Purple Sicilian Cauliflower


The Homegrown Revolution compound’s purple Sicilian cauliflower (Cavolfiore di Sicilia Violetto from Seeds from Italy) from our illegal parkway garden is now ready for the table after four months since planting from seed. Cauliflower needs some attention; it needs to be kept moist and it’s prone to aphids, but the little buggers can be blasted off with a hose fairly easily. While the plant takes up a lot of room and doesn’t yield a lot per square foot, what most folks don’t seem to know is that the leaves of cauliflower and broccoli plants are edible as well, although best when small.

Ultimately if you’ve got the space cauliflower is worth the effort, especially this particular variety, since when it gets down to it, the Man’s cauliflower at the supermarket just does not compare to the rich flavor of our home grown version. And if flavor isn’t enough to convince you to grow your own, cauliflower is one of those plants that demonstrates the groovy world of fractal geometry, where the smallest parts of the plants maintain the geometry of the whole. Take a look at the even more fractal broccoli cauliflower mashup, chou Romanesco.

Safety Chic

According to today’s Wall Street Journal, doom and gloom is out and “a new safety-chic is playing out across retail.”

All the Chinese slave-labor employing big boxes have jumped in on the bandwagon including Wal-Mart, Dillards, Costco and Sears. They’re all getting together to save our collective asses from hurricanes and suitcase nukes by getting us to . . . shop. Home Depot is coming out with a line called “HomeHero” which among other things includes the white fire extinguisher illustrated on the left.

“People just haven’t thought about redesigning these categories,” says Peter Arnell, founder of the design and marketing firm Arnell Group, a division of Omnicom Group Inc., which helped craft the Home Depot HomeHero line. “In the old days, you had a chunky old red fire extinguisher and you were going to hide it. That doesn’t work anymore. The world has changed.”

Funny, we thought fire extinguishers were red so that they would stand out in an emergency. But Homegrown Revolution likes the idea of yuppies in their burning kitchens accidentally grabbing the cappuccino frother. The article ends with this zinger:

“They have clearly recognized an absence in the market and that’s the fundamental proposition,” says Dale K. Cohen, founder of DKC Resources, a New York marketing strategy and growth catalyst firm. “Fear is an emotion. And whenever you tap into the emotional component of something in selling, you have a very strong, resonant angle”.

Tour de Crap

Homegrown Revolution apologizes for yet another scatological post, but we’re delighted to report on the success of the Tour de Crap, a Bike Winter event which featured a tour of the Hyperion Treatment Plant. The photo above shows some intrepid cyclists who have traded their bike hats and helmets for hard hats and hair nets in order to enjoy the sight of a pile of poo soaked condoms in Hyperion’s odoriferous headworks building.

Everybody should have to tour their treatment plant and meet the nice folks who deal, literally, with our own crap. Maybe then people would decide not to lift manhole covers and throw couches and motorcycle frames down the sewer system as happens here in our fair city. Perhaps someday we’ll all take a bigger step and assume responsibility for out own waste as the folks in Scandinavia have done with in-house composting toilets like the Clivus Multrum.

In the meantime people, remember that somebody has got to deal with what you all flush and pour down the drain so please don’t put cooking oil and grease down the sink. Not only is this bad for your own plumbing, but it causes clogs in the city’s lines as well. Also keep your pharmaceuticals out of the toilet–no joke here–we have ocean fish swimming around hopped up on Prozac.

Lastly, should zombies or Al Queda take out Hyperion, learn how to shit in a bucket.

Got Real Milk?


Join Permaculture expert David Khan for a special two part lecture including a presentation by Mark McAfee the president of Organic Pastures (our source for Homegrown Revolution‘s cheese making experiments):

Where:
Audubon Center at Deb’s Park
4700 North Griffin Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90031
(323) 221-2255

www.sustainablehabitats.org

When:
March 3rd 2007 @ 10:00 AM for Introduction to Pemaculture Class and at 2:00 PM for “Got Real Milk?” Presentation.
************************************************************************
-Sustainable Los Angeles lecture series:

* Part1: Free Urban Permaculture Design Course Introduction by David Kahn
* Part2: Talk and Slide Show Presentation:

“Got Real Milk?” by Mark McAfee President, Organic Pastures,LLC.

“Today’s milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to heart disease to cancer, but when Americans could buy Real Milk, these diseases were rare. In fact, a supply of high quality dairy products was considered vital to American security and the economic well being of the nation”. -The Weston A. Price Foundation

“What’s needed today is a return to humane, non-toxic, pasture-based dairying and small-scale traditional processing, in short
A Campaign for Real Milk”.

Learn the truth from one of America’s leading experts on raw milk.
Mark McAfee, is regarded by many in the industry as a foremost expert in raw milk safety and raw dairy product markets and technology.

Please RSVP:
www.sustainablehabitats.org

Make Your Own Damn Cheese

We live in a country where buckets have warnings on them, but the greatest indignity of our present nanny state is that the Man does not want us to eat raw cheese. As Jean Anthelme BrillatSavarin put it, “A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman who lacks an eye” and if that cheese was made with crappy pasteurized, homogenized and sterilized milk it ain’t worth eating.

That’s why you’ve got to make your own cheese. We forget, in our age of individually plastic wrapped crap-ass single-sliced cheese, that the act of cheese making is a way to preserve dairy products and that it’s well within the capabilities of the do it yourself kitchen revolutionary.

Here’s the catch. You’ve got to use raw, un-pasteurized, and un-homogenized milk. It’s possible to make cheese with the pasteurized shit, but it won’t taste as good and you’ll have to add calcium chloride to make it work. We’ve tried using regular milk and it’s a crap shoot–sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t even with the calcium chloride. Milk labeled “ultra-pasteurized” will definitely not work.

Now pasteurization is for wimps and worry warts. All of the tainted milk scares in the past few years have been with pasteurized milk. Those factory farm dairy cow concentration camps out there that produce most of the milk in this country figure that they don’t have to be clean since they are pasteurizing everything. Fortunately raw milk is available at health food stores–we used a brand called Organic Pastures.

Making cheese is actually fairly simple and can be done with just milk and rennet, also available in the baking section of health food stores such as Whole Foods. One other nice thing for the vegetarians out there is that you can use vegetable rennet rather than the animal based rennet that is used in most cheese.

Homegrown Revolution recommends that you start your cheese experiments with soft cheeses which are easier to produce. The Neufchâtel recipe that we used to produce the cheese pictured above can be found on the nicely illustrated cheese making website of biology and chemistry professor David B. Frankhauser. Frankhauser’s website is an excellent introduction to cheesemaking.

To make Neufchâtel you add rennet and let the milk sit out in a stainless steel pot overnight. If all goes well, the next day the milk solids called curds, should have separated from the liquid which is called whey. You place the curds in a piece of cloth, and suspend it over a bowl in the refrigerator. The next day the cheese is ready to form in a mold and serve.

The verdict on Homegrown Revolution‘s cheesemaking experiments–though urban cheesemaking is somewhat costly due to the high price of raw milk, it’s very satisfying to know that we can make our own cheese and patronize dairies that have more ethical standards. Or maybe it’s time to get our own dairy herd.