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Indiana Cookies
I bet that title got you! Much more exciting than Indiana Deodorant. There are so many great cookies in our state. My favorite (so far) come from Cindy Hawkins at Circle City Sweets. Not only does she make great cookies (lemon ginger are my favorite), but so many other great items. My house is full of her stuff: Jam, Granola, fruit bars, and my Saturday morning obsession Kouign-Amann with cream cheese and cherry. The best way I can describe it is to take the best cheese Danish you have ever had, put in 3 sweet cherries, and then replace the typical boring danish dough with a dough more similar to a croissant. This is my one MUST purchase every week at the market on Saturday mornings…I also keep 3 on hand in the freezer in case I can’t make it to the market on a Saturday.
I say so far because I am expected an exciting delivery today. I am getting 2 dozen cookies (6 different types) from Zinszer Bakery. Zinszer is a bakery based in Anderson, IN that was founded by Judy Zinszer and ships cookies around the world. I learned about it in a fascinating interview that Gerry Dick did on Inside Indiana Business. The Inside Indiana Business link will take you directly to the interview. I was fascinated when Judy explained that people around the world will buy their cookies, but Zinszer has trouble selling to people in Indiana. “People just think, well, it’s Indiana, and it couldn’t be as good as someplace else. How good can they be, they are from Indiana,” said Zinszer. I’ll have a post later today with my own opinion on how good they are @feiney.blogspot.com.
In the interview Zinszer calls for people in Indiana to do a better job purchasing products from Indiana. She goes on to say, “I think if we could have a website where the different products were featured, that would interest different businesses… with links to that business’s website would help, because just being able to find what Indiana products are is important.” I can personally attest to the challenges in finding Indiana products. After a lot of research I have found a great many things (e.g. Tell City Pretzels!), but they aren’t as easy to find as going to Google and typing Indiana Pretzels or Indiana Cookies.
I have found some good resources this month like Slow Food Indy and Going local Indy, but I have not found any one comprehensive site that would promote Indiana businesses. I’m looking for a place where I could find Indiana milk, Indiana deodorant, Indiana pork tenderloins, and Indiana laundry detergent. This made me stop and think. Maybe after this month is over I could dedicate time to developing a site that would be a central place Indiana businesses could promote their products to people from Indiana. The site could be set up to search by location (maybe county or region) and by product. It could also have business to business information along with information for consumers. Each business could then have its own page with contact information, a link to its website, and a brief overview. For awhile today I was dreaming really big of holding a summit of groups like Slow Food Indy, Going local Indy, producers like Judy Zinszer and Tracey Clean, along with other interested parties...but I’m getting ahead of myself. This paragraph is really just a stream of consciousness; I would love to hear your ideas on ways we can promote Indiana business.
I had a few other things I wanted to share. On Saturday I went to the Bloomington Farmer’s Market…Wow. You can read about my experience here. The most exciting part of the trip was meeting Paul from Local Folks Food. We had a great conversation about all of Local Folks Food’s plans for growth (both in products and distribution). We will hopefully be talking later this week so I can learn about their plans in detail and feature them in my blog here next week.
I also pulled cucumbers from the garden today for pickling. I am so excited. That is my favorite part of having a garden, making a sour kosher garlic dill pickles…like my grandmother used to make on her farm. The only problem I had was some cucumbers were just too big. One was 1.25 pounds, I saved it for a salad. I am now off to Marsh to pick up Trader’s Point milk to go with my cookies. I don’t think this will be my week to lose any weight.
