Archive for November, 2017

28 Nov

Green Slaw, and notes on salt-curing greens

Posted by wooddogs3 in Cook's treat, cooking, edible landscaping, farmers market, front yard gardening, greens, home food production, Ketogenic diet, Nose-to-tail vegetables, salads, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , .

Right now my garden is full of savoy cabbage and collards, the cold-hardiest greens around, and I’m trying to eat them in as many forms as possible. There are no greens more nutritious, and after a few hard frosts the texture is excellent. One way I really love to eat them is salt-wilted or salt-cured, which makes them more tender and gives them a velvety texture. The slaw shown above was designed to go with Mexican flavors and makes use of cilantro stems, which are often wasted but shouldn’t be. They have pure cilantro flavor and, unlike the leaves, will stand up to marinating or cooking.

For two people, I used one giant outer leaf of savoy cabbage and cut the midrib out. I then rolled the leaf halves up and cut them into thin strips less that 1/4” wide. Half a red onion was cut into very thin slices. The cabbage and onion strips were put in a bowl and salted generously. I didn’t measure the salt, but the idea is to use somewhat more than you might sprinkle on at the table, not to drench them with salt. Half a teaspoon for this small salad would probably do it.  Then- this step is important- I massaged the salt in with my fingertips for about a minute. The bowl was then put aside for half an hour. Meanwhile, I chopped a small clove of garlic finely and cut a handful of cilantro stems in fine cross section, as well as getting the chicken breasts and sauce ready. While the chicken breast was cooking, I squeezed out the greens to get rid of excess liquid. Then I tossed in the cilantro stems and garlic, squeezed the juice of half a lime over the leaves, tossed with couple of tablespoons of good olive oil, and finished with a few grinds of black pepper and a generous sprinkle of ground toasted cumin. The most important final step is to taste and consider the seasoning before serving. It may need additional salt, since much was lost when the liquid was squeezed out. And after considering the flavor balance, I ended up tossing in a light sprinkle of stevia, probably equivalent to about half a teaspoon of sugar.

This basic technique can be taken in many other directions. For a more Chinese take, leave out the cumin, use rice vinegar instead of lime juice, and add some grated ginger with the garlic and finish with a final drizzle of roasted sesame oil.  A sweeter take that can accompany Korean food or barbecue with equal facility can be achieved by tossing the wilted veggies, garlic, and cilantro stems with quasi-Korean sauce.  (Incidentally, when making that sauce, remember that oligofructose is not an essential ingredient and, if you aren’t low-carb, you can just use a smaller amount of sugar.) If pursuing an Asian flavor, use a neutral oil like macadamia oil rather than olive oil.  Rather than cilantro stems, you can use finely chopped parsley stems or a handful of finely sliced celery. You might want to salt-wilt the celery with the cabbage and onions if you use it, to make the texture blend in more harmoniously. You can dress the wilted veggies with wine vinegar or tarragon vinegar, add some finely chopped fresh thyme, and finish with a very good olive oil to have the slaw accompany more traditional western flavors. Parsley stems, lemon juice, oregano, and a final sprinkle of feta on top makes it more Greek, which is where I learned the salt-wilting technique in the first place. You can of course use part of a cabbage head rather than outer leaves, and red cabbage turns a lovely scarlet when salt-wilted and dressed with something acidic.  The point is that salt-wilting is a way to make thick cabbagey leafy greens more tender and chewable so that they can readily be eaten raw, and then you can take the flavor in any direction you want.  If you absolutely don’t have time for the salt-wilting step, you could try just massaging the finely sliced veggies with your fingers for an extra couple of minutes, and depending on your greens, this may soften the texture enough to make them very tasty, although the plush texture achieved by salt-curing won’t be there.  And if you don’t want to serve it as part of your meal, a small portion from half a large leaf or  so made in the kitchen while you do other things is a great cook’s treat  to eat while you work and prevent overeating later on.

I never tire of harping on the fact that leafy greens form the basis of the Cretan diet, the diet that nourished some of the healthiest and longest- lived people in the world. Also, they are full of soluble and insoluble fiber and very filling, so you have half the chicken breast left over to eat the next day, providing economies of time and money in addition to the health benefits.There is a meme going around that says

“How do you reset your body back to its factory settings?

It’s kale, isn’t it?

Please don’t say it’s kale”

Substitute “leafy greens” for “kale” and this becomes fairly accurate, and can be made delicious. If you grow your own greens, it’s also dirt-cheap. So there just isn’t a downside.

 

26 Nov

Food Diatribe I

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, farmers market, front yard gardening, home food production, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

I grow some winter vegetables under frost blankets so the growing season is never completely over for me, but it is certainly a lot slower than it was a couple of months ago, and I have some time in the evening to read and even, occasionally, to think. One of the things that I think about most is the future of agriculture and American health. I am hardly indifferent to the health of other countries, but I like to start at home, and the fact is that by many parameters we have worse health outcomes than most first-world countries and many third-world countries. I have put a few references below, but the short version is that you name the health parameter, from overall longevity to infant mortality to rates of cardiac death to obesity and diabetes, and we’re not doing well. I will only be addressing factors that have some well-established link to diet and therefore to agriculture.

This is the article that provoked this post:

Why Small Local Organic Farms Aren’t the Key to Fixing Our Food System

This article is an example of the stuff going around in the popular press right now, because a great way to get clicks is to attack the current mantra whatever it is, and “organic and local” is the current food mantra.  And I believe that this article is partially correct: the production of grain, legumes, etc. does benefit from some economies of scale because of the land and equipment involved, and even raising grassfed large livestock requires a lot of grass and, therefore, a lot of land.

This is where I disagree:  the article does not address the fact that what small local organic farms are producing, mostly produce and small livestock, is exactly what most of us would benefit from eating more of, and the environment would be better off if we did.  I believe that in many ways American agricultural thinking is still stuck in the old model of maximum calories per acre, even though nobody would ever talk about it that way anymore.  Corn, for instance, can produce a huge number of calories per acre, and therefore a huge amount of food, most of it not good for us. The only reason to grow so damn much corn is to produce a huge number of calories. So I invite you to just look around you, and figure out how many people of your acquaintance or visible in any public place are suffering from a calorie deficiency.  I am not talking here about nutrient deficiencies, but about simple calorie deficiencies. Calorie deficiencies  exist in America, definitely, but they are not common. I follow a lot of lifespan, healthspan, and mindspan research,  and much of it looks at what has nourished healthy populations, not for a part of one lifetime, but for generations and even millennia.  Vegetables keep emerging as a theme. One of the things that I think could benefit every single American without necessarily changing anything about cooking techniques,  overall diet, specialty ingredients, etc. is simply to think in terms of removing half of what is on an average plate and replacing it with more vegetables. Not the starchy sweet ones but the real ones, especially leafy greens. Nobody is in a better position to help you with that than your local small farmer.

Another issue arises when it comes to the question of how your local small farmer can make a living, because the organic local produce that he or she produces clearly has to be more expensive than most other factory-farmed produce, so that farmers can stay in business. So how can low-income people with  little ability to spend flexibly make better food choices? I think this might be the place to use government subsidies creatively. Right now, subsidies make it possible for Big Ag farmers to make a profit producing huge amounts of GMO corn that go into feeding animals in unhealthy ways and making corn-based sweeteners that make us fat and sick. If, instead, farmers were subsidized for things like employing local labor and using good employment and environmental practices, this would be the beginning of a solution. With topsoil erosion a huge agricultural problem and steadily worsening, subsidizing the farmers who don’t contribute to it could make a real difference.  If low income consumers were also subsidized for using local farm resources, say for example foodstamp dollars would buy one dollar at a grocery store but two dollars at a farmers’ market, it would become more possible for low income people to eat high quality produce. And yes, I would advocate taking away the subsidies that make GMO corn profitable. Cheap beef is sick beef, and cheap sweetener is the basis of an obese society. It is unclear to me why taxpayers should pay for the privilege of making people and animals fatter and sicker. Some people don’t believe in any subsidies at all, but if we’re going to have them, I’m in favor of using them for long-term improved health of soil, animals, and people.

I can’t resist adding (because, after all, it’s what this blog is about) that if you have just a little bit of land, you are in a good position to help yourself.  Put in a vegetable garden and plant a few fruit trees,  or identify fruit trees in other places that you can harvest from (many people don’t want the fruit from their trees or get a lot more fruit than they can use,) and you are in an excellent position to make a salutary change in your diet at minimal expense.

WHO stats of life expectancy by country:

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

We are 31st per 2015 statistics. Really.  And remember the China and its administrative region Hong Kong do not participate in the world health organization and are not in their statistics, but both have significantly greater longevity on average than America. So if they were added in, we would drop further.

Stats of rate of cardiac-related death by country:

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-heart-disease/by-country/

In cardiac death rates we look okay at first, down at number 107 among countries for which stats are available, but then you notice the long list of countries, including some third-world nations, that have lower rates than we do. You may also notice that France, Italy, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and most first-world countries generally are doing a good bit better than we are, with notably lower rates of cardiac death. It is very legitimate to ask what we need to do better.

Prevalence of diabetes by country:

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SH.STA.DIAB.ZS/rankings

Here, too, we look okay at first, down at 42nd place in percentage of people age 20-79 diagnosed with diabetes. But then notice Spain down at 89th place, Canada at 95th, Norway at 130th, France at 143rd, the UK at 152nd,  and in fact all developed and many undeveloped nations showing diabetes rates well below ours, and it is imperative to ask how we can do better.

24 Nov

The Fall Summation V: Summer Squash

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, home food production, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , .

At this point, in this area, I have given up on standard zucchini. No matter how disease-resistant the variety is touted as being, it succumbs to icky yellow wilts. This summer I tried three vining types which proved totally resistant to bugs and wilts and were alarmingly healthy. The three were trombocino, Thai bottle, and serpiente. My hands-down favorite was the serpiente, which is shown above. It produced three-foot-long “zucchini” all summer until killed by hard frost, with nary a bug or yellowed leaf in sight. I should note, though, that two plants covered an area about 20’x20’ so thickly that nothing else would grow.  Next year I will limit myself to one plant and prune it a bit to control its ambitions.

The trombocino squash  had healthy vines but seemed to have some pollination problems, and many of the young squash withered and dropped off unpollinated. There were plenty of pollinating insects, so I don’t know what the problem was but I don’t think that I will grow it again.

The Thai bottle  squash was a very prolific producer but I did not find this out until the end of the season. Throughout the season I thought that it was not producing more than a few squash, but when the first hard frost killed the leaves back, I found 24 fully mature squash that had been invisible under the thick leaf cover.  Since they are only edible when rather small, I would not grow this one again unless I had a very large trellis or some other arrangement where I could reliably see the small squash.  But if you do have a large trellis and want one plant to cover it in a short period of time, this is your candidate.  But do note that it has to be a big, really strong trellis. This squash is probably capable of covering the side of a building, given a very large trellis and half a chance.

I should note that if you love squash blossoms, as I do, the serpent and bottle squashes have small fragile white flowers, not the great golden trumpets that gladden our hearts.   I might put in one hill of pumpkins just for the gorgeous and delicious blossoms.

When it comes to flavor, all three were the equal of any zucchini I’ve ever eaten. Personally I think that too much is made of flavor nuances in zucchini, and they all taste much alike to me. Same with these vining squashes, all of which have a mild flavor when young and a texture just slightly firmer that zucchini. Get them young, when a thumbnail goes right through the skin with no particular effort. I think that all summer squash are best when cut in pieces of the size you want for the dish you’re making, salted generously, and left for an hour. Excess liquid can then be squeezed away with a dish towel. I just don’t think there’s any substitute for this step, although I do skip it if my decision to cook squash for dinner was impulsive.

The mature fruits that you inevitably find when frost kills the leaves are not usable as squash, but when cut in half with a pruning saw, the chickens relish the insides.

22 Nov

The Fall Summation IV Part 3: Perennial Odds and Ends

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, home food production, Ketogenic diet, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

So far I’ve written about 16 perennial vegetables that I eat regularly and enjoy, and there are still more to mention. Most are things that I haven’t really gotten to work well yet, but pictured above is a perennial veggie that I eat nearly every day. The Egyptian walking onion has become so intrinsic a part of my cuisine that I don’t take special note of it as a perennial vegetable. It’s just food. I have written elsewhere about how I manage it,  so I won’t repeat most of that material here except to say that I have four patches of it now, north exposure and south exposure, sun and shade.  This is how I ensure that almost every day of the year except January, there are green onions somewhere on the property that I can harvest. A good way to site them is to wait for a spring snow and then note two things: where the snow melts away first, and where it lingers the longest.  This gives you a good indication of your warmest and coolest microclimates, and you want to get some perennial green onions in each so that you have the longest possible season. If you don’t get any snow at all, odds are that you can grow them throughout the year with succession planting.

I stole the photo above because I daydream about lavish piles of fresh bamboo shoots. Three years ago I planted Phyllostachys dulcis, the famously invasive sweetshoot bamboo, a 35’ bamboo with shoots sweet enough to eat raw.  I reasoned nervously that in my desert climate the lack of water would probably keep it from spreading far, and for extra insurance I sited it against the fence of my goat’s pen so that, in a worst-case scenario, I could turn her loose on it.  Three years later, it is a clump of about five scrawny canes 6 feet high at most, and I have eaten exactly one bamboo shoot.  That one shoot was very delicious slivered into a salad, but this is not exactly the course that I anticipated. Maybe it’s my dry climate and alkaline soil, or maybe it’s karma,  but so far this one isn’t budging. I remain hopeful.  Maybe 2018 will be its year to take off.

Rugel’s plantain is a plantain  that I actually paid money to have, because I read that it had better flavor than the common great plantain.  It might taste a little less rank and weedy, but I don’t find it to be a choice eating plant by any means.  Probably the best way to use it is boiled and seasoned baked in the planting chips, but then even the common plantain tastes okay when used that way.  So this one is a nice indestructible plant with limited uses.  I am willing enough to let it keep occupying that space, but if I had it to do over again, I probably would not spend money on a specimen.

Rhubarb is not a plant that I find a lot of uses for, but I must say that I do enjoy harvesting in the tightly packed flower buds. When steamed, they look a lot like cauliflower but taste strikingly like sorrel, with a strong lemony tang.  The cooked buds make a delicious addition to mixed cooked vegetable salads.

Sea kale  is a plant that is still settling in for me.  Each plant makes only six or seven big waxy leaves, and if you harvest more than one, the plant will probably die. Only one of my new plants bloomed this year, and I did not harvest the buds as a “mini broccoli“ because I wanted to smell the flowers, which are said to smell strongly of honey. Mine had very little scent, so I might as well have eaten the buds.  But they were mobbed with bees.   I am told that if you let the plant ripen seeds, that is another thing that will cause it to die. Per the reports of people who have it, it seems determined to die. I did read that the leaves could be harvested in late fall when the plant no longer needs them, but at that point mine were so ratty and bug-holed that I could not imagine eating them.  So in 2018 I will just harvest buds and leave it at that.  I want to love this plant, because Thomas Jefferson loved it, but so far it is not exactly earning its keep around my place.  Still, there are many perennials that it takes me years to learn to use well, so maybe this is one of them.

Chicory comes in dozens of forms. The one that I grow as a perennial is Clio, from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. It resembles a dandelion on steroids until it produces its sky-blue raggedy blooms. I cut down the bloomscape after it blooms, and harvest the newer leaves in fall. Like all bitter greens, it needs strong seasoning, and I especially like it with bacon lardons and red chile.  The flavor is different from dandelion leaves, a little richer and not as bitter, and some people like it who don’t care for dandelion at all. I think that probably you could force it with frost blankets in cold weather, but haven’t tried that yet because I have enough other things to eat in cold weather.

I think that every urban homestead needs to have a wine grape growing somewhere. You will never get enough grapes from one vine to make any wine or vinegar, but wine grapes tend to have nice edible leaves,  while the leaves of Concord grapes and many other grapes of American derivation are full of unchewable undigestible fibers and cannot be considered edible. Grape leaves are endlessly useful. I might actually make stuffed grape leaves once a summer, but once a week in the mid and late spring I grab a handful of grape leaves to throw in mixed greens. They need to be finally slivered because the leaf veins can be tough, and the stems need to be removed altogether, but they have a lovely tang. I also like the small fresh ones chopped into salads.  Young tender grape leaves fried quickly in olive oil make a labor-intensive but really lovely garnish for nearly anything that you might serve in late spring, and I recommend frying them in good olive oil because the rich oil combined with the shatteringly crisp lemony leaf is very delicious.

I have decided to count the Siberian elm samaras that grow all along the nearby path as a perennial since, after all, what could be more perennial than a tree? Elm samaras are mild and have no distinctive flavor of any kind,  but they are available in mind-blowing quantities, and are the first green of spring along with bladder campion and whatever I have managed to force under frost blankets.  They are a useful addition to salads and cooked greens, can be nibbled along the walk as a nice trail snack, and gathered by the bucketful  for my chickens and goat, who have gone through the winter without fresh greens.  So despite their lack of distinction, all of us are happy to see them. Within two weeks of their first appearance as a green mist on the trees, the edges have become papery and tough and the season is over. No problem, I am on to other things at that point.  But later in the growing season when I am cursing the wily and invasive Siberian elm, it helps to remember that it was one of the first fresh things to come to my table.

 

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