So Many Beautiful Men, So Little Time...

So this has nothing to do with food, farming or even my life actually but every single media outlet I enjoy (and they are not all websites built around fart jokes, I swear) is going nuts over Twilight the existence of which I was not aware of until about a month ago. Whoa out of touch with nerdy fantasy porn, what?? I have to say it's piqued my curiosity. I'm a little jealous that I'm no longer a tweenager with a pretty boy to swoon over, Mr. Pattinson...then I remember I've already experienced the as good as it gets vampire fantasy.

I want to share with everyone, because we all deserve to see it once more before time completely ravishes the memory, the beauty and awesomeness of James Marsters as Punk era Spike:


That is what I am talking about. Again:


Nice. And how bout that Hugh Laurie, huh?


Ah, men on TV. Without them what would emotionally stunted women do?

Forking and Groveling OR Don't Fear the Potato

Oh, Potatoes! Potatoes! Say it loud and there's music playing, say it soft and it's almost like praying...

Dear Reader, I would like to relate a short anecdote about a dish I made. In this dish were the following ingredients: quinoa, kale, tomatoes, onions, some olive oil, and little bitty pieces of potatoes. It sounds simple but it is out of control delicious. I made a bunch, ate some, put the rest in a bowl for the next morning.

Next Morning: Open the fridge. My beautiful bowl of food which I so lovingly prepared has been decimated. Kale: Gone. Onion: Gone. Tomato: Gone. Little Quinoa Sprouts: Gone. All that linger are the potato bits, clustered together at the bottom, shell shocked by the ravaging of their cohorts. Perhaps tormented by the guilt of survival.

Of course I experienced the usual rage that comes with finding your roommate has eaten sustenance you set aside for yourself. Of course! But the insult to the injury was leaving the potatoes behind, like they were something tainted and wrong. So agonizingly wasteful. Since that day I have been determined to spread this life changing message: DON'T FEAR THE POTATO!!!

Potatoes do not make you fat. Bread does not make you fat. Pasta does not make you fat. A constant buffet of these things with no vegetables, lots of sugar, and mostly fried WILL make you fat. But as a part of a balanced diet-a small component of a dish with many healthy ingredients like kale, quinoa, onions, tomatoes for instance-they can be quite good for you. Potatoes thicken soups. Absorb flavor. Chock full of vitamins. Easy to store. What I'm trying to say is stop ruining my cooking.

Since I have friends and apparently roommates who have no interest in potatoes it's hard to find a place to talk about my love. Which is why blogs are great. I can just get it out there! An alternative to blogging is farming and Frosty Morning Farms grows lots and lots of potatoes. When I was first there the potato plants were all leafy and tantalizing. I kept insinuating we should just rip them right out of the ground now and I'd make some soup. But no, there were still flowers on there, still secret rooty things happening underground and the only things I could do in the potato patch was weed or squash potato bugs. WITH MY HAND. THEIR INSIDES ARE ORANGE.

After days of coming back covered in dirt and bug juice with nothing to show for it I had begun to resent those plants a bit. When I revisited the farm in September I was hoping to even the score, pull them up and mash them good. What I saw was shocking. Those proud plants had fallen, limp and brown to the ground. Around them the weeds had taken over (yay, more weeding!) and it was hard to tell where the rows had been.

If, like me, you've never harvested potatoes you probably have visions of pulling up a plant with lots of nodules just hanging off it waiting to be plucked. Or you have no idea where potatoes come from and don't really care but I'm about to tell you anyway, so suck it. Basically the potatoes are taken out through a process Allison called Forking and Groveling. If you're lucky enough to have two people to share the work, one will use a pitchfork to gently loosen the earth while the other (kneeling on the ground) runs their hands through the soil trying to differentiate the potatoes from lumps of earth or rocks. You have to be careful not to make two many cracks in the soil ahead of where you're groveling because the best place to store the taters till you need them is in the earth unless you're prepared to lug bushels to the root cellar. And cracks let in sunlight. Which ruins them! Don't eat a green potato, it has been exposed to the sun and is not good for you. If it has little eyes though, it's fine.

SO that's the boring story. I asked Allison if the word groveling came from the way potatoes are picked, grovel=down in the dirt at someone's feet, but when we did a bit of a search there was no indication of where the expression came from. We all grovel sometimes without knowing why, I guess...

My back broken from alternately forking and groveling we carried loads of fingerlings and yellow potatoes back to the farmhouse to be washed and sorted by size. There were also a few Magic Molly's, an 'experimental' (F.M.F. sometimes runs tests on new plants to see how they do organically and what kind of tastiness they produce) potato that comes in a deep beautiful purple. I snuck some in a bag and plan to plant them this spring and fork and grovel on my own. That night I made an amazing potato, carrot and celery soup with goat yogurt to make it creamy and full of all the dried spices Allison grows around the house. Yay!

Usually I try to tie in my mundanities with some pretentious conclusion I've drawn about life into an annoying package. This, however, is a simple message coming from a heartfelt place. Don't fear the potato. It's more afraid of you than you are of it...that's why it's hiding underground.



P.S. Fun fact. In upstate New York they have a dish called simply Salt Potatoes. The area used to have many salt mines and the workers would throw their potatoes into the vats of boiling salt then fish 'em out and chow down. Nowadays the tiny round taters featured above sell at a higher price to make this 'delicacy'. Funny how time makes all things for the rich. Except being poor.

Is There No Love More Sincere Than the Love of Food?

On Saturday, the Lord's favorite party day, I went over to the Red Hook Harvest Festival with my pal Ray who took a series of crappy phone photos of me posing with hot cider and desperately clutching a copy of Edible Brooklyn. I now regret not bringing a real camera but will try my best to illustrate all my important points through these images.


First of all, wow. I've never been to see the Red Hook farm though I've touted their organizers, Added Value. Added Value works in Red Hook on community programs that clean up parks, teach leadership, good nutrition, provide access to healthy affordable food and build urban farms, like the one in front of Ikea. That's right, there's an Ikea next door if you weren't sold before. I went without even knowing about the Ikea so just imagine my delight. In fact I had so little knowledge about where I was going or why that Ray and I wandered around for almost forty minutes before by the grace of an unseen force (Ikea?) we stumbled across the festival grounds.

Now I don't know what I was expecting but those expectations must have been low because I was pretty blown away by what from most perspectives was a less than breathtaking affair (Ray's perspective). First of all, they had the South Bronx bee man there, Roger Repohl giving a demo on the ways of the bees and violently disputing the lies promoted by Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie to the little children all around. Having seen a few demos of honey harvesting and bee hypnotizing I opted out but came back later for a tasting. Can I just say Wow! And Whoa! Roger harvests a few times a year, through summer to late fall, and every batch has a different color and flavor. Most larger distributors just mix all their honey in one big pot so they can get a consistent product. No generic sweetness here, each bottle contained a separate and unique bouquet of aroma and sensation. It's times like these that I wish I had a more colorful food vocabulary... particularly considering my supposed investment in food. Hmm. Let us just say they were fruity and burst across the palate with an amber fist of nostril flaring-eh, forget it. Let us just say instead that I spent my last six dollars on a bottle, six dollars that may break the bank for rent this month. THAT'S how good it is.


I wasn't going to go on and on about honey again but in that issue of Edible Brooklyn I'm clutching there happens to be an article about urban beekeeping and how New York is one of the few cities that outlaws it. It's pretty interesting and I think once I have enough start up capital (never) I may flaunt the law and my landlord and start up a hive of my own. Their fall issue isn't up yet or I'd link to it, but it is really interesting and can be picked up around town or you can check in later this month here.

Also Roger has a blog that seems to be largely about politics, oddly, and I haven't really reviewed his opinions...but he has a few funny articles about bees too.

There were a lot of vendors around but since I had a budget of eight dollars and spent six on honey my choices were limited. A dollar for cider and a dollar for a raffle ticket-fingers crossed I'll win that vintage bike! Amongst the people selling edible fall goodies were various organizations handing out information and free swag. Big ups to Heifer International for bringing loads of colorful lapel buttons featuring such classic slogans as 'Go Goat' and 'Bee Sweet'. Raymond took so many I was embarrassed to continue the button-glutton, but did manage to snag those two. Because I can get behind Goats and Bees, for realz. We weren't alone in our attraction to shiny colorful objects- a local step dancing troupe outfitted in fringed tie dye (hurray for classics again) had clearly stopped by the table before their performance. Maybe they'll look up what Heifer Int'l is when they get home...


There were also representatives from Compostville, or The New York City Compost Project. I don't want to belittle what they do or say that their table was anything but covered in pamphlets and helpful info on how to compost, but the guy I talked too seemed completely baffled by all my questions regarding my compost bin, which right now is just a garbage can full of rotten food.

"But, that's what compost is...", He said, smiling uncertainly.

"Yes, but it's almost full!! What do I do?"

Pointing at pictures from the pamphlets of what my bin looks like and reiterating that it's almost full had no effect. Luckily there's a compost helpline (Seriously): 718-817-8543. I haven't called it but may this weekend as my roommate and I have vowed to do something about the compost situation. Stay tuned for further reporting...Anyhow he loaded me down with booklets and magnets and sent me away to bother someone else.

The farm itself, which I realize still hasn't been described aside from being blessed by Ikea as a neighbor, sits on a piece of land that looks like it was once a park or playground surrounded by chain linked fence and rowed all across with hay and beds and its own tall compost pile. They have a greenhouse and a few chickens, plus a demo hut which in addition to the Bee Man also featured a canning/jarring how to. There was a even a pumpkin patch in the back filled with parents and shrieking children and some sadly crushed pumpkins. Better than sadly crushed children. Am I right?

The pumpkin patch encapsulated the urban farm for me. It was kind of crazy in there, full of diverse families crushing pumpkins...actually I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I mean to say that we think of farming and nature as being exclusively for rural parts of the country, and it's true that when you take farming to an urban setting it's not as picturesque as we like. But it is lively and inclusive and brings people together.


This image is beautiful. I may get a carrot-pierced heart tattooed on my chest.

After all that fresh air and love of nature we walked to Fairway and ate all the samples. I call it Urban Foraging. Here's another link to Added Value. They're great. Did I mention they have a farm next to Ikea? (I really couldn't care less about Ikea)

Red Barn, Blue Roof

So something I've been doing since getting back from the farms is eating red meat. I never really did before except out of curiosity and for a while after giving up factory farmed chicken I was pretty much a vegetarian, being too lazy to cook meat for myself. Much better to subsist on pasta and potato chips, right?

In a way I respect vegetarians (I'm stealing off Micheal Pollan right now, I'm sure he doesn't mind because we have a deep soulful connection) because they consider what they eat and what the ramifications of their food choices are on something other than themselves. There are probably vegetarians out there who do it purely for health/beauty reasons but mostly they're sad about the wittle animals (Gross Generalization Alert!) I'm constantly on the fence about this because I wuv animals myself, but there are lots of places in the world where raising meat for food makes a lot more sense than any other kind of farm production.

Okay, but I live in America, land of plenty where I can have food shipped to me all year round that no animals were murdered to produce. Well, what is all the shipping and out of season vegetable/fruit eating doing to the planet at large? Who's exporting their own produce to me? What's the cost of the fuel to our environment? What went into this veggie/fruit production in pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers? If I'm eating processed grains what kind of energy did that take and what about all those poor little mice in the threshers? And the birds?? And the manatees! God, think of the manatees!!!!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my priority is ultimately with people (I've noticed lately I use the word ultimately a lot). The only reason I give two toots about the planet is because without a planet there are no people. The food choices you make today influence the environment of the future and eating meat under the right circumstances can be the better environmental choice.

Aside from that, grass fed beef if quite tasty. It begins to quench my thirst for blood....blood...

This summer after reading about how horrible corn fed beef was for the environment and how depressingly cruel people are to cattle just to get those McD hamburgers ground out I was pretty curious about these other cows living so dreamily off GRASS/CRAZINESS. So I visited a grass fed beef farm. I've told several people this story and each time it was met with a resounding Meh. Why is it so exciting to me that I went to a place where a bunch of cows are standing around chewing cud?


Well, since I decided not to eat meat without knowing where it came from, actually seeing a place where the meat is being raised is kind of a big deal-I could see how they were living and decide if I was okay with it or not instead of just accepting that grass fed is better, the way I accept organic is better though a lot of places are organic through loop holes rather than practical application.

Also farms are cool. Obviously.

We were greeted at the barn by Veronica, a very small Korean woman with a grip like a vise. She and her husband run the place with their son, raising and selling both sheep and cattle. We drove out to the fields to see the cows. NY state has great clay-ey earth for growing hay (though that makes it challenging for other kinds of produce without a lot of mulching etc.) so Veronica grows all her own hay for the winter months. The rest of the time the cows move from one pasture to another and as their designation implies, eat grass.


We stood on the side of the road and watched them chewing. They watched us back, tearing up the grass and occasionally lowing for attention. They started to wander closer and Veronica yelled, "No, it's not time yet! You stay there!" at which they mooed. As I looked one of the black Angus lifted its head and a stream of mucus drained from its nose. Gross. I asked Veronica if they give the cows antibiotics and she laughed. They don't need it, cows get sick when they're kept in close quarters and force fed corn, which isn't easily processed by their delicately evolved stomachs. So I guess mucus is normal?

After we got bored of staring at the cows and them staring at us we went back to the farm house which was a whole other menagerie. There were half a dozen dogs, a couple sheep, like twenty goats and a gaggle of black (?) ducks wandering the premises without the benefit of a fence between them.

There were chickens somewhere too as evidenced by the somewhat comical bucket of eggs in their foyer.



Dani, my WWOOF hostess who arranged this lovely visit, bought a bunch of beef and helped Veronica brainstorm ideas for self promotion. Dani loves the business aspect of her organic farm, PR I guess you could say. Veronica has a lot of beef and a lot more coming (though grass fed cattle have longer life spans than corn fed generally, about two years before heading to the slaughterhouse as opposed to seven or eight months). Despite this she seemed pretty lackadaisacal (sp?) about the whole thing, casually eating blueberries as she talked about maybe starting a web site or putting up signs along the road. I weirdly admire the kind of impracticality that resists outside influence but I could see Dani getting worked up about how little action the beef farm was taking to sell itself. Finally we left with our beef and that night Dani cooked it up.

My god. It was a revelation.

So here's this amazing web site about how factory farming is affecting the environment, the water we drink, our health. There are a few pictures of CAFOs but it isn't one of those sites that just throws how the animals are suffering in your face. It's pretty easy to distance oneself from the wittle animals especially when they're not super cute and snot mucus all over the place. But you cant distance yourself from the fact that corn fed beef is destroying parts of the planet and by supporting grass fed beef farms you're supporting a sustainable mode of production. Which is awesome. And tasty.

Oh and I forgot she had horses. It's not a very clear picture because she said one of them likes to bite and I didn't catch which. And they were closing in.

The Mosquitos! Oh God, The Mosquitos!

This weekend I helped my pals Ella and Pete weed their new garden. After five years of living in a boxy little place with many tiny rooms and no sunlight they moved to farther afield pastures, a place equipped with a back yard.

I'd heard about it, I'd seen pictures but I still wasn't mentally prepared for the horror show. While I was fantasizing about going with Ella to pick out chickens and a pygmy goat I ignored the reality of how much work rehabilitating an overrun garden would be. I'll say right now I didn't contribute much to the process. Mostly I drank beer, swatted mosquitoes and identified the one plant they didn't want to rip out of the ground. Hibiscus. Someone who lived there long ago loved hibiscus and it's sprouted up in tall shrubby trees everywhere. What a fun kind of archeology to look back and see what meant something to someone who existed there, what made their heart sing to see blooming on a bright summer morning. Coincedentally, I found a used condom next to it's wrapper. It was a Magnum.

There are three levels of hell to this yard and it's only in the back where the ivy has completely taken over that you can really appreciate the extent of the neglect. The fence tappers off except for where its remnants are bound together by an old hospital bed frame and rusty rake head. The back is where we also found the source of the mosquitoes. Seriously, I know it's fall and that's when they like to have their last hurrah but it was like a plague. All day into the evening they swarmed and followed us around from one room to the next. Killing them and measuring the blood streak was a crowd pleaser. The breeding was going on in an abandoned dog crate filled with water and larvae and fear. Around the crate were a few toys, a bowl and a broken chain. It's only a matter of time before they find the dog.

But you know what? I'm jealous. I have my lovely little yard but I've had to build most of my garden boxes. There's no helpful ground to throw compost on, just our alarmingly full bucket. As 'we' raked over the earth iridescent worms squirmed hysterically back into the soil. There's life there, potential for growth and lots of nutrients from all the buried dog carcasses. One day, if they can maintain their current crusade, Ella and Pete are going to have someplace beautiful to grow tomatoes and herbs and a pygmy goat. Of course, Ella's mom came down with hives from something that may or may not be poison ivy out there and Pete treed himself sawing dead branches so who knows? Growing stuff is hard work. And I'm sure as hell not gonna help.

Just kidding. That whole 'tend your own garden' thing is really not such great advice. We should all tend each other's gardens. If we all do a little the world will be a bit greener, more beautiful and soon everyone will know a hibiscus just by looking at it. And poor unsuspecting people who were wearing work gloves praise Christ wont be finding deteriorating condoms under very leaf. Or if they do, they'll know who left them and that person will be held accountable by God!!

Also I need some weeding assistance myself. They owe me for cleaning out all those beer bottles.

Cheating

I love to bake. Baking is closer to science then most forms of cooking. Things like baking soda and baking powder can be confused so easily or added too much or not enough and KABLOOIE! Like the particle accelerator. Or just really bad tasting cookies. Anyway there's a weight of responsibility when you're baking that isn't there in the average stir fry or soup. Like Spiderman but with cake.

When I was at Frosty Morning Farms Alison and Karl grew pretty much everything they ate. A lot of people on Commonplace did and it made them think in a kind of luxurious fashion-they can talk about how great it is to eat and live sustainably and how wrong it is to buy food shipped from far away or grown with pesticides etc. On a farm you can pick your food. You can jar it, turn it into jam, store it for winter. What ever's leftover, if something spoils, you can feed it to the pigs or chickens or just the compost heap and it will eventually feed you too. The circle of life! It's a lot harder to find the time and space and animals for all that in the city, stacked up to the sky like we are.

So after being judged as a wasteful city dweller who throws out her egg shells it was kind of a relief to see that the Frosts cheat. They sneak in all sorts of stuff even ::gasp:: bananas. That shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. How do they do it? Well, I'd like to point fingers here but even as cheaters they're kind of doing a service-they get buckets of compost from the Syracuse food coop that would just go into a garbage/land fill otherwise. During the summer the buckets often get pretty pungent and melt into something gloppy and good for livestock. Occasionally you get a bucket of out of season tomatoes, a bunch of fresh spinach for soup, avocados for the guac or some overripe bananas. As the weather cools what's inside the buckets stays edible for humans longer and they have some true delights for those cold winter nights. Avocados and bananas don't grow round these here parts and I can't imagine the Frosts buying them under any circumstances...but for free, hey, why not?

Anyway after days of fennel, kohlrabi and other not sugar filled veggies I was about to bite someone's throat out. If there was carbs inside. A load of stuff arrived and I begged Alison to let me bake something with the browning fruits. First we had to empty the oven which works as a kind of rudimentary dryer for her, the pilot light slowly sucking the moisture from a dozen baskets filled with herbs. She uses the herbs to make teas and tinctures or just for cooking. They all had to be sorted and crunched through to remove stems and air them out. When the oven was finally empty I looked up a recipe for banana bread in the Moosewood Cookbook. If you're a vegetarian this book is where it's at. The vegetarian recipes that is.

Since I was using all these foreign ingredients, the bananas and sugar and wheat and baking powder (or was is baking soda?), Alison suggested I go collect berries from around the farm. Late July is an amazing time for berries. Things were blowing up all over the place! Blueberries, black currants, mulberries, gooseberries. They all went in the pot. It's kind of sad how little berry experience I had, what I didn't even know I was missing. The next time you have the chance try a new berry out.

There were also a few soft pears courtesy of the compost buckets and we threw them in too. Plus almonds. I'll just say, GOD IT WAS GOOD! I WISH I WAS EATING IT RIGHT NOW!

All this made me think about the ways the Frosts cheat being good organic farmers who care about the earth, like the buckets and...well, they're pretty good. Caring about the earth is tiring because a lot of fun stuff involves shrugging off thoughts of consequences or responsibility and you barely ever eat cake. But I shrug all the time. So then I started thinking about the ways I could cheat being someone who throws stuff out when it spoils or who buys stuff from another hotter hemisphere.

We compost. Today I made soup from some leftover lima beans. I buy stuff grown locally. Not sure what to do with my big can of compost yet. Any other ideas?

In the mean time I'm going to bake what ever's around into cake. Ingenuity is really what's behind eating good food because you use what's available. It makes you a better cook too if my banana bread is any indication. Of course, if I keep up my own form of 'cheating' I wont be eating bananas for awhile.

Here's a cool site about worm composting which is pretty manageable even in a small apartment, I've seen them, they don't smell and you'll be making great fertilizer:

http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html

Coincidentally, I'm listening to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. It's available free on Hulu.com and it's great. Hurray for Neil Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon, they're like every delicious berry baked into a tart. A saucy tart.

Back On the Dark Horse

Hey, It's been awhile since I hollered at y'all. I know it seems like the Sophomore Blogger Slump (the second month is Sophomore) but actually it was just a general mental slump. My life has a hilly terrain and, much like upstate New York, there are lots of ups and downs. So I went to the actual upstate New York again to spend another week on the farm and rejuvenate myself. It's worked pretty well overall. I learned lots of new interesting things that I plan to drone on and on about in the coming weeks (sneak peak-Garlic Braiding! Yeah!). So don't abandon my ramblings, tell your friends and tune in tomorrow. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Station.