The last owners of this house surrounded the property with rosebushes, of all stripes and colors. My particular favorite has been an exceptionally sweet-smelling one that is red and white striped (I’ve nicknamed it the “Candy Cane” rosebush in my mind but I don’t know the varietal). It’s already begun its second blooming sequence in the beautiful Rose City, and so inspired, I decided to attempt to preserve the seasonal delight of rose fragrance by making rose petal jam. I took recipe inspiration from several other blogs and posts after a quick Google search and hobbled together my own quadruple-sized recipe with what I had on hand:
- 4 cups rose petals (Notes: I did not bother removing the white part as some recipes recommend and it tastes just fine. The roses are untreated – no chemicals to my knowledge since my tenure in this house of two years. 4 cups of rose petals was just half of a small mixing bowl that I’d picked off our bush, after rinsing, plucking petals, and removing bugs and spiders.)
- 3 cups clean-tasting untreated Portland tap water
- 1/2 cup organic lemon juice
- 4 cups sugar (I had 3 cups organic cane sugar on hand and 1 cup maple sugar)
- 3 more cups Portland tap water
- 1 package Pomona Universal Pectin
After rinsing the petals and rescuing two spiders, I blended the rose petals with a hand stick blender with the lemon juice and water, which made a watery, clumpy concoction. I hand-stirred in the sugars.
About sugar and pectin boxes: I hate teeth-aching, throat-burning, super-sugary jams and jellies. This recipe uses about 1/3 the sugar called for in other recipes – I was only able to do this because I was using Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require the massive amounts of the sugar the typical Sure-Jell type pectin packets require. Pomona’s looks more expensive in the store per box, but each box of Pomona’s actually does about 4 batches of jam, while each batch of Sure-Jell or what-have-you does only one batch, so it actually works out cheaper, too!
In a small saucepan, I heated the additional 3 cups of water with the entire package of pectin (since I am making a quadruple batch here) and the 1/2 cup water + 1/2 tsp calcium mixture as described in the pectin box directions. The box directions didn’t include ratios of pectin and calcium water for rose petal jam, so I erred on the jellier side and calculated the batches based on 4 tsp pectin and 4 tsp calcium water. There was only actually 11 tsp of pectin in the packet and extra calcium water, but I just threw caution to wind and used the whole thing. I haven’t done this before, and although I was whisking constantly, it looked pretty lumpy, but as it reached a boil the lumps began to dissolve more and it turned more glue-y.
Once it had reached a full roiling boil, I added it to the rose petal mixture. The resulting mixture had a great clingy and congealed texture, like a good jam ought. Poured into sterilized ball jars, processed in a hot-water bath for 10 minutes.
Filed under: Food Preservation
After the long winter divide, it is time to start preserving again. One of the first things ready in the spring: dandelion blossoms. The much maligned “weed” is actually totally edible: roots, roasted and charred for a coffee substitute tea, fresh young leaves to add to our salads, and blossoms for wine. Why is it considered a weed? I will never understand.
At least one of the benefits of harvesting yellow dandelion flowers is that they never reach the seed stage. I’ve never actually made or tasted the wine before, so this year it is a Grand Experiment. I found several recipes online that I cribbing from, but using what I happen to have on hand today to make it work. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” which makes me wonder about the greater implications on our society right now – not many Americans have experienced necessity. They find a recipe and go to the grocery store to fulfill all the bizarre celebrity ingredients (pomegranate juice?) rather than finding what’s in their cupboards and making a recipe to fit what they have.
Today I just got the wine started, so future posts will have to let you know how it turned out:
Picked a bag of dandelion flowers – anything yellow will do. Using a strawberry huller, I picked off the green ends (or at least, the majority of it) and ended up with about four cups of yellow dandelion heads. Let soak for a day and a half in about two quarts of water. Interesting, the soaked flower petals kind of smelled like a carrot. More appetizing than I would have thought.
Drained the water off from dandelion flowers into a bowl, and added with fresh water to total four quarts. Put into a large pot and added 6 cups sugar, the dandelion flowers again, a cup of chopped dried plums (remember when I did that last summer? see earlier post), 3 tbsp lemon juice, zest from half a Meyer lemon, and half a minneola Tangelo (juice squeezed out by hand into the pot and the rest of the orange slices thrown into the pot), and a pinch of cloves. Brought to a boil and let at a low boil for an hour.
Poured the liquid through a cheesecloth. Waited until the liquid reached less than 110 degrees using a cheese thermometer, and then added 2 tsp bread yeast dissolved in 1/2 cup warm water. Rubber-banded a cloth over top to let it sit overnight. Tomorrow, I will pour into bottles, cap, and let sit six months to one year.
Cross your fingers!
Green tomatoes and tomatillos
Last weekend, I finally convinced G it was time to pull up the tomato plants and harvest whatever was left there. Like all gardeners, he kept hoping the green tomatoes would yet ripen, but it was getting to coat weather in the mornings. Ain’t gonna happen.
I pulled up all 10 of the tomato and tomatillo plants and piled up what was left for making green salsa. I found this great recipe on a fantastic blog called Farmgirl Fare. She said you could double it, but I quadrupled it and mixed in tomatillos with the green tomatoes. Then realized I didn’t have enough onions or cider vinegar. I grabbed some more cider vinegar from the store and added it in while the mixture began to heat up, and then unfortunately overcompensated with too much cider vinegar! It turned out really tangy, but definitely edible. It is more of a relish than a salsa, as the recipe would suggest.
Last time I made green sauce, I found it was really good mixed with lots and lots of grated cheese and pre-cooked rice and leftover veggies, then baked in a casserole. Easy and tasty.
In other green news, the broccoli, cauliflower, and romanesco have begun rolling in from the CSA. All of a sudden today, I realized, Crap! I haven’t used up any of those brassicas that I put up last year! From my weekly CSA newsletter I learned last year that you can lightly steam broccoli, cauliflower and romanesco florets (brassicas), put them in a freezer bag, and freeze them for later use. Easy-peasy. I was overflowing with brassicas last October, so I mixed all the florets up and froze two gallon bags, never to use them in the winter or spring as I had intended.
They were looking pretty sad, stuffed at the bottom of the freezer drawer, crusted together in freezer-burn ice. The green broccoli heads had turned black, and the cauliflower had turned a yellowish off-white. Ain’t gonna happen again!
The only way to salvage them was to cook them into something unrecognizable, so I made a huge batch of cream of brassica soup: Saute lots of onion, leeks and/or garlic in butter. Add all the brassicas cut into florets and a potato cut into chunks with enough liquid of 4:1 stock:white wine to cover the veggies. Simmer until potato is soft and puree with a stick blender. Add half as much cream as white wine with lots of salt and pepper. It turned out very good and I don’t taste any freezer burn. I mixed in the freezer-burnt brassicas with a fresh cauliflower and leftover from last week’s romanesco that I’d steamed and put into the fridge: all three levels of freshness.
With all the space now left in the garden, I moved into Phase 2 of my first attempt at a winter garden. Supposedly, I can grow veggies year-round here in the temperate Pacific Northwest climate. We’ll see if I have a green-enough thumb! In September, I planted turnips, kale, parsnips, and an overwintering carrot called Merida. All four seeds have come up and are on their second set of leaves now. Slow going.
Last weekend, in place of the tomato/tomatillo plants, I planted garlic cloves and fava beans. Fava beans are supposed to be excellent winter cover crops, plus they can be dried and preserved like any dry bean. Cool! As of this weekend, I’m not seeing any green yet. My attempt at planting plain old dry beans this year didn’t turn out so well, so I attempted an inoculant, using a homemade recipe of 1:9 molassas:water I found somewhere on the internet. I dipped the fava beans in the molassas water and let them soak for about 5-10 minutes before planting, then dumped the molassas water into the dirt.
Here’s hoping that this IS going to happen!
Filed under: Food Preservation
Citrus (pineapple) sage on a pedestal
I have a citrus sage bush (also known as pineapple sage) that goes wild every couple months and threatens to take over my entire herb bed. No matter how viciously I prune it back, it still comes back with a vengeance. I use it judiciously in herb salads and as a spice, but it’s a beautiful, fragrant plant, and it makes delightful tea.
Herbal teas are so simple to make, it’s a wonder we don’t do more of it. All you do is take a whole mess-load of branches of the herb in question, put it in a brown paper bag, shake it up every few days to evenly distribute the air, and put it in a clean, dry ball jar when it’s completely dried out. I’m sure there are fancier ways of preserving the tea to keep the color better (my method makes it all turn brown), but the tea has nonetheless been effectively tasty.
It is an easy way to preserve nutrition and enjoy sunny flavors in the winter. And having glass jars full of herbs I dried definitely appeals to my inner witch.
Pear success.
The brother of our CSA farmers had a Bartlett pear tree that overproduced this year, so with their weekly newsletter, our CSA farmers offered us organically-grown Bartlett pears for $1.50/lb. Even though we are awash in dried plums, I thought I would add dried pears to our mix. 10 lb. of the pears were delivered with our usual weekly bushel basket of veggies on Tuesday, and in the refrigerator they ripened until yesterday.
The music of pear slicing and arranging on dehydrators was not as rhythmic as it was for the prune plums. The prune plums song was simple:
Cut the plum – keep the knife in as you turn it over – twist the two halves – drop the pit and the plums.
Cut – turn – twist – drop.
Cut-turn-twist-drop.
cutturntwistdrop.
The pears were all a little goofy. Some of them were odd-shaped, some had strange brown woody spots that even my heavy-duty butcher knife was resistant to cutting through. And the pear slices didn’t crowd together as neatly as the plums did — it took some geometric configuring. Luckily, G loved the architectural challenge of geometrically arranging the maximum number of slices on the trays. I cut the slices about 1/2″ thick. The music of the pear?
Chop in half – a cut to each side of each half – a cut to the back to remove a rectangular core – slice what’s left into slices.
Chop – cut – cut – cut – cut – damn woody spot! – slice – slice – slice – slice.
Chop – cut – cut – cut – strange one, this one didn’t have seeds on half – slice slice slice slice.
The 1/2″ thick pear slices dehydrated much faster than the plums. The plums required nearly 24 hours, all said and done — could be because I was able to crowd them into the dehydrator trays so neatly. The pears only needed an overnight, from top to bottom.
Dried pear slices for snacking or rehydrating in oatmeal this winter.
And now the cheese failure: I got this awesome mozzarella and ricotta cheese-making kit from New England Cheesemaking Company a while back and successfully made an excellent first batch of mozzarella. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually finish it before it went bad, and I was looking forward to trying it again. So, on a whim, I grabbed a gallon of fresh milk today at the co-op from a local dairy (Noris Dairy, the same dairy that will deliver dairy products to your door in the Portland-Salem-Eugene area like an old-fashioned milkman — rad!).
When I got home with my milk, I pulled out the kit and start following directions. In a small bowl, mixed the rennet tablet with bottled water to dissolve. In a saucepan, mixed the citric acid with bottled water, added the milk, and placed on medium heat. So far, so good.
The instructions called for the milk to be heated to 88 degrees. I pulled out the cheese thermometer from the kit, which is in a protective capsule. I opened the capsule, and out dropped…half the thermometer. Somehow, I broke it cleanly in half. Dammit! How am I supposed to tell when it’s at 88 degrees? I frantically started rummaging through the drawers, and found a meat thermometer — no, two meat thermometers! Both of them don’t even start the temperature range until 130 degrees, and by then, my mozzarella is toast. Luckily, I told myself, I’ve done this once before, so maybe I could guess approximately where 90 degrees by making my own marks on the meat thermometer, evenly spaced backwards from 130 degrees to 90 degrees. I pulled out a Sharpie and made a few marks on the meat thermometer.
Since this blog is entitled, “Cheese Failure”, I think you know how it goes from here. At roughly 90 degrees, I took the milk solution off the heat and stirred in the rennet/water mixture. It said to let sit 5-7 minutes, and then cut the curds into 1″ pieces. I let it sit 10 minutes, and my curds were still not cut-able. They were a fine granular mess. I tried to strain them out using a fine mesh sieve, and I got a baseball-ball-sized pile of powdery curds (if they can be called that). The recipes called for you to dunk the curds in hot water and knead them into mozzarella, but they never congealed or turned shiny and I lost a little more of them to the hot water each time I dunked them, until my pile was golf-ball-sized. At that point, I gave up and just ate what was on my hands.
It’s too bad my first blog on cheesemaking has to sound so negative, because the first time I made it, it worked just great. Lesson learned: don’t attempt to make cheese without a thermometer. The temperature really, really matters.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The folks here at Living Skills have a lot of big ideals we want to fulfill:
community building/network strengthening + economic/social justice + environmental stewardship + local food supply/survivalism = ????
At least, those question marks have been what we have been trying to figure out for a while. One obvious way that a highly-motivated group of folks in Portland are addressing this multidisciplinary problem is by spearheading a local money system, like they have in Ithaca NY. There are several initiatives out there working on this, but that is a Big Project that needs A Lot of Work. Isn’t there anything we can do on a smaller level as our group of friends? Something we can do now?
Over a few locally-brewed beers this weekend (I’m not telling how many) at our favorite neighborhood pub, we think we hatched an interesting idea to get at this overly ambitious desire to do good in all those ways at once.
What if we took all of our resources as a group and founded an urban CSA by finding a wannabe urban farmer?
Here are our resources: tools, a few urban properties with yards (mostly in the same neighborhood, but not all; some residences, some rentals), our various group business, organization, and marketing skills. In the land of utopian idealism that is Portland, Oregon, surely there must be someone(s) who has the complimentary skill set: time, extensive and devoted gardening talent/experience, a desire to start a CSA but with no land or start-up capital.
Surely…?
M is working on preliminary market research to explore the feasibility of this idea, and then we can look at a business plan, if it makes sense.
Imagine.it.
It’s the time of year to put things up. I like that saying: “put things up.” I imagine literally putting ball jars up on the top shelf with pride.
Today, I harvested all the tomatoes I could off the tomato plants. The large ones I put in the freezer bags with the others for eventual canning, and the small ones and cherry tomatoes I put in the dehydrater (great idea, Hil!) to be treats in sauces and salads later.
Meanwhile, all the liqueurs we put up in May/June after the wedding with all the leftover cheap wedding vodka were ready for straining. We’d made blackberry and cherry liqueurs. They’re pretty easy to make: dump fruit and a little sugar in vodka, put in dark place, let sit for 3 months, strain through cheesecloth. They turned out pretty good; a good way to preserve the flavor of that early summer fruit that I’m already missing. The liqueurs make good presents, or they taste great over ice or on ice cream. Most liqueur recipes call for more sugar than you need; be judicious.
I planted the first winter garden seeds last week as dusk fell: purple globe turnips, mixed siberian kales, gladiator parsnips, and meridia carrots. The turnips and kales have already sprouted. The parsnips and carrots haven’t, but the seed package did warn of “erratic germination”. Once I can take the tomato plants out, I’ll replace with garlic and fava beans, both of which can be planted in the fall rather than late summer.
For the first time ever, I am also putting seeds up for the winter, also known as seed-saving. So far, I’ve put up komatsuna greens seeds, basil seeds, a few pea seeds, and the sad results of my attempt at growing beans this year. I grew so few beans that they are only good for saving as seeds for next year. The good news is that those few that grew are absolutely beautiful: a lima-bean-sized black and purple speckled bean, a black coco bean, and a small kidney-red bean. Next year, my lovelies. I’m putting you up until then.
Filed under: Food Preservation
Zucchini, conquered.
The age-old question of gardeners everywhere: what do I do with all this damn summer squash?
Summer squash is the bane of my existence. It’s my least favorite vegetable — practically tasteless and always watery — but I get a ton of it in my CSA. (It’s a package deal.) Thursday night, I decided to put it away to worry about it later. While dinner was simmering, I took out the grater and grated two zucchinis we’d gotten from the CSA that were overwhelmingly large: about a foot and a half long and 3″ in diameter. One of those zukes had been staring at me every time I opened for the fridge for the past three weeks, making me feel guilty about ignoring it. “What am I going to do with you?” I thought helplessly, “You’re just too big!”
When I got a second one this week of roughly the same size and shape, I feared they had won. They reminded me of a large drunk girl I ran into on a dance floor at a wedding a few weeks ago. She was about a foot taller than me and was aggressively pushing her body onto everyone on the dance floor — for me, that was her ample breasts being pushed into my face over and over again. This was her way of trying to show affection, but it was like being in a mosh pit that followed you around. This zucchini was shoving its enormity in my face — what’re you going to with me, heh? It was so satisfying to take those big logs down to size by shredding them into little bitty pieces! Mow them down! Ha — take that!
Geoff’s favorite job is wringing out zucchini water, I swear. I shredded the zukes into a cheesecloth-lined colander, and Geoff twisted the cheesecloth over the sink to wring out all the extra water. Few seconds later, we had a nice-sized pile of zuke-shred ready for freezing in a freezer bag, and I pitched it into the freezer. We’ll pull it out later this winter when we’re finally feeling again like we’re missing zucchini fritters or zucchini bread again.
Filed under: Local Food
My fridge is full of good intentions and they’ve taken the form of seemingly self- multiplying cucumbers, squashes and eggplants. But I’ve got a 4 month old, school has just started for my 9 year old, Kes – and my husband too, and I’ve gone back to work after spending the past 4 months lazily gazing at baby toes through a haze of sleep deprivation. The reality is that after 3 hours of sleep and a full day of work I’ve really not been able to figure out how to turn fifteen pounds of fresh, local, organic summer squash into a family-pleasing meal by adding farmers-market cheese and cucumbers, while holding a squirming baby on my hip. Its much easier to make mac n’cheese for my daughter and a bag of popcorn for myself – or whatever else you can eat with your left hand while breast-feeding and helping with homework.
We have made strides at breakfast at least. I purchased old fashioned oats from Bob’s Red Mill. I have no idea if they’re local oats, but at least BRM is a local company. We even had lunch there once. They’re certainly not as tasty as the pre-packaged kind that comes with sugar and seasoning. They require a lot of cinnamon and local organic butter to cut it for me. My husband still requires some prodding and convincing – and several spoonfuls of Xylitol to eat them. Kes certainly won’t give up her pop tarts for the oat mush. At least not yet. She does have this rather odd obsession with honey that I might be able to leverage into oat-consumption.
Whenever we go to the farmers market on the park blocks Kes ends up parting with the bulk of her spending money at the honey stand. She likes to take her sweet, gooey purchases and make ‘syrups’ with them by adding various random ingredients like cinnamon and flower petals. As a side note, she has also acquired from the same farmers market stand multiple bees wax candles shaped into various animals and mythological beasts which now reside between the stacks of fading squashes in our fridge to ‘keep them from melting’. They stand guard over the honey-syrup experiments which pool in reused gelato dishes perched delicately on top of uneaten cartons of cherry tomatoes.
I have some vague hope that these forays to the farmers market, and perhaps overly-permissive misuse of my refrigerator, will foster a love of local agriculture in my daughter as well as an adventurous fondness for cooking – in spite of the repetitive mac n’cheese meals.
Hoping to further expand on the honey in-road, I signed us up for a morning of apiary education and honey tasting sponsored by our local slow food group and hosted by the Community Bee Project at Zenger Farms. So after enforcing the oats on the family, I packed up Kes, the baby and Gramma E on this sunny September morning. and we were off to learn about bee-keeping.
Zenger Farm is an odd and lovely little place. Apparently the lot was acquired by the City some years back for the wetlands habitat that remains across the lower, northern half of the property. The upper half was covered in brambles and suffered frequent vandalism and was becoming a liability to the city, when a man whose name I don’t remember offered to keep the upper half mowed, occupied and to run education classes in return for being able to farm that land. Thus Zenger Farm was born and they currently hold a 50 year lease on the property. Friends of Zenger Farm runs educational programs like cob building and organic gardening classes as well as summer camps for kids. The actual farming is done by a variety of folks.
One of our 3 guides, Laura of 47th ave farms, seemed to have the lions share of the crops out there. She began farming 12 years ago on a double lot on 47th ave in the Woodstock area and has been leasing or borrowing different patches of ground to grow her CSA ever since. It was only this year that she actually purchased farm land in the central valley. Laura gave us a quick tour of the fields, the chicken cooperative, the beetle row, the tomato green house, the immigrant gardens, the childrens garden and the worm bins. Marc from the Xerces Society was there to provide a very lively and entertaining talk on local, non-honey bees. I had no idea that there are tiny green bees that live in the ground. He showed us how to make bee houses from bamboo and a live female bumble bee he caught earlier to share with us. His enthusiasm for pollinators was infectious. I resolved on the spot to make bamboo bee houses – with my left hand while holding a squirming baby on my hip.
Our third host was Wisteria, the former executive director of Zenger Farm and a member of the Community Bee Project. There were also several other folks involved in the project there – including the very knowledgeable Tom who has been keeping hives for 25 years. The Project meets one Tuesday a month and is open to anyone interested in backyard beekeeping. You can come and learn from experienced keepers, volunteer with the Project’s hives out at the farm and share in the honey haul. We discussed everything from colony collapse disorder, to watering the bees. I really wish I had the time to join in. Its a lively group.
I have to admit I did have some mixed emotions being there. I felt a bit like a fraud among the slow-fooders, several of whom apparently also were already keeping bees and had packed along some amazing luncheon fare. I not only had the secret guilt of my popcorn dinners to deal with, but I had also had not put two and two together and somehow failed to realize this was a potluck gig – an organic local slow food potluck gig. Oops. Well, Kes took it in stride and scaled several apple and plum trees – with permission from the farm folks – to provide Gramma E and me with some snacks. I also tried my hand at picking some plums. Just as I reached my hand up into the fruit-laden bowers, a huge, gigantic, shiny and overly-protective wasp leapt onto my arm and proceeded to sting me repeatedly. I squealed in pain. The slow-fooders are watching now. What do I do? I can’t kill it. They’ll think its one of the honey bees that are disappearing at an alarming rate. A precious pollinator. Oh the irony. I brush it off and run. It follows me. “It’s a wasp!” I shout at my fellow bee enthusiasts by way of excusing my behavior as I run squealing by. So much for bee keeping.
In spite of the wasp incident and the lack of potluck offering, I was still feeling satisfied that I was there learning things I’d wanted to know, enjoying being out in the sunshine, watching my daughter climb trees and chase chickens, making up for the mac n’cheese. I was inspired to keep on in the local food and urban farming quest.
This evening the naps seemed to align in just the right way that I was able to take my cutting board out in peace and revel in my renewed inspiration. This was a very good thing since there was not room for even one more cherry tomato in the fridge. I hauled out my CSA squash and onions and farmers’ market garlic and potatoes from our yard. I set my pan a sizzling with local butter and started a chopping. I managed to whip up an almost all-local dinner of mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, salad and squashes. It was the salad that was the foreign- laden offender due to a dressing of olive-oil, liquid aminos, lemon and avocadoes. (If I were to get one Kingsolver-type exemption, it would be avocadoes). Our meal was fresh, vibrant, local, organic dripping with summer. I felt a warm and fuzzy glow as I set this all out for my family. Especially as I realized all we had eaten that day had actually been mostly local. I resolved to find hazelnut oil to replace the olive and to finally do that food inventory I’d been meaning to, and prep food for the week on Sunday.
And I delighted in this peaceful Saturday meal with my family – that is until Kes found a second bug on her plate. The second was a large, fat, wormish type thing that seemingly had been fried up with the squash. The first had been a cute little green caterpillar in the corn. The caterpillar was easily dealt with as I set aside that particular piece to be boiled separately and promised that the offending ear would be mine alone. But this fat whitish worm was not so cute. It immediately caused panic on either side of me. “C’mon guys, its farm fresh, you have to expect a few critters along with the veggies. And it’s a local bug.” The protest continues along with gagging. “They eat bugs all the time in other parts of the world.” More gagging. “I have two-bite brownies for desert if you finish everything – except any bugs or worms of course”. Still more gagging. “Jared can you set a good example please?” The shear horror on their faces. How large that fried worm seemed as it was flung onto the edge of my empty plate. A thorough examination of the remaining contents of plates was conducted to look for any half-eaten worm bits or additional worms. None were found, but that was obviously to be the end of dinner. I half considered actually eating the worm myself to try to prove a point – “See guys, its yummy. Not that there are any more. Keep eating” – but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Local eating is obviously not for the faint-of-heart or stomach. However – that won’t stop me. I am resolved to keep at it and we’ll get into a fuller swing I’m sure. I’ll just have to remember to more thoroughly inspect the veggies – and let others pick the plums.
www.xerces.org for info on building bee houses and planting pollinator attracting plants.
Our 20-mile bike errand route
On a lark, my brother, Jon, stopped by and asked if I wanted to bike to Ikea with him today. Why not? It certainly turned Saturday into an adventure. Transportation is a big part of community — how should we get around our community? Are paved four-lane roads what we want in our community, or sidewalks and landscaping?
Small groups of folks in Portland are focusing on car-free moves — that is, combining bike trailers and people power to move couches and refrigerators across town. This was our small first attempt at moving something normally considered unwieldy, by bike. Is there an irony to biking 20 miles in order to buy products from a huge international corporation that ships many of their products from Sweden? As with everything we are attempting to do here on the Living Skills blog, I think we’re just trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got. As far as I can tell, Ikea is one of the most environmentally conscious furniture companies focusing on flat packaging, and as a European company, uses less toxic chemicals in their manufacturing than their American counterparts.
It may have been an imperfect goal, but the goal of the day was to buy a shelf and bike it back to Jon’s house. We only live 10 blocks apart, so we left from my house. Biking east through the neighborhoods in Southeast Portland is no problem until you get to 82nd St, which a friend of mine once called “The Berlin Wall of Portland”. You must cross 82nd at a light, and only then with great trepidation, and preferably on a designated bike route.
We missed a turn a couple of times, but we managed to make it alright. Our most major missed turn took us into Washington! We ended up on the Glenn Jackson Bridge on I-205, headed into Vancouver. Bike lanes are forgiving, so just when we realized we’d gone off the wrong trail, we stopped and took stock. Looking back where we came, we saw the “Welcome to Oregon” sign. Whoops! Turned the bikes around, and headed back where we came from.
Ikea has plenty of bike parking, and is right off a MAX line, if you find yourself too tired to bike all the way home afterwards.
I have a foodie confession to make: Ikea’s Swedish meatballs. They’re really nothing special, but for some reason I can’t say no to them.
After the usual glue-eyed Ikea trip (including Swedish meatballs), we bungee-corded his shelf boards and my two throw pillows onto his flat front rack. The weight added to the bike definitely made the trip home harder, and the terrain wasn’t really all that challenging. The I-205 bike corridor is hilly, but only moderately so — thank goodness for that. We routed our trip to the sides of all the little dormant volcano hills in east Portland, so we avoided the big hills. Four hours and many bike wheel rotations later, we got back to the house satisfied that we had completed our goal.
Shelf: in hand. First major self-sufficient bike errand: completed.
Jon
I think I’ve decided on my favorite Portland farmer’s market. Drum roll please…Lents Farmers Market, near I-205 and SE Foster. It may seem like an odd poster child next to the interstate, but I think it represents the closest thing to the farmer’s markets of yester-lore. Only a few stands, mostly vegetables, mostly small producers. Reasonable prices. A good place to go get a ton of whatever is in season that week for a discount. Exactly the kind of place a food preservationist likes to find herself.
My favorite way to shop at a farmer’s market:
1. Arrive as early as possible for the best selection. But, if you want to sleep in and enjoy that coffee or newspaper before you head out, take comfort in the fact that if you do get there towards the end, while you take a gamble that while some of the good stuff may be gone (eggs always sell out first), there’s a good chance you can get the last-minute deals: the price slashes as people try to sell out of what’s not selling well.
2. Make at least one slow circuit around the entire market before you buy anything. Look at what’s in season. Take a note of the prices of the things you’d like to buy and compare them. Look for something you’ve never tried before.
3. Have a set number of dollars you’re willing to spend, and make the various products and prices fit together so you get the maximum amount of goodness for your dollar — it’s a fun game!
4. Go back around the second (or third) time and make those purchases.
Today, I scored two big boxes of canning tomatoes for $7.50 apiece. It’s hard to guess how many pounds of tomatoes are in that box. Geoff guesses 30-35 lb. As he pointed out, one of those tomatoes alone is easily 1 lb. That makes the tomatoes approximately 25 cents/lb. SCORE! We are going to be enjoying these throughout the winter.
Box o' tomatoes!
This year, my tomato objective is, like last year, to can all the tomatoes plain and whole for using in any variety of winter stew and roast recipes, but without the hassle and literal pain involved with dunking tomatoes in boiler water and pulling the skins off with my bare burnt hands. Last year involved several hours of burnt hands and tomato juice everywhere, as we tried, but failed, to get into a nice, clean rhythm of dunking tomatoes in hot water, dunking in cold water, stripping off the skins, and packing into jars. I’ve heard that if you freeze tomatoes, the skins slip right off when run under water. It’s worth a try! Also, I like the idea of storing up a whole bunch of tomatoes and canning them all at once rather than in multiple waves, like last year. Today, I will take these two boxes of tomatoes and simply bag them and leave in the freezer for a big tomato canning binge, perhaps later in October.
The tomato plants in my garden, while proliferate in cherry tomatoes, have only produced a few large red tomatoes. Many green ones stare at me with hopeful eyes, hopeful that the first frost won’t render them green forever. Grow, little babies, grow!
Filed under: Food Preservation
It’s plum season! My friends AC-DC have a rockin’ 20-year-old Italian prune-plum tree in their yard that produces way more fruit than any normal person could eat, so for the third year in a row, I stopped by this weekend to pick plums to my heart’s delight. Italian prune-plums are perfect little purple eggs that seem to grow exceptionally well in the Portland area. I’ve hardly ever seen a wormy one (but have never had such luck with pears or apples).
The first year we made prunes — just chopped the plums in half and plopped them in a dehydrator overnight. They were delicious. Geoff finished them off within a couple months — so much for overwintering!
The second year I made plum preserves — also very good but not as much universal appeal. Not everyone liked them, and besides, how many preserves can one really eat in a year? We still have preserves left over from each of the past three summers.
Remembering how popular the prunes were last year, I decided to make them again — but this year, I’ll make even more so we can try to eat them through the winter. A huge branch had fallen from the plum tree this year, so AC-DC had already picked two huge canvas bags full of them that they let me take home (in exchange for some finished prunes, of course!).
When I got home, I dumped all the plums into the sink and washed them off. Cutting them in half for the dehydrator felt like visiting an old friend…yes, I’d done this a million times before two years ago. It only took a couple plums to become precise again.
Prepping and slicing the plums
Using a sharp knife, a swift cut down to the core using the natural inset butt-crack of the plum to keep the cut straight. Roll the plum over the long way with the knife in place until it makes a complete circle cut. Twist the two halves clockwise until they give way into two pieces. Place the pitless half face-down on the dehydrating rack. Pry the freestone free with my thumbnail in the other half and nestle it into the dehydrating rack close to its cousin. It takes about 10 minutes to fill up a tray. Dehydrator has 5 trays. We got our dehydator used on craigslist for $10, but you could also do the same thing in a low oven.
Plums crowded onto a dehydrator rack
Since it’s such a large piece of fruit to dehydrate, it takes several hours to completely dehydrate, 5-8 hours depending on a number of factors. I take them out of the tray when the fruit is wrinkled like a raisin and the skin turns from matte to shiny, or when you press your thumb down on the prune and it feels leathery rather than squishy. I’ve accidentally overdone these before and they turn out crispy and a little burnt tasting — what I learned from that experience is that it’s ok for them to be a little squishy.
After dehydrating and significantly smaller
These prunes are really good reconstituted in meat dishes, like lamb tagine or roasts, or eaten plain on the trail. They’re tangier than store-bought prunes, true dried plums — real food!
Prunes!
I have grown to love David Korten’s works and highly recommend them, especially When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning
The latter is an excellent book that points the way forward, presents the necessary elements of the story we need to guide us and is a highly interesting read. In the interest of time I have cut and pasted from the UUJEC site (Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community - a national organization that our group is connected to).
Here’s some info on a documentary we are looking into showing at our film series. I appreciated their simple steps to shift spending as well as some encouraging words to talk to super
In the course of creating Broken Limbs, filmmakers Guy Evans and Jamie Howell discovered their own purchasing and eating habits were transformed. It is important to note, though, that shopping habits formed over a lifetime are not changed overnight, but one small purchase, one meal at a time.
Think of it as a treasure hunt. Read labels, ask questions. Then consider these questions:
- Was it hard to find local or regional products? Did you have to go out of your way?
- Did you buy anything you wouldn’t have otherwise?
- How did the cost compare to what you might ordinarily have purchased? How did the quality compare?
- Did you make any discoveries about your own habits, good or bad?
Extend your range: A natural extension of this exercise is to seek out foods that offer you a higher level of information about how they were produced.
Organic Apples? Free range chicken? Grass-fed beef? These are all examples of foods labeled with communication in mind. It doesn’t matter what you believe in or approve of, only that you momentarily raise your conscious awareness of where the food you buy is coming from and how it is grown.
Vote with your wallet: In the movie Deborah Kane of the Food Alliance pointed out that a produce manager will make changes in a produce department when about 10 people ask, “Because they figure if 10 people go to the trouble to ask, 100 others are thinking the same thing.”
In addition to actually asking, if you would like to see more local, regional or sustainably produced foods on the shelf, one of the best ways to send that message is through the buying decisions you make every day. Make no mistake, America’s businesses are paying attention to those votes.
Filed under: Local Food
Driving home from our thought-provoking weekend at the coast cabin, I was reading out loud from “The Long Emergency”, the book I’m reading about “the converging crises of the twenty-first century.” Seriously scary stuff, but I have found more than one argument I disagree with, which gives me hope.
In this particular passage, he was discussing the homogenization and McDonaldization of American food and the apparent lack of regional specialties, such as they have in the sparkling white wine in Champagne, France or that sharp cheese in Parma, Italy. We tended to murmur in agreement, and yet, we were driving into the town of Tillamook, possibly the best-known specialization in Oregon: Tillamook dairy products. Grass land in Tillamook County is just worth more than in even neighboring counties, just from the efforts of the Tillamook County Creamery Association.
Inspired, we decided to stop by the Tillamook store and pick up some local “specialized” dairy products — to date, we have only found Tillamook’s squeaky cheese curds and garlic cheddar cheese in their store. Unfortunately, it was a frickin’ zoo. An entire store full of many Oregon-made food products, a great start to our new Northwest diet…and a 1/4 mile line just to get to the cash register, overweight tourist families blindly lurching about, and a crowd like Ikea on opening day. It’s great to see an Oregon cheese store so popular, but sheesh – who can stand that kind of crowd?
We ducked in, did a bewildering round about the store, and quickly escaped back out the same door, sadly without cheese but relieved to have personal space again. Walking back through the mall-sized parking lot to the car, we saw across the street a little seafood store with a sign touting FRESH seafood.
We walked in the little seafood shack door and the shop was completely empty. The lone employee said hello as soon as we walked in. We asked about the house-smoked salmon (wild, not farmed) and the Dungeness crab (cooked every morning, alive and walking mere hours ago) and bought a pound of each. As she was cleaning our crab, a fisherman walked in carrying blue net bags full of fresh oysters and steamer clams. Oh baby! I think our jaws literally dropped open. “Fresh from the ocean!” he said to us with a wide, snaggle-toothed smile that spoke of a successful day at the sea, and settled up with the gal behind the counter: 65 3/4 pounds of fresh catch. On his way out the door, he grinned to the gal and said, “You keep sellin’ ‘em, and I’ll keep diggin’ ‘em!”
We added a dozen oysters and two pounds of clams to the order. With an additional bag of Kettle chips for each of us for lunch (fried in Salem, OR in a LEED-certified building using solar and wind power…but potato provenance as yet unknown) and a chunk of local smokey Rogue blue cheese (we did get specialty cheese, after all!) the total came to $37. Not bad!
By the time we got home again to Portland, we had already eaten the potato chips and smoked salmon but we were still starving. Geoff put the clams in a steamer basket and steamed them a few minutes until they popped open while I melted butter (Noris creamery near Salem, OR) in a small saucepan with smashed garlic (from our farmer’s CSA) and lightly simmered it with an equal part white wine (St. Josef Gewurtztraminer, near our old house in Oregon City). A slice of bread from the bakery down the street (flour provenance unknown) finished the meal.
This was our first conscious attempt at eating more local foods after our inspiring commitment to do this as a team this weekend — we weren’t really prepared to be 100% local (no bread) and we haven’t set the ground rules of our diet yet, but this was a bang-up first meal!
New resources discovered:
Fresh Seafood NW: local seafood market across from the Tillamook Creamery in Tillamook, OR on Highway 101. 503-815-3500. www.freshseafoodnw.com.
Kettle Chips: I emailed them to ask the provenance of their potatoes.
Bread: I just remembered that I heard from a semi-reliable source that Grand Central Bakery buys their wheat from the Goldendale area. I emailed them to ask about it, too.
Rogue Creamery, Tillamook Creamery, Blue Heron Creamery: All Oregon-made cheese! Mmmm!
Filed under: Uncategorized
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