Food

The New Home Economics

Avatar photo
Beer, Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
photo above by whiteafrican photo on right by Wayan Vota

So what is this simple, elegantly designed object? It’s a bottle opener from Africa as seen on one of our favorite blogs, AfriGadget. Tough times call for elemental solutions, not to mention popping the cap off a beer.

And speaking of tough times and ingenuity, with our economy continuing to meltdown and unemployment on the rise (check out this youtube interview with author Nasim Nicholas Taleb and mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot for a real scare), we’ve begun to see sudden interest in the long forgotten topic of home economics. A good example of this new home economics is 30 bucks a week, the recipes and strategies of a couple in Brooklyn attempting to limit their grocery bills to, yes, just $30 a week.

But back to that African beer bottle opener pictured above. Yes, it exists in the context of poverty, but it’s also a symbol of hope, of facing adversity with resourcefulness, a sense of style and play.

Kitchen Alchemy

Avatar photo
Food, Recipes
3 Comments

“Those who believe civilization can be run according to different principles – humane, equitable, and collaborative ones – need to step forward now with concrete proposals and put ideals into practice.”

-Daniel Pinchbeck

A Homegrown Evolution reader quite rightly scolded us recently for not writing enough about what people in apartments who can’t keep gardens or chickens can do. It’s our contention that all of the activities profiled on this blog are a kind of alchemy, symbolic gestures that ultimately lead to the kind of societal transformations that Pinchbeck writes about. These symbolic gestures need not be over sized, nor do all of them require land. Cooking homemade meals from scratch, as often as possible, is just the kind of alchemy one can practice anywhere you’ve got food and a source of heat. And what is cooking anyways, but a form of alchemical transformation? As luck would have it, we’ve had a number of visitors to our humble casa in the past week, Pinchbeck included (read his thoughtful Prophet Motive columns here). Two other visitors are cookbook authors. All share a common vision of positive change through personal and household actions.

Ysanne Spevack moved to our neighborhood recently and has a really nice cooking website and blog at www.organicfoodee.com. That pumpkin bread she blogged about recently looks mighty tasty and we can’t wait to try her buckwheat recipes recently featured in the Los Angeles Times. She has written a number of books, specializing in cooking with organic ingredients.

We also got a visit from farmer and agriculturalist Shannon Hayes of New York’s Sap Bush Hollow Farm. She’s the author of two books on how to cook grass fed meat. Hayes is currently working on a book on what she calls “enlightened homemakers”, touching on the kind of societal transformation that can occur when we change the way we run our abodes.

Lastly, there’s a new online cooking school that has some mighty nice how-to videos and a free trial offer for 30 days. At Rouxbe.com we’ve learned a couple of nice tricks, our favorite being how the pros slice an onion. Very handy.

Now I’ve gotta stop blogging and make a pizza . . .

Fruitacular!

Avatar photo
Food, Gardening
2 Comments

Noel Ramos, writing to correct an inaccuracy in my guava post (“Guayabas” is the word used all over Latin America for guava not “guyabas”) was nice enough to include this amazing photograph of some of the many kinds of fruit that you can grow in Florida: red bananas, sugar-apple, canistel, pink guayaba, dragon fruit and orange-flesh lemon.

Noel is the director of communications for Slow Food Miami, “an eco-gastronomic organization that supports a bio-diverse, sustainable food supply, local producers, heritage foodways and rediscovery of the pleasures of the table.” I hope the photo above will encourage readers in the Florida area to get involved with this organization which is working worldwide to fight the industrialization and fast foodization of what we eat. Not in Miami? Look for a local chapter via Slow Food USA.

Noel also has contributed articles to another remarkable group, the California Rare Fruit Growers which strives to preserve and explore the mind boggling biodiversity of fruit trees. And speaking of biodiversity take a look at Noel holding a Rollinia or Biriba, a fruit tree native to the Amazon region that also grows in Florida.

Some have described the taste of this fruit as like that of a lemon meringue pie.

Guyaba Guayabas (Psidium guajava)

Avatar photo
Food, Gardening
9 Comments

Just last week I was spotting L.A. river blogger creekfreak while he bench pressed a whole bunch of weights (was it 300 pounds?) at our local YMCA. Between hefting all that poundage (we’re both getting ready for the inaugural L.A. River Adventure Race), the conversation turned to a productive guyaba fruit tree on the grounds of the L.A. Eco-village, where the creekmesiter’s crib is located.

Guyaba (Psidium guajava–“guyaba” is the Spanish Dutch word for “white guava”) is a small tree native to Central America. It’s one of around 60 species of guava and is also known as “apple guava” and “yellow guava”. According to the California Rare Fruit Growers, it can be propagated by seed or by air layering. The apple guava has a delicate tropical flavor, and according to creekfreak, some varieties have edible seeds. The fruit off creekfreak’s tree rots really quickly, so don’t look for him to be opening a booth at your local farmer’s market. The tree seems fairly drought tolerant, but more productive with water. Guava expert Leslie Landrum notes that the guava is a “weedy tree, a tree that likes disturbance. It likes to grow along roads and in pastures. Animals eat the fruit and spread the seeds around.”

It’s also a fruit so tasty that creekfreak occasionally has to chase off guyaba rustlers poaching specimens off his tree.

Pickled!

Avatar photo
Fermentation, Food
2 Comments

Picklefest 2008 was, no other way to put it, pickletastic. Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder for coming up with the idea, DJ Pickle for spinning the tunes, and the folks at Machine Project for hosting! We’re looking forward to Picklefest 2009.

To those who attended we wish you the best of luck with the pickle projects you took home. We forgot to tell you all not to be afraid of your pickles! We’re all a few generations away from the kind of lacto-fermented or brined pickles that we made yesterday. When we first tried doing this a few years ago we were afraid to eat the results. In fact, we should all be afraid not to eat lacto-fermented foods, as they provide beneficial microorganisms essential for our health. Lacto-fermentation does not lend itself to our industrialized food system, with its emphasis on cheap, shippable commodities, which is why these traditional types of pickles are rare outside of expensive health food stores.

For those of you who couldn’t make it or those of you who’d like to try some other fermentation projects, we strongly recommend picking up a copy of Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation.