Old Food

For lunch today, I dolloped kim chi onto egg-roll wrappers, rolled them up and fried them. I made the kim chi myself. This evening, I jarred and refrigerated sauerkraut that I made myself and I pickled some fresh beets. One jar of beets I am pickling with vinegar, sugar, and spices. The other, I am pickling with whey. I "made" the whey myself from yogurt. Typically, I think of whey as a byproduct of cheesemaking, but in this case the cheese was the byproduct--a tangy cream cheese. Before going to bed, I set some black beans to sprouting.

So, what's going on?

Well, for most of my adult life, I have enjoyed cooking and food prep. and I have always felt like the way we buy and prepare food around these parts is pretty disconnected from they way most humanity has and does handle food. I am grateful for the grocery store and that is still where the majority of my food comes from. But I do think that, when the way we approach food is radically different than most of human experience, we have to be somewhat alienated from that experience and the humans who are part of it. As someone who values tradition, I really want to better understand food traditions.

So last year, Skylar and I started a garden. This year it is about double the size but still pretty small. We also got off to a bumpy start with the summer crops, so while dad is Tweeting that he has green tomatoes on the vine, we are thrilled that our plants have cleared eight inches. However we did plant early and late spring crops this year, which is progress.

But the whole preservation and fermenting kick comes from my recent read of Nourishing Traditions (subtitle excised because it is self-contridictory and embarrassing). This is where have learned about fermentation in the history of food culture. So far I have fermented carrots, cabbage, and beets. I look forward to cucs (pickles), tomatoes (ketchup), mushrooms (mushroom ketchup, if you can imagine), and just about every other vegetable I can get my hands on.

Also, we are kombucha-brewin' nuts now. I don't know where I first heard about this fermented tea, but Nourishing Traditions talks about it and I educated myself on the Web. Coincidentally, cousin Zach took a class, so a got a starter culture from him, have multiplied that, and now have three gallons fermenting on staggered schedules.

We bought a dorm fridge at a pawn shop to hold all of my glass jars of fermented/brewed stuff.

Sprouting nuts, seeds, and legumes is apparently another traditional way of getting max nutrients from those foods.

There is a method to my madness. Jaime has a crazy digestive system and it seems that Simon may have inheritted some of it. We have verified via testing by a gastroenterologist that she has an over abundance of some sort of bad flora in her gut. She had begun a regiment of heavy-duty antibiotics to kill this off, but had to stop it due to other health issues. Well, fermented foods are a benifit here in a couple of ways: fermenting using the methods I am learning is pro-biotic. Fermentation increases the growth of the bacteria that are beneficial to your digestive system--some of the same bacteria in live-culture yogurt. Additionally, fermentation is, essentially partially pre-processing food, making it easier for your system to digest.

Anyway, all that stuff is out there on the nets and in various books. Fact is, I love the taste fermented foods like kim chi and kraut and I love making stuff from scratch as much as possible. I am spending scads of time in the kitchen, but I find it very satisfying.

Then of course, there is bread making, which has actually slowed down for me since determining that really great tasting bread requires long rising times. I need to work out the best way to work my schedule with that.

I dream of a life of growing things--vegetables fermenting, kombucha brewing, cheese aging, bread rising, and beer brewing in the house and fruits, vegetables, chicken, rabbits, and whatever else growing outside. Children and grandchildren growing both in and outside (but mostly outside). I have been reading Sharon Astyk's blog and would love to have something similar, but in town. Whether or not I realize that dream, anything I do to grow/make my own food is incredibly satisfying.

I'm hungry now.

The house smells like chicken and beets

Auntie Skylar started a new blog about her latest project and that got me to thinking, "hey, I have one of those; I should dust it off and see how long it takes before I can prove I know how to use a semicolon correctly."

The Big News around here today is that David woke up from a bad dream to a Buzz Lightyear. The way Jaime tells it, he told her that he had a bad dream this morning and woke up and turned over and there was Buzz and he closed his eyes and opened them again and Buzz was still there. I am the one who put Buzz in bed with him. After years of keeping my finger securely in the hole of the dam holding back the Buzz Lightyear, I was finally overwhelmed by the forces of nature. It happened when the mother of David's bestest friend said that this friend wanted to give David his Buzz Lightyear. She is standing there with it in her hand and I didn't have whatever it might have taken to say, "No, he can keep it." Just the other night, David and I were eating ice cream on the front porch after sunset when he spotted a star. I taught him how to wish on a star and he wished for Buzz Lightyear. So this morning I put it in bed with him before I left for work.

He called me later at work and told me that he really liked the Buzz Lightyear. There was not a shread left in his voice of a little boy or toddler or anything. I was struck by how very grown up he sounded. I have been thinking a lot lately about how little he was when he was born and sighing.

This evening I made chicken stock and pickled beets and eggs. Actually I finished stock that I began several days ago and then ran out of time. I have been reading a couple of books about food and cooking, which inspired the stock: Nourishing Traditions (I'll omit the embarrasing subtitle) and Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. As a result of both of these, I have been doing a lot of experementing in the kitchen. I've made various things such as Kombucha, cream cheese and whey, Kim Chi, pickled carrots, five shortbread cookies, dumplings, pop-overs, fritters, and, this evening, stock and pickled beets. Not sure what I am going to do with the stock. Tomorrow is a fasting day, I am out of town Thursday through the weekend, and the Apostles' Fast begins Monday. So basically, I will not have the oportunity to do anything with it unil July. But the house smells nice, if you like beets.

Quote of the day

From Crunchy Con (the comments): "I have a friend who won't eat tongue either--he says it's just too strange to taste something that might be tasting you back."

Cowpooling

Word Spy - cowpooling

For several years now, we have discussed this, but we never seem to plan adequately to have the cash on hand at the same time the cow is available.

worms, roxanne, i'm afraid of worms!

So, David is eating his dinner last night with an unusual level of cooperation--eggs with pees and corn, raisins, and chili-power-covered pistachios. A few minutes in, he declares that he doesn't like worms.

"Great" I say, "I'll leave them off of the grocery list."

A few minutes later, he announces that there are worms in his raisins. Ha ha, what a tremendous imagination. I assume the funny voice, "there are not worms in your raisins, sillyhead. Now, eat your eggs"

A few minutes more and he points at the raisins, "see, worms right there."

I'm a good sport, so I look. Holy leaping larvae, there ARE worms in his raisins! There are two or three tiny white wormy things the look a lot like inch worms would look if they were quarter-inch worms.

"I don't like them," he says.

This final statement begs a question: Does he know he doesn't like them because he has tried them, or is he just assuming he doesn't like them because daddy served them and he is an obstinate two-year-old? Because you know that, the next time I try to feed him, all he is going to want is the raisin worms.

later, worm fans.