 |
| City slickers at Jasper Hill Farm. Photo: Dimitri Saad |
The beasts behind a few of the brilliant cheeses at Vermont's family-owned Jasper Hill Farm and its extraordinary, 22,000-square-foot cheese-aging cave, built right into the earth (one of only two like it in the nation), are up on their current pop for two reasons. As sales and outreach specialist Zoe Brickley told a group of self-proclaimed dairy enthusiasts, it's both because "the barn boys like it" and because the cows do: "If cows are stressed out, their production goes down. Happy, contented cows are best for milk quality."
Jasper Hill seems intent upon making its fellow cheesemakers happy and contented too, by providing aging facilities for 10 to 12 farmers throughout New England. With their enormous cave, they have recreated an atmosphere that has been "historically used" to create cheese, which is a boon for many local cheesemakers, who traditionally had to rely essentially upon tricked-out refrigerators. Owned by two couples (brothers Mateo and Andy Kehler), Jasper Hill is helping keep artisanal cheese alive in New England, and sustaining some of the top fromagers in the country.
After the jump, how they do it and a look at the caves and aging process.
You don't have to be gregarious or adventurous to start or be part of a community garden. If you're lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with an available spot of ground, say 80'x80', you have the beginnings of a great social experiment. Here in Boulder, this was inclusive to the development plans in my neighborhood so procuring growing space wasn't a problem. I thought getting people to sign up and rent plots (this wasn't my job) would be an issue. Not so. It was what should be grown that got thorny. Most wanted veggies and flowers. Some wanted only flowers and vice versa. In the end it was an even mix. We even had edible flowers: I ate carnation petals right from the plant, and later 
If you read a lot of personal food blogs, you will occasionally here someone refer to CSA or a delivery from CSA. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, a cooperative system in which goods from a farm are delivered directly to a consumer. The way it works is that people purchase the rights to part of a farmer's crop prior to the beginning of the season. Once the crops start coming in - and some farmers provide everything from vegetables and herbs to fresh eggs and meat, though most primarily provide produce - a portion of the harvest is delivered to each subscriber each week, either directly or to a central location where it can be picked up. The farmers benefit from having a direct sale, and the consumers benefit because they are getting ultra-fresh produce and supporting their community. 
Earlier this week, Nicole 
Sure, the fast food industry has recently spurred non-fiction books, documentaries and plenty of investigative
journalism, but fan fiction? In a similar vein to the LiveJournal community of 
The internet is chock full of recipe sites ranging from the good to the bad. Usually, when I'm
researching a recipe, I use a combination of Google and my favorite recipe aggregation sites. The CookbookWiki
aims to collect all the world's culinary traditions and recipes into one wiki site. Wikipedia already does a good job
of covering food, but perhaps with CookbookWiki's tight focus, it can be an even more invaluable resource for chefs and
amateur cooks alike. They already have an aggressive 
What Can I Get You Folks? - Server Revenge
Reality-Show Celebrities Serve Up Chef Curtis Stone's 'Hundred-Dollar Burger'
Foods Celebrity Chefs Hate
