Celt M. Schira's Posts - Transition Whatcom2024-03-28T15:22:41ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchirahttps://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2197504501?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=0a99ghcin8jvu&xn_auth=noCelt's Garden - California Dreaming in a Droughttag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2014-02-25:2723460:BlogPost:959732014-02-25T02:10:46.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>It's time to pull out the seed starting trays. Onions, scallions, tomatoes, and perennial herbs first, then as March gets on, Asian green stuff, salad greens, brassicas and flowers. Some delicious green stuff, such as spinach, is essentially water. Water that is becoming expensive and possibly unavailable to California farmers. Even the cute plastic bags of organic salad greens are water piped hundreds of miles from rivers, sprayed on 10,000 acre lettuce patches in the desert and then…</p>
<p>It's time to pull out the seed starting trays. Onions, scallions, tomatoes, and perennial herbs first, then as March gets on, Asian green stuff, salad greens, brassicas and flowers. Some delicious green stuff, such as spinach, is essentially water. Water that is becoming expensive and possibly unavailable to California farmers. Even the cute plastic bags of organic salad greens are water piped hundreds of miles from rivers, sprayed on 10,000 acre lettuce patches in the desert and then picked, washed, bagged and trucked here.</p>
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<p>Far better to walk outside and pick your salad. Homegrown fresh, delicious crunchy stuff can be grown in a modest patch. Salad greens and herbs are the most cost effective use of small gardening spaces. The drought in California is liable to put price pressure on all vegetables, from tasteless cardboard supermarket broccoli to the delicate high end organic greens. Gardening takes time and energy. I've always looked at it as an optimization problem: what can I grow that I am too cheap to buy? How can I maximize the value of a small space? What things are clearly superior from the garden?</p>
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<p>A drought in California, which has positioned itself as vegetable and fruit supplier to the whole nation, changes the calculation considerably. We will get more from Mexico and possibly further south. We will pay more for what we get. Eastern Washington may get a big boost in vegetable sales. Whole supply chains that rely on massive quantities of cheap vegetables from California will have to adapt.</p>
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<p>Home gardening is looking better and better.</p>Here's a Guy in Texas Hanging on with Native Grassestag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2013-04-06:2723460:BlogPost:888612013-04-06T17:25:59.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong>This rancher is managing his cattle by managing his forage of native grasses. It's working for him. It's interesting that he has only 200 head of beef cattle and he's making a profit. Usually cattle operations in Texas are much bigger. It supports my theory about small business, that there are many sweet spots at different scales. it's all about making it work at a scale that is comfortable for you.</strong></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">A Stubborn…</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong>This rancher is managing his cattle by managing his forage of native grasses. It's working for him. It's interesting that he has only 200 head of beef cattle and he's making a profit. Usually cattle operations in Texas are much bigger. It supports my theory about small business, that there are many sweet spots at different scales. it's all about making it work at a scale that is comfortable for you.</strong></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">A Stubborn Drought Tests Texas Ranchers</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/business/a-long-drought-tests-texas-cattle-ranchers-patience-and-creativity.html?pagewanted=1">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/business/a-long-drought-tests-texas-cattle-ranchers-patience-and-creativity.html?pagewanted=1</a></p>Celt's Garden - Thoughtful essay on urban agriculture in Bostontag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-12-22:2723460:BlogPost:860732012-12-22T18:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>" The third reason, she said, is that we’re paying more attention to the structure of our cities. Rust Belt cities that formerly relied on manufacturing, such as Detroit and Cleveland, “were in a state of utter catastrophic fall.” The land in Detroit is relatively inexpensive because there is no market for it, Tumber said, making agriculture a viable use. Another appeal of urban farming is that “people are losing confidence in the food system,” Ladner said. They are “realizing how perilous…</p>
<p>" The third reason, she said, is that we’re paying more attention to the structure of our cities. Rust Belt cities that formerly relied on manufacturing, such as Detroit and Cleveland, “were in a state of utter catastrophic fall.” The land in Detroit is relatively inexpensive because there is no market for it, Tumber said, making agriculture a viable use. Another appeal of urban farming is that “people are losing confidence in the food system,” Ladner said. They are “realizing how perilous it is and how fragile it is and how broken it is, and they’re starting to wonder what the heck will happen when it breaks down.” </p>
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<p>Full article: <a href="http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/fenway-kenmore/2012/12/the_sprouting_of_the_urban_agr.html">http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/fenway-kenmore/2012/12/the_sprouting_of_the_urban_agr.html</a></p>
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<p>The article points out the challenges of creating a realistic business model for urban agriculture. The author has a lot of good points, including the legacy of industrial pollution and the regulatory hurdles.</p>
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<p>My take on it is that trying to make a profit, much less a living wage, from urban farming misses the point. By now, a vast number of people have found out that growing their own provides fresh, delicious food which they may not be able to buy, because they can't afford it or they live in a food desert or they can grow much higher quality veggies than they are willing to pay for. Just knowing what's in the food on their plate is worth the effort for many people.</p>
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<p>Trying to make a living from urban gardening means facing all the usual challenges of leveraging a hobby into small business ownership. Anybody who has ever tried to leverage their excellent skills at massage, house cleaning, jewelry making, photography, car repair, jam making, catering parties, or even plumbing into a legal business knows all about it. Regulatory hassles and problems finding the right scale are not unique to farming. </p>
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<p>Most of our excellent skills are used for ourselves, our family, our friends and our community service activities. Gardening doesn't just improve our lives. Gardening often provides a surplus. This is a wonderful opportunity.. to give it away. Most of us are not going to have enough at the right time or put in the work to connect with our market to sell the surplus. But, we can use it to build and strengthen the connections in our social network. </p>
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<p>Excess food is a great social lubricant. It is also a way of building reciprocal connections in the gift economy. This is not exactly barter, although it can be. Barter is something you do on the spot with people whom you don't know or don't trust to reciprocate later. The recipient of your excess jam who returns the clean jars, excellent, that's polite of them. The jam recipient who calls you six month later to glean their apple tree, keep that friend. They get it. </p>
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<p>There is some actual cash to be made in niche crops. The article quotes Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, "Carpenter believes the only practical business model is growing a specialty cash crop." This is highly seasonal and requires advance work and keeping up your customer list. If you have cherries, hops, basil, pears, eggs, seeds, starts, or suchlike, it's totally doable to make a little cash on the side to subsidize your gardening habit. Most people are going make whole tens of dollars, but it's worth it for the connections alone. </p>
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<p>I found that when I worked at selling herb and heirloom tomato starts, my best year grossed a few hundred dollars, which was enough to break even on gardening overall. Business crashed when heirloom tomato starts became widely commercially available. And here is just another pitfall of leveraging a hobby into a side business: the nano-capitalist has neither the facilities (greenhouse) to go for economies of scale nor the motivation to quickly switch to another product and chase the market when even Wal-Mart has heirloom tomatoes now. So these days I grow starts for my family and long time customers, now friends, who request them.</p>
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<p>Happy holidays and happy garden dreams! See you at the 5th annual Bellingham Seed Swap in January.</p>Celt's Garden - Gardening as Self-Unemployment Insurancetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-11-12:2723460:BlogPost:851072012-11-12T16:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>The single mother in New York City told her story to the NY Times: She's a self-employed writer, illustrator and marketing materials designer. She lives modestly with her two half grown boys in a tiny apartment. "Sometimes, my clients pay late. Sometimes, they don't pay at all." She relies on the food bank to get through the month, especially that last grim week. All of which just highlights how difficult subsistence activities are in a tiny apartment in the middle of NYC, dependent on cash…</p>
<p>The single mother in New York City told her story to the NY Times: She's a self-employed writer, illustrator and marketing materials designer. She lives modestly with her two half grown boys in a tiny apartment. "Sometimes, my clients pay late. Sometimes, they don't pay at all." She relies on the food bank to get through the month, especially that last grim week. All of which just highlights how difficult subsistence activities are in a tiny apartment in the middle of NYC, dependent on cash transactions for everything. She needs a garden.</p>
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<p>Gardening is self-unemployment insurance. Self-employed people soon learn to cope with a bumpy cash flow, mostly by not running out and spending the sparse checks all at once. Coping with a bumpy food flow is another matter. One way is the unfortunate single mother's path of food bank and food stamps. Another is to grow your own, and can, pickle, ferment, root-cellar and jam up whatever excess you can grow, trade, scrounge, glean or buy wholesale. I'm just here to tell you, a meal of homegrown organic potatoes, baked winter squash, sauteed kale with garlic and onions out of the winter garden, a slice of homemade bread and a glass of apple cider is far superior to the leftover dreck of the industrial food system.</p>
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<p>The food you grow and make yourself is so much better, better than you can buy without spending a whole lot of money, far better than what could be purchased with the sparse cash. The cost is time. All that work takes time. The skills of cooking from scratch, gardening, brewing, baking, preserving and making do take years to master. The harvest season is just a scramble, trying to meet work commitments in the formal economy and taking on another 20 hour a week part time job for six weeks in August and September. That's the traditional rhythm, and in all this hoopla about "eating local", we forget that carpenters in Cyprus used to down their tools and go into the vineyards and orchards to harvest grapes, olives and lemons. We just aren't used to organizing our time like that.</p>
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<p>We have to slowly creep along, rebuilding our local food systems and divisions of labor. I missed the grape harvest and the wine making season because I was busy with potatoes and dry beans. In a traditional society, I've have it set up a year in advance. Then I could concentrate on growing the luscious, delicious heirloom potatoes and trade for the wine. </p>
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<p>Gardening, particularly gardening in our tricky maritime climate, takes a while to find the rhythm. My Army buddy Bob called me up one day and I asked him about that garden his wife used to put in every year. His wife had lost interest in it. He didn't feel the need to take it up himself. And here's the punch line. Bob tells me, "We're doing OK. I survived three rounds of layoffs because of what I have to offer. If things get really bad, then I'll take up gardening." I hardly had the heart to tell him, Bob, that's just brilliant, I understand that you would rather be engaged in typical middle class leisure activities than grubbing in the dirt all summer and putting up U-pick jam. Really, I understand, there are days I feel that way myself. All you have to do is when things do get really bad, then just back up three years and take up gardening.</p>
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<p>I will be teaching "Subsistence Gardening" on November 18, 2012. The class covers growing energy crops such as potatoes, field corn and dry beans, winter gardening and how to process your harvest. Register through Whatcom Folk School. </p>Celt's Garden - Four Hundred Pounds of Potatoes!tag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-10-26:2723460:BlogPost:846472012-10-26T15:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>That's right, four hundred pounds of potatoes from 400 row feet with 33 pounds of seed potatoes. Which sounds very organized, but actually it was 15 different varieties and the yields were highly variable. German Butterball, 5 pounds of seed potatoes, over 60 pounds harvest. That's the second year of stellar performance. Krista and I got the same result last year in our variety trials. The German Butterballs also had the most gaps in the row, so the yield was from 2/3 of the plants. I think…</p>
<p>That's right, four hundred pounds of potatoes from 400 row feet with 33 pounds of seed potatoes. Which sounds very organized, but actually it was 15 different varieties and the yields were highly variable. German Butterball, 5 pounds of seed potatoes, over 60 pounds harvest. That's the second year of stellar performance. Krista and I got the same result last year in our variety trials. The German Butterballs also had the most gaps in the row, so the yield was from 2/3 of the plants. I think it was voles. I found tunnels under my potato plants when I dug them up.</p>
<p>Red Lasoda, Russet Burbank and Red Chieftain seed potatoes are grown in Whatcom County for the commercial potato industry in Idaho. Red Lasoda is what a potato chip aspires to be. The glory of Red Lasoda fries is only available to the gardener, who can eat them while the sugar is still fresh. Our three local varieties had excellent yields and tolerance of local conditions. I started with conventional seed potatoes from the Whatcom Farmer's Coop in Everson and grew them out organically.</p>
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<p>Elba (susceptible to blight), Red Norland (low yields) and Red Maria (just hammered), are not worth growing in this region. I bought the Fedco fingerlings mixed package and they all did well. Desiree, now that's a potato. Pink skin, sweet flesh, bullet proof in the garden, excellent yield, good steamed or baked in the oven with a little oil and some garlic.</p>
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<p>Potatoes are great for greasing social relationships. People are always delighted to receive organic potatoes grown with love. They taste so much better. Most of the potatoes have already gone to friends and extended family. That time I borrowed my mothers hand truck and didn't return it for five months? All better now. The family member who has taken on raising her daughter's kids (don't ask, it isn't pretty.) I have the privilege of helping out a little.</p>
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<p>Next year, grow plenty of potatoes.</p>
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<p>Addendum: Two heritage varieties from the Northeast, Green Mountain and Katahdin, did very well here in 2011. Fedco didn't have any for sale in 2012 due to Hurricane Irene. </p>Celt's Garden - Squirrel Timetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-09-05:2723460:BlogPost:827532012-09-05T18:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>It's time to run around like crazed squirrels. Summer's bounty is upon us. Trim those herb bushes and dry them ASAP, as they may winter kill if cut back any later. Dry, pickle, and freeze the excess from your garden. All sorts of random fruits and veg can be dehydrated with an electric dehydrator: blueberries, prune plums, green zucchini slices (the yellow dries to vile due to its gourd ancestry), small young winter squash slices, green beans, broccoli leaves, mushrooms, green onions,…</p>
<p>It's time to run around like crazed squirrels. Summer's bounty is upon us. Trim those herb bushes and dry them ASAP, as they may winter kill if cut back any later. Dry, pickle, and freeze the excess from your garden. All sorts of random fruits and veg can be dehydrated with an electric dehydrator: blueberries, prune plums, green zucchini slices (the yellow dries to vile due to its gourd ancestry), small young winter squash slices, green beans, broccoli leaves, mushrooms, green onions, sliced celery and beet stems, turnip tops and more. </p>
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<p>It's jam time. My favorite type of jam is the one where I get a really good deal on the fruit. Blackberries grow wild all over the county, just stay away from picking on heavily traveled roads. Many folks in town have more plums than they care to eat. Check the u-pick berry farms for fall raspberries.</p>
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<p>Apple or plum butter is easy to make with a crock pot. Just start with clean fruit chunks and a little water, on low, and keep adding fruit chunks as it cooks down until you have the desired quantity of fruit butter. Sweeten to taste towards the end. It can then be steam or water bath canned for long keeping.</p>
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<p>Pickles are in and the tomato rush is beginning. Pickles and relishes are limited only by your time, motivation and the amount that you think you can get your family to eat. Some people make their holiday gifts now, making extra preserves for friends and family and putting up herbs in vinegar. Take advantage of the tomato rush to put up tomato sauce, salsa, and hot sauce. There will be plenty of days this winter when my idea of cooking dinner will be to cook some noodles, open a jar of tomato sauce and flavor it up with herbs, dried mushrooms, and a splash of that mind puckering red wine that was on sale, grate a little cheese over it and call it good enough. If I get really motivated, I can steam some broccoli out of the winter garden. </p>
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<p>Tomatoes can be cooked down in the crock pot to make a concentrated paste. I can it in 8 oz. jars for instant pizza: open jar, spread on crust, apply herbs and toppings, bake. Making your own tomato paste is cost effective if you have a supply of ripe tomatoes, such as your garden at the end of the season or a case of B grade table tomatoes from your favorite farmer.</p>
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<p>The weather is great now but when it turns the beans in the garden will get funky and be a moldy mess in a few days. My soup beans have not dried down, due to insufficient heat hours earlier this summer. I am picking the fat pods and shelling them fresh. Yup, I have a big pile of bean pods sitting on newspaper on the kitchen floor. Yup, it looks weird. I shell some every day, pack them in quart freezer bags and throw them in the freezer. The motivated could pressure can them. This produces canned beans which are superior to anything that you can buy. Green beans can also be pressure canned. A few years ago, farmer Walter Haugen pointed out to me that Romano beans make a superior canned bean. It's worthwhile to grow some Romano beans just to can your own. </p>
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<p>The fall potatoes and winter squash are coming in. Talk to your farmer about getting some. Stash a large sack of carrots in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator. Good quality carrots will last months packed in green vegetable bags. Onions and shallots can be had by the box and stored in a dark place at cool room temperature. Just check them often and use any that are starting to go. </p>
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<p>Windfall apples make cider. Windfall plums make a strange peasant beverage which is quite good.</p>
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<p>Fermented Plum Juice</p>
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<p>Works with red or yellow plums. Italian prune plums are best dried for prunes, eh?</p>
<p>Equipment: a gallon glass jug with an airlock, a large mesh bag or clean pillowcase for straining, empty wine bottles with screw on tops from that red wine you got on sale, large bowls. Funnel. A large food grade plastic bucket of the sort bakeries buy cupcake frosting in is very helpful. Ask nicely.</p>
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<p>Rinse and squish plums in a large bowl, removing the pits with your hands as you squish. Drape the mesh bag over the bucket and strain the fruit. If you can figure out how to hang it up, like a giant jelly bag, you get a better yield. The pulp makes great plum butter but takes a lot of sugar, since the sweetness is mostly in the juice. Pour the juice in your clean gallon glass jug. The truly motivated will use champagne yeast to ferment the juice. I just use the wild yeast on the plums themselves. Fit the airlock and leave in a cool shaded place for a week. Pour off the juice into clean wine bottles, leaving extra room. Add 1/4 cup distilled spirits of your choice. I used no-name whiskey, but vodka also works. The distilled spirits act to stop the fermentation and as a preservative. I got that out of a 19th century manual on housekeeping. Works. They advised using French brandy. Cap your bottles and store. Best drunk young. If the juice wasn't quite fermented flat out you will get some carbonation. Too much and the tops blow, so keep an eye on your brew, cracking the screw lids if you need to let off the extra carbonation. It takes a lot of plums to make a few bottles, so I just store it in the fridge. Excellent with tortilla chips and home made salsa after a day's work.</p>
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<p>Extra plum juice can be canned. Easiest recipe ever: put plum juice in clean quart jars with new lids. Process 20 minutes, water bath, or 10 minutes in a steam canner. Let cool and pack away in boxes.</p>
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<p>Resources:</p>
<p>Hopewell Farms and Cloud Mountain have bulk quantities of fall veggies.</p>
<p>Green veggie storage bags are for sale at Terra Organica and the Co-op or on line at canningpantry.com, which also has bulk canning jar lids. Yeager's and Fred Meyer have all the canning supplies. </p>
<p>Cash and Carry has supplies for preservation: wine vinegar and cooking sherry in gallon jugs, Diamond kosher salt (Look for Diamond, Morton's canning and kosher salt blow), bulk freezer bags.</p>
<p>North Corner Brewing has all the bite and pieces for home brew, including giant mesh bags and several sizes of airlock.</p>
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<p>Check earlier Celt's Garden blog posts for hot sauce and salsa recipes.</p>
<p>The library has a myriad of books on canning, preserving, urban homesteading and suchlike.</p>
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<p>I will be teaching Traditional Food Preservation for the Whatcom Folk School this fall, along with some other cool classes, including a new one on Subsistence Gardening. Register through Whatcom Farm School. Meanwhile, take advantage of the seasonal bounty and make your own goodies.</p>
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<p> </p>Celt's Garden - Time to Plant Your Winter Garden and WSU Mt. Vernon Research Updatetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-07-18:2723460:BlogPost:821532012-07-18T19:34:38.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>Summer having barely arrived, it's time to plant the winter garden that will sustain us through fall, winter and early spring next year. Summer gardens are mostly fruits: zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers. Cool season gardens are mostly leaves and a few roots: carrots, beets, cabbage, bok choi, chicory, hardy lettuce, parsley, leeks, kale, radishes. It's OK to start with purchased starts. Look for varieties that say suitable for fall planting, or have "fall" or "winter" in the name.…</p>
<p>Summer having barely arrived, it's time to plant the winter garden that will sustain us through fall, winter and early spring next year. Summer gardens are mostly fruits: zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers. Cool season gardens are mostly leaves and a few roots: carrots, beets, cabbage, bok choi, chicory, hardy lettuce, parsley, leeks, kale, radishes. It's OK to start with purchased starts. Look for varieties that say suitable for fall planting, or have "fall" or "winter" in the name. Cabbages are named by the season that you eat them, so January King is planted now. Quatre Saison lettuce goes in in late August and September, when you have to fuss over them to keep the starts from drying out.</p>
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<p>WSU Mt. Vernon Research Station, aka <b>NWREC,</b> had two public open houses this month, the Small Grains Field Day and the general field day. Pretty cool stuff. There is a lot going on, from potatoes to tree fruit. The director is Dr. Steve Jones, who is a prominent wheat breeder. Dr. Jones is breeding wheat for the maritime northwest. All of the USDA wheat varieties go through a trial at Mt. Vernon for susceptibility to stripe rust. We have the perfect conditions for stripe rust, so the USDA is growing out 15,000 varieties there. Despite all that wheat, local farmers have to buy wheat varieties from the Midwest to plant here. No one has bred a commercial wheat specifically for this climate. </p>
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<p>Dr. Jones is clearly proud of his wheat project. He stood behind three small plots of hard red spring wheat, the most challenging choice for local conditions, just beaming. The wheat was headed out nicely. All three varieties were less than four feet tall, they hadn't fallen over in the recent giant windstorm, and they were green in a patchwork of trial plots browned by stripe rust. The bakers want a local bread wheat. NWREC has put in a test kitchen for baking trials. (That must be a kitchen with a mini-thresher. Hey, I want one!) It's not just the bakers. Most of the country's seed potatoes are grown right here, and the farmers need to grow wheat to break the potato disease cycle.</p>
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<p>NWREC has a certified organic field. The barley trials were quite a sight. Barley comes in many forms and heights, from seven feet to knee high. There are different varieties for malting, feed, and food. The organic malting barley looks particularly good. One of the themes of the field day is that organic farming requires different varieties from conventional farming. (I can hear all you growers saying, "well, duh!")</p>
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<p>They did a trial of different cover crops (wheat, rye, pulses and grains) for no-till vegetable farming. The intent is to suppress the weeds with the cover crop, then use a crimper to turn the cover crop into a pile of biomass and plant vegetables into it. I asked about using a machete or scythe to do the same thing at a smaller scale and was told to go do my own trials. Sounds like a plan. I'm going to use winter wheat and a mix of oats and small favas, not the rye. Rye turns into a monster in small gardens. </p>
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<p>I was pleased to see the move towards using far lower levels of chemicals in the conventional research projects which form the bulk of NWREC's work. Using more and more chemicals is working less and costing more, and now the growers are funding research focused lowering input levels. </p>
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<p>Another theme that came up as we heard about grains, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, raspberries, pollination, diseases, fungi, viruses, and more, was the side effects of scale. I kept thinking that smaller integrated farms would have fewer of these problems than large monocultures of anything. Pollination? Plant hedgerows and beds for native pollinators. More crops different in smaller fields would help with disease. Integrating animals would boost fertility. Cycling inputs on the farm would lower costs. Then we're back to a farmer who has to manage and market wheat, chickens, vegetables, apples, raspberries, strawberries and potato starts, and it's a whole different approach to farming than 100 acres of raspberries or silage corn followed by silage corn.</p>Celt's Garden - Food From Around Heretag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-03-11:2723460:BlogPost:779102012-03-11T20:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>The Winter of Eating Locally just sort of happened around my house. No plans, no resolutions, no rules about only sourcing from within the state or 100 miles, no soul searching about coffee or bread wheat, no life changing decisions. It was life changing anyway. The Winter of Eating Locally was a by product of a great gardening year followed by a long season of underemployment. Good thing that I planted a winter garden.</p>
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<p>In addition to my home garden, Krista Rome (the Bean…</p>
<p>The Winter of Eating Locally just sort of happened around my house. No plans, no resolutions, no rules about only sourcing from within the state or 100 miles, no soul searching about coffee or bread wheat, no life changing decisions. It was life changing anyway. The Winter of Eating Locally was a by product of a great gardening year followed by a long season of underemployment. Good thing that I planted a winter garden.</p>
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<p>In addition to my home garden, Krista Rome (the Bean Woman of Everson) and I planted calorie crops last year at Broadleaf Farm in Everson. Krista has been doing dry bean variety trials there for years. One of my goals was to see what a part time farmer could grow on a scrap of land with minimal inputs.</p>
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<p>The answer is: a lot. My half of our potato variety trials was 200 pounds. I shared most of them and still had potatoes until March. I grew malting barley, harvested and threshed it by hand and made beer with local hops, dense, dark, and nutritious as liquid bread. The squash, beans and peas yielded bountifully, the field corn project produced considerable food as a by-product of breeding for tolerance of our maritime climate, and I even got a little wheat from my wheat variety trials. All this on 1/8 of an acre.</p>
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<p>I about went nuts last August and September trying to get the harvest in on top of the last rush of engineering projects. I'm not claiming that this is easy, just that the normal rhythm of humanity in the Northern Hemisphere is to run around like crazed squirrels in August and September. Then some big feeds to eat up what won't keep and shift gears for the winter.</p>
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<p>Then an interesting thing happened. I about quit buying groceries. I've always been good about baking bread regularly, but the abundance of corn and potatoes really cut down on the need for bread flour. The hard red winter wheat for bread flour is grown in the Great Plains. We can buy locally milled bread flour, but not locally grown. The winter garden has been producing steadily all through the mild winter, pumping out kale, big fat winter radishes and beets. Tomato blight ravaged my tomatoes last year, but I managed to salvage about half. They ripened up in newspaper lined cardboard trays inside. They don't have the sweetness of a vine ripened tomato, but they make outstanding sauce and ketchup. </p>
<p></p>
<p>The taste of around here is blue cornbread made with Bellingham Blue sweet corn; soup from Dunsdale pole peas or Dutch Brown Soup beans flavored with garlic and carrots from local farms; thick brown beer from Hayes Awnless two row barley; Nothstine Dent and Mandan Briade tortillas piled with Indian Woman Yellow beans and chunky homemade chili sauce; a pan of baked Navajo Grey squash, beets, potatoes and whole heads of garlic; red polenta; blueberry muffins; apple sauce; hard cider; kale and winter radish fritatas for breakfast; Molasses Face baked beans; chicken posole; and sourdough flatbreads made from soft wheat and barley. The taste of around here is just amazing.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I about quit setting foot in supermarkets, and it's been great eats all winter. It would coast a fortune to buy it all, and some things are not commercially available at any price. The bounty took work to grow, but I answered the question: can a working person grow enough to substantially feed a small family with minimal time, space, money, water and mechanization? Yes, as a matter of fact. Totally doable.</p>
<p></p>
<p>No, not without foregoing usual suburban pleasures such as mowing the lawn (no lawn left at my place, it's all veg), taking off for weeks in summer, and the American average of 17 hours a week watching TV. I got out to the farm about once a week last year, sometimes for a long day and sometimes for an afternoon. I dragged various family members and friends out there to help and piled them with chow. Krista organized a work party to weed the corn and beans for me at one point. The fact that it was necessary points to a way that local food production is different from the industrial food model. Even an 1/8 of an acre gets out of hand for one person when the weeds go berzerk in June. The weeding is best done collectively and followed by a picnic. It doesn't fit well with the office hamster model of work. If we took turns going around as a group weeding everybody's plot in June, our office hamster jobs would suffer. Of course, if enough of us are unemployed, we aren't going to care. </p>
<p></p>
<p>And here's the thing. The food is way better.</p>
<p></p>
<p>See previous Celt's Garden posts for tortilla making, sourdough bread, the chicken posole recipe, red grits, Bellingham Blue sweet corn, and kale fritatas. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Seeds and seed potatoes for varieties worth growing and eating are becoming more available. Check smaller seed companies from northern states, including Territorial and our own Uprising Organics. I particularly like Fedco from Maine. Krista has dry bean seed available at backyardbeansandgrains.com. I gave away a whole buncha seed corn at the 4th Annual Bellingham Seed Swap. If you missed it, I have limited amounts available for a donation to the cause. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Check the Whatcom Folk School for classes from myself and other farmers and backyard homesteaders. Somebody has to be crazy enough to do this stuff and figure out what actually works.</p>Celt's Garden - Hamster Does Taxes Reduxtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2012-02-28:2723460:BlogPost:771832012-02-28T05:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>Tax time is here again. Many people have already filed and already received a refund. A large number have filed and wonder where their refund is. The short answer is... delayed. The IRS put out the word that they wanted everybody to e-file. Mostly, folks did. The computers promptly crashed and the IRS is still digging out. </p>
<p>Refunds go to people who paid too much in taxes, or to people who are due what is called a refundable credit, a credit that exceeds the tax paid in. The major…</p>
<p>Tax time is here again. Many people have already filed and already received a refund. A large number have filed and wonder where their refund is. The short answer is... delayed. The IRS put out the word that they wanted everybody to e-file. Mostly, folks did. The computers promptly crashed and the IRS is still digging out. </p>
<p>Refunds go to people who paid too much in taxes, or to people who are due what is called a refundable credit, a credit that exceeds the tax paid in. The major refundable credit is the Earned Income Tax Credit. It is not widely recognized that Aid to Families with Dependent Children (that would be what used to be called welfare) morphed into the EITC. The purpose of the EITC is to deliver a big chunk of change to working adults with children. A big criticism of AFDC was that it encouraged people not to work, and it encouraged the breakup of families because the mommas couldn't get AFDC if poppa was still around. Hence we had welfare case officers running around prying into people's lives.</p>
<p>Now we have tax preparers, at the risk of hefty fines and license revocation, prying into people's lives. The eligibility criteria for the EITC are quite specific and there is a detailed interview. </p>
<p>The refundable credits can pump a considerable chunk of change into a low income family all at once. I don't know if that's a good way to deliver a subsidy to the most vulnerable families or not. Listening to people's stories is frequently heart breaking. Just how does a mother of three small children get by making $11,000 a year? Sure, she is eligible for food stamps, and sure, she can get subsidized day care if she can find any, but clearly this lady is busting her tail working at a low paying job and trying to keep it together. Then she gets a $9,000 tax refund and that about doubles her annual income, but she doesn't have a bank account to put it in. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Washington is one of the more enlightened states at tax time. State income tax sounds like a less regressive idea than our notorious Business and Occupation Tax, until encounters with numerous state tax forms reveal just how rigged most of them are.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Jack and Jill are unmarried and living together with Jack's son, Jill's daughter and their baby. Jack has a job carrying water and Jill stays home with all the children and has no other income. Jack can claim Jill and her daughter as dependents. We are progressive in these parts. There are 16 states where this domestic arrangement violates local laws against cohabitation or fornication and the non-working partner cannot be claimed as a dependent.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Suzie and Sallie live with Suzie's daughter and Sallie's Chihuahua. Suzie supports the household with her job and Sallie makes $2000 a year selling crocheted hats. If they lived together all year, Suzie can claim Sallie as dependent. It doesn't matter whether they are a couple or just housemates. The Chihuahua doesn't count.</p>
<p></p>
<p>If Suzie and Sallie become registered domestic partners, their tax status changes. It always does when you tie the knot. Then they encounter a curious instance of bureaucratic schizophrenia. The federal government does not recognize the relationship. Washington State not only recognizes it, Washington is a community property state. The solution is to split the income of both partners and have both file as single with half the joint income and half the tax liability. This complicates filing, takes longer, and cannot be filed electronically. However, it also generally reduces the couple's taxes. If one partner makes considerably more than the other one, it can significantly reduce their taxes by bumping both into a moderate income bracket.</p>
<p></p>
<p>In another case of bureaucratic schizophrenia, tax status has nothing to do with immigration status. Maria is an undocumented worker. Maria is required to pay taxes on her income and is eligible for some tax credits. Non-social security card holders are required to obtain an Interim Tax Identification Number to file. This connects Maria with the social security taxes that she paid. She is credited with what she paid into the system at such time as her legal status is resolved. </p>
<p></p>
<p>The easiest way to end up with a balance due at tax time is to work several part time jobs and not have enough withheld. If taxes are withheld for each job as if there is no other income, it's easy to come up owing. It also happens with married couples when one makes pretty good money and the other has a part time job with low or no withholding. </p>
<p></p>
<p>The next easiest way to owe taxes is to have a small business and not pay quarterly estimated taxes. The federal government frowns on this. People do it all the time anyway, despite the potential for fines. The self-employed are responsible for paying the employer's portion of the social security and medicare taxes. This can be scary. I figure that between operating costs and taxes, I have to make two dollars to keep one. </p>
<p></p>
<p>A sizable number of self-employed people panic, do business in cash and don't file at all. This is not a good idea. For one thing, operating completely in the informal economy for years means not paying into the social security system and not establishing a track record in the formal economy. After years in the shadow economy, Joe Plumber wanted to buy a piece of land and was sobered by the realization that he had no documentation for his financial position. My deceased uncle was proud of having evaded paying into social security for decades, until he reached retirement age and realized that he had outsmarted himself. </p>
<p></p>
<p>It is always cheaper to file and request a payment plan than not to file. The IRS will issue a refund for returns filed three years late, but in the case of a balance due, the clock starts ticking immediately for penalties and interest. For small business owners who have not filed in years, this is a correctable problem. Joe Plumber can file returns for back years, but he will have to either do the work of reconstructing the returns himself or pay for help. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Free tax preparation is available at the Bellingham Public Library (run by AARP), Western Washington University and Whatcom Community College (run by Volunteer Income Tax Assistance.) Check the web for hours. The volunteers' scope is limited to the current tax year. Joe Plumber is out luck for his back year returns. People with very complicated tax situations will also fall outside VITA's scope, but usually those folks can afford to pay for professional help. Bring photo ID, everybody's social security cards, all tax documents and last year's tax return if you have it.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I'm on Friday mornings (except when the college is not in session) at the Heiner Library at WCC. See you there.</p>Celt's Garden - Reverse Planning Your Cookingtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-12-19:2723460:BlogPost:743932011-12-19T21:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>The garden catalogs are arriving, seducing the gardener with glossy food pornography of next year's harvest. Now is the time to sit down with pencil and paper, recipe notes and old shopping lists and think through what you are going to eat next year. We are conditioned to think in terms of a week's shopping. Stop for a moment and think of a year's eating. Most people have family favorite dishes, repeated several times throughout the year.</p>
<p>What do you need to grow to have the makings…</p>
<p>The garden catalogs are arriving, seducing the gardener with glossy food pornography of next year's harvest. Now is the time to sit down with pencil and paper, recipe notes and old shopping lists and think through what you are going to eat next year. We are conditioned to think in terms of a week's shopping. Stop for a moment and think of a year's eating. Most people have family favorite dishes, repeated several times throughout the year.</p>
<p>What do you need to grow to have the makings of Grandma's spaghetti or Dad's Pad Thai on hand? Spaghetti is tomato sauce, garlic, onions, oregano, basil, savory, rosemary and a little grated lemon peel. Start with the herbs. Oregano, winter savory and rosemary are perennials. The rosemary is marginal in our climate, so put it in a sheltered spot. Tuscan Blue is a good cultivar for this area. Basil is an annual that needs high fertility and warm weather. I like to grow it on my deck in a tub of purchased potting soil, so I can fuss with it. We grow great garlic around here. It you have room to grow some of your own, it will save money.</p>
<p>Onions are always an issue. Onions require precious space in the home garden, diligent weeding and regular watering, but don't sell for that much. If you can find local storage onions and lay in a sack for the fall, great, otherwise buy retail. The urban gardener may choose to grow fresh slicing tomatoes and buy a case of processing tomatoes to put up Grandma's tomato sauce. Any green tomatoes left at the end of the season can be brought inside to ripen in newspaper lined trays. They lack the sweetness of a fresh tomato right off the vine and are best used to make sauce and condiments. Shave off the yellow part of the rind from your lemons, dehydrate and save in a spice jar. You don't even need a dehydrator. Just leave the little curls of peel out and they will dry out. The white part of the rind is bitter, so you don't want that.</p>
<p></p>
<p>One ingredient of Dad's Pad Thai, the Thai basil, can be grown here with sufficient fussing. It will only be fresh for a short season, but you can dry some for the winter. You are out of luck on the lime juice and coconut milk. Success with chili peppers depends on matching the variety to your micro-climate. The central European peppers do well for me, Bulgarian Carrot and Hungarian Black, as well as jalapeno and cayenne. Serranos and anchos are often available locally, check the farmer's market in late summer and dry some for those overcast, pepperless months.</p>
<p></p>
<p>What do you like to eat? Salads in spring (grow, under cover for earlier salad), broccoli in early summer (fantastic local broccoli is available if you'd rather not bother growing your own), corn on the cob (I buy yellow sweet corn, the lady across the street feeds the raccoons and they get all the sweet corn in the neighborhood), potatoes (limited supply locally available, contact your farmer early), roots and squash in winter (grow if you have the space), kale and leeks in late winter (grow)? Green peas are cost effective to buy frozen. They have to be picked and processed immediately or the sugar turns to starch. </p>
<p></p>
<p>What can you grow, where you are, with the space that you have, that will give a boost to next year's cooking? What do you like to cook and can you grow the ingredients or buy them locally? What worked for you this year and what would you do differently? Some people grow to stock the freezer. I mostly quit doing that, because my household lost interest in frozen vegetables after eating fresh food from the winter garden. </p>
<p></p>
<p>The basis for deciding what to grow, what to buy and what to make is some thought given to what your household will actually eat. I can get mine to eat sauerkraut once a month for eight months and not at all during the rush of summer goodness. One solid head of cabbage makes two or more quarts of sauerkraut. So that's easy to figure out. Get 3-4 local heads of nice fat kraut cabbage in August, put up eight quarts in wide-mouthed canning jars, done. The looser home grown garden cabbages tolerate winter very well and are best eaten fresh, sauted with galic and steamed a bit to break down the cellulose.</p>
<p></p>
<p>How much jam does your household eat? Can you make it from what you can grow, u-pick, trade and scrounge? Are there favorite pickles, chutneys and relishes that you can put up? A basic quick meal, for example curried canned garbanzo beans and rice, is improved immeasurably by homemade chutney. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Here's part of my garden list for next year:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Early salad: fill a small bed with horse poop and a layer of top soil in February, plant lettuce and spinach and protect with a row cover. The volunteer lettuce is the earliest, but there is never very much of it.</p>
<p>Mushrooms - Spring is mushroom season. Lay hands on a quantity and dry.</p>
<p>Nettles - harvest in early spring and dry for tea and stock.</p>
<p>Basil - supplement the tub on the deck with enough u-pick basil to make pesto and freeze it. Half Acre Farm does u-pick. Grow lemon, purple and Thai basil. Purple basil can be substituted for shiso, which is a real pain to grow.</p>
<p>Tomatoes - get the starts in the ground earlier and use row covers to keep them warm if we have another dicely spring. Heirloom tomatoes make great sauce, but at $5/lb, the only way to do that is to grow them yourself. Grow more tomatoes.</p>
<p>Peppers - Grow more peppers next year, and concentrate on varieties that do well here. </p>
<p>Corn - grow flint corn (the raccoons distain it) </p>
<p>Summer squash - one each cocozelle and yellow zucchini, pattypan, trombincino and rampicante.</p>
<p>Cucumbers - salad cukes are easier to come by than picklers, particularly the small ones for making cornichons. Grow a few vines of pickling cucumbers on a trellis, so I can do small batches instead of a mad rush to locate pickling cucumbers and process them immediately.</p>
<p>Winter garden - get the winter green stuff planted in August this time, put some old fencing over it to keep the deer out and remember to water, eh?</p>
<p>Edamane - parboiled fresh soybeans are amazingly good. The deer don't seen to like the fuzzy pods. </p>
<p>Green beans - freeze some. </p>
<p>Peas- Grow edible pod peas, snow and snap peas, and buy frozen green peas to make Korean noodles with peas.</p>
<p>Blackberries and plums - forage, gather and trade, since neither grows in my garden. Make some fruit wine next year, less jam, dehydrate the plums, freeze some blackberries.</p>
<p></p>
<p>That's enough to get you going. Now take out pencil, paper, old shopping lists and those glossy seed catalogues and have at it.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Oh, right. Reverse planning is a military term. It means starting with the end state and planning in reverse from there. The patrol leader reverse plans the mission, starting with the time the last soldier has to set foot over the line of return and planning each step backwards from there, arriving at the time the patrol has to leave the line of departure. Whatever time is left before departure is the time to prepare for the mission. I found it a great planning tool for working mothers. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Curried Garbanzos</p>
<p></p>
<p>2 servings cooked brown or white rice</p>
<p>1 15 oz can garbanzo beans, drained, or a cup of cooked garbanzos</p>
<p>garlic clove, peeled and diced</p>
<p>1/2 medium onion, diced</p>
<p>1/2 teasp. curry powder</p>
<p></p>
<p>Saute onion, garlic and curry powder in a little oil until onions are cooked. Add garbanzos and cook until warm. Serve over rice, topped with a few raisins and coconut shreds. Your choice of chutney, hot sauce, sliced raw apples or suchlike go well. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Sauerkraut in quart jars from Keeping Food fresh by Terre Vivante</p>
<p></p>
<p>Thinly sliced fresh juicy cabbage</p>
<p>Kosher salt</p>
<p>Non-chlorinated water</p>
<p>Berries of allspice, juniper, whole black peppercorns, bay leaves or caraway seed, peppercorns and bay</p>
<p>Clean wide-mouthed canning jars</p>
<p></p>
<p>Put a few berries in the bottom of the jar. Firmly pack a layer of cabbage. Add a pinch of salt and more spices. Continue until jar is almost full. Add water to within 1/2" of the top, covering the cabbage. Put lids on and set jars on the counter where you can watch them for a few days. Unscrew the lids and burp the gas every day or so. After a week, screw lids down and store in a cool, dark place. Plastic jar lids work well for this, as the brine will eventually eat metal lids. Lasts at least until the following summer.</p>
<p></p>Celt's Garden - Cook vs. Free Range Birdtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-11-28:2723460:BlogPost:737952011-11-28T21:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>In my childhood, people the age that I am now would double over at rubber chicken jokes. Some geezer on the Art Linkletter show would pull out a rubber chicken, a lovingly painted rubber likeness of a plucked and eviscerated chicken with the head and feet still attached, and my greying babysitter and her skinnny sister would start laughing. Merely waving the chicken around would cause them to have difficulty holding on to their glasses of beer (no lady drinks beer out of the bottle.) With…</p>
<p>In my childhood, people the age that I am now would double over at rubber chicken jokes. Some geezer on the Art Linkletter show would pull out a rubber chicken, a lovingly painted rubber likeness of a plucked and eviscerated chicken with the head and feet still attached, and my greying babysitter and her skinnny sister would start laughing. Merely waving the chicken around would cause them to have difficulty holding on to their glasses of beer (no lady drinks beer out of the bottle.) With the clarity of a small child whose perception far outstrips their social skills, I thought this was inane.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I had similar thoughts about the ladies with the heavy arms who gathered on the stoop in front of our apartment building to complain about the tasteless food in the supermarket, a newly opened A & P that would fit comfortably inside many current gas station convenience stores. I thought they ought to have something better to do with their time, or at least come up with a new topic. Their arms fascinated me, the broad forearms and large biceps gone slack with decades of city living. They were stout, those ladies, but mere thickness in the middle is nothing compared to the morbid obesity which was nearly unknown when I was a snotty little kid on the stoop. The ladies seemed ancient at the time, but actually they were barely older that I am now. Perhaps our overlapping life spans go back a century.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>That century was the century of industrial agriculture, when food and cooking were transformed. My middle aged babysitter and the ladies with the heavy arms were farm girls from Wisconsin, who moved to the city during the Roaring Twenties, or the Depression, or after World War II. By mid-century, they were living in apartments with gas stoves, central heating and vacuum cleaners, their formidable upper body strength turning to flab.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The ladies had a point about the food. They had recently encountered cake mix at the A & P (an endless topic of derision.) Cheese puffs, frosted toaster pastries, "lite margarine" and my favorite food idiocy, human dietary fiber in flavored drinks (beans, my friends, and oatmeal..) were still to come. The dreck got so bad that the natural foods movement went mainstream. Meanwhile, science tells us that broccoli has doubled in size and lost 90% of its nutrients, starting from the exact time that the ladies were complaining about supermarket vegetables tasting like cardboard.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Chickens still came from small farms at that point ("You can't get a decent chicken these days.") The grower model of farmers raising birds on contract for central processing companies was just starting to get traction. Actually, the chickens, and especially the turkeys, weren't too bad back in the day, not compared to Frankenchickens raised in 10,000 bird lots without room to move around, soaked in antibiotics to combat the toxic chicken house environment. The swollen, gummy breasts are almost too soft to survive cooking and even the legs are limp. Industrially produced turkeys have been rancid since the 1980's.</p>
<p>[Edit: Gene Logsdon has the explanation for the fishy taste of industrial poultry in his August 3, 2011 blog post. Apparently it is caused by feeding the animals too much corn.</p>
<p><em>Now I’ve found a farmer who agrees with me more or less. He was an Englishman writing in 1893. He might have been a bit prejudiced about anything from America but nevertheless his words are most interesting. I found him quoted in Farm and Dairy magazine in a regular column, “Let’s Talk Rusty Iron” by Sam Moore. After stating that corn’s merits have been considerably exaggerated, the Englishman went on: “Maize, although useful, is not a perfect food for pigs and poultry, as, although it’s fattening, it certainly produces an inferior quality of meat, having a somewhat coarse and fishy flavor, particularly objectionable in poultry.” </em></p>
<p>Sadly, the unpleasant effects of a high corn diet are easily achieved, even in a backyard operation. Since the high cost of corn caused many commercial poultry growers to shift to feeding wheat, perhaps even commercial birds are better this year.]</p>
<p></p>
<p>However, we have plenty of recipes for Frankenchickens. Figuring out how to cook a true free range bird is a whole different undertaking. The free range bird of commerce is quite decent. Clearly the growers are struggling for middle ground between people's expectation of chicken and real food. Often, they are accused of raising insufficiently free ranging birds, and for excellent reasons. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>I'm just here to tell you, a real free range bird can be the stuff of rubber chicken jokes. The tender roaster is best kept penned, fed plentifully and killed young. The standard meat chicken is a Cornish Cross, an animal bred to grow giant breasts in record time. Even when raised in a natural environment, they are almost too stupid to go outside. They grow so fast that their skeletons can't support the meat and they become crippled if allowed to live.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I like happy food best, food that gets a chance to hang out with the goats and eat bugs. Last summer, I met dinner. The Cornish Crosses were running around the pen in circles, while the Buff Orpingtons were perched on the rail, laughing at them. I took dinner home and slaughtered it, delicious happy food. The interesting thing was that even the overbred Cornish Cross had tough legs, best cooked by stewing, when it came out of a back yard.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Ah, that's it. Cut up the bird, possibly marinate it, but in any case cook it slowly in plenty of liquid. Roasted, your true free range bird may have the consistency of eating rubber bands. Stewed, the meat has texture and taste, and stands up well to strong flavors. Some Indian chicken recipes call for marinating, simmering and then grilling, treatment which causes American commercial chickens to disintegrate.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The little cull roosters from the order of straight run layers have very little meat on them at the point that they become too obnoxious to keep around. Soup, or coq au vin rouge. Old layers are mostly feathers, fuss and egg laying apparatus. Excellent soup. Our holiday bird was a particularly loud and obnoxious gander, seven pounds dressed. Marinated, browned and stewed. The gander had a little over a cup of fat, nothing compared to the Shelton's Natural goose I roasted last year. The Shelton's goose produced four cups of schmaltz and the digestive experience that inspired the saying "goes through you like goose grease." Fine roast goose, and very well received, by the way. Shelton's has good turkeys as well.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I get the arms now. After a few of summers of subsistence gardening, my biceps will no longer fit into the sleeves of my tailored suit jackets. Time for new jackets to go with my new chicken recipes.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Stovetop Peking Goose </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Four quart heavy pot, goose, unpeeled whole garlic cloves, handful of coarsely chopped shallots or onion.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Spice mix:</p>
<p>1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon</p>
<p>1/2 teaspoon garlic powder</p>
<p>4 whole cloves, 1/2 teaspoon each whole cumin, peppercorns and coriander, crushed in a mortar or ground</p>
<p>2 whole star anise</p>
<p>1/2" peeled and sliced ginger</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Cut the goose legs, wings and breasts off the backbone and cut the breasts in half so they fit in the pot. Rub with the spice mixture and pack into a deep bowl. Pour 2 tablespoons each vegetable oil, soy sauce, apple cider vinegar and sherry over the meat and marinate overnight in the refrigerator. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Brown the goose pieces on medium high heat, then remove from the pot and plunk back into the marinade. Pour off excess fat from the pot. Cook the garlic and shallots on low until onions are starting to turn translucent. Return goose pieces to pot. Add the marinade, 2 cups apple cider and 2 cups apple juice and cook on medium low heat until tender, about three hours, occasionally rearranging so that all the pieces cook evenly.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Excellent with Mandarin Tortillas</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Smash together until uniform in texture: </p>
<p>4 cups whole wheat bread flour</p>
<p>1/4 cup sesame oil</p>
<p>scant 1/2 teaspoon baking powder</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Add about 1 cup boiling water, adding slowly and stirring until it sticks together and you can work it into a soft ball of dough. Let sit 15 minutes. Put 1/2 cup of unbleached flour into a shallow bowl. Pull off ping pong ball sized balls of dough, roll in the dry flour, and knead briefly with your hands. Roll it in more flour if it is too sticky to work. You will feel the texture become more elastic. Form into a flat disk about 2" across, flour generously and stack up. When you have a nice stack going, use a tortilla press or rolling pin to flatten the disks into a thick tortilla shape. Cook on a comal, an unheated flat cast iron pan.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>See Celt's Garden - Start with a Live Chicken for directions on how to slaughter poultry and a recipe for Coq au Vin Rouge. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Yer basic chicken noodle soup recipe:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Old layer, dressed, or wings, back and neck from purchased chicken or turkey</p>
<p>The old layer goes straight in the pot. Purchased bird parts are best cooked first, either by starting with leftovers from a whole roast bird or by cooking at 300 degrees F in a shallow pan for an hour. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Just barely simmer one hour, a slow glub, glub. Remove the meat from the bones. An old layer may take longer to soften up. Return the bones to the broth and simmer two more hours. Strain out the bones and return the meat to the pot.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Add chopped carrots, onions, celery, garlic, a bay leaf, a pinch of rosemary, parsley and thyme and cook on low heat. When the vegetables are soft, add spaghetti or other long thin noodles, broken into 4" pieces, and cook until the noodles are al dente. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Two additional thoughts: Sometimes all that is needed to transform a backyard bird from chewy to sublime is a good rest. I bought a dressed turkey from a buddy years ago and stuck it in the fridge, overcome by some other crisis. I finally got around to cooking it 36 hours later and the muscles had relaxed. It was great. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>If you slaughter your own goose, they take a while to pluck. Use water just off the boil for dunking the carcass to strip the feathers off. After being defeathered and cleaned, it still took me 45 minutes more to get the pinfeathers out with needle nose pliers. I used to keep a pair of pliers in the kitchen utensil drawer back when I was living in other people's countries and shopping at open air markets. The warm feathers inspire thoughts of feather stuffing, but I didn't keep them clean enough to use when I was plucking. I put them in the garden for mulch instead. The rich meat goes well with fruity sauce: hoisin sauce, mango chutney, cranberry sauce with a little shredded chipolte pepper, your pleasure. </p>
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<p> </p>Celt's Garden - Bellingham Blue Sweet Corntag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-11-01:2723460:BlogPost:721582011-11-01T21:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>Bellingham Blue corn was given its name by the elder who showed up at the First Annual Bellingham Seed Swap in 2009 and shared the treasure that he had saved in his backyard for decades. It's blue, a deep blue-black, it's small (the ears are 3" - 7" long), and it grows on bushy 4' - 5' plants with 2-3 ears per plant. The blue tastes a bit different from white or yellow sweet corns. Bellingham Blue is early, always a good trait in corn in these parts, and it's open-pollinated, so you can save…</p>
<p>Bellingham Blue corn was given its name by the elder who showed up at the First Annual Bellingham Seed Swap in 2009 and shared the treasure that he had saved in his backyard for decades. It's blue, a deep blue-black, it's small (the ears are 3" - 7" long), and it grows on bushy 4' - 5' plants with 2-3 ears per plant. The blue tastes a bit different from white or yellow sweet corns. Bellingham Blue is early, always a good trait in corn in these parts, and it's open-pollinated, so you can save the seed. It makes a sweet, blue cornmeal that is great in cornbread.</p>
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<p>The gift we were given to steward was also suffering from severe inbreeding depression. Corn is wind-pollinated. Pollen grains from the male tassles blow around and land on the silks of the female ear. Each silk leads to a single kernel. To preserve enough generic diversity to keep a corn variety healthy, the experts advise growing 1000 plants and saving seed from the best 200 - 400. That's tricky in a backyard. </p>
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<p>Several people tried to grow Bellingham Blue that first year, but it gave them trouble. It was not vigorous. Some of the plants tassled but did not develop ears. Others made an ear but at the wrong time for the tassles. Some of the plants just didn't grow well. The guy who came to the next seed swap, bearing his ears with joy, had crossed it on purpose. He interplanted Bellingham Blue with Golden Bantam, a old open pollinated yellow sweet corn with a similar short maturity. Bingo. The blue was dominant, as was the characteristic lack of uniformity in the ears. The cross looked right but it actually grew well and produced the iconic blue sweet corn. </p>
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<p>Meanwhile, we found out what it is. Indeed, Bellingham Blue is part of our Pacific Northwest heritage. In the 1920's, Ira Hooker of Olympia, Washington bred, or possibly adopted, "Sweet Indian", which seems to have been multi-colored. "Hooker's Green" is a selection, ahem, a sweet green. Bellingham Blue is the blue one. I was astonished to hear that when students at Evergreen University wanted some local heritage corn for trials, they got Bellingham Blue from the Cornell University deep freeze. They had trouble with it. Legendary plant breeder Alan Kapuler, who lives in Corvalis, Oregon, grew a short, scrappy blue-black sweet corn for his now-defunct seed company and called it "Hooker's Sweet Indian". Territorial now carries a short sweet corn, also named "Hooker's Sweet Indian", that starts out white, turns pink and then purple and matures to blue-black. Seeds of Change has a similar called one "Hooker's Corn" that doesn't claim to be sweet. They may be crossed with something to come up with reasonably well behaved commercial varieties. Bellingham Blue has smaller ears and is blue at the sweet corn stage.</p>
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<p>The blue color comes from the aleurone layer of the kernel. Think of it as a thin sheet of blue cellulose between the starchy endosperm ball and the hard outer pericarp layer. Corn genetics is quite complicated, but blue is white endosperm + blue aleurone + clear pericarp. Yellow endosperm + blue aleurone = green corn.</p>
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<p>The professional approach is to lay hands on enough seed to grow out a whole field, hand pollinate to isolate from crosses with other types of corn, and then select for larger ears and more uniformity in size and maturity. I did none of that. Resembles work. Besides, I had seed from only two ears. Instead, I crossed Bellingham Blue again, by planting it next to Golden Bantam, Black Aztec and Celt's Black Sweet, my own unstabilized cross from a prior year (Black Aztec flour corn x the neighbor's sweet corn) and saving the ears from the Bellingham Blue mother plants. The blue color is dominant, although I got an occasional yellow or white kernel. Sweetness in corn is a recessive trait, but it is easy to select for because the sweet kernels are wrinkled. A smooth kernel may be floury or it may carry genes for both, but a wrinkled kernel is sweet. I just separated out the small percentage of smooth kernels. The enthusiastic could grow it out and stabilize the variety, or just grow it and eat it.</p>
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<p>I have enough to share. See you at the Fourth Annual Bellingham Seed Swap. </p>
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<p>I will be teaching "Urban Gardening in Small Spaces" November 13, 2:00 - 4:00 at Bennett House in North Bellingham. Register through the Whatcom Folk School. Address provided after registration. Learn how to grow lots of fresh food in small spaces, even without your own yard. See you there.</p>
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<p> </p>Celt's Garden - Hard Cider and Brew Sludge Breadtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-10-12:2723460:BlogPost:703932011-10-12T19:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>Time to get the winter squash in. Collect the squash, wash them off, and then go over each squash completely with a wash cloth soaked in clean water with a little bleach added. Allow your squash to air dry and store in a single layer, not touching. They keep well at cool room temperature, 50 - 60 degrees F. Eat in reverse order of keeping qualities. Check the seed catalog or on line. The small C. pepos don't keep as well as the big C. maximas, so plan on Sugar Baby pumpkin pie and baked…</p>
<p>Time to get the winter squash in. Collect the squash, wash them off, and then go over each squash completely with a wash cloth soaked in clean water with a little bleach added. Allow your squash to air dry and store in a single layer, not touching. They keep well at cool room temperature, 50 - 60 degrees F. Eat in reverse order of keeping qualities. Check the seed catalog or on line. The small C. pepos don't keep as well as the big C. maximas, so plan on Sugar Baby pumpkin pie and baked delicatas this fall. If you didn't grow any winter squash, now is the time to buy some. If the stem breaks off where it joins the fruit, eat that one early because the scar spot will rot.</p>
<p>It's time to glean the apples, windfalls and all, and make cider. Cider is properly a fermented beverage, so the "cider" sold at this time of year is properly labeled "fresh apple juice". Purchased "cider" is pasteurized, just like milk, raised to a specified temperature to kill the various micro-organisms. Hard cider can be made with pasteurized apple juice, but if you can get your hands on raw juice, use that.</p>
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<p>The best way to get raw juice is to press it yourself. For that, you will need access to a cider press. Sharing a cider press is a shady activity. See Sandor Katz' book, "The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved", for the gruesome details of how this traditional American subsistence activity was sorely crimped in modern times. Due to the possible transmission of e.coli, we are all expected to invest in a large, bulky, expensive piece of equipment which has to be stored and kept clean 11.5 months of the year if we want to make our own cider. Almost as if private citizens were being actively discouraged. Since making hard cider from your own apples is the cheapest, fastest way to make a goodly quantity of a quite decent alcoholic beverage, Katz has some dark thoughts. </p>
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<p>So when you get access to a cider press, fail to put it on your Facebook page. Next, you will need a standard beer kit. This can be purchased from North Corner Brewing Supply for a modest sum. It is certainly possible to make your own from parts and two food grade plastic buckets with lids, one 6.5 gallons and the other 6 gallons, but it's hardly worth the trouble. The break even point for a beer kit has remained 2.5 batches of home brew since I started brewing up in the 80's. Purchase some packets of champagne yeast while you are there and store it in the refrigerator. Beer kits come with a bottle of iodine sanitizer concentrate.</p>
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<p>Small quantities of cider can be made in a glass gallon jug. Take the jug to Robert at North Corner Brewing Supply and purchase an airlock to fit. A five gallon plastic bucket (ask nicely at your favorite deli) of apples will squish down to fit in a gallon jug. I once ground up apples in the grater attachment of my Kitchen Aid mixer and squished them with a tabletop wine/cheese press to make a gallon of cider. Worked great but it was time consuming. </p>
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<p>Cider has joined the long list of artisan products, so you can get really involved if you wish. Cider is properly made from a mix of sweet, sour (20%) and bitter (5-10%) apples. The sour and bitter apples give cider a full, clean taste. This being a town of old apple trees, there are a surprising number of cider apples lying on lawns. I've used all sweet apples from older varieties (King, Queen, Gravenstein) and the result was quite decent. I also used 15% Dolgo crabapples for the sour/bitter flavor and that got rave reviews. </p>
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<p>Once you have press, fermentation setup and apples arranged, you are ready to go. Wash the apples in water with a little dish detergent and rinse in a separate container of clean water. Washing off the deer poop is the step that private citizens supposedly cannot be trusted to do. The fastidious trim the apples, removing soft spots and insect damage. I just trim off anything black, on the principle that alcohol is a disinfectant. </p>
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<p>Using the press is a two step process, first grinding the apples and then pressing the pulp. Strain the juice into your clean, sanitized primary fermenter, pitch the wine yeast and allow to ferment 5-7 days at room temperature, out of direct sun. The kit comes with beer making directions, so just follow the step by step with your apple juice. Once the bubbling stops, transfer the cider to the bottling bucket and bottle. I use recycled wine bottles. The kind with the screw on lids work particularly well, as you don't have to be trying to jam a used cork to seal the bottle. The artisan cider makers are rolling their eyes at this point. </p>
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<p>Go ahead and drink some. The cider will be better after 6-8 weeks, really good at 6-12 months, and start to turn to vinegar if kept too long, due to the low tech bottling technique. Robert will sell you proper equipment when you are ready.</p>
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<p>Oh yah, and your beer kit comes with ingredients for a brew up. Project #2, eh?</p>
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<p>Brew Sludge Bread is excellent stuff.</p>
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<p>As a side effect of primary fermentation, you will get a 2" layer of dead yeast and cloudy apple juice at the bottom of the primary fermenter. Pour this off and mix with two cups whole wheat flour in a glass or ceramic bowl. Cover with a tea towel and leave it sitting on the counter for day or two. Put some in a quart jar in the fridge for a sourdough starter. Take the rest and make sourdough bread. See Celt's Garden - Slow Bread for the details or just search on the sourdough method. </p>
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<p>I will be teaching seed saving on Sunday, October 16 at Bennett House in North Bellingham. Check it out on the Transition Whatcom Events page. Register through the Whatcom Folk School. I've given a basic introduction to seed saving at the Annual Seed Savers Exchange to standing room only for three years. I've had several requests to present the material in more depth, with a quieter venue and more information about breeding vegetables. In this class, we'll start with the basics of seed saving and get into backyard vegetable breeding. See you there.</p>
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<p> </p>Celt's Garden - Community Emergency Readiness is All About Attitudetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-09-26:2723460:BlogPost:688832011-09-26T00:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>It took quite a while to get the fake blood out of my hair. Then I went out and planted the winter garden in the gathering gloom of approaching heavy weather. It's late, I should have planted turnips, beets and rutabegas in August, but it didn't work before. The deer ate it, dry gardening doesn't work on roots around here, take that Steve Solomon, I was unable to keep the little sprouts that I replanted watered, which just demonstrates the limits of my capability to keep it all together. If…</p>
<p>It took quite a while to get the fake blood out of my hair. Then I went out and planted the winter garden in the gathering gloom of approaching heavy weather. It's late, I should have planted turnips, beets and rutabegas in August, but it didn't work before. The deer ate it, dry gardening doesn't work on roots around here, take that Steve Solomon, I was unable to keep the little sprouts that I replanted watered, which just demonstrates the limits of my capability to keep it all together. If you haven't been organized and planted the winter garden already, you should run right out during the next dryish spell and plant roots, radishes, fall lettuce, green onions, spinach and the leafy brassicas: kale, mustard and bok choy. Garlic, multiplier onions (AKA the Yellow Dutch Shallot) and fava beans go in any time through November. Winter wheat, barley and oats are planted any time the ground is workable in the fall. </p>
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<p>Meanwhile, the harvest is coming in in buckets, including food you can't buy. Green Mountain potatoes, for instance, delicious and middling keepers, which were dropped from commercial production due to their uneven sizes, and fresh red flint corn meal. Red polenta from Italian heritage floriana flint corn is all the rage in L.A. Ten bucks a pound, or more if you want it cooked and served on a plate. All very well, but the stuff has a long growing season, which makes it doubtful around here. I interplanted the red kernals from Abenaki Calais flint with some "decorative" red flint corn from Bellevue Acres and Chippewa Bear Island. Sure 'nuf, red grits. Will ya getta look at that, Marge. This in two 14' by 2.5' garden beds.</p>
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<p>Oh, the blood... I was a head injury/burn victim for Bellingham Airport's Mass Casualty Exercise. They have to have one every three years to stay operational as an airport. Fake blood and gore are made from various concoctions of corn syrup and vaseline, just a bugger to get out of long hair. I still have fine charcoal powder from the "burns" ground into my gardening calluses. </p>
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<p>Bob Jacobson, the Community Emergency Readiness Training (CERT) program director for Whatcom County, put out the call for CERT graduates to be plane crash victims. Bob is retired Weather Service, the kind of guy who is happy to put in fifty hour weeks for no compensation and rope his wife in to volunteer with him. CERT trains community members in basic disaster preparedness. We are likely to need disaster preparedness soon. There have been major earthquakes in Indonesia, Japan and the Pacific off South America in the last few years. It's just a question of when, not if, the fourth edge of the Pacific Rim goes. </p>
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<p>At the exercise, I got to talking to other gardeners. Therese told me about her involvement with "Map Your Neighborhood" a few years ago. The mapping exercise was about connecting with community: locating elderly or disabled neighbors who might need help in an emergency, mapping water and gas shut off locations, exchanging phone numbers with neighbors, etc. Columbia Neighborhood got the grant and went all out. They are still at it and the momentum has carried over into some Transition activities. Therese lives in the old East Side of town (considered part of Transition Samish.) Therese could not get her neighbors off a dime. They didn't believe a disaster could occur in Bellingham. They didn't want to know their neighbors, much less exchange phone numbers. Many expected to move and couldn't care less. They were disaffected and disconnected at all levels, from personal to municipal. Therese couldn't get them to garden, either, even if someone else came by their place and did the gardening and just gave them a share of the food. </p>
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<p>This is not good. This is that anomie we've been reading about, the culture of cheese doodles and mindless TV. Worse yet, the people who are so disaffected that they cannot be convinced to pack a 48 hour bag and locate the water shutoff are exactly the people who used to have no capital, except social capital. They relied on a dense network of relationships and reciprocal connections to get by. Without the social capital, they have nothing, they are totally dependent on the continued ability of the state and federal governments to hand out social benefits. </p>
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<p>Columbia Neighborhood has spectacular pocket gardens as well as the best organized disaster preparedness in the city. Check it out. I like to walk down the alleys. That way I can peer into people's gardens while pretending to move out with a purpose. </p>
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<p>Disaster takes many forms. Consider the guy who planted a square foot garden in the former front yard, just for kicks, and then was laid off. Consider that the sewage from the Lake Whatcom side of the hills is pumped up and over to the Wastewater Treatment Facility. The city is quick to respond when a sewage pump loses power (the residents have probably never noticed.) So, how about a major power outage where all the pumps lose power for days? Consider that supermarkets have three days of food (much of it vile non-food extruded dubious rancid concoctions made from GMO corn and soybeans.) Consider that FEMA advises everyone to have two weeks worth of food stored because they don't plan on getting to you sooner than that (and if you are brown, rural, or poor they may plan on getting to you never.)</p>
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<p>Bob runs CERT classes at BTC in Fall Quarter and by arrangement. Here's the link: <a href="http://www.co.whatcom.wa.us/dem/educate/cert/cert.jsp">http://www.co.whatcom.wa.us/dem/educate/cert/cert.jsp</a>. Bob's office has recently moved to the Saturna Capital Building downtown. His number is 360.778.7163. </p>
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<p>P.S. I will be teaching Traditional Food Preservation Methods and Steam Canning on Sunday, October 2, 2:00 - 4:00 PM at Bennett House in North Bellingham. If you are interested, register through the Whatcom Folk School. Dry, pickle, make saurkraut, kimche and jam, smoke, ferment, preserve in alcohol and more. Take home recipes for great food that you can make better than you buy. Great stuff. Look forward to seeing you there.</p>Celt's Garden - Adventures in Microfarmingtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-08-05:2723460:BlogPost:612752011-08-05T18:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>I have moved up from nano-farming. I am now learning micro-farming. Like all transitions, it has its moments. Eating snow peas off the vine was a good one. Breaking into the first row of potatoes and coming home with the best, freshest potatoes ever, that was great. Half a bucket of fresh snap beans to share with my family and friends, yah. Most of the moments so far have been intangible joys: Navajo Grey squash swelling on the vines, corn tasseling, soup peas in exuberant bloom, looking…</p>
<p>I have moved up from nano-farming. I am now learning micro-farming. Like all transitions, it has its moments. Eating snow peas off the vine was a good one. Breaking into the first row of potatoes and coming home with the best, freshest potatoes ever, that was great. Half a bucket of fresh snap beans to share with my family and friends, yah. Most of the moments so far have been intangible joys: Navajo Grey squash swelling on the vines, corn tasseling, soup peas in exuberant bloom, looking like something too decorative to eat. </p>
<p>So far, I've learned that an eighth of an acre can crank out an amazing amount of food. Other moments have been more of a learning curve. Pole peas need really sturdy posts because they will knock over anything wimpy. Dry farming is all about timing. The barley and spring wheat have to go in in time to get solidly rained on. April is a rush to plant peas, potatoes, onions, and beans. Corn and squash go in in May, and then have to be watched and replanted. </p>
<p>Crows are persistent about pulling up germinating seeds. They are particularly fond of heirloom corn, and will ignore acres of commercial corn to eat every seed of heirloom varieties. Weeds were my friend. Where I assiduously weeded, the crows got it all, and then all of the replanting. </p>
<p>Weeding corn, like harvesting more than a test patch of grain, turns out to be an issue of social organization. Turns out that weeding is best ignored until the corn is tall enough to resist crows, and then done with all your friends. Which immediately leads to time organization. An urban garden can be maintained in a state between neat and cheerful disarray by one person with a day job. I tend towards disarray, personally, but neat could be done in theory. Weeding the corn patch all at once requires teamwork. </p>
<p>Once upon a time, the Arikawa ladies hoed the corn together in June, moving from patch to patch until it was done. Then they came back in July and hoed everybody's patch again. Then they went on the buffalo hunt and came back just in time to harvest. Sounds like a plan to me, particularly the part about taking off buffalo hunting. So, properly I should arrange my life so that I have a week in both June and July to participate in roving garden work parties. Then I could take off fishing in Alaska. So far, this is a mismatch with my day job. </p>
<p>The goal of micro-farming is to grow more calorie crops than will fit in my urban garden. Ten feet of bush beans will produce a pound of dry soup beans. Heirloom corn in my garden test patches produced 1/5 pound of dry shelled corn per plant last year. One pound of shelled field corn makes a batch of tortillas or cornbread. Barley yields about 3 cups in 16 square feet, which is a pound, which is enough to malt and add plenty much zip to a kit beer. Potatoes yield 5-10 pounds or more per pound planted, 20 to one is exceptional. And the big honking sprawling Navajo Grey squashes taste delicious, cook up easily and store well, what's not to like except that they take up 64 square feet per plant for a couple of squashes each. I planted in wide rows, with plenty of space between plants because it was not planned to be irrigated. A little calculation reveals that an eighth of an acre will produce a lot of calories, even more with irrigation available.</p>
<p>You probably know someone who has an eighth of an acre in a perennial crop of grass clippings. Perhaps you do. Perhaps you can convince that person to lend you their lawn in exchange for plenty much potatoes, squash and beer.</p>
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<p> </p>Celt's Garden - Fried Radishes for Breakfast and Other Tales of the Recessiontag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-07-09:2723460:BlogPost:568682011-07-09T16:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>I'm becoming quite partial to fried radishes for breakfast, particularly the big fat ones that get a bit hot for fresh eating. Slice radishes thinly, saute in a little oil until translucent and the edges begin to brown, drop in a couple of scrambled eggs, top with green onions and slivers of chilies. Serve with a side of warmed leftover beans. For low cholesterol eating, skip the eggs. Fried radishes out of the the garden are sweet and juicy. Radishes are a frequent volunteer in my garden. A…</p>
<p>I'm becoming quite partial to fried radishes for breakfast, particularly the big fat ones that get a bit hot for fresh eating. Slice radishes thinly, saute in a little oil until translucent and the edges begin to brown, drop in a couple of scrambled eggs, top with green onions and slivers of chilies. Serve with a side of warmed leftover beans. For low cholesterol eating, skip the eggs. Fried radishes out of the the garden are sweet and juicy. Radishes are a frequent volunteer in my garden. A petite pink radish shoots up into a small bush covered with white flowers. Quite darling looking. Black Spanish radishes turn into exuberant bushes four feet high and flower purple. Radishes will set edible seeds pods, juicy and succulent at first, then the pod ripens and becomes stringy and dry. The seed will be ready for harvest in late September. Just collect the dry pods before they split and burst. I leave the pods sitting around in a paper sack in my dining room for a few weeks to finish drying and then thresh and clean the seed. </p>
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<p>You always miss some seed, an occasion to reflect that weeds are any plant in the wrong place. Most of the weed radishes are not worth eating, too spindly, too close together, or bolting too soon. Some are fine, just in the place intended for something else. Those go in the breakfast pan. The first new potatoes are ready. When the potato plant begins to flower, it is possible to reach into the edges of the hill and rob the new potatoes. I have plenty of volunteer potatoes that I have never gotten around to pulling out. This is a good time to dig them up, compost the vines and eat the new potatoes. The volunteers are usually too closely spaced for a good yield of full sized potaotes and anyway, the whole point was to rotate that spot to something else. New potatoes won't keep. Just scrub them, leaving the thin skins on, and steam or slice and saute. A cast iron skillet makes the best fried potatoes.</p>
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<p>The garden is part of my business plan. And a good thing, too, as this year seems to be shaping up for a short, intense burst of work in my engineering practice. Engineering has always been seasonal, even back in the day when I was working for the government, like picking strawberries but it pays better. Gardening helps conserve cash for the off season. Besides, the fresh food from the garden tastes better than anything I'm willing to pay for. </p>
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<p>It's time to go out after the dew has dried in the morning and gather herbs to dry. Rosemary, sage, thyme, marjoram, oregano, savory, Italian parsley and basil dry easily. Collect the herbs and lay out to wilt away from direct sun. The next day, dehydrate on low until they reach the dry snap stage. Bend a woody twig. If snaps with a nice dry sound, the herbs are ready. Best to pack immediately in glass jars and label. I use a large bowl to rub the dry leaves off and a canning funnel to pack them in jars. If dried herbs are left sitting around overnight, the humidity tends to rehydrate them. Some fluffy plants can easily yield enough to last through winter.</p>
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<p>Out in Hamsterland, I am hearing alarming rumblings of an economy gone south. Each story is individual: unemployment run out, resources exhausted, job lost, small businesses dragging their small butts, bankruptcy from a construction loan to build a modest house on a modest lot out in the county, the lady talking about her niece the pole dancer in Everett whose tips are way down (I suggested the young lady in question go to BTC and take plumbing; plumbing cannot be outsourced and pays almost as well as pole dancing.) The collective picture is enough to send shivers up the back. All the more reason to cook from basic ingredients and grow what we can. </p>
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<p>Here is Grandmother Colleen Libby's meatball recipe. It makes a package of hamburger into lots of hearty, delicious meatballs</p>
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<p>Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F and find a large flat baking dish to hold the meatballs.</p>
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<p>1 - 1 1/2 lb package hamburger</p>
<p>1 medium onion or leek, chopped into 1/4" pieces</p>
<p>1 egg</p>
<p>1-2 cups coarse bread crumbs, maybe more</p>
<p>1/2 cup tomato sauce</p>
<p>2 tablespoons mild chile powder and a teaspoon crumbled oregano</p>
<p> OR 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning and a fat pinch of black pepper</p>
<p>juice and zest of 1 lemon</p>
<p>sprinkling of salt</p>
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<p>Gently squish everything except the bread crumbs together in a large bowl, trying not to handle the meatballs too much. Overhandling makes them tough. (AH, that's how they do those rubber Swedish meatballs!) Add bread crumbs slowly until you can pat together meatballs that don't self-destruct. The amount of crumbs will depend on the juciness of the hamburger. Form into meatballs a bit larger than golf balls and line them up shoulder to shoulder in the baking dish.</p>
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<p>Bake about 30-40 minutes. Test a meatball in the center of the pan and see if it is tender, the juice runs clear, and the hamburger is cooked.</p>
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<p> </p>Celt's Garden - What does growing 10% of your food look like?tag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-05-30:2723460:BlogPost:527942011-05-30T02:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>Walter Haugen from F.A. Farm recently said that he was on a farmer's panel and the current trend is to encourage everybody to grow 5, 10 or 15% of their own food. That's a goal which is totally doable, although if a lot of people get serious about it, a whole bunch of little scraps of lawn all over town will disappear under potato patches and square foot gardens. Even a modest number of people producing 5-15% of their own food will change the visual character of…</p>
<p>Walter Haugen from F.A. Farm recently said that he was on a farmer's panel and the current trend is to encourage everybody to grow 5, 10 or 15% of their own food. That's a goal which is totally doable, although if a lot of people get serious about it, a whole bunch of little scraps of lawn all over town will disappear under potato patches and square foot gardens. Even a modest number of people producing 5-15% of their own food will change the visual character of neighborhoods. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>I'm all for it. The U.S. has 57 million acres in wheat and 40 million acres in lawn grass. In terms of energy inputs, chemical fertilizer and herbicide, the country's number one agricultural product is grass clippings. European cities have commons, greens for soccer games, frisbee, picnics, music, fairs, or just strolling about looking cool. There are far fewer private residences with what we would consider the conventional lawn and landscaping. That many of them are behind gates and around large houses is a clue to the embedded class symbolism of the expansive lawn. It is a stupendous, ostentatious waste of resources, and being born democrats and naturally allergic to aristocracy, we love it and want our ten feet of struggling grass. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Lawns were maintained by sheep prior to the industrial age and riding lawn tractors. The big lawn has a brutal and sometimes bloody history. Prior to the sheep, there were tenant farmers growing field crops, orchards and large gardens. In 19th century England, the Enclosure Laws capped a long trend of kicking the tenant farmers off the land in favor of raising sheep for the wool trade. The farmers flooded into the cities, providing cheap labor for the Industrial Revolution and a few actual revolutions in mid-century.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Contemplating our own scraps of green, what would growing 10% of our food look like? Is that 10% by value, or 10% by calories? If it is 10% by value, that's not hard to do. The highest value thing to grow by space used is herbs, followed by the crunchy green stuff. The most valuable gardening that you can do is to grow the cool season garden. See Celt's Garden - Winter Gardening and other prior posts on how to plan and grow your cool season garden. Hint: start now, putting in your fall and winter greens and roots.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You need 30 square feet per eater for the spring garden and another 20 square feet per eater for the winter garden, to grow all the green stuff you can put in your face. A couple of summer squash plants will keep a small family in zucs. Two tomato plants (a cherry and a slicer) plus one more per eater will provide a bounty of fresh tomatoes. For canning, you will need more tomato plants. Or, you could arrange to buy a case of tomatoes when they are dead ripe and abundant. Best to have that conversation with your farmer early. Now is a good time. When I was gardening in a patio, I used to buy a case of canning tomatoes, a sack of green beans for freezing, two or three ginormous juicy cabbages to make 8 quarts of sauerkraut, and a box of pickling cukes in August. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>A 4' by 8' bed with a trellis will grow the picklers and a couple of slicing cucumber plants. The deer eat my green beans down to nubbins unless grown within a protective cover of repurposed fencing, but in principle a bed of green beans is easy to grow. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Another high value plant is garlic. Garlic is planted from September through November. A 4' by 4' square will grow 32 garlic plants, which is nowhere near enough for my household for a year. I grow some garlic and I buy some. The one that I try to grow every year is China Pink (Territorial.) China Pink is early and a great keeper. It's ready in May, when last year's harvest has run out or gone off.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The best onions to grow are the ones that you are too cheap to buy. I like shallots, scallions, Italian Red Torpedo and cippolinni onions, over wintering Dutch Yellow shallots (the bunching onion) and perennial onions. Walla-wallas are a beloved Washington tradition, although they take some fussing to get nice bulbs. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hot pepper plants can grow in pots. They need warmth and fussing to produce, but a couple of robust pepper plants will produce a year's worth of chilis. Ginger and lemon grass are houseplants. Just plant the ginger root in potting soil. The shoots are amazing. Look for juicy lemon grass plants with some roots attached, pop it in a pot and keep it out of direct sunlight until it starts growing again.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>All that fits in raised beds and some pots and you just saved over a thousand dollars a year on groceries. Suppose you wanted to go for 10% by calories? Visualize the lawn replaced by raised beds. A 4' by 16' raised bed can grow:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A whole pile of potatoes, 40 - 50 pounds.</p>
<p>A gallon jar of small seeded fava beans.</p>
<p>About 12 pounds of dent corn, enough for 12 generous batches of tortillas.</p>
<p>About four pounds of malting barley, enough for a 5 gallon batch of beer.</p>
<p>About 6.5 pounds of dry soup beans. </p>
<p>Four monster winter squash plants or six small squashes such as delicata or acorn.</p>
<p>A nice stand of small grains for your chickens or ducks.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Resources for growing your own calorie crops:</p>
<p>Krista Rome's blog, <a href="http://www.backyardbeansandgrains.com/">http://www.backyardbeansandgrains.com/</a> and her downloadable grower's guides. Krista (AKA the Bean Woman of Everson) has been doing variety trials on beans, corn, grains and oil seeds for four years and has a lot to say about what works in Whatcom County.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. Deppe has packed her book densely with information and opinions. The information is great stuff. I reserve judgement on the opinions. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Seed companies are starting to offer more calorie crops. </p>
<p> </p>Celt's Garden - What's a Fanning Mill and Why Do We Need One?tag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-05-08:2723460:BlogPost:500022011-05-08T03:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>Great question. A fanning mill is a winnowing machine. Winnowing is the step of cleaning the grain to separate the considerable chaff, dust, weed seeds and whatnot from what you want to eat. Winnowing is done after the thresher knocks the grains loose from the head. The most basic technology for winnowing is the shallow baskets that can be seen in traditional Chinese paintings of pretty girls tossing the rice harvest up and down in a breeze. This gets old, I'm just here to tell…</p>
<p>Great question. A fanning mill is a winnowing machine. Winnowing is the step of cleaning the grain to separate the considerable chaff, dust, weed seeds and whatnot from what you want to eat. Winnowing is done after the thresher knocks the grains loose from the head. The most basic technology for winnowing is the shallow baskets that can be seen in traditional Chinese paintings of pretty girls tossing the rice harvest up and down in a breeze. This gets old, I'm just here to tell you. </p>
<p>In modern times, the winnowing is done within a large, expensive combine, which moves through the fields cutting the heads off the stalks, threshing, and spitting the clean grain into a bin and the chaff in a stream out the back. Considerable intermediate technology exists between hand threshing with a flail and winnowing with baskets in the breeze and needing a $250,000 combine to harvest 2000 acres of wheat. We just seldom see that level of intermediate technology. </p>
<p>Small threshers can be powered with a tractor or even horses. And a small winnowing machine is a fanning mill. Fanning mills range in size from tabletop models to permanently mounted big honkers. They used to be common on farms, even if the farm had a combine, for cleaning feed, seed crops, and small quantities of edible grains. Fanning mills are still produced and sold, primarily for the seed industry (think flower seed, vegetable seed, bird seed and lawn grass seed.)</p>
<p>In the late 19th century, the A.J. Ferrell company sold many small fanning mills to farmers throughout the country. The Ferrell Clipper consists of a frame, differently sized screens for different kinds of seed, and a small electric motor for shaking the screens. As appropriate technology, it worked so well that the modern Clipper is still sold in tabletop "laboratory" and larger stand alone models. You don't want to ask what a new one costs.</p>
<p>Which is why I went looking for an old one. They are still around, mostly in the Midwest. By the time we got a lot of momentum farming here in the Northwest, there was already a transition to larger farms and larger machines.</p>
<p>Growing grain is the easy part. It's the harvesting, threshing and winnowing that is labor intensive. It's hard to hit the right scale. Even my 16 square foot wheat variety trials, grown in my garden, yielded enough to make processing it by hand a chore. I developed a better sense of what it would take to grow enough grain to actually do something with, such as feed chickens or feed yourself. </p>
<p>People are working on our local appropriate technology infrastructure. Walter Haugen of F.A. Farm uses a leaf shredder for threshing and a box fan for winnowing. Brian Kerkvliet bought a used chipper/shredder and slowed down the gearing to use as a thresher. He also made a winnower from a circular fan, a piece of irrigation pipe and two street Y's. Pretty cool, and a big improvement over hand screens, but without speed control, the Rube Goldberg winnower proved difficult to adjust. </p>
<p>Small scale grain growing is one of those things that is crazy until it isn't. With combines crawling over millions of acres of wheat on the Midwest, why would the small farmer or the even smaller gardener bother with grains? For all the same reasons for growing vegetables locally instead of ceding control over our meals to big growers in California. Because we want to preserve and eat delicious heritage varieties, because monocropping huge expanses of single varieties of grain has regularly led to crop failure in recent history (Southern corn blight, wheat stem rust), because an interest in local eating quickly leads past backyard broccoli to the question of where our energy crops come from, because not all grain varieties are suited to our tricky climate. Because we get 70% of our calories from energy crops and almost none of it comes from Whatcom County and vicinity. Because it's like everything else in reestablishing our local food production; it has to start with the whacko hobbyist.</p>
<p>I found an antique Clipper. They are getting hard to find. We are not the only whacko crazy people taking back their local food sovereignty out there. It has been stripped (only one screen, motor missing) but the frame looks OK in the picture, the motor can be replaced, more screens can be found used or locally fabricated. It's a pig in a poke; the true extent of restoration effort will not be apparent until it gets here from Illinois. It's a start.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Fanning Mill Update November 18, 2013:</p>
<p>It's a go! The Clipper debuted at the 2013 Whatcom Skill Share Faire, where it was a big hit. Brian Kerkvliet, myself and a rotating crew of volunteers rehabilitated the Clipper. We stuffed a week's hard work into 18 months, but the job is done and the Clipper looks great. We had to replace all the sheet metal parts and some of the wooden parts, using the old ones for templates, and then sand, stain, paint, and reassemble.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Brian figured out how the thing works. It is quite the sophisticated piece of low tech. The Co-op gave us a grant for some screens to get started. We cleaned two kinds of wheat, barley, oats, flax, and buckwheat at the fair. I chose to use the grant funding for grain sized screens, because cleaning grains is the biggest hole in our appropriate technology equipment.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The current power source is an exercise bike, which is great when there are kids at the fair lined up to pedal. Brian has a washing machine motor that we can put on for larger batches.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Next goal: </p>
<p>Get some more screens sized for the peskier vegetable seeds. Lettuce seed, for example, is way too much work to clean by hand. I usually have several paper bags of uncleaned lettuce seed hanging around in my dining room long past harvest. </p>Celt's Garden - Hamster Does Taxestag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2011-03-01:2723460:BlogPost:447302011-03-01T21:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p>There are three Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites in Bellingham this year that I know about. AARP is running one at the Central Library. There is a site at Western buried in Parks Hall, run by the Business School. Gotta love em for doing it, even with Western's Parking Zombie Patrol. Don't bother parking on campus, take the bus. They don't have enough business at the WWU site, while the Central Library has a line out the door. The third site is Monday and Tuesday evenings and Friday…</p>
<p>There are three Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites in Bellingham this year that I know about. AARP is running one at the Central Library. There is a site at Western buried in Parks Hall, run by the Business School. Gotta love em for doing it, even with Western's Parking Zombie Patrol. Don't bother parking on campus, take the bus. They don't have enough business at the WWU site, while the Central Library has a line out the door. The third site is Monday and Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings at Heiner Library at Whatcom Community College. The best part is the price: FREE!! </p>
<p>I'm on the Friday morning shift at Whatcom. Things have been slacking off around 11:00, offering me a great opportunity to catch up on my internet surfing, but it's an even better opportunity for someone to get their taxes done.</p>
<p>VITA, in case you never heard about it, is staffed entirely by certified volunteers. Maybe that should be "certifiable" volunteers. It was my first time through the certification course, and I found it quite character building. There are some restrictions on the types of returns that VITA volunteers are allowed to do, but the vast majority of folks will find it's a good fit.</p>
<p>Bring ID, social security numbers for all family members, all forms W-2 and 1099, mortgage interest and real estate tax statements, list of business expenses by category if you are a sole proprietor. Schedule C expenses up to $10,000 are within the scope of VITA. If your business expenses are larger or you own an LLC, corporation or some other fancy schmancy entity, plan on paying a professional tax preparer. VITA volunteers cannot do out of state tax returns. Nothing too weird, eh?</p>
<p>Plan on some spent time waiting around. Heh, nothing is totally free.</p>Celt's Garden - Sacred Carbohydrates in the Fourth Cornertag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-12-17:2723460:BlogPost:377742010-12-17T22:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Our relationship with our staple carbohydrates is celebrated in story, song, prayer, myth, family traditions and local recipes. Food is so intertwined with culture that it is impossible to discuss food without bringing up culture. What may be less obvious, surrounded by 1500 mile Caesar salads and take out Chinese food, is that the sacred carbohydrates are…</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Our relationship with our staple carbohydrates is celebrated in story, song, prayer, myth, family traditions and local recipes. Food is so intertwined with culture that it is impossible to discuss food without bringing up culture. What may be less obvious, surrounded by 1500 mile Caesar salads and take out Chinese food, is that the sacred carbohydrates are tightly attuned to place. The staple calorie crops define a region as much as the geography and weather. What can be grown, where and when, and with what efforts and inputs, give meaning to eating, create a cuisine, fill dog-eared notebooks with recipes. There are varieties of hill rice which will grow halfway up mountains, tall corn that grows in Georgia and takes nearly five months to mature, and Hopi corn, planted deeply at just the right time to be watered by the brief desert monsoon season. Tall, high protein hard spring wheat grows in the plains of Montana and the Dakotas. Around here, we have short wheat that will overwinter in the maritime Northwest and be ready for harvest in summer. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Wheat and barley are from the Middle East, potatoes are from Peru, rice is from Asia, cassava and sweet potatoes are from South America, millet is from arid Ethiopia in East Africa. Rye was a weed in wheat fields as wheat cultivation moved north in Europe. Hardy rye and oats proved better adapted to northern Europe than wheat. The indigenous staples of equatorial Africa are sorghum, tubers and starchy fruits, such as yam and plantain. Corn is from Mesoamerica and widely adapted to North America by the First Nations. Corn seed was widely traded and carefully selected, creating thousands of varieties. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Our indigenous local staples are camas bulbs and the wetland tuber wapato. The wapato is a threatened species, squeezed into a fragment of wetlands down by the Columbia River. Camas grows in prairies. Receding glaciers left a large natural prairie on Whidbey Island in the area around Ebey's Landing, a prairie of legendary fertility. A scrap of the prairie is maintained by a college as an ecological teaching center. Since the the college was my client, I was too polite to mention that maintaining a "natural" camas prairie without harvesting, selecting and replanting the camas using the techniques of the Lower Skagit Indians is about like trying to maintain the gardens of Colonial Williamsburg without human intervention. Most of the prairie is now part of Ebey's Landing Natural Reserve and still farmed. When it was first converted from camas to wheat and potatoes in the mid 19th century, Ebey's Landing set national records for harvests. Those Lower Skagit folks were better stewards of the land than they got credit for. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">The Portuguese took African bananas to the Caribbean and South American cassava and sweet potatoes to Africa, a straight swap across equatorial regions. Camas and wapato never caught on with the Europeans in the Fourth Corner. Instead, traders brought potatoes and beans to the First Nations by the early 19th Century. By the second half of the 19th century, local farmers were producing a surplus to support the growing towns and feed the loggers and miners and fishermen. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Interesting question, a surplus of what? Dr. Steve Jones from the WSU Mt Vernon research station told us that they have recovered all but two of the heritage wheat varieties that were grown here. The popular heritage wheats were short, soft, white, winter varieties. Dr. Jones' advice is to plant winter wheat, and if that doesn't work, replant in spring. Winter wheats can be planted as spring wheat, but not the other way around. The high rainfall washes nitrogen out of the soil in winter. Even though we now have short hard winter wheat varieties that will grow here without falling over, it's hard to keep the protein content high enough for a bread wheat. Makes great organic chicken feed, though.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Corn, beans, flax, peas, oats, apples, squash, cabbages, leeks, and potatoes are mentioned in the brief historical blurbs easily available on the internet. Shannon Maris' family grew oats in Skagit County and barged them to Bellingham. Most of the oats must have been for the heavy horses working in agriculture, transportation, logging and mining.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">From the aspect of regional cooking, the soft wheat is interesting. That's biscuits, pies, quick breads, crackers and pilot bread, otherwise known as hardtack or ship's biscuit, made on the top of a pot bellied wood stove. The corn is interesting, too. Seems the hardy New England flint corns do better around here than the soft, sweet flour corns from the Great Plains. The flour corns are overly beloved by bugs and fungus in our humid climate. Flint corn can be harvested even after fall rain and frost, and it keeps well. Flint corn is usually eaten as grits or hominy. Popcorn is a special miniature flint corn. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">They grew barley for beer here, and hops became a major export crop. That's just brilliant. Hops are light, valuable and squish down into compact bricks for transport. I grew a two row awnless malting barley in the garden last summer, with seed from Walter Haugen at F.A. Farm. The stuff is bulletproof. The barley burst up past the spring wheat planted the same day, set heavily and matured a month earlier. And it shrugged off the wheat stripe leaf fungus that was all over the country last summer. I haven't tried to eat it yet. Dan Borman warned me that malting barleys are bulletproof because the hull adheres tightly to the seed, making them less suitable for porridge than hulless barley. Not a problem. I'll just malt it and drink it.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">The New Englanders and Dutch, Scandinavian and Irish settlers came to rest here in a maritime climate at much the same latitude as they started out. They brought with them seeds already adapted to short seasons and food traditions to prepare them. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">If you have deep roots in the area, or a fondness for historical research, you might want to try to dig past "corn", "wheat", "barley", etc. and try to find out what that means. What did it look like? Where was it from? When was it planted? Were specific varieties mentioned, and did they do well, or badly? How was it used? No doubt some of you have older family members you can ask, or a passion to dig through local histories and diaries for clues about exactly what people grew and how they prepared it. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">The first step to recovering our sacred carbohydrates, our foods of place, our regional cooking, our local connection with the earth's bounty, is to notice that we actually have quite a few calorie crops that grow here. The next step is to cook with them. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Biscuits</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">I usually cook without recipes, so feel free to tweak this. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">2 cups whole wheat flour</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">2 tablespoons butter or shortening</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">1 teaspoon baking powder</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">dash salt</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">1 tablespoon sugar </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">about a cup of milk or water</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">small amount of corn grits for the baking pan</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Rub the shortening into the flour until it takes on the consistency of fine cracker crumbs. Add everything except the milk or water and mix. Add the liquid, a small amount at a time, working the dough until it sticks together. You'll see the consistency change when it gets to the point where it can be rolled out. This is where the grannies say to stop mixing, to avoid overworking the dough and producing tough biscuits. I'm just here to tell you, don't sweat it. Homemade biscuits fresh out of the oven are so superior to what you can buy that few folks will notice if you get them on the chewy side. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Liberally flour a board. Pat the dough flat and roll into a 1/2" thick slab, flouring it generously so you can handle it. Cut out biscuits with a water glass or cookie cutters. Squish the scraps together to make another slab, until you run out of scraps and form the last biscuit by hand. Sprinkle a baking pan with corn grits and arrange biscuits. Bake about 20 minutes.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Pilot Bread</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">This recipe comes to us from Civil War reeneactor Jaque Fifer. At its most basic, pilot bread is a thin hard cracker of flour, water and salt, made much the same way as the biscuits above, but rolled thinner and baked at 400 degrees F. The point of pilot bread was to make a dense, compact, easily transported cracker. </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">To approximate the handling qualities of low protein wheat, try 1 cup unbleached flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat fine bread flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">3/4 teaspoon salt</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">1 tablespoon shortening</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">3/4 of a cup water</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">Rub the dry ingredients with the shortening and slowly add the water. Knead longer than biscuits, intentionally developing the gluten. As you work it, it will form a ball and come away from the sides of the bowl. Let it rest for a half hour, then roll it out about 1/4" thick on a generously floured board and cut into squares about 4" on a side. Poke holes all the way through with a chopstick or blunted nail. Otherwise, they puff up like miniature pita bread. After baking for 20 minutes, you have something resembling a Saltine cracker. Not bad, particularly if you have dusted the top with salt and pressed it in before baking. Pilot bread was eaten just like that in the winter in Alaska, when it was too cold inside rough cabins to make sourdough.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555; min-height: 13.0px;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Lucida Grande; color: #555555;"><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;">To make pilot bread keep a long time, it was cured in a kiln for several hours. Fifer suggests stacking the crackers loosely in the oven and baking at 175 degrees F, with the door cracked open, for 2-4 hours. The resultant hard tack had to be soaked in coffee or grease before it was soft enough to eat. Make your own disaster rations, eh?</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: small; color: #000000;"> </span></p>Celt's Garden - Local Eating in Wintertag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-12-04:2723460:BlogPost:374752010-12-04T20:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
It wants to be temperate rain forest around here. Winter is when the pioneer dandelions, dock, and blackberries get on with the job of reestablishing the forest. When a break in the weather lines up with some time you aren't at work at your day job, it's an opportunity to run out and weed your winter garden and perennials. Onions and garlic are particularly poor competitors with weeds. Your overwintering beets, turnips, radishes, cabbages, brussels sprouts and your perennials are next. The beds…
It wants to be temperate rain forest around here. Winter is when the pioneer dandelions, dock, and blackberries get on with the job of reestablishing the forest. When a break in the weather lines up with some time you aren't at work at your day job, it's an opportunity to run out and weed your winter garden and perennials. Onions and garlic are particularly poor competitors with weeds. Your overwintering beets, turnips, radishes, cabbages, brussels sprouts and your perennials are next. The beds that will hold your spring and summer gardens can be ignored, that is "left fallow", with the weeds bringing up useful nutrients from the subsoil. Just remove the blackberries and poison hemlock and pull the heads off the dandelions.<br/>
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Winter is when you get the biggest payoff for your gardening and preserving. We have a good climate for winter gardening, but we still don't have the marketing and distribution to make it safe for our farmers to quit their winter jobs and raise veggies for us. If we want fresh food in winter that isn't trucked in and priced accordingly, we have to raise it ourselves.<br/>
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"That was so good. When you get used to eating real food, you can never go back to that stuff they sell in the supermarkets'" That was Tina Hoban (aka The Woman Who Milks Sheep), on broccoli from a couple of broccoli bushes that overwintered in my garden last year. That stuff labeled as lettuce that they were selling in the super for $.79/lb: rancid, tasteless green cardboard. No wonder it was cheap.<br/>
<br/>
Eating from your winter in garden requires some thought, particularly if you cook for people who expect lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber salad in every season. That's hard to pull off, even in summer. There's maybe a week when the early tomatoes and some cucumbers babied under row covers are ready and the early summer planted lettuce has hasn't turned bitter and bolted yet. That whole lettuce-tomato-cucumber salad business is from the big hotels back east, back in the day. They used to get out of season vegetables grown in greenhouses or shipped in by train from warmer climes. It was a big deal to go out for lunch on the weekends to a hotel restaurant and get a fancy meal with this amazing salad. The amazing salad was copied, by all who want to be cool, that is everybody, and of course in the process reduced to rancid poisoned commodity lettuce from California, decorated with a few slices of limp cardboard tomato and bitter cucumber.<br/>
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If you must have midwinter tomato and cucumber, the BC hothouse growers do as good a job as can be done with coaxing warm season vegetables to produce off season. It will be special, though. The price will remind you why such effort is a big deal.<br/>
<br/>
So what to do? The large brassica family gives us serious eats through winter unless it gets really cold. Winter is the season for root vegetables, and organic ones are sweet and delicious, a far cry from that nasty fodder turnip my relatives tried to force me to eat, back in Chicago. Winter squash, pumpkins, apples, and potatoes, either grown or purchased, store well for months. We can fire up the sprouter and dig out our canned marinara sauce, pickles and sauerkraut. The ambitious can try growing hardy greens, spinach, beets for leaves, Asian greens, and the burlier lettuces, in a hot frame or greenhouse.<br/>
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Anthony Bourdain, who writes profane and funny books about the restaurant industry, once asked famous food activist Alice Waters about local eating in winter. She reeled a list of roots and brassicas. Bourdain's response (pronounced Bour-DAHN, stick the N up your nose instead of saying it) was "I'm not eating like a f#@$%! Russian peasant." Good point. Bourdain's family is from a fishing village in France, and he delights in pointing out that much high priced French food is actually recipes from rural France, developed to make something good out of tough meat and local seasonal vegetables. The taste of home, for him, is eating like like a French peasant.<br/>
<br/>
So the question is, "What kind of peasant do want to eat like?" We can grow or buy winter vegetables from Europe, Asia and North America. We can steal (urh, adapt) recipes from Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, Korea, Scandinavia, Northern France, Northern China, our own First Nations and pioneer traditions. There are even seasonal recipes from England and Ireland that are good if you make them yourself. We can notice that it is way cheaper to make outstanding organic tomato sauce, jam, sauerkraut, pickles, chutney and kimchi when the ingredients are in season and abundant than it is to buy good stuff later.<br/>
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So think back to your own ethnic roots. What did grandmother in winter make that really said "this is home?". Sauerkraut with caraway and sausages? Borchst? Kimchi and rice? Carrot soup?<br/>
<br/>
F#@$%! Russian Peasant Borchst<br/>
<br/>
1 1/2 lbs meaty beef bone<br/>
carrots<br/>
beets<br/>
cabbage<br/>
onion<br/>
potatoes<br/>
can tomatoes and juice, or homemade marinara sauce<br/>
<br/>
Brown the beef bone in a little oil in the bottom of a soup pot on medium high, in a little oil or fat. Turn down the pot to low, add sliced onion, and saute until translucent. Add water to cover, sliced carrots, a bay leaf and a pinch of peppercorns, and simmer until meat is falling off the bone. Meanwhile, peel, chunck up, and steam the potatoes. Take the bone out of the soup and remove all edible bits of meat. Return meat to soup. Grate the beets and add. When the beets are soft, add the tomatoes and cabbage slices and cook just until tender. Serve over steamed potatoes.<br/>
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Purists will notice that borscht recipes vary by country, region, even household. Good point, time to dig out Granny's recipe and make the real stuff.<br/>
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French Carrot Soup<br/>
This is Germaine Carter's recipe from "The Home Book of French Cooking". Mme. Carter was from northern France. She wrote the cookbook while interned during WW II. Her husband was the British Consul, so the Nazis locked them up in the same prison cell instead of shooting them. Mme. Carter's book is about real people food, a distinct contrast to Julia's Child's Cordon Bleu cooking. The cookbook did well and was in print up until the 1970's. You can still find used copies. I have my mother's copy. She cooked Mme. Carter's recipes when we lived in France, and after we came back to Chicago. Mama's home cooking, eh?<br/>
<br/>
6 potatoes<br/>
6-8 carrots<br/>
2 tbs. butter<br/>
1 tsp. salt<br/>
1/4 tsp. pepper<br/>
2 quarts water<br/>
3 tbs. minced parsley<br/>
<br/>
Peel and slice potatoes and carrots. Put everything except the parsley in the soup pot, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer until the vegetables are soft and falling apart. Mash up the potatoes and carrots with an immersion mixer (the Vroom), the potato masher, or the way Mme. Carter tells you to do it, by forcing the soup through a sieve. Add parsley and serve.Celt's Garden - Hamster's Holiday Tipstag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-11-28:2723460:BlogPost:370952010-11-28T03:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
After a holiday is a great time to stock up on staples. Snarf around at local supermarkets and grocery outlets and see what you can find. Whole wheat pastry flour, olive oil, shelled nut meats (freeze, they go rancid quickly), molasses, spices, winter squash, often a great deal on chocolate chips and whole frozen birds, especially if the bird has been dropped on the floor. Allow the bird to defrost in the refrigerator until it is thawed just enough to cut up. It will keep better if it doesn't…
After a holiday is a great time to stock up on staples. Snarf around at local supermarkets and grocery outlets and see what you can find. Whole wheat pastry flour, olive oil, shelled nut meats (freeze, they go rancid quickly), molasses, spices, winter squash, often a great deal on chocolate chips and whole frozen birds, especially if the bird has been dropped on the floor. Allow the bird to defrost in the refrigerator until it is thawed just enough to cut up. It will keep better if it doesn't completely thaw. Run parts that are too frozen to work loose under cold water. Cut off the breast and leg meat and package in sizes that you might cook for a meal.<br/>
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To repack for freezing, first lay out a sheet of plastic wrap and put your protein on a diagonal. Flap a corner over the protein, then another corner. Roll the meat over and make a nice little gift wrap with the other two corners. Repeat with a layer of freezer wrap (paper with backing, comes in big rolls.) The freezer wrap prevents freezer burn. Tape shut with freezer tape, or package tape in a pinch. Label, date and put in freezer. Break down the back, wings, neck and bones into lengths that fit in a 4-quart soup pot. Make a pot of stock with the heart, gizzard and some of the parts. Put the rest into gallon freezer bags, filling the bags about half full. A half gallon of bones and bits makes one batch of stock. Saute the liver with some onions, sherry and black pepper and eat it with toast and some nice vin rouge du cheap, or give it to your neighbor's cat if that sounds icky.<br/>
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Turkey and chicken refreeze well and will still be good, months later. I like to disassemble two or three chickens at once, and get a package of legs and several packages of chicken breasts and soup bones. Duck does not keep well. Best to eat the whole ducky inside of a month. Duck soup, eh?<br/>
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Snow is your friend in the garden. Snow blankets your garden with a layer of insulation, protecting it from the cold wind. After the thaw, see how it's doing. Driving around town, there were some fine looking kale and leeks in gardens on the north side. My kale is looking pretty sad, but the cabbages, mustard and chard are in good shape. The cabbage is even putting out new little side heads where I harvested the main head and left the stalk. My mother dug up decent potatoes after the storm. It all depends on your microclimate. Don't bother pulling anything up, even if it looks a goner. Dead cover crops will hold the soil. Cabbage family members and roots will regrow even if the top foliage withers. That's what they are supposed to do: put out new leaves and then bolt when it warms up. Given the random nature of weather around here, they can do that in December if we get a warm spell.<br/>
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Another good reason to stock up on staples is that in the process, you go through your cupboards and count up what you already have. Then, when you shop, you can keep in mind that another storm front could make it difficult to get out to the super for a few days. A few things that can be stored without refrigeration and eaten without cooking, in a pinch, might be advisable. Check the supply of candles and matches in case you lose power.<br/>
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To make a new bed for the spring, pick a spot on the lawn. Dump whatever organic material you can get your hands on on the spot. A pile of leaves covered with an old piece of fencing and restrained by some rocks works very well, also mulch, chips, straw, barn sweepings or just sand. Leave it there over winter. By spring, the worms will have digested the sod. Turn it over and plant spring greens.<br/>
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This is a good time to make your garden plan for next year. It's easiest if you take it a bed at a time. Then you can ignore the rest of the garden while you weed, turn over and plant one bed at a time. Seattle Tilth has a detailed calendar, "The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide". The small companies that carry heirloom vegetables and sell primarily to the home gardener have been running out of seed early for the last several years. Best to have your plan thought out and your seed order placed in December.<br/>
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You want a continuous harvest, early spring through next winter. There is only so much salad one person can eat. Thirty square feet of green stuff per eater is plenty. The spring greens will still be going strong in late April through early June, when it is time to plant the summer garden. The beds that will hold your summer garden (tomatoes, green beans, peppers, summer squash) can follow this winter's garden, a cover crop, or go into a new bed. Next winter's garden is planted July-September. It can follow garlic, overwintering onions or a cover crop. So you might think of your beds in three groups: spring planted, progressively every few weeks, summer garden, and building fertility (or growing garlic) for the winter garden.<br/>
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Peas go in on the first day in February that you can work the soil and it's always a shock. Sneaks up up on a person after winter.<br/>
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Here's a tipple for the holidays.<br/>
Cranberry Liqueur<br/>
<br/>
Package of cranberries on sale<br/>
Sugar<br/>
Vodka<br/>
<br/>
Simmer a cup of the cranberries in 1 1/2 quarts of water until soft and falling apart. Allow to cool and strain. Return the liquid to the pot and add a cup or more of sugar. Cook until the sugar has dissolved. Cool again. Add vodka to taste. 1:1 is a good starting ratio. Package in fancy bottles and give to your friends, if you like. Warning: sneaks up on you.<br/>
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Bird Stock<br/>
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Always start with cooked bones. That skimming of stock made with raw bones: way too much like work. A cooked turkey carcass might be too big. You might want to break it down into two or more batches and freeze the rest. Roast uncooked bones, frozen or not, in a shallow pan in the oven at 300 degrees F until brown, about an hour if you start with frozen parts. Frozen cooked bones and bits (that zombie turkey) can just go straight into the pot.<br/>
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4 quart soup pot<br/>
About a half gallon bones and parts, cooked<br/>
Water to cover<br/>
Bay leaf and a pinch of rosemary<br/>
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Simmer an hour, on low so that it just bubbles slowly. Fish out the parts and remove edible meat. Return bones to stock and simmer another 2 hours. Strain, pour into quart canning jars. Allow to cool. Store in the fridge. Turkey and chicken stock is good for a couple of weeks, at least, if you leave the cap of fat at the top undisturbed. Duck stock will go off, plan to use within a few days. Makes about two quarts.<br/>
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Duck Soup<br/>
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Duck meat and stock<br/>
white part of a leek or 1/2 onion<br/>
1-2 cloves garlic, minced<br/>
1/2 cup uncooked rice<br/>
2 tablespoons uncooked wild rice<br/>
Can green beans<br/>
1/2 pound raw squash or pumpkin<br/>
dried mushrooms<br/>
bay leaf, pinch rosemary, whole black pepper and savory<br/>
goodly shot of sherry<br/>
<br/>
Slice the leek or onion thinly. Leeks accumulate grit, so you may need to rinse the leek before, during and after slicing. Saute the leek slices and minced garlic in the soup pot with a little duck fat. Put everything else in the pot and cook until the rice is tender and the squash is done. Pour yourself a glass of sherry while it cooks.<br/>
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Happy Holidays from Hamster to the other 80,000 Hamsters in town.Celt's Garden - Garden Dreams and Pumpkin Souptag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-11-24:2723460:BlogPost:368972010-11-24T00:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
The glossy garden pornography has started to arrive. The Pinetree catalog was first. Pinetree sells small packets for modest sums, with a good selection of heirloom varieties and a focus on small-space gardeners. Best to start with a garden plan. Then the catalogs are more of a reference and less of a temptation. Inside on a snowy day, we can dream and plan next year's garden. Now is the time to think about adding a raised bed, or putting in a trellis, perhaps some herbs in pots. What worked…
The glossy garden pornography has started to arrive. The Pinetree catalog was first. Pinetree sells small packets for modest sums, with a good selection of heirloom varieties and a focus on small-space gardeners. Best to start with a garden plan. Then the catalogs are more of a reference and less of a temptation. Inside on a snowy day, we can dream and plan next year's garden. Now is the time to think about adding a raised bed, or putting in a trellis, perhaps some herbs in pots. What worked for you? Would less zucchini be more? How can you best use your garden space for a long harvest, from early spring greens to hearty brussels sprouts and cabbages next winter?<br/>
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As you are planning next spring's garden, I would like to encourage you to aim to maximize value from your garden and minimize aggravation. Keep your rotation plan in mind. The nightshade (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers), allium (onions, leeks, garlic) and cole (everything cabbagy, from broccoli to kale) families are the worst offenders for building up diseases and pests in the soil. Keep three years between planting them in the same bed. Work in everything else around that basic rotation.<br/>
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As you dream, consider your space. Is there room along the edge for some perennials? Plenty of room for a trellised grape vine or are you looking at something more along the lines of one thyme plant? The tall stuff goes on the north side of the garden or along east or west walls. Short herbs and berries can go where they won't shade your annual veggie plots. Stuff grows. You want to keep that sunny spot in the middle for your annual veggies even when the perennials are full sized. Even a slow growing lavender will eventually sprawl out of its assigned spot and have to be cut back or replaced. Match the plant to the spot: warm, sunny and sheltered for your rosemary, full sun and acid soil for blueberries, south facing wall or fence for an espaliered fruit tree, shade loving herbs for a hole in the trees. Perennials still have to be weeded, so be sure that you can get to everything without squishing your food forest.<br/>
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Perhaps you can just use your existing raised beds more intensely. Trellises for annuals can go north-south (sun on both sides as the day progresses) or south facing. Tomatoes, pole beans, cucumbers, winter squash and peas can be trellised. You can extend your season a month on both ends with covers like Grow-Therm over a wire hoop frame. A 6' wide section of row cover will cover a 4' wide raised bed. The hoop are made from 9AWG wire, 7' long so that you can shove the sides in the ground. A little algebra reveals that this set up gives you 18" in the middle of the row, so we are talking lettuce and starts here, not a full sized brussels sprout plant. The brussels sprout doesn't care about winter, unless it really freezes hard, and then the whole garden has to wait for spring, anyway. Taller hoops tend to blow over unless made of pipe.<br/>
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If you are a container gardener, perhaps you can add some containers for salad greens and fast growing bok choy and mustards to stir fry. A patio tomato (look for early, smallish determinate varieties or cherry tomatoes) and a fancy summer squash by the front door might be all you have room for. Butterstick is a good container squash. The scalloped and round squashes didn't do well in containers for me. Your basic green zuc in a big pot just kept pumping them out. Pole beans can go up a trellis. Since you are dreaming, how about purple Dragon's Tongue, yellow wax or Romano beans for fresh eating. Use your valuable space to grow something that you are too cheap to buy.<br/>
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The best pumpkin pie you can make starts with a whole pumpkin, cut up, seeds cleaned out and chunks steamed. Then scoop out the flesh to make pie filling. After you make your pie, you still have half a pumpkin left. This soup is really good on a cold winter day. If you still have more steamed pumpkin left, it freezes very well.<br/>
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Pumpkin Soup<br/>
<br/>
4 quart soup pot<br/>
1 onion<br/>
2-3 cloves garlic<br/>
2 medium potatoes<br/>
2-3 cups steamed pumpkin<br/>
1 bay leaf<br/>
pinch each: thyme, savory, basil<br/>
1 tablespoon curry powder<br/>
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper and a dash of paprika<br/>
1 quart vegetable or chicken stock<br/>
<br/>
Peel and cut up the potatoes into 1" chunks. Slice the onion and garlic and saute until translucent, in a little vegetable oil in the soup pot. Put everything else in the pot except the pepper and paprika and cook on medium-low until the potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes. Add some water if starts to lose the soupy quality and get too thick, more like the consistency of mashed potatoes. Add pepper and paprika and serve with toast for an easy meal.Celt's Garden - Gingerbread and Apple Muffinstag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-11-20:2723460:BlogPost:359742010-11-20T19:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
Time to fire up the sprouter. If you don't have a sprouter, Terra Organica sells a set of three cheerfully colored plastic lids for a widemouth canning jar, with holes of different sizes for alfalfa seed through soy beans. A tad pricey, but after fooling around with scraps of screening and rusting lids, I found it a worthy use of hydrocarbons. The nifty lids also make it easy to wash off the outer skins of the seeds. Sprouts do best in non-chlorinated water. I keep a jug of water sitting on the…
Time to fire up the sprouter. If you don't have a sprouter, Terra Organica sells a set of three cheerfully colored plastic lids for a widemouth canning jar, with holes of different sizes for alfalfa seed through soy beans. A tad pricey, but after fooling around with scraps of screening and rusting lids, I found it a worthy use of hydrocarbons. The nifty lids also make it easy to wash off the outer skins of the seeds. Sprouts do best in non-chlorinated water. I keep a jug of water sitting on the counter to boil off the chlorine for my houseplants. Mung and soybean sprouts are a winter staple in Korea.<br />
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You might want to lay in some fresh beans to have around in the winter. The bulk bins at our fine retailers are a good source. The turnover is generally higher in the bulk bins than the packages on the shelves. As for the expensive little packages of seeds for sprouting, try some seed out of the bulk bins first, and see if the results are good enough. The dedicated sprouting seeds presumably have a tested germ rate, but this is probably immaterial. I also liked the way that the sprouter lids store compactly, with no need for a dedicated device.<br/>
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The smell of baking goodies in winter hits us right in the old brain, inducing an instant sense of well being. If someone in your household is going out in the cold, to work, unstick the car and go places, or just do battle with algebra, bake something before they come back. Then everything is all right, even algebra. Gingerbread is particularly good for this.<br/>
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Gingerbread<br/>
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. and put the tea kettle on. Butter and flour a baking pan, shape immaterial, but deep enough to hold about three quarts (a 9 x 9 x 2 inch pan is 162 cubic inches. You knew that algebra would come in handy somewhere.) First, rub the inside of the pan evenly with butter. Then, take a heaping tablespoon of flour and sprinkle it over the pan. Shake it around to cover all the butter. This is your mold release.<br/>
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The organized will use separate bowls to mix the liquid and dry ingredients, perhaps sifting the flour with the leavening for maximum fluffiness. As this resembles work, I seldom bother.<br/>
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Put 1/2 cup butter in a deep bowl.<br/>
Pour 1 cup of really hot or boiling water over it. Careful with the hot water: put the measuring cup down on the counter and pour into it, just like the nice wait staff refilling your coffee. Then pour the hot water over the butter.<br/>
Mash up the butter as it softens.<br/>
Add 1/2 cup molasses and a 1/2 cup sugar or honey. I like to use good strong dark organic molasses and raw sugar, but lighten it up if you find the taste too powerful.<br/>
When the liquid ingredients are cooled to just warm, beat in an egg. If your mix is still over 112 degrees F, the egg will start to set in long strings as you stir it. Ignore this. It tastes the same.<br/>
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Add 2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour, half and half kamut and unbleached flour (really good) or any combination of your favorite flours, and stir until there are no lumps of unhydrated flour.<br/>
Stir in 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon salt and a tablespoon of ground ginger. That's all you need for gingerbread, but you can add more flavors: a dash of ground nutmeg and allspice is really good, or a small handful of raisins or chopped nuts.<br/>
Now for the leavening. That's the trick to one bowl and no sifting: add the leavening just before it goes in the pan and pop it right in the oven. Sprinkle 1/2 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon baking soda over the batter, give it a good stir and scrape it out into your prepared pan. Bake about 1 hour, or until a knife stuck in the center comes out clean.<br/>
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Recipe freely adapted from a stained and dog eared page of the 1973 Joy of Cooking.<br/>
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Apple Muffins<br/>
<br/>
Those apples you felt compelled to glean from the tree might be getting a little shriveled, sitting in your kitchen. Here's a way to recycle them and bring cheer as well, what's not to like?<br/>
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Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Peel, trim and cut apples into pieces about 1/2 inch on a side until you have roughly 2 cups of pieces.<br/>
Makes 18 muffins or 12 muffins and a small cake. Line muffin cups with cupcake liners, butter and flour a small baking dish for the overflow. You can also butter and flour each muffin cup, but I find that this resembles work.<br/>
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In a deep bowl, combine 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour, or your favorite, with 2 teaspoons baking powder. Take the time to rub any lumps of baking powder between your fingers. Baking powder clumps in the humidity.<br/>
Stir in 1/2 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon.<br/>
Now for the wet ingredients: 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 1 egg, 1 cup milk, yogurt, buttermilk or whey. Give it a good stir, just until you can't recognize the ingredients in the batter, fold in your apple bits and fill your muffin cups and baking pan.<br/>
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Bake 15-20 minutes, until a toothpick in the center comes out clean.<br/>
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You astutely observe that this basic muffin recipe is adaptable to banana nut (2 mashed very ripe bananas plus 1/4 cup chopped walnuts), raisin spice (1/2 cup raisins, 1/4 teaspoon each nutmeg and allspice), or canned fruit (1 cup drained and chopped apricots or pineapple.) Just adjust the amount of cinnamon to your liking.<br/>
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News flash: F.H. King's classic "Farmers of Forty Centuries" is out in a facsimile edition, published by Cornell University Library and reasonably priced. This edition has the pictures. The text by itself is widely available, even as a free download, but a photo essay without the photos is hardly worth reading.Celt's Garden - Hamster Reviews "The Witch of Hebron"tag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-11-08:2723460:BlogPost:354542010-11-08T18:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
Lemme start with letting my alter ego, Hamster, review the narrative in the style of my fellow Vanderbilt alumnus, Joe Bob Biggs of "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In" fame, then the geek engineer can get to appropriate technology. Breasts: 12 (I think, I lost count), dead bodies: I definitely lost count; gallons ketchup: 17; corpse in the onion wagon; special points for panther mauling; sword fu; pistol whipping fu; head pounding fu amid chaos in brothel; goat butchery; horse appreciation; very…
Lemme start with letting my alter ego, Hamster, review the narrative in the style of my fellow Vanderbilt alumnus, Joe Bob Biggs of "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In" fame, then the geek engineer can get to appropriate technology. Breasts: 12 (I think, I lost count), dead bodies: I definitely lost count; gallons ketchup: 17; corpse in the onion wagon; special points for panther mauling; sword fu; pistol whipping fu; head pounding fu amid chaos in brothel; goat butchery; horse appreciation; very professional hypnotism; psychic prediction; sex therapy; sneaking suspicion that the first person narrator of the first book, "World Made by Hand" was not telling the whole story, in his folksy way; not PG pocket rocket scenes: 2; and and a whole bunch of folks walking around dressed as we are Amish if you please, we are Amish if you don't please and knocking back the home brew. The 11 year old gets all the best lines. Hamster says check it out.<br/>
<br/>
By James Howard Kunstler, the patron curmudgeon of peak oil and author of some excellent books on urban design which didn't cause him nearly as much fame and commotion as "World Made by Hand".<br/>
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The appropriate technology is spot on, as it was in the first book. Kunstler's starting point is a salvage society in a world of zero oil and social isolation from the larger world outside Washington County, New York. There is an early scene which explains why it is whole a lot easier to produce mechanical power from a water wheel than electrical power. The water wheel can produce a lot of torque for direct mechanical take off. You can do it with wood or bamboo if you have to. Electricity requires wires and enough parts to make an alternator, not easily fabricated.<br/>
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The appropriate technology serves as a background for the narrative. I liked the way that Kunstler stuck with his premise and built on our existing knowledge of the material world. There are no magic undiscovered analgesic herbs or miraculous new energy sources. The herbalism is totally solid. One of the characters makes wine from wild grapes flavored with sweet woodruff to cut the foxy flavor. In the Northeast, there's a disease that attacks European wine grapes. It's controlled by spraying. (It's also why California is such great wine country.) Native grapes are unaffected, and that's how wine fans describe the flavor of the wine, "foxy". Sweet woodruff is still used in Germany to flavor country wines. It grows easily in the herb garden around here.<br/>
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The characters eat cornbread because a virus has made it impossible to grow wheat in the area. That is all too close to true. Wheat stem blight went through the Northeast once already, about a century ago. Ug99, a new race of wheat stem blight that came out of Uganda in 1999, has already severely affected crops in Africa, Kazakhstan and Iran. Stem rust is the heavy stuff. Wheat leaf rust, which varies in its effects depending on variety, was all over the U.S. this year.<br/>
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Two of the characters make extensive use of hypnotism, although it only appears in a medical context in sex therapy. Ones of my friends, a doctor turned engineer, used to say that 50% of medicine is in people's heads. That's the 50% that hypnotism works on. He described using hypnotism for battlefront surgery when they ran out of anesthesia. The 11 year old hasn't mastered that one in the book, but give him a few years.<br/>
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The low tech appendectomy scene is just what the village doctor would do in a pinch in the jungle: opium up the rectum for anesthesia, straight razor for a scalpel, kitchen table for the operation, gut guitar string for stitches, keep everything as clean as you can with boiling water and home made brandy. If you have a notion, read or watch (courtesy of PBS) "One Thousand Gold Coins", which is based on the true story of a Chinese girl in a 19th century gold mining camp in Idaho. She pulled a lead bullet out of her boyfriend with her crochet hook, sterilized in whiskey. If anything, Kunstler's background assumptions are conservative. The real Chinese pharmacist in the mining camp knew how to make penicillin from moldy bread.<br/>
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There's more, but have fun reading it and try not to let Kunstler pull your chain. He's a great one for pulling people's chains. No doubt the commotion sells books.<br />
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Additional note: there is a person on this site who goes by the name of "Hamster", a fine choice of nom de screen but no relation. Hamster is the name I use to comment on other people's blogs out on the internet. There are other Hamsters out there, but I'm the only one who is me.Celt's Garden - Korean Comfort Foodtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-11-07:2723460:BlogPost:353802010-11-07T19:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
It's a great year for winter radishes. They are still coming up in the intermittent warmth, so go ahead and plant some daikon, Black Spanish, Rose Heart or Purple Plum. It might work. Since the radishes are looking so strong, maybe a few turnips or mini carrots will make it, even this late in the year. All the roots are sweeter just out of the garden. I've been crossing winter radishes for years. Breeding is perhaps too strong a word, since my program consists of pulling up anything too puny…
It's a great year for winter radishes. They are still coming up in the intermittent warmth, so go ahead and plant some daikon, Black Spanish, Rose Heart or Purple Plum. It might work. Since the radishes are looking so strong, maybe a few turnips or mini carrots will make it, even this late in the year. All the roots are sweeter just out of the garden. I've been crossing winter radishes for years. Breeding is perhaps too strong a word, since my program consists of pulling up anything too puny looking and leaving a few good ones to flower in spring and mature seed next fall. I've got some good lines going, a rainbow of fat, juicy, flavorful winter radishes. Last week, I harvested a two and a half pound radish seen nowhere else: deep pink all over with the black rough surface characteristic of a Black Spanish and the sweet crunch of a really good daikon. I think it had some Candela di Fuoco parentage.<br/>
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In Germany, Black Spanish radishes are sliced, dressed with malt vinegar and salt and eaten as a snack with beer. In Korea, daikon is a basic vegetable. Here's a Korean recipe for winter soup which is hearty and warming. Grass fed beef or bison usually has less fat to tenderize the meat, similar to the pasture fed beef in Korea. Use a cut with plenty of bone to make a rich broth.<br/>
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Beef and Radish Soup<br/>
This takes a while to tenderize the meat, so plan it for a day when you can watch the pot for a couple of hours. The soup takes very little time to finish after the broth is made.<br/>
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1 1/2 lbs beef with a bone, such as meaty sections of neck bone or shank<br/>
1 1b daikon radish, cut in 1" cubes<br/>
1 onion and 2-3 cloves garlic, sliced<br/>
dried or fresh shitake mushrooms, sliced thin<br/>
thinly sliced fresh green stuff from your garden: mustard greens, cabbage, kale, bok choy, etc., or a small Napa cabbage<br/>
1 star anise<br/>
1" cinnamon stick<br/>
1 tablespoon sugar<br/>
2 tablespoons soy sauce<br/>
sesame oil and a green onion for garnish<br/>
a little vegetable oil<br/>
<br/>
Brown the beef over medium high heat on all sides in the vegetable oil in a large soup pot. Remove the beef from the pot, reduce the heat to low, and saute the onion and garlic until just starting to turn translucent. Add beef, water to cover, cinnamon, star anise, soy sauce, sugar, mushrooms, and radish chunks and simmer until the beef is tender and can be removed from the bone. It's hot and drippy, be careful. Retrieve the cinnamon and star anise, return the trimmed beef, and add the vegetables. Cook until the vegetables are just tender and still bright. Turn off the heat and served dressed with a little sesame oil and thinly sliced rounds of green onion.<br/>
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Korean rice often has barley, millet or beans cooked in. Korea is very hilly. The terrace farming practiced for millennia is well adapted to growing small patches of grains. Even where the terrain is adaptable to paddy rice farming, grains are grown in rotation.<br/>
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Korean Rice with Beans<br/>
This is momma's cooking, a comfort dish that says "home". The red adzuki beans turn the rice an interesting purple color. I use brown rice but it is authentically made with white rice.<br/>
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1/2 cup adzuki beans<br/>
2 cups short grain rice<br/>
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Soak beans overnight in a bowl with water to cover. The next day, drain the beans, reserving the liquid. Add water to the bean liquid to make up about 3 cups water. Put rice, beans, and the bean liquid in a pot, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until rice and beans are tender. Add water if needed to keep it from sticking.<br/>
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Rice with beans is good served with some contrasting flavor and crunch. Traditionally, the contrast comes from one the over a hundred varieties of kimchi, but it can be anything vegetable: steamed spinach topped with sesame seeds or stir fried carrots flavored with a little soy sauce and sugar, for example.<br/>
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Buckwheat Soba and Peas<br/>
I like to keep a package of organic peas in the freezer just to make noodles and peas for a quick meal. Korean black bean sauce (check the Asian grocery stores in the Fountain district, there's another on Meridian near WCC) comes in jars and keeps in the fridge for a long time. If you can't find any, South River (Terra Organica) makes flavored miso which works very well in this recipe.<br/>
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8 oz buckwheat soba or in a pinch, angel hair spaghetti<br/>
1/2 onion and 2-3 cloves garlic<br/>
black bean sauce<br/>
package frozen peas<br/>
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Put the water on to boil for the noodles. Cook noodles to al dente and drain. Cut the onion into pieces about 1/2" on a side and mince the garlic. Saute the onion and garlic in a little oil, add the peas and cook until the peas are tender. Then add a generous glob of black bean paste and saute briefly. Serve with the pea sauce on top a wad of noodles, rather like spaghetti. The eater takes chopsticks and stirs it together before eating.<br/>
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Bebimbap<br/>
This was always a vegetarian dish when I lived in Korea in the 1980's, but recent recipes add sliced beef. I like it with brown rice (not at all authentic) and just vegetables, a hearty working person's meal. If you are feeling authentic, there are all sorts of dried Asian vegetables that can go into bibimbap, such as bracken fern and strips of dried squash (soak in a little water and soy sauce to reconstitute.)<br/>
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Cooked short grain rice, keep warm<br/>
One egg per person<br/>
Gochujang, Korean hot red bean paste<br/>
Shitake mushrooms, fresh or reconstitute dried mushrooms in a little water, sliced thin<br/>
Your choice of vegetables: carrots, daikon radishes, seasonal greens, zucchini in summer, all sliced for stir frying. Peel the carrots and radishes. Cut carrots, radishes, zucchini and anything else hard into sticks 2" long and about 1/4" thick. Thinly slice the leafy stuff.<br/>
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Stir fry the vegetables. Put a generous serving of rice in each bowl. The authentic presentation is to stir fry each vegetable separately and arrange artistically on top the rice. Or you could be like me and cook it all together. Cover each bowl with a saucer to keep warm. Put a little more oil in the pan or wok and fry an egg for each person. Put a glob of hot red bean paste on top of the vegetables and top with a fried egg. Serve immediately. The eater takes chopsticks and breaks up the egg into pieces, mixing the hot bean sauce with the rice and vegetables.<br/>
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See previous post "Healthy Korean Food" for more recipes.Celt's Garden - Cabbage, Potatoes and Sausagetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-11-01:2723460:BlogPost:348622010-11-01T18:30:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
Gardeners will routinely cheerfully eat produce that they would refuse to pay money for. Those undersized, lumpy, be-spotted potatoes that appeared after shoving a fork into a supposedly vacant row? Trim, steam and mash, or make cottage fries. The ragged cabbage sadly loved by slugs? Drown it in salt water to stun the critters and surreptitiously wash out mud, intense green caterpillar frass (bug poop), slime, earwigs, pill bugs and all four kinds of gastropods when the rest of the household…
Gardeners will routinely cheerfully eat produce that they would refuse to pay money for. Those undersized, lumpy, be-spotted potatoes that appeared after shoving a fork into a supposedly vacant row? Trim, steam and mash, or make cottage fries. The ragged cabbage sadly loved by slugs? Drown it in salt water to stun the critters and surreptitiously wash out mud, intense green caterpillar frass (bug poop), slime, earwigs, pill bugs and all four kinds of gastropods when the rest of the household isn't watching. Ask your local farmer about #2 potatoes. Sometimes they have a deal on spuds too sad looking for neat piles at the Farmer's Market.<br/>
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Steamed Cabbage with Sausage and Onions<br/>
This can go central European style with caraway and dill or more Southwest with hot pepper seasoning. This is good with any cabbage, particularly the dense savoy ones that hold so nicely through the fall. For a red cabbage, add a splash of vinegar to the steaming stage to keep the color bright.<br/>
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You need a large skillet with a cover to make this one pot meal. First, cook the sausage on medium-low heat, trying not to burn the bottom too much. Remove the sausages when done. Slice a fat onion and about a pound of cabbage. Saute onion in a little oil or schmaltz until it starts to turn translucent, add cabbage and a little water, stir and cover. Turn the heat to low. Season with caraway, dill seed, hot pepper flakes, or some coarsely ground black pepper and a dash of ground allspice. Check and stir often, adding a little more water if needed, to avoid burning the cabbage, which turns a nasty brown if over-cooked. It will take a while to break down the heavy cellulose in winter greens.<br/>
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Serve the sausages on a bed of cabbage with your reclaimed potato masterpiece.<br/>
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Home made sausages:<br/>
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1 1/2 lbs. ground meat. It needs to be 1/3 fat. High fat hamburger works well. Ground turkey is too lean by itself, so add some finely minced animal fat. Ground lamb just kicks butt. Get the good stuff, it will be incomparably better than pallid CAFO meat smelling like wet dog.<br/>
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1/2 onion and 2-3 cloves garlic, finely minced<br/>
1-2 cups bread crumbs, maybe more<br/>
1/2 teaspoon each oregano, basil, finely crumbled sage and coarsely ground black pepper<br/>
1/4 teaspoon salt<br/>
few red pepper flakes<br/>
1 egg<br/>
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Mash everything except the bread crumbs together in a large bowl. Add bread crumbs, a little at a time, until it sticks together. Form into short logs about an inch thick and three inches long, or patties, and cook. You will need a little oil in the pan to keep them from sticking.<br/>
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Or you could just buy some good sausage. Hempler's makes a great variety at their factory in Ferndale. The farm stand on Railroad Avenue carries Skagit River Ranch sausage.<br/>
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Look for local beef, bison, lamb and other animals at more and more retailers: Terra Organica, Farmer's Market (3591 Birch Bay Lynden Road), Co-op, Haggens, The Market supermarkets, Skagit River Produce at Exit 221 on I-5.Celt's Garden - Corn Tortillas and Skagit River Producetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-10-29:2723460:BlogPost:337362010-10-29T21:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
Winter squash stores well at cool room temperatures. If you didn't grow any winter squash, feel free to buy some from your local farmer. To prepare your squash for storage, wash off the soil, scrubbing gently with a soft brush, then go over the clean squash again with a wash rag soaked in cool water with a shot of bleach added. Allow to air dry. Then store your squash in cardboard boxes in a single layer, not touching. I keep mine in the basement, but any coolish place where it doesn't freeze…
Winter squash stores well at cool room temperatures. If you didn't grow any winter squash, feel free to buy some from your local farmer. To prepare your squash for storage, wash off the soil, scrubbing gently with a soft brush, then go over the clean squash again with a wash rag soaked in cool water with a shot of bleach added. Allow to air dry. Then store your squash in cardboard boxes in a single layer, not touching. I keep mine in the basement, but any coolish place where it doesn't freeze will do. Some varieties keep better than others. The delicious little Delicatas: eat those first. Acorn squash is a good keeper. Our Bellingham heirloom, Navajo Grey, keeps into spring in a good year.<br/>
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A freshly made tortilla is wonderful. Fresh corn tortillas are hard to buy legally in this town. The eatery at La Gloria Market (4140 Meridian, behind SuperGas) will make a dozen for you. Ask nicely at your favorite Mexican place. If it's a slow day you may luck out.<br/>
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Although a fresh tortilla is by far better than that stuff in the packages, unfortunately the commercial places use masa harina, dried pre-made tortilla dough, available in big bags from Cash and Carry. The masa market is dominated by Mesteca in El Paso, and they cheerfully buy GMO dent corn on the commodity market. Usually, any place with a substantial Mexican American population has a hole in the wall fresh masa factory, but I haven't been able to find one, even in Lynden. Besides, they often start with whole GMO corn kernels.<br/>
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Or you could make your own. Fresh homemade tortillas will make you a lot of fans. Bob's Red Mill makes an excellent masa harina. Something about the masa making process renders the product ineligible for organic certification, but Bob's says they start with non-GMO corn.<br/>
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Tortillas are usually made from white or yellow dent corn, with the white preferred by the Mexican market. Hence most masa harina available in the U.S. is made from white dent. Corn has two kinds of starch, soft and hard. Dent corn has a cap of soft starch. It collapses as the corn ripens, forming the characteristic dent in the kernel.<br/>
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Flour corn has a high percentage of soft starch. Hopi Blue Flour is used to make blue tortillas and tortilla chips. If you look closely, blue tortillas are denser and more granular than the soft, fine white ones. Flour corn is usually used for cornbread, parch corn or hominy. Corn breeder Dave Christiansen developed Painted Mountain flour corn to grow at high elevations in Montana. It's spectacular, colorful stuff. Krista Rome grew a crop of Painted Mountain in 2009 and reports that the masa doesn't hold together well enough for tortillas.<br/>
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Flint corn is just the opposite of flour corn, high in hard starch. Flint corn can be used for tortillas, but due to its hardness is usually eaten as hominy or polenta, that would be corn grits to most of us. Floriani Red Italian heirloom flint corn has become popular for upscale grits. Grits are ground up corn, fine, medium or coarse. Hominy is made by boiling the whole kernels in hardwood ash, pickling lime or other alkali, and washing off the skins. Hominy lends itself well to stews. Due to its hardness, whole flint corn stores well and is harder to grind than dent. Various First Nations people grew some flint corn as a hedge against crop failure in future years. Flint corns have low cross rate of 10% with dent corn. I grew Abenaki Calais Flint alongside of Nothstine Dent last summer and sure enough, they didn't appear to cross.<br/>
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Popcorn is an envelope of hard starch surrounding a soft starch interior. When heated, the soft starch explodes. Popcorn is dominant over other types of corn. If you grow Jade Baby or Strawberry popcorn, it will dominate your sweet corn. Or your neighbor's, eh? If a jar of stored of popcorn loses its popping quality, it's probably just dried out. Put a tablespoon of water in the jar, seal it back up and let it sit for a few days to absorb the water.<br/>
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Popcorn keeps years; it's hard stuff. I about broke my Kitchen Aid mixer by trying to grind popcorn with the grain mill attachment. Then I figured it out: run the popcorn through on a coarse setting and then a second time on fine. It made excellent cornbread.<br/>
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Waxy corn is the other major corn type. Waxy corns are 100% soft starch. As food, waxy corn is used for porridge, popular in Asian countries. Waxy corn is used to make corn starch, corn oil, ethanol, plastics, and widely used in industrial processes. The latest GMO market flop is a waxy corn. Farmers aren't buying it, saying that the yields aren't high enough to justify the higher price.<br/>
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Farmers across the country are having trouble finding non-GMO seed corn. Even finding non-hybrid seed corn is a challenge. The Aamot family has grown Nothstine Dent, an old open-pollinated variety, on their farm for years. I didn't get enough Nothstine Dent (seed courtesy of Matt Aamot) out of my test patch for a tortilla test (patch ravaged courtesy deer), but it is burly stuff, shooting up past the Hopi Blue Flour and setting fat ears.<br/>
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As you are blasting along on I-5 through Skagit County, consider turning off at exit 221 to check out the new Skagit River Produce barn. Just east of the interstate, a new barn with what looks like 3KW of solar panels. Owners Tory Fidler and Tracy O'hare are stocking gleaming piles of conventional produce from the Skagit Valley and smaller amounts from their own farm (organic methods, not certified) and certified organic produce. They also have an excellent selection of meat, dairy, honey, eggs, baked goods and value added products like jams, pickles, locally roasted coffee, Skagit wines, and regional beers. One cold case is aimed at the road side convenience store market: ice cream, sodas, beer, pizza and so forth, except with real food. Open into December and then, "We'll see how it goes".<br/>
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Corn Tortillas from Scratch<br/>
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1 pound whole dried corn kernels<br/>
1 tablespoon baking soda or pickling lime (calcium hydroxide, food grade lime)<br/>
2 quarts water<br/>
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Heat water and alkali until it just starts to boil. Add corn and turn down heat so that it just simmers for an hour. Then let it sit overnight. The next day, drain and wash thoroughly under running water. The challenge is grinding it into masa. I use the grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer, which makes a lumpier than ideal dough. You could try a food processor. The proper tool for the job is a corn grinder (Corona, Estrella or Victoria), available for a modest sum from Mexican grocery stores.<br/>
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Add enough water to the masa so that it sticks together and you can form it into tortillas using a tortilla press (inexpensive cast iron or larger wood dohicky, the plastic ones break) or your hands. The talented can use a rolling pin. Cook tortillas on an ungreased griddle, turning once. I found that a cast iron pancake griddle works well, available from Yaeger's on Meridian.<br/>
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The same process also makes dough for tamales. Traditionally, tamales are made from a coarser dough than tortillas, but it's case of use what you can come up with.<br/>
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Hominy <br/>
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If you can get your hands on whole heritage corn, such as red flint or an heirloom dent, it makes excellent hominy. Basically the same as masa, but allow the corn to boil vigorously in the alkali, and scrub off the skins when you rinse the kernels. To make the hominy "flower", pinch off the end of the kernels and they will open up in the stew.<br/>
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Chicken Posole<br/>
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Saute sliced onions and garlic with bite sized chicken chunks. Add chicken stock and hominy. Season with fresh or dried red chiles and a liberal quantity of oregano. Let cook or a while, and add some green stuff out of your garden: sliced cabbages, winter radishes, maybe a few mustard leaves. When the green stuff is soft, stir in a shot of lime juice and serve with tortillas.Celt's Garden - Mother Corn and More Hot Saucetag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-10-08:2723460:BlogPost:329182010-10-08T17:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
It's time to get the garlic in. For the organized, the cover crop of summer buckwheat is already grown, tilled in, and broken down and the garlic patch is ready to go. For harried folks with day jobs, me for example, it's a rush to get the summer garden pulled out to make room for garlic. Planting garlic comes on the heads, to protect the cloves until planting time. When you pop the cloves off the head, take care not to injure the base plate at the bottom. The clove's roots will grow from the…
It's time to get the garlic in. For the organized, the cover crop of summer buckwheat is already grown, tilled in, and broken down and the garlic patch is ready to go. For harried folks with day jobs, me for example, it's a rush to get the summer garden pulled out to make room for garlic. Planting garlic comes on the heads, to protect the cloves until planting time. When you pop the cloves off the head, take care not to injure the base plate at the bottom. The clove's roots will grow from the base plate. Plant medium sized to large cloves, 8" apart in all directions. Plan on weeding your garlic over the winter, as perennial weeds will pioneer the open soil and bring back temperate rain forest. Of course, that happens everywhere in the garden.<br/>
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There are six main types of corn: sweet, dent, flint, flour, popcorn and waxy. Sweet corn is popular in home gardens, for the incomparable taste of fresh corn on the cob. Heritage sweet corns lose their sugar soon after picking. The traditional recipe for garden fresh corn on the cob is to put the water on to boil and go out and pick the corn. Heirloom open pollinated sweet corns such as Golden Bantam and Stowell's Evergreen are regaining popularity after losing almost all the market to hybrids. Victory Seeds in Oregon has reintroduced Sunshine, a short season sweet corn that vanished from the market in 1992.<br/>
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Open-pollinated sweet corn is one of those things that gardeners have to grow if they want to eat it. Even organic market gardeners grow hybrids, and for a good reason. The supersweet gene is recessive. Hybrid sweet corn is produced by growing two tightly inbred lines, then interplanting rows of the two varieties. The plants from one variety are detassled to obtain the desired cross. Supersweet corn will keep its sweetness while the corn is picked, transported and sits around the cook's kitchen for a couple of days.<br/>
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Detassling on a large scale is labor intensive. Corn breeders were delighted to find a male sterile corn in Texas. It was just the thing for breeding hybrid corn. In 1970, 80% of the U.S. corn market had Texas male-sterile heritage, setting up the whole country perfectly for the Southern corn leaf blight epidemic.<br/>
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Those of us whose own genetic heritage passed through the Irish potato famine in the 1840's may retain deep family traditions of prejudice against widespread monocultures of anything: one corn lineage, one potato variety, giant waving fields of genetically identical oilseeds. If you haven't already heard the story from Granny, Michael Pollen wrote eloquently about the Lumper potato and the consequences in "the Botany of Desire".<br/>
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Corn is wind pollinated and it suffers from inbreeding depression if it is grown from too few parent plants, but don't let that stop you from saving your seed. To save seed from an open pollinated sweet corn, let a few of the best ears mature and dry out on the stalk. Then husk the cob and let it dry some more inside. Seed corn can be stored on the cleaned cob or husked and stored as kernels to save space. If you swap some of your seeds, or save some of your purchased seed for the following year, you can manage inbreeding depression. This turns out to be old-timer advice: keep back some of your seed corn each time and plant out with seeds from more than one year. As for your neighbors, if they are growing hybrid sweet corn, it's recessive and your heritage corn will tend to dominate the seed.<br/>
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More later on growing your own tortillas.<br/>
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Here's a seasonal hot sauce recipe:<br/>
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Sweet and Hot<br/>
<br/>
1 lb hot peppers, red or mixed red and green<br/>
1 lb cooking apples, such as Granny Smith or the old apple tree in your neighbor's backyard<br/>
4 lbs any combination tomatillos and red and green tomatoes<br/>
1 lb onions<br/>
2 heads garlic<br/>
3 cups apple cider vinegar<br/>
1 1/2 cups sugar<br/>
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Spice bag:<br/>
2 inches of cinnamon stick, broken into smaller pieces<br/>
Whole tumeric, 1/2 long dried piece, smash into smaller pieces<br/>
1 star anise<br/>
1 teaspoon each of whole seeds: fennel seed, black pepper, coriander, allspice, mustard seed<br/>
tie into a piece of old handkerchief, doubled cheesecloth or those cute little premade muslin bags sewn by twelve year olds in China<br/>
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Be careful removing the stems and seeds of the hot peppers. Wash your hands, knife and cutting board with soap frequently and use aloe or a burn gel with lidocaine if your hands sting. Clean and cut up the fruit, onions and garlic and put it in a four quart jam pot or crockpot with the vinegar and peppers. Cook down on very low until it's all mushy. Mash everything up with an immersion mixer (called the Vroom in my house), blender, or potato stomper. Add the sugar and the spice bag and cook on very low 4-5 hours. Best to check on it and stir every now and then, as the sugar makes it stick to the bottom.<br/>
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By now, it should have reduced to about two quarts of sweet, dense sauce. Scald pint jars and lids and process 10 minutes in a steam or water bath canner. See previous post Jam Session for detailed canning instructions.<br/>
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Originally a homemade version of the dipping sauce for Asian dishes like fried wonton, this hot sauce is wonderful on cottage fries, burgers, rice, beans and tortillas, or just your eggs in the morning.<br/>
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I bought hot peppers from Dona Flora at the Farmer's Market to pad out my meager harvest. She recommends Cyclon, Bulgarian Carrot, Serrano, Jalapeno, the big Cayennes and a tiny C. frutescens that turns purple when ripe for the Northwest Corner. I passed on the Habaneros and used a mix of Polish Cyclon (very hot), Cayenne (hot), and Jalapeno (mild), with Hungarian Hot Wax peppers from my garden, to make the hot sauce. The small Serranos and C. frutescens will be pickled. (See previous post Reverse Engineering Hot Sauce for pickled pepper directions.) They are too small to mess with otherwise.Celt's Garden - Easy Seed Savingtag:transitionwhatcom.ning.com,2010-09-28:2723460:BlogPost:163652010-09-28T21:00:00.000ZCelt M. Schirahttps://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/profile/CeltMSchira
Here's how to save tomato seed: slice a very ripe tomato through the equator. Using the point of a knife, scrape and squeeze out the seeds and surrounding jelly into a glass. Add a half cup of non-chlorinated water. Take some tape and make a label with the variety and date. Now, leave it sitting around 2-3 days. The jelly will disintegrate. The top may grow a layer of mold. The good seeds will fall to the bottom. Take a mesh tea strainer and pour the lot through the strainer. Run some tap water…
Here's how to save tomato seed: slice a very ripe tomato through the equator. Using the point of a knife, scrape and squeeze out the seeds and surrounding jelly into a glass. Add a half cup of non-chlorinated water. Take some tape and make a label with the variety and date. Now, leave it sitting around 2-3 days. The jelly will disintegrate. The top may grow a layer of mold. The good seeds will fall to the bottom. Take a mesh tea strainer and pour the lot through the strainer. Run some tap water gently through the strainer until the seeds are clean. Dump out the seeds onto a paper towel. Label the paper towel. Otherwise you may end up with several batches of mystery seeds. When the seed is dry, scrape it off the paper towel and put it away in a labeled envelope.<br/>
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Lettuce seed is also easy to save. Like most tomatoes, lettuce is an inbreeder, that is the flowers mostly self-pollinate and the varieties breed true. Just let lettuce bolt and turn into a bush. The flowers turn into fluffy heads like miniature dandelions. When they open up at the base, as if to take wing, the seed is ready. Just pick it, pull off the fluffy top and store. By the time lettuce sets seed, all lettuce plants look like a scraggly dry bush, so it's good to label the plants while you still remember which is which.<br/>
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With many new gardeners this year, and many gardeners switching from conventional to organic methods, I've been asked several times recently to explain heirloom vegetables. Heirloom vegetables are varieties saved and grown by back yard gardeners and small farmers, often for generations and sometimes for centuries. Since breeding and saving seeds is work, sometimes a lot of work, gardeners and farmers save the good ones: vegetables with a lot of taste, particular adaptation to a regional climate, or special cultural significance. There's no firm cutoff for age, so sometimes heirloom is used to refer to recent innovations such as the Green Grape tomato.<br/>
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The home gardener looks for a really luscious tomato, and doesn't care whether it has the fortitude to survive machine harvesting and three days in a truck, followed by being stacked in the supermarket. The home gardener wants broccoli that produces a lot of fat side shoots after the main head is harvested and cabbages that are staggered in maturity. The market gardener, on the other hand, wants cauliflower that are all about the same size at once, so that he has some hope of filling 110 CSA boxes without giving some people a cauliflower the size of a basketball and others softball sized ones. The industrial farmer wants 10,000 identical cauliflowers all ready at once.<br/>
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Heirloom vegetables are in general better tasting, less uniform and more interesting than that stuff in the supermarket which is bred to survive industrial farming, processing and distribution. There is no point in growing your own food if you grow the same cardboard vegetables that you can buy in the supermarket.<br/>
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Vegetables can be either open-pollinated, which means that the seed can be saved and the next generation will considerably resemble the parent plants, or hybrid. Hybrid seeds are created by taking two different strains and deliberately crossing them. The next generation is called F1. The F1 often has a burst of hybrid vigor, resulting in larger plants.<br/>
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Sometimes hybrids have other desirable characteristics, such as disease resistance or special color. Generally, the hybrid won't breed true, and may even be sterile. Just a basic plant cross, such as Mendel's yellow podded peas crossed with green pod peas, will have an F2 generation where half revert to the original parent varieties. Commercial hybrids can have very complicated parentage. Responsible seed distributors will label crosses F1. Sometimes you get the back story for open-pollenated varieties, such as "early tomato developed at OSU by Dr. James Baggett" (modern open-pollenated variety) or "frilly pink poppy carried over the Oregon Trail by Charlotte Aamots' great great-grandmother and saved for generations in the family back yard" (that's an heirloom, contact Susan Templeton, who has taken over stewardship of the Aamot fancy poppy, if you would like some seed.)<br/>
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There is nothing inherently wrong with hybrids. Hybridization is the first step in plant breeding. Want a purple broccoli? Cross broccoli and red cabbage and select plants to save seed from year after year. Eight years of work later, you have a stabilized variety which is purple headed, grows like a broccoli and heads the first year, and breeds true.<br/>
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Tomatoes seeds are easy to save because modern tomatoes are inbreeders. Each flower has both male and female parts, and each flower self-pollenates to produce a fruit. Save the seed, and you get the same genetic material that you started with. Some older tomato varieties cross more easily, indicating that tomatoes were once partial outbreeders.<br/>
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Inbreeding plants, like tomatoes, peas, beans and lettuce, are easy to save seed from: just select seed from a sturdy looking parent plant. Outbreeders like squash are similar to people: you know who the mother plant is but the father is harder to pin down. Fortunately, squash has big flowers with separate males and females. The female flowers have a tiny fruit at the base. If you want to pollinate it deliberately, tape a female flower shut just before it is ready to open. The next day, use a paintbrush to move pollen from a male flower that opened that day to your female flower, and tape the female back shut. Summer squash, gourds and small winter squashes such as the Sugar Pie pumpkin are all Curcubita pepo, and will all cross. A summer squash-gourd cross will make people sick. A summer-winter squash cross is probably just not very good. To save your own summer squash seed, hand pollinate. You will have to let the fruit go well past anything you would want to eat to get mature seed, and the vine will stop pumping out fruit when it switches to growing the seed. The product of your work is a monster zucchini with huge, tough seeds and stringy flesh. Cut open the monster and dry the seed.<br/>
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More seed another time.