Archive for the ‘Nose-to-tail vegetables’ Category

13 Apr

Living in Interesting Times: Shortages

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, edible landscaping, farmers market, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, home food production, Nose-to-tail vegetables, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

When I talk with friends and neighbors about the current pandemic, I am sometimes surprised to encounter a firm fixed belief that there are no food shortages and won’t be any food shortages. Ask them if they’ve tried to buy flour or rice lately and you won’t receive a sensible reply. My own view is that in such situations there are potentially two kinds of shortages: short-term ones caused by panic-buying and hoarding, and longer-term ones caused by interruption of supply chains. Our current difficulty (at least in my area) in getting rice, flour, eggs, and toilet paper fall in the first category. Some people’s’ hoarding caused others to go without, and I’ll just add that there is a special place in hell reserved for those who hoard and price-gouge infant food, diapers, and other baby supplies. But there is lots of other stuff available and most of us will be just fine except for a little grousing.

The other kind of shortage, from interruption of production and transportation chains, is longer-term, hard to predict accurately, and potentially more worrisome. Without predicting disaster, I can only say that American agriculture depends heavily on immigrant labor, and you can review the Farm Bureau’s summary of this. I will quote only one startling fact from their statistics: “If agriculture were to lose access to all undocumented workers, agricultural output would fall by $30 to $60 billion.” Since to help contain the pandemic we are closing borders and tightening enforcement, I don’t see how the agricultural labor supply can be unaffected. This could translate to fruit unharvested and veggies decaying in the fields or not getting planted in the first place.

This is a long-winded way of saying that all food should be treated like the treasure it is. Don’t hoard it, and don’t waste it either. Look at what you have and let your imagination run wild about how you might use it. Relax your usual food restrictions unless they relate to religion or health. Taste things you might not ordinarily think about. Get a couple of good cookbooks about vegetables so that you’re ready to get the most out of available produce. Two that I highly recommend are Six Seasons and Vegetables Unleashed. Both are available in e-format and will help you make the most of any food available. Think creatively about what to make. Can’t get rice? Make lettuce wraps. We are not going to starve, not by a long shot, and we can better utilize our supply chain by being more flexible in our thinking.
The problem that I really worry about is not national and international supply chains but local ones. Huge ag corporations won’t be allowed to go under, but your area small farmers and stock raisers just might, or may be disheartened enough by plowing good vegetables back into the dirt that they don’t continue. So find out where they are and how you can buy their produce. In my area the growers’ markets will open in May but  will be limited to food only, and since it’s in the open air, this is probably safer than going to a grocery store. Use all recommended precautions, but support those growers.

Plant something of your own. This morning I was thinking about what I would grow if I only had one small garden bed to work with. Given a tiny little space four feet on a side, I would double-dig it, enrich the hell out of the soil, and plant Fordhook Swiss chard and tuck some thyme plants in at the edges. Chard produces heavily all summer regardless of heat if kept watered, and few things will do more for your health than eating more leafy greens. The taste is mild and acceptable to nearly everyone. The old reliable Fordhook is more productive and resilient than the newer fancier colors, and the stems offer a second vegetable with a different texture, great in stir-fries. It can be harvested all summer and then left in place to produce some early greens the following year. Chickens adore any leaves that you don’t get around to eating, and if you know any goats, they love the tough ends of the stalks, or just compost them. One packet of seed produces all the greens a small family can eat. I don’t know of a more nutritious and efficient vegetable. As for how to use it, click on the “greens” category in the sidebar on the right side of this page  for a dozen or more ideas, and that’s just the beginning.

 

 

 

 

12 Apr

Living in Interesting Times: Tough Herbs

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, herbs, home food production, Nose-to-tail vegetables, Perennial edibles, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , , .


Joyous Ostara/Passover/Easter, happy Spring, or whatever you choose to celebrate when life is returning to the soil. “Spring is Christ, raising dead plants from their shrouds” Rumi said, and any ordinary yard shows us the truth of it.  These are strange times indeed, and the best way to keep yourself safe is to stay home when not working. Gardeners and permaculturists are used to staying home, and have plenty to stay home for. This is the glory season for greens and herbs.

I have written before about one of my favorite plants, bronze fennel, and you can find that post here. Today I’ll just remind you that it is very ornamental most of the time and you can easily sneak it past your homeowners association if you are unlucky enough to have one. Pollinating insects adore it, and so do I. It will take two or three years to reach a good size, so start now.

in the spring I like to make herb pesto used to have on hand for all kinds of seasoning uses. Essentially, pesto involves garlic in some form, herb leaves, nuts of some kind, and olive oil. I typically add the cheese at a later stage.

Don’t make pesto just by throwing together all the herbs you have. Herbs have strong flavors, and some contemplative tasting, sniffing, and thinking is called for to make sure you have a coherent and appealing flavor picture. I made this one yesterday morning, picking the  fennel first, and decided to go with the anise flavor and chose anise hyssop and a fruity mint, a couple of stout sprigs of each, and two stalks of green garlic.

in my opinion, proper pestos are made with a mortar and pestle. Use the food processor if you must, but please, don’t even think about using the blender. Blended leaves all acquire an off, grassy taste. Wash the herbs, remove tough stems, chop the leaves coarsely, and peel the green garlic down to tender parts and finely slice it crosswise. Pound the garlic in the mortar with a good pinch of salt until it is pretty thoroughly crushed, then add the chopped leaves and pound to a chunky paste. Then add nuts of your choice and decide how finely to crush them. The herbs had a Sardinian taste so I added roasted salted pistachio kernels and pounded them only until coarsely crushed. Pound in a little really good herbaceous olive oil, then stir in more oil to the consistency that you want. Check for salt.

It smelled so good that I was eager to eat some right away, so for lunch we had fresh handmade egg linguine with half the herb pesto, a couple of glugs of additional olive oil, and some top notch Parmesan. Yum. The rest of the pesto went in a jar, and later that day I stirred up some sourdough bread dough and left it to rise in the refrigerator overnight.

The next day I took the dough out of the refrigerator mid-morning and let it come to room temperature for a couple of hours. Then I patted a loaf’s worth of the dough out into a large somewhat erratic rectangle on an oiled board, smeared it thickly with the rest of the pesto, and then topped it with grated Romano. This was rolled into a long loaf and left to rise on a baking sheet, then slashed across the top, brushed with more olive oil, and baked in a preheated 425 degree oven until done. After cooling on a rack for 15 minutes, it was ready to break into beautiful fragrant chunks and eat as an Easter lunch full of the flavors of the season. Butter was excessive, but that didn’t stop us.

The amount of pesto to make is a very individual decision. The flavor of this one is subtler than it sounds, and I picked a nice sized bouquet of fennel leaves and ended up with about a cup of pesto, divided between the two dishes here.

28 Apr

The Perennial Paddock: Mycelial Madness

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, home food production, mushrooms, Nose-to-tail vegetables, Perennial edibles, sustainable, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Nothing made me more joyously certain that I had created a real, albeit tiny, ecosystem in my suburban yard than when the first mushrooms grew among perennial plants rather than in a grow-bag or other artificial arrangement. Last year two kinds of mushrooms spread from spawn I had introduced and appeared far from the original “planting.” I was ecstatic; the mycelial Internet was forming! And this spring I was even more gratified to find a big cluster of Stropharia rugosa-annulata pushing up through the mulch months before I had expected to see any mushrooms. By perfectionist standards they were  overly mature when I discovered them, as evidenced by size, lightened cap color, and the cracks in the cap. But I am no perfectionist and knew that they were still perfectly good to eat.

So a few notes on introducing mushrooms, in no particular order:

1. Stropharia rugosa-annulata is the easiest mushroom  to grow in your garden. Even here in the high desert, it thrives in a deep mulch of straw and oak sawdust. In my opinion the almond agaricus is the most delicious, but it is more finicky and less productive. I have grown oyster mushrooms in containers, but this year I’m experimenting with introducing them into more unlikely spots. I’ll report back.

2. Get good spawn. Mine came from Field and Forest Products, and it was ready to grow.

3. Know how to indentify the mushroom that you introduced. Know its field marks and identify it before you eat it. When you create a good outdoor environment for mushrooms, you are not in complete control of what grows, any more than you are immune to weeds in your garden beds.

4. Be aware of how many commercial mulch products are treated with fungicides to prevent fungus from moving in. If you want select funguses to move in and thrive, you need to avoid these products.

5. Cook and eat with a sense of reverence and awe for the complex and extraordinary interactions of nature. If you want to learn more about this, Mycelium Running, Mycelial Mayhem, and Radical Mycology are useful books.

I sautéed my mushrooms in olive oil with generous additions of green garlic and fresh thyme, then removed them from the skillet, set aside in a warm spot, and scrambled some eggs in additional olive oil with a little salt. When the eggs were cooked, the mushrooms were folded back in. Simple as that. Scrambling is an underestimated technique. In this case I cooked the eggs fairly firm, for texture contrast with the softer mushrooms.  I framed the fragrant heap with a couple of slices of bacon. It made a quick delicious dinner, mostly from my own property, and was a culinary salute to the mycelial web that underlies, well, damn near everything.

21 Apr

The Perennial Paddock: Goji Berries

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, fruit, greens, Nose-to-tail vegetables, Perennial edibles, sustainable, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , .

I planted Goji berries years ago when I was interested in eating the berries, and hadn’t yet discovered how invasive they were. I am told that they like slightly alkaline soil, and indeed mine revel in it and come up everywhere despite whatever obstacles I put in their way.  But as far as I’m concerned their invasiveness is a positive boon, since my favorite part of the plant is the young shoot.

Gojis want to ramp away into big lanky vines that sprawl everywhere and don’t bear much fruit,  but some trimming helps them settle down and stick to their work.

I tie mine to fences or stakes about 40 inches above the ground, and then in the spring I whack off everything above that point.  There is no artistry involved in this pruning; you can do it with a hedge trimmer.  Then they grow new branches which drape down artistically from the point where they are tied, and are covered with fruit in season. They are very ornamental and can be grown in the front yard.  They are also highly drought  tolerant once established. The fruit tastes rather like a tiny tomato with a hint of bitterness. I use it mostly for fermenting into hot sauce and making superfruit sauce.  You will find material online suggesting that the berries will prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s and make you live longer. I don’t get excited about that kind of talk, and I hope that you don’t either. They do have a good nutrient content, including doses of lutein and zeaxanthin that might be useful in helping to prevent macular degeneration, however be aware that the berries have not been researched for that purpose.

My favorite part of the plant is the young shoots that come up in places where I don’t want them, so I can pick them and eat them.  Please note that the shoots are only edible when they are young, tender, and snap cleanly off as soon as you try to bend them. If they will bend without snapping, they are not fit to eat.  I chop a bundle of shoots into fine cross section, about 1/4” lengths, and stirfry with some garlic, ginger, and soy, and find them very good. If the stems are getting wiry and bendable, you can still harvest the leaves and add them to mixed greens or cook them lightly in a Thai-style curry.

Now, about those health claims: I find two opposite sets of claims being made about Goji berries and leaves (the leaves are widely used for tea in Asia and are used in traditional Chinese medicine.) One is that the components of both leaves and berries include multiple antioxidants and compounds that act as anti-inflammatories in vitro and in vivo. This view is based both on their traditional uses and on the fact that multiple flavonoid antioxidants have been identified in both leaves and berries.

Below is a link to a simple analysis of components of the leaves.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28095717

Below is an analysis of anti-inflammatory activity in extracts of three berry species, including Goji berries, in vivo in mice.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27114691

The other point of view is that, as a distant member of the nightshade family, this plant should be avoided in its entirety. I have not found any credible research suggesting that the vast majority of us have any reason to avoid nightshades. I also don’t find it credible that a plant which contains numerous compounds that have demonstrated anti-inflammatory activity both in vitro and in vivo (beta-sitosterol, betaine, and hydroxycinnamic acid amides, to name only a few) would suddenly become inflammatory when eaten. If you feel that eating gojis makes your stomach burn or your joints hurt, by all means avoid them.  You are the author of the owner’s manual for your own body.  But to go from there to saying that nobody should eat them is quite a leap, and ignores demographic evidence.

This is a picture of goji berries being grown commercially in China, apparently staked up in more or less the same way that I do it but more neatly and artistically.  When covered with their fruit in summer, they are as radiant as Christmas trees.

 

 

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