Local Food Connections

Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago our oldest daughter, who is the undisputed Sauce Queen, gave me a bottle of Bar-B-Que sauce she purchased at a Farmer’s Market. She said it is the best and knew we would love it. Well, she was right.

About a week later, I was at the Excelsior Farmer’s Market and right between Mackenthun’s and Ridgeroll Farms, was the M&B Homemade Seasonings and Sauce stand. I was so surprised and pleased. It also gave me an opportunity to meet Brenda Snell, one of the owners. It is always great to see a successful family business and they show their pride in their product.

M&B Homemade Seasonings and Sauces offers a complete line of products. Their sauces

M&B Homemade Sauce

include Maple, Original, Sweet Garlic, Northwoods Hickory, Zesty, Fireworks and the Grand Finale. They also offer spices with a 14 All-U-Need Seasoning and a Cowboy’s Seasoning.

All of their sauces and seasonings are made with the highest quality ingredients, with no added chemicals, but a lot of love in their product. I am pretty picky about this stuff because I don’t like buying sauces with high fructose corn syrup as their first ingredient. Most ketchup already has that as an ingredient, so why add even more!

I know they are at the Excelsior, Minnetonka, Delano and Maple Grove Farmer’s Markets, but you can contact them if you want to know of other locations or they might offer a mail purchase.

Contact information: M&B Snell, Corcoran, MN – MBSnell2@comcast.net or call them at 763-221-6295.

I know they would love to hear from  you!

Take care,

Judy

Hi everyone,

We have a wonderful new market near our home… Fresh Seasons Market. Their philosophy is one of being a special place to shop, but providing quality and value. They have a superior produce department, their meat and seafood department carries only the best available. The deli and bakery sections are the same. Quality and value are the mandates of the store and when you throw in a caring, friendly staff – that is what it is about these days for us.

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Hi everyone,
It is April and dealing with a winter and short growing season will never be familiar to me. With that said, Chuck and I are SO looking forward to our visit each week to our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) – Crazy Daisy Farm.

This is our 3rd year and we can’t imagine not having those baskets of wonderfulness each week from late June through October. I remember the first year we signed up for a CSA share that it took me some time to locate a CSA that offered half-shares and was still available and that was in April. We made it under the wire and now, in addition to the wonderful produce, we enjoy a friendship with a great family. Bonus!

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Hi everyone,

Finally, we are pulling back the blanket of a chilly, snowy winter and looking forward to seeing the new apparel that Mother Nature will give her tree and flower children this year.

I think we all need spring badly this year. Our country is in economic chaos, our people are stressed and we need to find some joy and warmth in our lives. Spring just might be able to help warm us all up just a bit.

And this post couldn’t be more appropriate for Earth Day 2009.

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Hi everyone,

Salsify – I love that word. It just rolls around your tongue and comes out sounding like music. Talk about stereotyping, immediately exotic comes to mind. This vegetable is far more popular in Europe than the U.S., which makes it even more interesting to me.

When we received our 2009 CSA brochure, salsify was on the list of vegetables they are testing this season. So, now I am curious if the flavor of salsify will sing as much as its name. Salisfy comes in two colors – black or white and looks like a carrot or parsnip, but even skinnier. Apparently not only are they tasty, they have a beautiful flower to adorn your vegetable garden as it grows.

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Hi everyone,

Last week, my husband and I took another class at the Kitchen Window. We are pizza snobs and proud of it. Whenever possible, our pizza of choice is made at home with our own dough. The class was “Better-than-Pizzeria Pizza” and making the perfect dough was the premise for the class.

The dough was ready for us so we could start cooking. We were paired in groups and off to work. We assembled two types of pizza and then spent a rotation at the dough station. Our group was so much fun and we worked well together. Our Bacon-Cheeseburger and Chicken Taco pizzas were delicious. Never thought I would eat a pizza with dill pickles on it! The Pear and Gorgonzola just melted in my mouth. My least favorite was a Roasted Vegetable (which I normally love) and I think it was because of the potatoes. I would have preferred peppers, artichokes, zucchini, and onions, which is the great thing about pizza – you can make it your way

John Michael Lerma (the instructor), of Food Network fame, was ill so a local chef, Scott Hurlbut, taught the class for him. He walked in at the very last minute and taught an amazing class.

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Hi everyone,

Many of you are familiar with Lynn Rossetto Kasper, her excellent cookbooks, her newspaper column, and her show on Public Radio, The Splendid Table. 

Chefs are coming more and more to the forefront with the Eat Local movement and Chef Kasper is no exception.  
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Happy New Year!

We are almost halfway through January of the New Year and I am wondering how many of you are already losing that resolve to make major changes in your life?

This past summer I was involved in a writing intensive with an wonderful supportive and talented group of women and a great coach, Suzanne Lieurance (The Working Writer’s Coach). Last week, she had a reunion call with our group to discuss our writing goals for 2009. After the call, I reviewed my goals based on the discussion, but also thought about them in a different light. Now I am applying that philosophy to my life, not just my writing.
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Hi everyone,

After a wonderful adventure in tasting the Columbus Salames, olive oils, cheeses, vinegars, and, of course, the chocolate, back on the bus to the Kitchen Window.

While Chef Royal prepared a superb lunch, he talked about each of the dishes and the subtleties in bringing them up one more notch on the flavor level. Our luncheon menu included several of the items we saw or tasted at Great Ciao.

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been away from my blog for awhile. With the end of our CSA season, it is time to post on fall and winter activities in the Minneapolis area.

This past Saturday my husband and I went on another field trip. If you read my blog during the summer, our last one was to Midtown Global Market and the result was Molly’s Midtown Market Salsa recipe.

The field trip we took last Saturday was quite a bit different. We are fortunate to have the Kitchen Window, in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, as a wonderful go-to spot for high quality kitchen items that are on your “required”, “must-have”, or “want really badly” lists. It is rare that we walk in that store without finding at least one thing from one of those lists. However, I am also content to wander around the store and add to my wish list.

The Kitchen Window also offers cooking classes, both participation and demonstration, as well as special events and food tours. The last weekend was an exceptional food tour – The Grand Ciao Market Tour. Because of Kitchen Window and Chef Royal, we had access to an incredible warehouse of gourmet and everyday goodies. The group of 20 participants, led by Chef Royal Dahlstrom, were taken to Grand Ciao, which is a distributor of superior quality food items purchased by many local restaurants and stores. It is not a place where you can just go and shop. It is for the trade only.

At Grand Ciao, Jeff Price, a former chef and now food marketing guru, treated us to tastes of wonderful cheeses, meats, olive oils, and vinegars. Before we tasted, we took a tour of the warehouse. Shelves of oils, vinegars, tomatoes (canned and dried), olives, fruits, sticks of tuna in olive oil, spices (the sweet scent from fennel pollen came right through the plastic packaging), salts, peppers, pasta, oriental ingredients, chocolate, and two separate rooms in the cooler. One room for was the meats and cheeses and a separate area for the cheeses that needed cool, but less humid air.

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