Yes, yes, yes! If I could make a movie right now, this is the movie I would make. But it’s already been made and is coming to theaters this summer. Money quote from the trailer:
The way we eat has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000
Go and watch this trailer, now!
This is a real shocker: growing your own food is hard work.
After removing a whole bunch of sod, amending the soil, moving in edging, and planting 3 blueberry bushes, 2 rhubarb plants, and 10 heads of asparagus, Adam said, “I’m already burned out on gardening for this year.” And it’s not quite May yet.
It’s hard to feel super excited when all the fruits of last night’s labor are so far into the future. Everything that we planted last night will not be harvestable for at least a year (rhubarb) or 2-3 years (blueberries and asparagus). I’d post a picture but it was dark by the time we were done, plus we planted bare-root plants so there’s not much to see.
We eat a lot of bean-based dishes, so even just replacing half of our canned beans with dried saves us several dollars a week. We use Bittman‘s dried bean cooking and storage method, and have found that, when cooked, the texture and taste of beans that have been dried is much better than beans that have been canned. You can also cut down on your sodium this way. Here’s the method we’ve been using (this can be used for any kind of dried beans and is best done on a day when you’re around the house):
1. Put a good pound or more of dried beans in good-sized stock pot with a lid and cover with cold water by 2-3 inches.
2. Bring to a boil; boil, uncovered for 2 min.
3. Cover the pot, turn off the heat, and leave it soaking for 2 hours.
4. Taste a bean. If it still has a long time to cook, add extra water so that the beans are covered by about 2 inches again. If it tastes nearly done, add a tiny bit of extra water so that the beans are covered by about 1 inch of water.
5. Bring to a boil again, then reduce heat and simmer. Check the beans every 15 minutes or so until they seem done. (If you plan on using them in soups you could stop cooking when they are still a little bit under-done.)
6. Drain off a good half of the cooking liquid, then using a soup ladle, ladle your cooked beans, and a little of their liquid, into 1-2 c. portions in little containers. Cover and freeze up to six months. When you want to use them, thaw them out and use them exactly as you would canned beans.
I think these containers were once used for frosting or jam or something, but they work really great for storing the beans. The beans in all these pictures are adzuki beans. We’ve also had great luck with black beans and great northern beans. If you do cannelini you might want to undercook them a bit; otherwise the freezing and thawing will cause them to fall apart.
Once again, I can’t understate the value of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. This cookbook has really simplified a lot of things for me and helped give me the confidence to try things I might never have tried before.
I don’t know why I was so skeptical about the milk jug greenhouses. They have succeeded well beyond my expectations, and through a week where we had everything from 38 degrees and rain to 85 degrees and super gusty wind. My brussels sprouts seedlings, which I started inside, have now been out in the garden for one entire week. I put in six plants with the milk jugs, and had 4 leftover seedlings so I just put those in too, partially as a “control group” and partially just in case one of the milk jugs ones died. One week later, a comparison:
Brussel sprout plant, without any protection:
Brussel sprout plant, with a milkjug greenhouse over it for its first week outside:
Now I just have to decide when to remove the greenhouses permanently. It will have to be soon or the plants will get too big to fit inside. Hoping for some milder weather tomorrow (we’re back to low 40s and rainy today).
To make a milk jug greenhouse: simply cut off the bottom of a milk jug, unscrew and discard the cap, and place it over your newly-transplanted-to-the-outside-world seedling. Leave on until the weather improves. But watch out if it gets too hot; you may want to remove it during the hottest part of the day so you don’t fry your plant.
I will eventually have to remove those four “control group” brussels because I don’t have room for them at full size. If they survive and seem healthy enough, I’ll try to find a neighbor or friend who wants them.
I found this recipe in an issue of Wondertime magazine, the only parenting magazine I really like. It instantly became a regular feature in our house — the kids cannot get enough of these. It’s hard to explain what they are. Are they a no-bake cookie? A homemade energy bar? Whatever they are, they are delicious:
Powerballs
1 c. peanut butter
1/2-3/4 c. honey (or brown rice syrup; they will be less sweet)
3 c. old-fashioned oats
1/2 c. ground flaxseed
2 c. any combination of nuts and soft dried fruits
Stir together peanut butter and honey until smooth. Gradually add in oats, flaxseed, and nuts/fruit. If mixture is really crumbly, add a little bit extra honey in. Wet your hands with a little water to minimize sticking, and roll into ping-pong size balls. Keep in the refrigerator. They freeze well too.
I like that these are a treat, but yet have some healthful ingredients and a “slower burn” — lower glycemic index — than standard cookies. And they taste just like cookie dough. Here are a couple fruit/nut combo ideas:
1 c. chopped dates / 1 c. chopped mixed nuts
1/2 c. coconut / 1/2 c. chopped dried bananas / 1/2 c. chocolate chips / 1/2 c. walnuts
I usually just use up whatever dried fruit and “stuff” we have on hand. Dried apricots, craisins, dried apple rings, sunflower seeds, chocolate chips, etc. Nuts could be omitted altogether.
Adam doesn’t like these to be super sweet so he uses 1/4 – 1/2 c. honey at most and just adds a little water if it’s too crumbly.
I was so excited about the Bittman “Vegan Before 6” article, and then I saw in the comments that someone posted a link to The Weston A. Price Foundation philosophies of eating.
So I spent some time reading up about Mr. Price’s research and now I feel really confused. Mr Price and his foundation have done research that shows in fact that, among other things: eating lots high-fat meat is good for you, our diets should be based in animal proteins, soy is bad for you, and whole grain bread is bad for you, among other things. This is why I feel like I need to take a liberal art course about nutrition — there is so much contradictory information out there. Who is right?
Before you go out and buy a bunch of bacon, spend a couple minutes on the Weston Price Foundation website. They don’t advocate the type of meat-eating that most Americans do; on the contrary, their diet could best be summed up in one word as paleolithic. It’s whole foods to the extreme. Here are their 20 Dietary Guidelines (copied from the site):
I can get behind a lot of that stuff (especially forgiveness), but some of it I find downright confusing. What is Celtic sea salt and why is that better than normal sea salt? How do I “sour-leaven” a grain? What the heck is enzyme-enhanced lacto-fermentation? Are roasted nuts out? The thought of steamed or soaked walnuts does not appeal to me at all.
I also noticed some inconsistencies. For example, they talk about embracing traditionally fattier meats like red meat, but then emphasize that those meats must be grass-fed/pasture-raised. Well, grass-fed beef is naturally a much lower-fat meat its corn-fed, CAFO-raised counterpart.
Also, the primitive people that Price studied probably needed more calories to sustain them than we cubicle-dwelling moderns. Anybody out there familiar with this diet? Practice it? I’d really like to see a recipe book that espouses these ideas; it would help me understand some of these principles a little better.
One guideline that I really liked was “eat only foods that will spoil” — guess that rules out Twinkies, huh?
I could not love Mark Bittman more. I love this concept, and I want to try it. Go and read this article right now, then rush right back here and tell me if you’re as excited about it as I am.
I would take it one step farther and say that meat once or twice a week is plenty, but I think for a lot of people, just going down to meat once per day would be a good first step. Anyone want to try this with me?
By the way, this hits a LOT of my categories.
I got this recipe from my friend Tracey. It is easy, versatile, and a powerhouse of nutrition.
Garlic White Bean Spread
3 cloves garlic
2-16 oz cans of Great Northern or Cannelini beans, rinsed and drained
3 T. lime juice
2 T. olive oil
2 T. chopped fresh basil or 1 T. dried
1 T. chopped fresh thyme or 1/2 T. dried
1/2 tsp. fresh ground pepper
Put everything in a food processor or blender and process until smooth. Conversely, you could pour the liquids over the beans in a bowl and mash them with a fork.
Bean spreads are a great substitute for lunch meat or heavy cheese-based dips. I wouldn’t be able to source this one locally, but the overall footprint of bean-based proteins instead of meat ones can NOT be overstated.
Don’t feel like you have to follow this recipe to the letter; it’s very versatile. Just about any seasoning will work. I’ve tried oregano, and that was really good. I bet rosemary would also be excellent. Lemon juice instead of lime is also fine, and any old oil that you like will work.
On Saturday, I got much of my garden planted. It doesn’t look like much right now:
It’s a little less than half-planted right now. So far I’ve planted peas, brussels sprouts (which were seedlings that I started inside), lettuce, radishes, parsnips, and a few onions. The brussels sprouts are sheltering under milk jug greenhouses for a few days until it warms up a bit.
I’m trying new ideas for mulch this year, because last year I went crazy trying to keep up with weeds. So this year I am putting down newspaper, with various things piled on top to hold it down. For my “aisles” — the spaces in between my double rows — I already put down newspaper and piled on old leaves and straw on top, like this:
As soon as my plants emerge and establish themselves (and the weather warms up a bit), I will put newspaper around the seedlings and cover that newspaper with compost. And maybe some more leaves or something on top? Haven’t totally decided yet. But I have read that it’s a bad idea to mulch too early, so I hope I didn’t screw things up by mulching my aisles now.
I planted my parsnips and radishes together in one row this year, on the advice of several garden websites I’ve read. (My love for parsnips equals that of this blogger’s.) Parsnip seeds take forever to germinate, so by the time the plants are really starting to get established, the fast-growing radishes are long gone. Two plants out of one row: excellent! Here are the seeds, about to get planted (the parsnip seed is the light-colored one that looks a little like an oat):
After all the work on Saturday, we got rain (YAY!) all day Sunday, so I took the opportunity to start the rest of my seeds for my warm-season crops which will go into the ground sometime around May 15 (earliest). I started cucumbers and a bunch of herbs, but I decided to try a couple different methods for what container to start them in:
The little plastic pods that came with my Burpee Ultimate Seed Starting Kit proved to be less than ideal when it came time to extract my tender brussels sprouts and onions and plant them on Saturday. I had to completely destroy the pods to get the seedlings out, and I still damaged a few seedlings in the process. So I’m trying peat pots for my cukes (which apparently don’t take transplanting well), and we also threw a couple seeds into some egg carton halves, which Adam heard about from a co-worker. We cut holes in the bottoms of the peat pots and egg cartons so they could suck up the water from the watering “mat” thing.
Here’s my experiment, complete and ready to go under the light:
What a busy weekend. Now all we can do is wait… some things should sprout by the end of this week because it is supposed to get dramatically warmer.
My hometown newspaper (and my employer, I work in their advertising dept.), the Star Tribune, had an article this morning about misleading nutritional claims on processed foods. If you weren’t born yesterday, there will be no shockers here. Really, do people not know this stuff? Am I overestimating the intelligence of the general public?
Then again, it’s all relative. We all know an apple is better for us than a candy bar. But if I’m dying for something sweet, and I have to choose between licorice and a Snickers, isn’t the licorice the relatively-less-bad choice?
Your everyday choices are more important than what you might do occasionally, for example, on a road trip. We always indulge in a little bit of junk food when we’re driving through places like North Dakota. I don’t think the occasional naughtiness is going to kill any of us.
The one part of the article that hit especially close to home was the part about Vitamin Water. The New Home Economics approach to bottled water is very simple: carry a bottle with you and refill it at a tap. A filtered tap if you can find it. This method hits three sweet spots: my wallet, my health, and the environment.
Anyway, here is the article if you wish to learn about how cocoa puffs are not actually a health food. It is a good reminder of how misleading labels can be.
Stacking Functions Garden 