Since the start of the weekly lunch program at Quamichan Middle School, the Farm to School program has served over 400 local food lunches, created 13 tasty lunch menus and sourced products and produce from 23 Cowichan Valley farms.

March can be one of the hardest months to find local produce. Although longer day lengths bring more life to crops in greenhouses, it is still too early for outdoor spring crops and food stored from autumn is starting to soften. However, March is a great month to start using up food preserved from the fall. This week's menu featured two items, carefully preserved during the autumn bounty: frozen butternut squash grown at Makaria Farm, and canned blackberry sauce from Maple Groove Farm.
Preparing cucumbers for picklingThe butternut squash was harvested as the snow came to the Valley in November, roasted by the farm to school cooking team, and frozen until this week when it was transformed into a tasty Butternut Squash Galette! The blackberry sauce made its way into the menu as a topping for brownies made with local eggs and flour.

 
Anatomy of a Farm to School Salad

Salad is a mainstay of Farm to School menus. Each week, Providence Farm harvests 2 lbs of beautiful salad greens for the Farm to School program. Purple kale, sweet arugula flowers, spicy radicchio, tart red-veined sorrel, crispy curly endive, rainbow stemmed chard and delicate mizuna, to name just a few I pulled from the salad bag this week. Preparing a salad of freshly picked local greens seemed to be a wonder this week when out the kitchen window snow was falling. I am continually thankful for the heated greenhouse and the hard work of everyone at Providence Farm.

The variety of textures, flavours and colours of the salad greens nicely complements the warm winter comfort food that has been on the Farm to School Menu lately. This week, salad was served alongside a pasta bake featuring Baird Brothers Farm's grass-fed beef and focaccia bread featuring Stillmeadow Farm wheat, topped with camamelized sweet potatoes from Terra Nossa Farm.
The Week's Farm to School Lunch

This week, students and staff at Quamichan were dished up a vegetable unknown to most - Sunflower tubers! These root vegetables are known as Sunchokes, Jerusulum Artichokes, Sunroots or Earth Apples. Sunchoke plants produce flowers related to sunflowers in the summer. In late autumn, their underground tubers are ready to be eaten!
Sunchoke Tubers and Sunchoke Flowers The tubers will stay fresh in the soil all winter long and can be dug up as needed, making the sunchoke a great winter vegetable when other fresh local veggies are hard to find. Sunchokes can be grown in your backyard, but be careful - they spread easily and are known by some gardeners as a weed! Sunchokes can be eaten raw, adding an earthy crunch to salad, or baked and eaten similar to other root vegetables. I often roast them bringing out their creamy texture and sweet flavour. For Farm to School this week, we baked the sunchokes in a cheesy casserole along with local chicken and leeks. 

Want to grow your own sunchokes to add to your winter meals? Come to Cowichan Green Community's Seedy Saturday in March for sunchoke tubers, as well as a great variety of seeds and transplants.

Sourcing local chicken requires not only local farmer's to raise chickens, but also an approved facility to process chickens. With the new provincial meat inspection law passed in 2006, many small-scale poultry farmers across BC were without a facility to process chickens. Small-scale farmers were forced to close their poultry farms and consumers were left without options for purchasing local chicken.
'Stock Options' waiting on my counter at homeFortunately for southern Vancouver Island, Farmhouse Poultry was established, a provicinally approved poultry processing facility that was designed specifically to provide processing services to local, small-scale poultry producers. Chicken from Farmhouse Poultry was featured in the Farm to School soup this week. Looking for your own sources of local chicken? Farmhouse Poultry distributes chicken to local grocery stores, or check out our on-line Buy Local! Buy Fresh! Food Map to buy chicken from local farmers (many of these farmers have used the facilities of Farmhouse Poultry to process their chickens). 

On the Farm to School Lunch Menu this Week:
Chili, Caesar Salad and Honey Oat CookieA hearty bowl of local meat and vegetable chili seemed like a fitting lunch for a cold February Farm to School day. The chili featured grass-fed beef from Baird Brothers Farm, beets and garlic from Maple Groove farm, sweet potatoes from Terra Nossa Farm and onions from Saanich Peninsula farmers. The Chili was served along side more greens from Providence Farm tossed with a caesar dressing and croutons.

For cookies this week, I wanted to feature local honey. The benefits of buying honey locally from small scale producers are lengthy. To name a few:

Salad is often on the Farm to School menu for Wednesday lunches at Quamichan.
This week's lunch at Quamichan Middle SchoolWe have been fortunate to source fresh mixtures of salad greens from Providence Farm each week (you can buy them too, at Providence Farm Store, open Monday to Friday). Providence Farm's heated greenhouse protects salad greens though the chilliest winter months. But even with a heated greenhouse, heartier greens such as kale and chard are easier to grow in the cold, short winter days. This week's Farm to School menu transformed kale into healthy, tasty kale chips! I eat endless quantities of kale chips in the winter - a healthy snack, a crunchy garnish, a bright green side dish, a unique appetizer and now, a Farm to School menu item.

Thanks this week to Tom Henry and True Grain for Island grown wheat, Westholme Farm for bacon, Katie Farm for potatoes, and Providence Farm for kale. 

This week's Farm to School menu:

Leek and Potato Soup
Cheddar and Bacon Scones
Kale Chips

Recipes:

Leek and Potato Soup

Potatoes waiting for the oven at
Warmland House kitchen

Did you know that sweet potatoes can be grown in the Cowichan Valley? This year Terra Nossa Farm tried their first crop of sweet potatoes! The Farm to School menu this week featured Terra Nossa's sweet potatoes and roasted them along side Mr. Rossi's Russian Blue potatoes and Katie farm's white potatoes. The result? A colourful, tasty, crispy, sweet mix of the Cowichan Valley's root crops. 

Roasting five huge trays of root veggies, along with preparing meatballs in tomato sauce and green salad requires a lot of kitchen space and equipment. The Farm to School program is very thankful for the use of the Warmland House kitchen. Just across the street from Quamichan Middle School, the Warmland House has generously offered its spacious, well-equipped kitchen for weekly use by the Farm to School Program. It is a great kitchen for quantity cooking and has enabled our Farm to School program to operate without our own kitchen.
Heather preparing Providence Farm salad
greens in the Warmland House kitchen

Produced in the winter in the Cowichan Valley is an array of protein rich foods. The Farm to School program this week featured a few! Farm fresh eggs are plentiful in the Cowichan Valley and are an inexpensive and versatile local protein source. We cooked up eggs from Wilberry Orchards into a quiche that featured local chorizo sausage and a local grated potato crust. Hazelnuts are another local protein source - one which often gets over looked. Looking to buy some local hazelnuts? Wilberry Orchards sells their hazelnuts at local grocery stores and offers farm gate sales. . . or grown your own hazelnuts and plant a tree in your backyard! This week, we ground our hazelnuts into flour and made tasty, local, gluten-free cookies.

 
Plant a hazelnut tree in your backyard

This weeks Farm to School Menu:

Butternut Squash Soup featuring squash from Makaria Farm, chicken from Terra Nossa Farm and garlic from Maple Groove Farm.
Chorizo Quiche featuring eggs from Wilberry Orchards, Sausage from Westholme Farm and Russian Blue Potatoes from Mr. Rossi.
Hazelnut Cookies featuring hazelnuts and eggs from Wilberry Orchards.

I had lots of recipe requests this week, especially for our hazelnut cookies, so here they are . . .

Chorizo Quiche

As winter arrives our selection of local fruits and vegetables becomes more limited. For these winter months, the Farm to School program focuses on other types of local foods - meat, eggs, dairy, nuts and grains. I was delighted this week to find Tom Henry, a farmer in the Metchosin area growing wheat. Milling opportunities for grains are limited on Vancouver Island, therefore we purchased the whole wheat kernels from Tom, known as wheat berries. Wheat berries are great cooked for salads or sprouted and made into bread. They have a firm, chewy texture and a nutty flavor. This weeks Farm to School menu featured a Grape and Feta Wheat Berry Salad, Green Salad with Cheese and Bacon, and Granola Apple Bars.

Thanks to all the farmers who supplied us with fresh, tasty, environmentally sustainable food this week! Thank you to Providence Farm for greens, Westholme farm for bacon, Cobble Hill for apples and Stillmeadow Farm for wheatberries.

Winter Wheat Berry Salad
(adapted from www.caricooks.com) Serves 4

1 cup wheat berries
1/2 cup minced red onion
1/2 cup diced red pepper
1/2 cup diced cucumber
1/4 cup crumbled feta
1 cup halved grapes
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup toasted walnuts