Chicken Pot Pie (revision)

My favorite food is my girlfriend’s chicken pot pie. The vegetables we get from the farm are so good. The pie comes from the oven steaming out of its golden brown crust and when we break through it with the knife chunks of carrot and potato mix with the broken crust and condensed soup and peas, celery and chicken. I always burn my mouth because it's too good to wait.
I like digging in the dirt. At farm volunteer days we plant or weed, sitting or kneeling on the ground and moving slowly up the row, careful not to disturb the plants behind us as we move. It’s the kind of Saturday that feels worthy for a long time. There's a summer solstice celebration too.

These pictures are from the Cresset Community farm website. After working on planting in the field all day we come together for a pot luck lunch. It’s really a great social occasion, with everyone having worked together and then contributing to a communal meal. I think that the appreciation of and understanding that this work is one of the finer things in life is a shared value. On page 259 of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” Pollan discusses the slow foods movement in which “eating contributes to the landscapes and species and traditional foods that would otherwise succumb to the fast-food ideal of one world, one taste.” This type of relationship between eater and farmer is the first step in a truly great chicken pot pie.

The site distribution process is another social aspect of the community supported agriculture farm. These are not mere commodities, manufactured with economies of scale and distributed worldwide from the cheapest producer. Rather, a group has formed and agreed to rotate responsibility amongst each other to travel to the farm on Saturday morning, collect the shares of food and divide them accordingly at the pick up site, which is our patio in Golden. Everyone takes this seriously, as we depend on each other in a small group. In this way each share member gets to communicate with the farmers and visit the farm a few times a season. While visiting, the basics of ethical agriculture can be witnessed in practice. There is no pesticide application machinery. The chickens roam freely, as do the cows in the pasture. This farm produce is totally free of preservatives, other than the non-chemical based pickling in jars. The picture is of our distribution site where the shares are divided among the 16 share members in the Golden area.
The produce varies with the season and goes 36 weeks total, every weekend during the summer distribution and every other during winter. There are all kinds of fruits from the Western Slope in the fall. Hotchkiss, Colorado is where the apples and peaches come from. Apple cider, pumpkins, bread baked on the farm and unpasteurized milk are all available in season. There’s a barter share too. If you work three hours a week you get a share in trade, enough to feed two people through the harvest season.

This website called Local Harvest lists farms that direct market to customers in the Denver area.