It can be somewhat hard to fathom when the weather is so confusing, but Winter is not normally thought of as a bountiful harvest time.  If you’ve been out and about over the past several weeks, you know what we’re talking about.  One day it’s 35 and raining, the next it’s 65 and breezy, then snow, then pushing 70.  It’s Mother Nature’s version of the “Bob & Weave.”

“Go ahead!  Tag me!  Nyah Nyah!  You missed!”

But wobbling weather is no reason to kick your commitment to good, healthy food to the proverbial curb.  Sure, you may not be stepping outside to pick a fresh tomato off of your own vine, but there are a great number of foods that are still available and good for your Winter repast.

The best way to get your Winter organic on is to raid the root cellar.  While there’s nothing quite like eating something fresh out of the ground or off of the vine, things that grow IN the ground can be held for a long time before you munch on them.  These are root vegetables like carrots, potatoes and onions.

Another great addition to that list is beets.  Not the pickled kind, but out of the ground beets.  Like in our Winter Beet Salad.  You know – the one with oranges, fennel and mint?  Which brings us to another way to stay fresh in the Winter:  Fruit.

We try to stay as local as possible with our purchases, but also try to avoid scurvy, so sprinkle our menu with fruit as much as possible.  This sometimes means resorting to dried cranberries and cherry preserves (As in our Fruits of the Farm), but we also use pears, tangerines, and good, Virginia apples.

Contrary to popular belief, not everything fresh in your basket needs to be shipped in or culled from your dark, dank basement.  There are a great many leafy type vegetables that can be found pretty close to here to augment your meal.  If they can, after all, now grow palm trees in North Carolina, we should be able to find some lettuce, right?

Kale is a great leafy green and a good source of vitamins.  This time of year you can also tuck in to cabbages, lettuce, spinach and Brussels sprouts.  If you source carefully, you can load up your plate with peas, cauliflower, broccoli, and a garden’s worth more.  Local, fresh, organic cucumbers or tomatoes?  Not so much.  You can find them fresh and/or organic, but they likely came from a land far, far away.

If you think about it, back in the good old days before refrigerators and crispers and interstate commerce, we didn’t survive the winter by eating tree bark and shoes…

Okay.  Historically speaking, we sometimes did.  But times have changed!  Today, you can eat fresh and organic regardless of the season, and you don’t have to go against your better judgment to do it.  A good first step might be to visit The Urban Farmhouse.  We even made it easier for you by opening a new location.  So there.  Dig in.

You’re reading this because the Mayans were wrong.  We’re not sure if it’s because they ran out of numbers or invented tequila, but we woke up, so that was good.  This also means that you have to buckle down, finish your holiday shopping, and visit with your relatives, whether you like it or not.

For good or ill, we are pretty thankful this year.  You can still bring gifts, but we don’t really need much.

2012 saw our landlord sell our building, but we managed to stay intact and our Cary Street store is doing great.  Sandy came and went and we didn’t need our canoes to navigate Shockoe Bottom.  We had a bunch of Urban Farmhouse fans donate goods to The Martin Agency’s relief truck, and we felt pretty darned good about that.  We were able to donate some much-needed winter gear for Bundle Up RVA, and some needy Richmonders will be a little warmer this year.  Felt good about that.  We spent some time at Farmer’s Markets and are making great progress on our Midlothian location, and those are awesome things.

We spent 2012 surrounded by wonderful friends, looking at amazing artwork, and listening to some of the best home-grown music Richmond has to offer.  We dished up great local and organic food, poured some steaming coffees and biodynamic wines, and popped the caps on some of the finest beers you’ve ever tasted.  Life has been good.

Sure, we’re still in a lather about factory farms and genetic engineering, but we try to do our part.  Have you heard that the FDA has approved the sale of genetically modified salmon?  Grows to maturity in about a week, but they say it’ll be okay for you.

There.  Got that out of the way.

If you were to provide a gift to The Urban Farmhouse this year we have a few requests:

Be kind to your fellow man.  December brought news of violence and heartache for many families.  That sucks.  Do you want to really freak out a complete stranger?  Smile at them and say “Hello.”  If you really want to creep them out, offer a handshake or hold the door open for them.

Support your local guys.  Many of the vendors that we do business with are like us – privately owned and operated.  Most of them are right here in Central Virginia.  We have nothing against a guy raising pigs in Iowa, but it’s nice when we support our local economy.  It keeps moms and pops in business, drives our local money, and is the backbone of our country.  Just don’t tell ConAgra.  They’ll seek a patent.

This goes for your local arts community also.  Go to a gallery.  Go see a band.  Picasso was known the world over, but he got his start painting stuff for his neighbors in Spain.  They just called him “Pablo.”  And the kid you see playing guitar here during Sunday Brunch may be the next Andres Segovia.  But he’ll never get to Carnegie Hall if you don’t throw him a buck or two here in RVA.

Come see us in 2013.  We’ve had, as we said, a great year.  But it’s more than just a business request.  You know the saying about breakfast?  “A chicken lays an egg but a pig is committed.”  We’re like the pig.  We’re committed.  We will continue to support our local partners, musicians, and artists.  We’ll continue to search for people who provide the foods that we believe in.  In a sense, most of the money that you spend goes right back into our local economy.  And we’re big fans of that.

But more than anything else, we like to see you.  We created The Urban Farmhouse to be like the kitchen and dining room of a large family home.  Warm, comfortable, and good food.  And you guys are kind of like our family.

And with that, a very safe and wonderful holiday to you and yours.

Love, The Urban Farmhouse

We were watching some television last night.  PBS.  Go figure.  Anyhow, we were watching the new Ken Burns documentary, The Dust Bowl.  If you’ve not seen a Ken Burns film before – settle in.  It’s going to be a long one.  He’s kind of known for doing exhaustive work on his subjects.  Baseball explores everything about our National Pastime from its history to its social impact.  It clocks in at 18 ½ hours.  Jazz explores the origins, artists, and genres of America’s Music during 10 extensive episodes.  The Dust Bowl is something that he just kind of threw together and is a quickie at four hours.

But once you start watching it’s pretty impactful.  Here’s the short story:

The Great Plains is very much like Africa’s Savannah.  Massive expanses of grasslands stretch from the Rockies to the Appalachians with a significant lack of trees and other windbreaks.  Like Africa, it periodically goes through periods of monsoon and drought.  Before the Civil War it was known as the Great American Desert.  That should tell you something.

Following the Civil War and the expansion of our railroad system, the Great Plains was seen as a great place for cattle and corn.  Millions flocked to the flat lands to stake their claim and raise families.  A few wet years lead many to believe that they had found the Promised Land.  As farming became more mechanized, it became easier for farmers to plow over acres and acres of prairie and plant wheat and other easy cash crops.  And then it stopped raining.

And here’s the thing:  The Great Plains averages about ten inches of rain per year.  To put that in perspective, Richmond gets over forty inches per year, and we’re technically too dry right now.  All of the prairie grasses that had grown for millions of years in our nation’s breadbasket have evolved to make the most of that climate, and when we plowed them up, the earth turned to dust and blew away.  Quite literally.  Dust storms originating in places like Oklahoma and Colorado left grit and blackened skies in New York City.  And the people who had bet the ranch on these shifting sands lost everything.

From 1925 until 1930 the land being cultivated in the Great Plains more than tripled.  From 1930 until 1940 over 500,000 people in the region became homeless and over 2.5 million just up and left.  They returned east, headed north, and hundreds of thousands fled to the greener land of California.  This massive migration led to the term “Okie” and spurred John Steinbeck to write The Grapes of Wrath.

A great deal of Ken Burns’ documentary relies on historic photographs taken by artists such as Dorthea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration.  The photos coming back to Washington initially showed vacant farms, fallow fields and starving livestock.  Then one came back showing a family, and a sense of desperate futility leapt off of the print.  That became the directive to the photography team and the focus of their work.  Shooting these portraits put a very human face on the devastation faced by these farmers and their plight was brought home to everyday Americans.  They have since become among the most iconic in our photographic history.

And it didn’t have to happen.

One of our favorite magazines is The Sun.  It’s been around for about thirty years and is ad-free.  It’s a little bit information, a little editorial, and a little bit fiction and poetry.  A sort of New Yorker without the Broadway shout-outs.  Anyway, the October issue had an interview with one of our favorite guys, Joel Salatin of PolyFace Farms.  He talked about the symbiosis of a good farm, and how the animals and plants and farmers all become one unit.  He lamented the fact that our farms are banished to the edges of our society, and the process of producing our food is something never seen and only talked about in hushed whispers.  You never need to see it or smell it.  He points out that the manure coming from commercial factory farms is so devoid of helpful bacteria that it can’t be used for compost.  Too many hormones and antibiotics.

He was discussing the notion of the morality of eating meat when we thought of The Dust Bowl.  He doesn’t understand why we would hold a pig in higher regard than a carrot.  Is it the eyes?  Does that take a potato that has sprouted “eyes” off of the table?  He also is trying to come to grips with how we farm.  We’re disrupting the natural cycle of nature.  He said,

“The notion that we could have a functional planet if people did not eat animals indicates a profound ignorance of ecology. Animals would soon overpopulate the earth. Oh, you say predators would increase? I’m sure people would love to live next to large predators. Plant destruction would lead to population collapse. Erosion and soil destruction would follow. Even urban areas now have deer-hunting seasons, because if the deer population isn’t controlled, they’ll destroy all the vegetation. With little vegetation, temperatures increase, the rain stops, and the earth is destroyed.”

My, how much we’ve learned.