Growing a Garden from the Ground Up!

While I fritter away my youth looking for a job in this poor economic climate, I also have been working on a project to construct a raised bed garden in my parents' backyard. Granted, October in the Pacific Northwest is not the best time to start planting a garden from scratch, but I did so anyway.

Much of the delay in getting my plants in the ground I can blame on the difficulties in actually putting the bed in place. I used a "recipe" for success on Sunset Magazine's website, that resulted in a beautiful wooden ... that is, after I gagged my way through the oil fumes of the wood stain (not particularly environmentally friendly) and pushed my hands to their limit in drilling each plank. Then, of course, the lovely top soil had to make its way from the front yard to the bed - and it wasn't about to do that itself.

But finally, at the end of October, my seedlings have made it into the soil. They face a tough road ahead. The broccoli, garlic, and beets most assuredly won't reach their full potential until the spring. I may reap the benefits of the Swiss chard, lettuce, and arugula before the first frost, but that is doubtful. No matter. My little plantlings are only the beginning of a (hopefully) long and fruitful backyard garden!

Ode to Winter Squash

It's not that I'm obsessed, but I currently have 10 varieties sitting in my living room...

Kabocha Squash pound cake from Love, Eric.

Happy International Climate Action Day! In honor of the planet, I've decided to dedicate today's post to the quintessential seasonal vegetables of the dark and gloomy late fall/winter months - when all you want is a plump and juicy tomato shipped from the south. Yes, those delicious, slightly sweet, creamy-fleshed winter squash.

Oh, winter squash, how you brighten my day.

You tantalize my taste buds in every way.

Baked, roasted; diced or puree,

Orange, striped, or bluish-gray,

No matter what, I have to say:

Because of you, though it sounds cliche,

In the depth of winter, I feel OK.

So I like to rhyme. Winter squash are probably my favorite thing about this time of year. I don't care for the constant wet drizzle from October through May in Seattle nor the temperatures dropping daily. That warm, sweet, beta-carotene-filled meat easily lifts my spirits.

I'm usually pretty boring about cooking up my squashes - just douse them in a little olive oil and salt and stick them in the oven until tender and lightly browned. But, occasionally I'll go a bit nutty. Below is my favorite recipe for Butternut Squash Risotto, and I've included some links to other squashirific recipes.

• 2 cups Butternut Squash, cut into small square cubes about 1/2 x 1/2 in.
• 1 cup Grated Butternut Squash (both butternuts can be substituted with red kuri, acorn, or other similar squashes)
• 2 Tbs. Olive Oil
• 2 Cloves Crushed Garlic
• 1 Tbs. Minced Onion
• 2 cups Arborio Rice
• 5 cups Vegetable Stock
• 1 tsp. Kosher Salt and maybe a pinch more depending on your taste

1. Toss cubed squash w/ 1 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper (optional)
2. Roast at 425 F for about 25 minutes, until edges lightly browned.
3. Sprinkle this over the finished risotto.
4. Over low heat, warm a deep sided sauté pan, turn heat up to medium and add 2 Tbs. oil.
5. Add 2 cloves crushed garlic and 1 Tbs. minced onion, sauté until garlic and onion become fragrant. Add 1 cup shredded squash.
6. Sauté on medium to medium low until a nice caramel color starts to develop on the squash (about 10 min.).
7. Add risotto, sauté until rice is coated with butter, and shredded squash. Stirring frequently add 1/3 of the stock.
8. As the rice absorbs the stock add more, repeat until rice is done (this will take about 35 minutes).
9. Rice should still have slight firmness (not mushy) and be creamy.
10. As the squash cooks with the rice it will break up and incorporate into the creamy risotto.
11. Risotto is forgiving. do not worry if you need a little more stock, and season to your liking.

Other Recipes (keep in mind that many squashes are interchangeable in baking):

Roasted Squash and Apples

Pumpkin Cranberry Bread

Butternut Squash Hummus

Delicata Squash Bisque

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

Pumpkin Pie Brownies

Butternut Squash and Pear Soup

Spiced Winter Squash Cake - Best of Bloodroot Vol. II

My favorites: oven-roasted delicata squash; spaghetti squash with home-made tomato sauce.

Enjoy a squash-full winter!

How to eat cheese...

The fruits of my labors - five little mozzarella balls from 6 cups of milk!

Deliciously creamy, the ricotta made from the whey made an excellent hor d'euvre topping a (single) cracker with fireberry jelly...

...simple answer: make it yourself! When I decided to go back to dairy, I swore that I would only consume milk that came from local, pasture-raised cows. Well, while there are some local cheese-makers, there is definitely something more rewarding about doing something yourself. So, this evening I decided to attempt it...with relative success!

My childhood favorite ice cream place, Theno's Dairy - whose land became too pricey to keep a herd - happens to sell milk from Golden Glen Creamery - one of the few local dairies with accessible milk. On the way home from Yoga, I picked up a bottle of skim and half-and-half to try out my little experiment. I followed these simple instructions as far as I do any recipe - with a very large grain of salt and much improvisation.

What a phenomenal sense of accomplishment, not to mentioned satisfied taste buds, after culinary delight. I highly recommend trying this out some time, even if you don't plan on being the sole producer of your cheesy comestibles. You will need vegetarian rennet and citric acid - difficult to find except online or at a few specialty stores, like Cellar Homebrew in Ballard, WA! Have fun!

Weeding Down Climate Change

Zucchini and tomatoes abound during the summer. I try to analyze the exception productivity of the "trombetta" variety growing in the garden.

Occasionally we had an extra helping hand on market days...unfortunately, most of the time it was an extra paw.

On this year’s theme of Blog Action Day – Climate Change – a person could take her blog many directions, attesting to the complexity and severity of the issue. Seeing how my blog focuses almost exclusively on one of those things near and dear (and essential) for human survival, I thought I’d write a bit about food!

I am an advocate of the “practice what you preach” method (I know, cheesy) – so I will not tell others to cut back on driving if I am not planning on biking down to the library, AND I do not plan on rebuking someone for buying an apple from New Zealand, if my own apples come from Chile instead of Washington State (woot!). Today it is near impossible to escape the popular literature and news articles pushing the connection between food production and distribution and climate change.

As much as I try to eat local, seasonal, organic, and less-processed foods, it is difficult for me to really understand the breadth of inputs that go into our daily bread. Sure. I can rant about food miles and the method of transportation, chemical inputs, and on-farm machinery use, but it is still in the abstract. Therefore, in an attempt to get better acquainted to my own food-related carbon footprint, I thought I would explore the actual growing of the food I eat.

During the month of September I worked on an organic farmer near Bologna, Italy – yes, I WWOOFed. (Ok, so flying halfway around the world isn’t the best way to lower one’s carbon footprint, but this was an extension of my three-month “cultural education” in Europe…and I already feel super guilty about those air miles.) Elisa and Romana began leasing a few acres of land to grow primarily vegetables for the farmer’s markets and restaurants in the Bologna area about two years ago.

With only one machine to do a bit of weed whacking and no use of commercial fertilizers or pesticides/herbicides, Il Granelo registers pretty low on the input scale. But, that meant that much of our time was occupied weeding, harvesting, and lamenting the loss of rows of crops to the ravenous locusts. Production was greatly limited by manpower, and without a hothouse, the fields basically shut down in the winter. It saddened, but didn’t surprise me that Romano had to return to his old job a few months out of the year to pay off farm debts.

I gained a new respect for the plight of the organic farmer, and now appreciate more the higher costs at markets, the imperfect skin of the fruit, the hole-y leafy greens. Modern “conventional” agriculture has made leaps and bounds that eliminate many of the strains on a farmer’s life. At the same time, though, it relies heavily on fossil fuels to run machinery and create the chemical inputs; it releases greenhouse gases and other wastes into the environment. Many of the local farmers I talked to at the market in Bologna love what they do, but it is made more difficult without support – although a growing trend among consumers in helping.

So, in the spirit of taking action against climate change – think before you bite, and consider your meal’s carbon footprint. Stay tuned for my next episode, where I attempt to install a garden for my parents to try their hand at growing veggies!

My Vegan Dilemma

Obligatory photo...vegan chocolate beet cake! More delicious than one would assume...

Almost exactly two years ago I decided to go veg - not just no meat, poultry, fish, etc., but no dairy or eggs, either. Eight years earlier, around the same time, I began my life as a vegetarian... don't ask me why these revelations all seem to come during the autumn, or why they fall surprisingly close to a slew of holidays (not the least of which is Thanksgiving A.K.A. Turkey Day). However, this time my diet transformation resulted for slightly different reasons.

As a thirteen-year-old, I was most concerned with the fact that I was consuming a once living, breathing creature, complete with brain and nervous system. It also didn't hurt that half the girls in my eighth grade class adopted the same principles (although, none to my knowledge still follow them). After those eight years of refining my values, transitioning from a more animal-focused outlook to a bigger picture environmental one, I didn't know what my next step should be.

Then it hit me. The livestock industry produces almost 20% of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions and takes up large swaths of land either for grazing or even worse, for growing chemically-intensive corn and soy. While some animals make less impact than others (eat goats), that doesn't solve my dairy dilemma (I do not like goat's milk). Furthermore, while I actually think that raising chickens in the right situation and eating their eggs is completely fine, the way modern industry packs them together, concentrating their waste, and mistreating the animals, causes eggs to be even less appealing than dairy. So, I quit dairy and egg products. I took on the challenge of converting one my favorite pastimes - baking - and set out on my new food journey.

My experiment was going well a year and a half in; I had my staples down and baking was starting to come to me nicely. Then I jetted off to Europe for three months and decided to revert back to my vegetarian days while on the trip (in great part because I would be staying on a farm with an Italian family for a month). This little hiatus got me thinking - when cows are raised on grasslands as they were meant to be, they are excellent converters of energy inedible to humans to something we can digest; chickens play an important role in pest control and fertilization...when allowed to roam around a farm; and goat and pigs are good consumers of excess food and field scraps. The real, contemporary issues are that too many animal products are created from high waste and emission producing systems, AND people eat TOO MUCH meat, dairy, and eggs.

So, rather than go whole hog back to veganism now that I am in the States, I've decided to try a new experiment. For all intents and purposes, I am vegan - any products I buy will have no dairy or eggs in them. BUT, I plan on consuming dairy or eggs produced in an ecologically conscious manner - local, pasture-fed cow's milk (like I said, goat's milk is not for me) and "backyard" chicken's eggs. I don't expect the entire population of the United States to give up meat, dairy, and eggs, and in some places in doesn't even make sense (in norther latitudes, dairy products are keys to survival). I believe that people should make more informed and conscious decisions about their animal products. Therefore, I want to support those farmers who are trying to produce in a more sustainable fashion.

For now, this seems like a good place to be!

Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

Ah, the joys of summer in the Mediterranean!

So I've been rather negligent of this blog since its inception a year ago. However, now I have a reason to reinvigorate it: Blog Action Day. Taking place on October 15, thousands of bloggers will be posting on the topic of climate change - check out other blogs at www.blogactionday.org. I decided to take this little nudge and start updating my blog again ... concentrating on my experiments with being vegan (and successes and failures), as well as thoughts on the larger issues imbedded in our food systems' sustainability. As I have several topics I want to discuss at the moment, I think I will devote a separate post to each one. Stay tuned for more activity on this site, and hopefully something to interest you!