Our local, heritage Thanksgiving - Great Basin Basket and Wind Dancer Ranch

Usually, after Thanksgiving dinner is over and my thoughts turn to turkey sandwiches on white bread, I'm kind of relieved. We love to cook and have family and friends over, but it's a lot of work and requires the timing skills of a high wire acrobat. Whew! This year our dinner was more like an adventure thanks to Great Basin Basket, heritage turkeys from Wind Dancer Ranch, and our friends and family.

Check out what we received in the Thanksgiving CSA basket; easily enough for the big dinner and a few more. Look at all this!

All of it was delicious, fresh, and grown or made by people who live in our community.

The Brant family had a Royal Palm turkey ...



All the other families had Spanish Blacks...

(We took this picture the day we picked up our turkeys.)


Our 2007 Thanksgiving shopping was more like visiting friends than a chore. We met new people, all of them nice, outgoing, and committed to their land, the food they grow, and the people in their community. We spent two hours touring Wind Dancer Ranch, a working farm that had been abandoned for 17 years and after three years of hard work looks like paradise. "Shopping" doesn't get any better than this!

Links fixed - again!

Thanks Pauline, for letting me know the Great Basin Basket contents links weren't working. They've been fixed, AGAIN! If I didn’t love technology so much, I'd hate it!

Great Basin Baskets - summer and fall 2007 contents

Last night we picked up the last fall 2007 Great Basin Basket box. CSA living has given us a rewarding couple of seasons and an interesting experience, starting with our first summer basket on June 7, 2007, and ending (maybe) with the final fall basket on November 13th. For twenty three weeks we've eagerly anticipated visiting with all the wonderful people who make the CSA possible, rummaging through our box of fresh local produce, and reading the weekly installment of Down on the Farm.

Having had zero prior experience eating local Nevada produce I didn't know what to expect the first year out, which made the meal planner in me slightly uncomfortable. So, in preparation for the second year Mark and I kept track of everything that came in each 2007 box. Keep reading if you’re interested in the learning what we found.

Here are the unscientific, yet interesting Fall and Summer Great Basin Basket lists. We tracked the type of produce, the variety if we knew it, and the quantity; we included weight information only if it seemed useful to the home cook.

Now that the two seasons are over all that’s left is to enjoy the remaining fall fruits and veggies, and ponder the possibilities of the first 2008 basket. It’s been a life changing experience on many levels and we can’t wait for more. Happy reading!

LFNN madness - fixed

Whew! I spent yesterday verifying all the links and spellchecking (again!) the entries so the blog content should be in working and professional order. The bad news is....

The Home Grown Nevada web address problem doesn't have an easy fix. Tina knows about it now but it might take a while to recreate Home Grown Nevada's internet presence. In the meantime, please call 775-465-2549 or email jsbeef@earthlink.net to learn more about the Smith's grass-finished beef.

LFNN blog entrys and links gone mad

While doing a bit of blog maintenance I found that some of the entries and links have gone wonky. Some entries are displaying with spelling errors, in spite of being spell checked before publishing, and it looks like the Home Grown Nevada address, which used to take us to grass-finished beef raised by the Smith's, has been commandeered by a web address squatter. Also, my Google document links are no longer intact so readers may have been experiencing problems. It looks like activity on Google's end changed all the document addresses. I'll get everything fixed as soon as I can. Nothing worse than reading something filled with typos; I’m MORTIFIED! Sorry about that!

Suntara Farms - readily available Northern Nevada eggs are no more

We love her eggs but now she's moved on. Michelle of Suntara Farms has moved due to a transfer at her other day job. Such is the life of farmer/growers who must rely on a second job to make a living if they want to stay on the farm. People in the community have adopted her chickens but their eggs will not be available to us in the immediate future. Now where do we get eggs?

Hopefully, the local food network will be able to find someone else with local chickens so we can again eat really fresh eggs. In the meantime we'll be making due with organic eggs from the Co-op.