Just shy of a soapbox

If you haven't already, stop by The Slow Cook and check out Ed's post on fish sustainabilty. Please don't take this as a preaching of politics, I'm in love with our differences, but I do appreciate being informed. I knew salmon and a few other species were on the "oh shit" list, but damn, there are a bunch more that need to stay off my plate. If you find what Ed has shared helpful, kick ass, if not... well, still kick ass. Cheers.

A Good Shelling

We've had snow and snap peas for a bit. Yesterday we had our first taste of some shelling peas. For some reason we have always had a hard time growing these things. Usually a warm or cold blooded pest was to blame. This year things were a bit slow to mature because our first planting got mucked with by chipmunks and I am also suspicious of a bad batch of seeds. Oh well, that's the gardening experience I suppose. Did I mention that Meg is clutch with the Alfredo sauce? Throw in some of these peas and... Hot Damn!

In about two months,

picture this

but with tomatoes.

Diversity in salads

This year's first pea flower.

Backyard Breakfast

This morning I went out back, gathered some eggs, harvested red oak leaf lettuce, picked some sage, and clipped a few leaves of chard. Fifteen minutes later they became breakfast. Other than the olive oil everything came from our garden/coop and it was delicious. This is one of the major reasons why we shop at home.

Holy Garlic Stink, Batman

Last night, we went through with our plan to turn some of our green garlic into pesto sauce. I cleaned a small handful of garlic—roughly the same amount as bunch of green onions from the grocery store—and chopped off both the roots and the grassy tips. I threw the garlic in our trusty Magic Bullet, along with some olive oil, a little salt and, to thin it out a bit, some water from our cooking pasta.

We put it in a pot to heat up and added some romano cheese. It looked very, very, green and it smelled deeeelicious.

Then we tasted it, and we fell to the ground and started to cry. It was insanely, tongue-burningly strong. It was intense.

Note to anyone making sauce out of green garlic: No need to use a ton of the stuff.

We poured about half of the sauce into a container to use some other time, and added a boatload of cheese and cream to the remainder with hopes of mellowing it out a bit. That did the trick. It tasted way good on pasta, and we'll zap up the rest of our early garlic crop and freeze it (in teeny tiny portions) so we can throw it on food throughout the sumer.

I kept getting whiffs of garlic today because my bookbag, which was in the kitchen while we were cooking, reeked of it.

What's for Dinner?

Kelly bagged us a groundhog on Easter. Ali, who is from a rural area that's appreciative of the self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle that we strive for, suggested a few recipes that we might enjoy.

She posted about them here

Delicious! Plus, these recipes are versatile and you can make substitutions and adjustment to fit your lifestyle. Take the Venison or Moose Casserole, for example. How often are you out of venison and you just don't feel like running out to the store right before dinner? With most cookbooks, you'd need to scrap that whole recipe and make tater tot casserole or something. That's not the case here! This recipe is for Venison or Moose, so just pull that extra moose meat out of the freezer, and voila! Dinner is served! Thanks, Mrs. Clara Miller, Crescent Beach, Maine!

A School Lunch

We are political eaters. Now this doesn't mean we're perfect eaters—I can tear into a cheesesteak like an alligator eating a gazelle—but I don't think either of us has stepped into a a fast food joint (bathroom breaks included) in at least five years. I believe that the processed foods we buy at the market are officially nonexistent and just about every meal we eat requires some sort of preparation that can't be done in a microwave.

We don't eat like this to look kickass to everyone else; we do it because our bodies just respond well to it. There is also great pleasure to be had from food that is allowed the freedom to communicate its flavors in the simplest expressions. I think that everyone would have a healthier relationship with their food if they just gave it time. Unfortunately, time is probably the greatest reason why people feed themselves food not from their own kitchens.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are my "long days." I leave to catch the train at 7:15 in the morning and get back around 4:00 in the afternoon. On Mondays and Wednesdays I'm usually back by 2:00 before I have to teach a 6-9. Yeah I know, my life is rough.

On my long days, I pack a lunch which usually consists of fruit, a PBJ, and some soup. There isn't a microwave for me to use, so if I want something hot I need to bring it in a food jar or start a fire. I figured that I would save the later for after I get tenure.

Before the semester started I bought a Stanley food jar and it has been the talk of the town/faculty lounge. To keep in line with our political appetite, I make my soup from scratch (broth excluded until next year). I chop up a bit of potatoes and veggies the night before and bring them to a boil in broth the following morning. By the time lunch rolls around, the potatoes are cooked through and the rest of the veggies have added a little boost to the broth. It's pretty simple and the fact that I only have to do it twice a week really helps keep it interesting.

There's Hope

We love onions. A gardening book of ours suggests that the number of onions to be planted should be around 40 per person. We're guessing that no less than 100 per person will do.

A total of 200 is being very optimistic. We have yet to have any harvest worth weighing. Past plantings were done with sets. The greens looked promising, but the bulbs at harvest time were either rotten or only slightly larger than the set that was planted. This year we are planting from seed as opposed to sets. I've gotta say that this little onion sprout has me about as excited as the first time one of our tomato seeds sprouted. Our goal this year is to make a few big batches of vegetable stock with every ingredient coming from the garden. We've had every part going except for the damn onions; but this little fella's giving me hope.

What's in your sink?

Kelly has a theory: If your household generates an insane amount of dishes, you're probably eating well. I think that's probably true, and have a few hypotheses to further this theory.

1. If your sink is full of dishes, your trash can is empty, and your compost bucket is full, your food is probably pretty healthy.
2. If your sink is empty and your trash can is full, you're probably eating takeout a lot.
3. If your sink is full and your trash can is full, you either need to get a compost bucket, or you're eating takeout but putting the food on real dishes to appear classy about it.

For the record, those dishes are only from this weekend. And Kelly's washing them now.

What's for Dinner

I recently learned to enjoy eating mushrooms. I've always liked the flavor of them—in soup broth or whatever—but I could never get over how they squish and squeak when you chew them. Recently something clicked, though, and I figured out how to eat them without grossing myself out. I have problems, I know.

So anyway, since this discovery we've been putting mushrooms in everything, including the super tasty pasta we made this evening with our very own pasta sauce.

The sauce was already loaded with onions, garlic, and herbs, and we threw it together with some mushrooms, butter, cheese, and cream. Yum.

We saved enough food that we can eat from-the-garden dinner three or four times a week for the rest of the winter, and eating pasta sauce that is far superior to what we can get at the store is a great motivator for putting away even more food next summer.

Still Growing

While the garden layout is being planned and garlic is still sleeping, believe it or not, we still have some veggies growing in the garden. As last year's garden petered out, we planted some more carrots and parsnips to share a covered bed with the already established chard.

With the worst of our winter over (it barely came at all), we still have a little green going on under the row covers. Granted, the life under the cover is only a small amount of half-assed root veggies, but we should be able to harvest enough to soupify some of our bean crop. We also have some thyme, sage, and chard to throw in the pot, which should make for a hearty bowl of backyard goodness.

Growing Our Own Herbs

As we all know, any part of good cooking is usually accompanied with the use of fresh herbs. I love how a little fresh cilantro can make simple scrambled eggs seem gourmet.

Plans are that this year's harvest will result in a massive canning and freezing frenzy. One of our goals is that very little, if anything, will come from anywhere other than our garden. And with that in mind, I present minor obstacle #1:

I've always been taught that a good bouquet garni for sauces and stocks must have bay leaves as one of the ingredients. Well what do we do if we don't have a sweet bay laurel handy (will they even grow in Pennsylvania?) and we want to stay away from buying any at the market? Is there a substitute, can I omit it, or do I have to suck it up and buy them anyways?

In the Kitchen

"[I]t was evident once again that, as a nation, our amnesia regarding how to cook is wasting food and costing us - and the environment - dear."

This is a line I swiped from a post I read a week ago on Hedgewizard's Diary. The post has to do with free-range chickens (which we obviously support), but I was really intrigued with this statement. Everything that we do in our gardens comes to fruition in the kitchen. I don't think Meg and I have really given the power of cooking enough attention when considering what we plan to harvest from our garden. Maybe because it's something we take for granted. I don't know. Shortly after I read Hedgewizard's post and went to the Pollan reading, we started talking about our cooking interests and habits.

Quite honestly, we don't use cooking books all that much. A lot of what I learned came from hanging out with family while meals were being prepared and working in restaurants while I waited for academia to produce something. We do love food. Food in our house is just as much for the experience as it is for the fuel, but we just have no desire to spend all evening cooking (unless it's slow cooking in the oven). The keys for us are simple recipes with fresh ingredients. Two books that I reference on occasion are The Professional Chef, 7th Ed. and the Food Lover's Companion. I mainly use the FLC when I run across ingredients that I'm not familiar with in TPC. The most helpful attribute of TPC is that the recipes for sauces and stocks are designed to be made in bulk. When we get into livestock and start to prepare our own meat, there are also some great tips for butchering and preparing these meats in large amounts. Putting Food By is a book we picked up last year in anticipation of doing a whole lot of canning and freezing this year.

I'm beginning to have a great deal of interest in food blogs lately and Meg and I plan to start adding them to our blog roll. I received a great recipe for rabbit from Steven at Dirt Sun Rain; I have been blown away with his knowledge in the kitchen, thanks Steven. The more we read, the more we learn about what we can do with food. So often I'm concerned with watching that I'm using less and not being wasteful, and I realize that a good deal can also be done if we pay attention not just to what we eat, but how we eat it. Meg and I are hoping to grow some amazing things this year and I can't wait to see how they turn out in the kitchen.

Michael Pollan: Part Two

On Thursday we hopped a train to Philadelphia to see Michael Pollan speak and give a reading from In Defense of Food at the Free Library of Philadelphia. We got to the library an hour and a half early, but couldn't get inside because the library had closed for the day and was waiting to reopen at seven for the event. We were effectively the third and fourth people in line after two young women who had arrived ahead of us and were hanging out on the steps. By six o'clock there were easily two hundred people waiting. It was interesting to see what an obvious demographic turned out for the reading; at least 75% of the attendees were under 35 years old, and about the same percentage were urban hippies: Keens, Nalgene bottles, and thrift store cardigans were in abundance. We're rural hippies, so we had Keens, Nalgene bottles, and flannel shirts. We were all let in at quarter after six, and by six-thirty all seven hundred available seats were taken and the library staff had to start turning people away. The crowd was pretty amazing.

Before the event started I was a little bit concerned I'd be disappointed, because I thought (and still think) that the catchphrase for the book, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," was a little cute. That line is being repeated ad nauseum on NPR, in reviews, and online, and even though it makes sense and all, it is a little too pat for my liking. His other writing is very much not like that, though. I've read The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, in addition to some of his articles, and his other stuff seems well thought out and researched. My chief complaints with the two books I've read are that Pollan identifies and discusses a lot of problems inherent in the agricultural and food industries, not to mention the government, but he doesn't do very much in the way of offering alternatives. I know that he's technically a journalist, so it's not his obligation to give answers. But he's probably more intimate with the issues he writes about than most people are, so it almost seems like his duty to give us some sort of guidance. What's the best way to fix the farm bill? How do we get the government to subsidize the farmers who are doing good work? How do we get consumers to wrap their minds around the fact that in the end they pay a lot more than a dollar for that fast food value meal?

I don't know. Anyway, from Pollan's talk, it sounds like In Defense of Food will give a bit more direction, at least to individual consumers. Here are a couple highlights from his talk:

• Foods are not "the sum of their nutrients," despite what Multi-Grain Omega-3 Heart-Healthy American Cancer Society Approved Cheerios might have you believe. For reasons we don't understand yet, eating a fish from the ocean (presumably one who was able to avoid the toxic, mercury-filled parts of the ocean) is a much better and more effective way to get omega-3s than by taking a supplement or eating fortified food. The beta carotene in a carrot will do a lot more for you than fortified Wheaties.
  

• When sociologists look at food, they find that the health of a population has nothing to do with individual foods; rather it's contingent on the amount of whole foods that are eaten. Pollan talked about an African tribe that basically eats beef, cow's blood, milk, and a couple grains. They have virtually no chronic diseases, they live a long time, and they can withstand minor illnesses way better than the average Westerner. The same holds true for any group of people who are eating a very culturally based diet, whether it's Inuits eating seal blubber, South Americans eating beans and potatoes, or French people eating brie.
  

• Speaking of Westerners, we have pretty much the crappiest diet in history, and immigrant populations who move to a Westernized area and start eating our junk food develop lots of health problems—high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity–very, very quickly. However, switching someone back to their native diet, or any diet of organic whole foods, completely reverses the problems they developed in, like, six weeks.
  

• Crappy food is cheap food, thanks mainly to the completely disproportionate and nonsensical allocation of government subsidies. Next time you hear someone whine about people who accept welfare and government handouts, tell them to boycott Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, and the like. Processed food is cheap because of government incentives to produce monster quantities of nasty, genetically modified corn, ship it around the country, and cram it into every box of cereal, soda bottle, and frozen dinner. One dollar can buy you about 1500 calories of processed food; the same dollar can buy about 250 calories of fresh produce. It is not really more expensive to grow a carrot than to make a box of Hamburger Helper; the problem is that the carrot farmer doesn't get any help from the government. In fact he's got to pay the government if he wants to call his carrot organic.
  

• I'm getting worked up.

• A big factor in the rise of health problems in Westernized nations, especially the US, is that we don't cook anymore. If you go to the grocery store and buy bread, milk, vegetables, and meat, you're going to be a whole lot better off than if you go for a box or a bag in the freezer section. Sure, you can add too much salt or too much butter, but most people don't keep corn syrup and hydrogenated soybean oil and monosodium glutamate in their spice rack. On the whole, you'll fare much better if you cook your own food, especially if you buy organic ingredients.
  

• And finally, a positive thought: the food industry is extremely sensitive to health scares and contamination, because of the awful publicity that such things bring. Basically, they're terrified of consumers. As an example, Pollan cited McDonalds' unadvertised use of genetically modified potatoes in the late 1990s. A few people learned about this and were rightly concerned, and they called and sent letters to the company. Less than 100 complaints was enough for McDonalds to reconsider, and lead to the eventual reverse of their use of GMO potatoes.
  

On the whole, Pollan was a very good speaker. He was engaging and funny, and he gave a lot of information. It made me eager to dig into the new book this weekend. It seems like it might serve as the missing last chapter of The Omnivore's Dilemma and take those ideas a little deeper, and I'm hoping to get a more complete picture of the whole food issue after reading it. After the talk, we ran upstairs to the book signing line with the three books we'd brought along. He happily signed them all and put a nice little book-specific note on each one: "To Meg and Kelly, fellow bumblebees," in Botany of Desire, "Vote with your fork!" in The Omnivore's Dilemma, and "Eat food," in In Defense of Food.


A podcast of the event is here. It is about an hour long, and I highly recommend listening to it whether you're familiar with Pollan's message or not.

Edited to add: Kickass Philly Blogger Albert "Dragonball" Yee has a very thorough write up of the reading here.

Bad Photo of Great Soup

Sorry about the photo; the light in our kitchen is something awful.

So far this soup is my favorite that Meg and I made. It's nothing fancy, it's just squash soup. I have found that some of the best soup recipes are the ones that can be passed verbally (very few ingredients with basic cooking instructions).

Ingredients: (I wasn't given any amounts, so you won't be either)

Olive oil
Garlic (none of that store bought garbage in a jar)
Onions
Squash (preferably zucchini and yellow summer squash)
Parsley
Thyme
Vegetable broth
Salt and Pepper (optional)
Heavy cream (not heavy "whipping" cream)

Cooking instructions:

In a pot bring your olive oil up to a good non-smoking temp and toss in your chopped garlic. Cook the garlic just long enough for you to grab your already chopped onions, and then add the onions. Sweat the onions and garlic until the onions begin to clarify. Then add your chopped squash, parsley, and thyme and sweat the hell out of it. (Now some folks will remove the seeds and what not from the squash before they cook it to reduce the amount of water they give out. Meg and I like the squash juices, so we leave them in.) When the squash looks like it has had about enough, start warming up some vegetable broth in a separate pot. You won't need much, it is mainly going to be used as a thinning agent. With a hand blender, puree the squash. While the blender is on and in the pot, add vegetable broth until the mixture is the consistency of runny cream of wheat, grits, porridge, or what ever other visual reference you're savvy with. This is your base. Freeze what you don't plan on using in serving size portions. With the base you do plan on consuming still on the heat, add salt and pepper to taste, and stir in heavy cream until the soup is the color of your liking. Serve and enjoy.

It snowed; now we can eat.

Last year we made a big batch of squash soup and froze some for the winter. It was our first foray into saving food. We were excited about it, and in order to keep ourselves from eating all of the soup in September we made a rule that we couldn't eat any of it until we got snow. However, we forgot to take into consideration the fact that southeastern Pennsylvania winters are crap in terms of snow and didn't get to eat any soup until sometime in February. And even that was kind of a stretch, since I was the only one who saw the snow: four individual flakes that fell as I was waiting at a traffic light on my way home from work. In retrospect, it could have been ashes from someone a few cars up holding their cigarette out the window. Either way, we ate the soup and it was totally worth the wait.

We instituted the snow rule again this year, but lucky for us we didn't have to wait as long or fabricate reports of snowfall. Earlier this week we got a respectable (for early December) inch and a half, which was topped off yesterday by a couple snow showers. So this evening we made the inaugural trip to the freezer and came up with some beautiful, delicious, 100% homemade pasta sauce.


We cooked it with frozen seafood and some cream, and it smelled so stinking good–tasted that way, too.


Pasta, bread, wine, and a seed catalogue. Yum.

Gobble, Gobble

Earlier today we chopped up our carrots

cooked 'em up with some garlic and sage (both from our garden!) and olive oil

and ate 'em.

Along with lots of other stuff, of course.

We hope all you bloggers had a happy Turkey Day.

Love It Spicy

Mmm, Hot Sauce! This was my first go at hot sauce and I must say that it turned out pretty good. I’ve been glopping it on everything.

Ingredients: Red Ripened Hot Peppers, White Vinegar, and Salt.
Cook the hot peppers in white vinegar. Remove the peppers, save the vinegar, and let the peppers cool. When the peppers are cool enough to handle, remove as much of the skin as you can without becoming irritated. Put the peppers in a blender or processor and zap it until it is chunkless. Use the vinegar as a thinning agent. Add salt to taste (vinegar is an acid and salt is a base; you need the two to even each other out).

mmm, pesto

As I mentioned yesterday, our tomato sauce looked a little lonely in our big, new freezer. Last night I whipped up some basil pesto to keep it company. Also, our basil patch was growing out of control and we needed to use it up before the cold got it. But mostly I wanted a friend for the tomato sauce.

This year, we planted basil around the bell peppers. They're reportedly good companions for each other and though I don't know the reason for that, I do know that we got awesome peppers and basil.


I pulled basil until I'd filled an empty case of beer...


...and dragged it all up to the kitchen. I pulled off all the good, relatively bug-free basil leaves and put them in this gigantic bowl so I could wash them:


I ended up with two bowls full of basil–and there's about twice as much still out in the garden. Looks like we'll be pesto-ing again before the season is out. And yes, in case you're wondering, we do all our food prep on the kitchen floor.

When all the basil leaves were cleaned and dried and scrunched up, we probably had about four cups. To that, I added maybe a cup and a half or two cups of olive oil, a handful of pine nuts, a small head of garlic, about a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar, a tiny bit of salt, and a deliciously obscene amount of grated up Romano and Parmesan cheese. I threw everything into the trusty Magic Bullet (of infomercial fame–thanks, Yolie) and zapped it up.

Pesto in progress:


It's pretty thick, because when we cook with it we'll add a little starchy pasta water to thin it out. I ended up with six cups, which I split into six freezer bags. Yum.