the bad ol' days

My first and third years of college, I had housing arrangements that required that everyone in the house took turns cooking dinner.

   The first year, I cooked weekly for 6 young women. The third year, I cooked every other week for 6 women and 6 young men. Men eat more.

The third year involved a dinner allowance. I had to keep and submit a receipt. It was the same amount allowed the other 5 women and 6 men when they cooked. I remember it being $24; $2/person. We were not to go above budget.

   The most filling, cheapest meals I knew how to prepare involved pork, and pork is haram [1 man and 1 woman were Muslim]. 

   Every time it was my turn to cook, I struggled.

Q: Why didn't I just go to Grocery Outlet, buy a whole bunch of bulk food on sale, and cook rice-and-beans at every meal? 

   A1: I didn't know Grocery Outlet existed; even if I had, I didn't conceive of cheap food as something that is worthy. I identified as a person who didn't shop at trash groceries.

   A2: I didn't have a car, and there was no grocery store within walking distance. I had to beg a favor to get to anywhere I wanted to go beyond campus. 

   I hated (and still hate) feeling obligated to buy something at a store just because I visited. When someone on a college student's gas allowance has made a special trip to take you to that store, the pressure's on. And I hated, then as now, begging rides. Imagine, with those high emotional costs, how it would've felt to beg a ride to go to three different stores on three different days to find the best deals. 

   My idea of a nightmare.

   A3: Bulk food was not in my playbook at the time. Also: who has room to store bulk food in a college apartment?

   A4: Rice-and-beans was already overplayed. One of the 6 guys had cornered the rice-and-beany market. He claimed a Mexican mom. He made r&b each time and people did complain that he always made the same thing. Repeating meals wasn't so socially acceptable unless you ordered :PIZZA.

What on earth would I do if I had to feed myself and Bjorn on $2/meal? That's just $12/day! Now I know how to cook, and what foods to prioritize, but I wouldn't be able to do it and be healthy.

   I'm grateful I don't have to worry about that.

no ado about much

Actually there is a big to-do brewing.
   In February Bjorn asked me to read this book. I read it, OFCOURSE. I love having books recommended 'specially to me!

It changed my life. My life changes a lot. Here's a book for that.
   I don't think that someone else reading the same book would have the same life change. This book introduced me to a new concept, which I followed, researched, and further followed and researched for 100 more hours —

my research took the time of a part-time job, some weeks.

I'm planning on turning our yard into an Edible Forest Garden. I am not sure why I haven't blogged about it a lot. I do feel like I've talked to some people a lot about it and they still exhibit cluelessness about what it is. That kind of takes the hot air out of my sails.
   What's with the deaf ears?
   Maybe my message is wrapped in an impenetrable tortilla of zealotry. Perhaps my elevator pitch is snore boring. Maybe these concepts are so counter-cultural that people can't grok it. Perchance people lack only visual aids.

I am very interested in talking about it — I'm more interested in doing it.

Stuffing the Lily

Nudiustertian supper: daylilies stuffed with sardine salad (fennel bulb, pearl onions, garlic scapes, a mustard sauce, olive oil).

Keeping It Real

I sometimes tell people that I make EVERYTHING my family eats.
   This isn't strictly true; I do not make, for example, the tahini we eat. The other day I was at the co-op filling up a jar with bulk tahini. A little kid in a grocery cart (who was shopping with a father figure) asked his dad "what's that?" His dad said, "it's tahini. It's ground up sesame seeds. You know the little white seeds we put in stir fries and stuff? That what they look like when you blend them all up." And the little kid said, "oh. But that's not homemade. That's co-op made." He repeated it, a note of disdain in his voice, "co-op made. Not homemade."
    [Note: it's not even made at the co-op; they just stock it there! So it's even worse than he thinks ;)]
   I thought it was so cute that this little kid's a homemade food snob .... though my dreams of this 100% homemade food family were dashed when I saw the man buy PASTA (gasp!) 30 seconds later.

I don't roast and pulverize my own sesame seeds. I don't make our own vinegar, either.

Lazeez -- No, Alazz

I was asked to bring a vegetable to Sunday dinner. A cooked one. (A raw one, beet-and-carrot salad, was already being provided.) (Of course, there weren't just two vegetables. There were cooked carrots, too; there are always cooked carrots. Ok maybe not always but 90% of the time.)
   (There were homemade pickles, too, and the pickles are always; 100% of Sunday dinners.)
   I didn't know when dinner was going to be, so I wanted to prepare something that would be decently yummy hot, warm, or cool. I also wanted to use nettles. Nettles (a) have such a short season and (2) are uberduber healthful and (+) they're local and (iv) I already had some.

Here's what I did, and it was the best nettle preparation I have ever eaten. (The first time I prepared them was last year and I boiled them. I was afraid of the stingers. :P AND I was serving them to guests. I didn't want to sting my guests.)

Put nettles (I used .5 lb total in two separate batches) in a skillet-ish pan on low-medium heat. Add raisins. (1/4 c?) Add a little bit (a few Tbsp?) of coconut oil in one crescent of the pan, shoving the warming nettles to the gibbous remains. (I was using my 14 inch pan.) When the coconut oil is about half melted add spices to it. I added ground mace, ground clove, and ground ceylon cinnamon. Then add salt. Then let the coconut oil finish melting, mix the spices as needed, then mix in the nettles and raisins bit by bit. Stop cooking when it looks and smells done.
   Nettles are often compared to spinach. They are more delicious than spinach. They are much less watery, so these were almost crispy! Wow. Yum. And the type of fat, and the seasoning (bakery-ish) increased the temperature range at which it would be yummy.

I don't know if I'll get a chance to do this again before nettle season is over. I cook nettles infrequently enough that I might not be able to remember this if I don't record it.

So. For the record.

sprang spreng sprong moo moo moo

On the first day of SPRING! I walked 5 miles, liquid fasted until supper, did some research at the library, enjoyed my day off work.
   I turned off the heat. I let the dog sleep with us because I didn't want him to get too cold in his crate (I am a pup pamperer). Bjorn turned the heat back on this morning. 'Twas too cold for him.

Today I got my taxes done. Da did them. Joint filing FT$!

And we picked up our cow. Wow. Wow. Wow cow. Cow wow. 706 lb hanging weight. ~21 cubic feet of freezer filled.
   We got 17 boxes of cut-and-wrapped cow parts and 3 bonus boxes of dog bones (that is, cow bones for the dog). When we got home, we took the meat out of the boxes. Most of the boxes were packed by cut. 4 boxes of mostly hamburger (whoa, so much hamburger), 2 boxes of soup bones, 1 box of cube steaks and fajita meat, 1 box of T-bone and sirloin steaks (one cow makes a lot of steaks!), 2 boxes full of roasts ... yada yada fish paste.

(When Roscivs lived in South Africa one of his favorite friends there said "fish paste" after "yada yada" and he picked it up from her.)

Bjorn and I did a great job with a novel situation. Go team! Huzpaz! Together, we wanted to get everything into the freezer as fast as possible on this end (the now), and to get things out of it as efficiently as possible on the other end (the future). To that end (that is, the future), we divvied up the cuts and put them back in the boxes (dead cow Tetris) with the basics in each: hamburger, steaks, a roast, soup bones. So it'll go like this: take a box out of the freezer. Bring it in to the little freezer in the house. Dine on a nice variety of cuts instead of 3 weeks in a row of chuck roast all the time, 4 weeks in a row of nothing but T-bone steaks, and no more of either for the rest of the year. And no digging around in the freezer for this or that cut.
   I think it'll work well. If we get stew meat in a box I take out in the winter I'll make stew; if in the summer, I'll make kebabs (on rosemary skewers from our garden!).

These are the daffodil days. Anything you want to, do it.

Beef Eaters

Bjorn's parents are very even in their parenting. Even, perhaps most obviously, in what they give to their children. I have never known such even parents. My parents were (are?) not that even. Roscivs' parents were definitely not even even.
   What is it that makes his parents so even? I conjecture. It's that they are Ts, not Fs. It's that they have two children and not five. It's that they have one of each sex. It's that one of them suffered unfairness with a sibling.
   It's my perception. Moreover, it is the perception of both children that their parents are fair!!

In all this this fairness, we have gotten ourselves a mighty chest freezer. His parents bought a stand-alone freezer for Em and En when they got a house, and so when we bought our house they offered to buy one for us. They didn't shop for it: "Pick the freezer you want", they said. So we did. We picked the grandaddy of all freezers. (The geezer freezer?) This is a freezer that will hold approximately 25 cubic feet of chopped up bodies.

This was on our long list (as opposed to our short list) of reasons to get a house: we could have a freezer. (We didn't know, before we moved, that his parents would buy us a freezer. That they'd bought one for Em and En was information retrieved only from the fairness.xls file in his parents' minds.) In this our dream scenario, we would buy "locker meat", which is to say, buy an animal by the quarter, half, or whole directly from a local, sustainable-scale rancher/farmer/grower/herder.

Being busy with other things, we did not get a freezer right away. November and December passed freezerless. Then Bjorn spent much of January organizing the garage to be ready for it. It was partly because I was pregnant, and it had been suggested that I really should have a freezer in order for it to be stocked by my mother and sister-in-law for meals to eat in the first month after birth.
   And so the space was made, the husband fabulous, the freezer acquired and (not long after the miscarriage) delivered.

The majority of small-scale slaughters happen in the fall, I thought, so we didn't know when we would be able to get any meat to fill our behemoth freezer. I started making inquiries early — now — to get on wait lists.
   In a piece of luck, we got an opportunity to buy cow from our second-choice cow folk. (Our first choice is doing "herd maintenance" this year and won't have any available animals for at least another season.) w00t!
   This is very exciting for us.
   We bought a cow, a whole cow! The term that our cow-seller uses is "a whole beef". I thought that "a whole beef" sounded weird. It sounded more like the other kind of beef. It sounded inappropriately countable. Now I'm used to it.
   We had a deadline if we were to make the midwinter slaughter (today). I agonized over the butcher/cutting order. I called the butcher. How was I to make sure I got my oxtail?! There was nothing on the order form about it. What about the skirt steak? Should I get the top of the top round cubed and the bottom of the top round in fajita meat? Yes I want the brisket cut but no I don't know how! I was overly whelmed. I made the order. Bjorn posted it, with our deposit.
   The price/pound is $3.80 (that includes the wrapping fee). That's a little more than half what we pay for ground beef at the co-op. Estimating we eat 300 lb of beef a year, this will be at least $1,000/year in savings. This is a happy animal. Born on the same farm where it died, never stressed by travel and filled up with stress hormones; weaned in contact with its mother; loved; named; fed on pasture.
   In a couple of weeks (like any respectable outfit the dry aging lasts a fortnight), the cow will come home.

Made from scratch?

I am making kasha out of sprouted buckwheat! I have never before prepared buckwheat in my life. Two days ago I set buckwheat to sprout. I had never sprouted anything besides lentils (and really, lentils just sprout themselves). I succeeded. Now that I know how to do it, I'd say "it's easy".
   (Note if you are astonished that I am eating grains: when I was pregnant, my doctor suggested I eat sweet potatoes and some [sprouted] grains. Even though I'm not pregnant any more I continue to eat them twice-ish a week.)

In other cooking ventures, I present my last three meals. (One reader stated high interest in hearing regularly what I eat. One reader counts for a lot around these parts. I am potentially pleasing a large percent of my readership when I post about what I eat.)

Meal 1

• 3 oz salmon (including skin and bones, mmmmm the round "spine" bones are my favorite! I could eat a bowlful.)
• 1/2 sweet potato, fried up in plentiful bacon drippings (the sweet potato itself had, the night before, been cut into large dice and roasted in the oven)
• 1/4 c green cabbage smothered in EVOO

Meal 2

• roast beast (rubbed with salt and pepper and then cooked for 25 min. at 425F then 6 hrs at 225F)
• frizzled leeks (frying oil: coconut oil)
• Brainless House Salad (one head of lettuce, red leaf; two handfuls of sunflower seeds; a handful of raisins, EVOO, salt, and pinot grigio vinegar)

Meal 3

• hash: 3 large, frozen tomatoes put first into the saute pan and left to sauce up; Penzey's Fines Herbes, let to stew in the tomatoes, then ground lamb; 
• nearly-naked slaw: lots and lots of green cabbage smothered in EVOO

It is a fluke (but not a salmon fluke) that in the first meal I knew what the sizing portions were. Normally I pay no heed to such things. Grams and calories? Not sticky information. What I do notice is relative portions, like 'more-of-this or less-of-that next time'. For example, in meal 2 I noticed that we both could have eaten two times the scrumydiddly frizzled leeks!
   The Brainless House salad is the simplest salad, the default that I lately make. No time to think? Must put food on table? That's what the salad looks like.
   I notice I am not consistent in noting when I put salt in things. Of course I put salt in the fried sweet potatoes. It just seems to go without saying. It is also always Himalayan salt, what En calls "the pink stuff".

Am I cooking from scratch? Regard meal 3. When I went to college, I discovered the abomination of "pre-made" "spaghetti sauces" in jars. Such stuff hardly ranked as food, much less food from scratch. I considered a sauce made from scratch to be one where you add seasoning to plain tomato sauce (even if that seasoning was "Italian seasoning", yet pre-mixed seasoning has something in common with pre-made sauce, no?). I really saw a world of difference between these things. Today I wouldn't count sauce+seasoning as sauce from scratch. I might not even count meal 3 as made from scratch. I used whole tomatoes. But I didn't dry, chop, or mix my own spices. Moreover, I didn't grind my own meat.
   Does it count? What is scratch?
   (Note: I am satisfied with the scratch level of my cooking, unestablished though it may be; my inquiry is driven by curiosity, not a concern over failing to align with some shifting baseline of orthodoxy.)

Comestible

Sometimes I eat food that I don't make. One example is South River's "Dandelion Leek Miso" made of deep well water, organic soybeans, organic brown rice, sun-dried sea salt, dandelion greens, wild leeks, nettle greens, organic sea vegetables, and koji culture.
   Another example is an artisanal chocolate made of [all organic] stone ground cacao, cacao butter, honey, hemp, and maitake mushroom.

But I'd say 90% of what I eat is food that does not have a label. Maybe I should track that to be sure. Who wants to know what I eat every day? Do I?

Salad

I made up a salad yesterday that I love.
   I used 2 pomegranates, 2 avocados, a bunch of cilantro, and 5 green onions. I dressed it with the juice of 1 lime, olive oil (probably halfish a cup), and Himalayan salt.

last week's foodlight: mushroom+turnip+pickle dice

I made breakfast of bunashimeji in 3 Gs (ghee, garlic, and ginger) and cut-up salad turnips. I served the still-steaming bunashimeji in a bowl over the crisp turnips.
   Bunashimeji is one of my three favorite kinds of mushrooms. Black Trumpet and Shiitake are the other two.

When I was a kid, sometimes for lunch we were set free to forage or one of my siblings (or I) was in charge of fixin's. Usually sammich fixin's. Sometimes, especially foraging times, we fought over food (especially if there were leftovers of "lipstick and worms", i.e., spaghetti). But sometimes, especially sammich times, we'd pretend we were at a restaurant, and those times were congenial dining times.
   This breakfast was congenial dining too. And it was gourmet and I didn't have to wear pants. It had pickles, too! Cucumber pickles. I forgot that above: chilled lacto-fermented pickle condiment.

Tasty Hasty Victuals

Supper was vegan. And not just any vegan. RAW VEGAN.
   This is funny to me.
   Extra virgin olive oil (harvested November 2012) and my homemade lacto-fermented salsa (delicious) on zucchini noodles and avocado.

My salsa is so good, I'm sure people would pay money for it. Also, I didn't use a starter, mwaha, haha, BWHAHAHA! I cut the mustard! I am fermentation goddess!

Apocalyptic Food, pt 3 o' 3

Behold the face in front of the well-oiled, so-far cogs of my no-grain food storage!

♣ canned salmon • canned sardines • canned coconut milk • coconut oil • ghee • tallow • seaweed • raisins • animal gelatin • honey

TA-DA!

Almost all of my process, hard work, and rumination is unenumerated; these three parts are bones; not included are soft, connective, fleshy bits.
   I did tons of work to figure out how to have command of a simple process, and this is what I have to show for it, and it's not showy. I feel like this must be what happens to my grandpa. He and my grandma send out a newsletter every month. His part of it usually has such simplified structure that one might think it insulting, yet sometimes (as he states) it took him years to achieve it.
   Well, Grandpa, if this is what happens to you, I feel ya.

So. There's no way that I have three months worth of only these foods. And even if I did, it would be a dreary three months. But I have made a very fine start for myself.

al-Lazeez!

I often make something very yummy and then forget about it (thus not making it again). Well, this one I want to remember, so I am telling you what we had for breakfast today —

   Chili powder and garam masala CARROTS coined and sauteed in ghee, with ginger. Then one egg over easy each.

Food Storage part 2 of 3

Part 1

My future food storage system has two primary traits. It is low maintenance in each of three cost categories — energy, time, money. It nourishes my family for ≥ 3 months in The Event (e.g., of a Zombie Apocalypse).
   The supporting traits I've identified are familiarity and stability. These each bear up both primaries — minimizing maintenance costs and maximizing nourishment. All food storage candidates satisfy these criteria.

Up to this point, the decisions on including a food are basic — binary. Now they become complex.
   When I identify a food that is familiar and stable, next I'll consider its basic nutritional profile. What are the macros and micros? How does it compare with other foods I have identified? Next, is it a hassle to prepare OR consume? Zombies are chasing me, I've lost an arm, and I've run out of spoons. Do I need a can opener for this?

If I end up with dozens of winning foods — more than I have room to store — I can cull by considering other traits. (Comparative cost?) But for now I'll save that energy.

Emergency Preparedness: Food Storage

It is a good time of year to consider catastrophe.

The other week my dad recommended a certain product to me for food storage. I began doing more thinking about what good food storage items are — for someone with my diet.

   Consideration A: Grains are the staple for food storage as I know it. (Now "knew it".)
   Consideration B: Rotation is a primary principle of preparedness; to rotate, store what you eat and eat what you store.
   Consideration C: Mine is a diet of animals and vegetables, of no grains, of few pulses or legumes (lentils and limas allowed), of no sugars except fruit and honey.
   ==
   Problem: I cannot realistically rotate something I don't eat, and I don't eat the common storage items, so I can't use the old methods, and I don't know any other way.

But who am I to not do something because I don't know what to do? Not I! Time to make up another way.

I am making two lists, one of traits (what do I want of my food storage items?), another of items so far (what do I already eat with those traits?). I shall post them.
   Did you notice that I said "items so far"? SO FAR! I request ideas. Pretty please, with a dried cherry on top.

first year pickler

I make my own pickles. Amazing!

Since early spring I have successfully made lacto-fermented pickles* out of radishes and garlic scapes. My other attempts were lemons and carrots, but I lost 'em to mold.
   The radishes were DIVINE. My visiting family ate the last of the scapes.
   It had been weeks since I set anything up to pickle, but on Thursday, when I was at the Farmers' Market, I found the season's first pickling cukes. I bought some, added pickling dill (read: dill in bloom) and garlic. I hope I'm not sorry I didn't have any grape leaves!

--
* For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about:

   • Yogurt is certainly the most commonly known (and the only commonly eaten) lacto-ferment in America. It's basically pickled dairy! However, "lacto" goes with "lactic acid", NOT "lactose". Lacto-fermentation has nothing necessarily to do with dairy.

   • "fermented" evokes beer, wine and other things alcoholic but lacto-ferments are not alcoholic. 

   • "pickles" evokes foods soaked in vinegar, but lacto-ferments are not made with any vinegar. 

For Supper

I made an omelette for the first time! 4 duck eggs. It was the purtiest omelette I ever did see!

artifulchoke

I found out what to do with my "baby" artichokes! (The artichokes we received in our CSA were very small. I thought they were just harvested small, but no. It's like how really short adults aren't children.)
   I cut them up with this as my guide, and I then sauteed them in white wine vinegar, salt, and ghee. They were quite tasty! I want more of them!

In other news, I actually went to church with Jobabhatron today because the issue from the pulpit was based around Emily Dickinson. I really, really, really love Emily Dickinson.

Culinary Adventure: Shave the ... Mussels

I just de-bearded mussels! I have probably consumed a mussel before, but not that I can specifically recall. Never before had I prepared one.
   This guide by my seafood guru took the potential whattheheckamievendoing?! stress out of the mystery.
   There were 3 dead mussels. They are in their grave. The others, alive — and now beardless, sleek — sit unmoored in the fridge. Thank you, little bivalves, for your lives.