In a Pickle

I am very excited about participating in the Tigress' Can Jam this year.



Participants can one fruit or vegetable a month throughout the year--and this month's choice is CITRUS.

* * *

I have a lot of excuses for not getting it done yet. Really. And some of them are pretty good. Yep.

But nevertheless, the citrus is whole and the jars are still in the box, and they are going to be staying there all day. Instead, I will be rushing around to meet the requirements of a day filled with activities and a special evening occurring at our house.

In short, I am in too much of a pickle to can jam today.

Instead, I am preparing my canning fiesta for tomorrow, using a recipe for spiced oranges from The Joy of Pickling, Revised Edition: 250 Flavor-Packed Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market.

Citrus in a pickle? An experiment too hard to resist!

Eating Local during the Dark Days of Winter

This year's celebration of the eating local during the Dark Days begins this week. While finding local produce seems easy during the abundant harvests of late summer and early fall, the pickings start getting slim once the temperatures drop and the amount of light lessons. The annual challenge put forth by the (not so) Urban Hennery helps motivate eaters to keep up the work and realize that what sometimes seems hidden is in fact its own kind of abundance.

Eighteen months ago, we started a tradition of Eco-Shabbat, or Sabbath for the Earth--a continuation of Earth Hour. We were originally inspired by Melinda at One Green Generation to have an evening off the grid. We've enjoyed the candlelight dinners every fall, winter, and spring--but during the summer, we usually loose our way when the sun provides the light to allow us to continue full speed ahead. Darkness doesn't point toward a slowing down until it is almost time for bed.

But now that the "Dark Days" are back, we've started again. Our No Impact Project helped us adopt the practice again more regularly this season. The official project guide gives a variety of helpful suggestions for ways to mark one day a week as an eco-sabbath.

For our recent Eco-Shabbat, we pulled the only successful spaghetti squash out of our garden and baked it up.  We served it with a sauce made of red peppers (from our amazing CSA), which we dehydrated last summer.  Dried peppers simmered in water--just as simple and plain as that, and yet it was astoundingly delicious.

For a side, we cooked up some mixed greens with an onion and some garlic from our CSA and from the farmer's market in town.

We also served a home-canned jar of "Not-So-Sweet Bread and Butter Pickles." The recipe can be found in the excellent canning guide The Joy of Pickling: 250 Flavor-Packed Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market.

For our dessert beverage, the adults at the table sipped our sickeningly sweet but oddly charming homemade Rhubarb Liqueur.  This little taste of preserved summer was a lovely ending to the evening.

Eating at Home

Preparing ourselves for the annual return of One Local Summer,
we had a fabulous local meal--actually, another one that went a little beyond just "local".



On the menu:

Salad all grown in our garden, with a dressing made from rice vinegar marinated with our own chive blossoms and a bit of non-local olive oil.

Potatoes from the farmer's market, dressed with sour cream from our dairy supplier.

Hamburgers made with local beef, flavored with some of the last of our home-dried tomatoes mixed in before cooking.

We served the hamburgers on homemade whole-wheat buns--from wheat we ground ourselves.



This was an intensely satisfying meal--one that fed us well in both body and spirit.

Drying Up

or, Growing Your Own for back-to-basics food independence.


In what is already the beginning of our preparations for winter, we picked lemon balm, peppermint, and spearmint from our back yard and stuck the springs in the dehydrator for about twelve hours:



When the sprigs were dry, I pulled the leaves off the stems and piled them in an clean glass honey jar. It is about half full. After we fill it with another drying session, I'll put the jar in the basement until winter--a time when we will no longer have fresh herbs for our tea available just by opening the door.



Although the plant is very tiny at this point and not ready for any significant picking, we've just acquired stevia and look forward to using a few leaves to sweeten our fresh and dried herbal tea. Has anyone tried growing stevia? Any tips?

Dandy Lions

Last weekend, we had a lovely time celebrating the beginning of our CSA season. Red Wiggler sponsored a potluck muffin breakfast at the farm, allowing all the members to meet each other, get to know the growers (developmentally-disabled adults), and go on a tour of the farm.

One of the things I was most pleased to see is the enormous number of dandelions growing in fallow fields!

"Um..." you ask, tentatively. "Happy about dandelions?"



Thinking about food independence and going back to basics lately, I've been planning to make dandelion jelly. When the flowers were blooming in profusion around our neighborhood, I was busy with academic stuff, Passover, and an in-law visit--so I never got around to picking anything. On top of that, all the places with great profusions of dandelions seemed to be right along busy roads. I was hesitant to make jelly with that much car exhaust. Then--long before I expected them to, the dandelions disappeared and were replaced with new blooms of some other wild edible.

Well--when we saw the abundance in the organic fields at Red Wiggler, David reminded me that we had our marketing bags in the trunk of our car--and in the bags we had a couple of plastic quart containers (usually used for bulk grains or beans, or for small produce like strawberries) that could be useful in transporting the flowers.

With son's help, we filled up two quarts.

Then, basically following directions we found on the web, we removed all bits of green--or at least as much as we could--from the yellow petals. David is a pro at this job:



The job was a lot more time-consuming than we had imagined, so we alternated who did the picking and who did the entertaining. The one without yellow hands read aloud from a great book we just found: See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America, about a family who decide to leave New York to live on a Virginia farm as if they were in 1900. What a perfect read for those moments when you're doing projects like this together.

We poured boiling water over the blossoms and went to bed. The next morning, I strained the petals, added sugar and pectin and lemon juice, and boiled the mixture up while I sterilized the jelly jars. After they were filled, I stuck them in a hot-water cannerfor about ten minutes.

The jelly is a deep honey color--a little lighter than the picture shows but not by a whole lot. And the jelly tastes like a combination of honey and orange marmalade. Absolutely fantastic--and sweet enough to send you into a diabetic shock....

Leaving the Narrow Place for the Open Fields

During Passover, Jews are asked to acknowledge the history of slavery. Not only should we "acknowledge" it: we should act as if we were personally enslaved and personally freed.

Many Jews ask what things in our selves and in our surroundings keep us enslaved now. Then we think about ways we might loosen those bonds and step away from our own Mitzrayim, our own narrow place--no matter how safe and cozy it might seem at any given moment. When we are able finally to make that first step, we will begin to see how constrained we have been. Only at that point is an end to freedom--and a start to independence--possible.

I spent a bit of my Passover thinking about how to become ready to make a change, how to be ready to abandon the things that hold us back even if they seem to put us in such a secure place right now.

Many parts of my own personal narrow place are internal personality traits--parts of my self that hold me (and those around me) back from where we could go. One is my sometimes-extreme shyness. Another is my fear of anger, whether it is in myself or in others (anger towards me or towards others). Yet another is my reluctance to do or say anything that could make me stand out too much. And a biggie: I think about big issues until they are fully dissected, get depressed (too often in a too serious way), and do nothing about whatever the issues are.

But here we are, my family, ready to make some big steps out of our narrow place.

* * *

One way out of our Mitzrayim seems to be increasing food security both for us and for our community.

For a long time, my family has sought to eat a diet (and live a life more generally) less dependent on corporate consumerism and more reliant on the local economy of small business and small farmers. We attempt to purchase mostly foods without labels. (Ah--wouldn't the nutrition police fall over dead? No label to read?! Surely that is not healthy....)

This year we've expanded our garden to grow more of our diet in the back yard--our very tiny "postage stamp of native soil" which will really just be a symbolic way to help us understand more about how food is produced. Some of the old pros who do this (on a much larger scale in an only slightly smaller yard) call it the "path to freedom." They've launched the 100 Foot Diet challenge to help us connect with other people doing the same thing. I've mentioned their challenge before.

We've also made a serious commitment to prepare now so we will be able to keep up our non-corporate eating during the winter and early spring. And for this, the brilliant Sharon issued her own challenge:



Sharon asks us to create "food independence" (and to a degree, independence from a fossil-fuel-led society more generally) by regularly trying to, as Sharon lays out:

1. Plant something.
...The idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly. Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil. Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

2. Harvest something.
From the very first nettles and dandelions to the last leeks and parsnips I drag out of the frozen ground, harvest something from the garden or the wild every day you can. I can’t think of a better way to be aware of the bounty around you to realize that there’s something -- even if it is dandelions for tea or wild garlic for a salad -- to be had every single day. Independence is really appreciating and using the bounty that we have.

3. Preserve something.
Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter. And it adds up fast. The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later. Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.
Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket. Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal. Sort out and inventory your pantry. Make a list of tools you need. Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does. Fix your bike. Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it. Plan for next year’s edible landscaping. Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go.... Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

5. Cook something. Try a new recipe, or an old one with a new ingredient. Sometimes it is hard to know what to do with all that stuff you are growing or making. So experiment now. Can you make a whole meal in your solar oven? How are stir-fried pea shoots? Stuffed squash blossoms? Wild morels in pasta? Independence is being able to eat and enjoy what is given to us.

6. Manage your reserves. Check those apples and take out the ones starting to go bad and make sauce with it. Label those cans. Clean out the freezer. Ration the pickles, so you’ll have enough to last to next season. Use up those lentils before you take the next ones out of the bag. Find some use for that can of whatever it is that’s been in the pantry forever. Sort out what you can donate, and give it to the food pantry. Make sure the squash are holding out. Independence means not wasting the bounty we have.

7. Work on local food systems. This could be as simple as buying something you don’t grow or make from a local grower, or finding a new local source. It could be as complex as starting a coop or a farmer’s market, creating a CSA or a bulk store. You might give seeds or plants or divisions to a neighbor, or solicit donations for your food pantry. Maybe you’ll start a guerilla garden or help a homeschool coop incubate some chicks. Maybe you’ll invite people over to your garden, or your neighbors in for a homegrown meal, or sing the praises of your local CSA. Maybe you can get your town to plant fruit or nut producing street trees or get a manual water pump or a garden put in at your local school. Whatever it is, our Independence days come when our neighbors and the people we love are food secure too.


Participants had lots of creative ideas for tweaking the rules--moving things out of one listing into their own categories in order to emphasize them more--or adding things entirely new. Some of my favorite additions:

8. Store something (edible) you'll need in the future so you won't have to go to the market as often.

9. Reduce waste, Compost.

10. Clean something, Mend something, Make do.

11. Learn a new skill, or practice one you are learning.


Coming soon: how we're taking our first steps along this new road.