Still here...

A quick post, mostly to notate the schedule of things so far this year so I can remember what happened when. The onion seedlings got hit by fungus gnats and so they all had to be tossed out, I think I did that in the last week of February. The weekend of March 22-23 I started working on the raised beds and got the chard transplanted and the spinach and lettuce seeds into the 3x3 bed. The following week, (Spring Break, more or less) I got my seed potatoes in the mail and set them to sprout in a box, and also placed the two 3x6 beds where I wanted them in the backyard. I loosened the soil under the beds so the drainage would be better (the soil here is very thick clay) and planned out what would go where. I also started tomatoes, bell peppers, and more onions (regular and green) in pots on the porch.

The weekend of April 5-6 I filled one of the 3x6 beds with SummerWinds planting mix and put in leek seeds, zucchini seeds, and delicata squash seeds, along with nasturtiums, zinnias, and cosmos, all started as seeds. I also marked out and started double-digging the 100 sq. ft. Biointensive bed. The digging was tough at first but it was better once I established a rhythm. If I had been thinking ahead I would have done the double-digging last fall and planted buckwheat or vetch to get the soil going, but...oh well. I got about 3/4 of the bed dug that weekend and kept it watered so the soil wouldn't turn into brick. I also planted oregano, basil, marjoram, dill, tarragon, sage, and cilantro in the herb bed, to go along with the parsley, mint, oregano, sage, and thyme that survived from last year. Borage and marigold seeds, too, and there are Shasta daisies and white alyssum left over from last year that are flourishing as well. Somewhere around this time I planted some arugula in the 3x3 bed but I can't remember exactly when that was.

The weekend of April 26-27 I filled up the last 3x6 bed with planting mix and put in sweet and Thai basil (from the nursery) and the tomato plants that I started from seeds: Brandywine, Yellow Brandywine, two Romas, and a Green Zebra (I bought that at the Farmer's Market in Mountain View, my Green Zebra seedling inexplicably died one day). I also put in seeds: Genovese basil, marigolds, and cosmos, and transplanted some of the basil and the dill from the herb bed since they weren't looking too good. Biointensive bed: I sifted in some compost over about 1/2 of the bed and loosened the top 2 inches or so of the soil to get the compost mixed in.

Yesterday I finished double-digging the Biointensive bed and planted the potatoes as I was digging. There are 5 rows of Yukon Gold potatoes. I also finished sifting compost over the rest of the bed. Today I planted seeds in that bed: corn, summer squash, canteloupe, carrots, cucumber, and beans. I put in 3 tomato plants from my seedlings - 2 Rutgers and a Brandywine - and put in some Roma seeds since the 4th tomato plant didn't survive the transplanting process. There are also some basil, marigold, and Sweet William (dianthus) seeds in there and I plan to put in more flowers. I transplanted the bell pepper seedlings into the bed with the leeks, winter squash, and zucchini and also moved a couple of other things around since I got several seedling that had come up right next to each other. The onions are still in their pots: I'll transplant them soon.

Our garage has so much stuff left by previous tenants in it that we can nearly always find something we're looking for out there. We've found nails, plywood, and plastic netting for fencing so far...today I read that the carrots should have burlap or shade netting over them (on the ground) until the seedlings come up so I went looking around and there was some burlap! I love this house.

Vegans, vegetarians, and the rest

I'm not vegan. I think I would like to be, but I haven't made the leap yet. However, I believe that nearly every meal I have posted to this blog has been vegan or very nearly so... It's hard to say for sure because I know some already-prepared foods, like the beer in the beer bread, could potentially be non-vegan. Everything had been good, and some things, like tonight's dinner, I thought were really excellent. Full of flavor and texture, and quite satisfying. 

Most of the time when I eat out, I go to places that I know can provide a similar experience. There are not many choices within walking distance of my office, but I know that I can get an enjoyable meal at any of the indian, japanese, and thai restaurants (relatively) nearby. Yes, I realize that thai food which claims to be vegetarian often still contains fish sauce, but to me that is not that big of a deal, as I will occasionally eat fish with no issue.

You see, I discovered several years ago that eating meat was making me sick. I've had indigestion and/or other stomach problems for as long as I could remember. One day, I decided I was going to learn to cook for myself, and as I was aware of the (perhaps exaggerated, I don't know) dangers of cross-contamination, I decided to forego the meat until I had developed some skills. A week later, at my next opportunity to eat meat, it dawned on me that I had felt so much healthier since several meatless meals had gone by. It was an epiphany. I've never gone back.

...intentionally, that is, because it turns out that meat is really hard to avoid. A large part of the population assumes that if you don't eat meat, you're a messed up freak. I can deal with that, I guess. The problem is that there's another large part of the population, possibly the largest, who is so unaware of the issue that it perhaps doesn't occur to them that chicken broth, for example, is not vegetarian. There's no "meat" in it, so it's OK, right? The problem for me is that I get sick if I eat such things. Because of this I am considering just telling people that I am allergic to animals and will get sick of I eat any part of them. This is sort of almost true, so I guess I can live with it, except I am tired of being the annoying picky eater everywhere I go. So for the most part I eat at places I know I can trust, and do my best not to be too much of a pain when I go elsewhere, unless I feel like I have no safe option unless I raise a stink about it. 

The flip slide is that occasionally I encounter well-intentioned vegetarian dishes which were clearly designed by people who would never, ever consider eating a meal without meat unless they had to suffer through the creation of such a recipe. I think the big fallacy of the meat-eater's mind is that vegetables have no flavor, and so veggie meals prepared by non-veggies often seem to me to still contain more animal products than vegetables. Cheese, mayo, butter, and anything else that is rich and not-quite-meat. 

I guess I've found that over my five meatless years, my need and desire for such rich food has seriously waned. I am still capable of packing in a lot of rich, heavy food at an indian buffet, I admit it, but for most meals, I get by just fine with something lighter. I have come to enjoy the flavors you find in spices, fresh herbs, organic and heirloom produce FAR more than the surprisingly-small-when-you-think-about-it variety you find in meats and cheeses. I think your average meat-centric food preparer would do well to look into these options, too. It would likely improve their own cuisine, as well as enable them to come up with something a little more creative for the rest of us than pasta alfredo with a white lettuce side salad. 

Solar-baked beer bread

Solar-baked beer bread
Originally uploaded by wbajzek

Our oven broke a while back and rather than replacing it, since we're pretty sure our landlord wants to tear this whole place down, anyway, we decided to try out a "green" replacement for it.

I baked this beer bread in our (very) shiny new CooKit!

2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 cup garbanzo flour
3tsp baking powder
1tsp salt

fennel, cumin, thyme, and marjoram
12oz Gordon Biersch WinterBock (leftover from party)

stuck it inside the cast iron dutch oven, sealed it in a plastic oven bag, and put it in the Solar CooKit at 9am, angled optimally for midday (since I'd be out all day). It spent 9 hours in there, probably longer than necessary, but it came out moist with a nice crust on top.

Onions...how prosaic

It would be easier to make sense of all the seed charts and growing information and helpful hints if they would all just agree with each other! I was under the impression that the tomato seeds needed to be started in January to be planted in March/April, but it seems they can wait another month or so. Everyone agrees, however, that the onions should be started now, or maybe last week. I bought 2 packets of onion seeds (Seeds of Change, Valencia onions) from Common Ground yesterday and put 78 seeds into pots today, hopefully I'll end up with 30-something plants from these. The Sustainable Vegetable Garden says 67 onions for 2 sq. ft.!!!!!! I guess I have to believe them...I'll start these and then put some more directly into the ground later and it'll just be nonstop onions for a while. I hope.

I loosened the soil for the 100 sq. ft. bed yesterday and today. The spading fork goes down 8 inches in some places and 12 in others. I'm hoping that the next round of single digging will be easier since the rain will get down further into the ground and loosen things up a bit more. LOTS of earthworms in the soil already, thank goodness.

Trying to find ways to get compost and topsoil for free or cheap, instead of buying many bags of potting soil for the raised beds. I suppose it would be nice to just be able to throw money at the garden, and I probably could do that if I really wanted to, but I'd rather be creative and frugal. As usual.

Seedy musings

I spent a lot of time this week with the charts in both The Sustainable Vegetable Garden and How to Grow More Vegetables... and the conclusion is that I don't HAVE to start all the seeds myself. Which is good, because I don't have room for this, and I'm not willing to build a mini-greenhouse with a heating pad on the porch. Compromise: I will start tomato seeds, if they don't work out I can always buy the seedlings. I have Green Zebra, Brandywine, Yellow Brandywine, and Roma. They are going to live in re-used 4-inch plastic pots...I knew I was saving them for a reason. I am trying to do this with as little actual expenditure as possible, so instead of spending $16 on the nifty redwood flats from Ecology Action, I have recycled nursery pots and 2 plastic trays from Goodwill. They will all live on the washing machine as that's the only window that gets decent south light. Stay tuned.

Yesterday I cut back all the herbs from last year and took out most of the plants that were left, for the new compost pile. The old one is a soggy mess but it's supposed to be sunny all week so I'll turn it a couple times and hope it dries out a bit. I think it's actually compost, though. I also stuck the spading fork in the ground and it went in 6 inches. Arrrggghhh....One step at a time.

I have visions of wildflowers in the front yard, the entire back yard full of happy growing herbs and vegetables, pots placed here and there, the entire back porch filled with houseplants, as much of it as possible gotten from Craigslist or friends or stuff we found in the garage when we moved in. I also have visions of the landlords deciding to knock down the house in June, just as everything's getting going. If nothing else, all the planning has been good for me.

Happy new year!

I went to my second round of Grow Biointensive classes today in Palo Alto: Introduction to GB and Composting. The Introduction class was very well done and presented a large amount of information well within the class time, along with gorgeous pictures in the Powerpoint slides. It made everything sound very easy and logical. The Composting class was mostly people who didn't seem to know about GB methods so there were a lot of tangential questions to be dealt with, but answers were provided (or at least local resources to find the answers) and things moved on. Again, very straightforward, except I don't have giant piles of compost material ready-to-go...

So I picked up a copy of The Sustainable Vegetable Garden and headed home (after the thunderstorm, thankfully). And I read my new book. And I got VERY nervous...I was planning to prepare the 100 sq. ft. bed (recommended for beginners) this month and let it sit for a while, and then plant in March when I have a week off from my morning job. However, I need to start seeds (I want to do this RIGHT!) in January and February and prepare the bed right before the actual planting. Ack! I think if I get the flats and get them ready, it'll be easy to put the seeds in at the right times and then I can do all the serious work over that last week in March. So, flats and seeds on Jan 12, start sowing Jan. 19/20, continue through Feb., and so on. Hope the compost pile actually did its thing...once it stops dumping rain on us, I'll see what's at the bottom and if I can use it. Flat soil is just going to be regular potting soil, I can do it properly next year.

Also, there will be 3 raised beds with potting soil and plants from the nursery. I feel like I need a control group :)

Thai curry again

I'll spare the details, other than to say I finally got galangal and lemongrass, albeit in jarred format. It is much improved, but I have found that the peppers are not hot enough and the
food processor doesn't grind the paste into, well, paste. The other thing, probably more important, is that commercial thai curry pastes and other recipes I've seen online often contain shrimp paste, and I am wondering if that's the next "magic" missing ingredient. Not that I'm going to put shrimp paste in, but perhaps I can find something with similar qualities (perhaps just a bit more salt? Would miso do it? Hmm..) to fill its void.

indianish food again

We got another box from the CSA the other day... It took me a while to work up the inspiration to prepare some food, but it turned out pretty well. I sauteed some some usual-suspect spices in ghee (almost gone now) and threw in a few chopped onions and the whey from my soy-yogurt cheese experiment. To this, I added chopped potatoes, cauliflower, carrots, and some frozen peas. Eventually I added more water and then a bit of peanut butter and nutritional yeast to thicken it up. I have to admit that it's not immensely flavorful in spite of having a more salt and cayenne in it than I normally would put, but it is pretty good and has a nice texture to it. Panir or lemon-marinated tofu would have been a nice addition. We're eating it over rice.


Yogurt cheese? Yogurt cheese. I made some soy yogurt as I often do, and am straining it in a sieve lined with cheese cloth. I think that for the full effect, it would need to sit for a few days, but it thickened up pretty well. After I finish dinner, I'm going to mix in some sugar, saffron, and cardamom and serve it as dessert.

I don't know what to call it.

For tonight's dinner, I sauteed a variety of summer squashes with dill and basil, steamed some spinach, and pureed it all with some tahini. The inspiration was a mixture of baba ganoush and palak panir, and it came out very well. I served it over rice.

chocolate tofu pie

I made a chocolate tofu pie the other day to serve at a party on Friday. I started with a store bought graham cracker crust, two bricks of silken tofu, and a bar of baking chocolate. I melted the chocolate and then blended it with the tofu. At that point, it wasn't chocolatey enough, so I added some cocoa powder and kept blending until it was smooth. Then I filled the crust and stuck it in the refrigerator.

It came out tasting great, but it was more pudding-like than I'd hoped. Actually, it'd make a fantastic pudding, but I was trying to make pie. I either need to put something in to thicken it up, or (as a friend suggested) try a different brand of tofu which may have a lower water content.

Also, next time I will go with my original gut (ha ha) instinct and get an extra bar of chocolate, in case the one is not enough for the amount of tofu.

Tonight's adventures: burritos & muffins

First, I made stuff to put in burritos... Leftover brown rice, a rinsed can of pinto beans, salsa, and "sour cream uncheez sauce," which basically consists of cashew butter, fresh lemon juice, and a touch of nutritional yeast. This mixture really hit the spot for me.

Unfortunately, the tortillas were a flat out (ha ha) disaster. I think I got the dough to the right consistency, but the recipe (basically 2 to 1 and a bit masa harina and water) said to roll them out between two sheets of wax paper, and I found it to be nearly impossible to transfer them from the wax paper to the skillet without them falling apart. I got ONE good one, which of course wasn't really ideal for a burrito anyway, because it was too crispy. I might try this again to make gorditas or crispy tacos, but it really didn't work for the burritos, so I guess I will have to get some store-bought flour tortillas to finish the burritos... It's too bad, because I was hoping to share them with a gluten-allergic friend.

I made some muffins, too, partly because I was annoyed at my defeat at the hands of the tortillas. Roughly 2 cups of flour, all purpose, brown rice, and almond, in some reasonable proportion favoring the first two, combined with some cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder and soda, all vaguely like a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. I put a banana, some soy yogurt, soy milk, oil, and cashew butter in the blender and pureed it, and then stirred all that in to the batter. Filled the muffin cups and baked for 20 minutes at 400 and they came out quite nice... A little on the dense side, but tasty... I couldn't bring myself to use as much sugar as the recipe called for, so they're not as sweet as they could be, but I think with the banana and the cocoa they have a very good flavor. They stick to the muffin cups a bit too much; I'm not sure what to do about that.

I will probably edit this in the future and put in some links, but for now I'm off to bed. Tomorrow morning I plan to ride my bike at least part of the way to work, for the first time in a long time. It's an awful long and dangerous commute entirely by bike (15 miles each way, give or take) but I am excited about it... I need the exercise, I miss riding, and I will be burning less gasoline.

Pseudopusas

Inspired by a recent post in Vegan Lunch Box, I modified the banana flop idea into pseudo pupusas. I made a batter of corn meal, chickpea and brown rice flours, baking powder, and soymilk and made a thick pancake-like object. Before flipping them, I put (previously cooked) sweet potato and mango on top and layered on more batter.

I'll be honest, it needs something. Salsa? Cheese? Spices? I'm really not sure, probably any of them would have done the trick. In spite of the sweet potato and mango, it came out a bit on the bland side. Actually, bland's not the right word. The flavor was good, it just needed to feature something.

Still, it was a worthy experiment. I'll be attempting it again at some point, but probably not before I try to make a more authentic version.

Experimenting in the kitchen 2

"If you understand your painting beforehand, you may as well not paint it at all." - Salvador Dali

Fill-to lines; cooking in bulk; chinese food

Conceptually, I like the idea of making a big pot of something to eat throughout the week, from a convenience point of view. But I reach a point where I just can't take it anymore. No matter how much I like the thing that I made, after my 4th or 5th helping of it throughout the week, I am desperate for something new. I joked recently that I should draw "fill to" lines on our pots so I don't make too much of one thing.

So, how to deal with this? If I don't have materials to prepare lunch for the day in 5 minutes or so, I will often just skip it and go out to lunch. I do so much less often than I used to, but it's still not ideal. I'm sick of mysterious food. I want to know what goes into my food!

Well, I have a few ideas.

One, a friend of ours is a brown rice fanatic and will often cook thw whole of it at once and then freeze it in meal-portion-sized zip-locks so it is readily available every day. Rice is a good staple ingredient, because it's healthy, filling, and it goes well with most things.

Two, well, I have long been anti-chinesefood. The reason is that most chinese food you get at restaurants consists of slimey, oily glops of homogenous food. Even when I ate meat, I didn't like the fact that most chicken dishes (for example) at chinese restaurants would be NOTHING but chicken in slime. Deep-fried chicken, at that. Most of the time you couldn't even get a floret of broccoli with it. On the other hand, I work (and lunch) with many chinese people, and what I've noticed is that their food is almost always a nice portion of rice topped with equal small portions of meat and vegetables. I'm sure there's some sauce, but I've never seen the kind of oil slick that comes on most restaurant-bought chinese food, and I've never seen any of it deep-fried. I'm getting the feeling that what you find at most chinese restaurants is a very americanized version of the cuisine.

So, the idea I'm getting from this is to prepare rice as above, and then cook (or not cook) our weekly shipments of food in several dishes that are either one or two ingredients, rather than trying to turn it into one or two large dishes. Lunch ends up being a portion of rice and a selection from two to four options, plus some raw fruit and veggies. It can probably all be done in the same time it takes to make the big dishes, and the result is a more diverse menu throughout the week which can be quickly gathered before heading out in the morning.

Experimenting in the kitchen

Something in Season has an interesting post about how to experiment with recipes. A lot of his advice centers around following recipes carefully, which helps learn to predict how things will go, I suppose. It's interesting to me because it's pretty much opposite from my philosophy... I personally follow the "banana flop philosophy" by Helium (aka God around Hippycore HQ) in my favorite cookbook, Soy, Not Oi!, although ironically(?) I have yet to make the banana flop recipe.

So what kind of a vegan are you, having to read a book to cook or prepare food! You are a pitiful person. You have been socialized. You think that 1/2 cup less of this or 1/2 cup more of that will render your dish inedible. You think that a written recipe is the optimum balance of the ingredients... you are bummed. [The banana flop recipe does not include exact measurements, temperatures, times, etc]

Natural foods have the wonderful property of being able to be blended with each other in any manner or proportion and still always give a minimum total nutritional value equal to the sum of their parts, so nutritionally speaking you can't go wrong. Different combinations will bring different tastes and different textures; a wonderful array of tastebud experiences that will bring you joyful, romantic, painful, funny, gratifying, and humiliating memories... the merging of the soul and the pallet.

So my friend, break free from the rigid limit of your food habits and turn your kitchen into a playground of creativity... Welcome to the BANANA FLOP philosophy!

Since reading this, I have rarely worked from recipes unless it's something mysterious, like NYC, a grain-to-liquid ratio, something Chinese, or ... anything that's to be baked. I'm also generally pretty happy with how my cooking turns out.

In my case, I USED to rigidly follow recipes, and eventually came to the conclusion that cooking doesn't have to be an exact science. Sure, there are some things that can easily be over- or undercooked, but most things provide leeway in terms of cooking time, ingredients, etc. A friend came over a while back with a semi-improvised persimmon bread which included several whole grains (and was quite awesome, in my opinion!)... I think the key to success is to combine flavors you like, and if any are especially distinctive, don't feature more than one.

Update 2/18/2007: Inspired from writing this post, I made the banana flops this morning. Everyone should have a copy of Soy, Not Oi!