October 2008 Archives

I've saved some choice ingredients for our final week of the Eat Local Challenge, and the change in seasons means we'll be getting a little variety in our diet. Breakfast was my usual goat milk & honey muffins, chock full of toasted pecans. Lunch was tomato and arugula sandwiches. Dinner was this tasty salad, made with lettuce and arugula from our garden, Sweet Home's Bayside Blue cheese, market tomatoes, cucumbers, and satsumas, and vinaigrette with Perdido Farm's wine vinegar. Unfortunately, that's all the lettuce that's mature now, so we won't be having any more salad this week. Still, it was nice for a change!

For readers outside the Gulf region, if you're not familiar with satsumas (I wasn't before I moved here), they're better known to most people as mandarin oranges. The fruits are sweet and juicy, with a good orange flavor. They are small and the skins are easily removed, both attributes which make them popular with children (like my daughter, who loves them). Satsumas are one of the most cold-hardy citrus, and they can be grown even in the north part of the state. We have a young satsuma in our yard that we planted this spring, and it's weighed down by eight fruits. If you have a friend with a satsuma in her yard, you generally know it, because mature plants produce more than a single family can easily eat.

Earth Day was six months ago on April 22. I made a note to myself at the time to revisit my Earth Day resolutions six months later, so here we are.

• Be politically active on environmental issues: C. I've certainly done some things, and have signed a lot of petitions. However, I haven't written any of the personal letters I'd like to send. There's still time to do that, and after the election will be a key time to get messages to legislators.

• Reduce waste; maximize recycling and compost, Freecycle, make consumer decisions that minimize packaging, minimize use of disposables: B-. We recycle everything the city's program will accept: paper and cardboard, glass, steel and aluminum cans, plastics 1 & 2, and kitchen grease. (Also, I forgot: batteries can be recycled at Dueitt's Battery Supply on Springhill Avenue.) We compost, although we still frequently have cooked food waste that we have to throw out. I save up items to give away through Freecycle. I do make purchasing decisions based on packaging, though most of our waste remains food packaging (one thing that's become extremely clear during the Eat Local Challenge). I haven't figured out how to ditch plastic bags & wrap for storage. I do reuse them as much as I can, and foil as well. There are plenty of disposable bag alternatives, but I haven't ponied up for any of them yet.

• Set up a clothesline: B+. We set up TWO clotheslines, and I love it. My sense is that it has reduced our electric use, though I don't have the figures to prove it. My husband won't use it for his laundry, however (he often does his laundry at night), so we aren't dryer-free. And there are, of course, days when it rains.

• Convert all household bulbs to CFL: A-. We have done this, with the exception of two candelabra bulbs that are over our fireplace, and one fixture that won't accept anything but halogen. I have had second thoughts, however; with a young child in the house I envision a couple of our lamps getting knocked over and releasing mercury vapor, so I'm considering switching those back.

• Buy shade liners to help insulate house better: F. We haven't done this because frankly we can never afford it. Shade liners are $20 - $25 each, and we have A TON of windows.

• Install screen doors to improve ventilation: A. Done. We would still like to replace a screen door on the back of our house with a storm door, but again that will have to wait until we can afford it.

• Minimize driving; use bus and walk as much as possible: B. We sold our second car and my husband now rides his bike to work. He has logged well over 1000 miles at this point! We also carpool our daughter to school. I do try to drive as little as possible, and there are usually a couple of days each week - sometimes more - when the car doesn't leave the driveway. I don't use the bus as much as I would like, but I always consolidate errands. There is very little driving out for one item. Still, I think we could drive less. I've been tracking our mileage and the lowest we've gotten is just over 500 miles in one month.

• Join environmental organizations: F. Haven't done this. Again, it's an issue of cost.

• Eat less meat, more organics, more local food: B-. We have DEFINITELY accomplished this during the Eat Local Challenge, and during market season I try to buy as much local produce as possible. For organics, I buy only certain items...again, an issue of cost, but I do as much as I can. We don't eat a huge amount of meat, mostly seafood and poultry and rarely beef or pork. We do consume a lot of dairy and eggs (and are planning on raising our own chickens). We do eat two to three meatless meals per week, but we could definitely reduce our meat consumption further. I'm trying to embrace the meat as condiment style.

• Buy used and recycled products when possible: D-. I really should be buying recycled paper products (for toilet paper, for example; I do buy recycled printer paper, though we use very little of that), but I don't. I'm not good about planning to buy toilet paper, so typically I realize that we're out and get it at the first available place.

• Minimize junk mail: B. I've used Catalog Choice to greatly reduce the amount of catalogs I receive, and we don't get a lot of unsolicited mail. I've gone to paperless billing for most (but not all) of our accounts. Still, if I were more vigilant I could probably reduce it even more.

If you read my previous post about Earth Day, you'll see that the last item was "rethink your consumption." Given our limited budget, we're not big consumers to begin with, but who knew that there would be a global financial crisis and now EVERYONE would be talking about reducing spending?? Frankly, I never thought I'd see it, but I'm gratified that at least for the time being there seems to be a cultural shift to at least reconsider our consumption.

Aside from persimmons, there has been no fruit available here. There were satsumas at the market last Saturday, but I paid for mine and, much to my frustration, left them on the table. Today there were satsumas, tangerines, and kumquats.

In addition to the citrus, also at today's market were: baked goods, candy, cucumbers, eggs, cut flowers, honey, jelly, melons, okra, pasta, peas (shelled and unshelled), pecans (shelled and unshelled), persimmons, pickles, pumpkins, seafood, soaps, summer squash (yellow), sweet potatoes, textiles, tomatoes (ripe and green), turnips and turnip greens, vinegar, wine.

NEXT WEEK ONLY, November 1, Mobile's downtown market will be held at Bienville Square instead of its usual location because of the Senior Bowl Charity Run.

My menu has been rather monotonous, so I won't bore you with details. I've been baking a lot - sometimes twice a day - and one new recipe I tried was for popovers. If you've never made them (I hadn't), they're very easy, tasty, and fun. They're made with an egg batter, similar to a crepe batter, and baked in muffin tins. During their time in the oven they puff up into high, rounded, hollow domes, at which my daughter and I marveled as they baked. We had them at breakfast, but you could easily use them in place of rolls at dinner.

In the garden, I've harvested another serving of pole beans, and the occasional arugula for accenting sandwiches. The squirrels have been absolutely pestilential this fall; it must have been a banner year for them. Generally I regard squirrels with tolerance, if not benevolence, despite their semblance to tree-loving rats. Whatever their activity in the garden, they don't eat the plants and so it's never been an issue. However, this year there are SO MANY of them, and they've all decided that my neat, newly planted beds with their loose soil are the perfect place to store and/or forage for nuts. Numerous holes have been dug, even around my newest additions like the banana tree, butterfly bushes, and dill (they actually overturned that one with their digging). In the future I may have to apply netting so the seeds have a chance to sprout and grow.

When I decided to take this challenge, part of my driving interest was to see how feasible it would be for the average person, with an average income, to eat locally. I anticipated I would do more driving than in a typical month, but I figured my budget could probably absorb it. However, here we are at day 18, and when I reviewed my funds this morning I decided that even with the price of gas a dollar lower than it's been in recent memory, I really couldn't afford to drive to Ocean Springs to pick up the locally raised chickens from Live Oak Farm I had planned on using to add variety to our diet. I was disappointed, but hey, the average person isn't going to travel far and wide to put local food into their pantry. So it's realistic, right? We'll just have to make do as best we can on what we can get here.

Today, making do included a breakfast of scrambled eggs with arugula, lunch of homemade sandwich bread with blackberry jelly, and a dinner of pizza with tomatoes, arugula, basil, and Sweet Home cheese. There were even leftovers for tomorrow.

At today's Cathedral Square market: baked goods, candy, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, eggs, cut flowers, greens, honey, jelly, pasta, peas (shelled and unshelled), pecans (shelled and unshelled), persimmons, pickles, plants, pottery, pumpkins, satsumas, seafood, soap, summer squash (zucchini), sweet potatoes, textiles, tomatoes, vinegar, wine.

Creativity was on the back burner today, with my daughter requesting more pancakes for breakfast, and another round of shrimp po'boys and sweet potato chips for dinner, with the addition of a serving of green beans from our garden. Blanched, with a little salt and pepper, they were fresh, tender, and delectable.

The morning's trip to the Botanical Gardens plant sale netted me some herbs and a "Blue Java" banana. We already have "Gran Nain," a dwarf variety, but it didn't bear this year; the main stalk died over the winter, so the clump we have now is all pups from the spring.

After our success yesterday with dinner, and faced with a dwindling selection of vegetables in the fridge, I decided to make speckled limas, roasted turnips, and braised turnip greens for tonight's meal. I suppose after so many good meals it shouldn't be a surprise to have one finally turn out bland, bitter, and unappetizing. The limas tasted like dirt, so I had to keep cooking them and adding salt and plenty of butter until they were edible. The turnips...well, I just don't like turnips very much, though I'll tolerate a few if they're roasted along with other veggies. Too bitter. And turnip greens, it stands to follow, are more bitter also. And I should have been more careful about stemming them. The only way I could make my meal palatable was to wash it down with an Abita Amber.

At long last I was able to pick up some goat milk today. As you might imagine, multiple people (including my husband) have raised their eyebrows at the prospect of drinking goat milk. If you've ever had fresh goat cheese, then you're familiar with the tang you'll find in goat milk. In the milk it's very slight, and gives a flavor reminiscent of buttermilk. That's how I got my idea for lunch: goat milk pancakes with toasted pecans, topped with honey. Decadent. (Breakfast was the end of my muffins, once again with blackberry jelly.)

Dinner was corn and lima bean ragout on top of biscuits (a recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), along with braised mustard greens, a meal which my husband had been groaning about for a week since I had first mentioned it. Though he rolled his eyes like a small child at the prospect of having to eat a mundane vegetable stew, hunger got the better of him. Much to his surprise he, like I, found it delicious and satisfying. I had been dreading the greens; our previous attempts at collard greens had resulted in a rubbery, tasteless mass, most of which went into the trash. These were much better, and turned out close to chard or spinach.

I realized at dinner that I've been eating a lot of sandwiches. But I'm OK with that, since a sandwich is a versatile meal, with enough variations to keep a picky eater happy indefinitely. Breakfast was (again) muffins with blackberry jelly. Lunch was a fried egg sandwich with arugula. You must try this; it's simple and delicious! Dinner was a sandwich made from grilled eggplant and zucchini, sliced tomatoes, Sweet Home's Swiss cheese, coarse sea salt, and a splash of white wine vinegar from Perdido Vineyards. The Eat Local Challenge gave me the excuse I needed to buy a bottle of this vinegar, made across the Bay in Baldwin County. It is excellent, and has a nice balance of tart and sweet that reminds me of balsamic. The label touts its high antioxidant content.

Breakfast: more of my muffins topped with local honey. Lunch: Swiss cheese from Sweet Home Farm, homemade bread, and blackberry jelly. Dinner: sliced tomatoes, arugula, and Sweet Home's Jubilee cheese on my bread, and a couple of sauteed zucchini. An outstanding sandwich.

WHAT: Mobile Botanical Gardens Fall Plant Sale
WHEN: Thursday, October 16, 4-8pm; Friday and Saturday, October 17-18, 9am-4pm; Sunday, October 19, 11am-4pm
WHERE: Mobile Botanical Gardens, 5151 Museum Drive, Mobile AL
COST: $25 for the opening night party and sale on Thursday; all subsequent days are free

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Gardeners of all sorts - including kitchen gardeners - will want to visit the Mobile Botanical Gardens' Fall Plant Sale. The opening night party includes food and drinks, as well as a chance to be first to get your hands on all those plants. The sale continues with free admission Friday through Sunday. More information and a plant list (pending availability) is at the Botanical Gardens web site.

Edibles include vegetables and herbs, fruit and nut trees, bananas, berries, and grapes. You'll find varieties you can't get elsewhere, and plants selected specifically for their suitability to this region.

Even if you don't go to buy, or to buy very much, it's great fun to just stroll the grounds and look at the wonderful variety of plants. For best selection you'll want to go early; in recent sales many herbs and vegetables have sold out quickly.

This week's entire New York Times Magazine is devoted to food issues, and includes a long feature article from Michael Pollan on "what the next president can and should do to remake the way we grow and eat our food."

WHAT: Local Food Production Initiative public meeting
WHEN: Monday, October 20 at 6:30pm
WHERE: the Nix Center, 1 Bayou Drive in Fairhope

TOPIC: Community supported agriculture farms, or CSAs. Phil Strinste, owner of the Bee Natural Farm in Fairhope, will discuss his experience in operating the CSA, and Patty Hermecz, owner of The Cottage Garden CSA in Silverhill will briefly talk about her experience in opening a new CSA.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Community supported agriculture farms are quite different from traditional farms. They are much smaller and more labor intensive. Members who join the CSA pay so much per year, and every week of the growing season receive a share of the produce harvested.

See this archived post for more information on the Local Food Production Initiative, centered in Fairhope. Current projects the Initiative is looking into include establishing a community garden in Fairhope; expanding the season on the Fairhope Farmers Market and perhaps finding a permanent off-street location for the market; educating the public about the opportunity for and benefits of local food production; and exploring ways of encouraging the preservation of farmland in Baldwin County.

For information about the Local Food Production Initiative or about the October 20 meeting call Elaine Snyder-Conn at 990.4751.

Muffins with local blackberry jelly were my breakfast and lunch. Dinner was shrimp and oyster po'boys on homemade bread with local tomatoes, fried okra, baked sweet potato chips, and Abita beer. Aaaaah.

In the garden, I've FINALLY got some beet sprouts. The arugula is doing well and I'll be able to start trimming leaves to accent our meals. All the brassicas are thriving. Our jalapenos are still producing. The green onions are hanging in there. The chard is growing slowly. The beans, sadly, have suffered from the bean leaf rollers that Bill Finch mentioned in his Friday column. I don't know if we'll see anything from them. I bought parsley at the farmers market and put that in the ground, and divided my thyme and chives. The satsumas are just starting to show a hint of color. Our pathetic little Meyer lemon tree has one gigantic lemon that's beginning to ripen, and I look forward to using it this month during the Eat Local Challenge.

Head early to the farmers market. At just after 8am, the crowd is already there, but you still have the leisure to stroll about and make selections. My neighbor wasn't so lucky. She got there later and said after one pass she came back to buy squash that were already gone. Available: corn, cucumbers, eggs, cut flowers, greens, honey, jelly, okra, peas (shelled), pecans (shelled), peppers (green bell), persimmons, pickles, plants, seafood, soap, summer squash (zucchini and yellow), sweet potatoes, tomatoes, vinegar, wine.

After hitting the market we headed over to Baldwin County to pick up cheese at Sweet Home Farm. I also bought eggplant and garlic (happy find!). Then I went to BJ Farms to see if they might have any onions (they did in the spring). They did, but only Texas onions. However, they did have turnips (with greens).

Ironically, after a day of shopping locally I didn't eat much local food. Friends invited us for dinner, so all bets were off. Even so, their appetizer featured cherry tomatoes and basil grown by our friend's father in his Birmingham garden.

We returned from our visit to my parents' late Wednesday, so my eat local challenge started in earnest yesterday. A rather dismal start it was. I had some apples left from Indiana, and had one for my breakfast. Lunch was homemade bread. Jimmy Lowe's was out of goat's milk, so the only thing I picked up there was some Mississippi sweet potatoes. The fish market supplied Gulf shrimp for dinner. I've been out of honey, and I can't go to the farmers market until tomorrow, so I had nothing to put on my bread and produce options are limited (REALLY limited).

Today has been a little brighter, however. I take my daughter to school on the west side of town, and every time I'm out there I pass a little market that sells landscaping plants and has a sign advertising local honey. I stopped in today, and while the owner wasn't there I did find a man waiting with fresh seafood. If you've never lived in a seaside community before, you quickly learn that it's common practice for men with pickup truck beds full of iced-down coolers to set up in a convenient parking lot, selling fresh seafood, most often shrimp, sometimes oysters, crab, or fish. As far as I can tell they're usually resellers, as was this 70 year-old man, who told me he drives over from his home near Lucedale, Mississippi (close to the state line) to pick up his wares at Bayou la Batre, the biggest fishing community on the Alabama coast. When I pulled up he was packaging shrimp, gorgeous big Gulf whites with shiny shells, iridescent green and blue still on their tails, and a pure, briny smell. He said he'd had to wait for the boat to come in this morning. 10-15 count, $5/pound (head-on), which is cheaper than the price we pay for the inferior browns at the nearest fish market. (Save those heads, by the way, and use them with the shells to make shrimp stock.) I bought oysters too, which my husband loves; they're in season now and the man said they're working all night to unload them from the boats. He had crab meat as well.

I always have mixed feelings about buying shrimp, since their harvest damages the sea floor and produces wasteful bycatch. But I do love to eat them, and they're relatively low in contaminants. Faced with a limited local foods diet, it's hard to pass them up, especially when I won't be able to get my only other planned source of meat (free range chickens) until some time next week. While $5/pound is very affordable and in this economy I'm thankful for that, I almost hate to pay so little for them, especially with the cost of fuel so high. It's hard to imagine how anyone is really getting the true value, not to mention that, as with conventional agriculture, that price doesn't account for the environmental costs of shrimp trawling.

I did get some local honey at the market, at $4.50/pint about the cheapest I've seen. The market owner had a big freezer where she kept shelled beans and peas, which the fish man delivered from Mississippi. He didn't grow them himself but got them "from someone else." She's sold all her small portions and only had 10 pound bags left. Since barely one of them would fit in my freezer I asked her to make some small bags for me and I'll get them next week. She also had some frozen shelled pecans from last year, and I bought a package of those. Though we'll soon have this year's harvest, my own stock of frozen pecans was gone long ago and I'm happy to have more.

My Indiana apples were starting to go soft, so this afternoon I baked them with some honey and cinnamon, and reduced the liquid in the pan to a syrupy glaze. I was hungry, and they were delicious!

I'm looking forward to the market tomorrow, hopeful at this point to add some variety to my diet. I may drive over to Elberta for cheese and the market there, as well.

Oh, and for the lesson of the title, around here it's best to carry a cooler in the car to capitalize on the unexpected opportunities presented by roadside stands and folks selling out of the back of their trucks. Cash only, of course.

Including advice on how to battle that last batch of caterpillars (try garlic spray).

Today we took my daughter to the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival. For kids, the main attraction is the carnival rides (including my daughter's new favorite, the State Fair Slide); adults come for the four-block long array of food booths, said to be the second largest street festival in the United States. The menus are dominated by conventional street food, with the emphasis on fried, such as the familiar corn dogs and French fries, fried mushrooms, and fried pickles; but also including state fair favorites and more eclectic items like fried stuffed olives, fried Coke (?), deep fried candy bars, deep fried cookie dough, and deep fried Oreos. Since the booths are all run by local non-profits, each vies for customers by offering unusual fare, ranging from brain sandwiches to chocolate covered crickets to alligator stuffed potatoes to scorpion pops to kangaroo burritos (and yes, all those items really do contain the named ingredients). But there's local food to be had even here. One of the booths sold mini fruit pies made from locally grown apples, blackberries, and peaches. I had the peach.

Incidentally, today the Evansville paper ran a story on Tim Schaefer, who runs Oasis Country Farm in Mt. Vernon IN. Mom bought her eggs from him at the farmers market.

Breakfast was all-local (except for a small amount of butter): fried egg on toast and an apple. Dinner included more butternut squash and a local tomato.

Chris reported back to me on the produce at Saturday's market: red and yellow tomatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, wax beans, peppers, eggplant, pumpkin, greens (likely collards), and seafood.

Browsing through my mom's library books, I found Hey Mr. Green: Sierra Magazine's Answer Guy Tackles Your Toughest Green Living Questions. With the current craze for all things eco-conscious, these kinds of guides have sprouted up like weed seeds after a good rain. Still, I thought this one was quite useful, and it includes a chapter on "What to Eat, How to Drink, and Answers to Other Dietary Dilemmas." Among Mr. Green's Food Commandments are (not surprisingly) 2. Buy Organic, 3. Support Local Farmers, and 9. Grow Your Own.

All I was able to manage today was some more locally made bread. I had intended to put some local organic berry jam on it, but when I cracked open the jar there was mold on top. So much for that. It's hard to lose even a little when you don't have that many options to begin with.

We made a day trip to Grant's Farm today (a sort of historical site/game park/family attraction outside St. Louis), and the highway goes straight through southern Illinois farmland. Having lived most of my life in the Ohio River valley and south-central Indiana, this is the landscape that feels like "home" to me. The open, gently rolling fields standing under a big sky, planted in corn, soybeans, or wheat, or serving as cattle pasture, punctuated by large single trees or little stands of forest, the clusters of farmhouses and outbuildings; seeing these vistas provokes a pleasurable nostalgia, a return to the backdrop for trips to my own grandparents and, later, my universities. It's harvest time now, and the fields are particularly attractive, glowing orange and tawny gold in the setting sun, the newly shorn rows of corn stubble proclaiming 'the human hand has been here.'

However, now that I'm invested in local and sustainable food, I'm reading other elements in these scenes, seeing the acres of monoculture and of crops that may be used for fuel instead of food; watching the huge combines and trucks that have become the symbol of industrialized, oil-driven agriculture; seeing the brown, dust-laden clouds carrying away vital topsoil to pollute our waterways and choke our oceans.

I think about the Eat Local Challenge and wonder what it would mean to these farmers if we were able to turn the agricultural system upside down; what would the fields look like then? Would they be unfamiliar; would they be beautiful? What would happen to the machines they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy? Would the grain silos be empty? Is it possible some of them might return to using the magnificent draft horses we saw today for their original purpose? I wish I knew, and I hope we'll see the day when a reimagined landscape is not only possible, but profitable, and sustainable.

My mother had very kindly done some shopping at her local farmers market, so for dinner I had an egg salad sandwich made with local eggs and locally made artisan bread (however, I did use Hellman's mayonnaise), and some locally grown butternut squash roasted in the oven and seasoned with salt, pepper, thyme, and local honey.

In other news, I read today that the Eating Alabama project is going to continue for an entire year. Wow, am I impressed. Eating fresh seasonal food can clearly be inspirational. Kudos to Andy, Rashmi, Joe, and Sara.

At dinner tonight we were talking local food, and Mom told me how her dad (who lived through the Great Depression) would gather poke greens from ditches and fence rows. She said she never ate it herself (she was a child at the time) but her parents did. She remembered it being prepared much like other traditional Southern greens, with meat such as bacon used as a seasoning. You can read more about it on Wikipedia, and here, among other places.

Just a reminder that Mobile's fall farmers market in Cathedral Square begins tomorrow. The fall season will run on Saturdays, October 4 - November 22, from 8am until 12pm. I'm actually out of town at the moment, but my husband has an assignment to visit and make a report.

This week's Press Register has lots of information about persimmons, including how and when to harvest, how to plant, and persimmon varieties.

Today was a travel day, and sadly, I ate nothing local. Instead, I'll share a link to a great t-shirt I received for my birthday. It's from Patagonia, a company known for its commitment to environmental activism and responsibility, and that started using organic cotton before it became fashionably hip. At $35 it sets you back more than most "simple living" budgets can afford (that's why I asked for it as a gift!), but it is long sleeved and is made of incredibly soft lightweight organic cotton. Incidentally the web site provides a carbon footprint for this product. I'm not sure how valuable a consumer tool that really is, but it is interesting and certainly makes you think.

My Eat Local Challenge is not truly beginning until I return next week from a visit to my parents in Indiana. However, in keeping with the spirit of the month, we did have a pitcher of Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company's Southern Pecan beer with our dinner, a belated birthday pizza at the neighborhood Mellow Mushroom. I had never tried Southern Pecan, and was unaware of Lazy Magnolia, located 90 miles away from Mobile in Kiln MS. (While most of the ingredients would not be local, pecans are, so in this case I'm settling for locally made with some local ingredients.) I'm no beer connoisseur, but the ale was yummy, full-flavored and rich without being too heavy. I definitely recommend it. Discovering a cool new local product made a happy start to my Eat Local Challenge, and I hope the rest of the month holds more delicious surprises.