Pantry Shelves: Food Security and the Simple Life

Glysophate in Flour

2014-06-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

Amber waves of grain. Photo by Cindy Hill

It Could Be Glysophate, not Gluten, Bugging Your Tummy

Since the 1980s, glysophate -- aka Roundup -- has been used off-label by non-organic-certified grain growers to dessicate (dry) the grain before harvest and grinding. Glysophate is at heart a salt, which is why it kills leafy weeds, and why it can be used to drive the moisture out of grains.

The University of Minnesota Cooperative Extension describes this process and use in a 2002 edition of its Prairie Grains newsletter. The FAO's 2005 survey of pesticide residues in food found that glysophate residues remained in flour and were not removed by milling.

Having baked all my own bread (and pizza crust and everything else) for decades, I was baffled to find the unbleached commercially popular brand of flour that I've always used getting drier, chalkier, and harder to work with over the last five years or so. I was nearly doubling the water in my usual bread recipe, and there was still something 'off' with the texture. I've deduced that the use of glysophate to dry the grain is the most likely answer, though higher-speed, hotter milling processes might also be a factor.

Mother Earth News did a fabulous job this past spring of presenting the latest scientific information on this subject, a technical article from the Journal of Interdisciplinary Toxicology on the question of whether glysophate, rather than gluten, could be the cause of the American epidemic of a wide array of ailments running from the merely embarassing digestive distress to the fatal, and including mental and emotional health ramifications like depression.

I've had numerous friends making the anecdotal link in their own lives between eating white flour and having episodes of negative, sometimes extremely dark, mood changes. I had started noticing problems of my own associated with eating flour. I was wary, however -- was I merely influenced by my friends, or by the trendiness of gluten intolerance? Was I misattributing symptoms of menopause to eating toast? Trying my objective best, I found that I really did feel better on days I didn't eat flour. I cut my flour consumption way back, and tried to balance any bread with a hefty dose of fruits and vegetables, which I found minimized digestive reactions. My hand-crank pasta machine sat unused on the shelf, which was very sad. My husband -- our household bread baker -- kept cranking out loaves, complaining ever more about the chalkiness of the flour.

Then, my food co-op started getting in an array of local organic flours. I started buying a cup or two of one or another and baking a loaf of bread with it. Champlain Valley Milling Corporation and Gleason Grains are just two of the growing list of locally grown and/or locally milled organic -- no glysophate -- flours in my neck of the woods. I started returning to my usual bread consumption habits -- with no ill effects. In fact, quite the opposite.

Last night I used Nitty Gritty Grain Company's high-protein extra fine organic whole wheat flour to make pasta for the summer's first batch of pesto -- and I was blown away by how alive it felt. The pasta is springy and flavorful and went through the hand-cranked Imperia pasta machine in silky, beautiful sheets.

Obviously anyone experiencing gastric and digestive distress or more serious medical symptoms like depression and exhaustion should seek medical attention and follow the advice of your doctor. But if your health permits it, or if you are just trying to find better, healthier, pesticide-residue-free flour that doesn't behave like chalk dust, hunt down locally-milled organic alternatives (or mail order from any of the above suppliers) and give it a try.

Back to School: Joybilee Farm and Vermont Outdoors Women Doe Camp

2013-08-23T05:12:00.000-07:00

Schools and magazines trying to sell you things are a dime a dozen, but few of them are marketing Joy. Joybilee Farm in British Columbia does just that, with a school for self-reliant skills that pledges to help you "laugh at time to come." Chris Dalziel homesteads, homeschools, writes, raises fiber animals and linen, and lives to share her passion for the independent, authentic life through her blog and facebook page that facilitate the growth of a homesteading community. Sign up for her free newsletter, and get her free booklet "4 Keys to Security and Homestead Abundance" which should be required reading in every Home Economics 101 course ever taught. Chris offers online tutorials, a subscription service to homesteading kindle books, and an annual linen festival camp-out at the farm amongst other learning opportunities.

Women can find a warm, supporting, fun environment amidst the beautiful Green Mountains of Vermont at the Vermont Outdoors Women Fall Doe Camp. VOW's mission is "to encourage and enhance the participation of women of all ages and abilities in outdoor activities through hands-on education." At Doe Camp, you can opt learn to canoe, navigate by the stars, cook fresh-caught trout, shoot archery or firearms, fish, kayak, start a fire with flint and steel, hunt turkeys or pan for gold.

Your self-confidence grows with your self-sufficiency, and your food security, health and economic well being are all improved as your relationship to the land becomes richer and deeper, be it through learning new wild foods to forage, new fly fishing skills, or how to sheer a sheep and spin and knit your own sweater. Going back to school with resources like Joybilee Farm and Vermont Outdoors Women are great places to start taking steps towards your own independence and food security.

Bees

2013-07-29T06:29:00.000-07:00


Bees love aromatic herbs like anise hyssop.

Bees are the whirling spirit of the garden, moving in mysterious circles, lifting away the scent and essence of each flower drop by drop and transporting it to be transformed into clear amber bliss.

Bees have been in big trouble lately, plagued with mites, colony collapse disorder and pesticide poisoning. Though it's not politically correct to say so, I also have to question whether some of the large-scale commercial beekeeping operations don't also contribute to a weakening of their bee populations. Keeping millions of bees in warehouses and tractor trailers, feeding the, (gmo?) sugar water, and traveling with them over huge areas must be disorienting to a species which has a highly-honed sense of direction and communication, I would think.

I opt for honey from local, smaller beekeeping operations, and plant many things to help attract the bees to my garden. It's delightful and meditative to sit and spend a summer afternoon watching them buzz contentedly around sunflowers, anise hyssop, oregano blooms, borage, echinacea, and the drifts of white clover that I seed through my (what passes for) little patch of lawn. (For the record, I hate lawn -- but I can't plant anything substantial over the leach field.)

I try not to use anything in the way of pesticides; when I do, it's hot pepper wax spray, and I do my earnest best to direct it right to the greens and stems where it's needed (usually on cabbage and other brassicas in bad cabbage looper years, and also on vining squash stem bases for borers), avoiding flowers. That way the spirit of the garden will continue to bless my patch of earth with buzzing and abundance.

Saving Seed

2013-07-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Saving peas for next year's garden.

If gardening is the most revolutionary act you can do at home, then saving seed must be the radical fringe of the revolution. Needless to say,I am a dedicated seed-saver and have been working slowly but steadily to improve my seed-saving savvy from year to year.

Slow and steady seems to be my watchword with all food production. Each year I add one or two new wild foods or mushrooms to my plate, a few more square feet of garden area and a few more garden crops, and now one or two new kinds of seed to save.

I have long saved flower seeds, particularly marigolds, calendulas, nasturtiums, and lots of perennials. I also nudge along a bunch of self-seeding annuals, preparing the soil around them and then helping the seed ponds make it safely to lightly-covered fertile ground.

My vegetable seed saving started with beans, of course. I say 'of course' because they are really easy, and beans don't tend to cross-pollinate. Nothing fancy about it, just let some pods stay on the vines or bushes and dry out. Ditto with scarlet runner beans.

But for some reason I never saved over peas, until this year. Maybe it's because I buy very large packets of peas to plant and they last several years. But this year I saved the three best kinds of peas (one snap variety, two fresh eating types) and am looking forward to seeing how they do next year.

Butterflies love kale flowers.


Kale seedpods are delicate.

I've been saving over kale seed for many years. Kale blooms and goes to seed in its second year. What I do each year is just leave the kale in the garden in the fall, pick leaves as late into the year as I can (they stay green under the snow for a while), and then in the spring, I watch to see which plants come back earliest and most vigorously. The others I pull -- either to the compost bin if they didn't come back, or after pulling off the young leaves to eat if they made a slow showing. Then I let the most energetic ones grow and go to seed.

Butterflies love the yellow spikes of kale flowers. You can keep pulling leaves off to eat (green smoothies, yum) all through the summer season. When the stalks of seed pods turn dry and brown, cut off the stalk, then roll the pods on a plate and sort out the tiny round seeds. The dried pods are very delicate and will pop open at the slightest touch, so handle them gently -- but don't worry, one kale plant produces enough seed to sow far more than my entire garden!

Do pull your seeds from multiple plants, however, to maintain genetic diversity in your garden kales.

I'm pondering learning to save over one more type of seed this year, and I'm voting for my Boothby Blonde (OP) cucumbers. Any other ideas for an easy save?

Food Security and Climate Change

2013-06-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Some years peppers are abundant; others, not so much.

This June our local weather here in Vermont has been abysmal. Rain is about two inches over the average for this month, and the month isn't over yet.

Our deluge appears to be the result of a Persistent Arctic Cyclone of unusual duration. Speculation is running rampant as to whether this is tied to global climate change, and climatologists and sea ice specialists are intently discussing the relationship of the cyclone to sea-ice breakup and a rising thermocline in arctic waters.

Be that as it may, my garden is seeing record rains. My pepper plants, so fabulously lush last year, look like drowned rats. Several eggplant plants have died. Yet other things are thriving. All the greens, from lettuce to cabbage, could not be happier. I've never had this many peas in all my years of gardening. And I've been eating beets and turnips out of the garden a month earlier than usual.

My home food security relies on resiliency arising from planting a wide diversity of food crops, sprinkled with a substantial layer of flexible attitude. I don't dictate to my garden what it will produce. I let my garden tell me what is going to grow well, and just roll with that.

I never know from one year to the next whether this is going to be a hot dry summer or a cold wet summer (or heck, as it is so far this year, a hot wet summer). So I plant sweet potatoes and kale, hot peppers and overwintering cabbage, tomatoes and arugula -- things that like hot, and things that like cold. I see how the weather is going. I see what withers and what flourishes. I watch the sky and the almanac and eavesdrop on the farmers in the diner and then take a risk and throw in an extra row of peas or an extra flat of basil.

I may not get the same produce every year, but whatever I get is a bounty and a blessing and I figure out what to do with it. Last year I had more hot peppers than I'd imagined possible in my small Vermont garden. I dried a bunch, made mountains of salsa, and then looked at the last bucket full and decided to try making hot sauce, which turned out wonderfully. This year does not exactly look like it's going to be a hot pepper year, but I'll be using that hot sauce on my abundance of turnip greens tonight.

In bad tomato years, I've made zucchini salsa instead, or batches of apple-green tomato chutney. When the brussels sprouts never came in, we ate the tender delicious greens off the top of the brussels sprouts stems. When the radishes started bolting early instead of forming radishes, I yanked them out, threw them to the chickens, and swiftly planted some heat-loving summer squash in their place.

Our industrial food system, however, is so large and commercial-market-driven that farmers -- agricultural industrialists -- are not responding to the land and letting the earth and climate guide their hand in what to plant to produce healthful abundance. The drive to deliver X amount of wheat for processed white flour, or iceberg lettuce to decorate burger buns, or watermelons of a certain size and color to meet a contract with a huge supermarket chain, means that the resiliency I've built into my garden is utterly lacking. Flexibility and redundancy are not watchwords of our current food economy. And that puts our large-scale food supply at risk.

While this risk can be seen as driven by commercial agricultural interests, it can also be seen as responding to market forces. The American consumer demand for white bread, white potato fries, and corn means that vast quantities of these monocrops will be grown -- at least until they fail.

Anything that you can do at home to diversify your food sources will help to ameliorate this large-scale risk. Grow some salad greens or sprouts on a windowsill or porch; buy from a farmers market or swap with a local gardener; even buying types of produce that you haven't tried before (kohlrabi? parsley root?) will help to encourage diversity in food markets. Go for the locally baked multi-grain breads, the brown eggs, the cornmeal from a small regional company. Your choices will help our food systems weather the storms of change.

BATNA: Lessons from Conflict Resolution

2013-06-25T07:44:00.000-07:00


Self-Reliance Improves Your BATNA

My conflict resolution students swiftly learn to apply the word BATNA to every conflict situation. The principle of Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement means that anyone negatively affected by another person or entity should first look for options that are wholly within their own control to improve their own position in a way that will minimize the impact of the actions of others.

For example: Afraid your place of employment might be downsizing? Bolster your eduction and job skills to make yourself as valuable in your workplace and as employable elsewhere as possible; start up other income streams, even small ones like selling some homemade items on Etsy, so that when your employment ends it won't feel quite like dropping off a cliff. Or, relationship on rocky ground with an uncertain future? Strengthen your network of friends and community, and shore up your financial independence; the boost in self-confidence may help put the relationship on better terms, or will clarify its ending without feeling like the your whole life is ending, too.

Every day brings us reports that food prices are rising, food production is down while population is skyrocketing, climate change is bringing drastic shifts in agriculture and patterns of civilization, and the food reaching our grocery store shelves is full of GMOs, lead, arsenic, high-fructose corn syrup, and a host of chemicals with names we can't pronounce. Health care costs are soaring while our health is diminishing.

It often feels as if we are ever-increasingly the helpless victims of massive corporate and governmental forces that we can not possibly control. Do we even have a BATNA in the face of what experts say is global environmental and economic collapse?

It is true that there are many things in life which any one of us can not control. Yet, you always -- ALWAYS -- have a BATNA. There is always some realm of your existence over which you have at least some modicum of control, about which you can make choices and formulate decisions to better your own position.

The food we eat is an area of our life over which we exercise a large amount of control. As supermarket prices rise and family budgets shrink, it sometimes may not feel that way, but it's true. Remember how I said that in the face of possible job loss, starting even a tiny sideline income stream was useful to improve your position? So it is with food. Even the smallest step towards food independence begins to free you from the power of the corporate agriculture giants and reduces the harmful impact of other people's actions on your body, wallet, and family.

Growing sprouts or shoots on the edge of the kitchen sink adds a nutrient-rich green vegetable to helps stretch your grocery shopping dollars and boosts your health. One pot on an apartment balcony with a single cherry tomato plant and some lettuce will give you fresh, nearly free salads all summer, helping to offset shortened summer work hours. Buying at the local farmers market is a fabulous option if you don't have growing space or time -- and can be cheaper than you thing, especially if you come at the end of the day and negotiate. (Many farmers markets also take EBT cards and some states provide food-assistance recipients with extra farmers markets coupons as well.)

Buying produce in season and throwing some in the freezer creates a buffer for lean times. Eating lower on the food chain -- lentils instead of meat some nights of the week--is cheaper and healthier. Drinking ordinary tap water instead of soda or other bottled drinks saves money and could be the best single thing you could do for your health.

Any one of these little steps empowers you by moving you one small step further away from the impact of decisions made by corporate agriculture--yet without any diminishment in the quality of your life or health. In fact, you'll improve your health, reduce your anxiety over food bills, and likely develop new tastes and food interests that will enrich your life far more than the box of expensive powdered donuts could have ever done. BATNA is about making yourself stronger and freeing yourself from the shadow of others' power over you. The more you re-assert your control over the food you eat, the stronger your BATNA, and the less power bad news about food prices and supplies will have over your life.

Growing Things That Come Back: Permaculture For the Rest of Us

2013-06-12T10:47:00.003-07:00

There's an old saying that Society Creates the Crime. It could also be said that Society Creates the Trendy Environmental Solution.

Locally-grown organic food, for example, could only be considered a neat thing by a society which has abandoned locally grown organic agriculture, and then embraces it as a fashionable passion as if it had just been newly discovered. In a way, it's akin to Columbus 'discovering' a half of a planet which was already inhabited by many millions of people.

'Permaculture' is one of those trendy cocktail-party words that left-leaning publishing houses just can't seem to print enough about. Only a society which had entirely converted to exotic, non-sustainable decorative landscaping, maintained through intensive chemical and labor interventions, could think of permaculture as a trendy new invention discovered by white men from some upscale north-eastern university instead of good-old fashioned practicality.

For those of us who are not much concerned about how our gardening methods sound to the cocktail-party set, planting things that come back year after year and work well in our local climate and soil is not only common sense, but is cost-effective, environmentally sound, and an efficient means of feeding both body and soul. Native plants -- in my neck of the woods, mint, sunflowers, black-eyed susan, joe pye weed, Jerusalem artichokes, bee balm, etc.-- and their cultivars make a natural starting place.

Rhubarb and Jerusalem Artichokes Return Every Year

Locally-adapted, low-care perennial flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables create a rich and beautiful home environment needing only annual additions of compost and frequent picking. Rhubarb, irises, daffodils, thistles, anise hyssop, rue, oregano, marjoram, aloe, bleeding hearts, elderberry, blueberries, hibiscus, sand cherry bushes, yarrow, echinacea, all come back year after year.

Self-seeding annual herbs and flowers like sweet williams, cilantro, parsley, bachelor's buttons, lupines, walking onions, multiplier onions, pansies and johnny jump-ups, all establish their own patches and do not need to be replanted each year. Just refresh with a little compost and weed out any intruding grass or other unwanted species to give them a competitive advantage.

Sunflowers self-seed each year, and give goldfinches and other songbirds a place to perch between eating garden bugs. Lilac hedges provide heavenly scent and a practical wind-break. Kale, left to regrow a second season, provides edible flowers loved by butterflies -- and a crop of easily-saved seed to replant.

The high-end permaculture books would have you believe that this trendy new idea requires consultants, graph paper, earth-moving equipment and a huge financial investment. None of that is true. All it takes is attention to where you live and in the space you have, and to what you want to get out of that space.There's no point planting a big asparagus patch if you can't stand asparagus. Look at what you've got for space, light and soil; look around you and talk to your neighbors about what grows well for them; and plant what works.

Save the Earth: Rip Up Your Lawn

2013-06-10T04:57:00.002-07:00

The largest irrigated crop in America is lawn grass. There is three times as much acreage in lawn grass production as in corn -- and many lawn owners apply just as much fertilizer and pesticides to maintain their outdoor carpets as those big corporate farmers do to produce commodity corn.

Where does that fertilizer go after you dump them on the lawn? Some gets taken up by the grass, of course, but much of it washes away, into our rivers and lakes causing excessive growth that uses up too much oxygen and ultimately chokes out the aquatic ecosystem.

Think about the quantity of fresh, potable water nationwide used to water lawns. Think about the amount of air pollution sent into our lungs every week as millions of homeowners or their landscapers mow, leaf-blow, and power-rake.

Food prices are rising, and most people go without fresh, locally-grown, organic produce because it's unavailable or too expensive. Yet America's suburban homeowners are sitting on the most valuable asset our nation has -- fertile land -- and using it for a home decoration. Instead of generating healthy food for themselves, their neighbors, and those without land, suburbanites waste this resource by using it as an expensive, chemical-laden hobby.

While it's easy to point fingers at corporate agriculture as the root of food shortages and a loss of food quality, the millions of small landowners who inhabit suburbia have the power to make a significant impact on world food supplies and their own pocketbooks and health simply by ripping up their lawns.

Turning your lawn into gardens means you'll get economic value out of it instead of dumping money into it. You'll get healthy produce for your own family, saving on the grocery bill, and can even produce enough to share with neighbors or the local food shelf. Check out the Facebook site for Grow Food, Not Lawns if you want to connect with like-minded individuals who can inspire you with stunning photos, plans, and information for transforming your expensive lawn crop into an environmentally-sound, economically-productive garden.

Weeds and Thinnings: Greens and More Greens

2013-06-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

Pigweed weeded out of the garden and onto the dinnerplate

Beet greens and kohlrabi leaves from thinnings

One of the best things about gardening is getting to eat the weeds and thinnings.

Pigweed, cress, purslane, young dandelion leaves, and many other garden weeds are delectable 'specialty greens' that commandeer high prices at upscale food markets. The young leaves of beets, kohlrabi, turnips, rutabegas, even carrots are delightful in salad, or mixed together and sauteed with the first garlic scapes, chives or new onions, a sprinkle of sugar, and a splash of hot sauce. Over brown rice topped with a fried egg, they make a perfect early summer meal that is economical and packed with nutrients.

Dryad's Saddles

2013-05-21T08:18:00.000-07:00

Dryad's Saddles -- also known as the Pheasant's Back, or Polyporus squamosus -- is as easily identifiable mushroom for anyone looking to dip a toe in the great, complex and sometimes scary stream of wild mushroom foraging. I love mushrooms, but am a very tentative mushroomer, only slowly adding to my short list of species I am comfortable enough identifying to bring home to the dinner table.

Giant puffballs or breadloaf mushrooms are probably the first wild mushroom to try, as long as you pick them when they are at least softball sized to ensure that you haven't mixed them up with an emerging head of some other type. None of the puffballs are poisonous and once they get to a decent size, there is nothing else that looks like them (unless you've inadvertently picked up an old soccer ball that has been sitting in the woods for years).

While there are many other shelf- or bracket-type fungus, Dryad's Saddles are simple to recognize. They have a short, thick angled stem, a curve downward to the stem, a feathery or almost shingle-like top, and most distinctively, a spongy underside of hollow tubes -- NOT gills, and NOT a hard flat bottom surface. The only other mushroom close to meeting this description would be the beefsteak mushroom, another bracket polypore, but it is pink to red, and fortunately is also edible so if you manage to confuse the two, you'll still be okay.

When Dryad's Saddles get older they get brown and dry, but then they are too tough to eat. Way too tough. So be sure to go for the light tan ones with brown feathery tops.

In May and June, look for these about two days after a rainstorm, on hardwood trees and stumps. They'll pop up literally overnight. Pick those that are flexible and have a light tan top like the ones pictured. Often they'll be about 4" across, in groups of 3 or 4. These two, growing right next to one another, had popped out to a full 8" across after we had a big downpour following several very dry weeks.

Sliced up and sauteed with butter and wild ramps, served with foraged fiddleheads or young turnip greens thinned from the early garden bed, they make a wonderful hearty spring meal, free and fresh from the wilds.

Pumpkin Pie

2013-01-22T07:27:00.001-08:00

You have to love a dessert that counts as a vegetable...

It's the nice thing about pumpkin pie. True, one could count those apple and blueberry pies as a serving of fruit -- but you get to count pumpkin pie as a vegetable. And a tasty, nutritious vegetable at that, full of fiber and vitamins.

But pumpkin also holds a certain spirit that satisfies the soul as well as the stomach and good health. Those orange orbs embody the sunshine of the whole growing season, the open sky and fresh air of the fields, those perfect autumn days.

Deep in January, biting into a slice of pumpkin pie brings the wheel of the year firmly to mind, and thoughts roll back to last year's garden, and forward to looking at the prize-winning pumpkins at next year's fair. Pumpkins bring us continuity across the seasons, across the years.

That continuity is strengthened by the bonds of generations when you use an old family recipe. There is something magical about cooking the same thing my grandmother did, an invocation of those who are gone from us.

I start with a Long Island Cheese pumpkin -- a flattened, tan heirloom. It could be any other kind -- but then it wouldn't be MY pumpkin pie. But choose your own -- that's part of what makes is special. I quarter the cheese pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and roast it on a cookie sheet with a little water in it at 350 degrees for... well, for as long as until it's done. Perhaps an hour, I just keep testing till a knife pokes through it easily. Then I let it cool a bit, scoop out the flesh and measure it, and bag it up in 2 cup measures in small zipper-seal freezer bags (suck the air out, seal them, and lay them flat to freeze -- then you can 'file' them upright in a milk crate in the big freezer). My recipe calls for 1 and a half cups of puree -- but when using home-cooked pumpkin, I find freezing 2 cups works best as you'll lose some liquid and volume when it thaws.

This is the only think I cook in which I use canned Carnation evaporated milk. I rarely use canned anything in my cooking, but this is an exception. You can use cream or whole milk or raw milk; since I want mine to taste like my grandmother's pie, I use the old-school kitchen staple for this.

Pick your favorite pie crust -- I use the basic shortening crust from my ancient, tattered edition of Betty Crocker's cookbook. But this recipe also works wonderfully as a pumpkin custard with no crust at all.

Pumpkin Pie:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Line a pie plate with your chosen one-crust pie pastry.

1 1/2 cups canned pumpkin, or a two-cup bag frozen home-cooked pumpkin puree
1 cup rich milk
1 cup sugar (not quite full)
1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon
pinch of cloves
--you can add more of these spices to taste if you like

2 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 Tbsp melted butter
1/2 shot glass whiskey

Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. Pour into the pastry-lined pie pan -- I avoid sloshing by putting the pan on the oven rack first and pouring the filling in there. Bake about 45 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Cool before cutting.

Top with maple whipped cream, and the coup de grace, a maple sugar candy leaf.

Winter Crunch: Sauerkraut and More

2013-01-19T07:45:00.002-08:00


Sauerkraut and Lacto-Fermented Carrots and Turnips

A forkful of crunch, tang, and summer garden flavor in the midst of winter, in old-school style: This is the joy of lacto-fermented vegetables. Much has been written about the new-found health benefits of lacto-fermentation, this food preservation technique is ancient -- and simple.

A great winter read to get you started is the little paperback by the Farmers and Gardeners of Terre Vivants, Preserving Food Without Canning or Freezing. It will give you some food for thought as you plan next summer's garden. But with cabbage available inexpensively through the winter at supermarkets and farmers' markets, it's a great time to try sauerkraut at home.

Slice, Salt, Pound

I had made sauerkraut a few times in the past, but Summer 2012 was a bumper year for cabbage in my garden, so it was time for a larger sauerkraut experience. I started with a crock -- but no need for one of these uber-expensive, water-sealed lacto-fermentation crocks that are en vogue in the seed and garden catalogs. I just found an old lidless one, about 3 gallons, that my mother had been using as a decorative objet d'art in the living room. Washed it well, then proceeded to production. Using about 5 pounds of cabbage, I quartered the heads and cut out the cores. Then I sliced thinly--about quarter inch to smaller-- with a big chopping knife while my husband layered the sliced cabbage in the crock, sprinkled with sea salt, and pounded it with a heavy piece of broken chair leg. A baseball bat end, wine bottle, or any non-pressure-treated and non-splintery heavy board would do, though again, they sell overpriced sauerkraut pounders if you feel compelled to drop lots of money on this operation.

Eventually all the cabbage is sliced, salted (I use about 3 Tablespoons total for 5 pounds of cabbage, but feel free to use a little less, though no less than 2 Tablespoons or the brine won't be the right chemical blend to spawn the right microscopic critter growth to produce the fermentation), and pounded down. At this point it should be swimming in its own brine; if not add a little spring water and perhaps a pinch more salt.

In lieu of those fancy expensive water-seal lids, I put one plastic food bag inside another so it's a big sturdier, fill it with water, and close with a wire twist-tie, then just to be sure, knot the bags over the twist tie to keep it from poking the bags. I put a small clean plate over the top of the cabbage to help weight them down evenly, then put the water-filled bag on top of this -- the bag spreads to fill the top of the crock to its edges, sealing out air but not so tightly as to prevent the bubbling fermentation gasses from escaping. Voila, a lacto-fermentation crock for cheap.

I set this in the garage in the late summer -- you are shooting for perhaps 60 degrees. Check it from time to time, and add some more spring water and sea salt if it seems to run dry, but unless you are in an extremely dry climate, it probably won't. Don't let it get too cold or freeze.

How long you leave it set is a matter of taste, preference and convenience. I really like my sauerkraut crunchy and tangy, so I like to leave it sit only two weeks. This year, with a large quantity at hand, I removed a quart mason jar's worth at two weeks and stuck that in the fridge to stop the fermentation, and left the remainder to ferment another several weeks, until it seemed to stop active bubbling and changing. Then I put that remainder in jars in the fridge, where it will keep for many long months.

Of course, I kept eating it right out of the crock daily through this entire time period, just because I could.

The two-week sauerkraut has a bite to it that I love, while the nearly two-month sauerkraut has a mellower, richer more complex flavor and a decidedly mushier texture. I have conducted numerous taste-tests amongst my friends, and find sentiments regarding preference between these two are nearly equally divided.

Beyond Cabbage

Meanwhile, inspired by the success of my sauerkraut efforts and the lovely advice of the Terre Vivant gardeners, I experimented with using the same technique -- minus the pounding -- for other vegetables. I was producing small quantities of these, so I just used half-gallon mason jars instead of the crock to start. I made one batch of julienned carrots and turnips, and one batch of julienned turnips and snappy black radishes. I packed them in their respective jars, covered with a brine made of spring water and sea salt, and put on the two-piece screw-type canning jar lids, though screwed on just firmly enough to seal but still allow gasses to escape. Paranoid about the potential for exploding glass, I also just turned the lid open then closed again once every couple days to release pressure. I set these jars in a small metal tray on the counter and let them fester several weeks.

The result was delightful. The carrots and turnips are sweet yet tangy, with a nearly citrus-type flavor and delightful crunch. The turnips and radish have an almost horseradish-type condiment flavor. Both can work on their own as a little side dish, be served on salad greens, or brighten up a lowly hummus or turkey sandwich out of its winter doldrums.

Many cooks also add a variety of things to their cabbage sauerkraut. Fennel seed and/or onions are common variations, but I suspect there are dozens of possibilities.

Mason Jar Canning Safety and Lids

I've read several food bloggers getting quite dismayed over the use of the standard two-part canning-jar lid for lacto-fermentation in mason jars, on the theory that it lets outside air in. Some now strongly advocate the use of new special, expensive, one-way-valve lids for this purpose. I admit I don't have the scientific credentials to have the last word on this, but I have not been terribly concerned about it because if the jar is filled right to the top, and the lid lightly screwed on, the fermentation process creates pressure within the jar and is constantly pushing the air out. This is the same reason that the air escapes and then, on cooling, creates a vacuum when you boiling-water-bath can using these same lids. If air could get in under such circumstances, then air and water would get in when you were water-bath canning, wouldn't it? As long as you keep the jar filled to the rim by adding brine, the positive pressure (evidenced by the daily leakage into your metal tray) keeps the atmospheric air out of the jar, doesn't it? At least that is my opinion, and it has seemed to work just fine for me without costly special equipment, but I will leave it to each cook and consumer to use her own best judgement regarding her family's food safety. Just do be sure to use SOMETHING that can be vented if you lacto-ferment in mason jars, to prevent the glass from breaking.

Cold Day, Hot Soup

2013-01-16T11:38:00.000-08:00


Slow cooker, old style -- cast iron on the woodstove


Black bean soup with what's-in-the-larder

It's snowing -- but it does that in Vermont in January, so all is right with the world. I had leftover sweet potatoes in the fridge from dinner two nights ago, so I set out to make black bean-sweet potato burritos.

Then I'd cooked more black beans than I needed (dry beans, cooked on the woodstove, are way cheaper than canned beans -- and no risk of whatever chemicals the can lining gives off, either, especially since they are local organic beans). So what to do with the rest?

Black bean soup.

Soup is the ultimate flexible dish. The recipe? Stock and whatever is in the larder. Here I even cheated on the stock. I kept the water the beans were cooked in, and added a couple jars of my canned tomato-vegetable juice. Then I grabbed a handful of carrots from the copious bin of them remaining from last summer's garden, a couple heads (yes heads) of garden garlic, and a couple locally grown onions. I was out of peppers and not driving out to the store in this snowstorm (mainly because I'm lazy and the woodstove feels too good) so I also drained and added a small jar of my canned jalepenos. Then the coup-de-grace, three peeled, chopped-up seedless oranges, as we weren't eating through the bag fast enough and they would no doubt have gone bad.

How to spice it? I tasted the onion-tomato-orange combo and decided exotic was the way to go. Some smoked sea salt, black pepper, some cinnamon, some ginger, a little Jamaican allspice, some dried parsley for added iron and vitamins, and just to finish it off, a dash -- more like a splash -- of my homemade hot sauce.

Now back on the woodstove it goes to simmer away and I'll taste-test it later. If it's too hot, I'll add some more tomato-veggie juice or some stock. Not zesty enough, more hot sauce.

Since we have the burritos for tonight, this can simmer along 'till tomorrow, adding some water or stock if it boils off too much. Then I'll make a nice crunchy cornbread to go with it (mine is always crunchy since we grind our own corn) and a green salad, and it will be the perfect hot meal for the predicted single-digit night.

Using up what you've got is the ultimate food security -- AND it can lead to the most creative and fresh dishes. Soup is a good chance to experiment; just chop whatever you have in the larder into roughly equal-sized pieces and throw them into stock or broth. Saute them first if you have a mind to, but it's not strictly necessary. Soup is also so incredibly healthful, usually low cal (unless perhaps it's something like a beer cheddar cream soup), high in fiber and nutrients, and filling.

What are YOUR favorite winter soups?

Winter Salad

2013-01-14T15:57:00.000-08:00


Fresh Greens from the Garden--In Vermont in Mid-January!

In the coldest of seasons, in the darkest of days, life goes on, and hope--and salad greens--spring eternal.

It's January thaw -- that annual occurrence of a few days of balmy thirty or even forty degree weather that feels downright tropical after last week's minus 20 Fahrenheit (yes, that is not a type -- it was minus 20 a few evenings last week). Yesterday, dinner was roasted root vegetables, including the last kohlrabi and the last turnip of the year. In a separate pan, I also roasted the last of the beets, to put on salads through the week.

When temps rose above freezing this delightfully sunny morning, I took a stroll out to examine the yard. It had actually rained last night, and the two-foot snowcover was gone. My kale bed was bursting with new green and burgundy leaves. I pulled the soggy straw off the parsley and chard, and they too were sending forth new growth. I picked handsful of tiny new green leaves to start my salad bowl.

At the other end of the salad greens bed from the chard, a few blackened heads of raddichio had soldiered through the snow cover, without so much as a straw blanket to comfort their frozen heads. I pulled the largest, stripped back the outer leaves, and was rewarded with a nice 4 inch head of bright red raddichio to add to the dinner loot.

On to the cold frames. The small one held some bedraggled arugula; the little bed is really too small to provide much protection from the cold. The larger 4'X8' bed, however, looked like a jungle. Spinach, arugula, mache, and sweet little 2" long French breakfast radishes with their cheery ombre of fushia and white.

Washed, spun-dry and chopped, I had about two quarts of salad greens. Plenty for two big dinner salads and lunch packed for tomorrow. I added some of the roasted beets from last night, some chopped walnuts, and grated some pecorino romano cheese that I had in the fridge since, it being that time of the year, I was also too broke to go spring for some nice blue cheese which would have been the absolutely perfect thing. But the pecorino romano added a surprisingly nice touch, so it's just as well that necessity was the mother of invention for this salad!

It's true that there are salad greens for sale in the market this time of year, but even aside from the carbon footprint question of where those salads came from, the price is nigh on unreachable for those of us feeling the economic pinch. This salad of organic greens with zero carbon footprint cost me the twenty minutes or so of picking, washing and preparing -- and gave me the great joy, deep satisfaction, and yeah, okay, bragging rights, of having picked my dinner from my front yard in Vermont in the depths of winter.

Reinventing the Cheese Wheel: What is Cheese?

2012-07-25T06:37:00.002-07:00

On-farm cheese caves,

like this one at Orb Weaver Farm in Monkton Vermont,

are where most of America's finest cheeses

are finished to a delicious, marketable state.

The explosion of artisan-made, cave-aged cheese may be the latest thing in food marketing,

but cheese itself is nothing new. Cheese is one of humankind’s most ancient methods of food preservation. This highly effective means of storing milk developed under the distinctly non-high-tech conditions of carrying liquid milk in sacks made from the rennet-rich stomachs of ruminants.

“Cheese making is a process of preserving the solids of milk as curds. This is done by coagulating these solids with the help of rennet enzymes, cutting it into small pieces and then cooking and stirring to remove some of the water in the form of whey,” explains “cheese queen” Rikki Carroll, whose New England CheesemakingSupply of South Deerfield, Massachusetts has converted thousands of ordinary people into home cheesemakers.

The basic principles of cheesemaking are the same whether you are making a pound or two with a kit at home or a thousand pounds in a small-farm dairy. “With higher production you just need bigger equipment and more storage space,” Carroll says.

Cheesemaking can be tricky. As anyone who makes bread or beer knows, playing with molds, bacteria and yeast is quite a balancing act. Good bacteria like B. Linens need to be encouraged to produce a natural rind, while other bacteria like Pseudomonas fluorescens, that can turn soft cheeses bitter, need to be avoided.

Then there’s the milk. “All cheese used to be made with raw milk, then pasteurized milk became the industry standard,” Carroll says. “Now ultrapasteurized milk has a slightly longer shelf life but it breaks down the proteins and makes curd formation more difficult.”

Aging Cheese

Once cheese is made, it must cure or age in a cool, moist environment. Unlike fine wines, fine cheeses generally age over the course of months, not decades. But while wine bottles sit quietly undisturbed in their cellars, some kinds of cheese wheels demand constant attention, including turning and washing with batches of favorable bacteria or herbal flavorings on a daily or weekly basis.

Historically, most cheesemakers supervise this aging process themselves at their farm or cheesemaking premises. In European markets where a high volume of artisanal cheese flows from farms to plate each day, affinage, or cheese aging, has become recognized as a separate task from that of cheesemaking. Affineurs, or people trained to oversee cheese aging operations, have developed a mystique referenced with awe in the food industry—an awe that drives the price-point of branded cave-aged cheese sky high.

Next time we'll look at whether affinage really creates higher quality cheese or if it's primarily a marketing ploy.

Natural Disaster

2011-08-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

While my own little shire of Middlebury remained just slightly affected by Tropical Storm Irene, much of the state of Vermont was devastated. This set of video clips is but the tip of the iceberg, and I encourage everyone to look at the updated aerial videos on www.wcax.com and the WCAX facebook page.

Flash flooding caused intensive, almost unimaginable damage to the state's infrastructure. We watched in horror as historic buildings and old and new bridges were ripped off their footings. Graveyards gutted with coffins floating downstream. Cars tumbling end to end in the waters as everyone tried frantically to see if there was anyone inside. Thirteen Vermont communities were wholly cut off from the rest of the world for several days. Most of those are now connected only by rough ATV paths. Crews are working around the clock to improve the access to at least temporary 4 wheel drive accessible roads.

Fortunately while the flash flooding was horrible, the wind and fury of the storm had dissipated by the time it got here, so areas not directly impacted by rising water remained intact. This is giving our state the resources to scurry through immediate clean up and disaster relief, and then longer term rebuilding. Had high winds impacted the rest of the state we would be looking at a much more sinister situation.

Vermont is very resilient when it comes to food security. Many people have gardens, and pantries full of home-canned goods. Those resources were put to the test here as many communities that had been cut off ran low on food. Through generosity and practicality people shared the contents of their melting freezers and the jars and cans from their water-soaked basements. But had it been slightly worse, or in a slightly different configuration, food and potable water could have become serious issues. As it is, they are strained commodities.

Rain barrels and home gardens will not resolve all ills of all natural disasters, but they help. Obviously if it all gets washed down the river, it won't help. But a few rain barrels full of water in a landlocked community can sustain many people for many days. Dried beans and corn, as well as home-canned pickles, dilly beans, applesauce and relishes, last for years all with no additional electricity. A well-stocked freezer will last quite a while after the electric goes out, and feed you for a long time afterwards. My freezer is bigger than my needs, so I've lined the bottom with milk jugs full of water. It'll buy me an extra day or two without power, and give me over 20 gallons of water if the electric is out for longer than that.

Redundancy is one of the primary keys of disaster planning. Have a woodstove, and a camp stove, and a firepit. Have a main garden, and a few cherry tomato plants on the patio and a few cucumber plants in hanging baskets. Or put in some storage crops like onions or pumpkins at a different location -- in a community garden plot or in an unused corner of a neighbors field, or in a vacant city lot.

I keep thinking about the community gardens in Harlem that I talked about a few weeks back. Had Manhattan born the brunt of this storm, they would not have been enough to feed many people for very long -- especially if they were under water. They would have helped though. Emergency rations rarely include fresh produce so the greens and fresh tomatoes would have been welcomed by most folks. But I compare this to the cities I've seen in Italy and Spain, where every apartment has a balcony, and every balcony is a garden. If the Tiber flooded Rome 6 feet deep, like our Vermont cities are flooded, everyone in their apartments would have still had enough to eat for several days from the lettuce and tomatoes and miniature fruit trees on their balconies. I'm not saying it wouldn't be boring -- but they would be in a better position to survive and patiently await assistance.

I'm not an outright survivalist. I don't think we need to bury tanks of water and dehydrated rations in sealed pits in the back yard (that we then can't shovel out when the ground freezes). But having food and water resources at hand makes sense.

Pesto Heaven

2011-08-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

"Tis the season, and I am drowning in basil. All those little tiny seedlings I set out -- twice as many as I need, since in past years sometimes the basil has had weather problems and not grown -- are now three feet tall and broad as a barman with a bushy handled moustache. And so I'm in pesto-processing-purgatory until it's all gone.

I'm going about it one row at a time. I had 6 rows, 6 to 8 plants each. Tonight I'm officially through half -- but only kind of cheating. The first two rows were lemon basil and lime basil, which grow to only half the size of the Aroma, Genovese, Large Leaf, and Sweet Basil that fill the other four rows. I used a light-flavored parmesan cheese for the lemon and lime, and included cilantro in some of the lime, parsley in some of the lemon, and used walnuts in some of the lemon just for grins and jollies.

I don't have a recipe. I lightly fill the glass container of my two-speed, genuine reproduction original metal-based Waring blender with basil leaves that I have washed and lightly spun in the salad spinner, so they still have a little water clinging to them. Yes, I have a food processor, and no, I don't like to use it for this. It macerates the basil so badly that it practically loses its flavor, and becomes quite a different product. I suppose the folks who make their pesto in a mortar and pestle feel the same way about my blender. I do have a mortar and pestle, and use it for lots of things -- but I have a lot of basil to get through and then a crop of amaranth seed waiting to be winnowed after that so I just can't make all this pesto in my mortar and pestle.

Then I pour in enough olive oil in a light steady stream until it reaches about a half-inch up the side of the glass container. Good olive oil is key -- and the brand or label does not necessarily tell you if it's good olive oil. I've purchased expensive organic olive oil at the food co-op and had it taste horrible and rancid. Try different kinds until you find a brand you like -- then watch for it on sale and buy enough for a whole pesto season.

Then I blend that to a bright green liquid. Then I pour in about that many nuts -- if I had to guess, I'd say a quarter cup or less. I do like pine nuts, but can rarely afford them, so I usually use almonds. I watch for these on sale at my co-op, too. Walnuts have a stronger flavor; pecans have a nice creamy texture. A friend with a nut allergy uses breadcrumbs, which yields a fabulous light flavorful pesto with a smooth texture. Another friend uses sunflower seeds, which are also healthy and inexpensive.

Then I throw in garlic. One big clove or two or three smaller ones, then I taste it. I like a lot of garlic, so I may throw in another. Lastly, the cheese. I grate an Italian sheeps milk pecorino-romano and put in about a handful. At this point the pesto is getting clay-like in the blender, and I'm stopping the blender, pushing the pesto down with a wooden spoon, starting it again briefly, and repeating the process. Sometimes I add just a few drops of water, or a little more olive oil. If the garlic flavor seems overwhelming, I'll stuff in some more basil leaves.

From there it goes into quart-sized zipper-type freezer bags, marked with what kind of pesto it is. I flatten these down on their sides, squeezing all the air out before sealing it. Thus far I have a dozen such bags in the freezer; I expect I'll have about 40 when I'm done. I'll probably take some of those to the food shelf and keep 26--enough pesto for every other week of the year, which sounds about right.

Uses? Pasta, of course. But don't stop there. Spread it on pizza crust or in bread dough; spread it on sandwiches. Throw some into minestrone. Spread it all over some halibut and quartered potatoes and bake it in the oven. Dab it into an omelet.

Pesto heaven!

Gardens in Harlem

2011-08-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

Last week my band O'hAnleigh was honored to play in the Fertile Ground Music Series at the National Black Theater in Harlem, New York City. Growing up on Long Island, I visited Manhattan many times for shows, to the Hard Rock Cafe, museums and so on downtown but never made it north of Central Park. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but what I found was a complete surprise: Gardens. Everywhere.

Little did I know that New York City's Green Thumb program is the largest community gardening program in the world. Just get enough people to sign up to take shifts and the city parks department makes available city-owned vacant lots for planting, along with resources like compost and workshops. The program's website provides a forum for local groups to exchange information, posts photos, and announces programs like farmers markets and the upcoming NYC Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners conference.

I did not see any of these gardens in the sterile streets of Central Park West or the area around Columbus Circle but the vibrant community of Harlem was rich with lush green gardens--and full of gardeners excited to talk about them. The video above is just a quick bit of conversation at one such garden on 126th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue, but there were many more. As in the original Garden, the food is just free for the taking. People sign up for short shifts to work in the garden through the week, then the gate is open through daylight hours for anyone to come pick some produce. Further up the block was a larger garden running alongside a building for about half a block that included cherry trees and a large patch of sweet corn.

I guess I should not have been surprised that a town with so much faith, heart and soul would also be full of gardeners!

Supply Line Economics: The Cost of Getting Food To Table

2011-07-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

An army moves on its stomach, the old adage goes. It means that any military action is only as good as its supply lines, no war can be fought by soldiers who don't have food and water. If your army moved on horses or elephants, that also meant food, water and bedding for the animals. If your army moves on Humvees and helicopters, it also means fuel, oil, antifreeze, spare tires, fan belts and a mess of other wee bits likely to fail along the way. Many a military strategist has determined that cutting off an army's supply lines is a lot easier than battling one's opponent head on.

The Subaru is the Ubiquitous Vermont Food Supply Line

Cities too, from Ur to Miami, have their necessary supply lines. The water for the showers, toilets, fire hydrants, cooking and car washing of New York, Los Angeles, and other metropolises, come in through a pipe or culvert from reservoirs and rivers hundreds of miles away from the urb. Relying on a small number of water sources at a great distance would seem to me to be a rather weak link, but the urban planning departments of America's major metropolitan areas don't call me for advice, so there you have it.

Food, too, travels to most Americans over supply lines, and those supply lines start with the truck that picks up the food at the farm or slaughterhouse and continues through either the truck that delivers the goods to your urban neighborhood store, or the car that delivers the groceries into your driveway in the small towns, vast suburbs and urban regions outside of dense city centers. For most of our food products, this means thousand of miles of foreign-fuel burning transit, billions of taxpayer dollars supporting road construction and maintenance, and the vast spacial and economic inefficiency of millions of Americans each sitting all alone in a several-thousand-pound, several tens of thousands of dollars worth of machine every day to obtain a 20 pound bag of bread, milk and cookies.

There is admittedly some strengths in this system. Most notably, it's more a web than a line, with enough inherent redundancy that if one thread of the supply system fails there are some others to man the gap. If, for example, my car breaks down and I'm out of celery, I can borrow my neighbor's car or ask her to pick me up some celery while she's doing her own shopping. The food will still get to my house.

Further up the ladder this resilience is less strong. A leap in fuel prices, a trucker's strike, or a bad round of weather at the source (or a cloud of radiation from Japan) cold nip off one supply line of food, creating upward jumps in food prices if not outright scarcity in the market. We've seen hints of this with things like particularly bad winters in Florida that have put a dent in the citrus crop. But none of us starved in those years when the citrus crops failed, we just skipped fresh oranges and bought apples from New Zealand instead.

The downside of all this supply line system redundancy is its expense. We pay for highways and bridges and tunnels, car and truck purchases and maintenance, and that's just the start. Air pollution. Landfills. Deaths and injuries in car accidents. Political wars over where it's appropriate to drill for oil. Ecological disasters when oil rigs rail. Wars over oil-rich foreign lands. All to move food along the supply line to our table--or to earn the money to buy the food and pay for the vehicle that brings it home.

If you don't know how we created this mind-shatteringly expensive car-and-truck dependent food supply line system, take a read of James Howard Kunstler's now iconographic book The Geography of Nowhere. If you're unfamiliar with the history of American landscape architecture, it provides a brilliant overview (though be prepared for the author's insertion of strong personal opinion regarding certain architects -- fans of Mies Van Der Rohe, take warning). Suffice it to say that the Federal government and General Motors played major roles, but you'll have to read the book to find out exactly how.

Being more of a pragmatist than a finger-pointer, I have to note that the public obligingly leapt to buy those Levittown houses and shiny new Mustangs. I tend to focus my efforts on trying to understand what was so attractive about the automobile-shaped landscape rather than whose fault it was. Fact is, it's here, and we can't afford it. So how can we use the best elements of it to build a better, more economically realistic model for the future?

Growing food in the suburbs and urbs--and harvesting water in those urbs, too--would seem the most logical approach. Every time I pick a salad from the front yard for dinner, I've diminished the number of times my ubiquitous Vermont Subaru Forester (nearly 200,000 miles and running just fine) leaves the driveway and runs the 4 miles to and 4 miles from the supermarket.

About a quarter of my little neighborhood has substantial gardens; if the other three-quarters grew their own veggies, too, then over time the local economy would only bear smaller supermarket spaces, with smaller parking lots. There'd be fewer trucks of produce running from California and Florida to Vermont. We would lighten our dependency on the very expensive supply lines in favor of food produced at hand. The advantage of redundancy would still be in effect, as now we'd simply have multiple food sources within a 100 yard radius. If I was out of celery, I could knock on the door a neighbor who grows great celery and ask to swap for some spaghetti squash.

Now that's an inexpensive, secure supply line.

Gardening With Blurred Edges

2011-07-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

Gardening is really a lot less about what you plant than about how you think about things--and what you decide to weed around.

I do have my raised vegetable beds, and my mess of perennial-flowers-and-weeds out front, but my garden is so much more than that. Out back, for instance, there was this small patch of wild beebalm, Monarda fistulosa, growing when we moved in. Whenever I'd cut some for drying, we'd also pull out a few of the other things that were growing around it, giving it a competitive advantage. The patch is now maybe 8 feet by 12 feet and growing, the plants reaching 5 feet high, and many of the scarlet flower heads sporting these interesting double-decker puffs. I leave these and harvest the singles for tea, encouraging the double heads to seed in.

Now that patch of beebalm is large enough to easily dry a year's worth of tea. My two beebalm cultivars that I have planted in the 'garden' out front don't do half as well. The bright red type I picked up at a nursery somewhere is being overrun by the lemon balm, and rarely clears 3 feet high. The lavender purple bergamot that I have in the flower bed blooms in a lovely shade over dusky gray-green foliage, but it suffers from mildew and expands only very slowly. I cut a few heads from it to throw in the tea mix for color, but that's about it.

I could order beebalm in various colors and configurations from any number of nursery catalogs, but why would I? Clearly none would grow as well and be as perfectly suited for the local growing conditions as the native variety that has adapted itself to this precise environment aons.

Other vegetative inhabitants of my yard that I've weeded around include red clover, a big patch of white yarrow that enfolds one corner of my lettuce bed, a couple of random mulleins that I always let grow each year (I pull out many of these from the raised beds but let some live at the bed corners, in the lawn or the flowers beds -- release them from competition and they will easily tower 6 feet tall or more). Medicinal herbs like Heal-All (Prunella vulgaris) and Gill-Over-the-Ground (Glechoma hederacea) I pull out as weeds in some patches of the garden, and pull other weeds around to let grow in other patches. When I weed it out, I stick it in the dehydrator or hang it to dry if the weather is cooperative, for valuable immune-boosting winter tea come flu season.

Clumps of black eyed susans move around my yard each year depending on where I decide to yank them out and where I don't bother.There's some lovely pink mallow blooming under the birch tree that I weed around every year, and it slowly spreads. We've planted sunflowers several times, but don't really need to anymore. They also self-seed, and i pull them out when they are in the middle of a veggie bed but let them grow at the corners and elsewhere around the yard, often transplanting the young volunteers before their deep roots take hold.

Am I just lazy, or are there benefits to gardening without bright-line edges between what is cultivated and what is wild? I feel like the benefits in attracted honey bees, butterflies and songbirds (who love the sunflowers) probably does help the garden productivity, and it also makes it a lush and aesthetically wonderful, alive place to be. This state of mind also blurs the edges between my garden and the living world beyond where my deed says my property ends. A circumnavigation of my block this morning added a whole dehydrator full of red clover blossoms to the stash I'd picked in my yard.

I suppose my yard is 180 degrees from the artistic suburban landscape wastelands I've seen in the upscale neighborhoods of the greater New York area, and folks who prefer that highly structured look of exotic shrubbery with red mulch between and not a weed growing would view my garden as a mess. They'd likely hire landscapers to bulldoze the beebalm, heal-all, yarrow, mint and marrow and plant a proper yard of mugho pine and dwarf weeping cherry. While that might satisfy the realtors, I prefer the life and soul of this flourishing, diverse landscape that blends seamlessly with the surrounding natural environment (though admittedly not so seamlessly with my neighbor's stunning, impeccable lawn, but he seems a truly good sport about that).

Famine on the Horn: Starvation and Politics

2011-07-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

I am sitting on my front porch surrounded by my own miniature Eden, with beds full of lettuce and basil and beets, garlic about to be harvested, squash and tomato vines taking over the neighborhood. The surrounding houselots, fields and farms are rich with nut trees, wild cherries, and escaped apples and pears. An afternoon stroll may bring back mushrooms, wild garlic, wild grapes, serviceberry, raspberries or blackberries depending on the season, along with lesser-known wild edibles like trout lily bulbs, cattail tubers, or fiddlehead ferns. Even my perennial bed is full of good eats and drinks: daylily flowers, bee balm, burdock and chicory. I consider the lilies of the field--and I eat them.

Amidst this abundance, famine seems unimaginable. Yet as I sit here, tens of thousands of people from the region of Somalia are walking days and weeks across burning desert to reach the largest refugee camp in the world -- Dadaab, an outpost in nowhere, Kenya, originally designed to hold 90,000 refugees of the Great African War and now holding over 400,000 people.

The present famine in Somalia is the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent. But to call it a famine, suggesting that it is merely a product of random unlucky rainfall cycles or maybe a crop failure, does not begin to accurately describe the situation, any more than the expression 'potato famine' describes the political and sociological disaster that occurred in Ireland in the mid 19th century.

I've heard folks quip cynically, "It's a desert, and it's always been a desert -- you don't want to starve, don't live in a desert." Not true on all counts. This is not the place to debate world desertification, other than to say that much of the world we now know as desert was not desert at one time (check your old testament for its descriptions of hanging gardens, flowing fountains, and towering cedar forests in the Middle East, for example). But many Somalis lived in villages built around wells, rich in cattle and crops plentiful enough to feed everyone amply and have grains, meats and vegetables left over to trade in markets for goods or cash--a permaculture Eden-like environment not unlike my green front yard. Until someone crashed through with tanks, killed the cattle, poisoned the well, salted the fields and raped the women.

Local food security vanishes with the speed of a flame in the face of war. Just ask an American from the South about the impact of Sherman's burning march. The tactic of destroying food resources goes back thousands of years; something about Carthage springs to mind. Permaculture is hardly permanent in the face of tanks and guns, unless one has the bigger guns to protect it, or the cash or gold in a bank account to buy the land and seeds to start over, assuming your bank does not also collapse.

On top of the disaster of war, Somalia has experienced lower-than-usual rainfall for several years. With freedom of movement and trade, Somalis may have resolved the hardship on their own, or with a minimal boost of some temporary food aid, much as those Americans hit by natural disasters like floods rely on. However, militant groups have precluded foreign aid from reaching those affected, escalating the impacts. The press says these groups are 'associated with Al-Qaida,' but I have no way to assess this information--my apologies for the cynicism, but not long ago we were told that all revolutionary groups were associated with Russian Communists; now they seem to all be associated with Al-Qaida. To the mothers watching their children starve to death, it hardly matters.

Political, social and economic security and food security are intimately intertwined. The ancient city of Rome rioted for bread, not because the wheat crop had failed or drought had destroyed farmlands, but because Cleopatra was involved in a pissing match with the powers that be and stopped shipping wheat. The actions of the people who occupy the White House and Capitol Hill, the actions of the people they appoint to our embassies and the United Nations, the wars our nation chooses to get involved with or not get involved with, all play out on the ground not only in terms of soldiers lost on either side, but in terms of which mothers walk for weeks with their dying children to beg for food aid in a desert camp of 400,000 starving, desperate people.

The U.S. has engaged in some half-hearted intervention in Somalia over the last several decades, none of which has worked out terribly well. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the U.S. quickly withdrew from Somali intervention, despite declaring the situation in Darfur to constitute a genocide. We have made the decision to commit to very expensive ongoing military action in these two locations, and not in other locations. On such decisions, people live and die.

Few if any among the 400,000 in this one refugee camp--and hundreds of thousands scattered at other camps across Africa--had anything to do with causing the violence which has shattered their lives and left them starving. Certainly the kids who are dying played no role in the global posturing and shoving matches that played a greater role in creating their circumstances than any lack of rain.

This Garden of Eden in my front yard, these rolling green fields and forests, are truly a blessing. On this glorious summer day, it seems impossible that anything could happen to take this wealth of food security and self-sufficiency away. Yet I'm sure that many wise and peaceful farmers throughout the ages have felt the same.

Please consider making a donation to the UNICEF Horn of Africa Emergency Appeal or any of the church, nonprofit or service organizations working on the effort to relieve the worst of this crisis including the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, and many local religious organizations. And plant a garden, including an extra row for the food shelf -- it is a precious liberty indeed.

Put Obese Kids in Foster Care?

2011-07-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

Today's Journal of the American Medical Association contains an editorial opinion by Dr. David Ludwig, whose work focuses on childhood obesity at Harvard's reknowned Boston Children's Hospital. In other words, a very knowledgeable, concerned, and influential physician in the realm of obesity, particularly pertaining to children and young adults.

Dr. Ludwig suggests that obese children be removed from their families and placed in foster care.

I can understand Dr. Ludwig's frustration, but since his days are spent looking at obese kids rather than the bigger picture of food marketing, consumption and health in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, I can see how he might reach the point he expresses in this editorial. From where I sit, I can't help but be horrified. My hope is that the editorial may spark widespread dialogue, about food, about families, and about the role of government intervention in regards to both.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (that regulates food labeling and food additives and develops nutritional education information in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture), Federal Communications Commission (that regulates broadcast advertising and children's television programming), Federal Trade Commission (that regulates product advertising), along with our state's attorney generals, education curriculum and school lunch programs committees, and local, state and federal surgeons general and health departments, have been utterly ineffectual at communicating the basic foundations of good nutrition and food choices. The poor USDA nutritionists and a few school nurses have been running around out there saying, Eat More Vegetables! and having about as much impact as holding back a hurricane with an umbrella.

Actually, 'ineffectual' is an understatement. The regulating agencies which we have created and engaged to try to protect us from unscrupulous business practices have not only allowed but subsidized and encouraged the production and marketing of substances extremely detrimental to our health.

They have allowed High Fructose Corn Syrup, clearly demonstrated by Princeton University researchers to lead to fat and weight gain as well as serum triglyceride increases even when consumed in modest amounts, to pervade every food product on the shelf.

They've approved the use of sythentic fat substitutes, now sold in 'fat-free' everything, but that interfere with the absorption of necessary nutrients and actually wind up making consumers fatter. This threatens to create malnutrition and increased obesity in precisely those kids whose parents think they are doing the best thing by buying them fat-free cookies.

They have allowed sugar alcohols to be included as ingredients in 'sugar-free' foods, even though they not only cause gastric distress in many people but can spike the serum cholesterol in diabetics.

This is not a matter of saying, "Well parents should exercise responsibility and read food labels." You can read the label of a product that says it's natural, fat-free and sugar-free, and still feed your child something that damages his or her health and leads to obesity. And now that these agencies have failed to protect ordinary families from the harmful products they were directed to regulate, we arrive at the suggestion that parents who don't somehow figure this all out should have their kids taken away from them.

What, I'm left wondering, would the qualification requirements be for foster families for such children? Would foster parent volunteers be screened for BMI? What about households that follow vegetarian, or various religious or ethnic food practices?

And what would the social service agency plans for family reintegration look like? Would the parents have to lose X amount of pounds and attend cooking classes before the child could be returned to the household? Would Child Protective Services now hire a team of nutritionists to evaluate the shopping list of parents before parental visitations could be initiated?

Instead of pointing fingers--fingers that will inevitably get pointed along socio-economic lines--we need to all insist that the federal and state agencies that we send our tax dollars to actually look out for our health and welfare, since that is what we've hired them to do. Then we need to help one another -- all of us, young and old, employed and unemployed, urban and rural -- to establish healthy food traditions that include links of family and community, like holding pot-luck suppers in your neighborhood or town-wide, and volunteering to give cooking and canning classes at the local food shelf.

And mainly, we--ALL of us--need to just say "no" to buying this processed crap at the supermarket. In my public speaking classes at the Community College of Vermont I always have students do an impromptu persuasive presentation trying to convince the other students to try their favorite cookie. Of the hundreds and hundreds of students I've had do this over the years, about 85% state their favorite cookie as a homemade chocolate chip--often made by someone in particular like their mom or grandmother. Kids are not going to become obese on homemade chocolate chip cookies despite the sugar, butter and real chocolate in them--but they probably WILL on the fat-free, sugar-free packaged varieties that they didn't really want in the first place.

So fight childhood obesity by baking some chocolate chip cookies with your kid -- and let's bury the talk of taking obese children away from their parents.

Chanterelles

2011-07-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

Golden chanterelles, as precious as summer sunshine. Dinner tonight: Salad of fresh greens, a bowl of green peas in the pod, sumac and raspberry leaf tea, and chanterelle puffs, a light simple little fritter that lets the delicate earthy flavor of these mushrooms shine through.

I have a confession to make: I did not pick these chanterelles myself. There are a small number of mushrooms that I am confident picking and eating--dryad's saddles, morels, angel wings--and every couple years I add one or two more to that list. Chanterelles have not quite made it onto my complete confidence list. I have found carpets of them a few times... I think...but at the last minute I was not totally certain so I let them lie. Maybe in a year or two...

Meanwhile I bought this batch from a gentleman who sells wildcrafted foods at the Middlebury Vermont Farmer's Market. With my own gardening and foraging, it's not too often that I actually buy produce from someone else, so I was really excited about this.

Then I had to decide how to cook them. A simple saute in butter is always splendid with wild mushrooms, as is an omelet. Mushrooms and eggs just seem to go together. I opted for this suggestions from the Mycological Society of San Francisco Cookbook, and I'm glad I did. The buttery simplicity, the melt in your mouth texture of the dough against the chewy woodsy flavor of the mushrooms -- pure heaven.

Recipe: Golden Chanterelle Puffs

1 cup chicken broth (I used my fresh-made vegetable stock instead)
1/2 pound or so minced chanterelles
1 stick butter
1 tsp. sea salt
1 cup unbleached flour
3 eggs

Preheat oven to 450 and lightly butter a cookie sheet. Heat the broth in a saucepan; add mushrooms, butter and salt and bring to a boil. Slowly stir in flour a little at a time. Remove from heat and beat in eggs one at a time. Drop dough by tablespoons onto the cookie sheet, and bake for about 15 minutes until lightly golden brown on top. Cool them on a rack, then try not to devour them all at once. They are splendid slightly warm, and even better cold for lunch the next day.

Taking Stock: Table Scraps to Soup Broth

2011-07-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

You may as well get every cent of value and every molecule of nutrition and flavor possible out of those organic vegetables that you either paid a fortune for or sweated hours in the garden over. Keep a big food-grade plastic bag in your freezer, and throw in all the onion ends, celery tops and bottoms, garlic peelings, tops and cores of bell peppers, mushroom stems, and twigs of herbs that you've dried. If you are so inclined, you can chop these bits into small pieces before freezing them, which makes your stock cook up faster and more flavorfully--but in the midst of dinner or salad preparation I must admit I usually don't take the extra time, but just toss them into the freezer.

I don't use brassicas like broccoli or cabbage leaves in my stock, as I don't like the taste. I like brassicas, just not in my stock, to me they impart a bitter taste but I know other cooks who use them and like the flavor. I don't eat meat, but occasionally eat fish and one summer after fishing I did make a batch of stock with the fish bones etc. in it as well, and it was really delicious; I used it later for making a fish chowder.

When the bag gets full enough, dump the contents into a large stock pot. Just cover the foodstuffs with water, add a bit of sea salt if you are so inclined (I do this, as I sort of feel it helps break the food down a little better and adds flavor, but I don't eat any processed or canned foods and don't really worry about excess salt in my diet; by all means leave it out if you prefer).

Simmer--don't boil--until there's nary an ounce of life left in the veggie scraps and they are all a brownish, colorless mass. Add water to bring the level up to just covering the vegetables if it starts to evaporate and boil off, but don't add too much or you'll wind up with a watery broth. Better to have a nice rich broth that you can water down later if need be.

Pour the hot broth through a colander into another big pot or bowl. Remember to put the pot or bowl under the colander. Yes, I say this through experience--my brain is so used to dumping pasta or things of that ilk into the colander where you save the stuff not the broth that I once poured the stock right down the sink. Sigh.

Send the veggie bits to the compost pile. Strain the stock once more if you like, through a fine mesh seive or cheesecloth. Stir well and pour it into quart or half gallon freezer containers and pop in the freezer to await your fall and winter soup and stew making. Freeze up a couple smaller batches for sauces and gravies if you like. While I usually do this on cool autumn nights, my freezer was jammed full and I needed to make room for incoming vegetables, so I pulled the bag of stock veggies and took advantage of an unseasonably cool July evening to cook up this batch.

Happy thrifty cooking!

Sumac Tea: Free Summer Refreshment

2011-07-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

The staghorn sumac, or Rhus typhina, grows as a 'weed tree' around these parts. It expands into islands about 20 feet out from the edges of woodlands in abandoned meadows, like the forest advance-guard, clearing the way for the aspen and birches to follow. As a kid I loved to play inside those island thickets, the tropical-looking leaf fronds forming a perfect roof and the open spaces between the trunks creating so many imaginary rooms.

Beginning in mid-July the staghorn sumac puts out distinct fuzzy red cone-shaped flower and berry clusters. Different stands seem to develop these velvety flower cones at different times from mid-summer to early fall, and I've not detected any particular rhyme or reason to the timing. The nice thing is, some patch nearby is always at its peak.

I use a pocket knife to snap off the whole berry clusters. You can just break them off with your hands, but sometimes the supporting twigs are a little tough, and you wind up either getting a mess of sap on your hands or breaking off a larger branch unnecessarily. Granted, sumacs are common as house cats so a small broken branch is not a huge disaster in the scope of the world, but still, it seems gratuitous, and besides, I like using my pocketknife.

At home, gently stuff the whole red berry cones into a glass jar. Fill with cold water. Let steep in a cool place, either just sitting indoors or, if it's not too hot out, in a sunny spot, but don't let it get too warm. The longer it steeps, the stronger it gets. Initially the brew will be a light pink with a mild refreshing flavor. As it gets darker it takes on tones of a hibiscus or rose hip tea, which it also resembles in its crisp, thirst quenching flavor. Strain the tea out through a cheesecloth or fine tea strainer, as the fuzzy bits from the berries can be irritating to the throat. You can sweeten it with simple syrup, honey or agave syrup, or drink it as is (I like it plain). It also makes a nice mix with green tea, or with a bit of lemon.

If you leave sumac tea for a day or two, the color will turn black. This doesn't affect its flavor at all but it's not quite so appealing looking as that rosy pink freshness. I've read that sumac tea is high in Vitamin A and Vitamin C, though wild foods like sumac have not been the subject of much in the way of serious nutritional and medical research. The tea certainly has that high-vitamin-C red tanginess about it, and it has been consumed by residents of North America for thousands of years, so it stands to reason that, at the very least, it's not bad for you.

I've seen instructions on the internet saying boil water and make sumac tea like you would a hot herbal tea. Give it a try if you like but I don't think you'll like it; boiling releases the tannins and gives you a nasty bitter brew. If you want hot tea, steep the sumac at cool temperatures, strain out the sumac, then heat the tea in a mug in the microwave.

As with any new food, some people may have unexpected allergic reactions or intolerances, so don't go drinking a few gallons of sumac tea the first time you try it. Make a small glass and see if you experience any adverse effects at all; if so, leave it at that. More importantly, make sure you harvest sumac berries from a location that has not been sprayed with agricultural chemicals or road-and right-of-way clearing herbicides. These are much more likely to cause you ill effects than the sumac berries themselves. Sumac that is growing as part of a formal landscape is probably off limits both from an aesthetic and trespassing point of view as well as by virtue of likely having been doused with chemicals.

That said, sumac is abundant and often grows in neglected places where picking a few berry cones will do no harm at all. Its delicious tea is healthful, refreshing, and free, the perfect antidote to sugar and artificial color laden tubs of fake iced tea and lemonade mix. Better yet, it's an easy way to step into wildcrafting, and sharing the seasonal bounty of the local landscape.