Chef Paul: February Food
February 11 2011
It’s tough this time of year.
Winter seems to be dragging on, you don’t get enough outdoor exercise and, if like me you live in a cold climate, there 
just isn’t much choice at the Farmer’s Market. As I mentioned before, we like to get most of our groceries from the local farmer’s market. But right now it’s root vegetables, root vegetables and more root vegetables. Now, I love me a good sweet potato stew and a roasted beet salad but still my body needs some green vegetables. There are some “end of season” Brussels sprouts available as well as some curly kale, but I long for the early days of spring when asparagus arrives.
So, this time of year we end up getting more from the grocery store than we normally do. Be it lettuce, broccoli or citrus fruit, sometimes we’ve just got to succumb and buy non-local. I stress here that these are my family’s choices. I am not condemning anyone who buys exclusively from the grocery store by any means…it’s just that we feel it’s very important to know where our food comes from. And yes, we have visited most of the farms we buy from…there’s even an organic Upick farm a couple hours away, my daughter loves it there.
Regardless of where you buy your vegetables and fruit, proper storage and care of the product is a must. Over on our facebook page, we were asked recently for tips regarding vegetable storage. Now, while not all vegetables are the same and you’ll never get two chefs to agree on anything let alone how to store vegetables, here are my two cents.
Storage Tips:
For the aforementioned root vegetables, I find it best to store potatoes and other tubers below room temperature, say between 4C and 8C in a dark well ventilated area (optimally a cold storage area if you can). Otherwise, you can store potatoes in a paper bag at room temperature for about a week or two as long as it’s dark and well ventilated (a cupboard works fine). We almost never keep potatoes in the refrigerator because this will release their starch and make them taste…well, starchy. I say almost never because new potatoes can be stored in the refrigerator as can Yukon gold or other yellow flesh, less starchy potatoes, for up to two weeks or so.
Carrots and their like, I store in the refrigerator in a well ventilated compartment or container. As for leafy greens, I ALWAYS wash and spin them dry as soon as I return from the market. I then place them in resealable containers with a towel (or paper towel) above and below the product to absorb any moisture. The two keys to this are buying fresh and spinning as dry as you can. We’ll talk about other vegetables as they come into season.
The best tip I can pass along is “buy local” whenever possible. It’s amazing how much longer the head of lettuce I buy at the farmer’s market lasts when compared to the “box ‘o’ greens” you get from the supermarket that has gone brown and wilted by the time you get home. Same goes for any vegetable; the closer you are to the farm the less it has travelled, the fresher the ingredient …longer it will last. Believe it or not, those lettuce greens from South America don’t fly here first class. They get picked well before their peek ripeness and “ripen” on their slow boat from Caracas. You may scoff at the price of buying local organic veggies but when you consider how much rotting lettuce you end up tossing out that extra $0.50 doesn’t seem like too much.
I’ll address other tip topics in future blog posts so stay…posted (couldn’t resist that one).
