Dinner and a Dash of Honey
Nov 13, 2007 farmers' markets, groceries, slow food, sustainable agriculture
I’m still silly busy at work, but rather than leave you empty handed, I wanted to quickly comment that it brought a smile to my face last Thursday when Ruhlman was talking about how great his salad would be with a fried egg on top. Fried eggs on salads rule, and as you can clearly see, I proved this only a couple days prior to his encouragement that “fat is good” when I made this salad for Ellie and me.
This incidentally is why I’d wanted the frisee the other day. I instead settled for arugula as Whole Foods was a sans frisee Whole Foods when I was lured into their shiny overpriced store.
Grilled Benne’s Best flank steak, fried Prairie Grass Farms egg, arugula, Bellews Creek red onion, malvarosa cheese, and a sherry vinaigrette (that had a little Esther’s Honey in it)
And speaking of Esther’s Honey. Esther is a really wonderful woman to speak with as she loves talking about her honey bees.
I never realized until the whole Colony Collapse Disorder scare how important the roll of honey bees is in the world of agriculture and was fascinated to find out, when she spoke at SLOWednesday, that there are huge honey beekeepers that transport their bees all over the country on semis to pollinate all sorts of crops nationwide.
Per Wikipedia…
“One major US beekeeper reports moving his hives from Idaho to California in January, then to apple orchards in Washington in March, to North Dakota two months later, and then back to Idaho by November — a journey of several thousand kilometers. Others move from Florida to New Hampshire or to Texas; nearly all visit California for the almond bloom in January.”
From further reading, this mass transportation apparently does not happen as widely in other countries, and it was this fact that exasperated the scare for so many farmers in America.
Another interesting side note is that she also taught us that honey bees will take over weaker hives they come across because really all they want is food and a weaker hives honey will do just fine. She specifically told one story about bees coming across a weaker hive that had Colony Collapse Disorder and they instinctively knew to move on. Apparently nobody is quite sure how the bees knew what the humans did not.
Moving back to the semis, the other thing I found interesting is that this is obviously how they get all those specific varieties of honey you see lining the gourmet food stores. They know exactly what the bees were pollinating not because they had to guess off taste alone, but because they took them to it in the first place.
And coming full circle back to my jar of honey…
When I bought it I’d asked Esther if she noticed a lot of flavor variation from batch to batch. The one I’d initially picked up was a darkish honey which she was unsure of. Many of the other bottles were much lighter, and she said her neighbor, who grows a lot of thyme, had been telling her the bees had constantly been around his herbs at the time she had bottled that honey. So I swapped for the lighter honey and it really does have a noticeable herbaceous quality to it. I’ve really been enjoying it, and I keep slinging it in just about anything I make where honey would even remotely work as it has a sort of lightness that isn’t as sweet and overpowering as other honey’s I’ve used.
Tags: Bellews Creek Farm, Bennes-Best-Meats, Esther's Honey, flank-steak, malvarosa, Pairie-Grass-Farms, salad
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