#3 | Tanja Westfall-Greiter: No Two Carrots Are Alike
My guest on Women in Food this week is Tanja Westfall-Greiter. Tanja is a farmer in the Austrian Alps. Her life principle is to make a positive contribution to the world, which she does through her food as well as her teaching. She’s the founder of the International Women Farmers Group as well as writing and teaching about garden methodologies that she employs and their roots from women gardeners and traditional teachings. She’s also an avid cook and lover of food, sharing with us how she eats from her garden throughout the winter months through the use of fermentation. We talk about her history from growing up on a Wisconsin farm to living in the Alps, terroir of foods, ways to enjoy winter squash, the history of women gardeners and more…
The Recipe starts at: 31:37
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Tanjas Garten Website
Tanja’s Social Media Links: Facebook and Instagram
International Women Farmers Network
Article: “Carrots & Terroir – A Unique Field Test”
Become a member of the Women In Food Community at: WomenInFood.Net/Community
Missy’s Farm Website: CrownHillFarm.com
Missy’s Business Coaching Website: SpiritBizPeople.com
Fermenting Vegetables At Home
In this episode, Tanja talked about a relatively weak brine of 1.5%, which works well with radishes, squash and several other vegetables. An all-purpose salt brine for everything from asparagus to carrots is 3% and a good way to start for beginners. The metric system is best for ensuring an exact solution, because salt can differ in weight:
1 liter of water + 30 grams of salt give you a 3% solution
1 liter of water + 20 grams of salt give you a 2% solution
and so on.
Most American kitchens do not have a kitchen scale for weighing ingredients, so here is Tanja’s suggestion for simplifying things: 1 quart of water + 5 teaspoons of salt will be approximately a 3% solution
METHOD:
Sterilize a jar and prepare your salt brine by heating the water enough for the salt to dissolve.
While the brine is cooling to room temperature, prepare your vegetables. (See notes below.)
Pack the jar as tight as you can with the vegetables. Let them rest a few minutes and try to pack in more.
Fill the jar with the salt brine and put the cover on it loosely, to allow for air to escape. If the vegetables you are using floats to the top, you might need to weight it down. A smaller jar or glass that fits into the mouth of your fermenting jar works well. The goal is to be sure all of the vegetables are sealed in by the brine by being below the surface of the liquid – completely submerged.
Leave your ferment at room temperature for 3-5 days, depending on how sour you want it. Taste it daily, using a sterile fork. In the first days, the brine may bubble up and spill over, so set the jar on a plate or bowl.
When you are happy with the degree of sourness, cap your jar and store it in the fridge. As long as they are not contaminated, a ferment can keep for a long time (up to three years, in my experience), but the general recommendation is to use enjoy them within 2 months.
NOTES:
Preparing various vegetables for fermenting:
Radish, squash, carrots: shred or julienne
Pickling cucumbers: whole or halved, if larger
Asparagus: cut in lengths to fit the jar when packed upright
Carrots: cut into sticks to pack upright in the jar, ferment with sprigs of fresh dill and sliced fresh garlic.
Jalapeno peppers: slice
Garlic, fresh herbs and fresh chili can be added to ferments. Fresh Thai chilis and garlic are my favorites for just about any ferment. Sprigs of fresh dill and sliced fresh garlic with carrots and pickles are a must!
In our commitment accessibility, we’d love to offer polished show notes to help make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who like to read rather than listen to podcasts. However, Women in Food is still a startup with limited resources. So we’re not there yet.
What we can offer are these very imperfect show notes via the Scribie service. The transcription is far from perfect. But hopefully it’s close enough - even with the errors - to give those who aren’t able or inclined to learn from audio interviews a way to participate.
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0:00:05.9 S1: This is Missy Singer DuMars, and welcome to another episode of women in food. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things food, business, and the feminine. Each episode, I invite you to sit down with me in my interview, guest as we dive into this intersection to spark your food curiosity, share my guest favorite recipes and give you some fun food exploration along the way. I'm inspired by these women, women farmers, chefs, bakers, Cox writers, food makers, who all bring their passion for beauty, nourishment, community, pleasure connection and deep care to others through food. These are women who advocate and take action towards increased food sovereignty for themselves, their families and their neighborhoods. Before I introduce today's guest and our topic, I have one request, if you could go over to iTunes or whatever app you are using to listen and do a rating and review... It truly helps me a ton. Thank you so much. So today, I am very excited to introduce to you, my dear friend and an amazing Farmer, Tanya Westfall writer, and we are going to talk about how No two carrots are alike. Tanya has been growing vegetables and herbs in her market garden in the Austrian ops near Innsbruck since 2017, although she grew up raising food on her family's farm in Wisconsin.
0:01:33.0 S1: Truly, as I know her, her life principle is to make a positive contribution to the world, which I've seen her do in so many ways, from teaching about her garden methodologies to supporting other food lovers and farmers on the Internet, and as I know her best, founding the international women farmers group, which I must say has been a huge support of mine and an amazing community of women from all over the world. So with that, Tanya, I wanna welcome you to women in food and to the show, and thank you for sharing this time with us today.
0:02:07.2 S2: Oh Miss, it is so good to be here and to have this dialogue with you, I'm really honored that you've asked me to be on your program.
0:02:15.8 S1: Oh, thank you. And I just, I have to start with asking you the question of how a Midwestern American girl ends up growing food in the Austrian Alps because there's got to be a story there that
0:02:29.4 S2: Is a little crazy, basically. I always wanted to live in Europe, and I thought that from my childhood on where something was attracting me to Europe, and when I had a chance to do that, it was actually as an English teacher, and so I came to Austria for a nine-month gig, many years ago, in 1991, and I love the mountains, immediately fell in love with them and just felt that life was good here and decided I would like to stay one more year, then it became another year and another year. I was very, very fortunate. I was hired to teach English at the university and really had a wonderful start here, and by the seventh year I already had a cat, so most of my friends thought I was surely going to stay and I decided to just leave it open end. And that year, it didn't take much time, and I fell in love then with a local, so it was pretty clear I was going to stay permanently, and that's exactly what happened.
0:03:36.0 S1: So how many years have you been in Austria? Now.
0:03:38.4 S2: We were just talking about that in... This year in 2021, it's going to be my 30th anniversary, so I've been here almost 30 years. Wow.
0:03:48.8 S1: That's amazing. And we were talking before the show about Austria and the area in Austria or in which is near ends Brook. And for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about that region and what it's like there...
0:04:03.6 S2: Oh, it's just one, it's the Austrian Alps at their best as far as I'm concerned, and one of the huge pluses is that we're close to Italy and Germany. So if I drive half an hour north, I'm in Germany in the area. If I drive 40 minutes south, I am across the border into Italy, and we're also quite close to Switzerland, so we're in the Western part of Austria, these are old mountains here, so they don't seem quite as majestic as the Rocky Mountains, the climate is surprisingly mild, as a Wisconsin it. I still marvel at how mild the weather is here, and very often we get what in the western part of the state might be called a shank or Saint, and as one alarm win that literally comes from the Sahara desert from the South. And so we even have periods of though in the middle of winter in our region, it's really... It's just, I love the climate, the beauty is just still breath taking, I still notice it every day and... Yeah, so I feel very lucky to live where I live.
0:05:13.7 S1: I love that you said that, that it's milder than one would to think because when I think of high mountains like the Alps, I do not think, Oh, let me grow vegetables here. I think of maybe sheep hearing and things like that, my dog comes from the breed of my dog, my farm dog comes from high apps like that, but that's true. Right, but I don't think of market gardens and vegetables. So how did you come to that piece in that location?
0:05:44.4 S2: Well, we had been living on the plateau where we now live, we've been here for 20 years, and so I had a really good sense by then about the micro-climates that were... Not only on our property, which is about a quarter of an acre, that is a residential property, but also in the fields next to us, because we live on a very small plateau with just a few farms and a few families, and... So I had a good sense of what the seasons were like here, what drove me though to start growing vegetables beyond my own private vegetable garden was actually a rather traumatic experience I felt on the steps in her house... Our house was built in the 1950s, and the steps to the basement are quite steep, and I just lost my footing and fell down the steps, and it was quite traumatic for both of us, my husband and me, because we were both terrified in the first seconds, the previous owner had actually fallen and died on those steps, so... Yeah, it was scary. I turned out to be very, very lucky. All it was was a compression break, so a vertebra was broken, but not in such a way that it was going to cause any kind of paralysis, what it did cause was my having to wait until that one healed, which meant I was really limited in what I could do, I was off of work on sick leave, and basically I sat on the couch all day and watched the tulips bloom, it was spring, and when it became clear that I was going to heal and be fine, I asked myself, CHE, what would you regret doing if you died to not having gone, if you died tomorrow, because there was that thought in our both of our minds, we were haunted by that Haruki I was...
0:07:38.6 S2: And the answer was immediate, and that was, I wanna grow vegetables for other people, it took me two months to tell my husband that, which was a very interesting experience because I spent the two months on sick leave, prepping myself... I did so much research, I'm so grateful for the internet and access to so many things, I ordered a bunch of books and read them, and then about two months after I had made the decision for myself, I confessed my husband. It was a little bit tricky in so far as he knew I had come from a farm, but he had never known me as a farm girl, so to speak, he knew me as a professional. At that time, I was working for the government of Austria, guiding a nationwide school reform, I was on a career track that was peaking actually, so the idea that I would give all of that up was a hard... I think for both, for him more than it was for me, and it was a big decision, but thankfully, we both allow one a lot of freedom so that we're able to pursue our dreams. Of course, we have dreams together too, but we also have individual dreams, so he ended up being very supportive once he got used to the idea, and I have to say, he's always there when I need him, he's not involved in the Market card, but he's been a great support.
0:09:03.9 S1: That is, I think a lot of us have those turning point moments like that, that starkly put things in a clearer perspective, and they ever were here before we're going along, going on walking down the stairs, and something happens, and all of a sudden everything comes to clear it makes me think of a number of years ago, a class I was in about tuning into your bliss and suddenly it was so clear what in my life served less what didn't, and it was so easy to let go of what didn't be on step further into what I wanted to create next at that point, so I really resonated with that story, and I think many of us have those moments of clarity.
0:09:47.1 S2: It's funny you mentioned the list because since I've been here, so that... Let's say since I was in my early 20s, one of my main mottos is the coat from Joseph canal of Otis Holly, your bliss in the path you find will be the one year meant to be on. And I do think that there's something really important about tuning in to bliss, and I've always done that, I've had big career changes in the sense of radical career changes, and every change was always the right decision. It was really a question of Lisa then. I guess it was just time for me to be a market gardener.
0:10:25.0 S1: Yeah, so let's talk about that. We've used the word a couple of times so far in this conversation of Market Garden, can you tell our listeners what you mean by that? What is that?
0:10:34.8 S2: Well, in 2016, when I was preparing myself to start in 2017 with vegetable growing, I did a great deal of research, as I mentioned, and discovered this whole new world of vegetable growing that was being referred to as market gardening, the term actually goes back... Well, over 100 years also here in the German-speaking part of Europe, and it goes much farther back in France, and market gardening refers to vegetable growing on a relatively small scale, usually a family farm. Sometimes those farms have integrated enterprises with animals and grains and production and so on, but if I look at the tradition of market gardening and France that actually influence key people in the United States, those are family farms that exclusively produce vegetables, and the sizes range anywhere from a quarter of an acre today nowadays to... Up to 10-15 acres. I would say on the European scale, the established family market gardeners are usually around 10 to 15 acres in the United States, though it has gained new momentum, and that has to do with, I would say, Jim 4A, a Canadian who built upon the work that ellice did since I was a kid, I grew up with Elliot Coleman on PBS every week, he had a gardening show there, a vegetable rings think JM 4 has made a huge contribution both to modernizing the term and developing systems that make it viable as a business, so that you can earn a living growing vegetables in a way that is also good for the environment.
0:12:31.1 S2: In the meantime though, I would say that I would differentiate in the meantime between mainstream market gardening, which is what has become popular, and other approaches that are spinning off sometimes going back to actually old techniques, but I'm really pleased in general that market gardening is becoming more and more popular here in Austria, there's quite a few young people who are moving into market gardening, and I think that that's a really good thing, it's a great way for people who perhaps didn't grow up on a farm and have no agricultural background whatsoever, it's a really low threshold way to get started in agriculture...
0:13:15.4 S1: Oh, certainly, that's how I got started right in... No agriculture experience. Now, I have a farm and I would consider it a market garden scale as well, and style, and I love... As I was listening to you speak, one of the things I was hearing, and I noticed this in a lot of places, that there's discussion of new ways of gardening and farming that as you can... Or actually, return to old ways. I'm curious to hear a little bit more, having grown up on a farm in Wisconsin, what are some of the ways that you bring from your own personal tradition into what you're doing now, 'cause I also know... And I'm sure we'll talk about this more, that you're... Just yesterday, you taught a whole webinar on these again, ways that are actually really returns to all way, so I'm just curious to say a little more about your philosophy around bringing some of maybe what you grew up with or generations before you and your own history back to the market. Arenal.
0:14:28.0 S2: Right about now, as this podcast is taking place, I'm obviously thinking deeply and widely about these things because of what I now call low input market gardening, and that's why I would differentiate between mainstream market gardening that has become popular and gained tremendous momentum. I just am so happy about that, but at the same time, there's a lot of bells and whistles and with mainstream market gardening that I started to put into question, and I think that that has to do with three things, one is, I grew up on a farm where, excuse me, we had two tractors and lots of equipment, and it was all about machines, and everything we did surrounded the machine, so the space that was used for the vegetable garden had to be accessible for the tractor and the plow in the disc. And then when that was taken care of, then in came the rotator, which was used for weeding and the hand-waiting that needed to be done around the culture was something that I did because that was too menial, I guess, for other people in the family to do I don't know, I had an impression though that that was the issue, and so my father would go through with the rotate and work up the past to get rid of the weeds in the past, and then we were growing vegetables in single rows, and that was because he was actually, he had actually laid out the vegetable garden in order to fit the roda tiller, we still needed to do the hand weeding in the RUs, of course, but there was this whole thing about machines.
0:16:08.8 S2: When I started my market garden, I really did my due diligence and explored what 408 was doing and a couple of other very popular men, I'd like to know men, I'll get into that hand, they were all using the SBS, which is a small walk, tractor, and getting all excited about the implements and then new tools were being to develop to follow a standardized bed size, and I decided from the beginning, I'm not interested in a retailer in any way, so that was out for me, but I still followed the standardized bed layout. So a certain width. So the tools work well, and I still was seduced into being a whole lot of tools that basically mechanized vegetable growing on a micro-scale, so Cedars, Green's harvesters, and we're talking about investments that are actually several hundred dollars, so it was quite a big investment, which I could have forged because I have my house, I have my stuff, and I was earning a lot of money as an educational consultant, so it was fine for me to invest several thousand dollars to get started growing vegetables, and the more I used this mainstream approach with all these bells and whistles and all these fancy looking tools that had been innovations for small scale vegetable gardening, the more I realized, this is my childhood on a micro-scale, this is me laying out a garden and maintaining what are called permanent beds with tools and inputs and it just didn't make sense to me.
0:17:59.5 S2: And so I started to do time and motion studies, which means I studied what kinds of motion was involved from the shade to the field and back, as well as the time it took me to prepare a bed for seeding in such a way that the cedar would work, I discovered it took me a lot of time by the time I calibrated the cedar, because I don't grow just one carrot, I grow 10 different varieties and said size can vary significantly, so it means that every time I use one of these Cedars as a tool I have to calibrate it a new... And that takes at least 15 minutes, if you're lucky. So it would be another thing. Again, if I were doing the same cart variety on a whole lot of beds, then it might make sense, this calibration investment, but I don't do that. Then the next thing was preparing the bed in such a way so that the cedar would function well, and the long and short of it is the following, My hand is so calibrated because I have a lot of experience with hand sewing that I can broadcast and inter plant carrots and radishes at the same time, broadcasting means you prep your bed with minimal preparation work, and then you scatter the seeds by hand, and I can do that and get really good spacing because my hand is experienced, and so I ended up comparing last season, just so in one carrot bed with inter-planted radishes by hand broadcasting it and one with the cedar, and guess what? The later was 10 times more.
0:19:44.3 S2: And that's a lot. Yeah, so yeah. That's just actually insane. And so I started to put into question, Why am I using these machines that are making me work for them instead of for the vegetables I wanna harvest it? And this is actually a lean management perspective, but perhaps from a woman's perspective, so
0:20:04.9 S1: I wanted to say that because just as I was listening to you, I prefer hand things as well as I was listening to you, I was realizing that doing things by hand, like the intentional mindfulness and awareness that goes into it, I feel like is a very feminine perspective to farming into growing food that we as women are nourishes and nurtures and putting that hand attention into things, is that nurtures and to separate ourselves from the soil and from the garden, with machinery is a little bit more of an efficiency, generally masculine approach, not to say there aren't places for efficiency 'cause there are... But as I was listening to, I was really thinking like, Oh, that's the fits just like I love to hand water, I will always handle water the gardens, I have some irrigation, but I much prefer to hand water and be in direct relationship with the soil and the food, and it sounds like you have that similar experience, both from an efficiency standpoint and a relational standpoint, definitely that relational thing with hand watering is something I can totally relate to, especially with tomatoes in a caterpillar tunnel, I need to be in there regularly anyway, to be checking on them.
0:21:31.7 S1: And so I just do it all in one go, and I want to do that because otherwise I'd be out of touch with them. Well, speaking of being in touch and out of touch, you and I had a conversation the other day about your morning ritual, you wanna share with our audience a little bit about that, 'cause I think that's a rotten approach to go...
0:21:53.5 S2: Yeah, my morning ritual. So I'm really lucky, I ended up being able to lease the field right next to our house, so I think my gardening life has an extraordinarily high level of quality because it's right next to our house, that means that I can go out in the morning barefoot and very often in my nightgown, I wouldn't do that if I lived in a busy place, but we're really isolated in our plateau and just that morning barefoot walk, and I do that actually, when... They're still snow on the ground, I just don't spend as much time out there. But even that is important to me, the first trust in the fall to be out there in the morning and the grass is a bit crunchy and... Yeah, I just need to do that. I don't work or barefoot, I've seen some people who do that, I just think it's too dangerous, but when I do those walk through sometimes an extensive one, barefoot. That's just a good thing to do.
0:22:56.5 S1: Yeah, and there's so much I'll say to all our listeners, whether or not you're a gardener or a farmer, to get your bare feet touching soil or ground or dirt or grass regularly... First of all, I know for myself it's so nourishing, I had a period of time where... A short period of time where I lived in Hawaii, and my biggest desire about living in Hawaii was to walk around and be barefoot as much as possible on touch, see and touch the ground, and there's something nourishing about it, quite literally grounding connective. It reminds us of connection and just soothing, I don't even know how to say it, but I love that that's just part of your morning ritual, and I would say separate practice, and I love... I love by the time I wake up in the morning to see your pictures of first morning views in your garden every day, I look forward to that in the morning, I lay in bed and look at your pictures in the morning when you take them and... So I love that, and we're talking about connection to land and connection to food, and you mentioned in talking about Cedars and machinery that the style of growing you do of different varieties and different kinds of things makes it hard to use those machines and those tools and systems, and we talked about this episode being how no two carrots are alike and see, tell us more about growing different varieties and what that's about for you?
0:24:23.7 S2: Yes. By the way, the older I get, I am over 50, so that maybe has an impact on how I view the world, but the older I get, the more I realize that the statement is true for everything, no two are like... No two carrots are like, no market gardens or guidance are like... And I just love that so much does this uniqueness and that our commonality is this To Meknes, what we share is being unique, and so let's come to my favorite topic, which is food, I am definitely a foodie first in a market garden or second... I totally agree. I resemble that statement, yes. My biggest motivation that I think led to this idea of, I need to grow vegetables for others, my biggest motivation for growing food and my private garden was I want to eat food that I... Especially vegetables, then I can't get anywhere nearby, I was the first market gardener in our region, and the variety of produce that is available in supermarkets or even at farmers markets here is really limited to mainstream badge, most of it hit modern hybrids that will guarantee success on the field, and so on.
0:25:42.3 S2: And so actually the choice was extraordinarily limited, so that's my niche niche also, so if my market car garden is called Toms kitchen garden, and for a reason, I strongly identify with the tradition of kitchen gardens and... Carrots are a good example, there are so many different kinds of carrots from all over the world, so their colorful... Their shapes are different, their flavor is different, and carrots are a great example because of some really interesting good work going on here in Austria, in the eastern part of Astros, around Vienna with market gardeners who have a cooking background, so former chefs and so on, and they have started to network with chefs and other market gardens, especially Robert broad neck is worth mentioning here at his market gardeners called crowd, and he is part of something now called The Cooking campus, which is near viana, and the cooking campus is starting to do tastings and the last one they did was carrots, and here's how it works, three market gardens, so the same carrot variety on the same day, and harvested that carrot variety on the same day, and they came together for tastings with professional chefs, and they discovered that there is such a thing as to rivet ales, and in the same way that we have a land which for talking about wine, and Wine comes from grapes and grapes are grown in soil, and it's well-known among why monitors that depending on where a great pros, you will notice different aroma notes and flavors in the final product, the wine, and the same is true for vegetables, and it's kind of obvious, I guess, but I think we'll pay too little attention to meshes, and I'm really lucky to have pretty awesome soil, and my bedrock is challis tone, as it is in most of the LPs in this area.
0:27:57.7 S2: And so I think my customers taste that, at least that's what they say, they say that my budget tool just taste different, and many of the older... And they mean that positively. Many of the under-customers say, it tastes like their childhood. Yeah, and so I love to do taste times, this was a difficult season last season because of covid, so I didn't do any, but I try to do regular tastings whenever possible on the field, when people come for tours, they do tastings as part of the tour, and the most fun is usually we have a national holiday here at the end of October, and that's perfect for doing a winter squash tasting, and it's always been so fun, so trying the different squash varieties that I grow and trying them in different ways, so raw steamed and baked.
0:28:54.6 S1: I love to... Go ahead, go ahead.
0:28:56.8 S2: No, well, I'm gonna say what you already know because I know you're a passionate code depending on how we cook things or don't different flavor notes come forth, and it's fascinating to me to experience that, and then there's also the haptic experience in so far as the consistency of squash is different depending on how it's been prepared, sometimes it's creamy, sometimes it's a dryer consistency, so it's just so I love doing that and you can hear I'm sure in my voice, it's because I love
0:29:33.4 S1: Them. I just love food. Yeah, I totally get that. I do, I've done... The past two years, I've done a tasting of garlic and I'll do both roasted and raw, and I'll always have a guest professional chef do the tasting with me, and is even there... I mean, they're professionals and then you know how food tastes prepare different ways, and yet they're still amazed at the range when you line up six or seven different varieties of garlic and then you eat them raw and roasted, how different parts of the flavor and different parts of like you said, the terroir come out. So I wanna dig further into squash since you went there, but before we do that, I wanna take a quick break and talk about sponsorship of women in food. Our sponsors are growing community of people who are passionate about food and supporting the diversity of women's voices in our food cultures, and here at Women in food podcasts, we don't have external sponsors that sell you products or services, so what I invite you to is to access a wonderful community of food lovers like yourself and the additional resources available to support you and your curiosity and love of food, while also supporting the global community of women and food businesses.
0:30:48.7 S1: And this is what the women in food community is all about, whether you're looking for a recipe or women made food products or a new restaurant, or help with your garden, the women and food community is the place for that resource. So if you're interested in being a sponsor, being a supporter of this podcast, and then being a participant and beneficiary of the Women in food community, you can go check that out at women in food dot NET community, and I'll put that link as well as all the things we're talking about today in the show notes for you. So Tanya, I wanna ask you more about squash because I know you have a recipe on a great and unusual or less common way to prepare squash.
0:31:35.2 S2: I think you're talking about by fermenting or to...
0:31:38.4 S1: Yes, I am talking about your fermenting, and so before you share the recipe, let's talk about fermenting a little bit because for those of us who experience a deeper winter, fermenting is kind of a bigger deal, and for those listeners who might not experience a bigger winter, they may not really know why for ending so important, so don't you share a little bit about that first with
0:31:58.3 S2: Us, talk about ancient ways of doing things that have been rediscovered, especially still in Asian cultures, there's still an ongoing tradition of fermenting here in the German-speaking world sauerkraut is, of course, something that is a tradition and is certainly a living well, but as in the United States, also over here in Europe, we've more and more attention is being paid to more creative fermenting, not just cucumbers and it makes fermented Pickles, but also in our crowd, but other things... So I basically... For me, just about anything. I also love Kim. We had very good friends when I was growing up, a family from Korea, so I actually knew about him, she just as soon as I knew about sour crowd, I met both of them at the same time in my life, and I love Cosima that... But that's a special... A little bit more complex way of fermenting, the easiest way to ferment integrated vegetable, it is simply to use a 1 to 5% saline solution, in other words, I'm gonna make it really easy because honestly, I am somebody who cooks by intuition just as much as Birches, and you can look up a recipe for a 1-15% slanting or salt solution, but basically, if you take a court of water and put in a couple teaspoons of salt and allow that cell to dissolve, that's a key point, and make sure that it's not...
0:33:34.4 S2: I do salt. That's really important. You don't want the added iodine in if you're fermenting and then just make sure the solution, the salt is dissolved, and then you can use that to... For me, just about any fresh badge, and so the one that we were talking about that I know you want to hear about is the fermented Winter squash. I think many people don't have enough experience eating Winter squash row, and there are some varieties that are asked if not better than carrots, squash is a little less sweet than the typical orange care might be. Orange parts have been bred to be sweeter as well, but it's got more of an earthy flavor to it, I can actually served in salads like slows to my husband who says he doesn't like winter squash and he thinks it's parents, and so I hope he doesn't listen to this pasture, like don't tell Tony areas actually in winter, but in spending... Exactly, so you can really sneak in Winter squash in salads, and it really is very similar to carrots. All you have to do is grade it. Or Julie in it. If you have a tool to do that, I wouldn't July in it by hand, I'm a little too lazy to do that, but you create it or you're in it, pack it into a jar, and mention jars are really in and beautiful.
0:35:02.0 S2: I know, but basically, any Jr will work and just make sure you pack it tightly and then you fill the jar up with this salt solution, so preventing is all about enough salt, keep bad bacteria, so bacteria that aren't healthy for us out of the fermenting process, but still enable the good bacteria, so a lot of people are becoming more aware now of micro-biotic and the microbiome, and that bacteria is so important for that health, we could even extend that to why that health is important for our brain health and so on. So it's a big deal.
0:35:46.9 S1: Not only that, you were talking about Terri, I personally think because part of fermenting is, it's like creating another... Capturing another layer of tar are of what's in the air? Absolutely, just like creating a Sardis capturing the ACES and no two shards taste quite the same because the East and one person's house or in one region is different than another, so I think it's interesting that fermentation... We were talking about Terai and the flavor of the land, because then the fermenting process is another layering of flavor of the land or of the air, and then the beautiful thing to me about fermenting is it's so flexible, you can get so creative with it. I mean, almost every culture has traditional formats, like in an Italian food, you've got Jordan era, I think of as a firm and in your age you have some kimchi, like you mentioned, or there's other Asian pickle, pickles, Mexican food you have pickled or fermented radish for Antonin obviously, sour Conan, the German and Austrian traditions, there's so many... So many are American deal pickles and people make dilly beans and things like that, that are all promoting it, what I wanna say about preventing too, and the way you're describing it is that particularly what's called a lector in...
0:37:12.5 S2: Yes, exactly, right. And it's the easiest... It's really, truly the easiest way to ferment most vegetables, and I think it's really a low threshold to start if someone has not yet started, and it just keeps for ages that way, so I grow varieties of Winter squash that I can't get into stores and my customers can't give either. And that he actually means that they're really big variety, so they can go up to 12 pounds, my favorite all-time winner every year, actually in the taste testing is a variety called Blue banana from Guatemala. I highly recommend it. The problem with these varieties is their excellent in flavor and multi-purpose in the kitchen, but they're too big to practically sell in a normal supermarket because they're just huge. So when I open up one of those and my customers get warmed also, okay, there's a big squash can be prepared to use it up in one go when you open it, 'cause they store for a long time, but when I open up a big splash then part of it goes into the oven and gets baked, part of it gets steamed and part of it gets fermented, and of course we had some fresh raw and whatever we're not going to eat in the next couple of days, Batista goes into the freezer.
0:38:35.4 S2: And that's how I learned how to freeze food and canned food from my mother actually, she did everything on the farm, she was responsible for feeding us.
0:38:46.1 S1: And I think some of the core of your philosophy must come from your mother.
0:38:49.5 S2: Yes, yes. She taught me how to make bread, I still can't make her bread, I still can't make her cinnamon rolls, and that's this other thing, no to... So minerals are like My mom, cinnamon rolls were legendary. But none of us can make them, although she really tried, I even asked her to Please do them with me and I still can't make them like this... I also love that about food, is that each of us just for whatever reason, a Cook has his or her own flavor as well, if you can take that, and so yeah, food connects us to people even when they're no longer with us.
0:39:25.5 S1: So if my listeners wanting to go to see their farmers market or a local farm that they know and search for the kind of squash that they might be able to ferment or ERA, what would be some varieties they might look for or some traits they should ask for?
0:39:41.0 S2: That's a really, really good question, because I do think that the farmers markets in your region problems more or have more variety, go for the hard blue-skinned varieties, the larger ones, generally, I have yet to have a variety with that particular feature that wasn't good, and some of them are big and round, there's a couple of French varieties that are like that, I would first talk to the farmer, if possible, about What are the varieties? And can you tell me about them? But if you're on your own, I would look for that. I would also look for dark green wordy skin, that is also quite hard, because those tend to also be really multi-purpose in the kitchen, spaghetti squash has its charm, I've grown it, but to be honest, the flavor wasn't there and the multi-purpose wasn't there, so that's an interesting squash, and if you're on a low Park diet, but I would say look for larger varieties with harder skins and a blue or green skin is really the most interesting.
0:40:43.8 S1: Yeah, so I think your blue green skins might be like... Or the more blue skins are like a Hubbard. Yes, the humanitarian. Exactly. And I know I grew for the first time this past year, one called Black Fuze, which is a smaller one, so it's a little more manageable, that's a dark green Ward kind of outside and a beautiful nutty orange flesh on the inside, and now I still have a couple and cold storage, so I'm like, Oh, maybe I need to try some of that raw or at that fast, that's a variety that I'm seeing come up in... I grew it this year, but more farmers this year had that one available when I'm seeing the seeds available in more places and it's a smaller variety, so it's not as unmanageable if you're intimidated by buying a big squash, but more and more, I'm seeing there's a lot of squash and pumpkins, which are sashes sold as quote, decorative, that are actually quite deal in these instances. So the kind of Tanis describing are often sold as decorative, but you can cut into those... I buy them at Halloween time and harvest time. I sometimes buy ones that are being sold as decorative squashed, but I cut into them and use them 'cause they're really delicious to...
0:41:57.1 S2: There is a really easy way to do that, tastes to, if you're not sure or if a squash slow to defer to is also edible, just open it up and take a tiny little piece and show it long enough to make sure it's not better, and because that bitterness is really actually not good for us, that's why gourds shouldn't be eaten, but you're right, there's a lot of really good squash varieties that are now being sold this decoration and are actually excellent for cooking.
0:42:28.5 S1: Yeah, in fact, pumpkins and winter scratches are one of the first things that got me excited about these unusual varieties, and I are talking about... Or what many people call RLM varieties. I saw a recipe a number of years ago when I lived in California for a French soup cooked in a pumpkin and a whole large pumpkin, a French soup that has leaks and crusty bread and broth and Greer cheese, and you cook it right in the pumpkin. So then it has the pumpkin as well. It was so good to be at Cal for a particular variety, French variety of pumpkin, and so I started calling all these pumpkin farms in Santa Cruz, California, which is a big farm area, and I found a farm that had all these Arlon varieties, and that's when I first got exposed, and then I also saw a recipe for stuffing, the little decorative pumpkins that people use, but you can stop and make a hole and Ethan and you can eat the skin and everything, and so that got me on the path of learning about unusual and different varieties and how to use them so that... That a
0:43:30.4 S2: Fantastic... And I also, just to make the point, I learn a great deal the from you about the varieties that you're growing, it's so interesting because some varieties that are available in the States just aren't available in Europe, but also vice versa, and so... Thanks for the recommendations. I hope in the show notes you give your listeners a few tips for the local ones, at least in your area, 'cause I really can't speak for your farmers market so...
0:43:59.6 S1: Well, our listeners are all over. So that's why I like some give tips for what to ask for or how to find and... Well, I'll also put in some tips about fermenting and perhaps I can sweet talk Tang it into writing up her basic fermentation. Will put that in the show notes as well for you. So we've talked about all kinds of things, and it's so much fun. And what I wanna ask you about, this podcast is called Women in food, and so we've kinda stepped into it a little bit here and there, but I'd love to ask you what your experience is being a woman farmer, particularly in Austria, as well as what you feel being a woman brings to food and what you do
0:44:46.0 S2: Now, I actually... I studied literature for my bachelor's degree straight out of high school and focused on women's literature, and I would say I have a relatively well-educated sense of feminism, but in most of my life, I've never needed to take on more of an activist stance, I guess. I've just always done what I wanted to do, and didn't have a sense that there was much standing in the way, I have to say, I was never interested in moving up in a corporate structure, so I've always been self-employed if possible, but in any case, it's just in the last few months, to be honest with you, that I've become highly sensitized and I feel like it's kind of a throwback to my university time when I was reading a lot of feminist literature, I think that women's voices are simply not amplified in the same way, as men's voice is particularly in agriculture, and I find that not only ironic but appalling, if you look at the numbers from the UN, 80% of agricultural workers are women in the world, it is women who feed their communities, their families first, of course, and then their communities, it is the women who tended their crops and started to domesticated crops while the men were in their socialized role of hunting, women, I think have a lot to say about farming, and most recently, something that actually really ticked me off, to be honest with you, I've been using the term no dig, which is also another popular term in today's market gardening community, and what the message there is, is don't disturb the soil, don't dig the soil in any way, and it's been very popularized and connected to a couple of men whose names I'm not even going to mention.
0:46:49.5 S2: But what I discovered when I was doing research on my book about low input market gardening, is that actually the first person to name that practice was a woman in the 1970s in Australia named Ester Dean, and in fact, Esther deans had an influence on... Australia's most well-known permaculture list, and even the term permaculture, I kind of draw back from because a lot of western men think they've invented something new and I don't think they have... I think there are other cultures and there are also particularly many more women who have more of a need and sense of working with nature instead of against her, and certainly more understanding at best were on an equal level with another one another. I certainly have, I'm not able as a human being to govern nature, it just doesn't work, you can control nature only in that you destroy it, and you can only do that on small patches of this earth without destroying the Earth. It's
0:47:58.5 S1: Interesting that you say that because we've had a discussion in the international women farmers group about this a couple of times, there's been a number of documentaries talking about advocating regenerative agriculture practices and all these practices you've been talking about and all taught and advocated by mostly white men, and I had written in our group about how... I think it's great that this methodology and this awareness to how we farm and grow food is getting more in the mainstream, however, I'm disappointed that there's no acknowledgement of the roots, that these root... Not just women, like you point it out, but some of these farming practices, permaculture regeneration, awareness of the interconnectedness of the web of life and all the things, it goes back to deep indigenous and ancestral roots anywhere in the world. Indigenous, exactly. In North America, ancestral in Europe, wherever our ancestries from, and no acknowledgement of that. And so, unfortunately, men's voices are helping advocate and bring these farming practices to more awareness, which is important and good, and yet not honoring routes and recognizing origins, and so it's an interesting economy of like, Yes, let's advocate about this more, but no, I want other voices talking about it.
0:49:26.7 S2: Exactly. I feel the same way. And the other thing that really pans me every single day right now as I'm trying to figure out how to work as closely as possible with self-renewing processes that are natural processes in my market are, I'm really just hated by the sense that I'm reinventing the wheel, and I'm trying to do my due diligence to go back to the original inventor of these wheels, many wheels that are part of my practice, and sometimes it's easy to find and sometimes it's not, and the thing that has started to comfort me a little bit is the thought that those people who are really truly trying to work with the processes of nature and not against them are probably always going to reinvent the wheel because we're being taught by nature what makes sense in our practices and what is affecting... And so maybe
0:50:27.6 S1: A nature now is not in her 5000 years ago. Robert.
0:50:35.3 S2: That term regenerative, I agree that regenerative agriculture is really important, and I read a lot about it, and it's a huge important area of interest for me, but we really do need to think about why is it necessary to regenerate something. And I think that a lot of the practices like permaculture, without being called permaculture, are simply developed in working with nature in order to also grow food and survive, and it's not the focus on regeneration, so I've actually stopped using the term regenerative recently, because I don't have anything to regenerate, I'm really lucky to a field that was healthy and whole, and so it's more about making sure I support the self-renewing processes of nature as opposed to extraction.
0:51:25.6 S1: Exactly. Action. Armenia, thank you so much for all this. I mean, we just wandered all over the place to
0:51:33.3 S2: Be... Did I love your history
0:51:34.7 S1: And to a... Yeah, that's great. And I just wanna ask before we finish up, if there's something you want our listeners to walk away with or think about differently the next time they look in the refrigerator at the market or stand in the kitchen, wondering what to make for dinner, or any of those things, what would you like people to think about? I
0:51:55.8 S2: Just think the most honorable and valuable thing that we can do for ourselves and our loved ones is to select good ingredients, if we can't grow them ourselves now where they've been grown and to prepare them with lots of love and to feed others. So I guess that would be my sum of woven and food from Tony's perspective. I
0:52:17.4 S1: Love that you said that because I know you shared with me personally that the biggest thing you learned from your tinea landline, your women's line is to love people through food, and we hadn't actually touched on that directly, so I'm glad... I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, if there's one thing to love people through food, I love that so much, and I know that that's what you do, and I think you mentioned that your customers talk about the amazing flavor of your food, I think it's because you love them through what you grow and what you prepare and what you share... Estonia, thank you so much, my dear friend. To the other... Yeah, thank you so much and thank you listeners for... I hope you enjoyed this episode. We will put links to Tony's website and her information in the show notes as well, I have some of the other references that she mentioned and we've talked about today, and you can find those in the show notes. Once again, you can go to our website and join our email list, women in food dot net, and you will get a notification of future episodes and when they release, as well as other special events and happenings and the women in food world.
0:53:28.7 S1: Thank you so much for listening. I'm your host, Missy singer to Mars, and this is honin.