Author: Mr. Homegrown

The 10 Day $25 Survival Pack

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Preparedness

This month’s issue of Backwoods Home Magazine, what Homegrown Revolution reads when we’re in a foul Unabomber type mood, has a handy article inspired by this winter’s Kim family tragedy. As you may recall the Kim family got lost on a seldom travelled road in Oregon and spent 10 days without supplies before James Kim finally made a fatal attempt to hike out through the cold. Playing armchair quarterback, the gun-toting off-griders at Backwoods Home have come up with an inexpensive survival pack and the best thing is the article is free and online!

Backwoods Home’s $25 survival pack makes extensive use of the sort of highly prepared ready-to-eat crap food easily found in America’s bloated supermarkets. Normally we wouldn’t touch this stuff, what the French call malbouffe, but its long shelf life and ease of preparation make certain items, such as Knorr chicken and pasta dinner and Maruchan ramen noodle soup ideal foods for emergency kits. These convenience foods are also great for backpacking as they are much cheaper and often tastier than freeze dried camping foods. And Homegrown Revolution can’t resist the irony here, that if and when the “shit comes down” we’ll be using the very products that let to our own destruction.

Of course, the Backwoods Home survival pack is designed for the typical SUV drivin’ American so you’ll have to pimp it out with some lighter weight items to make your “escape from LA” on a bike (trust us, a delightful form of transport in gridlocked traffic). For some lighter options check out the new topics list you’ll see on the right, particularly the preparedness section.

The revolution will be fermented . . .

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Fermentation, Food


Homegrown Revolution’s month of fermentation continues with the following bubbling containers–from left to right:

Rye Sourdough Starter
More info in a future post, but rye flour is much more active than a starter made with white flour!

White Flour Starter
We’ve already ranted about this stuff here and here. So far, much success.

Crème Fraîche
Special thanks to Susan of Northeast LA’s “culture club” for giving us some Swedish fil mjolk culture. We gave it some cream to feed on to produce a delicious batch of crème fraîche, though you can also make crème fraîche with buttermilk .

Filmjölk
Once again, more filmjölk given some milk to feed on thus producing more . . . filmjölk. More info here.

Lacto-fermented Daikon Radish
We’ll report the results. In the meantime read all about lacto-fermentation from an excerpt from the book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.

Post Petroleum Lecture – a reminder

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Miscellaneous

Homegrown Revolution, drunk from our many fermentation experiments, goofed and gave you all a bad link to reserve your spot in the upcoming lecture by Albert Bates, author of a brand new book The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook. To reserve your spot go to www.sustainablehabitats.org

Bates will be speaking at the Audubon Center at Debs Park on Saturday March 24th as part of the 2007 Sustainable Habitats Lecture Series.

Here’s the announcement again:

Albert Bates is a permaculture and appropriate technology instructor at the Eco village Training Center at The Farm community in Summertown, Tennessee, inventor of solar cars, pedal flour sifters and cylindrical tofu presses, and author of eleven books, including Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial (1979) and Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (1990). His Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New Society 2006) envisions the world as it will be transformed by peak oil and climate change, and offers a prescription for re-inhabitation. As one of the founders of the Eco village Network of the Americas (1994) and the Global Eco village Network (1995), Albert used his lifetime of eco-community living skills to create an incendiary meme, sparked by dedicated individuals and fueled by the pressing necessity of changing the way in which human communities relate to nature.

Place: Audubon Center at Debs Park
4700 Griffin Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90031

Time:10:00 AM
Cost:$10 on-line $15 at the door
Instructions for payment: RSVP and pay on-line using PayPal www.sustainablehabitats.org

Should you not be able to make it, Bates will be appearing the next day at the Los Angeles Eco-Village on Sunday March 25th at 8 pm. There is a suggested donation of $10 for the lecture. The Los Angeles Eco-Village is located at:

117 Bimini Place
Los Angeles, CA 90004.

For those of you who can’t make either lecture Homegrown Revolution always enjoys the peak oil harangues from the very cranky James Howard Kunstler.

Irish Soda Bread

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Bread, Food
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In honor of St. Patrick’s day we give you this still from the simultaneously captivating and unwatchable film Leprechaun in the Hood (special thanks to Dough on the Go! for insisting that we watch until the very end when the Leprechaun raps) and from our expanding comments section a recipe for Irish soda bread:

This is the other half of Homegrown Revolution here, and I have to say I am not thrilled with the recipe my comrade in arms decided to post as representative of the best of quick breads. For years I’ve been making a much better whole wheat-ish quick bread (which he seems to have forgotten) and this is how it goes:

Irish Brown Soda Bread

1 3/4 c. all purpose flour
1 3/4 c. whole wheat flower
3 T. toasted wheat bran
3 T. toasted wheat germ
2 T. old fashioned oats
(note: change up or skip these nuggety bits as necessary–they just add texture)
2 T packed brown sugar
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
2 T. chilled unsalted butter cut into pieces
2 cups or so of buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425
Butter a 9 inch loaf pan

Combine first 8 ingredients in a large bowl and mix. Add the butter and rub it into the flour. Stir in the buttermilk until a soft dough forms and you can scrape up all the dry bits. Don’t overwork. It is fairly wet dough. Put it in the loaf pan and bake about 40 minutes — do the toothpick test in the center to make sure. Turn it out of its pan, and let it cool on a rack.

This is a nutty, wheaty, slightly sweet bread. The original recipe came from an ancient Bon Appétit.


A garden that looks like a meth amphetamine lab

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Self Watering Containers
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This year around the Homegrown Revolution compound we’ve finally thrown off the tyranny of the beautiful. There’s simply too much of what we call “garden porn” out there. Coffee table garden books, Martha Stewart and 24 hours of bullshit home improvement shows set up expectations that drive us all to useless spending at nurseries and home improvement stores all in pursuit of unattainable ideals, at least unattainable for anyone not employing slave labor. Forget about creating a mini Versailles–it’s time to get down to business and grow stuff you can eat. Our new criteria for success in gardens is this–a garden must simultaneously provide food for our table and habitat for beneficial wildlife, and it must take care of itself with a minimum amount of human intervention.

We also need to start growing food everywhere we can. There’s an ugly concrete patio just off our back door. We could have spent much money and effort to jackhammer it and replace it with a yuppie entertaining deck but instead we’re growing food on it. We built some self-watering containers (for instructions on how to do this see our earlier post) and we’re growing collard greens, tomatoes and southern highbush blueberries, so far with great success. It looks like a meth amphetamine lab. But since it provides tasty fresh food, who give a damn?