I’ve been offline with travel and looking forward to getting back in the saddle. Speaking of saddles, I discovered a great community of urban farmers in Dallas, TX. I would not have thought it but it turns out Dallas has fairly permissive laws for keeping livestock within the city. As such, backyard chicken fever is hot in Dallas. Finding myself there for the holidays, I thought I’d make good use of my time. I noticed an announcement in a local rag for a chicken sale event at the North Haven Gardens. Apparently, a neighboring farmer comes out with a trailer full o’ chickens of various ages to sell. Thusly, we met Dan from Bageniece Farms. I was surprised at the fair price, a laying hen for $20! Far cry from the crazy $40 I’ve seen around my neck of the woods.

I’ve heard from family that growing food in Dallas is tough because it gets so hot. However, I found a great book that lists the best varieties to plant and during which months: Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening by J. Howard Garrett and C. Malcolm Beck. North Haven had the right idea as a garden store. They have these sale events, they offer classes on city farming, they carry garden and food equipment and feed. I spotted gorgeous hand forged tools for very reasonable prices, ~$26 for a pitchfork.

The organic feed from Coyote Creek Mill was the most expensive I’ve ever seen though, $50 for a 50lb bag. The feed mill carries chicken, rabbit and goat feed though, all organic. That’s something of a surprise. I also met insanely nice people to talk to (one thing about the south is that people can talk to one another without pretense or inflated self regard). I got pointed in the direction of some helpful community resources, a Backyard Chicken group, a food co-op in South Dallas called Urban Acre, and some active community gardens, East Dallas Community Garden and Promise of Peace Garden.  Even in conservative Dallas there are some promising urban agricultural communities!

I’ve written before about how I am learning more about my family history. Along with that, I am learning so much more indepth about our customs culturally. One of these include the Catholic holiday Feast of Our Virgin of Guadalupe. The feast of our Virgin de Guadalupe kicks off the holiday season. So when I went for a run around Lake Merritt and ran into a process hundreds deep and saw this…

I knew I had just luckily stumbled upon the Procession for Our Lady. The procession is typically on December 12h (though Oakland was a week early). Each float was topped with a rendition of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and surrounded by a congregation representing a unique region and cultural facet of Mexico. Some groups were in Aztec dress with rattles and copal, drumming sacred rhythms along the lake. Others were in jeans, cowboy hats and boots playing guitars and singing mañanitas. I took in many colors, plaited hair, gorgeous huipil blouses, much beauty and cultural richness.

I followed the procession to its end point which turned out to be the huge modern cathedral on the lake, The Cathedral of Christ the Light. At that point, I was not prepared to enter the church in my running clothes (besides the procession was a week early) so I ran home.

On the actual day of the Feast of Our Lady Guadalupe, the procession is followed by a typical Mexican meal (items depend on the region you are from). While there are no specific foods for symbolism on this day, there are some appropriate for December. These include Biscochitos and a steamy cup of Mexican hot chocolate.

Biscochitos (Mexican Christmas Cookies)
1 cup butter
2/3 cup sugar
1 egg
2 Tbsp red wine, brandy or sherry
1 tsp crushed anise seed
3 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder (optional)
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
1/2 cup sugar mixed w/ 1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350F

Beat butter until light and fluffy.  Mix in the 2/3 cup sugar, then the egg. Beat in 2 Tbsp wine/sherry and anise seed.  Stir in flour (and salt baking powder if using), adding more wine as needed to form a soft dough.  Let stand for 10 minutes. On a lightly floured surface, roll out 1/4 inch thick and cut into shapes as desired (fleur-de-lis is common shape).  Dip the top side of each cookie in the cinnamon-sugar and place on ungreased cookie sheets.  Bake for 10 or until slightly browned.

Mexican Hot Chocolate

For this, I just use two tabs of chocolate from either Ibarra or Abuela chocolate (you can find in most stores) per cup of milk. I heat the milk then pour it in a blender, place the chocolate tabs in and blend until nice and frothy. You can also add a pinch of red chili powder for an authentic kick.

Its not too late to support Farm Food Connect!

I got an email Tuesday morning from my friend David, inviting me to a wild boar dinner (awesome and tasty). Natch, I was there! I walked into a bustle of activity, a carcass being carried in, hack sawing, cooking, and hides. I was handed a container of salt by an arm extending out of the crowd of people and pointed in the direction of a rabbit hide and a boar hide. Proud of my primitive skills, I went outside, snapped a couple soft branches from a tree and set to work on the rabbit. Easy.

The boar hide however was another story. With little time left in the evening, I shuttled the hide the next morning to its (proud?) new owner, Juan Carlos.

A boar hide is a large undertaking that requires more than a few twigs off a tree. Boars have thick pads of greasy fat lining their skin which you need to remove. I have done a sheep hide before. For that we used only a table, wood ash and salt. For this we needed salt, a piece of rounded timber, legs on which to lean the timber, a frame on which to stretch the skin and proper de-fleshing tools, and some hands on experience with wild boar hides would have been great:

What we had was a card table in a garage, an old shelf, a long  handled ladle, some knives and a few hours.

We did a great job of extracting the skull with no damage to the hide or skull. Juan Carlos made his best effort to find alternatives to the required tools to attempt the job.  I should mention, Juan Carlos is a vegetarian that specifically requested the hide in order to honor the whole animal.

After five hours of smearing fat along the hide and slicing pieces of quarter inch thick of fat off the skin, we decided to focus our efforts on the easiest section, the hind quarters. The midsection and toward the shoulders was going to be impossible. So we moved the hide to the card table and cut the section off. That was when we noticed the hide was covered…no, COVERED, in ticks. Each time a grabbed I piece of skin to pull it taut for some procedure, I could feel their hard exoskeletons in my hand. This led to the creepy psychological thing of feeling like they are crawling all over you, biting you, burrowing into you. At one point, slightly laughing at my own uncontrollable reaction, I made Juan Carlos check behind my ear. To which he replied “oh…Esperanza. Its a tick.” A quick pluck from behind my ear and he revealed a humongous brain eating tick between his fingers.

In order to spare my friend the scene of me freaking out, I had to excuse myself a moment to walk outside, breath, assess. Once back in, we looked at the number of hours into the project, the hours ahead of us, the poor tools at hand, and the fact that we both took unplanned time out of our busy schedules to try to make this happen (the raw hide was an unexpected gift). Neither of us could come back to it the next day. We also had to consider that there were hundred of live ticks dropping off of it. The ticks tipped the scale. We cleared out the garage and sadly discarded the hide. We quickly pulled the outer layers of clothes off to wash them in hot water (and dynamite them if we needed to) and did a quick tick check like a couple of monkeys. We found live ticks crawling around the clothes and shoes. Grossgrossgross.

All in all, it was a great lesson that only hands on experience can tease out. I now need to find a seasoned tanner familiar with pig skins to find out better ways to remove the fat and how the hell you get the ticks off before handling the hide. I am inspired to craft the tools I need to do a quick and efficient job at fleshing such a tough hide. I hope to be ready next time. I also hope that the feeling of bugs crawling on me goes away soon.

See Shareable Magazine for a write up on my Kickstarter project, Farm Food Connect, as well as four other noteworthy projects. Awesome enough for what they do, Shareable rocks that much more for spreading the word about Farm Food Connect! Thanks guys!

New favorite website: Zero Hedge, jesters, good writing and skeptical analysis of financial institutions. Some might ask why this is on Pluck & Feather? The conversation on how to transform the food system is not possible without considering new economic models. Big ag practices driven by high profits but poor sustainability has undermined the nations access to healthy fresh food and damaged the environment. A published four year U.S. study demonstrated a 30% in fresh food prices.*

Its time for change. The questions is what will that change look like and how will be done?

Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.

*Monsivais, P., Mclain, J., and Drewnowski, A. 2010. The rising disparity in the price of healthful foods: 2004-2008. Food Policy.

A video compilation of some thoughts related to food sovereignty and the economy:

Don’t forget to let others know I am still raising funds for Farm Food Connect on Kickstarter!

Saw this video on Shareable and thought it was great. I also recently heard Michael Mandel from Visible Economy talk about how spending over the holiday season is not such a great thing if our dollars are going out of the community. While most of have less to spend this holiday season, it does make sense to circulate this support within our own community. That in mind, you must check out Rentalic, Inc. It is an excellent site where you can rent your own tools (or find tools to rent). No excuses for not gardening now! Between the amazing tool lending libraries across the nation and this resources, you should be able to cut costs significantly for supplies. If you have any specialized urban farming equipment that you only use a couple times a year, you can make more use of it!

Tis the Season. Happy Holidays!