Jujube Butter Oatmeal Bars

Jujube fruit simmered with apple cider to make a fruit butter, sandwiched between layers of pecan oatmeal bar cookie in a fruit dessert from the farmer to you via Barn2Door.

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Have you ever eaten a jujube fruit? There are more than a dozen people in SW Ohio who can now say 'yes, I have, they're yummy' because of these bars. Jujubes taste like a crunchy apple-pear, and they have a pit similar to a date. Disclosure: this recipe and my previous one used jujube fruits grown by Fairview Orchards that I received from Barn2Door in exchange for a post. Because I believe in buying directly from farmers who choose to grow food in sustainable ways, I am glad to spread the word about this platform, and I was delighted to share the last of the fruits and these bars with our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers to close the circle.

In my last post I marveled over the ability for me, in an area not known for local foodies, to source exotic produce direct from the farmer to concoct my Jujube Fruit and King Oyster Mushroom Sauté.
Today I'm going to tell you a bit more about Barn2Door's mission, and share another recipe I made--Jujube Butter Oatmeal Bars. [Of course you can just eat the fruit out of hand, like we did when I opened the box, but one of the purposes of my blog is to provide recipe inspiration for farm share ingredients, so I wanted to play some more.] Check out Barn2Door and subscribe to the newsletter. You can find them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest. While it would simplify things to say Barn2Door is an online farmer's market, it's a bit more than that.

Barn2Door is a marketplace where you can buy sustainably grown meat, fish, fruits, vegetables & items like raw honey and real maple syrup right from producers and growers. Farmers, fishers, ranchers and gardeners have their own store - like Etsy for farms - where they showcase the food they have for sale, and manage direct communications, sales and fulfillment (local delivery, national shipping or both!).

I like the idea of giving producers a platform to sell their products to a wider audience than the folks who make it out to the local farmer's market each week. I am a fan of supporting folks who choose to grow food in sustainable ways, so a platform that takes much of the effort out of creating an online presence--enabling the farmers to continue doing what they do best (grow my food) gets my tail wagging like Robert Barker's. [If I had the skillz to make a gif of his tail zooming side to side and then circling to the left and then back to side to side, I would. Dog has talent.] I typed in my zip code and was impressed with the variety of products I could have delivered to me from Fairview Orchards and other producers. While I will continue to source my local Ohio maple syrup and local Ohio honey from my farmer's market, if you don't have access to your local producers you can get Vermont maple syrup delivered to your door. How cool is that?

I thought it was pretty neat to get jujube fruits from Fairview Orchards. The package was on our doorstep, watched over by Robert Barker and Simon, when we arrived from a bike ride. A note telling me the fruit was picked 2 days before I received it gave me a little thrill. Just like when I pick up my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, the folks who grew the produce put it into the box and I take it out of the box. That's awesome, and 100% why I agreed to do this post. Fairview Orchards is diversified (got to be, with short growing seasons and uncertain water supplies). You can find them on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, and learn a bit about the Sean on the blog. Their storefront says it best:

"Fairview Orchards is a family owned & operated farm that cultivates a diverse variety of certified organic fruit such as Hass Avocados, Meyer Lemons, Blood Oranges, Figs, Specialty Tangerines, Jujubes & Pomegranates. Hand-picked and delivered or shipped fresh, we practice both traditional and sustainable farming methods while utilizing the latest technologies. Our farm is 100% powered by solar energy and is nestled in Ojai, California surrounded by rolling hills and the Topa Topa mountains. We are fortunate to have naturally rich soil and a great micro-climate that our trees and plants love."

One more thing I want to share before I get to the recipe--Barn2Door has a newsletter where you can sign up to stay in touch. Click here to sign up. You won't miss out on the latest news, promotions(!), new farmers, and of course seasonal food. 

For more recipes using Jujube fruits, I'll have to add a category to my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating direct from the farmer. Check out more on Pinterest and Facebook. Want to know how to use this blog? Click here.

Jujube Fruit and King Oyster Mushroom Sauté (Eating Direct from Farmers with Barn2Door)

Subtitle: Get Your Produce Direct From The Farmer

Jujube fruit and King Oyster mushrooms sautéed with a bit of farm share onion in roasted garlic-flavored olive oil and butter. An elegant appetizer made from produce direct from the farmer.

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Today's recipe uses rare-to-me ingredients that I got directly from the folks that grew them but in different ways. Disclosure: I received the jujube fruit from Barn2Door in exchange for writing about this new way to buy directly from the farmer. As a dorkily passionate supporter of keeping sustainable farmers in business, I am delighted to help spread the Good Word.

Last weekend was the last local farmer's market of the season. We walked down with a big bag to stock up on long-storing local apples and also picked up some candy onions to caramelize and freeze for Fall and winter stews. The mushroom folks had a nice array of King Oyster/Trumpet Royale mushrooms, so with my remaining small bills [pay cash for local businesses whenever possible, please] I picked up a container. The lovely lady manning the booth offered me recipe tips and I headed home thinking I'd make some kind of mushroom appetizer for my spouse.

We returned from a Saturday afternoon bike ride to this sight--boxes on the front stoop, watched over by ⅔ of the canine population [Vincent is too little to look out]. I'm not usually one to get excited about printer ink, but the other box, from Fairview Orchards, did give me a little thrill. The folks at Fairview Orchards picked these organic jujube fruits and I got them from California 2 days later.

If you think, when you visit the farmer's market at 10 am on a Saturday, that all of the product on display was freshly picked that morning by an army of minions in fields with football stadium lighting--well, you've got another think coming. Farmers like to sleep just like the rest of us, and plenty of weekly offerings are picked in the days before and stored until market day. Heck, the garlic and onions were harvested and cured before being offered at market. A mere 2 days for jujube fruits all the way from California? Amazingly fresh in my book!

With two exotic items staring me in the face, I knew I wanted to combine them. After biting into a jujube fruit (we all tried them fresh out of the box, a crunchy light apple-pear kind of flavor with a date-like pit in the middle), I thought of the Trumpet Royale Mushroom, Apple, and Walnut Sauté I'd seen on the recipe sheet from the mushroom folks. I adapted that recipe to use the jujube fruits, and my spouse and I enjoyed this gourmet date night appetizer at home.

This got me thinking about the power of the internet and how Janelle and her folks at Barn2Door are harnessing that power to enable farmers to sell directly to a wider audience than just the local folks who choose to visit their market stall. There are small pockets of local supporters all over, but their reach is limited to their local areas. I mean, the grocery store down the street also supports local farmers--they spotlight the family who supplies their sweet corn in summer and the folks who grow their turkeys for Thanksgiving. To give their customers greater access to seasonal items, Hatch chiles are trucked up from New Mexico and wild caught salmon is flown in from Alaska. Yeah, and I can walk to all of this seasonal abundance. But what if you don't live near my fabulous grocery store? You've got an online resource in Barn2Door.

My town is known for the electric car starter and the pull tab for beer cans. We are not at the cutting edge of the local food movement. However, between in person and online interactions, I was able to sit down to a savory appetizer of exotic produce direct from the farmers who grew it.