This Week's Food

Dinner, as we all likely are aware, comes at the end of the day. Sometimes it comes at the very end of very long days, where we have been stretched and pulled in a thousand directions, seemingly simultaneously. We get home and the prospect of dinner looms large, imposing another demand on your tired brain that feels like it clocked out hours ago.

We are always trying to tell more and more folks about the mission of Family Dinner.  That we want to bring you the highest quality, best tasting local food around and use data and predictive analytics to eliminate waste in the system and give small family farms the chance to compete at a larger scale. (Insert Family Dinner cheerleading emoji here.)

Since the dawn of Family Dinner (which feels like it was in the Mesozoic Era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but in fact was only in 2017), we have been sourcing seafood from our friends at Red's Best and at Ipswich Shellfish Company.  

We will certainly continue to do so but this week we wanted to introduce a new face to the line up: True Fin seafood which hails out of Portland, ME and is our main seafood purveyor there.

For many of us (all? Yeah. Let's go with all of us), 2021 has been a year of fatigue and malaise draped in a cloud of general blah that rarely lifted. People are just so darn tired, feeling worn down to the nub with a tank that's teetering on "E". It's hard to pick up your head and peek around for bright spots.

We hope you have a wonderful Holiday and get to enjoy some delicious food and time with friends, family, and dogs. :)

A little, organic bird may have told you that we have expanded Family Dinner into Portland, Maine. (And if you didn't know, now you know.) One of the very best parts of working in a new community is meeting the folks who make up its fabric. We met Lee and Bryna from LB Kitchen early in our Portland wanderings and fell in love immediately.

I'm willing to admit to having a cookbook problem. Well, technically two problems. First, I can't seem to stop buying them and second, I can't seem to use them for their intended purpose. So many of them are like museum pieces, oohed- and aahed over at first review and then rarely referred to again.  A great example the gastronomic magnum opus "Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes"; the exhaustive collection of the French Masterchef. It includes such works as Le Lievre a la Royale;  a wild rabbit with foie gras and truffles cooked in a sauce of its own blood. Doesn't exactly scream Approachable Weeknight Meal.

Working to fight food insecurity in our neighborhoods has always been at the core of Family Dinner. In the past year we have donated over $31,894.90 worth of local food to our friends at the Greater Boston Food Bank, La Colaborativa in Chelsea, My Brother's Table in Lynn, the Woburn Food Pantry, Elevate Youth, Lifebridge in Gloucester and many more.

Right after the delights of Thanksgiving--the carb loading, the football, the snoring dads, and the naps--comes Black Friday. The "Only in America" Hellscape that turns normal people into mouth-breathing zombies fueled by capitalist mind games who are drunk on coupons. 

One of our favorite fall veggies is the Brussels Sprout. Named after the city in Belgium, these little wannabe cabbages were brought to the US in the 18th century to delight our autumnal palates. They look like JV cabbages because they come from the same family (genus Brassica) and first cousins in this this family are called cruciferous vegetables.  They got that odd little name because their four-petaled flowers look like a crucifer, or cross. 

The time has come! Tomorrow we will be doing our first deliveries in Maine. We are pleased as punch to be working with so many local growers and producers to put this first share together. Some of their delicious products will also make their way into our Massachusetts shares, so we are spreading the deliciousness.

My father, the inimitable Andy Baumgartner, loved free stuff.  The man was an aficionado for all the little tchotchkes that come with a trip to the bank, a conference or even the dentist.  When you would chide him for picking up yet another TD Bank branded chapstick he would say "what do you want from me? They were giving them away!"

This year's turkeys will be from Tide Mill Organic Farm in Edmunds, Maine, a 200-year/ninth generation family operation!  The birds grow up eating fresh green grass and organic grains, and enjoying fresh air and Edmunds' notoriously varied coastal weather.  Processing occurs on the farm, which means the turkeys do not have to endure the stress of transport.  Tide Mill Organic Farm turkey is always tender and delicious because of the respect and care with which they were raised.  Turkeys will be delivered fresh or previously frozen.