To do your part to reduce food waste, you need to do some planning. First, make plans of what you would do with extra food of various types rather than landfill it. This is particularly important for perishable food such as meat, dairy products, vegetables, and fruits.
Plan A: Do what you can to preserve the food for your family: freeze meat before it turns, or cook into soups, stews, casseroles, etc., and freeze them (be SURE to use wide-mouth freezer-safe jars or plastic tubs). Can soups with a pressure canner. Mildly freezer-burned meats can be cooked in stews or braised; you'll probably never know the difference.
Vegetables can be canned, lactofermented, frozen, or dried. BE SURE to do this while they're still fresh, before they get wilted, discolored, or slimey. Fruits can be cooked into desserts, dried in pieces or as rollups, frozen, made into jams and jellies... well, you get the picture. Milk can be made into fresh cheese; fresh cheese can be frozen successfully. (Look for a post on this subject soon.) Same for cream or half-n-half, if you ever have such things left over. Or you can use milk or cream in soups, casseroles, puddings, etc.
If your storage is full, your freezer is full, you know you'll never use the food if you stored it (frozen and canned foods don't keep forever), no one in your family likes the food (buying mistake), or you feel that you have enough, then go to...
Plan B: Give the food to other humans. This includes family members, friends, neighbors, the less fortunate, food banks, food drives, and other charities. The best use of human food is for humans. Food banks probably won't take fresh meat and dairy products, unless truly fresh and unopened, for obvious reasons. Check first. But in general they are happy to take surplus vegetables and fruits, including fruits from your yard that are in excess of your ability to use them. Be sure to do this while the produce is still attractive and useful.
Sometimes, however, food items just get away from us; we turn our backs and they wilt, go sour, turn brown, etc. Not fit for human consumption. Now you can go for...
Plan C: Give the food to animals. If you have chickens, they're perfect! I give my chickens anything except chicken; they're omnivores like us, and will happily eat meat that is starting to turn, old dairy products, mushy fruits, etc. (Actually, chickens would eat chicken perfectly happily, but it's evil to feed animals their own kind.)
Perhaps you have friends with chickens, or even pigs. Don't feed pigs raw meat of any kind, to break the cycle of disease. But the meat could be cooked. Meat slightly past its prime or freezer-burned could also be given to dogs or cats, in modest quantities. Tired old casseroles, freezer burned vegetables, it all looks good to a pig.
Perhaps you don't know anyone with chickens or pigs. And that food is definitely over the hill. Next step:
Plan D: Compost it! If you have land, or even a neighborhood garden spot, get a compost heap going. Non-meat food scraps, outside leaves of cabbage, rotting apples, you get the idea, mixed with fallen leaves, grass clippings, and similar stuff. You can find numerous books with information on composting. Put it in, then let it work. Next year, add it to your gardens or flower beds. It is suggested not to put meat-based foods into compost unless the bins are secure, to keep down problems with skunks, bears, raccoons, the neighborhood dog, etc.
Plan E: The last useful stop on the food waste bandwagon is biogas generation. I don't know of any around here, but in Britain they have loads of them, using all kinds of food waste from "post-consumer" to factory wastes. Methane (natural gas) is generated--very useful stuff. The residue is a good soil amendment. The challenge is getting the icky stuff to the biogas plant, but the British are figuring it out.
Plan F (for failure): The worst thing to do with your food waste is to send it to the landfill. There it rots underground along with the rest of the stuff, producing methane and other greenhouse gases which make their way to the surface and into the atmosphere. Many communities are having problems with overly-full dumps and landfills.
This is waste of the worst sort--human labor and fossil fuels used to grow the food, which is now not of any use to any living thing, and increases the greenhouse gas and waste disposal problems.
BTW have you thought about the term "fossil fuels"? Fossil fuels were laid down under the ground along with the fossils. The natural cycles which make these things take millions of years. But we're burning through it as if there is no tomorrow....
Oh, another thing, "tomorrow", as in the next few decades, is going to be different from the last 50 years. Hate to break the news to you. The excesses that we're accustomed to are going to disappear. Somewhere between a technological paradise on the one hand, and apocalypse on the other hand, is where we're headed. If you want to read some really well-reasoned articles on these and related subjects, try the Archdruid Report.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Food Waste--A Global Tragedy
I have recently finished reading Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, by British author Tristram Stuart. His analysis features the UK food distribution system, with significant contributions about the U.S. system and other European countries. The facts are scandalous, as he says. This book is well worth the reading. Here are a few highlights.
Food waste starts right at the farm, particularly with contract growers for supermarkets. Supermarket chains order x pounds of something, like carrots, to be delivered by y date, but they can reduce their order if by that time, demand is down, they already have too many, or for any other reason.
If the grower does NOT deliver x pounds of carrots at that time, he/she is liable to lose their contract for the next year. Weather or crop failure is not an excuse, so the grower who wants to keep their contract will plant more rows of carrots than needed.
If the supermarket chain reduces its order arbitrarily, the grower is left with excess carrots. Or if there is a bumper crop, probably the other growers have one too. The residual value of all those extra carrots is probably not worth the trouble of packaging, shipping and marketing, so they are often plowed under.
Next, a tremendous amount of food waste is caused by "aesthetic" considerations. Carrots must be perfectly straight, so they all fit neatly into those bags. Non-straight carrots are dumped or sold for animal feed, or in the U.S. are sent to be milled into "baby carrots". Potatoes that are too big: out they go. Apples that are too small: out they go. Any produce item with a little mark on it, a slightly funny color, etc., out they go. In some cases they go for animal food, in some cases particularly in Britain, they are used as feedstock for methane generation. But often they are just composted or plowed under.
It gets worse.
Sell-by dates are the culprit in much meat and dairy-related waste. These are very conservatively set; most foods are good for another several days or even a week or more. This factor combines with the desire of stores to be fully stocked with every possible item, even perishable, regardless of level of sales.
Between the overstocking and the pessimistic Sell-by dates, packaged entrees, sandwiches, salads, and similar foods are usually just dumped. Stuart says that in the U.K., the dumpsters are generally locked to prevent the poor from getting their hands on the food. If not that, the foods are emptied from their packaging and stirred all together with non-food waste to make them unusable. Due to landfill fees in the U.K., more of this waste is going to methane generation, generating pennies on the dollar of their worth as food for humans.
The loss to human food by dairy and meat waste is multiplied by the tremendous amount of human food (corn, soy, wheat, etc.) fed to conventional livestock.
Other sources of food waste include eating too much (waistline as waste), general dislike of organ meats (though some of this goes into pet food), the packaging of perishable food in amounts that are too large for singles or couples to use before they go bad, and the tendency of many children to take a bite of something and throw it away. And the waste of by-catch for seafood runs up to 90% for some items such as wild-caught shrimp. Waste of seafood is particularly tragic since many species are drastically overfished.
Another cause is poor household planning: buying what's on sale instead of what the family will eat; forgetting what you have in stock; getting busy or tired and eating out instead of eating what's on hand.
Stuart has done a great deal of research, and finds that counting waste sources from farm to garbage can, approximately 50% of food production is wasted in the sense that it is does not meet its destiny as human food. The U.S. has more than four times the amount of food required by the nutritional needs of the population (some is fed to livestock). The production of surplus food is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions; the planting of trees on land used for wasted food would offset half to all of man-made emissions.
The good news is that enough food is produced now to give everyone in the world enough to eat. The bad news, of course, is that we do not do that. U.S. households spend about 9% of their income on food, half of what was spent a few decades ago. Food is SO CHEAP for most people that they do not value it. Convenience trumps instrinsic value. It must be especially galling for the hungry, especially in our wealthy nation, to know that tons of perfectly edible food end up in landfills. And it is not showing respect to the animals, the farmers, the land, the Earth, when we treat these resources as unimportant.
So what can we as individuals do? I welcome you to join me in trying to reduce the food waste in your own household. And I welcome suggestions from readers for specific and general ideas.
After all, it isn't just food, it's lives. Lives of food animals, lives of farmers, lives of wild animals whose habitat has been taken away for more soybeans or oil palm or whatever. It's past time for us to consider the Earth and its dwellers as precious.
* Be a better manager. Be aware of your stocks. Use or preserve items before they go bad. Buy only what you will use. There are a multitude of ways to use or preserve food items, and I'll discuss a few in upcoming posts.
* Buy direct from farmers, through CSAs, or through farmers markets or cooperatives. This will eliminate much of the "aesthetic" waste from the supermarkets. The crooked carrot and knobbly potato are perfectly good food.
* Buy grass-fed or pastured meat, dairy and eggs when you can. This will free up more food for humans, and will reduce the need for intensive monocultures.
* Teach your children to respect food. One way is to let them have a garden. The carrot they grew is more precious than the carrot from the supermarket. Or take them to a small farm or CSA, so they can see the plants and animals. Model respect for food in your own behavior.
* If you have fruit trees or shrubs in your yard, work at putting that harvest to good use, not just letting it fall on the sidewalk or be swept into the garbage.
I'll talk about some of the ways to reduce food waste on the community level soon.
Food waste starts right at the farm, particularly with contract growers for supermarkets. Supermarket chains order x pounds of something, like carrots, to be delivered by y date, but they can reduce their order if by that time, demand is down, they already have too many, or for any other reason.
If the grower does NOT deliver x pounds of carrots at that time, he/she is liable to lose their contract for the next year. Weather or crop failure is not an excuse, so the grower who wants to keep their contract will plant more rows of carrots than needed.
If the supermarket chain reduces its order arbitrarily, the grower is left with excess carrots. Or if there is a bumper crop, probably the other growers have one too. The residual value of all those extra carrots is probably not worth the trouble of packaging, shipping and marketing, so they are often plowed under.
Next, a tremendous amount of food waste is caused by "aesthetic" considerations. Carrots must be perfectly straight, so they all fit neatly into those bags. Non-straight carrots are dumped or sold for animal feed, or in the U.S. are sent to be milled into "baby carrots". Potatoes that are too big: out they go. Apples that are too small: out they go. Any produce item with a little mark on it, a slightly funny color, etc., out they go. In some cases they go for animal food, in some cases particularly in Britain, they are used as feedstock for methane generation. But often they are just composted or plowed under.
It gets worse.
Sell-by dates are the culprit in much meat and dairy-related waste. These are very conservatively set; most foods are good for another several days or even a week or more. This factor combines with the desire of stores to be fully stocked with every possible item, even perishable, regardless of level of sales.
Between the overstocking and the pessimistic Sell-by dates, packaged entrees, sandwiches, salads, and similar foods are usually just dumped. Stuart says that in the U.K., the dumpsters are generally locked to prevent the poor from getting their hands on the food. If not that, the foods are emptied from their packaging and stirred all together with non-food waste to make them unusable. Due to landfill fees in the U.K., more of this waste is going to methane generation, generating pennies on the dollar of their worth as food for humans.
The loss to human food by dairy and meat waste is multiplied by the tremendous amount of human food (corn, soy, wheat, etc.) fed to conventional livestock.
Other sources of food waste include eating too much (waistline as waste), general dislike of organ meats (though some of this goes into pet food), the packaging of perishable food in amounts that are too large for singles or couples to use before they go bad, and the tendency of many children to take a bite of something and throw it away. And the waste of by-catch for seafood runs up to 90% for some items such as wild-caught shrimp. Waste of seafood is particularly tragic since many species are drastically overfished.
Another cause is poor household planning: buying what's on sale instead of what the family will eat; forgetting what you have in stock; getting busy or tired and eating out instead of eating what's on hand.
Stuart has done a great deal of research, and finds that counting waste sources from farm to garbage can, approximately 50% of food production is wasted in the sense that it is does not meet its destiny as human food. The U.S. has more than four times the amount of food required by the nutritional needs of the population (some is fed to livestock). The production of surplus food is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions; the planting of trees on land used for wasted food would offset half to all of man-made emissions.
The good news is that enough food is produced now to give everyone in the world enough to eat. The bad news, of course, is that we do not do that. U.S. households spend about 9% of their income on food, half of what was spent a few decades ago. Food is SO CHEAP for most people that they do not value it. Convenience trumps instrinsic value. It must be especially galling for the hungry, especially in our wealthy nation, to know that tons of perfectly edible food end up in landfills. And it is not showing respect to the animals, the farmers, the land, the Earth, when we treat these resources as unimportant.
So what can we as individuals do? I welcome you to join me in trying to reduce the food waste in your own household. And I welcome suggestions from readers for specific and general ideas.
After all, it isn't just food, it's lives. Lives of food animals, lives of farmers, lives of wild animals whose habitat has been taken away for more soybeans or oil palm or whatever. It's past time for us to consider the Earth and its dwellers as precious.
* Be a better manager. Be aware of your stocks. Use or preserve items before they go bad. Buy only what you will use. There are a multitude of ways to use or preserve food items, and I'll discuss a few in upcoming posts.
* Buy direct from farmers, through CSAs, or through farmers markets or cooperatives. This will eliminate much of the "aesthetic" waste from the supermarkets. The crooked carrot and knobbly potato are perfectly good food.
* Buy grass-fed or pastured meat, dairy and eggs when you can. This will free up more food for humans, and will reduce the need for intensive monocultures.
* Teach your children to respect food. One way is to let them have a garden. The carrot they grew is more precious than the carrot from the supermarket. Or take them to a small farm or CSA, so they can see the plants and animals. Model respect for food in your own behavior.
* If you have fruit trees or shrubs in your yard, work at putting that harvest to good use, not just letting it fall on the sidewalk or be swept into the garbage.
I'll talk about some of the ways to reduce food waste on the community level soon.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Starting our Third Year
Jim and I started our local eating journey with the 100-mile diet on Oct. 31, 2007. Oct 31 is the Celtic New Year, which starts at the beginning of winter. The Celtic day starts at night at the setting of the sun. That's one reason why Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and Halloween are so important in our calendar. The Celts believed that at the turn of the year, the veils that separate our world from the spirit world became very thin. They of course considered it to be a holy time.
Two years ago we started "making the road by walking" with local food. We're not quite as strict as when we started, but local eating is working better and better. During this year we started getting more foods from the "100-foot diet"--eggs from our chickens (and chicken from a few of them), vegetables from our front-yard garden, and our selection of fruits.
This year the apple trees bore heavily, but no crop from the peach trees. So we have boxes of apples in the garage and applesauce in jars. But we don't have dried peaches. The greengage plums had a modest showing. They are SO Sweet I don't like eating them fresh very much. I cooked them down to a plum butter, which didn't need any sugar, and is very tasty.
Our food circles: 100-foot circle (from our yard)--chicken, eggs, fruit, some vegetables; 15-mile circle--CSA, most meat, some other vegetables, some dairy products; State of Colorado circle (square)--some staples, Western Slope fruit, pastured poultry; Western U.S. circle (not exactly round)--the rest of the staples, nuts and dried fruits, olive oil and olives, a little Alaska wild-caught salmon; the World--tea black and green, a few cans of artichoke hearts, spices, a little coffee, a little chocolate.
Our seasons: When you eat local food, you pretty much eat seasonally. This year I put less food up for out-of-season eating. I'm feeling more comfortable each season with what the season brings.
I enjoy the lactofermented foods in winter and spring, but not in summer. We have tomato juice and sauce put up, and some nectarines and peaches, bread and butter pickles, tart cherries in the freezer, apples in the garage. Today I got a bag of pumpkins from our CSA: enough for pies, soups, and casseroles.
Local food is just what we eat. Some evenings I look at the plates of food I have fixed, with high-quality local meat, vegetables, beans, cheese and other dairy, and fruit for dessert. What a sheer delight of freshness and flavor! How fortunate we are.
I have spoken to other members of our food cooperative. They also feel that their food choices and meals have changed to be so much more supportive of good health and enjoyment. And we can feel glad to support local farmers and ranchers in hard times. They need help from all of us. They are dedicating their lives to bringing good food to the tables of their neighbors. We're happy to bridge the gap between the growers and the eaters.
Happy New Year to all of you! May the coming year bring happy times and good meals to you and your families.
Two years ago we started "making the road by walking" with local food. We're not quite as strict as when we started, but local eating is working better and better. During this year we started getting more foods from the "100-foot diet"--eggs from our chickens (and chicken from a few of them), vegetables from our front-yard garden, and our selection of fruits.
This year the apple trees bore heavily, but no crop from the peach trees. So we have boxes of apples in the garage and applesauce in jars. But we don't have dried peaches. The greengage plums had a modest showing. They are SO Sweet I don't like eating them fresh very much. I cooked them down to a plum butter, which didn't need any sugar, and is very tasty.
Our food circles: 100-foot circle (from our yard)--chicken, eggs, fruit, some vegetables; 15-mile circle--CSA, most meat, some other vegetables, some dairy products; State of Colorado circle (square)--some staples, Western Slope fruit, pastured poultry; Western U.S. circle (not exactly round)--the rest of the staples, nuts and dried fruits, olive oil and olives, a little Alaska wild-caught salmon; the World--tea black and green, a few cans of artichoke hearts, spices, a little coffee, a little chocolate.
Our seasons: When you eat local food, you pretty much eat seasonally. This year I put less food up for out-of-season eating. I'm feeling more comfortable each season with what the season brings.
I enjoy the lactofermented foods in winter and spring, but not in summer. We have tomato juice and sauce put up, and some nectarines and peaches, bread and butter pickles, tart cherries in the freezer, apples in the garage. Today I got a bag of pumpkins from our CSA: enough for pies, soups, and casseroles.
Local food is just what we eat. Some evenings I look at the plates of food I have fixed, with high-quality local meat, vegetables, beans, cheese and other dairy, and fruit for dessert. What a sheer delight of freshness and flavor! How fortunate we are.
I have spoken to other members of our food cooperative. They also feel that their food choices and meals have changed to be so much more supportive of good health and enjoyment. And we can feel glad to support local farmers and ranchers in hard times. They need help from all of us. They are dedicating their lives to bringing good food to the tables of their neighbors. We're happy to bridge the gap between the growers and the eaters.
Happy New Year to all of you! May the coming year bring happy times and good meals to you and your families.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Three for the Season
We're at the turn of the seasons now--the summer bounty is fading fast, the fall fruits and vegetables come into their own. If you haven't put up enough tomatoes to last the winter, it's probably too late. This was a tough year for tomatoes here; they grew slowly in the cool summer, and just didn't want to ripen. Boxes of field tomatoes for preserving showed up late, for just a few weeks.
We're ripening three trays of small tomatoes from the garden, yellow gooseberry and red pear. They're very tasty; as they turn their appropriate colors we snag them as snacks. The juicy cooling salads of summer are morphing into salads of sturdier greens, trimmed with carrot and daikon and the last few tomatoes.
Here are some turn-of-the-season recipes.
Last of Summer Pasta Dish
3 frying peppers (mild light green), seeded and chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/2 medium onion, peeled and chopped, or one leek sliced
2 stalks celery
oops too late for the zucchini--omit
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium head broccoli, cut into small flowerets
3 or 4 good-sized tomatoes with a few soft spots
4 oz tomato sauce (optional)
Fresh or dried herbs as available
salt and pepper to taste
Grated parmesan cheese
Freshly cooked pasta, regular or gluten-free
Heat the oil, add the chopped onion, garlic, peppers, and broccoli. Saute over medium heat for 5 minutes or more. Chop the tomatoes, cutting out the spots; don't bother to peel. Add tomatoes to skillet, and tomato sauce if using. Add herbs--maybe 2 tsp mixed fresh herbs such as thyme, oregano, marjoram, or 1 tsp dried, and if you have a little parsley, chop that and throw it in too. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer covered until the tomatoes start to disintegrate and the vegetables are done.
Have the hot pasta drained. Place in bowls, top with sauce, and sprinkle with cheese. Yum.
-----------------
Beans and Greens Soup
I'm always careful to soak all beans very well before cooking, even these little guys. Be sure to pick over your beans well, removing bits of dirt or rock, and broken or discolored beans. Then rinse and soak. Don't use salt when cooking dried beans; it toughens them. You can salt them after they are tender.
1 cup navy beans
a little ham or small piece of ham shank, if desired
1/2 medium onion, peeled and chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
time......
2 cups chicken broth, vegetable broth, or water
1 lb hardy greens as available: kale, chard, tatsoi (a dark green spoon-shaped green), mustard greens, turnip greens, etc., washed and chopped
8 oz tomato juice or 4 oz tomato sauce
1 large tomato chopped
1 tsp Thai curry paste of your favorite type, or 1 tsp chili flakes
salt and pepper
This is where the time comes in:
Day before, pick over, rinse and soak the beans in water to cover. Next day, drain, add fresh water to cover by 1 inch, ham if you're using it, and chopped onion. NO SALT at this point. Simmer 2 hours or more until beans are tender. Add water as needed to keep it from going dry.
While preparing dinner, heat the beans, add the broth and the chopped greens of your choice, and the tomatoes. Stir in the curry paste, chili paste, or chili flakes to the hotness desired, and salt to taste. If you like, you can throw in some small pasta such as Orzo or alphabets (always fun). Simmer 10 minutes or more, until everything is suitably tender.
-----------------------------------------
Rhubarb Crisp
We recently got some fall rhubarb, and I made this decadent dessert. It was totally wrong of us to eat the whole pan that night, but we did.
2 1/2 cups chopped rhubarb (frozen is OK too)
1/2 cup sugar, or to taste (you could use Succanat or honey)
1 1/4 cups brown rice flour
1 cup gluten-free oatmeal
8 tbs butter (1/4 lb stick)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup brown sugar (or 1/2 c Succanat and 1 tbs molasses)
1/2 cup slivered almonds
Put the rhubarb in a small pan with water to just cover, and the sugar. Stew gently until it becomes soft.
Mix flour, oats, sugar and salt in bowl. Work in butter with your fingers, until like crumbs. Reserve half of the mixture. Spread the other half in a 8x12 baking dish. Then spread the rhubarb mixture over it as uniformly as possible. Mix the almonds into the reserved crumbs and sprinkle evenly on the top.
Bake at 375 degrees 30-35 minutes. Remove from oven and let sit a few minutes before dishing up. You don't need to top with cream or ice cream, but if you do, I won't tell.
We're ripening three trays of small tomatoes from the garden, yellow gooseberry and red pear. They're very tasty; as they turn their appropriate colors we snag them as snacks. The juicy cooling salads of summer are morphing into salads of sturdier greens, trimmed with carrot and daikon and the last few tomatoes.
Here are some turn-of-the-season recipes.
Last of Summer Pasta Dish
3 frying peppers (mild light green), seeded and chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/2 medium onion, peeled and chopped, or one leek sliced
2 stalks celery
oops too late for the zucchini--omit
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium head broccoli, cut into small flowerets
3 or 4 good-sized tomatoes with a few soft spots
4 oz tomato sauce (optional)
Fresh or dried herbs as available
salt and pepper to taste
Grated parmesan cheese
Freshly cooked pasta, regular or gluten-free
Heat the oil, add the chopped onion, garlic, peppers, and broccoli. Saute over medium heat for 5 minutes or more. Chop the tomatoes, cutting out the spots; don't bother to peel. Add tomatoes to skillet, and tomato sauce if using. Add herbs--maybe 2 tsp mixed fresh herbs such as thyme, oregano, marjoram, or 1 tsp dried, and if you have a little parsley, chop that and throw it in too. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer covered until the tomatoes start to disintegrate and the vegetables are done.
Have the hot pasta drained. Place in bowls, top with sauce, and sprinkle with cheese. Yum.
-----------------
Beans and Greens Soup
I'm always careful to soak all beans very well before cooking, even these little guys. Be sure to pick over your beans well, removing bits of dirt or rock, and broken or discolored beans. Then rinse and soak. Don't use salt when cooking dried beans; it toughens them. You can salt them after they are tender.
1 cup navy beans
a little ham or small piece of ham shank, if desired
1/2 medium onion, peeled and chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
time......
2 cups chicken broth, vegetable broth, or water
1 lb hardy greens as available: kale, chard, tatsoi (a dark green spoon-shaped green), mustard greens, turnip greens, etc., washed and chopped
8 oz tomato juice or 4 oz tomato sauce
1 large tomato chopped
1 tsp Thai curry paste of your favorite type, or 1 tsp chili flakes
salt and pepper
This is where the time comes in:
Day before, pick over, rinse and soak the beans in water to cover. Next day, drain, add fresh water to cover by 1 inch, ham if you're using it, and chopped onion. NO SALT at this point. Simmer 2 hours or more until beans are tender. Add water as needed to keep it from going dry.
While preparing dinner, heat the beans, add the broth and the chopped greens of your choice, and the tomatoes. Stir in the curry paste, chili paste, or chili flakes to the hotness desired, and salt to taste. If you like, you can throw in some small pasta such as Orzo or alphabets (always fun). Simmer 10 minutes or more, until everything is suitably tender.
-----------------------------------------
Rhubarb Crisp
We recently got some fall rhubarb, and I made this decadent dessert. It was totally wrong of us to eat the whole pan that night, but we did.
2 1/2 cups chopped rhubarb (frozen is OK too)
1/2 cup sugar, or to taste (you could use Succanat or honey)
1 1/4 cups brown rice flour
1 cup gluten-free oatmeal
8 tbs butter (1/4 lb stick)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup brown sugar (or 1/2 c Succanat and 1 tbs molasses)
1/2 cup slivered almonds
Put the rhubarb in a small pan with water to just cover, and the sugar. Stew gently until it becomes soft.
Mix flour, oats, sugar and salt in bowl. Work in butter with your fingers, until like crumbs. Reserve half of the mixture. Spread the other half in a 8x12 baking dish. Then spread the rhubarb mixture over it as uniformly as possible. Mix the almonds into the reserved crumbs and sprinkle evenly on the top.
Bake at 375 degrees 30-35 minutes. Remove from oven and let sit a few minutes before dishing up. You don't need to top with cream or ice cream, but if you do, I won't tell.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Guesswork
An important part of local eating in a temperate-zone area is putting up food for the winter. We're doing our best to eat fruits and vegetables from Colorado, and when winter arrives, they will no longer be available. So it's up to me to put them into jars, dry them, or freeze them.
The guesswork comes in: how MANY jars? what kinds of food? Besides that, every harvest season is different. It's a lot of expense and work to put up things that nobody wants to eat. And you really would like to finish off 2008's jars or freezer items before you start putting 2009 crops away.
What you should NOT guess at is when you preserved something. Every every jar gets its own label: what it is, month and year. I was pretty much amazed in the winter, as we went through jar after jar marked 8/09, 9/09, 10/09.... I must have been in a food-preserving frenzy last fall.
I put the dried goods into jars too, labeled with item and date. I mark the freezer bags with dates too. Rotating stock is SO important.
RESULTS:
--The green beans and snap peas I froze last year must have been blanched too long, because they came out kind of mushy. We weren't very interested in eating them, and they are mostly still in the freezer. Too bad.
--The nectarines and peaches in light honey syrup were WONDERFUL. I did a load of them, and then another load. Box after box. We enjoyed them all winter long, and I still have 16 pints left. Overshot just a little, but we'll eat the 2008s first. I did a few plums too, which were nice.
--The tomatoes were fabulous. I made stewed tomatoes, tomato juice, chopped tomatoes, and tomato sauce. We used them as pizza topping, in soups and casseroles, and tomato juice for drinking. I'm down to one quart juice, and 1 half-pint sauce. Turned out just about right, since the tomato crop is VERY late this year. I've got tomato sauce simmering on the stove right now. I'd like to find another box of tomatoes to put up, while they're still available.
--I still have some dried fruit left. I haven't dried any more this year, since we have so much. I'm drying more herbs this year: basil and dill from my CSA, mint from the garden, celery leaves from a head of celery I found at the Farmer's Market. This is not prime celery-growing territory, and I was happy to see it.
--We polished off all the lactofermented (pickled) cucumbers (6 half-gallons), in short order. They were followed by the (3 jars) lactofermented green beans, and we got through most of the (2 jars) of lactofermented salsa. I still have a few jars of mixed lactofermented veggies; I seem to lose interest in them in the summer. For this year, I've made three jars of wax beans, and one jar of cukes finished, with another three sitting on the counter now. And I've just put 2 jars of kim chee in to ferment.
I'd like to do a jar of salsa if I can get the tomatoes. And a jar of sauerkraut. Lactofermented pickles stay happily in your frig for months, sometimes even into the second year, if you don't eat them in time. Overshot just a bit on the lactofermented veggies. Or, perhaps we're not eating enough of them?
--I dried some green beans last year, forgot about them most of the winter, then discovered them in time to add to winter soups. They really come out well. I also have dried bell and banana peppers; I used some but not enough.
Some vegetables have gone to waste this year, because I have not gotten to them either in cooking or in putting up. You shouldn't try to put up old stale, wilting veggies, but plan ahead and put those veggies up when they're fresh.
--This year we have apples, loads of them. We haven't had a crop for the last two years. I'll be doing applesauce and apple rollups, so I don't think I need any more peaches and nectarines this year. We'll pick through the apples, choose the nicest ones and store them in boxes in the garage for the winter. These apples keep pretty well until March in a cold place. The rest will go into the kettle for applesauce.
--This winter I plan to do more sprouting. The fresh foods taste so good in the middle of winter. It's easy to do in a jar on your counter.
So, in general, my guesswork of last year worked out pretty well. I'm fine-tuning this year: what do we need more of, what less? What worked, what didn't? Where do I need to work harder at finding recipes and using the foods that we have?
To sum up, the rules of thumb for food storage are:
****Label Everything, with the date.
****Store what you eat, eat what you store.
****If you have a bounty of something, put it up while it is still fresh.
The guesswork comes in: how MANY jars? what kinds of food? Besides that, every harvest season is different. It's a lot of expense and work to put up things that nobody wants to eat. And you really would like to finish off 2008's jars or freezer items before you start putting 2009 crops away.
What you should NOT guess at is when you preserved something. Every every jar gets its own label: what it is, month and year. I was pretty much amazed in the winter, as we went through jar after jar marked 8/09, 9/09, 10/09.... I must have been in a food-preserving frenzy last fall.
I put the dried goods into jars too, labeled with item and date. I mark the freezer bags with dates too. Rotating stock is SO important.
RESULTS:
--The green beans and snap peas I froze last year must have been blanched too long, because they came out kind of mushy. We weren't very interested in eating them, and they are mostly still in the freezer. Too bad.
--The nectarines and peaches in light honey syrup were WONDERFUL. I did a load of them, and then another load. Box after box. We enjoyed them all winter long, and I still have 16 pints left. Overshot just a little, but we'll eat the 2008s first. I did a few plums too, which were nice.
--The tomatoes were fabulous. I made stewed tomatoes, tomato juice, chopped tomatoes, and tomato sauce. We used them as pizza topping, in soups and casseroles, and tomato juice for drinking. I'm down to one quart juice, and 1 half-pint sauce. Turned out just about right, since the tomato crop is VERY late this year. I've got tomato sauce simmering on the stove right now. I'd like to find another box of tomatoes to put up, while they're still available.
--I still have some dried fruit left. I haven't dried any more this year, since we have so much. I'm drying more herbs this year: basil and dill from my CSA, mint from the garden, celery leaves from a head of celery I found at the Farmer's Market. This is not prime celery-growing territory, and I was happy to see it.
--We polished off all the lactofermented (pickled) cucumbers (6 half-gallons), in short order. They were followed by the (3 jars) lactofermented green beans, and we got through most of the (2 jars) of lactofermented salsa. I still have a few jars of mixed lactofermented veggies; I seem to lose interest in them in the summer. For this year, I've made three jars of wax beans, and one jar of cukes finished, with another three sitting on the counter now. And I've just put 2 jars of kim chee in to ferment.
I'd like to do a jar of salsa if I can get the tomatoes. And a jar of sauerkraut. Lactofermented pickles stay happily in your frig for months, sometimes even into the second year, if you don't eat them in time. Overshot just a bit on the lactofermented veggies. Or, perhaps we're not eating enough of them?
--I dried some green beans last year, forgot about them most of the winter, then discovered them in time to add to winter soups. They really come out well. I also have dried bell and banana peppers; I used some but not enough.
Some vegetables have gone to waste this year, because I have not gotten to them either in cooking or in putting up. You shouldn't try to put up old stale, wilting veggies, but plan ahead and put those veggies up when they're fresh.
--This year we have apples, loads of them. We haven't had a crop for the last two years. I'll be doing applesauce and apple rollups, so I don't think I need any more peaches and nectarines this year. We'll pick through the apples, choose the nicest ones and store them in boxes in the garage for the winter. These apples keep pretty well until March in a cold place. The rest will go into the kettle for applesauce.
--This winter I plan to do more sprouting. The fresh foods taste so good in the middle of winter. It's easy to do in a jar on your counter.
So, in general, my guesswork of last year worked out pretty well. I'm fine-tuning this year: what do we need more of, what less? What worked, what didn't? Where do I need to work harder at finding recipes and using the foods that we have?
To sum up, the rules of thumb for food storage are:
****Label Everything, with the date.
****Store what you eat, eat what you store.
****If you have a bounty of something, put it up while it is still fresh.
Year of the Garden: Update
The baby lettuces you see in my previous post grew up into an astonishing array of variety in colors and shapes, nice medium-sized heads. I picked them all before the freeze last week. The kale, chard and chicory breeze right through mild freezes near 30 degrees. This was my most successful garden bed. Planted in mid-July, the greens had time to get good sized before frost. We had many servings of delicious thinnings along the way too.
I picked a big bowl of little tomatoes before the frost. My varieties this year were Austin's Red Pear and Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry. Both small and very flavorful. We picked only a dozen ripe ones, with hundreds on the bushes. I covered the plants, but the foliage got zapped anyway. However, the remaining green tomatoes survived, and I picked the rest of them the next day. I have 5 trays of the little guys waiting to ripen up (or give up).
The pumpkin vines did fine, making ten pumpkins. The watermelon and cantaloupe didn't ripen. The beans were a total disaster this year--I think my problem was rabbits or voles eating all the new shoots.
The flowers and herbs in their cement-block pots did wonderfully. They were easy to water. The mint stayed within bounds. And they were so pretty. Hopefully the perennial herbs will overwinter.
I'm now in apple harvest. We have three mature apple trees, variety Delicious, as Delicious used to be: sweet and flavorful. Great keeper in the garage over the winter. Sweet enough to not need any sugar to make applesauce and apple butter. They're also a good cider apple, mixed with bitter-sharp cider apples.
These are Delicious as they were before the plant breeders got to work trying to make them more red. The watery, pithy, flavorless Red Delicious in the stores, mostly from China, are so cheap that U.S. growers have been grubbing out their Red Delicious trees. There is no U.S. market any more.
Delicious need to be allowed to ripen on the tree to get their full flavor. Mine were finally ready to go this week. I've been sampling the last couple of weeks, to make sure they have come into their full flavor. We'll put aside the best into storage boxes, and I'll make applesauce out of the ones with worm damage.
A friend of mine offered to bring a troop of Girl Scouts to help pick. I figured maybe 5 or 6 girls, very much appreciated. Wow! Thirty girls showed up with at least 10 parents. They were scampering around, climbing up in the trees, filling up boxes. In less than an hour they had the trees pretty much picked, and they are big trees, full of apples. The energy of the young is astounding! And the power of community.
Picking apples has been close to an ordeal in previous years, when my DH and I did all the work. It is still fun to pack those beauties away in boxes and give them to friends and neighbors, but it's a lot of work. Now I have the boxes packed, and the girls had fun and took apples home with them. The chickens are enjoying the windfalls.
I didn't get to the wild plums the way I wanted to. I checked when they were not ripe (and VERY sour). Then time got away from me, and they ripened and mostly fell off before I got them picked. They are tasty when very ripe, a lovely dark pink color. Since we're not big jelly eaters, we just eat them fresh, or I freeze a few.
I picked the Greengage plums about a month ago, just as they were dead ripe. I made jam out of them; they are hard to dry, being so sweet. The jam was sweet, spicy and flavorful with just the plums--no sugar required. They're really almost too sweet to eat out of the hand.
I picked a big bowl of little tomatoes before the frost. My varieties this year were Austin's Red Pear and Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry. Both small and very flavorful. We picked only a dozen ripe ones, with hundreds on the bushes. I covered the plants, but the foliage got zapped anyway. However, the remaining green tomatoes survived, and I picked the rest of them the next day. I have 5 trays of the little guys waiting to ripen up (or give up).
The pumpkin vines did fine, making ten pumpkins. The watermelon and cantaloupe didn't ripen. The beans were a total disaster this year--I think my problem was rabbits or voles eating all the new shoots.
The flowers and herbs in their cement-block pots did wonderfully. They were easy to water. The mint stayed within bounds. And they were so pretty. Hopefully the perennial herbs will overwinter.
I'm now in apple harvest. We have three mature apple trees, variety Delicious, as Delicious used to be: sweet and flavorful. Great keeper in the garage over the winter. Sweet enough to not need any sugar to make applesauce and apple butter. They're also a good cider apple, mixed with bitter-sharp cider apples.
These are Delicious as they were before the plant breeders got to work trying to make them more red. The watery, pithy, flavorless Red Delicious in the stores, mostly from China, are so cheap that U.S. growers have been grubbing out their Red Delicious trees. There is no U.S. market any more.
Delicious need to be allowed to ripen on the tree to get their full flavor. Mine were finally ready to go this week. I've been sampling the last couple of weeks, to make sure they have come into their full flavor. We'll put aside the best into storage boxes, and I'll make applesauce out of the ones with worm damage.
A friend of mine offered to bring a troop of Girl Scouts to help pick. I figured maybe 5 or 6 girls, very much appreciated. Wow! Thirty girls showed up with at least 10 parents. They were scampering around, climbing up in the trees, filling up boxes. In less than an hour they had the trees pretty much picked, and they are big trees, full of apples. The energy of the young is astounding! And the power of community.
Picking apples has been close to an ordeal in previous years, when my DH and I did all the work. It is still fun to pack those beauties away in boxes and give them to friends and neighbors, but it's a lot of work. Now I have the boxes packed, and the girls had fun and took apples home with them. The chickens are enjoying the windfalls.
I didn't get to the wild plums the way I wanted to. I checked when they were not ripe (and VERY sour). Then time got away from me, and they ripened and mostly fell off before I got them picked. They are tasty when very ripe, a lovely dark pink color. Since we're not big jelly eaters, we just eat them fresh, or I freeze a few.
I picked the Greengage plums about a month ago, just as they were dead ripe. I made jam out of them; they are hard to dry, being so sweet. The jam was sweet, spicy and flavorful with just the plums--no sugar required. They're really almost too sweet to eat out of the hand.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The Year of the Garden
Last year was the year of Eating Locally. There was so much buzz about it; I was asked to speak to a number of groups. Books were printed, blogs were started. This year even the supermarkets have "Buy Local" stickers on some things. This is good, of course, though the few marked produce items are more of a token than a movement.
For us, Local Food has just become the way we eat. I've loosened our restrictions, but we're still eating probably 85% to 90% local food, more than last year when we had non-local food on hand that I was using. We've become accustomed to beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables, non-feedlot beef, chicken and pork from animals that had a good life scratching and rooting in the open air. The prospect of going back to commodity-based industrial food would be unspeakably dreary.
Someone recently asked me why I supported local foods. I told him that my purposes had enlarged somewhat over the past year. At first, it was mainly the somewhat abstract (though still important) issues of climate change and peak oil. After having eaten this way for a while, I'd have to say the most important issues are:
- Supporting local farmers and growers, and local small food processors, helping to create a robust local foodshed;
- Enjoying the best quality food we have ever eaten, at no more cost than industrial commodity and imported food;
- Eating a far healthier diet: cooking from ingredients rather than eating junk food and fast food; eating more fruits and vegetables and less grain; avoiding pesticides, herbicides, unpronounceable additives, MSG and high-fructose corn sweetener.
Back to my theme: if last year was the year of Eating Locally, this year is the Year of the Garden. People who haven't had a garden in years put one in this year (myself included). You see many more gardens in front yards than ever before. Seed companies are reporting phenomenal sales growth.
In our local food cooperative, produce sales are down somewhat, although we have more selection, and more direct-from-farm offerings this year. Our local CSAs are having more trouble selling their shares. Some is due to the economy, but much is due to people growing their own. When you have a couple of hills of zucchini (or even a couple of plants!) you've GOT zucchini.
It hasn't been an easy year for gardens in northern Colorado. June was unseasonably cold and wet; numerous hailstorms pounded young plants into the dirt, and pounded the replanted gardens two weeks later. On the other hand, we haven't had to water all that much. Tomatoes are slow to get ripe with cool days and cooler nights.
Let me tell you about My Garden. We live a few miles outside town, so the front yard/back yard what-will-the-neighbors-think problem does not bother us. With all the trees and shrubs on our acre, however, the only truly sunny spot was in the front yard. The front yard, nominally in grass lawn, is pretty well filled with clover and heavy pasture grasses, and our soil is clay that turns to brick in the summer sun. And I've got some physical problems that make it difficult for me to do heavy garden work. So I thought all last year about what I would do, and all this spring, and finally, a little late for this season, decided on a plan.
Rototilling the heavy grass (mostly Johnson grass) would make a new plant come up for every little fragment of cut root, so that was out. And I won't use herbicides. I tried raised beds a few years ago, with treated wood (uh-oh, arsenic). The other problem was that the dirt pulled away from the wood, and water just rolled off the soil, down the boards, and away. I'm sure expert gardeners out there are just rolling their eyes now.... But remember, if a solution requires a huge amount of physical labor, it's out for me, no matter how worthy it is.
Ingredients: Last year I made a compost pile using four straw bales for the sides, and filling the center with alternating grass clippings, kitchen scraps, leaves, etc. Then it stewed over the winter. This spring the straw was breaking down too, as it would.
We also had loads of cardboard and heavy paper bags from the food coop distributions. We had some wood chips left over from a previous landscaping effort. And I ordered a pile of mixed dirt and compost from a local landscape service. (I can detect eye-rolling again, but sometimes you have to work with what you can...)
We got cement blocks for the border. We laid out a double layer of cardboard and heavy paper bags, right on the grass (mowed short). The area was about 20 by 22 feet. Then we set the cement blocks, cavity side up, around on the edges of the cardboard (don't want the Johnson grass to come up in the cement blocks either). The north and south sides of the bed were blocks all the way, but on the east and west side I left matching openings (one block wide) to form three paths that you could run a wheelbarrow all the way through. The layout was to have four beds, four feet wide each, with wood-chipped paths between them running from east to west.
A kind friend came and helped us, and the three of us wheelbarrowed the compost and old straw and spread a four-inch layer over the cardboard. We sprinkled on some old dry chicken manure (saved from the chicks I raised last year). Next, we put two inches of soil, to keep the whole thing from blowing away, and I watered it all well. In further sessions, DH wheelbarrowed up loads of dirt, we built up the four beds another four inches, and I filled in all the little cavities in the cement blocks. Then we spread the wood chips into the paths.
We need to get some more chips, but what we have prevents muddy shoes at least. The beds themselves are nice and fluffy, because you don't need to step on them for any reason. The beds are just four feet wide and you can reach in from both sides.
I got bedding plants: flowers and herbs, some perennial, some annual, whatever I could find in mid-June. Loads of mint, marigold, zinnia, oregano, marjoram, snapdragons, nasturtium, sage, thyme, petunias, basil, carnations, nicotiana, and more. So late in the season, the flowers were on sale at $1/flat of four. I planted them into the cavities, alternating flowers and herbs.
I had started tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, by then somewhat potbound. The day before the garden was ready, our local packrats found the plants hardening off on the back patio and nipped off ALL the little peppers and all but one of the eggplants. Tomatoes don't taste good, so they were safe. I picked the best five tomato seedlings and the slightly chewed eggplant and planted them in one bed. What fun! It's been years since I had the joy of having a garden.
In the second bed I planted one hill each of early watermelon, pattypan squash, Lady Godiva pumpkin (grown for the plentiful soft-shelled seeds), and cucumber. They have plenty of room to ramble.
In the third bed, my failure. I planted green and wax beans, two rows down the entire 20-foot length. Once they got up, some little nibblers came every night and nibbled off all the new shoots (could be rabbits, could be packrats or voles). Finally the plants just gave up under the constant attack and died. Oh well. Next year, maybe some cages or other protective gear...
In mid-July I planted the fourth bed to fall greens: mixed lettuce, upland cress, rainbow chard, Russian kale, and mixed chicories. I covered it all with Reemay cloth (or similar), a non-woven light cloth that shades the worst of the sun, keeps the soil moist, and keeps out the four and six-footed eaters pretty much. You water right through it. By the end of the season it's shredded. I've been thinning the rows, and using the thinnings as mixed salad. We've had three meals off of it so far. The upland cress is very spicy; I've never grown it before.
My very-late-started tomatoes are setting fruit. The pattypan squash has several nice-looking fruits almost ready for harvest. The pumpkin is running uproariously along the bed, setting fruit. The lemon cucumber is setting its first fruit too.
I'm thinking that as the weather gets cold, I can cover the tomatoes (which are on the south end) including the cement blocks, which will help hold the heat through the night. The same for the greens bed, which is on the north end with its own row of blocks.
I water with the hose most days that we don't get a good rain, especially the block cavities which dry out quickly, but it takes only 5-10 minutes. Another five minutes daily to pull out the seedling weeds. I've never had such a trouble-free garden. The flowers and herbs around the bed make it particularly beautiful.
We only used up 2/3rds of the dirt I ordered, and we've got another half-load of cardboard built up, so I am planning to make another smaller bed, with more straw and leaves in it, this fall. Ideally a layered bed like this should be made in the fall, so it can create soil over the winter. I didn't want to wait; I Really wanted a garden this year, so I chose plants that don't need to root deeply.
Next year all that stuff in the middle will be well broken down, and I could even plant potatoes or carrots if I wanted. To keep this garden up, I need to be diligent about pulling weeds, never step on the beds, and be sure to build up the soil over the winter with more organic material. I should never need to rototill. The money invested in setting up the garden will pay back in future years of produce.
Compromises all the way around: money spent, dirt hauled in, cement blocks used (not eco-friendly). On the other hand, I used what I had: sunny area, cardboard and paper, compost, straw and old manure. I avoided problems: aggravating our fussy clay soil, encouraging the Johnson grass and clover, planting in tree-root or shaded areas. And I've got an informal setup for season extension, with the blocks next to the beds.
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