I am trying to make Treetown Vittles the kind of business that you can feel good about patronizing and a business that I will be proud to own. As I build my business, it is important to me to establish relationships with local folks that produce high quality products. By using local vendors and producers, especially those attentive to sustainable practices, we reduce our environmental footprint, support the local economy and offer the highest quality products to our customers.

I am so pleased to welcome Silvio’s Organic Pizza to our group of fine Ann Arbor vendors. I think Silvio’s has the best pizza in Ann Arbor and I am very fortunate to be able to offer you Silvio’s fresh pizza dough in our meal kits each month. Silvio Medoro, chef and owner of Silvio’s Organic Pizza, is well-known and respected in the local slow food community. He is a delight to chat with and I have much to learn from Silvio.

According to their website “Silvio was lovingly taught to produce the highest quality breads and pizza dough…The flavorful crust incorporates fine olive oil and is made with organic flour exactly the way Silvio’s father made it.” Please take advantage of our monthly ‘Make your own pizza nights’ to use this uniquely high quality pizza dough in your own kitchen.

I’d also like to introduce you to our newest vendor, Nancy Tatara, owner of Neverdone Farm in Dexter, MI. Nancy is supplying us with wonderful eggs from free range hens. Look for them soon in another frittata offering in March. This spring I will begin purchasing all of our garlic from Nancy as well. We can’t wait to visit the farm this spring to see what other goodies we can include in our meal kits (and I want to play with those cute goats!). Here’s a note from Nan:

“Neverdone Farm has some very fancy hens a laying, Speckled Sussex, Polish Goldens with Top Hats, Araucanas that lay blue-green eggs and the usual reliable Barred Rocks. We also have Boer goats that are only contributing wonderful fertilizer and hours of entertainment for our grandchildren. They are meat goats and we initially thought we’d breed them. However we became rather fond of the girls and we haven’t found anyone interested in goat meat. Worldwide, goat meat production is higher than cattle or hogs. We might still consider this a possibility. This year, having read that 80% of America’s garlic comes from China, I planted many beds of various types of garlic. We’ve a large vegetable garden, herb garden and many perennials. We have raised turkeys, ducks, geese and Guinea Hens in the past and have found them all interesting. I plan to have chicken eggs, herbs, garlic, flowers and fall decorative plants such as broom corn, gourds and Japanese Lanterns available.

Caring for God’s green earth takes time, patience, knowledge and way too much energy. I feel that caring for our lives and the life all about us matters. It is never done, it touches on the eternal and there is time enough.”

Nancy Tatara

Neverdone Farm

Ntatara@aol.com

Hi all,

Our shopping cart and checkout are now working flawlessly again.  As some of you noted, it was not possible to use PayPal to checkout with our shopping cart for the last couple days.  Thank you to our web designer/developer, Dan Shields.  Dan tracked the problem down to a change made recently by PayPal.  Dan quickly made the adjustments needed on our site to accommodate the change and we are now back in business and happy to take your orders!  Thanks so much for your patience.  -ellen

I hope that you had a wonderful holiday. As you are aware, I took quite a bit of time off at the end of last year. During the last few weeks Treetown Vittles moved to a new kitchen and we successfully secured our retail food license. I am so excited to begin the new year with exciting plans for expansion and wonderful new menus that I’m sure you will enjoy. Please check out our new menus for January and February.

One of my resolutions for 2008 (there are many, but you know how that is . . . .) is to communicate more frequently with you via this blog and to offer more recipes and practical food tips that you might find useful.

To start off the year on the right foot, I’d like to call your attention to a terrific local food blog by Kim Bayer, thefarmersmarketer.com.

It is a very thoughtful site that is filled with useful information and discussion that will prompt you to more carefully consider your eating habits as well as your food purchasing choices. The more that I give consideration to the complex food issues that confront us, the more convinced I am that businesses like Treetown Vittles could provide busy people with the extra help that they need to eat healthy foods and to take a small step toward repairing our world. We aren’t there yet, but I believe it is a worthy goal, even for a small business like ours . . . and it’s so exciting to be a part of this change. I look forward to working together with you, our customers, to enliven our effort. As always, I welcome your suggestions and comments.

I wish you a peaceful, happy, healthy new year.

Ellen

Hi all,

Since so many of our customers are planning to vacation during the last few ‘official’ weeks of summer, we have decided to take some time off out of the kitchen. Therefore, there will be no meal deliveries until after Labor Day. During the next couple weeks we will be planning new fall menus and testing new recipes (OK, I guess we will be in the kitchen!).

If you find yourself at home, too, and in need of some simple meals, you’ll want to include the Eggplant Salad recently published in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/dining/151arex.html?ref=dining

It’s easy to prepare and surprisingly very flavorful. It’s a very simple recipe, so the key is to use the freshest produce you can find. If you use those bland ‘pink’ tomatoes from the supermarket, you won’t find the salad very satisfying. I used heirloom tomatoes and the tiniest baby eggplant I could find at the farmer’s market–they were very sweet and thin-skinned. I’m not a big fan of mint, so I substituted basil. Although I had hoped to have left overs, my family polished this salad off at one meal, so you might want to make a double batch!

Enjoy the rest of August, and we’ll see you in September!

Ellen

We are excited to announce that beginning on July 18 Ann Arbor’s premier wine merchant, Morgan & York (1928 Packard Road), will be receiving Treetown Vittles meal kits after 5:00 PM each Wednesday.  The friendly folks at Morgan & York will be happy to recommend wine pairings to complement our weekly menu offerings.  Whether you wish to enjoy wine or beer with your meal or not, you may now designate ‘Morgan & York’ as your delivery address when placing your order for a Treetown Vittles meal kit.  When you pick up your order, don’t forget that Morgan & York carries a fine selection of cheeses and specialty foods to complement any meal.

I hope you enjoy a lovely weekend!

We’re finally online and open for business. After planning and experimenting, Treetown Vittles LLC is making it’s debut. A special thank you goes to our web designer extraordinaire, Dan Shields. Dan labored many evenings and weekends to bring this website to fruition. I am so grateful for his creativity, professionalism and enthusiasm. Check out his website at: http://theshieldsdesign.com

With this first posting, I’ll share how Treetown Vittles started and encourage you to explore our new website. One of our goals is to become a business that you will be proud to patronize not only because we provide a high quality product, but also because we will be a good citizen in our local community. More on this another time. In the future, I plan to use the blog to share recipes, discoveries, favorite cookbooks, cool foodie websites, cooking tips, etc. Your comments and constructive criticism are welcome.

It has been said that the best businesses to start are those that you yourself would find valuable. I started Treetown Vittles because I dreaded coming home after work to the inevitable question: ‘What’s for dinner?’ Even if you love to cook, the weekday haste of getting dinner on the table after work can take all the fun out of cooking even for a foodie. Even if I had an idea what to make, I never had all the ingredients. By the time I threw together something, we had already eaten our weight in junk food.

I’m a chemist by training (yes, I am one of the Pfizer lay-off alumni) and most chemists like to cook. I have always enjoyed food, cooking and learning about food cultures around the world. I find cooking a very nurturing hobby and an expression of caring for those with whom you share a meal. I’m not into presentation and fancy plating. I just enjoy preparing simple, beautiful, fresh, healthy food to share.

I started Treetown Vittles to offer those of you who also love to cook (and those who don’t!) a new option to prepare a real dinner at home using fresh, healthy ingredients. I always thought that if I had just a little head start, I could put a great dinner on the table pretty quickly. I just needed someone to plan a menu, shop for me and prep all the ingredients!

That’s what we do at Treetown Vittles. Each Treetown Vittles meal kit has ALL the fresh ingredients that you need to make a dinner to enjoy with family and friends in about 20 minutes. You can make a meal quickly because we did all the shopping, washing, chopping and measuring. We create interesting, contemporary menus. We give you all the ingredients and simple instructions. We package it all up in convenient sized containers (reusable or compostable, of course). We deliver it to your office in a personalized, insulated tote with a cold pack. You just put it all together at home and cook it up fresh.

Everything in the kit is fresh and there is never anything to thaw out. We use the highest quality ingredients, fresh herbs and spices and only extra virgin olive oils or canola oil for cooking. If a recipe calls for butter (sometime a little doesn’t hurt), we package it separately so you can decide if you want to use it or not. Most of our foods are low in fat and all are vegetarian or fish. All of our menus emphasize fresh vegetables and fruit. We never add preservatives or corn syrup to our foods. We feature local produce and the finest quality local artisan products whenever we can. Sounds good doesn’t it?

Please check out our website and let me know what you think. I’m very proud of the product we offer and I encourage you to give it a try. This is a new venture, so we welcome all of your comments and suggestions. We want to be the BEST at what we do, so we are all ears!

Ellen