyett, on the other hand, has built a commercial kitchen on his 245-acre Sunnyside Farm and Orchard in Charles Town, W.Va., to get his own slice of the value-added market.

"Think about it," Huyett tells me on one bone-cold Sunday at the Dupont market. "Before we started [the value-added items], you had to make enough money during the summer to support yourself year-round. That's difficult."

Huyett no longer has to rely on his limited palette of muted-colored vegetables to get him through the winter. His kitchen now turns out an array of soups, stews, dips, sauces, cookies and even mac 'n' cheese to sell at farmers markets. He figures half of his winter income is generated by his value-added products, all of which include local ingredients. "Either I'm growing it myself," he says about his ingredients, "or I'm purchasing it from another local grower."

Even operations as small as Terrapin Station Herb Farm can thrive in the value-added market. The seven-plus-acre farm in York Springs, Pa., cranks out dozens of products, from catnip and zucchini cupcakes to jams and cranberry ketchup. "If it doesn't sell at market the first time around, it gets frozen or turned into a jam or jelly or some other value-added product. Then we'll have it for the winter and after the growing season," says general manager Carl Purvenas-Smith, who sells at the Clarendon Farmers Market and the USDA Winter Farmers Market, both on Wednesdays.

The value-added market has become so lucrative for Terrapin Station that Purvenas-Smith figures 60 to 70 percent of its products are now prepared items vs. freshly harvested ones. "We find that we make a lot more money on the value-added than we do on the just the regular [product]," he says.

The next tier down in the value-added hierarchy includes chefs like Nathan Anda of Red Apron Butchery and Stefano Frigerio of the Copper Pot Food Co., who are not farmers but who have developed relationships with farmers. The chefs use local ingredients to produce charcuterie (Anda) or pastas and jams and sauces (Frigerio) to sell at local markets.

Then there's someone like Venable, the man behind TommyV's Salsa. He's not exactly a farmer and he's not exactly a chef, but his business incorporates elements of both professions. He grows his peppers indoors with an aquaponics system, an unusual combination of aquaculture and hydroponics. He then uses his chili peppers to concoct custom-made salsas, including the guilty-pleasure Fugosa, a blend of tomatoes, jalapenos and liquid smoke, and his tart, pureelike Cran Slam'n, a cranberry salsa with jalapenos, evaporated cane juice, mango and orange juice.

In season, Venable says, he might buy tomatoes from local farmers, but obviously some of his ingredients can arrive only from locales far away.

It's not clear where Abbie and Ron Pence get their kernels for popping. It's a trade secret and a secret to their success. They've been popping kettle corn for 12 years, ever since they both retired from their previous jobs to produce these plastic bags of popped corn, which are absolutely addictive. The Haymarket couple recently moved into local farmers markets after many grueling years of working state fairs.

Then there's Fred Jackson, the smoke expert. Whenever he appears at the Smart Market, Jackson buys mostly from Angelic Beef, the Fauquier County operation that produces naturally raised, hormone-free beef from Piedmontese cattle. When pressed, though, Jackson admits that he turns to giant food-service providers to supply meat for his catering events, which is perhaps why some at the farmers market think he uses Sysco-brand beef and pork in Gainesville, too. But on this Sunday, the first one of 2011, it seems that Jackson is generating an even bigger controversy than the source of his proteins. He has rattled a neighbor at the Virginia Gateway shopping center.

"The [shopping center] property manager got a call from Ruby Tuesday, and they were not happy that we were there with Uncle Fred," Smart Market director Janssen says a few days later. "They considered that competition."

So the value-added barbecue vendor has, on this day at least, become a liability. The Smart Market will be forced to relocate to another spot in the shopping center, down near Target, where the vendor tents are not so well protected from the winter winds.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/12/AR2011011200232.html

Winter Street Food In DC

I saw the Red Hook truck a few days ago - I still can't see standing in line in any weather to pay that much for a sandwich.


Food trucks fight a cold economy

By Tim Carman
Wednesday, December 22, 2010; E03

Back before our weather became a blunt instrument, battering us with its remorseless chill, the Red Hook Lobster Pound truck enjoyed a customer demand that had the depth and urgency of a Depression-era bread line. This month, however, the hungry masses that once huddled around this Maine seafood shack on wheels evaporated when a cold front dropped temperatures into a range better suited for antarctic mammals, not patrons of Washington street food.

Still, Red Hook's sales in December have not declined dramatically compared with sales in the warmer months, says Leland Morris, president of Red Hook's D.C. operations. He has a theory about that. "What I've noticed is strategy," Morris says. "The line comes in waves now. . . . People watch from their offices, and when they see the line shorten, they'll move down."

Morris offers the explanation with such nonchalance that it has the ring of truth. Two days later, as snow starts to blanket the District's streets for the first time this season, several customers outside the TaKorean taco truck on L Street NW confirm Morris's theory.

"I work right up there," says Daniel Mandell, pointing to an office building in the 2000 block of L Street. "I can see how long the line is. I waited until it was more reasonable."

It would appear the District's emerging food-truck market could use more persistent patrons like Mandell. If you discount Morris's happy accounting - and even the Red Hook president will admit, when pressed, that the cold has had a "slight impact" on sales - many of the mobile vendors are hurting this month. Operators of four trucks say their sales have dropped by 40 to 50 percent from peak numbers. "My guess is most of these trucks are going to be losing money in winter," says Justin Vitarello, founder of the Fojol Bros., whose own rolling empire is earning about 60 percent of its summer sales.

So why do these chuck wagons continue to roll during winter? Simple: They have bills to pay, such as commissary and vehicle storage fees, and people to keep employed. "The reason is to make a living," says Mike Lenard, owner of TaKorean, "and for the people who work for us to make a living."

It might not be clear from the streets, but mobile vendors such as Vitarello and Lenard serve a different kind of seasonal cuisine, the kind whose revenues fluctuate dramatically with the seasons. The businesses that occupy this unusual category typically have been ice cream parlors, frozen yogurt shops and the like, but with more four-wheel eateries roaming the streets, the group now includes food trucks, no matter what they serve. What's more, their seasonal economic disorder is complicated by something that often gets romanticized by the media: Many food truck operators have no experience in the hospitality business.

The D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs has long known that. One DCRA official, in fact, told me last week that, historically, almost nine of every 10 new street vendors have no business experience. They just have an idea - and ambition. That can be a problem when it comes to budgeting for, and surviving through, the lean seasons, when revenues shrink but expenses don't. Starting early next year, though, the DCRA will launch its Small Business Resource Center, a private-public partnership that will bring together local nonprofit and economic development groups to help new entrepreneurs map out their future and perhaps even get them through tough times.

Coming to grips with the limitations of mobile vending is enough to make the average food truck owner issue a small, bitter laugh. Why not? As the hired guns for bricks-and-mortar restaurants continue lobbying the D.C. Council for ways to neutralize what they say are the food trucks' "unfair advantages," these street operators continue to contend with elements that few restaurateurs ever face. Such as workplaces where the temperature is only a few degrees warmer than the air outside. Or customers who don't want to feel their faces turn numb just for the opportunity to buy lunch.

One of the recurring issues for truck operators during winter - aside from updating their menus with soups, chowders and other warming dishes - is the status of their ordering windows. Should they remain open, which allows the frigid air to whoosh into the vehicle, or should they be shut when no one's in line? It would seem like a no-brainer, right? Shut that sucker tight and stay warm. But operators say it's not that simple.

"If the window is closed, the message you're sending is that you're closed for business," says Kristi Whitfield, co-owner of Curbside Cupcakes. Only the most seasoned food truck customer or someone seriously hankering for a cupcake will dare approach a closed window, she says, a fact that can affect the bottom line.

For that reason, most truck workers keep the window ajar, which forces them to find other ways to seek and retain heat. Most operators adopt Whitfield's approach of dressing in layers. On a particularly frigid Saturday this month, Whitfield swears she sported six layers of clothing under her apron (although she admits her wardrobe was largely dictated by the fact that she also had to work the downtown outdoor holiday market). Those extra garments can have their drawbacks. Ask Fojol's Vitarello, who had to affix his trademark fake mustache over a ski mask.

Others, such as Stephan Boillon, the owner and chef of El Floridano, rely on the heat generated by griddles and steam tables to keep warm. Boillon's case might be the most extreme. Because he installed solar panels to run his kitchen, allowing him to turn off the truck's engine and save fuel costs, Boillon cannot rely on the vehicle's in-dash heater to provide extra comfort. It can get cold fast in his truck, but the owner has devised a solution: He shuts off the kitchen's exhaust fan for a couple of minutes. "It heats right up," he says.

Such improvisations could help these curbside restaurateurs survive the coming months. They might even help them thrive, if you consider Vitarello's story. Last winter, during Snowmageddon, the Fojol Bros. truck found a way to navigate the clogged streets between its Hyattsville commissary and Dupont Circle, where it was one of the few operations selling food to the snowbound. Vitarello hawked 120 meals during one lunch. "The winter can play to your advantage," he says.

Of course, what should not be lost in this discussion of food truck operators braving the cold is the fact that they are not the first street vendors to suffer through Washington's winter. They're just the ones who attract the attention of media-savvy foodies. Vendors such as Ethiopia Asreshegn were huddling against the elements long before the gourmet food trucks stormed into town. Asreshegn has been squatting at the corner of 12th and L streets NW for a dozen years now. She operates a hot dog cart, that clunky symbol of street food's past.

Inside her cart, Asreshegn has sealed herself off from the cold, her window shut tight. No one, I'd venture to guess, thinks she's closed for business. I ask her how much she has made today while sitting inside her frigid tin can, her skin buried underneath three sweaters, three pairs of pants and a puffy parka.

"$50," Asreshegn says. So why do you do it? Why not just stay home and stay warm? Her answer mirrors those of her motorized peers. "I don't have a choice," she says. "I have a family."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/17/AR2010121706633.html


http://takorean.com/

Indian Veg On K Street

I never tried Nirvana but wish I had.



Dosas to order at Nirvana Express in International Square

By Tom Sietsema
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2010; 12:16 PM

Vegetarians, and others of us who like to eat lower on the food chain on occasion, felt abandoned when the family-run Nirvana went dark on K Street NW this past summer. Where would we go for our dosa fix?

Not far, as it turns out. Four months before the Indian establishment closed, husband-and-wife owners Jawahar and Doler Shah quietly opened Nirvana Express, a small counter in the International Square food court serving lunch Mondays through Fridays.

There are no seats. Orders can be eaten at one of the dozens of nearby tables in the basement setting near the Farragut West Metro.

The abbreviations at Express continue with the selections. Unlike Nirvana, this kitchen doesn't serve anything as elaborate as banana peppers stuffed with a paste of coconut, coriander and mint. But the Express peddles those crepelike dosas, which you can watch being made to order on the griddle behind the counter. Spinach dotted with cubes of house-made cottage cheese is one of several agreeable ways to fill a floppy, hubcap-size envelope of cooked-till-crisp batter made from rice and bean flours. (You can get a dosa stuffed with falafel, but I find that the fritters taste flat.)

Two bucks buys you a samosa the size of a baseball; beneath its crisp shell is a comforting core of potatoes and peas. For $7, you can get a combination plate: your choice of a curry with basmati rice, the flatbread known as chapati and the yogurt dip raita. The last part of the deal tames the heat you might pick up in the zesty pumpkin and eggplant curries, two of the entrees I look forward to seeing on the rotating menu at this Indian outpost.

Carl Domingo, the former manager of Nirvana who holds the same job here, says that "we were doing well" at the now-closed restaurant.

But the Shahs were not, at least physically. Both are in India for a break, he says.

They plan to return to Washington next month, after which they hope to begin serving breakfast at their carryout and (yes!) open something bigger than Express but smaller than Nirvana, in either Dupont Circle or Capitol Hill.

1825 I St. NW. 202-223-0123. dcnirvana.com. Lunch combinations and dosa wraps, $5.50 to $8.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122102787.html

Hannukah Donuts!!!!!

Another miracle of Hanukkah: Fried jelly doughnuts
Customers rush and gush over Md. kosher bakery's holiday treat

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 11, 2009

In sitcom Boston, barflys have their Cheers. In Kemp Mill, the heart of the region's Orthodox Jewish community, the observant have the Kosher Pastry Oven.

A place where headgear is a baseball cap with "Nationals" in Hebrew lettering or a yarmulke knitted with American flags. Where there's a spare prayer book on the counter if you forget every word to a particular meal-related blessing. Where everyone knows your name.

And where, during the holiday of Hanukkah, which begins at sundown Friday, your sunny little strip mall cafe transforms into a mob scene. That's because the Kosher Pastry Oven has some of the region's best-known sufganiyot, a fried jelly doughnut that has migrated from Israel to America as a standard treat for the eight-day holiday.

Starting in a trickle earlier this week and building to a gush Friday, Jewish people have been coming to the Pastry Oven, where the subject of holiday food triggered debate about linguistics, religion and family.

"The story behind the sufganiyot is a military one," stockbroker Lew Sosnowik said Thursday morning to Joel Davis, his daily synagogue-and-breakfast partner, of Hanukkah's historic meaning.

"But the victory was a spiritual one!" insisted Davis, an accountant.

"Every story is dependent on the raconteur," Sosnowik added while a woman told a clerk that she was about to drive her order to her children in New York City. It's not unusual for sufganiyot from the Pastry Oven to be taken aboard planes bound for California or Florida.

In the back, order slips were being added to the dozens already taped to the fridge: for 100 sufganiyot, three dozen, 18 (a lucky number in the Jewish faith), 36 (double that), in Hebrew, English and Spanish for the different staff. Up front, at the counter, trays full of sufganiyot kept replacing empty ones. Discussion among customers bounced from the etymology of the word (biblical Hebrew?) to the Hanukkah food best-known to Americans: the latke, or potato pancake.

Both are not coincidentally dependent on oil, which is central to the miracle at the center of the Hanukkah story: a lamp used to rededicate the Temple in the 2nd century B.C. had only enough oil to burn for one day, yet it burned for eight.

As President Obama appeared on a television in the background, giving his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, customers debated: Can latkes be made in butter, instead of oil? Or does that change their meaning? ("It's not a latke," tsked Davis.) And what about the sufganiyot fillings: Are the caramel and cream varieties you can get easily in Israel or New York better than the classic jelly?

At the helm of the scene is owner Arie Eloul, a Moroccan Israeli pastry chef with an impish smile and knowledge of kashrut, or Jewish dietary law, so deep even those in the most Orthodox garb ask guidance from a guy who drives on the Sabbath (which you're not supposed to do) to synagogue (when he goes).

Eloul expects to sell 10,000 sufganiyot (at $1.25 apiece), and places including Shalom Kosher Market in Wheaton and KosherMart in Rockville are also doing brisk business.

Meanwhile, regulars popped in and out of the kitchen to say hello to Eloul and his wife, Shula. Despite a dinner menu that features $24 sea bass and homemade tiramisu, the vibe at the Pastry Oven is informal. Although the posted opening is 8 a.m., by 7:30 tables are already populated by regulars including Sosnowik and Davis, as well as writer Marla Fogelman of Silver Spring, the New York-bound woman who meets a group of other female writers there each week.

Holidays -- and holiday food -- of course mark the passage of time, and customers talked Thursday about rituals changed with spouses passed on, children scattered. Hanukkah celebrations that might once have been at home with family are now at synagogue dinners with friends.

For Jerry Sandberg the Pastry Oven's jelly sufganiyot are a fine, if limited, alternative to the variety he gets in Brooklyn, where he grew up and where his relatives still live. That said, he knows everyone at Eloul's and comes every other day during Hanukkah.

"The only down side here," he said Thursday, "is you've got to make sure you get here before they run out."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121004167.html