Perennial Foods Basket

Are you curious about cooking with perennial foods? Wonder no more! FMR's Agricultural Policy Manager Peter LaFontaine has curated a basket of essential perennial foods and ingredients for your home. This is a perfect opportunity to help the river by helping yourself to a basket brimming with sustainable and ecosystem-friendly agricultural products.

Friends of the Mississippi River is leading a diverse coalition of partners who are working together to make clean water, perennial crops - like the items in this basket - economically viable for famers.

Perennial agriculture is the solution to many challenges we face from grain production today. Perennials are plants that can be left in the field to return for several years without the annual tilling that damages topsoil and leads to erosion and nutrient losses.

This basket includes:

• 14 oz bag of Kernza grain and 14 oz bag of Kernza flour: Kernza is a perennial wheatgrass with a delicious, sweet, nutty flavor, and can be used in baking, cooking, and brewing.

• 3 oz bag of roasted and glazed rosemary hazelnuts: Savory goodness. Gluten free. ? 3 oz bag of spicy maple roasted and glazed hazelnuts: Gluten free. Great as a snack or a salad sprinkle.

• 1 lb of hazelnut kernels: Grown by farmers in the Midwest. Great for baking, fresh-eating, confections, and anything else you can imagine. Roasting for 15 minutes at 275 brings out the full taste and aroma.

• 8 oz bottle of hazelnut oil: From American Hazelnut Company out of Gays Mills, WI.

• 500 mL of camelina oil: Three Farmers Camelina Oil is your salad oil, your cooking oil and your healthy Omega 3 supplement wrapped into one great tasting product.

• 5 oz jar of elderberry creamed honey: Missouri honey and River Hills Harvest Freeze Dried Elderberries spun together on the Giofre Apiaries farm where the honey was collected.

• 10 oz jar of elderberry jelly: made with River Hills Harvest pure premium ElderBerry Juice, lightly sweetened using pure cane sugar with just a hint of lemon. Jars are recyclable.

• The Perennial Kitchen cookbook by Beth Dooley: James Beard Award-winning author Beth Dooley provides the context of food's origins, along with delicious recipes, nutrition information, and tips for smart sourcing. More than a farm-to-table cookbook, this book expands the definition of "local food" to embrace regenerative agriculture, the method of growing small and large crops with ecological services.