LoveLandLocal

The Green Leaves of Summer

2009-07-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

What a treat to be able to eat the fresh greens of summer. The field lettuce has come in, in a wide range of colors and shapes. It tastes so good after a winter and spring mostly on stored foods. And the "braising greens" are also ready to go.

We all know what to do with lettuce, but I had to hunt for a few new recipes for Greens. Braising greens are more robust than salad greens, and need some cooking to be at their best. Lettuce is not generally included; although you can cook lettuce, I've never had the heart to do so.

Braising greens can include endive, escarole, radicchio, bok choy, mizuna, chard in green, red, or rainbow colors, larger spinach, kale in their variety, collards, turnip greens, beet greens, and more. Even radish greens, if very fresh, can also be in the mix.

Kale is the most robust of them, and if your kale leaves are fairly good sized, slice them thin so that they cook along with the others. If you are using chard in a quick-cooking greens recipe, cut the ribs out and slice them thin, then chop the leaves. That'll give the ribs a chance to catch up on getting tender.

Chock-full of vitamins and minerals, greens are a great addition to your family table.

Braised Greens with Butter and Ginger

1 lb whatever braising greens you have on hand
4 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons tamari
1 finely sliced garlic scape (curly flowering top) or one
garlic clove minced
1 tablespoon peeled minced ginger root
1 tablespoon fresh cilantro, chopped

Bring a kettle of water to boil, meanwhile cutting up your washed greens in 1" lengths. Drop greens into boiling water, cook for about three minutes. Meanwhile, in another large skillet, have the butter melted with tamari, garlic, and ginger. Don't let it cook down. Drain the greens, then put in the skillet with the seasonings. Cook and stir a few minutes until mixed. Stir in
the chopped cilantro and serve. Unless your kids are really allergic to greens, they should like this one.

Summer greens with tomato and spring onion

1 lb washed and chopped greens
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium sized spring onion (small bulb with its greens) sliced (or you may use about 4 scallions sliced)
3 slices dried lemon (optional)
3/4 cup stewed tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon Thai-style curry paste, or more to taste
salt to taste

In a large skillet, heat oil and simmer onion till soft. Stir in the washed drained greens, and cook over medium heat until they start to soften and braise. Tear up and add the lemon slices if you have them. Stir in the stewed tomatoes and the curry paste. Reduce heat, put a lid on, and let simmer for 5-10 minutes until greens are tender.

Spiced White Beans

1 cup small white beans, such as navy or Great Northern, soaked overnight
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon garlic granules or powder
1 teaspoon mild to medium chili powder (to your taste)
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Drain the beans, then add fresh water and cook for 2 hours or until tender. (You should always soak and cook beans well to avoid digestive upsets.) When beans are done, drain and reserve most of the remaining liquid. Add the curry powder, the cumin and chili powder, salt and pepper to taste, and the olive oil. Simmer 10 to 15 minutes to get the flavors to meld. If they get dry, add a little of the reserved liquid.

This makes a nice side dish. For a double treat, serve with one of the above greens recipes. For a vegetarian, that's a meal. For meat-eaters, accompany with freshly-cooked sausage or on-hand cooked chicken pieces.

And enjoy the green leaves of summer!

PS: FINALLY I put labels on the Recipes posts, so you can find them more easily.

Just Say No

2009-06-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for quite a while, due to a number of issues that took some time to deal with. And we were pretty much finishing the Food Storage year. Now that the CSA has started, I plan to post more recipes to use that wonderful produce.

But today, I just want to discuss getting our power back.

1. I read recently that the airlines have reconfigured their planes to give you even LESS legroom than before. There are no meals, except that you can pay money for a little tray of junk food. You pay for checking luggage, which must be causing even more problems with oversize carry-ons. Many flights are being cancelled so that the remaining flights are even more crowded, if possible.

The answer: Just Say No. Don't fly, unless it is an absolute necessity. Don't play their game. Wait until they price their flights fairly to cover their costs and don't try to nickel-and-dime you to death. Wait until they treat you like honored customers instead of suckers.

2. I've stopped donating to many of the nationally-known nature and wildlife organizations. I've gotten terminally tired of getting unsolicited calendars, greeting cards, address labels, keychains, postcards, etc. etc. etc. The first calendar is OK. The 7th one is just a disposal problem. Just think of the forests that are cut down, and the petroleum wasted to get this unsolicited stuff mailed to you in order to pry some more money out of you.... Certainly at the costs of mailings, and the pounds of it I receive, they have spent five times my donation just asking me for more money.

The answer: Just Say No. I have stopped donating to these organizations. I save my donations for the few that don't continually dun me for more money. I donate to smaller groups, local groups, our food bank, Spikenard Farms to help save the honeybee, and similar organizations.

I wouldn't mind donating to the larger well-known organizations if they had a class of membership where they would ask you once a year for a donation, and tell you what they did with last year's donations, and leave you alone the rest of the time. I could feel good that my hard-earned donations are actually going to help the egret or the sea turtle or what-have-you, instead of wasting resources.

3. Credit cards. Congress can't seem to pass meaningful credit legislation that takes effect this year when people need it. The financial industry lobbyists are pretty powerful. Even the weak bill that did get passed, to take effect in 2010, caused tremendous threats and fulminations from credit card companies.

Now they're threatening to add yearly or monthly fees to every card, to punish those who pay their balances each month. Do you know what they call people who pay their balance every month? Deadbeats. I'm proud to be a deadbeat!

The answer: Just Say No. Put your credit card in your dresser drawer. Keep one or maybe two going by charging a few small items each month. Pay off the rest and let them go. You can get along with cash or checks for practically everything you buy. Vacations can be a problem booking airfares (Just Say No) or rental cars, I know, but for daily life you really don't need a credit card. I'd like to see the credit card throughput in the U.S. drop to about 1/4 or less of what it is now. Perhaps then we would be regarded as valued customers instead of suckers. We have the power; let's use it.

4. The statement: If you save and don't spend, you're contributing to the recession. I get highly annoyed at these claims that you encounter every day in the news. "We could get over the recession if only the consumers would open their pocketbook." This is worse than idiocy. It is self-serving commercialism plain and simple. Media needs to sell advertising. Advertisers need to sell products. So if they can guilt-trip you into buying more stuff you don't need and going further into debt, it'll help THEIR bottom line. Not yours, obviously.

The answer: Just Say No. I'm gratified to see that savings is way up in this country. It shows that we can take back our power. When unemployment is high and looks to get higher, saving is the only sensible thing to do. If you save enough, by not buying useless consumerist schlock, then you may be able to weather a spell of unemployment or, the latest, furloughs.

I'll tell you a secret. Money that you put into banks and safe investments (there are a few) actually goes to work in the system. Deposited money will eventually go out in loans to those that can use them. That's why banks were invented.

I recommend locally-owned and financially-stable credit unions. They tend to lend in your local community, benefiting your neighbors and your local merchants. Just Say No to those national bank conglomerates. They're too big already. They don't need your money, either as a depositor or a taxpayer. If a financial organization is too big to fail, it's too much of a danger to the country. So, help them get smaller by removing your money.

Burden Is On You?

2009-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

I just read an online article about the safety of industrial frozen food: With frozen food, the burden of safety is on you.

The problem gained public awareness with contamination of frozen pot pies in 2007. Investigators never figured out which of the more than 25 ingredients was contaminated with salmonella. The company (ConAgra) more or less threw up their hands. They said if they cooked the vegetables enough for safety, they turned to mush. So they put directions on the label to cook until internal temperatures were 165 degrees, nearly impossible to do in a microwave. Oh well....

And the article went on to say that these problems would become more serious, due to aggressive cost control. This involves sourcing of ingredients such as dough from a multitude of smaller suppliers, and importing vegetables and other ingredients from other countries with no testing procedure for pathogens. Manufacturers say the costs of testing and tracebacks are too high. Too high for what? Profit? How much is too high for thousands of people who get sick, and dozens who could die?

Oh What to do? What to do? (this is a trick question)

Locals know: start cooking fresh food for yourself. Avoid anonymous-ingredient packaged processed food. Not even the manufacturers of these foods know where the ingredients are coming from, or how they have been treated along the way.

This means learning how to cook, for those who are weak on that skill. But just think of what you'll gain! Really fresh, tasty food, from ingredients that you are sure of, saving money, and enjoying the creativity of turning high-quality ingredients into tasty dishes. And think of what you'll lose: high-fructose corn sweetener (almost ubiquitous in processed foods), cheap fats, too much sodium, artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives. And a little time.

The most surprising thing for DH and me when we started cooking and eating local food is how great the flavors are. Food that really tastes like something. Beans that cook quickly with lots of flavor. Really fresh vegetables. Fruits with a perfumed sweetness rather than a pithy cardboard consistency. Pizza that sits lightly on the stomach and the waistline, but is fully satisfying.

Don't consider that cooking is necessarily the job of the "wife" or "mother" of the family. The art of cookery is something for everyone in the family to know, including responsible children and teens. Teaching your kids to cook will have lifelong benefits to them in terms of improved health and decreased food budgets.

But the worriers will say: what if my ingredients are contaminated? To start with, if you source local foods as much as possible, it's much less likely. Wash your veggies well, and peel such foods as carrots. Spices won't be local, but you use such a small amount. Buy staples from a high-quality supplier. The food (such as a meat pie) doesn't sit around for months in warehouse freezers, possibly thawing and refreezing several times and allowing bacterial growth before you eat it. You prepare it, pop in the oven, and eat it. So pathogens from minute quantities of ingredients don't get a chance to grow.

I really see nothing on the horizon that will make industrial processed foods safer for us. The manufacturing chains are too long, and too inadequately policed. If they were adequately policed, the costs would be too high to make these low-end foods economical.

It is up to us to figure out how to source and fix good healthy food for our families. The burden IS on us, but we can also get the benefits of changing our food buying and preparation habits in terms of flavor, nutrition, and enjoyment.

Bon Appetit!

Spring! Ahhhhh!

2009-05-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

Spring again today, after yet another spell of cold, rainy weather. Everything is green, except for the daffodils (yellow) and apple trees (pink). And the wild plum is a mass of white blossoms.

I went to the first Farmer's Market of the season. As last year: bedding plants, gourmet dog biscuits, baked goods, pasta, kettle corn, more bedding plants. No greens yet. But the lovely Honeyacre hydroponic tomatoes and English cucumbers were there again. I bought some of each. We've been eating the tomatoes I put up last year, steadily through the winter, and enjoying them greatly. But fresh will be really wonderful.

Compared to last year, I don't have the "empty" feeling I did. We're still eating nectarines and peaches in light honey syrup I put up last fall. We're still eating green beans and snap peas from the freezer (though they are somewhat mushy). The last few Winesap apples have gotten totally mealy and are about to be compost, but they held out a good 6 months, which is a great track record for unwaxed home-stored fruit. We still have dried home peaches and prunes, apples, and fruit rollups, in case we run out of fruit before late summer.

The apple trees are covered with blooms. I'm glad we have a warm day today, since it's been too cold for the bees to fly. Sprinkling of blossoms on the cherry trees. No sign from the peach trees--it may have been too dry over the winter. Two front-yard euonymus shrubs look *really* bad--poor things. I should have winter-watered them. I'm just hoping they'll pull through. Everything else looks OK.

I've been buying the occasional head of celery or broccoli--not local, but U.S. grown. We're mostly through the lactofermented veggies: still some carrots, some sauerkraut, half a 1/2 gallon jar of salsa. Note to self: make more pickled green beans and more salsa next year.

We still have some onions from our CSA, but everything else is gone. I managed to cook up all the pumpkins before they got soft.

I tried to grow Lady Godiva pumpkins last year (they're grown for the seeds, which are "naked" without a hard shell). The ones I planted did very poorly; too shady. But I had a volunteer "something" which made a large orange and green striped fruit. I thought it was a hybrid of something, picked it before frost, and left it alone. Looking through a seed catalog, there was a picture of exactly my squash, and it was, ta-da, Lady Godiva. It has a hard shell compared to most pumpkins, which is why it kept so well. You don't eat the flesh, which is thin and stringy. It was filled with beautiful green seeds in a very light transparent coating. I saved and dried some for next season and roasted the rest. They were Delicious! I'll definitely try that one again. We do love home-roasted pumpkin seeds.

I've been getting sprouts in the store (hatched in Denver), and they taste SOOoo good in the spring. If I was better organized, I could sprout my own. I've still got a load of black oil sunflower seeds in the shell, which are what is used for sunflower sprouts.

If I can get a garden going, and a season extender (cold frame, hoop, or such like), we can have fresh greens probably from March on, and in the fall up through mid-December. Eliot Coleman's book "Four Seasons Gardening" is a good resource.

I went to a nice class at the Larimer County extension for pressure canning. In some ways it was encouraging. I got my pressure gauge tested and it is nearly correct. In other ways, not. The vegetables need to be cooked for a really long time, and then you're supposed to cook them some more before eating them. By that time, there wouldn't be much left. I may look into canning meat or poultry, to have quick meals that don't require electricity to store, carefully following the USDA rules. But for vegetables, I think I'd rather lactoferment them: beans, carrots, etc. They will keep 9 months to a year in the frig, and don't require cooking. You can put up a jar of them in 10-15 minutes, instead of the all-day siege of pressure canning.

I haven't been posting recipes lately. Our food choices are fairly simple these days, using stored food and a little fresh, so I haven't discovered anything particularly new and exciting. Once the CSA starts up in June, I'll be sharing some more ideas.

Worry and Hope: Two Sides of the Same Coin

2009-04-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a lot of reading recently, trying to wrap my mind around the economic meltdown and its connection with exponential growth. A post to come soon on this subject. It's not "cooked" yet.

Meanwhile, I want to spend a little time on "worry" and "hope". In our mythologies, worry is supposed to be "bad", and hope is supposed to be "good". But aren't they the same thing?

I have recently seen worry described as "a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we are doing something" (Gavin DeBecker, The Gift of Fear, quoted by Jill Fredston in Rowing to Latitude, a truly fine book).

And hope has been defined as the wish for an outcome that we cannot directly control. (If we could control it, we would do so, and not have to rely on hope to do it for us.)

The two meanings are not too much different, actually, except that in the former case we are focused on the glass half-empty, and in the latter case we are focused on the glass half-full. But it's the same glass, and the same water.

So I can say I "worry" about the future, for example regarding peak oil. I worry that the lights will go out, and we'll be cold, and it'll be dark, and we won't be able to get to town. (And I do worry about these things sometimes.) Or I can say that I "hope" that we'll quickly implement alternate and sustainable energy sources, or that we'll convince a meaningful percentage of our citizens to really take steps to conserve, postponing and moderating the inevitable downward slope. But in each case, I am putting my energy into wishful thinking rather than something practical.

And because these wishful feelings do nothing but cause a stress reaction in me, and perhaps wear out the patience of those who are obliged to listen to me, neither worry nor hope do any good for me, my family, my friends, my community, or the world.

What is the alternative to worry? There are at least two: practical action, and fearlessness. Fearlessness frees us for action. What is the alternative to hope? Again, practical action, and hopelessness. Hopelessness frees us for action.

Why is that?

Because hope shackles us to inaction. We feel that somebody else, some organization, or some governmental entity will solve it all for us, and keep us from having to make the hard decisions and do the hard work. We feel that we are owed security in our lives, and we give up our time and some of our freedom for it. But the unavoidable fact is that the our lives are insecure. No government, no promises, can change that.

Pema Chodron, in When Things Fall Apart, says, "Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty." She suggests that we put "Abandon Hope" on our refrigerator door. She says, "Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning."

I have a long way to go before understanding and internalizing this wisdom. From a practical standpoint, I know that action is an antidote to useless worry. That is one reason why we started eating local food, started the LoveLandLocal food cooperative, got an energy audit, changed our lightbulbs, drive a high-effiency car. That is why I talk to groups about local food and our experiences, and post on this blog.

Making the internal changes to stop worrying, to stop my idle hopes that we can wriggle out of the problems that our generation and several before us have caused, is not as easy. To the extent that we rely on hope for the future, we are not facing the truth. And when we do not face the truth, see it clearly, and learn to deal with it, we set ourselves up for a lifetime of suffering. Facing the truth is painful and disconcerting, but not nearly as painful as trying in every way to evade the truth until it slaps us in the face so hard that we can no longer ignore it.

I'm seeing way too much wishful thinking ("hope") in the corridors of power these days. No matter how much money the Feds print, it cannot reinflate the bubble caused by criminally negligent speculation. We cannot "hope" that things will go back to how they were, because the truth is they never were that way; it was speculation, gambling, a delusion that we were running too fast to see, a vast Ponzi scheme. And it came to the same end as all Ponzi schemes; a few rich people get even richer, and the rest of the participants get poorer.

What I want to hear is the truth, and people courageous enough to tell us: this is the way it is. It's not the end of the world, it's the end of a dreamworld. Life will be different. It'll be worse if you define the quality of life by the quantity of goods you have and the amount of energy you can waste. It can be rich in the intangible ways, the ways that matter, in love, caring, community; in meaningful work; in responsibility and integrity.

Stovies

2009-03-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

The Sausage and Vegetables recipe in the Rutabaga post is rapidly turning into one of my favorites. It is actually a Stovie, a Scottish dish resembling a casserole, but cooked on the stovetop. Stovies come in all kinds of flavors, but usually involve leftover meat and potatoes. From there on, the sky's the limit!

Making a Stovie

Choose some form of meat. Possibilities include:

Leftover roast beef, pork or lamb, cut into smallish pieces
Leftover roast poultry
Thick-sliced or chunk bacon, cut into pieces
Uncooked mild-flavored link sausage
NOT hamburger or ground meat; that would change the dish totally

Some form of appropriate cooking fat, a tablespoon or two. Consider:

olive oil, always a favorite
bacon fat or drippings (traditional Scottish), especially those from the roast you are using for the meat
chicken fat (if it's roast chicken you are using)
home-rendered lard, if you have it (commercial lard is nasty)
butter, especially with chicken

Onion--a necessity. Peel and chop.

Root vegetables. Your choice of:

Potatoes--traditional. Almost all stovies have potatoes; some have only potatoes. If you're Irish, you want "floury" potatoes. I've been using fingerlings. Some people like baking types, some people like boiling types. Wash, then peel or not as you see fit. Cut into chunks. Don't use already-cooked potatoes for this dish.
Rutabagas. Peel and cut into chunks.
Carrots. Peel and cut into chunks. Use less carrot than the other roots, so its sweet flavor does not overpower the dish.
Turnips, celery root, parsnips (a light hand on the parsnips), if you have them. Don't use beets because it'll turn a strange color of pink.

Herbs and spices. You don't want strong flavors here, which would overwhelm the flavor of the meat and roots. Some ideas:

dried or fresh parsley, a good handful.
other dried or fresh herbs, with a light hand.
ground allspice
garlic cloves, peeled and sliced, with a light hand.
ground cumin or coriander
nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste.

A little broth or water.

Proportions
Here you have a good deal of latitude. More meat? Less meat? Use about one onion per 1/2 lb of meat, and amounts of vegetables to suit yourself and what you have on hand.

Putting It Together
Peel and chop your onions. Wash, (peel), and chop your vegetables. Have the meat of your choice ready. Cut link sausages in half, cut bacon into chunks, cut leftover meats into pieces.

If you are using bacon, fry the bacon lightly to let it release some fat. Otherwise heat the oil or drippings. Stir in the onions and saute for about 5 minutes. If you are using sausage, add it now and stir for another 5 minutes. Then add the vegetables, stir a few minutes. Add the herbs, spices, salt and pepper and a little broth or water, appropriate to the amount of other ingredients. At least 1/2 cup liquid. You don't want to continue to fry the ingredients, but you aren't making stew either. After adding the water, stir in any leftover meats that you are using.

Cover the pan, let it simmer on the stove 20-30 minutes, until roots are tender. Voila!

My Favorite Stovie
This makes a generous one-dish serving for one, or enough for two people with some other dishes on the table.

1 tbs CA olive oil
1 medium CSA onion, peeled and diced
6 oz local pork sausage, raw, cut into 4 pieces
1/2 lb CO fingerling potatoes, cut in slices
1/4-1/2 lb CSA rutabaga, peeled and cut in chunks
1/4 lb CSA carrot, peeled and cut into chunks
2 tbs dried CO parsley
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp salt, some grinds of pepper

Saute the onion in the oil for a few minutes, then brown the sausages lightly. Stir in the vegetables and spices, add 1/2 cup water, cover and simmer 25 minutes.

Late Winter Update

2009-03-08T14:44:00.001-07:00

We're into March now, into the "hungry time" of the old days, when the winter stores are getting low and the new spring growth isn't out yet.

It's been very enjoyable to have a nice stock of fruits and vegetables put up from last summer and fall. So far we haven't run out of anything, but there are some things I just haven't used, or used fast enough. Here's a run-down of our stores:

1. Tomato sauce, juice, stewed tomatoes. We have really been enjoying the home-canned tomato sauce I made in large quantities last year. The flavor is superlative. I put a little tomato sauce into a pan, add a little olive oil and Italian herbs, and simmer it for 10 minutes to thicken up a bit, as pizza sauce. I also take a pint jar of tomato sauce, add bits of sausage or ground beef, herbs, and olive oil, and serve over pasta, GF pasta, or spaghetti squash. We may have enough to last until next summer's tomato season.

2. Nectarines. Still just to die for, the nectarines canned in a light honey syrup. This is a special treat for us, which we have about once a week for dessert. I put up over 40 jars, and the supply is holding out well. It might make it until the next harvest.

3. Frozen snap peas. I haven't served these much; they turned out a little mushy even when frozen in vacuum-sealed bags. But they're tasting better and better to me, as it's been many months since we had fresh.

4. Frozen green beans. Again, somewhat mushy. DH wants me to make more lactofermented green beans next year, and less frozen.

5. Fresh apples. Stored in our garage, the November Winesaps from the Western slope. I bought a whole case, which was packed in dimpled trays to keep the apples from touching each other. They are still holding out marvelously. One has rotted, out of a box of 40 lbs. We're still enjoying them tremendously. Fruit makes up our dessert for all but holiday meals. We have about 15 pounds left. The Winesaps are tremendous keepers. The Macintoshes that I had earlier, with their delicate skins, become wrinkled quickly.

6. Bread and butter pickles. I made 7 pints (water-bath canned), and have opened up and used one. They're OK, but just don't taste as good as my mother's bread and butter pickles did when I was a child.

7. Fresh pumpkins. Yes, I still have three pumpkins from my CSA awaiting me. It's amazing that they have kept this well. I need to get busy and not tempt fate. We have been enjoying the spicy pumpkin soup I posted in a previous article; we've had some pumpkin pies over the holidays; and I've used chunks in stews and chili. We've really enjoyed the toasted seeds too.

8. Frozen pesto. Somehow, I just haven't remembered to use the pesto. I have a number of small jars in the freezer; it's just a matter of getting them out. Pesto is good on pizza in place of tomato sauce, it's good on roasted or braised chicken, it's good on boiled potatoes, pasta, rice, etc.

9. Spaghetti squash. Finally got busy and cooked the spaghetti squash. The seeds are good toasted, like pumpkin seeds. You really can have it under pasta sauce, and hardly notice the difference. Spaghetti squash keeps amazingly well, often well into March, with their hard shells.

10. Onions and potatoes. Although I've been using them and enjoying them, I haven't been able to keep up with the supply of potatoes from our CSA. The potatoes have figured out spring is well on the way, and are all sprouting. BTW, you can use sprouted potatoes, as long as they are not green. Green potatoes should just be tossed, as they are somewhat poisonous. Our onions are holding out fine in the garage (which is cold but never freezes). I store onions and potatoes (separately) in paper bags on the ledge by the stairs into the garage, with the top of the bag folded over to prevent light from getting in. Onions and potatoes should not be kept in the same bag, as they do not get along and cause each other to spoil faster.

11. Lactofermented veggies. I outdid myself with lactofermentation last summer and fall. We've been through 5 jars of cucumber pickles (DH really loves them), 2 1/2 jars of green beans, one jar of tomato salsa, half a jar of sauerkraut, and half a jar of vegetable medley (tomatoes, onions, green pepper, ruby chard stems, cabbage, and dandelion greens). I haven't yet tried the bok choy kim chee or the collards, and we have one jar of cucumbers and one of salsa left. I also get lactofermented veggies from the CSA, including carrot and Napa, and delicious daikon and Napa kim chee, so we're not running out.

12. Dried vegetables: zucchini, green beans, green peppers. I've used the green peppers from time to time, though there are still some left. I don't seem to get into green beans and zucchini.

13. Dried herbs: parsley, thyme, marjoram, oregano. I've been using the parsley, though I still have plenty after making a miscalculation in ordering for the food coop which meant I bought and dried 15 bunches for home use. It doesn't really take that large a quantity of dried herbs to have enough for daily cooking.

14. Frozen broccoli: I froze extra from our CSA share, and we've used it all up. It turned out very nice.

15. Dried apples: not really using, since we still have fresh ones to eat. But when the fresh are gone, we'll enjoy them.

16. Canned plums and spiced peaches. These are both fine; I canned a smaller quantity of them than the nectarines, but I'm sure we'll use and enjoy them.

17. Carrots from our CSA. Carrots keep a really long time in the frig. Our CSA was bursting with carrots for the winter share. I put them into salads or soups, pureed with parsnips or turnips, or just peeled and cut for fresh eating. They're part of nearly every day's food. I have a multitude of carrot recipes waiting for some time and initiative on my part, too.

18. Dried plums, prunes, apricots and peaches. I bought Colorado plums (Santa Rosa variety), prune plums and apricots from the coop. We have Siberian peaches in the yard which had a nice crop last year. I dried all of these; the fruit dryer was busy seven days a week last August and September. I've been using them as snacks, but we still have plenty left. I dried them very carefully this year, picking through the partially dried trays to pull out the ones that were dry enough, continuing to dry the others. This means that the early ones were not OVERdried, hard and flavorless. It's a bit more work but the quality of the product is much better.

I put the dried fruit in quart jars this year, so if any got moldy I wouldn't lose a whole half-gallon jar of them (which is just TOO depressing). So far they have been holding out fine, and will probably make it through to the table.

If I made more desserts, we'd use more of the dried fruits. But both of us are watching our weight, and we don't need the carbohydrate-rich calories of sweet desserts. Dried fruit is sweet enough for me.

19. Staple legumes. I've started serving legumes with most dinners, cooking up black-eyed peas, baby dry limas, or other beans to have as a side dish. Another alternative is bean soups or split pea soup. They are particularly nice in winter and early spring. I'm planning to do more with the lentils that I have on hand. Lentils make good European-flavored dishes (like soups and stews), as well as Indian curry-style dishes, and spicy Mediterranean dishes.

20. EXCEPTIONS--This year I loosened the reins a bit for the winter season, and have been occasionally buying celery, escarole, and swiss chard. The cooked chard tastes really wonderful this time of year. I make salads from the escarole, a nice lightly-bitter winter green. (You can also make soup from it.) And celery is such a nice touch in salads, soups, etc., that I decided a modest quantity of California organic celery wouldn't be a bad thing to have.

This year the local eating is going much more easily than last year. This is my reward from the many hours of canning, lactofermenting, freezing and drying that I did last summer and fall. It's a pleasure to put together a meal from our stores. And my recipe research has turned up a number of favorite dishes that we enjoy, many of which I've shared with you.

Ruta... Ruta.... Ruta.... Swede!

2009-03-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

Actually the name is rutabaga (baggy root in Swedish), formerly called Swedish turnip (though it's not a turnip), thus Swede.
Rutabagas look like a big rough turnip, with a yellowish cast. But they are in the Brassica napus family, with Siberian kale and rapeseed, rather than
Brassica rapa with turnips. The ins and outs of the multitudinous Brassica clan are still being worked out by the botanists.

Rutabaga's flavor is milder and sweeter than the bite-y turnip, and it lends itself to many of the uses of potatoes as well as those of turnips. Here are some. Enjoy!

Mashed rutabaga--like mashed potatoes. Peel and cut up, cook in boiling water until tender, drain and mash with milk and butter, seasoning with salt and pepper. Or you can use half potatoes and half rutabagas.

Oven-fried rutabaga--like oven french fries. Peel 3 lbs rutabaga and cut lengthwise into french-fry shaped pieces. Mix 1/3 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese, 1 teaspoon paprika, and 1 teaspoon garlic salt. Toss rutabaga with 1 tbs olive oil, then sprinkle the seasonings over them as evenly as possible. Bake in oven at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, until tender inside and crisp outside.

Baked rutabaga--like baked potatoes. Don't choose the huge honker rutabagas for this, but more modest sized ones. Scrub very well and bake in oven until fork-tender. Cut open, add a dollop of butter or sour cream, and enjoy.

In vegetable soups--like turnips and/or potatoes. Peel and cut into suitable-sized pieces in mixed vegetable soups. It will cook right along with other roots.

In roasted root vegetables--alongside turnips, potatoes, carrots, parsnip, onion, and/or leeks. Whatever you have on hand. Peel and cut all vegetables into equal-sized chunks; cut leeks into 1" lengths. Toss with some olive oil, sprinkle with herbs such as rosemary or thyme, and salt and pepper to taste. Bake at 350 to 400 degrees (very forgiving) when you are baking something else. Turn occasionally. They will take 45 to 60 minutes, depending on the temperature and how big your chunks are.

In pot roast--with carrots, other vegetables. Brown a roast of beef in a little oil, add one or two chopped onions, liquid to half-cover (liquid can include up to 1 cup tomato juice or wine), salt and pepper to taste. Simmer meat slowly for 3-4 hours till tender. Peel and cut up rutabaga, carrot, potato, celery root, etc., any roots that you have except for beet. Arrange around the roast in the kettle, put the lid on again, and simmer another 30 minutes until tender. Taste for seasoning; add salt and pepper if needed. You could also add a little oregano or marjoram at the beginning of the cooking process, or other herbs to your taste. You can thicken with roux if you like: work equal parts of butter and flour together, form into small balls and stir into liquid. Use about 1 tbs flour for each cup of liquid you want to thicken. This works just as well with rice flour for the gluten-intolerant.

Stovetop sausage and root vegetables--In kettle, heat 1 tbs oil, add 1 lb mild pork link sausages cut in half, and brown lightly. Add 2 large chopped onions, stir and brown another 5 minutes, then add 1 pound each of peeled cubed rutabaga and potato, and 1/2 pound peeled cut carrot. Add 2 tbs dried or 1/4 cup fresh parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add 1/3 cup stock or water, cover, and simmer about 30 minutes, until tender.

Cornish pasties. Rutabagas are traditional in Cornish pasties. Make your favorite double-crust pie crust recipe, chill while making filling. Mix together 3/4 lb round steak cut into 3/4" cubes; 2 medium baking potatoes, peeled and sliced; 1 medium onion chopped; 1 medium carrot peeled and sliced;
1/2 lb of rutabaga peeled and chopped; salt and pepper to taste. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Divide dough into four parts and roll each out into a 6" circle. Place 1/4 of filling on one side of each circle, dot each with 1 tbs butter, fold over the other half and crimp closed. Gently place on baking sheet, and bake one hour.
I would not advise a gluten-free crust for Cornish pasties; it just wouldn't hold together.

This should help you get through your winter stock of rutabagas, or allow you to be on speaking terms with a new vegetable friend. Happy eating!

The Wisdom of the American People

2009-02-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I read an article on five things missing from the stimulus plan. The Stimulus Plan: 5 Missing Pieces. No. 5 was: please tell us whether it is better for the country for us to save or to spend? (The rest of the "missing pieces" are well worth the read as well.)

Actually, the wisdom of the American people has answered this question. The household savings rate went from -2% sometime last year to +6% now. A nation full of households has decided that living well beyond our means is no longer a smart thing to do. The strange compulsion so many people had, to spend and spend and spend as if we were rich, as if the stock market would go up for ever, as if real estate price would climb into the stratosphere, is suddenly broken. Now we're suffering the hangover from years of excess. But who could ever believe double-digit growth for ever, in the sober light of morning....

The good we do by controlling our spending and paying off debt:
* With every payment we make, we reassure the banks and credit unions that they will not be left holding the bag.
* With every payment we make, we free up some capital for the banks and credit unions to lend to responsible people and businesses.
* With every payment we make, we reduce our household financial risk in case of unemployment, wage cuts, hourly cuts, health problems, and life's other unexpected financial challenges.

This is better for the country in the long run than for us to continue to run up debt supporting the "Retail Space Bubble" that has grown in the last few years. Based on truly unsustainable spending by the American "consumer" (a word I hate), chains opened up way too many new stores, and too many people started up new retail businesses.

It's sad when stores close and retail salespeople lost their McJobs. It's even sadder when someone has invested their life savings in starting a new business, well-thought-out or not, and has to close their doors. Running the gauntlet of the new frugality will mean that the best stores will survive--the ones that sell 1. quality items 2. we need at 3. reasonable prices. And the stores with a poor business model, or too much competition, will fail. This is the real world. The pie doesn't keep getting bigger forever.

Another example. A month or more ago, I was reading articles about what it would take to save the Big Three automakers. One class of article were interviews with leading economists and commentators. Most of them were not employees of the companies in question. They said, in general, that the Big Three need to push wages down, shed workers, and slip out of legacy commitments for health care and pensions, and that was all that would save them. The second class of article talked to individual people, the wise Americans. They said, "They need to start making cars that people want to buy." Bingo! You get the prize.

If the Big Three paid way less people way less money, cut out their pensions and medical insurance, and made cars people aren't interested in buying, they would still go belly-up. Joe Six-pack at the gas station knows that the price of gasoline will go back up. He is not very interested in buying a big gas-hog unless it is a necessity for his business or his large family. But the talking heads and the CEOs and CFOs still don't get it.

Now a little blast at the word "Consumer". A consumer is somebody that uses up resources. It is the opposite of producer, somebody who makes something, improves something, or saves something. If you start a bonfire and throw dollar bills onto it, or $200 athletic shoes, you are a consumer. Are we rightly called the Consumer Society? I hope not. At the end of World War II, with much of the world in shambles, the U.S. was the biggest producer of goods in the world. We could call ourselves a Producer Society then.

Let's just retire the word Consumer as applied to U.S. citizens. To a store you should be a Customer, not a Consumer. To an arts organization, you are a Patron (Matron?). We hope that more of us will have the chance to become Producers again; people need jobs, and the U.S. needs to produce things to restore balance to the world economy.

What can we do?
* Keep paying off debt.
* When you buy something, try to buy American-made. I keep harping on this. Let the stores you patronize know that you are interested in buying American-made goods and giving jobs to American workers.
* Buy local foods and support your local farmers and ranchers.
* Buy locally-made foods and suppport local small business (and encourage them to buy local ingredients).

The dollars we spend are small. But the dollars we all spend are a huge force in our country and the world, for good or ill. Put your dollars where your own best interests lie.

Recipes next time.....

Parsnips--A Winter Favorite

2009-02-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

Here as promised is the amazing Parsnip Spice Cake recipe, and some other ideas. Parsnips are a great winter food. Their flavor improves after they are touched by frost. Then they last, if kept cool, until well into the spring. They have a flavor which contributes well to other winter foods.

Parsnip Spice Cake
You can fix this either wheat-based or gluten-free.

2 eggs
1/2 cup sunflower, canola, or olive oil
2/3 cup sugar or succanat, or 1/2 cup honey
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground allspice
2 cups grated parsnip
1/3 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped pecans, walnuts, or hazelnuts
1 cup Golden Buffalo wheat flour
OR 1 cup unbleached white flour
OR 1 cup brown rice flour

Grease a 9" springform pan. Mix eggs, oil, sugar, baking soda, salt, and spices. Stir in parsnips, raisins and nuts and mix well. Then stir in your choice of flour and mix. You're right, there is no milk or water added, but the recipe works.

Spread the thick batter evenly in the cake pan and smooth the top. Bake at 350 degrees about 45 minutes, until done. Let cool 10 minutes, then remove the springform and put on a plate for serving.

You could bake this in a 9" cake pan, well greased, and invert it onto a rack for cooling, if you don't have a springform pan.

You could change the spicing to your own taste, or use dried cranberries or other dried fruit in place of the raisins. After it is baked, you could sprinkle it with powdered sugar, or frost with a cream cheese frosting, but I think that would be over the top. It makes a fine moist cake or coffee cake as is. It's fun to tell people it's parsnip cake and watch their looks of incredulity (even disgust), until they taste it. You don't have to apologize for this nutritious treat.

Irish Parsnip Puree
1 lb parsnips, peeled and sliced
1 largish carrot, peeled and sliced
1 large potato, peeled and sliced
1 apple, peeled and cut up (optional)
1 cup broth
1/2 tsp allspice
2 tbs butter

Put vegetables and apple in kettle, add broth. Simmer until tender. Drain, reserving liquid. Run through blender, using reserved liquid as necessary for consistency. Return to kettle, add allspice and butter, salt and pepper to taste.

Parsnip Go-With

* You can add peeled and cut-up parsnip to many kinds of soups. It is particularly good in black-eyed pea soup or split pea soup. Try it where you would add turnip, or use them both.

* Add to oven-roasted vegetable mixtures along with carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions, leeks, rutabagas, or what-have-you. They will cook perfectly well along with other roots cut up similarly. (Oven-roasted vegetables take 45 minutes to an hour in a 350-degree oven, or an hour at 325, or less time at 400. You can generally fit them alongside other things you are baking. Toss vegetables in a little olive oil, sprinkle on your choice of herbs and a little salt and pepper.)

* Saute peeled cut-up parsnips in butter in a skillet, then add a little liquid and herbs of your choice and braise until tender (maybe 20 minutes, more or less, depending on the size of the pieces). You may top with sour cream, yogurt, or sharp cheese, and/or finely chopped walnuts.

* In a little water or stock, cook equal amounts of cut-up carrot and parsnips (maybe 25-30 minutes). Puree in blender, adding a little cream or milk, and salt and pepper to taste. You can do the same with with parsnip and turnip. Decorate with chopped parsley and a pat of butter.

* You can use grated parsnip in place of carrot in any baked good such as cakes, cookies or quick loaves, or use half and half grated parsnip and carrot.

Have fun with them. If you get them in your CSA share, don't let them sit in the frig until they are really past it (which will take a while). Parsnips are a valuable addition to the cornucopia of winter foods.

Natural Limits

2009-01-30T14:59:00.000-08:00

It's time to think about natural limits. This can be a bit frightening to those of us brought up to believe that the sky's the limit, there will always be more of everything, our children will always have it better than we did, the Dow Jones will always go up, well, you put in your favorite pipe dream here....

Overshoot is a fact of life on a finite planet. In the web of life, some life forms follow a slow and cautious path, having evolved ways of not overrunning their subsistence. Other life forms go for growth, growth, growth, inevitably followed by crash. Even a slight knowledge of the growth cycles of forms of life on this planet corroborates this fact. Lemming populations follow a bubble of growth, outrunning food supplies, then a crash. Their predators follow a similar pattern.

The motto of the cancer cell is growth at all costs, even at the cost of the life form it inhabits. This bears a startling similarity to the raison d'etre of the corporation: growth at all costs. Corporations are a very simple form of life. And the less supervision they have, the more they will adhere to their simple goals of more growth and profit for themselves, and externalizing the costs of their decisions.

There are some qualities that we have which are infinite. A teacher once told me that "the treasure which we have, which is Attention, is infinite". Yes. We can always pay better attention to ourselves, our bodies, our families, our earth, our behavior. And, most spiritual traditions believe in an infinite spirit, a universal soul or God. Most people believe that there is an infinite place of delight for us after death.

But there is no way that there is an infinite amount of physical "stuff" for every person on Earth; there is not an infinite amount of energy available to the ever-growing population of Earth. There is not an infinite amount of food, or an infinite number of acres of land on which to grow it. If we can't bring ourselves to live within our means on this planet, there are four predators which will do it for us: Famine, Pestilence, Plague and War.

Let's look at some practical, near-at-hand examples of limits.

1. Residential real estate cannot continue to rise in value far faster than the average take-home pay of the people who buy the homes. The real-estate bubble started about 2000. Take-home pay (adjusted for inflation) has been flat for decades. The real estate meltdown will stop when the relationship of home prices and take-home pay reaches historic norms again. You can't trick this process, or have the government bail it out by maintaining irrationally high real-estate values. If take-home pay sinks, as it looks likely, the real estate will need to sink to match.

2. The stock market cannot rise in a stable way any faster than the basic value-creating abilities of our society. This includes what we make, what we grow, what we dig out of the ground. Anything more than that is speculation and leverage. Leverage by its very nature cannot continue forever; it is a Ponzi scheme. Unfortunately, the news is even worse on this front. At the end of World War II, the U.S. had the largest manufacturing sector of any nation on the planet. Now, our claim to fame is that we have the largest retail sector, and the largest imbalance of trade. Well, you just can't make money selling "BUYING". Not in the long run, anyway.

What needs to happen? First, we need to start making things again. We need to restore the manufacturing industry in this country. We're smart enough to do this. Second, we need to stop buying cheap stuff from other countries, much of it worthless, some of it toxic. Third, we need to put some controls on the rampant leverage some organizations and traders are using to cheat the system and pull the nation's long-term value into their own short-term pockets.

3. We need less retail space. This is painful, I know, especially when it is a small business started by someone using their life savings. It is absolutely impossible for the people in the U.S. to continue the buying spree they have been on for the last decade. Can't be done. No more residential ATM. So, most unfortunately, small and large retail businesses have ramped up as if not just the spending, but the growth in spending, was going to last forever.

What we can do to help: support small businesses, local businesses. Keep the money in our community. Support local families with the dollars that you do spend. It is not our job to support people in China, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the Barbados, etc., by taking out debt that we cannot afford.

4. There is a natural limit to the energy available on the planet; almost all of it is nuclear energy--from our sun. The Earth has a sun budget coming in every day in the form of direct heating, ocean waves, wind, and hydroelectric. (How do you suppose that water got up into the sky in the first place?) The other basic source is Earth's natural radioactivity, which came from the dust of dead stars. We can tap that with geothermal energy installations. And Earth-based nuclear power plants, though there are lots of unsolved problems involved in that. (Peak uranium, anyone?)

We've been living way beyond our means on fossil fuels. They're called fossil fuels because it takes geologic time to make any more. The readily-obtainable fossil fuels are half gone, the easier half too I might add. Getting oil out of shale and tar sands is tremendously expensive in fuel and water, and it's uncertain that the world can afford it long term. Like somebody who has been poor for a long time and suddenly gets a big windfall, we've been drunk on the wonderful nearly-free energy we found. So much of it was wasted, and is still being wasted now.

The fossil fuels had a role to play in the planet's thermostat too. When the fossil fuels were laid down, the Earth was very hot, and the carbon dioxide level was very high. This carbon was sequestered under the ground, even under the oceans, where it couldn't do any harm. Like children, we found the wonderful treasure trove of carbon, dug and pumped it up, and are busy burning it, putting that dangerous carbon dioxide back into the air. Not much surprise that the Earth is heading toward a hot future.

5. There is a natural limit to the ability of Earth's natural systems to detoxify all the waste we're putting into it. When the population of the Earth was 50 million, with low technology, there was no problem. There was always clean air and water over the next mountain. No more. We have filled the planet, and now are filling the air and oceans with our waste. This is pretty serious, since we would like to have a human-friendly Earth in thirty years, in one hundred years, in a thousand years. Sure, all of us living now will be gone. But I don't want to think that my actions are leaving a toxic waste dump for my great-great-grandchildren.

This post has gotten into some serious long-term issues. Panic is not called for, and won't help us. In future posts, I want to consider a simple question: what would it take to have food on the table 100 years from now? 100 years is not that much time. The children of children living now could be alive then. Your grandchildren, perhaps, or their children. What actions can we take now to save something for them? to build something for them? to restore something for them? It is a matter of simple integrity in our lives to leave the world better than we found it, not worse. Starting from the goal of food within 100 miles, which is still a valuable goal, let's begin to look at "food for 100 years".

We will probably find that the two have a lot in common.

January: What We're Eating

2009-01-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

We're pretty much on winter rations now; it takes a little time to adjust from eating fresh food in harvest and putting it up, to admitting the harvest is over and eating the stored foods.

Fresh-----
We're still eating fresh apples, the late fall Winesaps from the Western Slope, that have been keeping wonderfully fresh and crisp in our cool garage. Winesaps are marvelous storage apples, good for fresh eating or pies.

We have four different kinds of potatoes: Yukons from our CSA, blue potatoes, red thumb fingerlings, and Russian banana fingerlings from White Mountain Farms in southern Colorado. They're holding out well in the cool garage in paper bags, protected from light.

We're just finishing up the Colorado red onions I bought in the fall from the cooperative, and have plenty of yellow onions from our CSA.

We still have pumpkins from our CSA; they're holding out remarkably well in a fairly cool and dry room. I need to push myself to use them, while they are still good. I used the other squash I had. The spicy pumpkin soup is a big favorite of ours. And cubed pumpkin goes nicely in stews or chile.

I fixed Parsnip Spice Cake recently; I'll post the recipe next time. Kind of like carrot cake; very moist and good. I used brown rice flour (CA), raisins (CA), and pecans (OK). It doesn't need frosting; I amazed our hosts by taking it to a potluck. Parsnip cake?

We're getting loads of carrots from our CSA; there is never a problem finding good uses for carrots. We're also getting a steady supply of daikon, potatoes, onions, leeks, beets and turnips, as well as several kinds of cabbage.

Frozen----
We've been eating the broccoli, green beans, and snap peas I froze last summer. I think I will cut down on the blanching time next season, since all of them are a little softer than I'd like.

Dried----
I've been throwing some dried bell peppers into soups and stews; they are very nice and I think I'll make more of them next season. I've also been munching on dried peaches, both homegrown and Colorado organic, prunes and apricots. We don't fix many desserts since we both have to watch our weight, so we usually have our fruit as its own sweet self.

I've been using home-dried herbs in cooking, particularly parsley. I ended up getting way too much parsley at the coop, and dried several jars full, but it's coming in handy now.

Canned----
We're really enjoying the nectarines I put up in light honey syrup. I loved the fresh Colorado nectarines so much, I got carried away preserving them, with 40 pint jars put up. Oh well; we can have one a week until the next harvest. I've also opened up several jars of spiced peaches, which make a wonderful ice cream topping. We've also had several jars of the Santa Rosa plums.

All the tomato products I use now are from tomatoes I preserved last summer and fall: tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and juice. I love the flavor. I find that homemade tomato sauce is not as thick as commercial, so for pizza topping I just cook it down a little more with herbs and olive oil.

Lactofermented----
We have really been enjoying the cucumbers and green beans I put up last summer. We've polished off four jars of cukes and two of green beans. The green beans get cut up for salads, or served as a side dish. I have one jar of cukes and one jar of green beans left. Next year: more pickled green beans, fewer frozen.

I also made several kinds of sauerkraut which are good, and lactofermented salsa which turned out really well. I haven't bought salsa in over a year.

Staples----
I've been cooking blackeyed peas and dry baby lima beans, having one or the other on hand most of the time as a side dish. We've also been having some pinto beans. I haven't yet cooked the black beans we got at the coop in January, though I had a very nice dish of them at a friend's house. I've got Colorado garbanzos soaking now.

DH gets his weekly homemade pizza, made with Golden Buffalo flour (NE), homemade tomato sauce, Rocky Plains sausage (Kersey CO), mushrooms (Hazel Dell, Windsor), fresh mozzarella (Windsor Dairy), and sometimes black olives (CA), and a little non-local trim in the form of artichoke hearts.

I've been enjoying the gluten-free oats (WY), or Colorado millet for breakfast. Local eggs are hard to find this time of year; sometimes we have to settle for "store" eggs. Maybe this summer we can get our own chickens again.

I've been cooking the Colorado quinoa, mainly in the form of Quinoa Cooked Like Pasta. Use lots of boiling salted water, add a cup of quinoa, and let cook for about 15 minutes, then drain. This is nice with (homemade) basil pesto, or other sauce.

Meat, etc.----
Most of our meat comes from Rocky Plains in the form of Colorado-raised buffalo, pork and lamb. We've been enjoying the pastured poultry available through Eastern Plains. One chicken makes several nice meals, and then the broth and meat from the carcass makes several more in the form of soups and casseroles. So although the chickens are expensive by the pound, they have a tremendous amount of flavor which is very satisfying and make a lot of nutritious servings.

Seafood is a miniscule part of our diet; once every few months, a meal of Alaskan wild-caught salmon.

Exceptions----
Compared to last year, I've eased up a little on the restrictions. I've bought balsamic vinegar, mustard, occasionally artichoke hearts, and regular and gluten-free pasta for infrequent meals. And for New Year's Eve, a carton of ice cream as a treat. Try butter pecan ice cream, home-canned spiced peaches, and a little Bailey's Irish Cream liqueur poured over. Yum!

Although I've loosened the restrictions, we're still using way more local foods than last year, when I was using the on-hand foods we still had. Central to our diet this winter are the fruits and vegetables I've stored in various ways, and the staples acquired through the cooperative.

I'm keeping track of how much I stored, and how much I'm using, so I can calibrate my efforts for next summer and fall.

Comment----
I'm enthusing over these foods that we have, and sometimes I say we eat like "kings and queens", but really, these are simple ordinary foods, not expensive. And we're eating not like kings and queens, but like ordinary people did 100 years ago, foods from diversified farms and gardens. The foods are fresh and flavorful, and satisfying.

By getting vegetables through our CSA, and bulk foods through the coop, we can get high quality for very reasonable prices. Cooking and putting up is essential for this kind of eating. You can't buy nectarines in light honey syrup no matter how much you have to spend, but for a modest cost you can make your own.

Like lots of things in life, it's the attention that you pay that makes the difference. Take time to find local foods; take time to cook; take time to preserve them for the winter. Cook and eat them with appreciation and respect. And give thanks for the bounty.

Pumpkin--More than Pie Timber

2009-01-11T15:50:00.000-08:00

We still have several nice-looking pumpkins from our CSA, and one from my garden. They keep fairly well at cool room temperatures, but it's time to use them. If you have pumpkins stored in your house, look them over every week or so, and be sure to immediately cut up and use any that are starting to get soft spots.

I have a pumpkin article from last year too: A Pumpkin of Your Own.

Fresh Pumpkin Pie
For this recipe you will need about 2 cups of homemade pureed pumpkin, just a little more than a pint jar if you have canned or frozen pumpkin. Commercial pumpkin is great, but it's mixed with squash and has some water squeezed out of it, so it is a little thicker. However, in a pinch you could use it in this recipe, just increase the milk by 1/4 cup. For your own pumpkin, be sure to start with pie pumpkins, not jack-o-lantern types.

2 cups pureed pumpkin (local)
2/3 cup honey (local)
1/2 tsp salt
3 to 4 teaspoons spices, chosen in your favorite combination from ginger, cinnamon, cloves (less), allspice, mace, nutmeg, or cardamon powder
1 cup milk or light cream
4 beaten eggs (for extra-large, use 3)
1 9" uncooked piecrust, preferably homemade

Heat oven to 450 degrees while you mix up pumpkin, honey, salt, spices, milk and beaten eggs. You can use a whisk or a mixer. Pour into pie shell, bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then reduce heat and bake at 350 until done, about 45-50 minutes. You can test it with a table knife, inserted into the filling about half-way out from the center. If the knife comes out clean, the filling is done. Good with whipped cream.

For a 10" pie pan, increase the recipe by half (3 cups pumpkin, etc).

Making pie crust at home is really not hard, and your results are bound to be better than commercial crusts, since you are using better ingredients. Here are recipes for "normal" wheat-based piecrust, and gluten-free piecrust.

Homemade wheat pie crust
1 1/3 cup white flour, Golden Buffalo flour, or whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 tsp salt
6 tbs homemade lard (for pete sake don't use shortening or commercial lard, but you can use butter)
1 tbs vinegar
a little cold water

Mix flour and salt, then rub in the lard by hand until particles are small. Add the vinegar, then a couple of tablespoons cold water, and knead the dough together. Add more cold water until the dough hangs together. Roll out on floured surface, transfer to pan. Fill and bake.

Homemade gluten-free pie crust
1/2 cup millet flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
1/3 cup sweet rice flour
1 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp salt
6 tbs homemade lard or butter
1 tbs vinegar
a little cold water

Mix flours and salt. Rub in lard or butter. Then add vinegar and a couple of tablespoons cold water, kneading until it holds together, adding a little more water as needed.

Now, instead of driving yourself crazy trying to roll out this delicate dough, pat it into the pie pan with your fingers. Take some time to get it even on the bottom and up the sides. Fill and bake.

Cubed Pumpkin--Ingredient
Start with a pumpkin, cut in two on the equator, scoop out the seeds, separate them from the strings but do not rinse, and roast the seeds in the oven at 325 degrees with a teaspoon of oil and a little salt, until they are nice and roasted. With the remaining flesh, cut in narrow strips, cut off the remaining strings and the shell, and cut the meat into small pieces. If you do a good-size pumpkin you will have enough for several recipes. It keeps for several days in your frig.

Pumpkin Soup
2 1/2 cups peeled cubed pumpkin
1 goodsize carrot, peeled and cut into small chunks
1 medium onion, peeled and diced
1 garlic clove, minced
2 1/2 cups chicken broth or water
salt and pepper to taste
1/3 cup heavy cream, or 1/2 cup half and half
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup fresh parsley, finely chopped, or 2 tablespoons dried
1/2 to 1 tsp chipotle chili powder (ground smoked jalapenos)
1 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice

Put into kettle pumpkin, onion, garlic, carrot, broth or water, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, simmer 30-40 minutes, until tender. Let cool a few minutes, then blend the soup in a blender and return to the pan. Add olive oil, cream, and spices. Add more water or broth if it is too thick. Simmer ten minutes, then taste for seasoning. You can add more chipotle, cinnamon, allspice, salt or pepper as you like.

Millet Pilaf
This recipe combines two of my favorite foods. Millet has a natural bitter coating like quinoa, which needs to be removed by toasting or by pouring boiling water over and soaking overnight. This recipe uses toasting.

1 cup hulled millet
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium or 1 large chopped onion
1 to 1 1/2 cups peeled cubed pumpkin
one quart chicken broth, vegetable broth, or water
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
optional: one cup sour cream
optional: one cup sliced fresh mushrooms

Toast the millet in a dry cast iron or other heavy skillet until it starts to brown. Remove. Add oil to skillet, saute the onions, then add back the millet, the pumpkin, salt and pepper. Transfer to casserole dish, and pour the broth or water over it. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 1 1/2 hours. Keep a lookout and add more broth if it gets too dry. When done, stir in the sour cream if you like. You can also add the sliced mushrooms to the saute, before the baking step. Garlic could also be a nice addition at this point.

Save Some for the Kids

2008-12-30T12:01:00.001-08:00

Ten or twenty years ago, I often saw bumper stickers on the backs of huge motorhomes on the highway: "We're Spending our Children's Inheritance". This, I think, was supposed to be cute. Now the $90,000 motorhomes are sitting forlornly with For Sale signs, worth a small fraction of their purchase price. The former vacationers? Who knows? Some of them have run completely through their children's inheritance, and are wondering how they can make payments on their own house. The formerly-cute statement is somewhat chilling.

But in a larger sense, that is what we are doing as a community, as a nation, and even as a world. We were gifted with a finite but huge inheritance from Mother Earth in the form of petroleum. In a little over a hundred years, we have squandered about half of it. (That's what Peak Oil means: half of it is gone--the easier half.)
The other half of that petroleum we leave for not just our heirs, but all succeeding generations of humans. And we're not showing significant signs of slowing down our consumption for the purposes of saving some for future generations.

At the beginning of the 20th century, we had a world endowed with ice caps and glaciers, pure air, an Aral Sea. Nature had put a lot of the carbon away safely in the petroleum, in the coal, in the limestone, in the permafrost, in the frozen clathrates in the ocean, in the forests that covered a significant portion of the globe. In the process of claiming our inheritance and that of our descendants, we're cranking that carbon back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

Two hundred years ago the oceans were packed full of beautiful lifeforms, in a highly complex web of life based on plankton. We found that many of these lifeforms were tasty or otherwise useful. The incredible bounty of the oceans made it seem that we could keep pulling out fish and shellfish forever, as much as we wanted, and not even have an effect. Unfortunately, the 20th century factory ships depleted most of the fish stocks, and pollution from land-based activities is causing major dead zones in most estuaries. Plankton is said to be down by 70% over levels earlier in the last century. Another inheritance taken from our kids, and their kids, for generations.

Bringing it closer to home, here in Larimer County we're busily engaged in paving over good farmland, putting up yet more retail space, or developing yet more subdivisions far from the city centers. The only thing that has slowed this process down is the real estate meltdown, not any consideration for preserving the land so that future generations can have food. Our priorities are cock-eyed. Do we need more McMansions, or do we need food? Your choice. As petroleum gets more expensive, importing food from every other country in the world becomes more expensive, and industrial-style farming becomes less cost-effective.

In the economy, we're rolling up a Mt Everest of debt for succeeding generations to cope with, or not, as the case may be. Greed doesn't look so "good" these days as it did in the 90s. The U.S. has been living so far beyond their means, drawing down the inflated equity of their homes, spending their way into their own mountains of debt, that the rest of the world which has been selling us all this stuff is sinking too, now that we're tapped out.

I don't have the answers to these enormous problems. This is too big for one person to have the answers. We all need to be thinking about ways to preserve the wealth and bounty of the natural world for our grandkids, their grandkids, and on into the future. One of the best compliments you can give for someone who died is that he or she made the world a better place than they found it. The generations now on the Earth (us) need to be thinking about how we can make the world a better place, individually and in communities.

We know that the future won't look like the 20th century, and we know that it certainly won't look like the breathless extrapolations common in 20th century science fiction: everybody with their own little copter to get around, colonies on Mars, endless supplies of everything, endless wealth for every inhabitant of the planet.

It's a shock to realize that the supply of everything on Earth is NOT infinite. As you spend some time thinking about it, you go down through layers and levels of thinking. Petroleum scarce? plastics scarce. Then you can think about how our lives are surrounded and supported by plastics. Petroleum scarce? we're not going to be buzzing off to Europe or Australia every year on vacation; maybe we won't be able to see far-flung family members very often, or ever. Natural gas scarce? How do we heat our homes? How do we generate electricity? That opens up another thousand questions. But putting our heads firmly in the sand won't solve the problems, and leaving it for "future generations", i.e. our grandkids, to solve shows a total lack of character and integrity on our part.

So I'm sending this question out into the community: What can we do to "save some for our kids"? What I'd like to save for my grandchildren's children:

* A HEALTHY OCEAN. Let's clean up the plastic waste now, and take steps to ensure that no new plastic waste goes into the ocean. Let's stop overfishing NOW, not in decades to come when the fish are gone. And I don't believe you can have a healthy ocean without the humans controlling their greenhouse gas emissions.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Stop buying fish! Cut down on your plastic consumption. Work hard to prevent pollution from entering the rivers and the oceans.

* HEALTHY SMALL FARMS. This means healthy topsoil and lots of small working farms, and lots of farmers; farms in every locality growing food for their neighbors. We have overshot with the principle that "efficiency" means less human labor and more use of fossil energy, fossil water (aquifers) and agricultural poisons. The most productive farmland in the world is in the form of individual small plots, carefully tended. We have land to do that, in our own backyards, in our public areas, on our schoolgrounds. We just need the will to do it.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Plant a Victory Garden. Support local farms by buying their produce. Work with government entities to protect and expand small farms, and get farms in the hands of young people who want to farm.

* AN INDUSTRIAL BASE in the U.S. This means jobs, where people actually make things and add value. Retail sales and services are the branches and leaves of the tree of the economy. We've cut our tree down at the roots (by outsourcing practically all real manufacturing), and it's just taking a little time for all those unsupported branches and leaves to fall, but fall they will. Have you tried to buy a kitchen brush lately? All from China. Not some but all; every one. Trying to buy American-made goods is an exercise in frustration.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Look for American-made goods, and complain to your store if none are available. Support re-skilling, both personal and industrial; this means that you learn some skills such as knitting, sewing, cooking, gardening, home repair, etc., and support for vocational training for young people (and older, too, for that matter).

* A SOLVENT NATION, STATE, CITY, AND FAMILY. When I think about this subject, the Oxygen Mask analogy comes to mind: Put on your own mask before you help others with theirs. The first thing we all need to do is balance our own household budgets, and live within our means. The CEO of 3M Co., George Buckley, said recently: "...the first responsibility we have as the leaders of companies is to make sure that we ensure the health and survival of our own companies first, not necessarily other people's companies, or, for that matter, the whole U.S. economy." When households, and companies, live within their means, they have a chance of accumulating some assets which can be put to work building factories, making jobs, and improving the community. When our nation stops trying to be a world empire, and becomes a fiscally conservative and responsible world citizen, all the countries in the world will benefit, including ourselves. But the transition will be painful, and we have to expect that.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Live within your means! Buy less, pay down debt, bring your material expectations back in line with reality. Choose frugality instead of excess. Choose sensible investments (which can be many things besides stocks or mutual funds) that pay back long-term in reduced energy use, and increased benefits to our communities. Help your local governmental entities in finding ways to balance their budgets too. Let your congressmen/women know how you feel.

I get discouraged sometimes, but I have not lost hope. I think our kids and grandkids can have a good life. It won't look like what we imagined, and it will be worse in some ways, but it can also be better in some ways. I can foresee them getting off the rat race that we're on at the beginning of the 21st century, figuring out what's important in their lives (besides material goods), and having the pleasure of making things that are real, useful, and beautiful.

Happy New Year!

Some Winter Recipes

2008-12-22T15:33:00.000-08:00

I'm making a determined effort to use my stored foods. It's really not a problem with the tomato sauce, and the delicious nectarines in light honey syrup. We're also using the jars of lactofermented sauerkraut, green beans, and cucumbers I made last summer. I think I'll need to make more of them next year. The beans taste especially nice in winter salads, cut small.

Winter Salad

Make a bed of cut-up or torn winter greens. Escarole is particularly nice in the winter, with that little touch of bitterness. You can use a little slivered radicchio for color. Napa cabbage, sliced fine, is also good. And we get sugarhat chicory from our CSA, though you probably won't find it in a store, another lovely slightly-bitter winter green.

Decorate with some sliced carrots, and ripe olives. If you have them on hand, add chopped lactofermented green beans or cucumbers. Or some lactofermented beets. Regular pickles can be used too, as long as they are not too sweet.

To make a chef salad, cut up roast turkey breast and cooked local sausage into small pieces, and sprinkle across the top. A few small pieces of local cheese add a nice touch.

Make a simple salad dressing of olive or sunflower oil, and vinegar or lactofermented pickle juice. Shake and pour over. Ratio: about 2/3 oil to 1/3 vinegar for flavor.

Put Up Or Shut Up Stew
The following makes about 4 servings, and makes a quick hearty meal.
Feel free to substitute.

1 pound local grassfed ground beef
a little cooking oil or lard
one medium local onion, peeled and chopped
1 pint home-canned tomato sauce
1/2 cup home-dried green beans, or 1 cup home-frozen green beans
1/2 cup home-dried bell peppers, or 1 cup fresh chopped peppers
1 cup peeled winter squash such as butternut, in smallish pieces
1 tablespoon good-quality chili powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
salt and pepper to taste

Brown the ground beef in the oil with the onion. Then add the remaining ingredients, and bring to simmer. Cover and cook for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the squash cubes are tender.

Serving suggestions:
--Top with lactofermented salsa (or other salsa).
--For low-carb meal: serve as is in a bowl.
--Serve on a bed of something you have prepared: rice, millet, quinoa, pasta, ??
--Roll up in a wrap.
--Sprinkle with grated cheese if desired.

Risotto with Pumpkin and Radicchio
Something to do with pumpkin besides pie (not that there's anything wrong with pie....)

1 cup peeled pumpkin, seeds removed (and toasted separately) and cut small
1/2 cup chopped radicchio
1 cup short-grain white rice (arborio is best, but sushi rice will also do the job; I'm not a risotto snob)
1 smallish onion, peeled and diced fine
2 tbs olive oil
3 tbs butter
3 cups chicken broth, kept hot
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Head the olive oil and 2 tbs butter in a pan, add onion and saute until soft. Add pumpkin cubes and 1/2 cup broth, simmer 5 minutes. Add rice, salt and pepper, stir for a few minutes. As the rice absorbs the broth, keep stirring and adding another 1/4 cup of broth. After about 10 minutes, add the radicchio. Continue stirring and adding broth. When all the broth is added, stir in the remaining tbs of butter and the parmesan. Continue to stir for another 2 minutes or so.

Living Within Our Means

2008-12-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

Slightly off-topic for local foods, but too important to let slide. This is a distressing time in this country. The problems we as a nation have gotten ourselves into, from decades of overspending, waste and greed, are not going to vanish quickly.

I get the sense that many Americans are finally waking up from a fantasy: that there would always be MORE MORE MORE. More spending, based on more borrowing. The piper would never have to be paid. The important thing was getting the McMansion, the new cars, closetsful of clothes to put in all those double walk-in closets, and all the latest consumer electronics. So many of us have been living far beyond our means, floating on a pink cloud of credit that is evaporating and raining down pink slips all over the country.

Well, the fact is that in the long run, you must live within your means. This is true for individuals, families, cities, states, and the nation. When you've loaded up on credit and owe a lot of money, living within your means becomes even more painful. Not only do you have to cut your "standard of living" (whatever that means), but you have to cut down even further to pay off the debt you loaded up on.

We can't expect the government to bail everybody out, and we can't expect the government to take the lead on bringing us back to fiscal good sense--what used to be called "conservative" fiscal management before "conservative" came to mean tax cuts and huge increases in debt and a pointless and expensive war. I'm holding out for the original meaning of conservative as someone who conserves, something we can be proud to count among our personal qualities. If we want the government to change, we need to model that change in our own lives. We need to lead, and they will follow.

This fall, we've already seen major changes indicating that people are waking up from the fantasy and watching their spending. Some people have stopped using credit cards, which make it just too easy to buy. You have to think about your spending when you fork over dollars or write a check.

Here are some other ideas for living within our means.

1. (and only too obvious) Just stop buying the frills; no more retail therapy. Spending more than you can afford is not really fun in the long run. Spending more than you can afford on your kids is not doing them a favor. They need a stable home, with electricity and heat, and food on the table. They need these things way more than they "need" the latest gadget or toy, or the latest style in clothes.

2. (Another obvious one) Pay off your credit card balances, especially the high-interest balances. You do have to balance this with your other needs, such as the mortgage.

3. Put something aside. This means money in an insured savings account, even if it is a small amount. If your credit is toast, your cards are full, and your house isn't functioning as an ATM any more, you have all the more need for emergency money. It's up to your individual circumstance whether you pay off credit or put money in savings or both, but I suggest both. It's also wise to start storing some food, foods that your family will eat, healthy foods. It's easier to face uncertain times with a full pantry and a full belly.

4. Stop watching commercial TV. You and your kids are exposed to dozens or hundreds of very skillfully crafted advertisements every day. People with advanced degrees in psychology and sociology are hard at work designing ads that are just too good to resist. It's all part of the process of separating you from your money. For TV addicts, this will not be easy. For harried parents tired of the endless nagging for junk food and the latest toys, it may be a relief.

5. Have a talk with your partner. You and your partner need to be on the same page with the budget. If you are in the habit of managing all the finances yourself, you need to share the information and power with your wife or husband. If you have kids, the kids need to know something about what's happening. Don't scare them to death, and don't expect them to follow advanced economic theories, but kids need to know the situation. You will probably be surprised at the support you will receive, once the initial screaming is over.

6. Make a budget, and keep track of your spending. (I'm sure some of you already do this--more power to you!) If you are doing your first budget, you won't necessarily get it right the first time. Keep track of how the spending lines up with your predictions, and learn how to make it work. Everything counts--the big expenses and the nickel-and-dimers.

7. Reasonable places to spend your money--if you have some, have some savings, and have paid off your credit card balances.
* Food storage, and well-chosen household items that will enhance your ability to store food and cook for your family.
* Home improvements that will save on your utility bills in the future. This includes such high-return items as better insulation, weatherstripping, and insulating shades; fireplace inserts, perhaps skylights that bring more light into your home and provide ventilation in hot weather.
* Good quality American-made goods. Just say no to useless plastic junk made overseas. Don't squander your money, but there are times you need to buy something. Buy something that will last. Buy something made locally if you can--support your neighbors and your community. Failing that, try to buy American. I realize only too well that is not always possible. Wherever it is made, be sure to buy something that will serve you well and last a while.

8. Patronize locally-owned stores and restaurants. Stay out of the big box stores as much as you can; their profit runs off to other states or countries, and doesn't stay around here helping our community.

9. Learn to do things for yourselves. This is called "Re-Skilling". Our grandparents and their grandparents knew how to do things: Cook. Bake bread. Make yogurt, cheese, butter. Preserve food. Brew beer. Make liqueurs, wines, jellies, jams, sauces. Sew. Mend clothes. Mend shoes. Tend a vegetable garden and orchard. Knit, crochet, embroider, weave. Make simple furniture. Make music: play piano or other instruments, sing. Make baskets, candles, lamps. Render lard. Raise chickens, rabbits, or other animals. Make herbal teas and medicines. Treat simple health problems at home.

The more skills you have in your family, the less you need to pay other people to do these simple things for you. You can become more resilient to hard times by being able to fend for yourselves.
This is especially true if one family member loses his or her job. He or she can make the most out of the situation by learning new skills, and spending time supporting the work of the home. Yes, men can cook and clean, and women can fix a wobbly chair or mow the lawn, so don't be too hung up on gender roles. In hard times, we need everybody to do what they can.

10. Build community. This means your neighbors, your next-door neighbors, your street, your neighborhood, your community. I have read many blogs and articles recently saying that times are going to be tough, and the American people are self-indulgent and helpless and will just roll in a heap if they can't get their big-screen TVs and lattes. I don't believe it.

We haven't stepped up to these challenges because.... We Haven't Been Asked. When our president told us that the most important thing we could do for the country was to keep spending, too many of us believed him. And here we are in 2008, a debtor nation, the biggest in the world.

When columnists say that 70% of the national economy is retail purchases, it makes me feel queasy. That's a sign of how long the road is ahead of us. What organization or family can keep going for long when 70% of their effort is spent just SPENDING? A nation's wealth is based on raw materials and on the things that its citizens make. What are these columnists thinking? If only we can continue to spend money we don't have and can't borrow, that we can avoid recession?

We have a lot of resources in this country, and I mean more than oil, gas, minerals, and good farmland. We have the diverse, resilient, industrious, generous American people. Some of us are a little rusty, some have lost their way, but I have faith that as a community, and a nation of communities, we can tackle these problems and come out of them stronger.

The Costs of Local Foods

2008-11-30T07:06:00.000-08:00

Last April I gave several talks on local eating. One person asked a question that I did not really answer at that time: how has local eating affected our food budget?

It's a complicated question, and to answer it you have to take a larger view than just what you spend at the store, farm, etc.

Organic vs Conventional
Organic food costs more, in dollar terms, at the grocery stores. It costs less, of course, if you were to take ALL costs into consideration, such as damage to the environment from genetically modified foods, herbicides, pesticides, and the loss of birds and beneficial insects. And as the long-term trend of petroleum prices is undeniably up (regardless of the little reprieve we have had), "conventional" will eventually cost more even in dollar terms.

Organic foods have more flavor and nutrition than conventional foods, and less (or no) pesticide residues. So for your extra dollars, you are giving your family better food, and helping to improve their health. Is it worth it? You have to answer.

Organic vs Local
Here is a good question: if you can't get organic AND local, which do you choose: Local, or Organic? There are points for either choice. For myself, if it is a choice between Local or imported Organic, I would choose Local every time. We don't have any way of knowing which foreign growers are truly organic; some may be, but certainly some are not, just co-opting the organic label to make a little more margin. If it is a choice between a local grower that I know or know about, I'd choose that over mega-organic from California. In addition to supporting the health of the environment, and our own personal health, we also need to support the economic health of our community by buying from local growers and ranchers.

Fresh vs Shipped/Stored
This particularly applies to fruits and vegetables. You get more nutrition and flavor from vegetables picked today or yesterday and put on your table tonight, than from "organic" vegetables picked days or weeks ago long before ripeness, coated with wax or other chemicals, and ripened by chemical means. So, what you grow in your yard is the best of all.

When I had a big garden (and the physical ability to keep it up), I would go out in the afternoon and collect a basketful of fresh vegetables and make dinner. My children grew up liking most vegetables, because they had eaten them at their best. So Fresh trumps Shipped/Stored every time. Fresh means your yard, your CSA, your farmer's market, your local growers. I'd pay more for Fresh, but often you don't have to. Your organic CSA vegetables, paid for at the beginning of the season, are almost certainly cheaper than organic vegetables bought at the grocery.

Seasonal vs Perpetual
Here is where you get some money back by buying local foods. Local foods are seasonal. What you can buy is what is harvested now. In summer, lettuce, cucumbers, green beans; in fall, tomatoes, and Colorado's second season of greens; in winter stored foods like winter squash and root veggies; in spring asparagus, peas, and tender greens. Foods in season are cheaper than foods out of season, whether hothouse-grown or shipped from another continent. Foods that ripen at particular times of year are just the kinds of foods we should be eating then. For the hot days of summer, juicy cooling raw foods and salads; for the cold days of winter, warming stews made from potatoes, onions, and other root vegetables. Eating large raw salads all year around is not good for your health, in my opinion.

We've come to have a bizarre notion: the Perpetual Summer supermarket. You can get strawberries in January (they're from Peru or somewhere). You can get apples all the year around (waxed and kept in a low-oxygen environment, tasteless and watery). You can get asparagus in the fall (from Argentina). As a nation, we've lost touch with the seasons. Food comes from the supermarket; it doesn't come from farmers; it isn't grown in the dirt somewhere; it comes in shrink-wrap film or coated with preservatives. Milk comes from a cardboard box. Meat comes shrink-wrapped from the meat department (don't even think about how it was raised or slaughtered, or how many million pounds of hamburger came in that batch).

Of course in our temperate climate, there are months that there IS no local harvest. We supplement our diet with home-preserved foods: frozen vegetables, lactofermented pickles, fruits dried or in jars. How is this different from buying cucumbers from Mexico in the winter? My cucumbers come from my CSA. One day or less from field into the brine means they're at the tip of freshness. I know exactly how my CSA grows those cucumbers; what chemicals they don't use, the compost they do use. They've traveled 15 miles to get to my house, not 2000 miles. They're a product of our local community.

Home-Cooked vs Prepared
Here is where you REALLY start to save money, and get better quality. By definition, junk food and fast food aren't local, they're anonymous. Many of them are made of the cheapest-possible ingredients, tricked out with high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fats, loaded with preservatives, artificial flavors, and MSG. Almost all are made with genetically-modified ingredients such as corn and soy, though you can find "organic" junk food too: organic toaster treats, chips, and cookies with dozens of ingredients in print too small to read.

Many commercial meats are shot full of a solution containing MSG and other salts, in order to weigh more at point of sale. When you cook them, that extra water evaporates out, but the salts and artificial flavorings that were in it stay in the meat. What sense does that make for you?

Restaurant food has to cost more for the same quality; they have overhead, salaries for cooks, waitstaff, management, etc., and advertising. They may buy in bulk, but that won't save that much money. So, if the quality is high, the costs are high. If the costs are low, the quality MUST be low. Restaurant personnel are not magicians; they're just running a business.

We do enjoy eating restaurant meals on occasion. We noticed that when we started eating local, fresh, freshly cooked foods, the food at some restaurants no longer sits well with us. It seems somewhat flavorless and indigestible. We have a small list of restaurants that are still a pleasure for us.

And when you eat at restaurants frequently, or get carryout or prepared foods at the store, you are almost certainly getting too much sodium, too much cheap fat, too much high-fructose corn syrup, too much MSG, and servings that are too large.

You don't have to spend a lot of time cooking. I put most dinners on the table in 15 minutes or less. They are generally simple meals: some kind of meat, two vegetables fresh or cooked, fruit for dessert. You don't have to have an elaborate production every time. Sometimes I'll cook up a pot of stew or soup, which takes a couple of hours of supervision though only a few minutes of work, and feeds us for several days. Not hard.

If you don't know how to cook, there are a raft of good beginner's cookbooks out there. You can start at the public library and browse for some that look good to you. Start by following recipes until you feel that you know what you are doing, then improvise. The more you cook, the more you'll learn.

Bulk Buying vs Small Packages
Here's another way to save money on foods that are staples for you: buy in bulk. You can get higher quality for less money, for instance organic in a large bag for less than conventional in a small package. See if you can find (or start) a local food buying cooperative. The power of numbers means that you can still get the good prices without buying a 50-lb bag or 30-lb box of whatever it is. That of course leads to techniques for storing food, and incorporating those foods into your daily menu. Well-stored staple foods keep a long time: whole grains for 10-30 years, dry beans and lentils for several years, nuts for a year in the freezer. Or you can buy boxes of tomatoes, green beans, peaches, etc., and put them up.

I was buying organic tomatoes last summer at the farmer's market for $13 for 18 pounds, and canning my own tomato sauce and stewed tomatoes for a fraction of the cost of store tomatoes. Now we're using them, and they taste really fresh and flavorful as I open the jars for pizza, spaghetti, or soups.

Bought vs Bartered/Gathered
Here's another way to save money on your food. Most CSAs have barter shares, where you trade your work at the farm for some or all the cost of your vegetables. That's what I do at my CSA, so I get 36 weeks worth of vegetables in return for work I do for the farm.

If you're looking for free local fruit, keep your eyes open in your neighborhood for neglected fruit trees. When the fruit is ripe and starts falling on the sidewalk, stop and politely ask the owners if you can harvest some of it. Give them some if they're interested, as a thank-you. Or make them a jar of plum jam, grape jelly, peach roll-ups, or whatever. With some appreciation, you can probably harvest that tree year after year.

If you can, keep chickens. They'll eat your scraps, weeds, and bugs, and some chicken feed, and provide you with eggs or meat. If you can, keep bees for honey. Learn to know the local weeds and wild plants, and collect greens, chokecherries, wild plums, wild grapes, or other foods. At least half of the weeds in your garden are edible; in fact, some are as good as the vegetables they are crowding out. Get a good book, or take a class, so that you know what you are doing.

More could be said about these subjects, and other subjects as well, but let's stop for now and get to the bottom line. Will you save money by eating local foods? Wrong question, actually. Can you eat local foods and stick to your budget? Probably yes, unless your budget is very strict. Are there ways to save money eating local foods? Absolutely.

What I found was that I'm paying a little more for local meats, with much higher quality. Most of my vegetables are bartered, so there is not much change there. I either get fruits from my yard, or in bulk buying, so I save money there. I save money by buying few or no prepared foods, junk food, or fast food. We're eating out less, thus saving money. My purchases of staples are much cheaper, and of much higher quality than I was getting previously.
And we find our meals to be more satisfying, so we're actually eating less and gradually losing excess weight.

I also find that my expenditures are more seasonal. I spent extra in August, September and October building up stores for the winter. Now that we're starting to use this food, our grocery bills are dropping significantly.

So yes, you can eat locally on a budget, and there are many ways to get high quality local fresh foods for less money than you're paying now.

Connecting the Path: The Food Storage Year

2008-11-26T06:48:00.000-08:00

I'm engaged in rediscovering the skills that our foremothers knew: how to store food for the winter and spring until the next harvest, and using stored food to feed their families. Very interesting. When you don't think in terms of driving to the nearest grocery store and buying foods shipped from all over the world, it requires a little more advance planning.

I've been busy "puttin up" since last summer; snap peas, English peas, green beans frozen in June; July and August lactofermented vegetables: green beans, cucumbers, various kinds of coleslaw. Then in August started the fruit: apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, prunes; canned in light honey syrup, dried in pieces or as rollups. Our early apples, very small crop, went into jars as sauce or dried. Then in September, the tomatoes! Sauce, juice, chopped, stewed. Apples and herbs dried; broccoli frozen.

And I've been gradually putting staples into half-gallon Mason jars. California brown rice in the garage (to stay cool). Beans, lentils, split peas from western U.S. growers. Wheat flour in the freezer. Wonderful Colorado millet and quinoa, buckwheat and kasha and popcorn from western U.S. A box of apples in the garage, separated by a reasonable distance from paper bags of potatoes; a case of mixed winter squash in a cool room.

Now comes the second challenge: Eat what you store. That's the food storage year:
* Store what you eat
* Eat what you store

In some ways, it's easier for me to just store and store, pack-ratting away foods that we like, feeling a sense of accomplishment looking in the freezer and into the boxes of gleaming jars. But... it's food! Precious indeed, but perishable. Whole grains keep a good long time, but beans get tired after a few years of storage. Frozen food gets freezer-burned. Canned fruit loses some of its flavor. The apples and squash and potatoes are fresh foods, good keepers, yes, but not forever.

So, now's the time to stop stocking up, and start using what I have stored. I've already gotten into the frozen snap peas; they turned out well using the vacuum bags. And I've started using the tomato sauce for pasta and pizza; very nice flavor. Muir Glen canned organic tomatoes are fine, and I've certainly used cases of them through the years, but my home-preserved sauce from Colorado tomatoes is especially good.

We've been eating the millet (me), the buckwheat, the gluten-free oats, the whole-grain wheat flour (DH), steadily. I just finished eating my way through the 50 lbs of Colorado organic millet I bought last February. Now I'm starting on the 25 lbs I bought through the coop in April. I love it, and generally eat it once a day; could be breakfast, lunch, or supper.

One secret to the successful food storage year is good record-keeping. I'm making an inventory of what I've stored, along with the date of storage. I'll make it a point to use the oldest first. (Blush: I found seven jars of applesauce from 2007; they'll go first). As I use something, I'll check it off the list. If I run out, and have to buy something before the next harvest, I'll note it.

By next summer, I'll have a much better idea of how much, and what kinds of foods we need to get through the year.

I also need to get into my cookbooks and find recipes that fit the foods we have. Oftentimes we have simple meals: meat, two veg, fruit for dessert. Now that winter is nearly here, I need to start making more soups and stews: good winter warming foods. I need to start cooking more beans. I need to motivate myself for winter squash. It's not really my favorite food; I always think it sounds good, but then just don't follow through with actually cooking and eating it. Maybe I just need better recipes. Maybe we need to eat more Pumpkin Pie!

Putting the cart before the horse, I've been discussing the hows of food storage, but not the whys. Reason 1. If you're going to eat mostly local food, you need to store for half the year, so you have something to eat the other half. Reason 2. Stored food also gives you some security in very uncertain times. Even if a family member loses their job or gets their pay cut, with a good pantry of stored foods you know that everyone will eat. As Sharon Astyk says, two important questions in hard economic times are: "Is there dinner? Do I get any?"

Long-term storage for hard times has some different aspects from seasonal storage, since you don't want to be running out of food in the summer either. I'll write some posts on this subject in the near future. Meanwhile, check out Sharon's food storage group for loads of information and experiences from real people in every part of the country. You can even see my name there once in a while.

I'll keep you posted from time to time on our experiences with our stored food: what we wish we had more of, what we had too much of, and recipes using the foods.

One Local Year: The Road Ahead

2008-11-22T13:53:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I wrote a post about making the road by walking. We walked, and made a little footpath. When I started the local food buying cooperative, a few others joined us on this path. And of course there are others making similar paths in every part of the country, though other matters have come to the forefront of public consciousness now.

We plan to continue eating locally, but cutting ourselves a bit more slack. If we're going to keep this up the rest of our lives (which we plan to do), we need to pace ourselves a bit. I will buy a few little niceties, very small amounts: mustard, artichoke hearts for DH's weekly homemade pizza (about one heart per pizza), vinegar, lemon juice. I

I plan to keep narrowing the circle as possible. Can I find California artichoke hearts, instead of Peru? Can I get more Front Range fruit in place of the Western Slope fruit? Can I figure out how to put in a garden at our home that I can actually keep up? (With aging and physical problems, gardening is hard for me.) Can I keep chickens without losing them all to predators? The most-local food you can get is what you grow and raise, after all.

And that brings up another vitally important point. We, and several hundred others in Larimer and Weld counties, are eating a large percentage of local food. We buy local meats, patronize local dairies, belong to local CSAs. But there are about 287,000 people in Larimer County, and about 243,000 in Weld County. That's more than a half-million people. Although agriculture still has a significant presence, particularly in Weld County which is the highest-ranking agricultural county in the state, we're far from having enough growers and ranchers in the two counties to feed the population with diverse foods. Many of the farms are extremely large, growing government-subsidized commodity corn and soybeans which are mainly fed to cattle.

We need to think seriously about what we as a community can do to encourage more small farms, more vegetable growing, more bean growing, more pastured livestock. The soil is fertile, the climate fairly mild though dry, and much of the land is irrigated from mountain water. But farmers, especially small farmers, face tremendous challenges. The cost of their inputs keeps rising faster than the prices they can get for their produce. Loans are becoming more and more difficult to get. Some of the better land is being eaten up by country subdivisions and outlet malls at a tremendous rate.

Speaking as someone who wants to eat food in the future, I believe it is essential for us to do two things: encourage and protect small and diverse farms; and start planting our suburban lots to vegetables and fruits, with perhaps beehives and small animals where possible. This will take money and work, of course, but in particular it will take a strong commitment for us as a community to build a resilient and productive local foodshed. There is a place for everyone in this vitally important work, whatever your skills and interests. Give some thought to where you might want to help in this effort.

One Local Year: Surprises

2008-11-16T13:13:00.000-08:00

We had some real surprises during the 100-mile diet year (Nov 2007 through Oct 2008).

The first is that eating high-quality home-cooked local food really ruined our taste buds for fast food, junk food, and cheap restaurants. Ugggh! I used to eat That? This used to taste good, now it upsets my stomach. Home-cooked foods are made from ingredients, in other words, real foods. No fillers, no artificial colors or flavors, no hidden MSG; no high-fructose corn sweeteners, no transfats, no preservatives, no modified food starch. We also tried to buy organic as much as possible, which has better flavor and nutritional value.

The second surprise is that I lost interest in buying standard grocery-store produce, so pretty looking, so tasteless. The Western Slope fruits are so far superior to the fruits shipped in from California or Washington state. I'm sure fruits bought ripe locally IN California or Washington for local consumption are perfectly fine. It's the whole industrial food system, picking chemicalized and water-bloated produce way ahead of ripeness, shipping it across the country, then "ripening" it with chemicals. Have you wondered how you have U.S. apples year round? Or consider the long path for produce from China, Argentina, New Zealand? How far before ripening must they have been picked?

Now I am a bit of an enthusiast for Western Slope fruits, actually, since I think the best Colorado pear or peach, apple or nectarine, is better than the best California peach, or the best Washington apple, but my comparison is unfair, since I've never eaten a tree-ripe California peach.

The next surprise was how much I did not know about harvest times in Colorado. I realized that fresh produce would be pretty much unavailable in March and April, but it was still unavailable in May, and only in June did a significant harvest of fresh vegetables show up in the farmers' markets. We had the early season vegetables: peas, beans, spinach, early lettuce. Then everything took the month of July off, pretty much. The lettuce and spinach bolted, the peas burned up, and it was slim pickings until August. August through October is the cornucopia time in Colorado. We were up to our ears in a wide variety of vegetables and fruits. Inventorying my stocks, I was a very busy person during those three months, canning, drying, and freezing the produce. (I dated all the containers--always a good idea with home-preserved foods.)

The fourth surprise was that home fruit trees and home gardens, especially with season extenders, can provide a great many items that are practically unavailable commercially in the area. Commercial Colorado fruit is from the Western Slope (and wonderful stuff it is), but our yards are full of apples, pie cherries, plums, peaches, and even pears; also raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, elderberries, Nanking cherries, serviceberries, and chokecherries. Anyone with a small garden in Colorado can grow strawberries, but they are commercially unavailable from this state. If you have a yard, plant some fruit trees and shrubs, some strawberries.

I've grown celery at home, muskmelon and watermelon, and garlic. You can even grow okra and small sweet potatoes here. Some of the CSAs in the area grow melons very successfully, which are distributed to members and sold at farmers' markets. You never see Northern Colorado melons in the stores.

What's more, with a hoop house, small greenhouse, or even coldframes, you can keep hardy greens and carrots living and ready for harvest all winter long. Our winters are not as harsh as they were 50 years ago, so the rules of thumb we learned as children, or from older gardeners, are no longer entirely valid. Our plant hardiness zone has moved from 4 bordering on 5, to 5 bordering on 6. This makes season extenders even more practical. Eliot Coleman's book "Four Season Harvest" is a useful resource. Anyway, the upshot is that if you keep your own garden, you can extend that three months of Colorado bounty to at least nine months, and you can get a lot of fruits from your yard or your neighborhood.

Another surprise was that I lost weight slowly and effortlessly, just by not eating junk. And my diet was not that bad to start with. I did not go hungry, and did not feel deprived. Real foods, cooked at home, are just more satisfying. I wouldn't mind losing some more weight, and perhaps that will happen over the coming year. My husband has been on a moderately low-carb diet for the last six months, which we were able to work out with the local foods, and has lost a lot of weight.

A surprise for me was the things I did not miss. I have not had citrus fruits except for a small amount of lemon juice in a year, or a banana or mango or other tropical fruit, and I really don't miss them. I don't miss sweet potatoes. Tapioca, especially tapioca flour, was a little harder to give up, since it's very useful in gluten-free baking. I didn't miss out-of-season foods like strawberries in January, apples in March, asparagus in winter. I'm willing to wait for them to be in season.

It was interesting learning the things that we really didn't want to do without. When I planned the 100-mile diet, I planned in ten exceptions, five to be chosen by each of us. My first was salt. No way I'm doing without salt. The next three were beverages: coffee, black/green tea, and herbal teas. The herbal teas can mostly be grown here, with a little advance planning (maybe next year!). I was not prepared to cook without olives and olive oil, but I was able to find them from California. I made an exception for the tropical spices that really are impossible to find in a temperate climate: pepper, cinnamon, etc.

Our only seafood has been Alaskan wild-caught salmon, and very little of that. My sons each said, "Mom, you could get a fishing license..." and I could have, and added Colorado trout to my diet, but I didn't do it. For years I have been gradually reducing the seafood content of our diet, due to concerns about overfishing and environmental effects of farmed seafood. So it was not too much of a stretch to just stop everything except the sustainably harvested salmon.

It didn't take DH long to put raw nuts on his list, which we restricted to U.S.-grown. Walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, and pistachios are on the list.

Finally, we used two vegetable exceptions to make it through the winter limitations: California canned tomato products, and U.S.-grown peas, frozen, fresh or dried. When the crops came in, we dropped them.

Now, looking back on the year, there were a few other things we missed. Basically they fall into the category of "condiments"--mustard (DH Loves Mustard), vinegar, lemon juice, coconut milk, herbs and spices, all in small amounts (except for mustard). Also, I had lots of herbs and spices on hand, but when they're gone, I'll either grow or buy some more. Maybe some day I'll figure out how to make local mustard, but for now, mustard in a jar is the way to go.

In the next post, I will talk about the future: the second year of local eating. We will be continuing local eating; it's pretty hard to conceive of NOT doing so, but we will allow a few more little niceties in our diet.

One Local Year: Learnings

2008-11-08T06:49:00.001-08:00

We've been on our local eating plan for one year now, and it's time to look back on our successes, failures, learnings, ideas, and impressions.

Q. Is it possible to eat a 100-mile diet in Northern Colorado
Yes, allowing a few exceptions, but there are significant difficulties. You certainly won't starve. What helps: having a CSA, having your own garden, cooking, belonging to a food buying cooperative, preserving food yourself.

Difficulty 1: If you plan to buy all your food at the grocery stores, you will last just long enough to run out of the food you have on hand. Even at Whole Foods, states of origin are marked only on fresh produce. In other food stores, information is practically unavailable. How to cope: The secret is to find local sources and/or grow your own. There are a number of local dairies, local farmers producing meat, and CSAs.

Difficulty 2: Colorado fruits and vegetables are only available from roughly June through November. If you have a garden, you can stretch the season a little by using cold frames, hoop house or other season extender. Going to the farmers market in May looking for fresh produce just didn't work. How to cope: Go back to what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did as a matter of course: put up food. During the summer and fall bounty, they canned and dried, pickled and fermented, made jellies, jams, and conserves. They stored food for the winter in unheated areas such as cellars. (We now have the option of freezing produce also.) They went into winter with shelves groaning with a rainbow collection of jars of fruits and vegetables.

Difficulty 3: Some of the small items that we enjoy in our daily life are just not available within 100 miles. This includes coffee and tea, spices and some herbs, olives and olive oil. For example: We just couldn't find mustard that was truly local. Some is made in Northern Colorado, but not from local ingredients. A friend made some vinegar and gave me some, but unless you want to start a project, vinegar is not local. Coping technique 1: call them exceptions and use them. Coping technique 2: Find local alternatives, change your tastes, grow your own in some cases.

Techniques on exceptions: Pick a few that are important to you and your family, and try to get them as close as possible. For example, olives and olive oil are available from California. Nuts are available from the west coast. Just say no to food items from China, except possibly green or black tea. Items like tea and spices don't weigh much for the amount of flavor and enjoyment they bring. Barbara Kingsolver just didn't sweat the small stuff: herbs and spices didn't count in her local eating plan.

Techniques on finding alternatives: Depending on the item, you may be able to grow it (like herbal tea), make your own (like vinegar), use pioneer techniques (coffee from roasted roots like chicory), or just substitute what you do have (local honey for non-local sugar). It's interesting to read through old cookbooks and pioneer diaries to see what they ate, what they made, the substitutions they used, and finally, what they bought, usually at high expense. You can also read about what the Indians living in this region ate, pretty much strictly local except that trade routes brought sea salt well into the interior of the country.

Q. Didn't you have a restricted diet?
No, not at all. Most of the things we couldn't get we didn't miss: tropical fruits for one example. We ate high-quality local beef, pork, buffalo, lamb, chicken, turkey, and eggs. We used high-quality local dairy products. Given a good effort at putting up fruits and vegetables, from year to year, there is no lack of excellent organic fruits and vegetables. You do need to get salt; the closest is RealSalt from Utah, but I didn't worry that much about it; it's a necessity of life, and we don't live near the ocean.

The staple foods were what turned our 100-mile diet in what's termed a bullseye diet. I was able to find 100-mile pinto and anasazi beans, whole wheat flour, and millet. That's pretty restrictive unless you are eating a paleo diet (no grains, no beans). So we stretched our limits, first to the rest of Colorado, picking up quinoa and the Western Slope fruits, and more beans from the San Luis Valley area. Then, as I started the food cooperative, we stretched the limit for grains, beans, and nuts to the western U.S. I'm relying mainly on millet and pintos, and wheat flour for my husband (I can't eat it), but I have a variety of staples now, all organic, all from the western U.S.

I mentioned the Bullseye diet in posts nearly a year ago. First, you get as much as you can from your own yard (the inner circle); next you move out to your neighborhood, such as community gardens, neglected fruit trees that can be gleaned. Next is the community and surrounding farms. This is where most of our food comes from: CSAs, farmers markets, local livestock producers and dairies, local eggs. There is no reason why grains and beans couldn't be grown that close to us, it just hasn't happened yet. Here is where we need to make the market, and suppliers will arise to fill it.

The things you can't get from your community, you reach out to your state and region. Colorado has a wonderful diversity of agricultural possibilities; as farms become smaller and more local (as petroleum becomes more expensive), we can expect to find nearly all our needs within the state. For now, and for some things in particular such as nuts and olives, we need to consider the western U.S., a breadbasket of lentils, split peas, grains of nearly every kind.

Finally there are a few things unavailable in the U.S., like some spices, pepper, black and green tea, and coffee. We try to buy organic and fair-trade as much as possible, and don't use a lot of these items. They are dry and light and easy to ship. Yes, if we really ran out of petroleum and they couldn't be shipped to us, we'd learn to live without them.

So, that was our journey. As we got to the scarce days of late winter and early spring, we expanded our horizons a little, and with due thought used some foods from outside the 100-mile circle. If you lived in Vancouver, San Francisco, or other areas with more year-round agriculture, it would be easier to confine yourself to 100 miles. Here, it is possible, with a lot of work and planning, but certainly not easy.

Next: the benefits we noticed.

Month 12: October--Opportunities Taken and Missed

2008-11-02T16:02:00.000-08:00

An essential part of local eating in our climate is storing the bounty of summer and fall, so you have foods to get you through winter and spring. We were still swimming in the fall bounty in October, with apples and pears from the Western slope, winter squash coming in, the last of the tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, and hardy greens.

I carried home groaning bags from my CSA pickup. I ordered boxes of fruit through the food cooperative. I bought more boxes of canning jars, and ran loads of stuff through the fruit dryer. The trays on my rather ancient fruit dryer are beginning to develop some cracks, from overuse.

But I just couldn't get to everything. We couldn't eat it fast enough. I couldn't fill the dryer trays fast enough. I filled up more cases of jars, with the last of the nectarines, and some pears. The pears got away from me, and I had to throw a few away. The last of the green beans wilted; we ate them earlier in the summer until we were both tired of them. I should have frozen or canned them when they were fresh, but they sat in the produce drawer unnoticed.

Eating local fruits and vegetables is a big change from shopping at the supermarket every week. First, the quality of the local fresh produce is absolutely superlative; we are thoroughly spoiled now and don't even want the tasteless stuff shipped from all over the world and ripened artificially.

Second, when produce comes into season, we eat it and eat it, until we can get tired of it. Then you feel, oh no, more (fill in the blank). And DH says, not again. And the reality is, that we won't get any more green beans until next June. We'll get over being tired of them long before that.

Third, by eating locally you really get in touch with the seasons of harvest in our area. Plums show up--better move quickly or they're gone. We have good lettuce in June, and great lettuce in August and September after a hot July with no lettuce at all. So, eating seasonally is great, during the seasons. But nothing is really available from December through May, so local eaters need to put food up when it's available. Not so that we can eat the same year around, but so that we can have a variety of healthy foods through the winter.

In order to make use of the bounty and provide for the winter, I need new habits. I'm part of the way there. I put up tomatoes, lots of them, but maybe not enough. I put up apricots, nectarines, peaches, plums, pears, apples. I froze snap peas, snow peas, English peas, and green beans. I pickled cabbage, green beans, cucumbers, and salsa. I dried apples, pears, plums, peppers, and zucchini. But I also threw some things away. It's got to become second nature to me; I need to learn to look at the week's incoming bounty, and decide what we might eat, and what I need to plan to freeze, dry, can, etc., while they are at the peak of their quality.

This is what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did. They had gardens, they bought or bartered from their neighbors, they picked fruit wherever they could, and put it away for the long weeks of winter and spring when little else was available.

We've sampled the first of our stored foods: some tomato sauce (fabulous), some delicious fruit canned in light honey syrup. I heated some snap peas I froze in vacuum bags, and they were just great, flavorful and with a good texture. But it's a long way till June (when we can get some more).

I'm planning to take an inventory of what I have, and keep track week by week of what we use, what we want more of, and what we don't really like. This will help me next summer and fall as I make choices of what, and how, and how much to store away.

It's also time to switch from summer-fall foods--salads, raw veggies, veggies cooked as themselves--to fall-winter foods: soups, stews, cooked vegetable medleys of various kinds.

So, October went well, and we have finished out our year of eating locally. My next post or two will be a summation of what we learned, and how our diet changed to fit the local circumstances.

Keep On Keepin' On

2008-10-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

The three-ring circus we're being treated to these days can be very upsetting and distracting. We're not sure that any amount of (deficit or imaginary) taxpayer money will be enough to save the big Wall Street firms that made big bets on leverage and sold them in every country in the world. Our IRAs and investments whipsaw up and down, but more down than up. It's a tough time, and nobody knows what it will be like next year. It's easy to get into a tight loop, waking up early in the morning and worrying about the future. If you have a reset ARM mortgage or your home is "under water", of course, you've got even more to worry about. And practically nobody's job is that secure.

I'm not the best example of someone who can just go on about doing the things that need to be done, and not waste my time and energy worrying about stuff that I can't do anything about. But really, friends, that's what we need to do.

Important Financial Moves
First: pay down your debt, as fast as you can. Especially credit card debt, or any high-interest loan. Paying ahead on your mortgage is good, but should be prioritized with the next two items, depending on your situation. Having a paid-off house IS very reassuring, however.

Second: do home improvements to make your home more energy efficient, and prepare for utility outages, etc. So many of us are totally dependent on electricity: to cook our food; run our lights, computers, and refrigeration; to run the fan and thermostat on the furnace; and if you have a well, to pump water out of the ground.

Having some non-electric ways to heat, cook, and cool is a wise thing to do, regardless of whether we get a financial meltdown. A winter blizzard could take out electricity, or if you live near the coast a hurricane, or here in Colorado a tornado. Having some extra blankets and sweaters and heavy socks is also good. Store some water, at least 1 gallon per day per family member for 2 weeks, just to be sure.

Make sure you have enough insulation; insulated blinds or other window coverings are good. If you are ready to replace a furnace or refrigerator or other appliance, get a high-efficiency one.

Third: start storing food. Again, you don't need to wait for a financial meltdown for this to make sense. If you lost your job, and couldn't find another for a while, or ended up in a low-wage job, having 6 to 12 months of food stored would be very handy. If money is tight, just buy a small amount of staple goods each week when you shop. You will build up your stock over time. If you can buy staple goods (like rice, beans, flour, etc.) in 25 lb bags, you'll find that they are much cheaper that way. (And learn how to cook with those stored foods, fixing foods your family will eat.)

The very best online resource I can give you is Sharon Astyk's blog: Depletion and Abundance. She talks about the hard issues (the problems coming), but mostly about the important issues: how to feed your family and keep them warm, what foods to store and how, and how to build the community around your family that will help us all weather the coming storms. It's worth it to look back through her posts for at least the last year, if not further. Goodies include lists of useful books and tools. It's nice to know we're not facing this alone. She keeps a can-do spirit, tackling the challenges that we could all face with grace and courage.

Anyway, the way to go forward is not to get paralyzed with worry, but to put one foot in front of the other, doing the daily ordinary activities to prepare for the unexpected; learning the mundane skills of cooking, sewing, fixing things, gardening, etc.; thinking about low-energy, low-cost alternatives to take care of ourselves and our families.

Month 11: September and the perfect Nectarine

2008-10-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

I see I haven't posted since the Month 10 report. I've been distracted (perhaps one could say "driven to distraction") by the Wall Street bailout, and other financial and political stuff. I've also been busy putting up fruits and vegetables, and working (I have a job that shows up once or twice a year for 3-4 weeks).

The perfect Nectarine: picked on Colorado's western slope, just about three days short of ripe. As soon as the nectarines get a little soft to the touch (anything but hard), they are ready. Wow! I think I like them better than peaches. It's been so many years since I had a good nectarine. We've been eating a bunch and I've also canned several batches for the winter.

Canning Nectarines
Canning nectarines is like peaches but easier. I didn't bother to take the skins off, though I do with peaches. For the full story on canning, you should get the Ball Blue Book of canning (also has info on freezing, drying, etc.).

But here's the simple story, for waterbath canning. Put clean pint jars into your canning kettle, and rings, and cover with water. Bring to boil. Jars should boil 10 minutes, but more doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, for nectarines, wash and cut each into 8-10 slices. A pint jar holds about 3 med nectarines. Also, bring to a boil 4 cups water and 1 cup Colorado honey, and in another (small) saucepan, simmer the lids for your jars for 10 minutes and leave them in the hot water. This is 3 burners worth that you've got going.

Now, put a couple of handfuls of nectarine slices into the boiling syrup, bring back to boil, set timer for 2 minutes. Fish out with a slotted spoon and put into jars that you have taken out of the waterbath. Use a canning funnel to keep from spilling. They will settle a bit, so you will have to keep putting a couple more into each jar until they are pretty close to the rim. When all are cooked in syrup and put into jars, pour syrup into the jars right up to the rim (shoulder) (not up to the top). Should be about 1" of head space. Get the lids out of the hot water with tongs, then screw on the rings tight but not too tight. Place the jars back into the canning kettle (the water should still be boiling). You may have to scoop a little water out of the kettle, since you are putting full jars in, in place of the empty ones. Bring back to boil (don't be fooled by the air bubbling out of the lids), and set your timer for 20 minutes. Then pull jars out of the water, put on counter, and wait for the ping!

There is a gadget you must have to get jars in and out of the canner, special tongs that grasp the jar on each side and allow you to lift it without tipping. Another little set of tongs for the lids, and the canning funnel, are really all the equipment you need.
Always use fresh lids each time. You can save the used ones for use with jars of dried foods, beans, etc., just don't can with them again.

If you are doing peaches, it is somewhat more involved. Bring a saucepot of water to boil, put peaches in for 30 seconds to 1 minute (depends on ripeness), and then into a bowl of cold water. The skins just peel off. Now slice into a big bowl, and proceed as for nectarines. You can peel and slice all the peaches, then bring the syrup to boil and simmer them; otherwise you'll look like one of those Hindu goddesses with eight arms.

If you have syrup left after topping off the jars, lucky you! It makes a wonderful refreshing drink, diluted 4:1 or even 8:1 in cold water. The flavor is honey + fruit; delicious!

After your jars cool off all the way, check to be sure that each lid is down, by pressing gently in the middle. If a jar didn't seal, or if it pings when you touch it (which means it didn't seal properly), put it into the frig and use soon. Otherwise, they're good for a year or more.

Colorado's fall bounty
September brings us the last of the peach and nectarine harvest, with pears and apples coming soon. The fall Colorado lettuce is superior to the spring lettuce, in my opinion. The heads are bigger and the flavor is better; also they keep very well. We can also get fall spinach, again superior to spring, and arugula. The cooler days and nights are good for the quality. The braising greens keep improving: chard, kale, etc.

We're still getting sweet corn, tomatoes, and all kinds of peppers, until the first freeze. I'm still putting up tomatoes, and my last two jars of lactofermented cucumber pickles.

Next come the winter squashes and pumpkins, just starting to show up now. They'll keep at a cool room temperature, as themselves, through the winter to early spring. Keep them out of the sun, and at 50 to 60 degrees. Look through your stash every so often, to see if any are getting soft spots, and use them right away.

September is Wild
September brings a frantic activity to take care of the harvest and store it for winter. Even if you don't put up food, you will probably feel it, as a general angst that winter is coming, hard times are coming, and we need to be prepared if we're going to eat next winter. Eating as a Locavore brings this anxiety to the front, as you work to fill up those jars while the fruits and vegetables are available. You can't substitute peaches from Argentina in the winter (not that they're worth eating anyway).

I think of what kind of meals I can prepare next January, and what I need to have on hand. It seems there can never be enough tomatoes. I have put up tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, tomato juice, and chopped tomatoes. I will be making a lactofermented salsa today, with tomatoes, peppers and onions from Cresset Farm. That will keep under refrigeration for months. I've made jars and jars of pesto for the freezer, and dried many batches of fresh basil and other herbs.

I've been filling up my staples jars for the past 5 months, and I'm fairly well set there. The local meat, dairy and eggs are available year round (though eggs can be a little hard to find in the winter). We live in a beautiful and bountiful state, never more bountiful than in September. And it's hard to say which is more beautiful: the cool, bright days of September or the days of April when the trees are in blossom. Happy Autumn to you all!

Month 10--August--Nature's Bounty

2008-09-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

August is an easy month to eat locally. We are picking grapes, and our own Siberian peaches and tiny greengage plums. The potatoes are ready, under the ground. Due to general neglect on my part, each hill has a fairly small number of potatoes, but they are delicious.

The fruit from the Colorado's Western slope is simply superlative.
The Colorado fruits are coming in: apricots, plums, early peaches. Now, in mid-September, peaches are still running strong. I was able to snag a box of Colorado organic nectarines this week. To look forward to: buttery Colorado bartlett pears, and a variety of apples. It has been years since I bought a supermarket nectarine. They have all come from California or even farther, tasteless and mealy. I have high hopes for the Colorado nectarines.

The CSAs are all in full swing, as are the farmers' markets. LoveLandLocal food cooperative is selling more produce than staples now. We buy only Colorado organic produce, and we've been feasting on corn, cucumbers, red spring onions, zucchini and yellow squash, green beans, and more. There was still some late spinach. The fall lettuce is just starting to come in. (Lettuce in Colorado does not do very well in the hot dry weather of July.)

Our meals often are very simple: some form of meat such as chicken, sausage, bison burger, pork chop, etc., and a selection of fresh cooked or raw vegetables. Examples are sweet corn, fresh tomato, green beans; green pepper slices, radishes, snap peas; sauteed green tomatoes, corn again. Then for dessert, whatever Colorado or homegrown fruit we have on hand.

I've also been very busy "puttin up". Today it was quarts of red plums, and greengage plum butter. Lessons learned: for red plums, leave a lot of headspace in the jar. As I took them out of the water bath, purple juice came up and out of the jar. I used the raw pack method, pricking the plums, packing them into hot quart jars, and covering with a light (Colorado) honey syrup.

The greengages have been sitting on the back table for a couple of weeks, starting to dry. They are small but sweet. I finally just dumped them into a saucepan and covered with water. After an hour or two, they were soft. I pressed the pulp through a colander, taking out the pits. Then I took the sieved pulp and simmered it in the saucepan until it was somewhat thicker. I seasoned it with ground cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. It had the perfect sweet/sour flavor without adding any sugar or honey. I packed it into hot half-pint jars and processed it in the waterbath.

I'm running the Siberian peaches through the fruit dryer, pitting, cutting into slices, but not bothering to peel. I dried a great load of green bell peppers last week, also some Anaheims and yellow gypsy peppers, for winter soups. Peppers keep beautifully when dried.

It's really a race when I get a box, or pick a bunch of something. When will they get ripe? When will they spoil? There's a window--wide for green peppers and tomatoes, narrow for apricots (every one ripens at the same instant).

Eating locally has really made me conscious of harvest times in our state. Cherries are done, apricots are done, plums are at the end, peaches only have a couple more weeks to run. Asparagus is a spring thing. Peas are a joy of early summer. We'll have fall lettuce until the first freeze, then the hardier greens. Enjoy it while you can! It won't be back until next year.

Some fruits and vegetables can be put up for the winter, and I've been doing it this year. I remember my mother putting up fruit and vegetables. She did green beans, peaches, sweet corn, bread-and-butter pickles, and watermelon pickles. Watermelon pickles were certainly not a favorite of mine, but the bread-and-butter pickles were great. We enjoyed them all winter. Nothing you can buy in the store beats them.

Bread-and-butter pickles
Makes 7 pint jars

4 pounds of small, very fresh organic pickling cucumbers
2 pounds of red spring onions, bulbs only
1/3 cup flaked sea salt
some ice
2 cups sugar
3 cups apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons mustard seed
2 teaspoons turmeric
2 teaspoons celery seed
1 teaspoon dried ginger
1 teaspoon peppercorns

Slice the cucumbers 1/4" thick, and the onions similarly. If the onions are large, cut into quarters before slicing. In a very large bowl (or 2 large ones) mix with salt, cover with ice cubes. Let stand 1 1/2 hours. Meanwhile, put your jars and rings into the waterbath canning kettle and bring to a boil. Put the lids in a small pan covered with water, and bring to a simmer.

Pick ice off top of vegetables, drain them, rinse, and drain well.
Mix vinegar, sugar, and spices in a large kettle and bring to boiling. Dump the cucumbers and onions into the kettle, and bring all to a boil. Pack vegetables into hot jars, leaving 1/4" headspace. Wipe off the rims, then place the lids and rings on.
Put jars back into water bath, bring back to boil, and process 10 minutes. Then lift out onto the counter and wait for the ping!

Their flavor is said to develop further in the first few weeks of storage, but the samples I ate that just wouldn't fit into that last pint jar were delicious.

They are very pretty with the red onions; white are usually used. You can do the same thing with small zucchini, adding 2 smallish sliced green peppers or sweet frying peppers. A friend was planning to make the zucchini pickles with the zucchini we got at the food cooperative. Surprise: the zucchini turned out to be a beautiful bright yellow. And the onions were red. But she decided to make them anyway. The yellow zucchini looked so sunny and bursting with health.

Don't bother to make pickles with wilted, tired cukes. They should be crisp and fresh. If you don't have fresh spring onions, regular onions will do. If you haven't seen spring onions, they are full-grown with green tops, pulled fresh out of the field in midsummer; they are NOT scallions. We've been getting them in the cooperative; they are really wonderful. If you refrigerate them, you can use the tops like scallions in the first few days; the bulbs last a long time.

Another summer's bounty recipe:

Quinoa tabbouleh

1 cup Colorado quinoa (if you can find it, or other source)
4 cups boiling salted water
1 large bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped fine
1 large red ripe tomato, chopped fine
chopped leaves from a large sprig of fresh mint
1/4 cup lemon juice, or to taste
1/4 cup olive oil, or to taste
salt and pepper as desired

Put quinoa in boiling water, boil 10 minutes, then drain. (This is quinoa cooked like pasta.) Put in a bowl, mix with parsley, tomato and mint. Add lemon juice and olive oil, then taste. Need more zing? add lemon juice. Need more salt? add some.