Sharon Astyk's Independence Days Challenge

This is the weekly round-up of moves toward sustainability and adaptability suggested in Sharon Astyk's blog at sharonastyk.com  Mine is more like monthly, or maybe quarterly, but the idea remains--to hold ourselves accountable, make a record to compare with other years, and share our ideas.


Plant something -- Tomatillos, lettuce, chicory, cucumbers; transplanted winter squash, peppers and tomatoes; added soil for the potatoes in barrels, set up coffee bean bags for planting.

Coffee bean bags-- biodegradable planters

 

Harvest something --Lettuce; the last of last-year's chard, braised for dinner with a little wine and a couple of olives; cilantro for the chili; parsley for everything, lovage for soup stock. The sugar snap peas and fava beans are flowering, so it won't be long now.

Preserve something--A batch of vegetable stock for soups.

Waste not: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." My friend and neighbor is putting in a small lowered patio, so we dug out some of the dirt that has to go. It's pretty sandy and rocky; we screened out the rocks to use at the bottom of my many big pots and mixed the soil with my compost.

I'm still getting produce from my Food Bank produce sorting shifts. This week I bent my rules about only taking items that can't go out for distribution due to cuts, soft spots, etc. A big bag of enormous celeriac showed up--they were the size of bowling balls and looked as weird and unappetizing as only a celeriac can look. I figured they wouldn't get many takers, except maybe from a few of the Russian families, so I took one home. I've been chipping away at it for purees and soup.

Want not-- This is about stocking up, building long-term supplies of storage foods and household  essentials: Nothing this week.

Eat the food --This category includes trying new recipes that make the most of what we have on hand, rotating our stocks of stored foods rather than saving them for an even rainier day, etc. I rummaged through the freezer last night and unearthed various forgotten items, some of which became dinner. The frozen winter squash is now near the front and I swear I will do something with it soon.

Build community food systems-- I'm now a garden mentor for a Food Bank program that picks 20 families a year, builds a small raised bed in their yard, and supplies soils, seeds and vegetable starts. I'm assigned one family to work with through the summer. In fact, they are doing a terrific job on their own and haven't needed me yet, but maybe something will come up as the season advances. In a few weeks I will start doing some produce education in the waiting line at the Food Bank, focusing on the vegetables that the Food Bank contracts to buy from local organic growers.

Happy tomatoes with 1+ cubic yards of compost below

Skill up (learn to do something new)--I learned to do something old. Over the past several weeks I've made and used a old-fashioned hotbed.You dig a hole a little bigger than your cold-frame and two-and-a-half feet deep. Fill that to within six inches from the top with compostable materials--I used leaves, coffee grounds, my neighbor's chicken coop cleanouts, weeds and kitchen scraps. Make sure these layers are, in the words of my 1914 British garden guide, "well-trodden." This involves clambering down into the hole (if I were younger I would jump) and stomping around. Cover the compost-to-be with six inches of soil, to just above the surrounding soil line. It will sink a bit as the stuff breaks down. Put the cold frame on top and your starts and seeded pots inside. The bacterial action below heats up the soil for three or four weeks, giving warm season plants the head start that we need in cloudy Northwest Washington. My tomatoes and peppers are a month ahead of their usual development. As a bonus, whatever I plant there next year will have all that composted soil to feed on. Making a hotbed is also, I have to say, a commentary on the class system. It was a lot of work, a lot of digging and material hauling, for a few weeks of heat. You either need time or plenty of low-paid staff, especially to do it on a large scale.

Food Bank Fresh #3

Because of a bout with flu, cooking has been on the back burner lately, and I kept my Food Bank foraging to a minimum this week.  However, I couldn't bear to see big bag of oyster mushrooms, deemed too dried out by a volunteer with more seniority and less fungi fanaticism, go to the pig bucket. So mushroom stock will be the base for the next Soup Night recipe. Oyster mushrooms are down the scale in the rich taste department, but I also scored a couple of aging portabellas and some other miscellany. 

Usually a mushroom donation includes some that are too far gone to distribute along with others that are still fresh and firm. We start a new container of the good ones and add to it as we sort until there's a meal's worth. You might get all standard grocery store shrooms; you might get a variety. I've even seen a few chanterelles head out to the distribution line and I hope they made someone's day.  Mushrooms are one exception to the "can't distribute if it's cut rule," but the presliced ones are generally too far gone anyway by the time they get to us. 

I also brought back a big, limp bunch of organic chard. I love chard and have picked away at my overwintered plants until there isn't much left. (They should make one more flurry of growth before they bolt.) Binda taught me to revive them by putting the whole bunch under water rather than just the stems in a glass. It works; I braised the chard and ate the entire bunch myself.  

Food Bank Fresh #2

This week's Food Bank rejects included  some limp purple kale, several red peppers with small cuts or soft spots, pears and apples (likewise), a couple zucchini, a chayote squash, and a bulk food bag of ground cardamom, smelling like heaven. There was also a mysterious pale yellow "squash" that turned out to be a melon. (The tub at left in the picture has a couple of chards and raddicchios that are waking from their winter's nap. There were more before I used some as a bed for marinated chicken the night before.)

I don't usually buy non-organic sweet peppers, which, given the cost of organically grown ones, means that I rarely eat them unless it's a good year in my garden. (I've learned the sticker code from my fellow volunteers. Organic produce has a 9 at the start of the ID number.) Bell peppers are a regular on the Dirty Dozen list of produce that shows up in the market with the most pesticide residues. But it was just too hard to throw these beauties away, and part of this project is about learning what it's like to plan meals from what's available at the Food Bank.  So I decided to roast them and remove the skins to sort of split the difference. (A good resource for pesticide residues on food is www.whatsonmyfood.org)

I roasted the peppers by putting them on the burners of my gas range, turning them as the skins began to blacken. It was an arresting sight--the bright red peppers arrayed across the shiny black stove--and as Ron pointed out, it smelled as though someone in the house was smoking weed. Once they were blackened and blistered over most of the skin, I put them in a plastic bag. The resulting steam loosens up the skin and makes them easier to peel. I stored them with just a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and boy are they good. We had pasta with the peppers, the zucchini (grilled), a little garlic, oil and salt. Grated cheese on the side, home made bread, and some Organic Girl salad greens, also from the Food Bank courtesy of Trader Joe's. Volunteer sorters always hope to get the TJ boxes because they are top quality and tidy--no rooting around through rotten apples and assorted scraps to get at the good stuff. 

I made fruit salad from the melon (which provided more bulk than taste, I have to say), pears and apples, and a couple of oranges whose skins were starting to harden up in my fruit basket. We had that at breakfast for the next few days. The saggy kale went into a glass of water and has now revived and looks fresh as can be. I'm having it for lunch today. I ended up composting the chayote, and I am still deciding what uses to make of the cardamom. Clearly some curries are in my future, and cookies. I also got a full box of rolled oats that couldn't be distributed because of a small tear in the security seal, so my granddaughter and I made oatmeal raisin bars and I'll crank out another batch of granola shortly. My friend Gale shared her granola recipe with me; it's simple and quick, and I never get tired of it: 

3 cups rolled oats

3/4 cup sunflower seeds

scant 1/4 cup light oil

6 tablespoons maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup chopped nuts (I prefer walnuts)

spices to taste--I like cinnamon and ginger

raisins, cranberries or other dried fruit to taste (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F.  

Combine everything but the fruit in a large bowl. 

Spread out mixture on a lined cookie sheet, bake for 15 minutes. Remove and stir to redistribute the granola and bake another 15 minutes. 

Remove from oven, add dried fruit (if used) and cool before storing. 

Even with the pricey maple syrup, this is way cheaper than store-bought, and so good. 

I have yet to "work the line" at the Food Bank, meaning actually helping with distribution to clients. I'm eager to get to know some clients and see who gravitates to the fresh produce, since canned goods and box food are also a big part of the distribution. When I think about how well we've been eating using Food Bank produce the past few weeks, it's easy to discount the reality that I have a well-stocked kitchen, no picky eaters (aka children) at home, and the time to chop, roast and simmer. Still, I'm guessing that many clients could do more if they knew more, and we are looking for ways to share that kind of knowledge.

Busted at the Bistro

I had a book signing here in Bellingham a few weeks ago, and a couple days after that, as I was polishing off dinner at the Fountain Bistro near my house and trying not to get salad dressing on the papers I was correcting, my neighbors Bob and Selma stopped by my table. They told me they were shocked, shocked after hearing my talk to see me eating restaurant food instead of staying home to scrub the topsoil off my rutabagas. 

Lucky for me that my profile is low enough so that a bit of teasing from the nice folks two houses down is the extent of my exposure to public expectations. I would hate to be, say, Barbara Kingsolver or Michael Pollen and have every my every public mouthful scrutinized.

Christmas Eve vegetable plates, in lurid, blurry living color

But speaking of Michael Pollen, one treat of my vacation is to read through 

months-old copies of magazines that I don’t get to during the work weeks. This week I browsed a six-month-old copy of the New York Review of Books, where Michael Pollen has a roundup essay on modern food movements. His thesis is that unlike many movements—say feminism, or Protestantism--which tend to fragment into ever more specialized concerns as time goes on, food campaigners may be finding more mutual connections. I don’t know if he’s right about this, but the essay, which discusses books on hunger in America, vegetarian activists, locavores, government food policy, sustainable farming, and critiques of bureaucracy (and more!), did help me put some ideas together. 

One of them is the economic relationship between American food prices and our health and family life. Pollan writes that on average, we spend less than 10 percent of our incomes on food and only half an hour a day preparing it (including cleanup). Those are the lowest numbers in the industrialized world, and they imply enviable quantities of disposable income and time to create great things outside the kitchen. But here’s the web in which those figures are tangled. That cheap food is the stuff that’s made directly or indirectly from heavily subsidized corn and soy—pop, McBurgers, chicken nuggets, milkshakes, processed cheese etc. (Fresh vegetable and fruit prices have not stayed proportionally low) And we all know the health consequences of that diet. The money we save on groceries gets spent instead on the medical consequences of our obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and diet-related cancers. Big Agriculture and Big Pharma get bigger yet, while we go broke paying medical bills. 

The French and the Italians--to pick two famous foodie cultures--pay a higher percentage of their incomes on food, spend a lot more time preparing and eating it (though less than they used to), spend a lower percentage of their income on health care, and live longer on average than we do.

But what about the time saved? Convenient food was supposed to liberate women, especially, from drudgery and resentment in the kitchen, and there is a case to be made there. Not every household contains someone who enjoys cooking, and though I love to cook I’m not in the mood three times a day every day. But it’s also true that it takes about as much time to go through the drive-through window as to throw a salad together. If you have the money, you can get food that is both nutritious and convenient. The people who make their livings at the fast-food windows, or processing the chickens that make the McNuggets, or stocking the Quick Mart shelves with Top Ramen, are the ones who can’t afford to buy nutritious quick food and often lack the time and training to cook more economical healthy meals from scratch. This plays into the familiar critique of mainstream feminism, that it is a creation of and for comfortable middle class women. 

And that brings to mind an old poem by Marge Piercy

What's that smell in the kitchen?

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lambchops in Peoria: it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago:
tofu delight in Big Sur; red rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning food they're supposed to bring with calico smile on
platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the
heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Burning dinner may be war, but having the dinner to burn is good fortune. That’s why it’s so important that we link up the issues of food equity and food quality. It’s not enough to have cheap food, if the real costs are our health and environment. It’s not enough to have sources of nutritious and delicious food if only the comfortable can afford it. 

Here's a link to a Bellingham Herald story about increasing access to real food: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2010/12/20/1780871/bellingham-food-bank-garden-project.html

If Pollan is right, and I hope he is, we’ll see more Food Bank Farms, more farmers markets taking food stamps and WIC, more community gardens, more gleaning, and more opportunities for people to make a decent living providing good food to their neighbors. 
 

And speaking of that, I hope Geoff and Anna at Osprey Hill are making a decent living, because they certainly are providing good food. Our Christmas Eve dinner relied heavily on their produce from my CSA box—delicata squash, carrots, and onions in the risotto; onions and garlic stuffed in the pork roast, with parsnips and potatoes cooked alongside; applesauce for those who like it with pork; mixed braised greens. It was all great.

After writing this ramble, and thinking about how I am one of the fortunate few who not only has the resources to grow and buy good food, but also gets to make a little money while promoting it, I decided to make my donation to the food bank automatic and monthly instead of by whim. Join me?  http://www.bellinghamfoodbank.org/get_involved/donate