~Dwight D. Eisenhower
LOCAL QUAIL EGGS FROM RUSTY SKILLET RANCH
Our favorite local open-air local quail ranch was recently featured in ThisisReno.com, a great online local news site. Jaci from Rusty Skillet Ranch talks about the varieties of quail she raises, while showing off the brand new chicks and the beautiful eggs her quail lay. These are a favorite for hard boiling and topping salads or pizzas!
JUICE CLEANSE!
As you wake up from your Thanksgiving food coma, remember that one of the quickest ways to clear your head and feel comfortable in your body is with a juice cleanse. We are excited to present our brand new cleanse packages here at the Great Basin Food Co-op! Cleansing is important to give your digestive system a well deserved break and feed your body pure vitamins, minerals, and living enzymes to renew and heal yourself from the inside out.
After spending the holidays indulging, we have to give our body the thanks it needs by eliminating all the toxins from our system. Toxins are absorbed from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the constant stresses that life presents. Cleansing is a wonderful way to promote physical health as well as mental clarity.
If you are interested in detoxing with us please email juice@greatbasinfood.coop for more information about our cleanse packages.
STAFF PICK OF THE WEEK
Wilson is our Arkansas-to-Reno transplant busy doling out fresh fruits and veggies in the produce department. You probably recognize his bright smile and genuine happiness if you're shopping in the evenings.
We asked him what his favorite food is and he chose the local shiitake mushrooms from Mountain Mushrooms. Not only are they grown locally, but shiitake mushrooms have a whole host of health benefits, from their abundance of B vitamins to their anti-inflammatory qualities.
What does Wilson do with these fresh shiitakes? It's simple, really. "Just sautee them up in a little bit of olive oil or coconut oil. They go great on top of rice or as a filling in collard wraps."
Holiday Hams
Now that Thanksgiving is officially over (we had our biggest sales day EVER on Tuesday before the big holiday!) it's already time to start looking ahead to Christmas, Hannukah,
Kwanzaa, and all our favorite winter solstice holidays.
If you are looking for a LOCAL holiday ham, we will have a very limited supply available! Please email to reserve yours today!
Come check out our new burritos!
That's right, our favorite burritos just got a little bit better! We've completely revamped our vegan breakfast AND lunch burritos, and redone our meat-based lunch burrito as well.
It's not that our old burritos were bad, but we're constantly looking for ways to use more
local
food in our kitchen, and chicken burritos, even with organic chicken, are just not as good as supporting Albaugh Ranch by making local meat burritos, for example.So, our chicken burrito has become the local
Albaugh Ranch
burrito - we slow roast this grass-fed and grass-finished meat (various rounds and roasts, because that's how you support small scale ranchers) in a red chili sauce, then mix it with localPeri and Sons
organic onions and localDayton Valley Aquaponics
tomatoes (in a pan roasted salsa), all mixed with organic chili lime rice and homemade refried beans. That's three local farmers being supported by one delicious burrito!Not into meat? You'll have to check out our new vegan burritos, then - the breakfast one is made with an organic tofu scramble and a whole lot of organic veggies to fill it out - tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, zucchini, potato, bell pepper, and garlic all partying together in one tortilla.
And the vegan lunch burrito? Oh boy. (This is the one in the photo above, by the way). Let's just say that we had a customer try to return it because she thought she had mistakenly gotten a meat burrito. Nope, that's just the texture you get from an organic walnut cauliflower crumble - simple ingredients loaded with flavor and texture, with marinated cabbage slaw and a chili "cream" sauce on top of cilantro lime rice. Yum.
So come check out our awesome new burritos! No hidden ingredients, no fillers, preservatives, or junk food, just good clean organic and local food made fresh daily. We're pretty excited to share these with you and we hope your mouths are excited too :)
What's local right now?
Al Sindlinger of Al Bees raises his bees in Carson and Gardnerville, NV. Thanks to the wonderful work bees put into making honey last through the winter, local honey is available year-round! Did you know bees have to visit more than 30,000 flowers to make a teaspooon of honey?
Order in bulk through DROPP to keep your sweeteners local through the winter :)
Peri and Sons may be one of the largest onion growers in the country, but they still let us pick up organic onions direct from their farm to sell through our food hub DROPP. Growing in Nevada can be hard, but onions are one of those crops that do great in our desert conditions. They come in 40 pound boxes and keep really well, especially in the winter!
A New Food and Farm Bill
Earl Blumenaur is the bow-tie wearing US Congressperson from Portland, Oregon, and he has taken years of research, communication, and debate and consolidated it into the thorough and complete Food and Farm Act.
The most recent farm bill (the Agricultural Act of 2014) will run through 2018, at which point it will be time for a new one - they renew on a five year basis. This bill is one of the most important acts passed by the US Congress, but most people know little to nothing about it.
The biggest provision in the current farm bill is actually the SNAP program, which guarantees access to food for millions of below-the-poverty-line Americans, though this rarely translates to healthy or organic foods.
After that, the farm bill does a lot to control the market - farming is a risky venture, and weather fluctuations, pests, yields, and commodity pricing can all affect a farmers' potential income, so the farm bill's next biggest expenditure is fixing a guaranteed price for commodity crops - if the market provides a lower price, the government will make up the difference. This can be good when taken as an insurance program for farmers, keeping them afloat in difficult years. However, it's also become a guarantee that no matter how much corn and soy a farm grows, it will get a guaranteed price. In other words, it's unintentionally flooded the international market with more corn and soy than anybody wants or needs, at unhealthily cheap prices (after all, the US government is paying the difference).
So what do we do with all that extra corn? Well, we turn it into fuel, feed for animals that don't eat grains, sugar, starch, makeup, plastic, paper, frying oil, penicillin, whiskey, and glue (among many other things).
How do we fix this?
Participating in our democracy is a great start. Congressman Blumenaur has put a lot of work into a revised Food and Farm Act that limits subsidies, increases spending on nutrition and health programs, as well as sustainability initiatives, and most of all,
focuses on small farms!
This isn't a reactionary bill designed to please the Portland hipsters but nobody in Congress - this is a thoroughly designed, carefully considered revision to fix the problems in the current farm bill, which is not a bad bill, just a flawed one. Read more about it here.
Contact your Senators (202) 224-3121) or Representatives
HERE
and tell them you support the Food and Farm act!
EVERYONE IS WELCOME! Open every day from 8am-9pm
Our mailing address is:
240 Court St Reno, NV 89501
775.324.6133
info@greatbasinfood.coop
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