Weed Eating Italian Style

Here at Homegrown Revolution we’re big proponents of eatin’ your weeds, which is why we were delighted to stumble upon an article on virtualitalia.com that contains a couple of weed recipes including dandelion egg salad and stinging nettle lasagna. As the article points points out Italians are one of only a few Western cultures that still actively forage.

Spring approaches and with it a free salad bar and produce section just waiting to be picked. Homegrown Revolution declares 2007 the year of the weed!

The Homegrown Revolution Broadleaf Plantain Pizza

For years a trade organization called the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association, has been lobbying the Italian government to create a “DOC” or d’origine controllata, to designate the proper form of Neopolitan pizza as a way of countering the indignities perpetrated internationally by the likes of Dominos and Wolfgang Puck. The VPN’s regulations include the following requirements:

1. A wood-burning oven: The pizza must be cooked by wood. Gas, coal or electric ovens, while they may produce delicious pizza, do not conform to the tradition.
2. Proper ingredients: 00 flour, San Marzano (plum) tomatoes, all natural fior-di-latte or bufala mozzarella, fresh basil, salt and yeast. Only fresh, all-natural, non-processed ingredients are acceptable.
3. Proper technique: Hand-worked or low speed mixed dough, proper work surface (usually a marble slab), oven temp (800° F), pizza preparation, etc.

While we haven’t constructed a wood burning oven yet, in the summertime it’s possible to make a authentic Neopolitan pizza at the Homegrown Revolution compound topped with buffalo mozzarella (available at Trader Joes), and Roma tomatoes and chopped basil from the garden. But in the wintertime we eat the Homegrown Revolution pizza, a highly unauthorized combination of mozzarella and chopped broadleaf plantain, a common lawn weed (though any green will do). It’s tasty and what we predict the California Pizza Kitchen will serve when the shit goes down.

We use the following recipe, which is adapted for home kitchens from the VPN’s regulations, for the dough:

1 1/2 cups warm water (105-115º)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons sea salt
1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast
Mix water and yeast and proof for 7 minutes. Mix flour and salt in a heavy-duty stand mixer. Add the yeast mixture to the flour and mix on low for 30 minutes. Shape dough into a round and let proof in a covered and oiled bowl for 4 hours in a warm place (we use the top of the stove which has a pilot light). Divide into two pieces and proof for another 4 hours. Preheat your oven to 550º, top your pizza and bake for eight minutes or until the edges are golden brown.

For guidance on how to work the dough see the helpful videos on the VPN website.

Quick Breads


Here at the Homegrown Revolution compound we used to make our own sourdough bread. In fact we used the exhaustive, fetishistic and ridiculously detailed instructions to be found in Nancy Silverton’s book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. Silverton did for bread what Starbucks did for coffee, before she arrived on the scene America was a Wonder bread wasteland but now, in our coast to coast boho yuppified age, you can even find decent La Brea Bakery bread in the red states. Now we’re a bit contrarian at Homegrown Revolution, so while we’re not quite ready to go back to Folgers (though that day will come), we are ready to try some down home white trash quick breads. OK, so Homegrown Revolution has changed our minds on the previous paragraph, and we’re back to making sourdough. That being said, an occasional quick bread ain’t a bad thing:

Quick breads are easy, involve no yeast or rising times, and are nearly foolproof, which is why the knuckle draggers in flyover country like them so much. [Erik here speaking in 2020: This is an incredibly offensive and stupid remark. I apologize. It’s the worst kind of cheap humor. It’s a humor not based on experience but, instead, just making fun of other people based on where they live. It smacks of classism and elitism. Know that I have evolved and am truly sorry.] Now the problem we had in our boho days with maintaining a sourdough starter is that it required daily feeding–in fact it was a bit like having a pet–a very boring slightly messy pet that leaves moist and moldy flour all over your countertop. Sourdough is best for slacker cooking geeks who plan on baking bread almost every day, a process involving multiple risings and sometimes dicey results if the ambient temperature is either too cool or too warm. By all means give a try sometime, but for the lazy we recommend quick breads, which can be whipped up quicker than riding the Xtracycle to Trader Joes.

With this in mind the Homegrown Revolution test kitchen will be experimenting with quick breads in the next few months and presenting the results. Today’s quick bread experiment, we are happy to report, was very successful–Whole Wheat Walnut Bread from the book Country Wisdom & Know How.

3/4 cup unbleached flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup brown sugar, lightly packed [note: SurviveLA recommends reducing or eliminating the sugar–this recipe is a bit too sweet for our tastes]
1 cup walnuts, coarsely broken
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups buttermilk

Combine all the dry ingredients. Mix the buttermilk and the vegetable oil in a separate boil. Mix the liquid and dry ingredients together just enough to make sure they are combined. With all quick breads you should minimize the amount of mixing. Bake at 350º until a knife inserted into the bread comes out dry. Cooking times will vary depending on the size of the pan you use.

We invite Homegrown Revolution readers to submit their own bread recipes.

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.

California Buckwheat

Here’s a plant SurviveLA would like to see in more Southern California gardens. California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum foliolosum) has multiple uses–it provides cover and nectar for animals, grows with almost no water, and best of all it produces edible seeds. We’ve gathered the seeds we’ve found in fields and baked it into bread and added it to cereal to both boost nutritional value and to add a nutty flavor. The local and resourceful Tongva Indians used the roots and leaves for headaches and stomach problems, among many other uses including using the stems to pierce ears.

California buckwheat is available from the Theodore Payne Foundation which runs a native plant nursery in the Sun Valley area. We can easily see California buckwheat fitting into your permacluture strategies, as well as something to look out for when foreging for food–not to mention the DIY piercings . . .