Sending some love to the Food Security Academy in New Orleans! They are the only food security academy in the nation. They currently employ 30 local teenagers to grow food and learn about the food system. Through meaningful employment and critical thinking skills, they are becoming leaders capable of reinvigorating their neighborhoods. They’ve been offered 2 acres for expansion across the street, which means more jobs, more beauty, and more fresh food for families, but they need to raise the money for seeds, soil, and hoop houses. Lets support them and help get the word out! Also, watch the video to the end, its so worth it.

Just read a great little article in New York Times about how to use as much of the plants we eat as possible (rather than throw away tops, leaves, stalks). My mother-in-law will like this article. Below is their quick list of typical parts we trash and culinary uses for them:

CARROT, CELERY AND FENNEL LEAVES Mix small amounts, finely chopped, with parsley as a garnish or in salsa verde: all are in the Umbelliferae family of plants. Taste for bitterness when deciding how much to use.

CHARD OR COLLARD RIBS Simmer the thick stalks in white wine and water with a scrap of lemon peel until tender, then drain and dress with olive oil and coarse salt. Or bake them with cream, stock or both, under a blanket of cheese and buttery crumbs, for a gratin.

CITRUS PEEL Organic thin-skinned peels of tangerines or satsumas can be oven-dried at 200 degrees, then stored to season stews or tomato sauces.

CORN COBS Once the kernels are cut off, simmer the stripped cobs with onions and carrots for a simple stock. Or add them to the broth for corn or clam chowder.

MELON RINDS Cut off the hard outer peels and use crunchy rinds in place of cucumber in salads and cold soups.

PEACH LEAVES Steep in red wine, sugar and Cognac to make a summery peach-bomb aperitif. (According to David Lebovitz’s recipe, the French serve it on ice.)

POTATO PEELS Deep-fry large pieces of peel in 350-degree oil and sprinkle with salt and paprika. This works best with starchy potatoes like russets.

YOUNG ONION TOPS Wash well, coarsely chop and cook briefly in creamy soups or stews, or mix into hot mashed potatoes.

TOMATO LEAVES AND STEMS Steep for 10 minutes in hot soup or tomato sauces to add a pungent garden-scented depth of tomato flavor. Discard leaves after steeping.

TOMATO SCRAPS Place in a sieve set over a bowl, salt well and collect the pale red juices for use in gazpacho, Bloody Marys or risotto.

TURNIP, CAULIFLOWER OR RADISH LEAVES Braise in the same way as (or along with) collards, chards, mustard greens or kale.

WATERMELON SEEDS Roast and salt like pumpkin seeds.

The Perennial Plate Episode 63: Three Farms, One Dinner from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

The folks over at Perennial Plate rock the shit out of a camera and great food stories. They are exploring food and culture in its many manifestations. Thanks for stopping by Daniel, Mirra and Samin!!

If anyone is ever looking for a unique dinner out in SF, check out Tartine Afterhours (you’ll have to call them to find out when it is).

For those of you that read this blog and have also not tried your hand at cheese for fear of failure. I hope this post lends some courage. Its been a very busy time for me and my milk bank was overflowing. so I decided to make a fairly simple Mild Goat Feta. The recipe is a process that can take about a day and a half.

The recipe reads:

1 gal of goat milk                           1/2 tsp Liquid rennet

1/4 c. culture or buttermilk          1/4 c cool water

non-iodized coarse salt

Warm milk to 86F. Add 1/4 c. cheese culture or buttermilk and stir well. Let milk set for 1 hour to ripen. Add 1/2 tsp liquid rennet to 1/4 c cool water, add to milk. Stir gently for 1 minute. Cover and allow to rest for another hour.

Cut curds into 1/2″ cubes. Allow cheese to rest for ~5 minutes. Stir gently for 15 minutes, keeping curds at 86F. Pour curds in colander lined with cheese cloth. Tie bag of curds and hang to drain 4-6 hours.

Slice curd ball in half. Sprinkle hunks of cheese with ~4-5 tablespoons of coarse salt. Place slices in dish, cover and let stand at room temp for 24 hours.

After 24 hours, salt all surfaces again, let rest at room temp. for 2 more hours. Place cheese in a covered container, place in fridge and allow to age 5-7 days. Use within 2 weeks or wrap and freeze.

What I actually did:

Placed 1.5 gallon of milk in pot. Put 3/8 tsp rennet in 1/4 water. Went looking for culture. Could not find (was jammed in back of freezer). Full of doubt, grabbed buttermilk from the fridge. Checked milk temp. Damn, it had gone to 90. Shit. Too bad. I wasn’t about to waste it. Put measured (1/2 more ratio) cold buttermilk in milk. Forgot to put rennet it. Took off for three hours to an appointment. Came back realized mistake. Added rennet. Stirred for 30 seconds. Let sit 1 hour.

Cut curds. Rested 5 minutes (myself, not the cheese). Forgot about the stir part. Poured curds into lined colander. Due to time back up, the required 4-6 hours would have me getting up somewhere in the middle of the night, yeeeah no. I left it overnight (so like 12 hours).

Next morning, I sliced it and did the salting thing and left it again for 24 hours. Then did the second salting thing though I was not so generous with the salt.

I tasted it, it was creamy feta-y and delightful. This is apparently a forgiving recipe.

I clean out debris from my chicken coop daily. I also clean out used bedding weekly to ever other week. At the same frequency I clear out debris/straw on the run floor and place in my home compost pile and layers of straw and manure. This leaves loose dirt for my flock to scratch and forage in. After all these years keeping my coop, it is interesting to see what items present challenges to clean.
 
For example, I have a branch that’s been in my chicken coop for several years. Its not where they roost but they use it to hop up to the roost. I have always cleaned off deposits and any other build up on the branch but I noticed recently that it smells differently- more musky the way a vivarium does. The Problem= the smell is coming from the development of bacteria. The Solution = depending on the type of bacteria it can be eliminated by using either an alkaline or an acidic solution. For alkaline use a bleach solution, for acidic use cider vinegar. To know which to use you have to just do it.
 

My hens are having a literal field day running around in the garden while this gets done and the fumes evaporate. Lucky them!
 

Several days later: I did the solution of bleach and water and it totally worked!

I was thinking of writing a post about why I eat meat but you know, I eat meat because that is my choice. I tried a vegan diet for a year, I tried a vegetarian diet for two. What feels best for my body and mind is to eat mostly plants, then eggs, dairy products, and small infrequent portions of meat. I also love exploring regional cuisine of Mexico with meat I have raised, processed and cooked. It is a respectful tribute to the animal and my heritage. It is one of the most natural and sacred cycles in my daily life.

The question I’d rather have answered is why do others, who choose not to eat meat, feel they should proselytize?

It is my philosophy that if you provide people with a choice and respectful, compassionate dialogue they will choose what is right for them- and that may change. Point is, people make true change when they have free will. Not when they are being forced. I do not disparage people for their food choices. That would alienate me from my own family. Instead, I provide a choice, share with love and enjoyment and let them choose. It has created loving dialogue and change.

I am all about the freedom to choose your path. In fact, I recently enjoyed a tasty lunch at Flacos a vegan taqueria in Berkeley, CA. Tuesdays they offer $1 flautas with a face melting hot sauce (love it). Ironically, I feel guilty when I eat these flautas. They are made of highly processed nonorganic soy product that’s been shipped from Taiwan (I know the vendor they get it from) AND deep fried. This is an example of food that is neither environmentally appropriate or healthy but still vegan. This got me thinking about the injustice of being attacked for my food choices and the irony of forceful tactics employed by people who claim to be the most righteous and compassionate for their own politics around animals.

I’m reading Hal Herzog’s book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. It offers a well documented, credible and insightful perspective on human animal relationships. He has included a section on some of the violence of the animal rights movement.

World history offers a vivid example of a world leader that was a vegetarian and an avid animals right activist who also believed their own moral and ethical beliefs should be integrated into their society, at all costs. He believed other cultural practices to be a defect of human nature.

This was of course Adolf Hitler. A fact of history carefully documented by professor, author and researcher Boria Sax in his book, Animals in the Third Reich.

It is little known that in 1933, the German government enacted the world’s most comprehensive animal protection legislation. Among other things the law forbade any unnecessary harm to animals, banned the inhumane treatment of animals in production of movies, and outlawed the use of dogs in hunting. It banned docking the tails and ears of dogs without anesthesia, the force feeding of fowl, and the inhumane killing of farm animals. Adolf Hitler signed the legislation on November, 24th 1933. On a 1933 radio show, Hermann Goring announced that he would “commit to concentration camps those who think they can continue to treat animals as property.” In 1936, the German government dictated that fish had to be anesthetized before slaughter and that lobsters in restaurants had to be killed swiftly.  In 1942, Jews were forbidden to keep pets (excerpt taken from Some We Love, Some We Hate Some We Eat).

The vegan activists who attack, invalidate, and work to eliminate the cultural practices of others may want to reflect on this.

Wholefoods is branching out and getting involved in urban agriculture. They are doing an educational series of web shorts featuring small farm and urban farm projects. The series is called Grow and its part of the Thrive campaign. I had the fortune to work with their awesome crew. I was nervous about what the content would be. It is after all a big corporation but the people working on Thrive created a beautiful and respectful depiction of my personal story in creating Pluck & Feather. I was so touched by the way they incorporated my hubby and my father-in-law. I am looking forward to seeing the other stories they produce.

Thanks guys! Great job.

Evil Coca cola claiming that their soda pop is good for babies!! Golly, and to think that back then some folks may have believed this. Which bring me to an interesting point about nutrition. There are gobs and gobs of information on nutrition and health. So much that it seems impossible to get a straight answer. Years ago I worked for a amazing nonprofit that focuses on the environmental links to breast cancer. My role there included research and education on exposures to cancer causing chemicals. I was reading research on nutrition and environmental exposures through food. This was a frightening time. The truth of the matter is that there is conflicting evidence and that more than anything the level of industrialization in our food system, the over reliance on only certain food sources- wheat, soy, corn, meat, and the chemical cocktails we are swimming in from ALL KINDS of environmental exposures to industrial chemicals is the main problem. Add to this overeating and a lack of exercise and you have got yourself a deadly problem.

I am thinking about this quite a bit as Oakland based vegans try to convince the city that it should all be vegan. Without going (yet again) into my own position about this, I will say a recent interview I read quoted “One of the problems with both the meat eating world AND the vegan world is that they don’t want to hear any science that they don’t agree with.” This seems a sagely statement. The position of animal products versus no animal products as a solution to health is a short sighted black and white argument. You can find evidence of raw food eaters losing their teeth from poor nutrition or heavy meat eaters with high rates colon cancer. You can find information to back almost any claim you want to make. Example: I know a vegetarian family who via doctor’s orders had to quite feeding their young daughter soy products because the heavy exposure to phytoestrogens what 1) causing premature reproductive development 2) putting her at greater risk of reproductive cancers because of it. Does this mean soy is evil in a diet- especially when you account for the agribusiness practices of producing it?

This was strong in my own thoughts as I read book after book. I felt overwhelmed and hopeless. Then one day I attended a seminar by a toxicologist focused on nutrition. She said she sees patients day after day that want to know the secret to the healthiest diet. From the evidence of exposures and nutrition, she believed we should not rely on any one source of food but rather eat little bits of everything in a balanced way- mostly plants. It was at that time I decided that looking to traditional food heritage was a possible answer. Basically, relearn how to eat in a wholesome way without fancy processed substitutes (sentiments echoed my writer Michael Pollan years later). Many of us, whether we know our cultural history or not, come from people who knew how to grow and raise their food and prepare it in a healthy way. Unhealthy diets came with the industrialization of food- its a recent phenomenon.

So while I will continue to read research and perspectives like The China Study (which I made a commitment to read and will), I feel certain that the wholesome foods that my grandmothers made will be how I nourish my body and my soul.

The above image is an orchid that some nongardening ladies chopped to pieces. When I wanted to keep the remaining roots, they said “Sorry to say, Esperanza but that’s a gonner.” Well ladies, get to know your plants. Plants can teach you about survival,

patience

healing

nourishment

and beauty.

I’ve been listening to a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts discussion called New Traditions in Bay Area Food Culture. Fascinating. The discussion featured Novella Carpenter, Terry Bryant, and Leif Hedendal- all active, articulate and cultural renegades.

Leif spoke of an amazing art and food project called Conflict Kitchen which is a pop up food vendor that provides meals from countries that the U.S. is in conflict with. For example, they created “Bolani Pazi” an Afghan take-out restaurant serving savory homemade Afghan bolani (turnovers). The bolani come packaged in a custom-designed wrapper that includes interviews with Afghans both in Afghanistan and the United States on subjects ranging from Afghan food and culture to the current geopolitical turmoil.

F*cking brilliant.

Urban farming has landed me in the midst of debates regarding food and culture and who defines what. With so much focus on food has come conflict in politics and ethics. For instance, the debate about which animals are considered food animals and which are considered “pets.” This is a very grey area. Can we treat food producing animals so well as to be considered “pets” and also eat their products, and them? Who defines a pet? Who defines food culture? Who defines compassion?

Look for example at rabbits.

While there is no doubt that it is part of my own ethnic tradition, is it part of American tradition?

As I mentioned in a previous post on the long standing culinary tradition of eating rabbit, many people from around the world eat rabbit, including Americans. Apparently we eat anywhere between 2.4* to 8 million rabbits each year (two sources claimed different frequencies). Once source claimed there were 200,000 rabbit producers in the United States. Also, let me remind you, the breed of rabbit I keep is called an “American Rabbit.” This domestic breed was developed as a food source in the United States in 1918.

However, some folks disagree, like the director at the Mill Valley based Save a Bunny, who is quoted saying “In our culture, they’re companion animals.” But in whose culture?

Rabbit can be easily obtained from butchers. You can also order prepared rabbit at many American restaurants- the kind that define and uphold culinary culture.

So if “our culture” doesn’t eat rabbit, I think New Yorkers, San Franciscans, and Los Angelelians alike have not gotten that memo. It appears that whether you look to America’s rural communities or to its city dwellers, north, south, east and west- rabbit is a part of American culture.

*USDA APHIA, “U.S. Rabbit Industry Profile”, June 2002, pp.8,18, http://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/ceah/cei/bi/emergingmarketcondition_files/RabbitReport1.pdf.