This Week's Food

Happy 2020 Folks!

It's been another great year at Family Dinner! We have been expanding - more cities and towns, more drivers, more wonderful members and more Farms and Producers that make the incredible food we are honored to bring you every week.

And it's been a year of growth and new horizons for us as well. Erin left MIT after 11 years to be fully at the Family Dinner helm, Tim has been focusing more on optimizing and streamlining processes - we even promoted Frank to CDO status - Chief Dog Officer. It's been a whirlwind.

We are incredibly grateful to everyone's support, love, patience and feedback as we continue this journey into 2020.

Love,

Erin, Tim + Frank

* And speaking of growing the Family, we have a promo going for 50% off new customers' first order with the code 2020 at checkout. Is your brother interested in grass fed meats? Are your co-workers always reading these emails over your shoulder? Is the town librarian an aspiring locavore? Spread the word and give them some love. And thank you!

... I say "let's make BLTs!!!"  Oh wait. That doesn't rhyme at all. 

Anyway, today we are headed out to Hadley, MA to visit Five College Farms and pick up a truck full of tomatoes for the shares this week! (spoiler alert: there's also Bacon from Tad!)

A bit about them:

 "Five College Farms is a USDA certified organic farm nestled in Hadley, in the verdant Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. We are a 72 acre farm with  2 acres farmed  under roof in our greenhouses. We’re all about growing some of the healthiest produce.  Currently, we grow several varieties of certified organic tomatoes. Our organic tomatoes are vine ripened and harvested by hand at peak ripeness. All of our tomatoes are grown in greenhouses, which means that you can enjoy healthy and locally grown produce year round." 

Hence, the indescribable joy of a perfectly delicious tomato for your perfect BLT in the dead of Winter. It's like magic.

We are really looking forward to picking these gems out today. Who knows, maybe Erin will even relive her undergrad days at UMass and drink some terrible beer, eat a whole pizza by herself while throwing a frisbee into the wind and listening to Ani DiFranco on repeat.  Ah, the Zoo.

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and is enjoying a Happy Hanukkah.

Cheers,

Erin + Tim

Hello!

They say it's the most wonderful time of the year and we totally agree. It's the time of year when you can wear foolish jammies, put brandy in all of your warm beverages and watch Love Actually AND Die Hard on repeat. What's not to love? 

This week we have a few reminders:

-We are selling amazing meats for your Holiday table. Holiday Roasts will be delivered on 12/24, just in time. Choose from Prime Rib, Pork Shoulder Roasts, Whole Chickens and More! Add on Bacon, Eggs for brunch left overs!

-We still have Gift Cards! Give the good gift of Food.

We hope you enjoy everything the season has to offer. Have an extra slice of pie, ogle at Bruce Willis a little longer and hug the folks you love just a little tighter.

Much Love,

Erin + Tim

FLOUR POWER:

For this week's grain we turned to Noah and Sophie (pictured, photo by Paul Carey Goldberg) from Aprilla Farm in Essex, MA. Aprilla is a beautiful place, nuzzled by the Castle Neck and Essex River estuaries. They milled Wheat Flour for Family Dinner just this week, to order.  You may be saying to yourself: Grains? In Massachusetts? What the Holy Heck are you talking about?

At Aprilla they explain it this way:

"As farmers in the 19th century pushed west, it’s not hard to understand how big stretches of flat prairie were enticingly able to pump out a huge amount of shelf-stable, shippable, commodity calories. Subsequently, the small, regionally-adapted New England grain varieties, and the knowledge, threshing, milling, and baking infrastructure that accompanied them slowly died out in the Northeast.
 
And yet, at Alprilla, we’ve made a significant push to try our hand at growing wheat, flint corn, barley, and beans. Our reasons are both intellectual and practical. As Noah says, the Local Food Movement can’t be just a Produce Movement; We need beer and bread, too."

Beer and Bread. Sounds like supper is ready. 

Enjoy!

In Mariah Carey's breathy rendition of the classic holiday jam, she croons:

"I don't want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need...

Make my wish come truuuuue... All I want for Christmas is youuuuuu"

We think this dazzling Diva has it all wrong. At Family Dinner we're going with the slight but essential edit of :

" All I want for Christmas (Hanukkah/Kwanza/Festivus/Finish Independence Day) is FOOOOOOOOOOOOOD"

That's right folks; this year skip the footed jammies, the Frozen 2 Electric Toothbrush set and the stuffed armadillo. This year give folks a gift they will really love - a Family Dinner Gift Certificate! They come in Veggie Only, Half, Whole and Double Share sizes. 

Hello!

Welcome back, we missed you! We thank you for your patience with us as we took the past week off to spend time with family and give our amazing team a moment to breathe.

We hope you enjoyed the holiday with delicious provisions and passable time with Family with minimal quarrels about sports and politics. 

We also want to send a nod and some love to folks for whom the holidays, these in particular, are a time marbled with joy and sadness. Maybe the missing of someone, the sadness of time passing have you not feeling so joyful.  We started taking this week off when my father passed two years ago when Family Dinner was just a baby. It's been a bittersweet season since and we appreciate the time and space to reflect, to be sad and to let food and laughter heal what ails us.

All that said, we have some fun goods in store for this week. Steak from Tad, tomatoes to make you dream of summer and a soapbox sermon about the merits of cast iron pans. 

We hope you enjoy.

Erin, Tim and Frank the Dog

NOTE: 

The snow is making driveways/pathways a little more complicated. If you're not home, please make sure your cooler is somewhere accessible! Our drivers appreciate it!

One Pan to Rule Them All:

Yes. We are making a culinary Lord of the Rings Reference. Yes, we are nerds. And yes you are correct...no one invited us to Prom.

I digress.

The world is full of fancy kitchen crap you don't actually need. The avocado peelers and melon ballers are just as well served by the sharp knives and dull spoons you already have. But if Cast Iron pans are in a different category.

If you love to cook and don't have a cast iron, it might be time to dive in. I cook everything except scrambled eggs in ours. That includes meat, fish, fried rice, frittata and fresh baked bread. 

We prefer Lodge pans and have a slew of them. The basics are under $30, you can buy them anywhere and treated correctly you will have them until Hell freezes over. (Which, given Climate Change, may be before the 2020 elections).

They're great Christmas Gifts, cool Yankee Swaps and amazing weapons of self-defense in the unlikely event of a burglary.

Last call for Birds!

So we have mentioned a few times that we are doing Thanksgiving orders for delivery on 11/26.  We don't want to be too repetitive but we DO want the idea that you don't HAVE to do the tedious shopping this year to get stuck in your head. Sort of like the terrible refrain from the 1963 ditty from the Trashmen, from which the title of this email is .... plucked.

We have great Thanksgiving shares to offer! Turkeys from Hurd Farm , Chickens from Tad and all the Thankgiving-y produce you want. Let us do all the work for you, order your share today.  All orders will be delivered on Tuesday 11/26.

Happy Not Shopping!

Cheers,

Erin + Tim

BREAKING NEWS! 

Family Dinner is growing! We will be advertising on NRP/WBUR this week. Listen in on your morning drive, cheer loudly in your cars, and spread the word to your fellow commuters stuck in the hellacious gridlock of 93 South.

People often ask how Family Dinner operates in the winter when the fields in New England look like the frozen terroir of the White Walkers. 

The answer is we have to get creative, cast a wider net and the result is we get to meet amazing people growing really delicious products in nonconventional ways.

This week we took a trip back to Lexington Community Farm to visit Mark Gabrenya from  Brite Harvest Farms. 

To get to Mark, you walk through the rows of kale and carrots, up a hill and past the alpacas. ( I paused to tell them a joke: "You guys wanna go on a trip? Alpaca my bags!" They were nonplussed.) Once you see the 40ft shipping container, you can stop. You're at the right place.

Mark grows greens year round in a recycling shipping container from local start-up Freight Farms. He grows hydroponically - meaning the plants are grown in a water-based, nutrient rich solution. They grow under lights supported by solar power, it is an amazing operation.

Growing in a 40-foot recycled shipping container with solar power allows Mark to harvest greens regardless of the outside temperatures. The lettuces and greens are more delicate than their soil-based compatriots outside, but holy heck are they tasty.  The leaves are tender but textured and very simply lettucey. Lettuce like. Hmm. That's not right. Letticious? 

You get the point, they're delicious.

We will have Brite Harvest green partially in our rotation for the coming months. We hope you enjoy!

I am the only one who gets in cooking ruts? We have access to the most beautiful, fresh,  local food yet in my abject laziness I will still return to the same things: everything is a taco, anything can be a pizza.

We all need some inspiration to pull us out of the depths our Everything is a Taco Hell. For that, I turn to Chef Dan Souza.  He's the Editor in Chief for Cook's Illustrated and a friend. If you're wondering if it is exhausting to have such beautiful and talented friends, yes. Yes, it is. It's the worst.

We went to visit him last week at America's Test Kitchen, to tour the space and learn about what he's been up to. ATK is pure nirvana for anyone who cares about food. A library with thousands of cookbooks, room after room of beautiful equipment and perfectly organized pantries. ( I actually have not left ATK yet. I'm penning this email from the cookbook room, and hope to be protected by the Squatter's Rights Act in the State of Massachusetts.)

Dan has a great channel on YouTube called "What's Eating Dan". They're short, smart takes on simple food topics that are informative and approachable.  Everything from egg yolks to cauliflower.  Check it out to improve your kitchen savoir faire and fall in love with things you never thought were in your wheelhouse.

Enjoy the weekend folks!

Erin + Tim

News Flash!

There are two new products on our a la carte offering! Delicious almond milk from Nectar and Green;  and Chickens from Tad at Feather Brook Farms! You can still get your coffee fix from the folks at Tandem as well as all the other add ons. Keep your eyes peeled for more news in the a la carte aisle!!

The Good Stuff:

So many of our members share their incredible creations with us week-to-week on social media, text messages or email.  We love seeing what you do with the goodies we carefully curate for you every week. Most of the time it makes just hungry and jealous.... but we love it.

Some folks have asked about more food resources and recipe ideas- so we want to share resources as they come across our desk/table.

It's exciting to learn that some of our members are food nerds themselves and it gives us great pride to share their work with you, to help create a community around great local food; how to source it, how to cook it and how to love it.