Sourdough Bread: Attempt #1, Result--partial failure

This actually looks better than it tastes.  It was only pretty good with lots of jelly.  I don't think I can actually repeat this recipe exactly, because I add a different flour to my starter each time I feed it.  The recipe I use, based on major adaptations to one on affairsofliving.blogspot.com, was:

2 and 1/2 c amaranth, millet, quinoa flour (ground in a coffee grinder)

1 c buckwheat flour

1/4 c flaxmeal

1 c warm water

1/2 c sourdough starter

1/2 t salt

1/4 c olive oil

flour for dusting; garlic powder and sesame seeds to sprinkle on after last rise and after rubbed with olive oil

Next time I won't let it rise in the crockpot.  It sort of started baking.  I think that was why it didn't rise enough and got really hard.  I'll also use honey to sweeten it a little.  I also might use whey or kefir in place of the water or part of it, just to see.

A Truly Terrifying Article

CAFO beef strikes again! E-Coli runs rampant in the beef industry in this country.

NYT: E. coli path shows beef inspection flaws - Food safety- msnbc.com

Let's support our local farmers who feed their cattle grass. I'm about to buy (and split with friends) 50 pounds of grass-fed beef from a local farmer.

Upcoming Events: Grape Juice and Sourdough

Hopefully on Monday I will be able to post a picture of at least one of my next projects: the baking of the first sourdough loaf, and the making and heat-sealing of grape juice (I asked the Amish girl at the farmer's market and told her I didn't know how to can but she assured me it was ok to heat seal grape juice). 

The sourdough had to go in the fridge for the weekend b/c we're going out of town and it's smelling a little ripe and ready to go.  I think I'd cry if I came back to find overly fermented sourdough on the counter.  The kefir's in there too for the weekend.  All fermentation projects on hold for now. 

The concord grapes are in the cool pantry/mudroom.  We'll see how they hold up.

Honey-Baked Lentils

hippiechickinsing on Chowhound gives a great recipe for yellow lentils. She says:

"I like honey-baked lentils. It's basically 2:1 water to lentils; for 1 cup lentils, I add 1 T. honey, 2T soy sauce, 2 T oil, 1 clove garlic and any spices. I usually use a curry blend, but dill works nicely, too, and salt and pepper. Put everything in a casserole dish, cover and bake at 350 for about 45 min.. I add carrots and red peppers sometimes. It's a versatile dish and goes well with baked potatoes, rice or flatbread."

I had no idea what to do with yellow lentils and had them around for about 6 months before I made this attempt. They were really very good (and I had very low expectations). I didn't measure anything, but I put in everything she said except the optional veggies. And for the spice I just used a little bit of curry.  I did use 1 and 1/2 c of the lentils and adjust amounts.  But then I had to bake it for at least an hour and a half.

I served it with Rice Vinegar/Garlic/Soy Sauce/Olive Oil marinaded ahi tuna steak with my homemade kefir as a yogurtish topping, sweet potatoes, and broccoli rabe/baby red beet green saute. It was a great meal. Yum.

I MADE CHEESE!!!!

OK, so I used the microwave for one of the steps to play it safe, and I did order a kit by mail, but I did make cheese!  It only took about 20 minutes or so (it's called "30 minute mozzarella," but unbelievably, it really only takes that long).  I didn't even have the thermometer I was supposed to have so I just guessed, and it still worked.  I do appreciate now why cheese is expensive, though.  2/3 of a gallon of milk only made a little under a pound.  It tasted exactly right.  I got my kit at the New England Cheese Making Supply Company (http://www.cheesemaking.com/). 

I was going to put cheesemaking off until after my sourdough and kefir experiments, but I had to make pizza and didn't have enough cheese (because I stopped buying it knowing that I could make it), and this is my brand of lazy and cheap (didn't want to go buy some at the store).

Jesse is POTTYTRAINED! Hurray!

Wow, what a blessing!  We are loving the freedom of Jesse out of diapers.  This is the first time in four years we haven't had to change diapers.  OK, except for the overnight diaper in the morning.  . . . And the diapers of the child I babysit a few days a week.  But still!  Very exciting.  And Jesse is very proud of himself.  He will often shout at me while I'm on the phone (sometimes with a business-related call, which is embarrassing) "POO POO on the POTTY!" so I share his good news with whomever I am speaking.  The boys really enjoy these group bathroom times now, though Jesse's figured out how to join his brother standing at the toilet, which is what they really find entertaining. 

Here's to some great diaper free days!

Weird stuff on the counter (kefir and sourdough!) . . .

My shrouded jars are: 1) the gluten-free starter that is aspiring to be sourdough bread; and 2) kefir, a hippie-type food that basically contains the bacteria and yeasts in yogurt.  I find myself in a strange new (vaguely alarming) world of stirring and sniffing and waiting.  The kefir arrived in several baggies in the mail looking like little curds of cottage cheese in cream.  I put them in milk for 24 hours and--AMAZING!--I got a thin yogurt product by today.  It looks and tastes (and cooked, on our fish tonight) like a thin yogurt.  Yum.  So I read about it that you can thin it and use it like buttermilk in pancakes or strain it and make it into cheese or drink it plain OR you can use it as a booster for a sourdough starter. 

A sourdough starter, just for those who don't know, is a fermenting dough product that makes its own yeast through the fermenting process.  It's harder to do with gluten-free dough, so I read that using a few tablespoons of this yogurt-like kefir can help with the fermentation.  We shall see.  But it did make great yogurt.  And for those who are concerned that the milk product is on the counter, I did put the yogurt in the fridge.  What remains on the counter is my new batch.  When I go away for the weekend and can't swirl or sniff it I will put it all in the fridge.  I am hoping to get to make a decent sourdough loaf of bread before I go away this weekend. 

I read an article (Thank you, Aunt Nancy) about gluten and yeast creating an especially bad combo for our gut health, and how back in the day everyone made sourdough bread and it was so much better for you.  So, here I go, but it's even harder trying to make it gluten-free.  I also feel like adding the kefir stuff just puts me into a whole new camp of weird.  But I am loving it!

I will of course post any success or failure on my first sourdough loaf.  At least the starter doesn't stink, it smells sourdoughish, and it's been on my counter now for a good four days or so, which would have been long enough for it to go bad.  Hopefully this will be more successful than my attempts to make gluten-free beer bread with hard cider.

About that Pizza . . .

That mozzarella, tomato, basil, thin-sliced red onion pizza with olive oil drizzled and parmesan (we used romano) sprinkled on top . . . was some of the BEST pizza I've ever had.  Even accounting for the gluten-free crust.  I have actually discovered that Trader Joe's brown rice tortillas work perfectly as crusts.  I just eat two mini pizzas each time.  Anyway, just didn't want anyone to miss out, you gotta try this recipe.  Hopefully while all the ingredients are still local.

Seasonal Pizza

In my attempt to eat local foods year round (which will of course include my canned and frozen additions in the winter months), I'm instituting Friday pizza day. We're on our third or fourth Friday this weekend. So far we've done summer squash pizza, broccoli pizza with roasted red peppers, and mozzarella with basil and tomato pizza. This one looks similar to that last with the addition of thin sliced red onion. I'm trying it this Friday.

Summer Pizza Recipe Food & Wine

If any locavores are going to try a similar idea this winter, it's a good idea to roast and freeze some peppers while they're in all the farmer's markets in cheap and plentiful quantities right now (an idea, I should add, I got from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle). Rachel Ray showed me how I can roast them right on the gas stove top, just turning them as I go. And then I pit them and throw them in a ziplock in the freezer. I also arranged with a farmer to get a bushel of onions that store all winter, so at least I'll have onion and roasted red pepper and tomato sauce all stored up for my winter pizzas.

Happy pizza eating!!

Healthcare Reform . . . Through Local Produce?

Check this article out! Michael Pollan says that making insurance companies take all patients regardless of health issues or pre-existing conditions could be a radical step toward moving the American diet back toward a vegetable/fruit centered localized base. Wow, I hope he's right.

Op-Ed Contributor - Big Food vs. Big Insurance - NYTimes.com

For those with zucchini to use up . . . or to sneak in . . .

Zucchini Bread

(adapteded from a recipe from Mary Bailey on allrecipes.com)

3 eggs
1 cup applesauce

1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 cups grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cup wheat flour or ground gluten-free grains
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts

1/4 cup wheat germ or flax meal

In a large bowl, combine eggs, oil, sugar, zucchini, and vanilla. Mix well. Add flours, baking powder, soda, salt, wheat germ, and cinnamon; stir to combine. Stir in raisins and nuts, if desired.
Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 1 hour, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

A Bizzarely Healthy Applesauce Breakfast Cake

1 1/2 c oats
1 1/2 c applesauce
1/4 c flour (of any kind, really, I use gluten free blended grains)
2/3 c walnut or pecan pieces
2/3 c raisins
1 egg
(if you like things sweeter you might want to add sugar or honey)

Mix. Put in 8x8 or 8x11 greased baking dish depending on if you want thinner or fluffier cake, sprinkle top with cinnamin, and bake between 350 and 375 degrees for 45 min. to an hour.

It's Freezing!

The freezing of produce has rather taken over all of my free time these days (well, free time and time that should be spent sleeping or cleaning or something besides stirring, slicing, or squishing). Over the last week or so I've frozen:

• spaghetti sauce
• tomato sauce
• diced tomatoes
• sliced peaches
• grated zucchini
• free range chicken and broth

I've also harvested pears off of a neighbor's pear tree (she knew about it, it wasn't in the dark of night). They turned out to be very green and will mostly all have to be thrown away. I'm new to this foraging thing. (Let's not revisit the horse chestnut scenario from last year.)

There has absolutely got to be an easier, lazy version of tomato sauce (than boiling diced tomatoes and squishing them gradually through a collander with a rounded wooden squisher), though Owen pointed out that if I blend it it will no longer be sauce, since the seeds and skins will make it just blended tomatoes. Hmm, well, maybe I'll have to do it again next year, but OH BOY, what a lot of work. It felt very un-modern-American. Micah helped cut up rome tomatoes with a butter knife.

It felt like a bit of a ripoff to spend 5 hours on the spaghetti sauce and only have 10 gallon bags to show for it.

The easiest freezing item was the grated zucchini. Now I have to find some recipes that use grated zucchini.

My broccoli rabe is almost ready (the first of three mini beds to be planted). The rutabaga could be ready soon, who in the world knows. And I planted swiss chard, kale, sugar peas, spinach, brussel sprouts, carrots, red beets, tatsoi, and endive.

I found a possible source for apples (for applesauce) and potatoes and buttercup squash that haven't been sprayed much and possibly a quarter of a grass-fed cow . . . if the Amish woman from the produce stand does actually call me as she said she would. I'm also going to try to get some onions that are dried for longer term storage.

The local eating adventure continues.

Going Local, Going Green, Going Crazy

Young urban homesteader who wants to know how old he has to be before he can buy his own farm

So we're getting a bit more extreme here lately (thank you Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for the inspiration). I froze corn and lima beans for the winter last night and this morning--only 3 small bag of lima beans, I'm still learning to appreciate those guys. Plans are on for my mom to come and help me freeze spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, and diced tomatoes. I'm hoping to freeze some fruit this year, too, but I may be too late to the punch. (When deciding you want to eat all local, mostly from your own land, it's best to reach this conclusion sometime around January. Reaching the conclusion around June, like I did--and after, in some aspects--creates a lot of frantic last minute scrambling.)

My next concerns:

• Finding local grassfed beef
• Making applesauce in the fall, and buying pumpkin to store for winter treats (too late for most storable fruit at this point)
• Making cheese (I found a website to buy supplies and read in the aforementioned extremist book that you can make mozzarella in 30 minutes--wouldn't it be dreamy to be able to to tomato, mozzarella, basil ON YOUR OWN?!)
• Finding where to buy my grapevine, lime tree in a container, and apriocot tree for the fall

A post for the Davis children fans

Just thought some of you might appreciate a picture of the Davis boys following this turtle while we were at the beach the other week.

BLIGHT!!!

My trash can is full of cucumber, cantalope, and zucchini plants--and my one grape tomato plant and sunflower. Bummer. It looks like blight, from what I can deduce from my online research. I don't know, things didn't look so healthy, that's what I do know. Which means I can't even have the satisfaction of composting the vines. I have a feeling my remaining zucchini, cantalope, and tomato plants will meet an early end as well. Serious bummer. On the bright side, this opens up room for the fall planting I meant to do (I got a late start in the spring because I had not yet realized I was going to become a 4 Season Harvest girl--yes, yet another reference to Eliot Coleman--and you have to have your summer crops out of the way by early August if you want to have room for broccoli rabe, rutabagas, red beets, carrots (for overwintering), leeks, spinach, and what have you. So this empty patch (where my cucumber and some cantalopes once grew) will hopefully be a burgeoning plot of broccoli rabe in a few months. I wasn't really prepared for the great loss that an organic farmer can have in a growing season. That cucumber was my joyful companion each time I gazed out my kitchen window. I had such high hopes . . .
Maybe this is my rite of passage.

What's for Dinner?

If anyone cares to find out about what frightening changes have occured in the American food supply in the last 50 years or so, check out this movie. It was truly frightening, but also exciting. The word is getting out about why E-coli is spreading to spinach, why our meat is so unsafe and unhealthy (both related to CAFO--concentrated animal feeding operations--sites dumping tons of animal waste into water supplies and breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria through unhealthy and disgusting practices with cattle and chicken farms), and how immigrants are being treated in an appalling way. And hopefully the result of the information getting out will be similar to the effect of The Jungle when Upton Sinclair wrote it (we need to make the reforms they made then all over again).

The movie was inspiring, though, and not just depressing, because it emphasized the ways that we can make a difference:

• start a vegetable garden (even a small one)
• sit down as a family to eat a homecooked meal
• buy local and organic
• see their webpage for other action steps (http://www.foodincmovie.com/)

Honestly, it was a little bit of preaching to the choir for me--I knew a lot of the information already. I guess the one thing I'll change is that I'll try to start buying organic milk (ouch, expensive).
Anyway, great movie . . . go see it!

Cheap coffee that is Organic, Shade Grown, and Fair Trade!

So I was alarmed to find out at the zoo the other day that coffee growers often cut down the rainforest in order to grow coffee instead of growing the much enviro-friendlier shade grown varieties. The sunny varieties cause hardships to birds (loss of habitat) and require more pesticides than shade grown coffee. I assumed I could not afford shade grown coffee, but at the following website at Amazon I found coffee that is:

• shade grown,


• organic, and


• fair trade . . .

. . . with 48 oz. for only $16.10.
Very exciting! That's cheaper than what I'm paying now at Trader Joe's.

Here's the link:

Organic Camano Island Coffee Roasters Sumatra, Medium Roast, Decaf, Ground, 16-Ounce Bags (Pack of 3): Amazon.com: Grocery

Garden Update

This time of year, it's hard to get good help in the garden. Everybody's working their own land. These two guys are the best I could do. I made them get their hair cut, they looked like a disgrace before. Every farm's gotta have some standards you know.

So I know you've all been waiting to hear about the status of the garden. Well, things have taken an even more serious turn of late, and we (Micah, Jesse, and I--Owen can't decide whether to laugh, or cry depending on what new way I've found to spend money on our garden, he's not really part of the "we" in this case) have decided to become four season gardeners (as in, yes, I've read another book, Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long). I'd like to provide most of the family's food from our little city garden. We're somewhat late to the punch for this year. We should have been growing all manner of winter squash and more substantial foods (I mean, cantalope and cucumbers will be lovely, but probably will not feed us through the winter).

Anyway, in the long term this will mean things like cold frames, trellises, netting, and possibly a root cellar. But in the short term, it means I'm still squeezing in summer crops in July in little spaces in the garden. Fall crops begin in August, so here's hoping summer crops hurry up. I'm not alone, though, I heard this year is late for crops due to rainy cool weather in May. I should really start my crops about a month earlier next year. Some of them, anyway.

Here's the nitty gritty:

Greenbeans- pretty good yield every few days

Cantalopes- no sign of anything bigger than a tiny flower

Chard, Kale- rather lame, so leaves picked

Basil- good

Blueberries- dying?

Cucumbers- one really big plant, lots of tiny ones so far

Zucchini- four or five tiny ones, plants look healthy

Lettuce- a few big salads worth

Broccoli rabe- two good pickings late May

Strawberries- a few here and there

The Clean 15 & The New 2009 Dirty Dozen

Here's an updated list on what you don't have to buy organic--and what you should buy organic. Anyway, just giving the update in case it's helpful to anyone. The list has changed this year.

Save Money On Organic Fruits And Vegetables - Low Pesticide Foods - thedailygreen.com