365 Days of Food

Promise

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

DSC_0046 smThere comes a day every year. A day when winter loses its grip.

A day when the wind vane lazily turns around and the breeze no longer cuts sharply into our cheeks, but gently caresses our faces and tucks the hair behind our ears.

It is a day when the lanolin of four hundred Romney lambs next door warms and mixes with the smell of freshly turned earth and the exhalations of the grass.

It is a day when we throw open the windows, though it is only fourteen degrees outside.

daffodils2 smIt is a day when we don’t worry that the firewood is scarce, when we can imagine a day that doesn’t start and end with a fire in the grate.

It is not spring. That day will come, but not yet. There are still weeks of kindling to split, and ice to break off the water troughs.

But it is the promise of spring.

And it is enough.

Ants!

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NewBugmobileclipsmFor nine years, I was owner/operator of The Bugmobile, taking live arthropods into classrooms all over Canterbury in a vehicle festooned with giant pictures of insects. I was known everywhere as The Bug Lady.

Last summer, when I closed my business, I didn’t expect to continue to think of my car as The Bugmobile. But fate, or rather a colony of ants, has interceded. My car is infested with ants.

I wouldn’t notice the ants if they weren’t so fond of Mentos…or if I weren’t so fond of Mentos.

I started keeping a roll of Mentos in the car when I was running The Bugmobile—if I had a sore throat, or needed a pick-me-up between programmes, a mint kept me going.

Apparently, they keep the ants going, too. I collected a few and identified them as the Black House Ant, Ochetellus glaber, an Australian ant that originally hitched a ride to New Zealand tucked in people’s belongings and in plant material. Ordinarily, these ants nest under stones and in tree cavities, but this particular nest is tucked neatly into a hollow in one of my mud flaps.

I should probably evict them…but they’re cute little creatures. Just 2mm long, and shiny black. I rather like them tootling around the car, cleaning up the crumbs the kids leave when they finish off their lunches on the way home from school. Maybe I’ll just find an ant-proof container for my mints.

Once The Bug Lady, always The Bug Lady…

Friends don’t let friends plant horseradish

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You can pull it out, but it will never die.

You can pull it out, but it will never die.

When we first moved in, ten years ago, we had big plans for the landscaping around the property. The first priority, however, was the vegetable garden. Even before we moved in, we had the garden tilled.

So it was natural that, when we had the odd plant that was supposed to go in some perennial bed not yet existent, we tucked it into the vegetable garden until its ultimate home was ready.

In my foolishness, I did this with horseradish.

I have spent the last ten years regretting it.

The horseradish never did establish well where we wanted it, but it thrives in the vegetable garden. I have dug it out down to 30 cm. I have planted large, smothering crops over it. I weed it out as soon as it pokes its leaves above ground. And still, the patch expands every year.

I like horseradish, and we eat the larger roots I pull, but never again will I plant it where I don’t want it.

Lentils

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100_3491 smEver since our stint in the Peace Corps, we’ve eaten lentils at least once a week, often several times. Lentils and rice was a staple meal in Panama, and it has since become a comfort food. And since lentils feature in many cuisines, they find their way to our table in many guises.

As a gardener, I found lentils intriguing. They show up in none of the seed catalogues, yet they can be grown in a wide range of conditions and locations. The two biggest lentil producing countries are Canada and India. If they grow in these disparate climates, surely I could grow them here!

With this in mind, a couple of years ago, I took a handful of lentils purchased at the grocery store and tested their germination—100%. Hooray! I was in business! I planted two types of lentils—brown and French green—at the same time I planted my beans. They sprouted well and grew vigorously. Their feathery leaves were a beautiful and intriguing addition to the garden. Patiently I watched them grow, flower, and set seed.

When the plants died back and the seed pods dried, I harvested whole plants, laden with pods.

Then I discovered why home gardeners don’t grow lentils.

Each pod contained only one or two seeds. If the plants were sufficiently dry, many of the seeds could be extracted from the pod by rubbing the plant between my hands. But even dry, a lot of seeds had to be picked individually out of the pod. And rubbing the dry plant left a lot of chaff mixed into the lentils. The chaff and the lentils were about the same weight, so blowing the chaff off also blew off many of the lentils.

After hours of painstaking work, I had enough lentils for, maybe, two meals. From the same garden space, and for a lot less work, I could have produced a year’s worth of dry beans.

I don’t regret growing lentils, and I’m pleased to know I can grow them. I’m also quite content to let someone else grow them (and harvest them mechanically) for me.

Strawberry Muffins

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_3478 smI froze strawberries for the first time last summer, and I’ve been trying to find ways to use them. The problem is that I think the frozen strawberries taste disgusting unless they are further processed after thawing. That’s not a problem with the sliced and sugared ones—throw them into a saucepan and simmer them down for a while, and they make an excellent strawberry syrup for pancakes. I can use up a lot of frozen strawberries on pancakes!

It’s the ones I froze whole that are causing me trouble. But yesterday I found a very nice way to use them—Strawberry yogurt muffins! This is a variation on Sour Cream Muffins in King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking.

 

2 cups whole wheat flour

½ cup all –purpose flour

1 ½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

4 Tbsp (60 g) butter, softened

½ cup sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup plain yogurt

2 cups frozen strawberries

Mix flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the vanilla and yogurt. Add the dry ingredients and mix just until smooth. Slightly thaw, then roughly chop the strawberries. Fold them into the batter, and refrigerate at least an hour (for breakfast muffins, make the batter the night before, and refrigerate overnight). The strawberries will release juice, so you’ll need to give the batter another stir just before scooping it into a greased muffin tin.

Bake at 400°F (210°C) for about 25 minutes. Makes 12 – 15 muffins depending on how big you like them.

Wedding Bowls

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100_3483 smTwenty-three years ago, when Ian and I got married, a whole lot of people gave us gifts. Most of those gifts were kitchen items. In addition to pots, pans, and knives, we acquired 23 bowls that day–ceramic mixing bowls, stainless steel mixing bowls, hand-blown glass serving bowls, artistic pottery bowls, wooden bowls… You name it, we got it.

We could have broken one a year for every year of our marriage so far. But most of those bowls are still with us, 23 years later. All are well-used, and remind us even now of the people who gave them to us all those years ago.

So, thanks everyone! Our wedding bowls ring daily!

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

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

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.