Sunday, March 27, 2022

Project Pantry Week One




Every single ingredient in today’s dinner - chickpea and sausage stew -  is from the gleaner’s pantry, except for the nettles, which were foraged. But even if you were to buy all the ingredients, this would still be a cheap meal. And it’s healthy, too! 

Chickpea and Sausage stew 

- One sausage per person. I used Louisiana hotlinks because that’s what the gleaner’s pantry gave me, but Italian sausage, Polish, kielbasa, or chorizo works great too. Slice into coins. 

- one yellow onion, sliced 

- one bell pepper, sliced, red preferred. 

- 1-2 cups nettles, or whatever tender greens you have on hand. Spinach is good. So is Swiss chard. Chop roughly. 

- 1 large tomato, chopped

- one can chickpeas 

In a little bit of oil, sauté sausage over medium-high heat until browned. Add peppers and onions.  Continue to sauté until vegetables wilt and are slightly browned. Add chopped tomato. Add rinsed, drained beans. Add greens. If needed, add a tablespoon or two of water. I find the vegetables usually give off enough moisture, but sometimes a little water is good. Or lemon juice. 

Cover and simmer 15-20 minutes, until flavors meld. 

Nice additions if you have them - chopped Kalamata olives, capers, zucchini. 

Score:

Gleaner’s - 5

Foraged - 1

Grocery store - (the oil) 


Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Forest Foraging (Spring Greens)



This afternoon the sun made an appearance, interrupting several days of chilly rain. I was so happy to see it that I was moved to actually get off the couch and take a walk outside with my husband. 

My favorite nearby walk is a trail through the forest that leads to a steep, rather slippery and rickety staircase down to the beach. It’s a quiet beach with no access other than this trail, so it’s often empty except for seagulls and crabs. The trip out and back is about a mile and three quarters, which is long enough to feel like exercise, especially when you consider the staircase. 

The forest is nothing special - it’s certainly not old growth - but it is interesting and varied. On some parts of the trail you are surrounded by cedars and enveloped in a ferny gloom; and in other areas alders and cottonwoods prevail. Right now the Indian plums are blooming and there are yellow skunk cabbage in the shady bogs. 

I’m sure a more expert forager than I am could tell you dozens of edibles and medicinals that can be gathered from an environment like this one, year round. I have personally harvested 

- red huckleberry 
- trailing native blackberry
- shaggy parasol mushrooms 
- nettles

I have seen, but not harvested, cottonwood buds (for making Balm of Gilead - https://learningherbs.com/remedies-recipes/balm-of-gilead/) and devil’s club. And I’m certain there are edible fiddlehead ferns and many other types of edible mushrooms and fungi in there as well. And this is just one small forest reserve that a biologist would doubtless describe as degraded. 

I do most of my yearly foraging in fields and hedgerows, not forests. I pick dandelion greens, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, field mushrooms like puffballs and agaricus campestri. Blackberries and sour cherries and plums from abandoned trees. Most of what I forage is not truly wild but rather escaped nonnative weeds. That’s okay. It’s all good food. 

A few days ago I went out and walked my fence lines looking for nettles. There were a few here and there, but they were all still very small. It will be another two weeks before I can get enough for a pot of soup. Today on the forest rail though, I saw hundreds of nettles, all at just about the perfect stage for picking. I guess I have my exercise for tomorrow planned out. 

Saturday, March 19, 2022

Food Finances (Project Pantry)






For a while now, I’ve been thinking about starting a new recurring feature on the blog about cooking and eating from “the pantry,” meaning in this case both my personal pantry and the Gleaner’s Pantry, which is a small food rescue organization from which I get a large percentage of our family’s food. We pick up produce, meat, dairy and bakery items going out the back door of supermarkets and sort the usable food from the unusable. On average, around three quarters of the food being tossed is perfectly fresh and good. The rest goes to animals. 

Years ago, when we first moved here, before I learned about the Gleaner’s Pantry, I was all about sourcing as much food as possible from our own land. We planted fruit trees, we put in a garden every year, we raised chickens and goats and pigs. I learned to can and put up quarts and quarts of applesauce, jam, salsa, and pickles every year. I dehydrated pears and plums for the kid’s school lunches. I made cheese and yogurt, and traded the excess to friends for vegetables from their gardens. I foraged for greens, mushrooms, and berries. 

A mixture of concern about climate change, food prices, and the zombiepocalypse combined with the inherent “wow” factor of being a real, live homesteader drove me to spend lots of time and energy producing and preserving as much of our own food as possible. Turns out, however, that with a few exceptions here and there, producing and preserving your own food is not cheaper than buying it already preserved for you. Mostly the opposite, in fact. You wouldn’t believe how expensive a dozen eggs are when you factor in the cost of building a coop and raising the chicks. 

Our global food system is based around efficiencies of scale, and it is very good at producing vast quantities of food extremely cheaply. Again, with a few exceptions, it is much cheaper to buy your food than it is to grow it yourself. Of course, much of that cheapness is predicated on government subsides and the exploitation of labor, not to mention the externalization of costs such as pollution of waterways from agricultural runoff. Money out of pocket is not my only concern, nor can it be the only concern of anyone who cares about the ethics of their consumption. 

Eating for the Gleaner’s Pantry allows me to address many concerns at once - cost of food, of course, but also the desire to minimize food waste and to avoid participating in the evils of Big Ag. None of us can avoid that entirely, of course - Big Ag is just one of the gigantic systems in which we are all enmeshed and which we literally depend on for our survival. I am under no illusion that my feeding my family from Big Ag’s waste-stream makes any appreciable (or even detectable) difference to any of the aforementioned problems. But it makes me feel good, it provides an example to my kids, and it saves us a lot of money. My daughters have taken many lessons - music, gymnastics, sports - that we were able to pay for because we were saving hundreds of  dollars a month in food costs. 

You might have noticed food costs have risen quite a bit lately. This phenomenon comes at a time that we are a bit tight on cash. Our family budget has taken a hit recently, and it made me think that I could probably make even more use of the Gleaner’s Pantry and save even more money. I’ve never tried to actually keep track of exactly how much we eat from the Gleaner’s versus how much from the grocery store. It seems like it might be a fun project for the blog. So I think I’ll try to make a weekly post breaking down at least one day’s cooking in terms of where the ingredients came from. Three categories - Gleaner’s, grocery store, or personal pantry, which includes farm-produced and foraged or bartered from neighbors. 

I’ll start with just one project: the lemon curd Swiss rolls I made today. They are super pretty! 

From Gleaner’s:                              From grocery store:

Flour                                                Sugar
Lemons                                            Butter

From Personal Pantry:

Raspberries
Eggs 

This is a win - four non-store items versus only two store items. Maybe I’ll keep a running tally! 










Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Attempting Chickens Again (Hammer and Crime)


Every winter, we lose most of our poultry to coyotes. This is, of course, mostly our own fault. Our chicken coop is hardly worthy of the name - it’s just a rickety collection of random boards nailed up between our two small barns, with chicken wire tacked on and roofed with corrugated plastic, which is cracked and broken. I haven’t the heart to keep the chickens penned up in there. The barns have no gutters, so the rain sheets off the roofs and pools in the coop. Eight months of the year it’s just a mud puddle. They do have nest boxes and a couple of dowels to roost on up off the floor, but they don’t really like it in there and I don’t blame them. 

So the chickens and turkeys are fully free-range. They mostly roost in the hayloft of the main barn, which would be fine except for the fact that it ruins the hay. And except for the fact that the main barn apparently does not protect them from predators one little bit. Over the years, we have clearly become known far and wide as “easy pickin’s farm” with the local coyote population. Our property is only five acres, but it abuts some two hundred acres of woods and fields, and there is a whole mess of coyotes in there. 

I’ve pretty much given up on raising turkeys, because they are expensive and ticklish to raise, and it’s just too disheartening to spend a few hundred dollars and several months nurturing poults into big, fat, profitable birds, only to have them disappear just as they hit market weight, leaving behind only a patch of scattered feathers somewhere out in the field. I was close to ready to give up on chickens too, when we were down to a last solitary bird. I wanted to give the poor bedraggled thing away to somebody with a real chicken coop, but Paloma cajoled me into getting four new chickens instead. 

It was obvious we needed a better chicken situation. Either we had to repair the coop in a serious way, or make something new closer to the house where the coyotes wouldn’t come. For a while we toyed with the former, but settled on the latter solution as being both cheaper and less work. These are our prime considerations in most cases. We have a very well-fenced back yard, and it has a chain link dog run in it. We haven’t used this dog run for anything in particular in many years. I don’t even remember where it came from. But it makes a serviceable chicken coop when roofed with cattle panels bent into hoops and then covered with a tarp. 

I found four young rhode island red hens for sale and put them in the new coop along with the one surviving yellow hen. It took them a week or so so settle in and start laying, but now they are happy and healthy and popping out eggs just like they ought to. The downside is the back yard looks like hell - grass all scratched up and porch covered in bird poop - but oh well. What’s that saying? You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs? 

Paloma named the chickens according to some secret logic of her own. She claims to be able to tell them all apart except two. The two she can’t tell apart she named Thunder and Lightening. The other three are Banka, Hammer, and Crime. I think Hammer and Crime sounds like the name of a rap duo from the late eighties. 

We had planned to get some fancy, colorful bantams as well, but I don’t know. Maybe five is enough chickens. It’s certainly better than just one.