Our Table Blog - Our Table Cooperative

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--Living the Co-op Life

10/1/2015

This is it for Sarah's Eat Local Challenge at OTC Grocery! We've come to the end of the month, which means her last post is up on Will Run for Pasta. What a glorious 30 days it's been together--we've gotten to know each other, we've shared meals, and now we're fellow business owners. This is what the co-op experience is all about. Thank you, Sarah! It brings us joy to share our love of food with you and so many others. Read Sarah's sign-off to the month here.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--Falling for Veggies

9/29/2015

Our resident co-op blogger Sarah was feeling under the weather this past weekend (feel better Sarah!), but she still managed to give us the lowdown on the most recent CSA share. Whether or not you're a CSAer, take a cue from Sarah and scroll through our blog to learn what's currently in season and ideas for what to cook with our ingredients. If you're not receiving a fall CSA share from us, then come see us at OTC Grocery for organic vegetables and more. You may run into Sarah there! For now, read Sarah's latest installment on Will Run for Pasta.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--S'more Potluck

9/25/2015

Sarah takes us back to the joy of last Sunday's member potluck in her recent post on Will Run for Pasta. Describing our meal, she reminds us how time at the table is a particularly important moment of connection and communion, especially when it involves s'mores. We promise there are more of these gatherings ahead, but, in the meantime, come see us at OTC Grocery because we love feeling in community with everyone every day that we're open! Check out what Sarah wrote here.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--Edible finds at OTC Grocery

9/23/2015

Lots of edible gems in Sarah's post this week on Will Run for Pasta! She reveals that there's something for everyone at OTC Grocery. Take a look at what we have to eat for the paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, a even Whole30 crowds. Own the food that you like to eat! Read Sarah's latest post here.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--Dining on the farm

9/17/2015

Head into the field for dinner with Sarah today! Consumer Member extraordinaire and author of the blog Will Run for Pasta, she recounts her experience attending our July Our Table in the Field dinner. Discover the magic of eating in the field through her post. Keep in mind that all Consumer Members receive a discount and first pick of our dinner tickets each year. In fact, there are still a few tickets remaining for our dinner on Saturday, September 26th.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--CSA(wesome)

9/13/2015

OTC CSA vegetables, Deck Family Farm pork sausage, Rogue Creamery blue cheese, and Roman Candle Baking Co. bread--Sarah's basket from OTC Grocery for the week sounds amazing. In her next post on her blog Will Run for Pasta, she takes you into both her kitchen and the OTC CSA. You'll notice that she never leaves the grocery without her Roman Candle Baking Co. bread. If you have suggestions on how she can cook her Deck pork sausage, send them her way! Check out her post here.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge--How it all started

9/10/2015

Sarah takes us deeper into her OTC story today with another post on her blog Will Run for Pasta. Lovingly titled "A Girl and her Co-op", she describes how we first met and what keeps her coming back. After reading, you'll need to plan a trip to OTC Grocery to experience some of the foods she highlights--lots of appetizing photos in this post! Among them is OTC Producer Member Oregon Brineworks' line of organic, fermented veggies--they're tasting their products at OTC Grocery this Saturday starting at noon during Co-op Community Day. Sarah's latest post can be found here.

Sarah's Eat Local Challenge at OTC Grocery

9/6/2015

Find out what the co-op experience is all about at OTC! Sarah, author of the blog Will Run For Pasta, will be sharing about her journey into the co-op over the next couple weeks. In fact, she's challenging herself to eat organic and local via OTC Grocery for the next month. Follow along and hear about her weekly CSA share encounters, some of her favorite finds at OTC Grocery, and what owning her food means to her. The first post is already up and can be found here.

Harvest, Hoops, and Hilarity

1/9/2015

Hey Everyone! I'm sure you've all heard it enough by now, buuut...Happy 2015!! Have all of you CSA members already enjoyed the fruits of our first CSA harvest of the new year?! It's been a perfect week for being out harvesting winter veggies - a little cold and foggy in the morning, but then it all burns off and all of a sudden its 60 degrees and sunny and your sweating through your sweatshirt. The colder weather has definitely been sweetening things up a bit in the field too, like this Castelfranco chicory you see to the right.-->
As long as we don't get a hard freeze for an extended period, these beauties will continue to grow and push more and more sugars into their leaves making them more and more delightful (even though the bitterness is nice too). Though, lets hope the voles and gophers stay away/find our traps first, unfortunately we're not the only ones that know that winter means sweet, sweet chicory season. They looooove the roots and will seek them out over most anything else.

This weather has also been kind to my other winter project: building our next pair of hoop houses! I know it doesn't really look like much at this point, but 80 holes have been dug, 80 posts have been set, and today I finished bracing the bottoms of the posts with a bunch of 20' 2x6's and metal brackets. So, first thing next week I get to start putting up the hoops, end braces, and purlins. Then hopefully the week after that I'll be putting on the plastic and building the end walls. And, voila! two not-so-instant hoop houses! If the weather wasn't cooperating as well as it has been recently I probably wouldn't be enjoying this project as much. But, when I'm doing something that lets me continue to exercise my carpentry skills on my own, while also not requiring me to wear a tool belt, I'd be happy enough to deal with a little winter rain while I do it. Fortunately for me it's looking like I'm not going to have to! So onward and upward until hopefully late January/early February we'll be able to start filling them with little seedlings for spring harvest!

We also had a little fun on Thursday's harvest that I wanted to share with all of you. I've always been fascinated by gnarly, twisted, roots that always seem to look like people in the most awkward of embraces. And, I've always thought about keeping a catalog of the most interesting ones and then making a coffee table book or something out of the images one day. The idea was as simple as that until Karen, Jen, and Dawn suggested that not only should there be pictures of twisty roots, but that they should be paired with pictures of live reenactments. Genius, right? So, here you go, the first in our new series of Our Table root vegetables and our reenacted versions. Enjoy!

Have a great weekend!
Til' next time,

Louis

Beautiful December Harvest

12/11/2014

Hey everybody! I hope you're all currently indoors and away from possible falling trees or other dangerous wind-blown debris. We had an absolutely gorgeous harvest today, and then like the weatherman said, right around 2pm those 50-60mph gusts showed up and started blowing us and our stuff all around. But, by that time we were finishing up washing and packing in the pack-shed so we got to watch from inside as it really start to pick up. Other than that it was a one-in-a-million December harvest day, just beautiful.

Here is a nice shot of the first batch of salad mix we harvested out of the hoop house as it gets it's first dunk before heading over to the store. It's a really nice mix of a few mustards, pak choi, and spring raab. Two of the mustards in the mix are actually my farvorites: Gold Frill, which are the light green frilly leaves (makes sense), and Magma, which are the kind of brownish leaves just poking through in the center/top of the picture. They've got a nice mustardy kick to 'em that I really like with salads or on sandwiches.

As for field cleanup, we're on the home stretch of just needing to get the last bit of tomato trellising out of the field: winding the string and pulling up the posts and storing them until spring. Luckily de-trellising is a job that gets a bit easier as time goes by and the plants that the trellising wraps around disintegrate. But, as both Josh and I have mentioned in previous posts, rolling up drip tape was the big priority for us and is a job that goes the opposite direction and gets more difficult as time goes by. Weeds continue to grow over the tape and basically bind it to the ground making it impossible to roll up without going through first and pulling it up and off of the ground. With that being said, we already got it all done!! It took a couple of marathon afternoons between a few of us on the crew but we finally got it all out! Here is what our roller looks like, with a couple of the rolled up bundles of drip tape behind it. Truthfully I don't really mind doing it, it takes just enough technique to keep it interesting and it can also be a bit hypnotizing to watch the tape wrap around the roller...in a weirdly satisfying way.

In other field-work related news...with my newly acquired construction skills I'm taking charge of erecting the two new hoops houses on the farm this winter. I had time last week to mark the layout for the posts on the two sites (I used trigonometry and everything to make sure things were square and inline with the other hoop houses, thanks Pythagoras). Now I just have to wait for a good (dry) window to rent an auger and drill 80 holes 9 inches wide and 2 feet deep according to my layout, then it's only up from there. I'm anxious about it, but I'm also excited to try and put my knowledge to the test when I actually have people counting on me to call the shots. It's time for me to "crack the whip", as Narendra puts it :)

That's all for now, don't get blown away.
Til' next time,

Louis

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