Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Bailey's Local Foods ordering ends TONIGHT at 8:00 pm (Tuesday, September 20th)

This is a reminder that you should place your order before 8:00 pm Tuesday September 20th for pickup on Friday September 23rd.
Click http://baileyslocalfoods.ca/ordering to log-in and order.
Items that you have placed in your shopping cart will be ordered on your behalf on Tuesday at 8:00pm. There is no checkout button. If you do not intend to order, please ensure that your shopping cart is empty.

Upcoming Bailey's Friday Pickup Dates include: September 30th and October 7th
No Bailey's Pickup on: October 14 and after that we'll be running on Mondays twice monthly until the year's end!


From Rachael:

Lately I've needed extra inspiration to write these emails and tonight I'm looking at the order form as I write. The organic Coronation Grapes look great, and I just added peanuts, PB and popping corn from Simcoe to the list (We should be getting more Canola oil too!) Andrew is in the order form too and I notice 6 baskets of the Sunstart and Polebake Tomatoes in our 'shopping basket'. I had to check that he intended this...

He's planning on making tomato soup, so it *was* intentional. Yesterday we made tomato soup. It wasn't intentional.

I was trying to tidy the kitchen (nothing is tidy with a 6 week old, 4 year old and 7 year old). In a box on the floor I found the bag of last week's tomatoes. They were in much better shape than you'd think after 10 days in a plastic bag, but they needed some trimming. I swore a little, then started to cut tomatoes. In our favourite round bottomed pot I turned on the heat, glugged some olive oil and sliced in a bit of the red onion that was left on the cutting board from the salad at lunch. Then in went the salvaged tomatoes. There were even two and a half tomatoes that were in pretty good shape and didn't need to go into the soup. Wonders never cease! By then, Laura was hungry, so I tossed in some salt, turned down the heat and ignored the soup in favour of nursing my baby on the couch. My 7 year old was not in the mood to pick herbs from the garden, so luckily Andrew took over and added basil and oregano. I'm not sure what else he added (turns out it was garlic, water, pepper, and definitely some spinach!), but when dinner came around it was a lovely sweet tomato soup that I enjoyed better than the turkey noodle soup that was planned for dinner! Perfect for the cold and rainy day! Now we'll just have to put the recreated tomato soup creation (with white beans too?) up in jars or find more freezer space...

What are you 'Putting up"?
Last year my motto for preserving was 'only one ingredient' and I promised myself I'd make salsa this year. This year we've frozen strawberries, blueberries and peaches (and the freezer is FULL) and canned white grape juice (there is still purple juice from last year). I'm not feeling hopeful that I'll get salsa canned, but if you have a recipe you'd like to share, I might just try it!

Luckily I have this great place to buy salsa... My favourite is the mild Asparagus Salsa from Barrie's Asparagus with the From These Roots Salsa coming in second - it's pretty spicy. Matt used to volunteer with us before he moved and he LOVED the Floralane salsa because of the pepper taste. Floralane even has a recipe on their website at http://abittaweb.com/www.floralane/recipes.htm but I'm not sure it's the same as the salsa they sell in jars. If you are preserving and finding quantities hard to manage when reading recipes check out this handy chart: http://www.pickyourown.org/info.htm.

Peach Slices! Sunshine in jars!
Speaking of putting up fruit. I can tell you that 12 boxes of PF24 peaches make 203 jars of peach slices. Naamon and Selema of Orchard Hill Produce processed the peaches for us last Monday and they are on the order form now! These are the sustainably farmed Palatine peaches in a light honey syrup - the honey is from Bauman Apiaries so these peaches in 750 mL jars are 100% local!! We also have peach slices from Country Flavour available in 1 L jars and by the case.

Last call for Niagara Fruit!
Unfortunately the peach slices in jars are the only peaches we'll still be able to sell to you until next year. The peaches have not held up so they will not be available on Friday. Sorry!

Big thanks to Eva and Rene for growing lovely fruit with more love and fewer sprays and thanks to Mary Jane and Jan who bring us this fruit from Niagara each week!

Here is the last note from MJ about the Palatine fruit for this year!
This will be our last fruit run to Niagara. It has been such an interesting year with the effects of the long spring reaching into the season reflecting in the cherries and apricots and some plums and pears. But once the heat hit and stayed the peaches were in their glory! And now the trees are showing signs of wanting to go to sleep for the winter and we will have to wait until they awaken for cherry season.
 
I would like to thank everyone for your wonderful participation. You are making a difference by supporting local farmers! We are a part of the sustainable farm. By doing our part in support, trees do not have to be ripped out and land lay fallow. Instead plans are being made to plant more fruit trees to sustain this direct market!
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For our final run we have VERITY PRUNE PLUMS, EMPRESS PLUMS,GREEN GAGE PLUMS, BLUE TABLE GRAPES and BOSC PEARS.

The Verity prune plum is a versatile plum. It is a medium size blue prune plum over a lovely yellow-greenish flesh. It is a good quality plum that is free-stone. They are good plums for cooking, baking, canning and juicing. They are also nice and sweet so they are good for drying and fresh eating. They are a medium sized plum with a dark purple skin.
We were hoping to have some Late Italian plums this year but the pollination was not good with the spring. The Verity plum can be used the same as the Italian plums.

This is the first year we have had the 'Empress' plum to offer. This is a very large plum fantastic for fresh eating. It has a deep blue skin over a nice yellow flesh with sweet flavour!

The Green Gage plum is a medium-small plum, bright green in colour. It has a sweet-tart flavour to it and is very good for preserves and jams (several recipes on Google).

We have 2 varieties of blue table grapes available for Friday. One is a smaller round and seedless variety and the other is larger, oval and may have a small seed.

Just a reminder - All the fruit we get from Eva and Rene are 'tree run'. We do this to avoid the sorting station that insists on fungicidal baths, fuzz removal (peaches) and paraffin wax coatings!. This means some fruit will be larger and some smaller, some more ripe and some less ripe all in the same box. Eva and Rene let our fruit ripen on the tree much longer than if they were to pick it for the shippers! The shippers want green fruit and we want tree ripened fruit!!

Don't forget  that this is the week to stock up on items from Green Table Foods, Oak Manor and Rounds Beans!

Cheers,
Maryrose and Rachael
Bailey's Local Foods
baileyslocalfoods.ca

Click http://baileyslocalfoods.ca/ordering to log-in and order.

P.S. We can use your fruit boxes, baskets and jars from preserves again if you return them.

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