Author: Robinne Weiss

The Laboratory

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IMG_2982 cropTo celebrate our 23rd wedding anniversary, my husband and I gave our kids their first experience staying home alone, while we went out for lunch to The Laboratory, a new pub in Lincoln. We’ve been waiting impatiently for this pub to open—it’s construction was delayed, and it’s been great fun to watch it go up. Built almost entirely with reclaimed materials, the building looks like it has been there for a hundred years already. The interior is quirky, and in keeping with the laboratory theme—water is served in Erlenmeyer flasks and beakers, table numbers are clipped to Bunsen burners, and tables are lit by a motley assortment of old articulated desk lamps.

The food is good, but limited—only 1 or 2 vegetarian options. The chips (fries), however, are excellent, and are served with aioli. We had hoped for a mozzarella sandwich today (which we’ve both had on previous visits), but as it wasn’t on the menu, we opted for a pizza. Lots of flavour on a cracker-thin crust—the perfect lunch pizza.

The Lab’s own brewery isn’t up and running yet, but they’ve got a nice assortment of craft beers. I enjoyed a lovely oatmeal stout (and was thankful I wasn’t driving home afterwards).

The best part of lunch was that the house didn’t burn down while we were away, and the only one who got into any trouble while we were out was the cat.

Food Security

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A post-quake community garden in Christchurch

A post-quake community garden in Christchurch

After the recent earthquake in Nepal, I wrote a blog post about food security in the face of natural disasters, but I never actually posted it.

But this piece about using vacant red-zoned land to produce food in Christchurch, in the news today, made me come back to that post and decide it was worth posting.

After the February 2011 quake in Christchurch, I saw firsthand how much more devastating natural disasters could be in the city verses in rural areas. Responding to a request for help on Trade Me, my husband and I, along with a couple of neighbours, loaded the car with shovels, wheelbarrows, tools and food, and ventured into the hard-hit eastern suburbs.

We spent a day clearing houses and yards of liquefaction, tearing out buckled and destroyed linoleum, and sharing out the vegetables, bread, and milk we brought from our farms. The people we met were amazingly strong in the face of the destruction around them—not one house in the neighbourhood was still straight and level, and the street was nearly impassable, buckled and cracked.

But they had no tools to tackle the devastation. The carload of tools we brought with us for the day was more than the entire neighbourhood could muster. City living doesn’t require heavy duty wheelbarrows and large shovels, and there were more willing hands than tools to go around.

Then there was the lack of gardens in the city. With stores closed and power out for many days, getting and preparing food was difficult. While meals were airlifted into the city, in the country we simply lived on food from the garden.

So, how do we build resilience and food security into our cities? How do we create cities that can feed themselves, at least for a short time, after a natural disaster? Part of the answer lies in community gardens that can provide food and positive community support, as they did in Christchurch after the 2011 quake. Part of the answer lies in taking a long-term approach to city planning—planting fruit trees in public parks, preserving green space with good soil within the city instead of covering it all with buildings and roads.

I would love to see Christchurch, and all cities, bring food production back within the city limits. No, a city cannot produce all its food, but having community gardens and food-producing commons makes a city a more humane place, even when there isn’t a natural disaster to weather.

Flowers to brighten the day

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100_2148 smIt’s a dreary, drizzly day, so I thought I’d base today’s post on a lovely flower photo from last summer!

Ten years ago, when we moved into our house, there were drifts of bulbs–glads, daffodils, snow drops, grape hyacinths, etc.—planted all around the house. One of our first jobs was to re-pile the south side of the house, which was largely held up by a few broken bricks and toilet seats (I kid you not). We hated to just trample all those bulbs, and we wanted to get vegetation away from that side of the house anyway, to help dry it out a bit. So we dug up all those bulbs—hundreds of them. I tucked many of them into the end of the vegetable garden, for lack of any other place to put them. My intention was always to remove them once we’d managed some landscaping in other places.

I did end up moving most of them, but I’ve grown rather fond of the glads that pop up around the garden gate every year. That end of the garden isn’t very productive because there is too much tree competition, so I’ve left the flowers. Vegetables are every bit as ornamental as “ornamental” plants, but it’s nice to have a bit of useless beauty amidst all those hard-working vegetables (and the hard-working gardener).

Fakin’ Bacon

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Bac-UnFor many years we resisted the vegetarian meat substitutes. TVP always tasted like tough cardboard to me, and I’d never had a vegetarian sausage that I wanted to finish eating. Besides, who really needed meat anyway with all the variety in the vegetable world? To try to get a meat fix by eating some highly processed vegetable just didn’t seem right.

But after a trip to China, where the art of meat substitutes is, apparently truly an art (they go to great lengths to make the substitute taste, feel, and even look like the real deal (down to gristle, and skin), Ian decided he wanted to try making some of those substitutes, just for the fun of it. The gluten-phobic should probably read no further, because these meat substitutes use wheat protein (gluten) to replace the meat protein.

I was highly suspicious, as Ian worked with the stretchy, slimy mass of gluten, and still wasn’t sure, even once the fake meat was made and ready to be prepared for a meal. But to my surprise, I ended up quite enjoying the stuff.

What we found was that preparing these meat substitutes makes all the difference in whether they are good or revolting. The mock duck he made was great when fried and served in flavourful oriental dishes, but took on the texture of a gumboot when boiled in a stew. The bacon was delicious, but needed to be very thinly sliced and fried hot to get that crispy bacon texture.

I prefer the bacon over the mock duck–I find that greasy, salty, crunch irresistible. And as a bonus, the bacon fits nicely into the bread oven’s heat cycle, making use of the cool tail end, and eking yet another few meals out of a bread day’s labour.

You can find the vegetarian bacon recipe Ian uses here. Whether you’re vegetarian or not, it’s a fascinating food, and well worth trying at least once, just for the adventure.

Getting over the hump

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knittingI am not a knitter. People have been trying to teach me to knit since I was seven years old, to no avail. I’m very crafty in other ways. I weave, sew, quilt and embroider; I was once quite good at macramé (when macramé was “in”); I’ve done quilling and scherenschnitt, basketry and rug braiding, beading and jewellery making. I’m proficient at all these crafts and more, but put knitting needles in my hands, and suddenly I’m all thumbs.

But I’m also stubborn. When my mother tried to teach me to knit, and failed, I tried again. When the neighbour tried to teach me to knit, and failed, I tried again. When a friend tried to teach me to knit, and failed, I tried again. I bought Debbie Bliss’ book How to Knit, and forced myself to knit and unravel, knit and unravel, until I could manage to knit a row without dropping or adding stitches. It wasn’t pretty, and it was a stressful process. I’d finish a knitting session with a sore neck and tense muscles. I made myself a pair of slippers. Then I made another pair, and another, and another, and another. Six pairs of slippers later, I was thoroughly sick of slippers, and still struggled with knitting. I took a break…a ten month break. When I came back to knitting, I had to learn all over again. I tried out some different stitch patterns, attempted knitting in the round, and ended up unravelling most of my work.

Another year passed. My slippers wore out, and winter came. My feet were cold, so I tried knitting again. I had to pull out the knitting book in order to remember even the basic stitches.

But something had changed. After the first clumsy rows, I began to relax. The stitches came naturally. My fingers didn’t cramp. I finished the first slipper in a day. I was over the hump.

As parents, my husband and I regularly have to push our children to get over that hump. Learning a new skill is hard work, and there are precious few rewards at the beginning. Playing the piano, there are many wrong notes, and the songs sound clunky, the rhythm erratic. Making pastry, there could easily be half a dozen dense, oily lumps before the first magical, flaky crust. Juggling, there are a lot of balls rolling away on the floor before they soar effortlessly from hand to hand.

For some skills, the hump is low, and easily surmounted. For others, that hump is like a steep mountain with no breathtaking views until the very top. As a parent, one of my jobs is to push the kids to get over those mountains and not quit before a new skill becomes fun. It doesn’t mean becoming a tiger mom, but it does mean enforcing some discipline in kids who may not want to practice their instrument, because it’s a struggle, and they know they sound awful. It means asking the kids to help prepare dinner, and patiently encouraging them as they slowly and unevenly slice the carrots or mix the dough. It means cheering on the child who comes last in the race, and running alongside her as she prepares for the next one.

Hopefully, if we do our job right, the kids will be able to push themselves over those humps on their own one day.

They might even learn to knit.

Paneer

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100_3424 smThis is such an easy, wonderful cheese to make, that even without a ready supply of fresh goat milk, I’d keep making this cheese.

Paneer is used largely in Indian cooking, though I’ve been known to throw it into oriental stir fries where it takes the place of tofu. No matter where you use it, it gets lovely crispy edges when it fries, and it soaks up spicy flavours.

Paneer takes almost no time to make (in cheese terms, anyway), and requires no special equipment or cultures. As a friend of a friend once said, “Paneer is very dangerous.” Too easy to make and too good to resist! Give it a go!

 

1 gal whole milk

2 tsp citric acid, dissolved in ¾ c. hot water OR ½ c. fresh lemon juice

Heat the milk on high to a foaming boil, stirring constantly to avoid scorching. Turn the heat down to low and quickly add the citric acid solution, stirring very gently. The milk should curdle almost instantly. (If it doesn’t, add a little more acid). As soon as the milk has curdled, remove it from the heat, and let it sit, covered, for 10 minutes. Spoon the curd gently into a colander lined with cheesecloth (3 layers if you’re using “cheese cloth”, 1 layer if you’re using butter muslin (known here as baby muslin; you can also just use a clean handkerchief). Once the large chunks have been transferred to the colander, gently pour the rest of the liquid and curds into the colander. Pull up the corners of the cloth and twist gently. Hold the bundle under lukewarm running water for 10 seconds, then hang to drain for 3-4 hours. To speed up the draining, you can press the cheese under a light weight (put a small plate or saucer on top of the cheese to spread the weight evenly; I use a 2 litre bottle of water) for 1 ½ hours. Refrigerate until you’re ready to use it; use within 3 days.

*When it comes time to cook paneer, most recipes say to fry it. If you don’t use a non-stick pan, the paneer will stick and fall apart. If you do use a non-stick pan, the paneer will sputter and spit hot oil everywhere. I avoid both by baking it on a lightly oiled non-stick baking tray in a hot (230°C/450°F) oven until it is nicely browned.

Almond Conundrum

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100_3428Well, there they go—the last of the almonds. The last I will buy for a long time.

I absolutely love almonds. They’re one of my favourite nuts. But I had already replaced most of the almonds we eat (which come from California, producer of 80% of the world’s almonds) with locally grown walnuts, in my effort to eat closer to home. Now, however, they’ll be a very rare treat.

In my post last week about our relationship with bees, I talked about how North American bees are forced to forage in agricultural monocultures, leading to poor nutrition and exposure to pesticides. The largest of those monocultures is in California’s almond growing region, where the bees are “parked” every year during almond flowering in order to pollinate the trees.

Add to that the gallon of scarce California water that goes into producing each almond, and I find I can’t keep buying them. At least not the ones at the grocery store.

BUT, in deciding that, I’ve discovered that there are NZ almond growers as close to us as Marlborough, and that, with a little coddling, we might even be able to grow them ourselves!

So, with that, I have cheerfully sworn off California almonds. I’ll be checking out my local nurseries for almond trees, and tracking down those locally produced nuts!

Winter Holiday Craft Project

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100_3422 smIt’s the winter school holidays and it’s been raining for days, so my daughter and I decided we needed a project. After paging through some craft books and trolling the internet for a bit, we decided to make coasters.

With some old map books, a few scraps of linoleum tiles and felt, we turned out these cool coasters.

We cut the linoleum tiles into 3 ½ inch squares, then looked for the best bits of map to cover them with. We chose map locations that were either meaningful to us, or that were just neat looking. We cut out 4 ½ inch squares from our maps, and used glue and/or double sided tape to stick them onto the linoleum squares, wrapping the edges to the back. Then we glued a square of felt onto the back, and protected the maps with two coats of varnish.

Simple and fun! A great way to spend time with my daughter!

Dali would feel right at home…

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eyeball(Transcript of an actual conversation between me and my daughter)

“You could blog about eyeballs!”

“Umm…the blog is supposed to relate to food.”

“You could blog about vampires, and how they eat eyeballs!”

“But vampires suck blood; they don’t eat eyeballs.”

“Yes they do. They suck the blood, then eat the eyeballs!”

“No, vampires have piercing-sucking mouthparts. They can’t eat eyeballs…Unless, of course, they liquefy them first.”

“Oh.”