Daily Archives: August 12, 2015
Q&A with an Urban Sky Farmer
A few weeks ago, we took a trip to an urban farm in an unexpected location — on the roof of a hospital! Eskenazi Sky Farm provides produce and an educational facility for the hospital. We are big supporters of Eskenazi’s efforts to integrate food and health, so we took a trip to the top to show you around. As luck would have it, the Sky Farmer is a dear friend, Rachel White. I caught up with her to ask a bit about her background and the farm, and Alex shot some lovely photos as a virtual tour below. Hope you enjoy it as another installment in our Healthy + Whole series!
Sonja: You are an urban farmer (!). How did you get into this field? Were you always interested in food?
Rachel: Honestly, like a lot of people my age, jobs were not available when I left college. I just happened to find a farmer that was willing to pay me for a season of work, and lucky for me, he had been farming organically for most of his life. It was about 4 acres, just the two of us and his dog, and it was a quick learning curve for me. I hated weeding in my parents garden when I was little, but this was different for some reason.
I wasn’t always interested in food. I think that with the convenience and cheapness of food there were some cooking and gardening skills that were lost in my family. I was fed well as I grew up, but I didn’t see food as fuel, I didn’t understand that it affects the way I feel, and I didn’t know that a sharp knife is the one thing you need in a kitchen. I had a lot to learn and I feel like I’m still catching up.
Sonja: The Sky Farm at Eskenazi Health is special, since it’s on the top of a hospital. What do you grow, and how is it used?
Rachel: I grow a variety of vegetables and fruit. I try to have a good combination of items that the general public might recognize from the grocery store, and a few that they may have never eaten before. The Sky Farm at Eskenazi Health is just over 5,000 square feet, so it is not considered a production farm, it works much better as an educational space. People get to walk the farm and find the items they recognize, ask questions about those they don’t, and sometimes participate in programs we put on.
All the food is used by the hospital. Some goes to restaurants on the hospital campus (Ingram Micro Mobility Marketplace and Café Soleil) to be worked into the existing menu, and some goes to a food and nutrition class as a take home shared located at one of our clinic. Another portion goes to our Veg Fridays event here at the Sky Farm at Eskenazi Health where we pass out samples, have a small nutrition lesson, and hand out some veggies so people can try them at home. I also have a small area of flowers and work with the Eskenazi Health Spiritual Care manager here at the hospital to pass them out to patients.
Sonja: What is your favorite thing about your job? What are some challenges?
Rachel: In short, my favorite thing and the most challenging thing are the people that come through. In general, we are pretty destructive to our land, and the Sky Farm at Eskenazi Health is no exception to that. It is a public space and that means that a lot of people come through, Many enjoy the space, enjoy the view, bring their lunch, explore, and ask questions, but every once in a while I’ll find plants pulled up and produce harvested before they are ripe. This happens infrequently, but it can be disheartening. I should say that wind and storms can do just as much or more damage to the plants, especially this year.
Sonja: What’s your favorite thing someone has made with the produce from the farm?
Rachel: A couple of Veggie Fridays ago the main item was beets. Our sample that day was a cool beet soup that was just beautiful. Usually the soup is a deep dark red like the color of a typical red beet, but I grow three different varieties up here. The combination of the three make a beautiful magenta color that was really shocking. Tasted delicious too.
Sonja: Why is having a farm as part of a hospital important?
Rachel: Having a small farm located on a hospital campus is not common, but now that I work here, I’m not sure why it isn’t common. To make it simple, the food we put in out bodies is a large part of our health. Sharing food and knowledge is a large part of being a part of being a part of a community. That’s what the Sky Farm at Eskenazi Health is here for, health and community.
More from Healthy + Whole Series
- How to Make Exercise Part of Your Lifestyle
- Managing Disease Through Diet
- Cooking as a Couple
- Eat More Plants and Help the Planet
- Real Food Tip: Grow Herbs
- What We Eat
- …And more!
Shattered Blueberry Yogurt Cake
August will always and forever be the month when we wash blue stains off our clothes. It’s still early in the month and we have already spent many days on our knees, picking blueberries in the Swedish forests. At the moment, the forests are literally covered with gorgeous blue gems, so sitting down inevitably means staining your clothes. We add blueberries to every breakfast dish, add them to our lunch salads and in our desserts.
We seem to get hooked on new blueberry recipes every year. Last year this wonderful crumble was going on repeat and a few years earlier, this blueberry smoothie. This year we have been making batch after batch of this Sunken Blueberry & Yogurt Cake. It is similar to some of our other almond flour cakes but we have adjusted the recipe to make it easier to bake without burning. It is light and moist, has a balanced sweetness and a fresh accent from yogurt and lemon zest. The cake is gluten free too (choose certified gluten free oats if intolerant). The beaten egg whites give this cake a very light and airy feeling so I imagine that it’s hard to create a vegan version of it. For vegans, I instead recommend making a cake version of our blueberry turmeric muffins with chia seeds. They are one of our favourite vegan treats and we imagine that they would be excellent as a cake. Just give it a little extra baking time.
The randomly scattered blueberries and the golden crust on this cake makes it beautiful as it is, served straight up, perhaps with just a dollop of yogurt on the side. But after a visit at the amazing rooftop restaurant Stedsans on Østergro in Copenhagen, we got hooked on a new way to serve cake. They made a chocolate cake that they smashed up/shattered into randomly sized pieces that they mixed with dollops of whipped cream, yogurt and berries. It’s a really friendly way to serve a cake as all pieces have different sizes and different amount of topping and it makes picking pieces to a bit of a lottery. Swedes are also very rigid when it comes to fairness and size of cake pieces so this is perfectly provoking. And most importantly, we also think it looks gorgeously decadent and chaotic served like this. Elsa however wants us to add that she think it looks ugly like this and can’t understand why we want to destroy a perfectly pretty cake!
What do you think? Do you feel like shattering your next cake into a decadent dessert chaos or do you prefer it nice, tidy and pretty, like Elsa does?
Shattered Blueberry & Yogurt Cake
Serves 8-10
You can of course replace the blueberries with other berries in season.
1 cup / 250 ml / 90 g rolled oats (choose cert. gluten free if intolerant)
1 cup / 250 ml / 100 g almond flour/meal
½ cup / 125 ml / 80 g rice flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground vanilla
1/2 tsp sea salt
3.5 oz / 100 g butter, room tempered
1/2 cup / 125 ml maple syrup
or honey
1 organic lemon, zest
3 eggs, separated
1 cup / 250 ml full-fat plain yogurt (we use Greek or Turkish yogurt)
2 cups / 1/2 liter / 200 g blueberries
To serve
2 cups whipped cream
1 cup full-fat plain yogurt
2 cups mixed summer berries
Heat the oven to 350°F / 180°C. Place the oats in a food processor and mix them into flour. Pour into a large mixing bowl and mix together with almond flour, rice flour, baking powder, vanilla and sea salt. Place butter, maple syrup and lemon zest in the food processor and mix until creamy. Add egg yolks and yogurt and continue to beat for another minute. Pour the liquid into the mixing bowl with flour and fold everything together.
Beat egg whites in a separate bowl with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Slowly fold the egg whites and half of the blueberries into the cake mixture.
Put a baking sheet inside an 8 inch / 22 cm spring form cake pan and pour the batter into it. Sprinkle the remaining blueberries on top. Bake for about 50-60 minutes, or until dark and golden on the top and baked all way through. Remove from oven and let cool for a while before removing the sides.
To create the shattered look: Wait until the cake cools completely then place the cake on a large serving platter. Carefully break the cake into variously sized pieces. Keep the same round shape, but only bigger. Twist and turn the broken cake pieces a bit and arrange with random dollops of whipped cream, yogurt and mixed berries on top and in between them. Scatter any remaining berries on top and serve immediately.