Category — day-to-day

Oh Hot, soupy, slippery wontons on a clear night after a deep snow.

The perfect portion of pork and scallion and soy wrapped in a soft, just-a-bit-chewy skin, topped with Sambal Oelek and a couple ladels of steamy broth with sliced cabbage.

What could be better?

Saturday night, I had the wonderful fortune to be invited to a wonton-making party down near Dupont Circle. I met up with friend Andy beforehand and we had a hot drink at Big Bear cafe and chatted about agriculture and business and solar power. Then we trudged through the slushy streets with our hands in our pockets and grins on our faces dodging the few silly motorists who dared to break the happy humanity of the evening.

It was a crowd of jolly 20-somethings, convening to drink and devour dumplings and delight in one another’s company. It was a crowd of many former classmates, whose faces I recognized, but who I couldn’t quite place. It made the party seem vaguely comforting and also a little unsettling.

A little after 10, I bundled up and headed outside, my hand on my belly, warm with beer and soup. I met up with Marcie five blocks away on the corner of 18th and Columbia and we trudged to a tall apartment building, where we went up to a party where no one knew anyone, but everyone was talking about love.

The party had cheese and wine and bread and those bright red roasted peppers in oil that have such a strange texture, like raw flesh. So we found a little corner and nibbled on things and talked about things until it was after one and we were sleepy, so we headed back to Marcie’s house.

The next morning, we got up and brought the computer to bed to seek out a breakfast spot. We shared some okay-but-not-great eggs and pancakes, had a mini-adventure at a furniture store nearby and then we each went our separate ways.

I’m in DC! Until May!

And it’s wonderful so far.

After a brief work-jaunt to Santa Fe, I’ve settled into a lovely house with awesome housemates, gotten down into work at the office, hung out with old friends and made a few new ones.

New Friends

Introducing, Marcie, a friend of a friend from the islands. We met for first time at the farmer’s market (where else) last weekend for squash and coffee; it was, needless to say, an encounter of kindred spirits.

This Wednesday we inaugurated what I think’ll be an especially fruitful cooking partnership.

I didn’t feel like trekking to the market and the pickings were slim. Since I just arrived a week ago, I was lacking some of my usual stockpile of goodies, but I figured a little bit of creativity and some love could yield something good. On hand: rapini on sale at Whole Paycheck, a jar of white beans, yukon golds, chicken broth, and some hot Italian sausage from Cibola Farms out in Virginia. It had been a grey day, so I was thinking soup. Marcie was in agreement.

Sausages in soup

The sausage made the meal.

Cibola Farms raises free-range heritage Tamworth pigs and grassfed bison. Buffalo-pork cranberry sausage? Buffalo summer sausage? Yum! I’m curious how they process their buffalo because a source in New Mexico mentioned that the USDA inspector charges some ridiculous hourly rate to inspect “exotic animals” like bison at their mobile slaughter facility. A question for the next market.

The sausage is made by Simply Sausage, a company out in Landover, MD that packages sausages for a number of different farmers. They’ve featured recently on Smithsonian.com in this sausage-making video

Plus their website has a friendly page on storing extra sausage.

So the soup was a success: sauteing the onions and garlic until the smell wafted upstairs into my bedroom where I could smell it 3 hours later, throwing in the harder stem ends of the rapini and the potatoes, then the broth, then the sausage as an afterthought (may have been even better if we had thought to brown it with the onions). Last the leafy bits of the veg, the beans (canned and already cooked), and a healthy dose of chili powder — not an entirely intentional pour, but an entirely welcomed one.

Accompaniments

And to go along, I made a batch of the buttermilk crackers that’ve been a table staple recently. So so simple, and so so delicious, although in this case they were slightly more difficult to make since our kitchen lacks a proper baking tray. I flipped over a smallish roasting pan and used the bottom. The crackers got mostly crispy, but I definitely need to invest in a proper pan.

I’ve been stressing about my graduate school applications and Christmas and my impending move to DC. All actually very happy things, but I’m finding it all overwhelming.

Thankfully, I have these little guys to put things in perspective.

We picked up a new batch of chicks at Kruse’s Feed this weekend. They were the first chicks they’ve had in in a long time because the hatchery has been running out. My dad talked to the manager who explained that backyard chicken raising has become so popular that they just don’t have enough (girl) chickens to keep up.

Last month we processed 10 of our chickens who had stopped laying so that we could get started with another group. It seems somewhat morbid to consider the death that these adorable little creatures might someday end up in the pot too, but I eat meat and I know that whatever meat I eat was once, at some point, a cute animal, so I try to take good care of them and be properly thankful for what they provide for me.

I’m going to go out to the garage right now to say hi to them, and then it’s back to personal statements. What matters most to me and why — in 750 words or less. Oh. My. Lord.

I have so much to say that it’s all packed up inside there and I can’t figure out a good place to start. I could draw this out into a really gross metaphor, but you get the picture.

Got back to Orange County and have been feeling dazed. I have a bunch of random projects that I’m working on: applying to graduate school, taking an econometrics class, planting a garden, working for my dad’s startup, hanging out with the fam, reading articles, writing articles, cooking, trying to start this new blog, trying to exercise, looking into farms for next season.

But going in all these different directions, I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere at all.

Toys “R” Us by Andreas Gursky 1999

My general mood these days is like this Andreas Gursky photo. Bad, huh?

Last night, I went to listen to this farmer at the Fullerton Public Library. He talked about a lot of things that made me happy like picking ripe peaches and treasuring family and driving down roads that blow up so much dust that you have to turn your windshield wipers on. He talked about the number of frost hours that peaches require, and he talked about

in turn nurturing and being nurtured. He was talking specifically about his family’s farm in Fresno, but I kept thinking about much I feel out of context and how much I want to put down roots, make a home, invest in land, invest in community.

I heard a great show on the Canadian Broadcasting Network by a neuroscientist who studied the development of children’s brains. She talked about how infants are taking in new input 100% of the time — they are in constant learning mode — open to new ideas, testing out theories, but not particularly good at focusing on a task. Not very good at letting go of some things to attend to one thing in particular.

I remember specifically that she said it could take up until a persons mid-to-late 20s for their brains to fully develop the capacity to focus in. I’m 24. Perhaps there’s time (?)

All this moving around and jumping from this to that has given me an amazing breadth of experience to draw from, but now I’m ready to build something.

I left the island today in the wee hours of morning. It was dark, but not too cold, as I hurried downstairs to put my last pot of water on to boil for tea and took out my last trash and stuffed my jar of kombucha (yes, really) and raincoat and hiking boots in the back of my car.

Packing turned the watertower into a maelstrom for the past few days and I’ve had no time to cook, and only a few hours of work on the farm — just to help out with the harvest.

Instead, I spent all my free time saying goodbyes and preparing my 7-day itinerary for the drive home. I’m stopping at five universities to talk with ten or so professors in Sustainable MBA programs and MS/PhD programs related to food systems, sustainability and business.

Day One: UBC

It went well, but I’m too exhausted now to go into the details. Tomorrow, Bainbridge Graduate Institute, where they actually offer a food industry focus. Amazing. I cannot wait to chat with the folks there and with the alum who’s offered to meet with me.

Here I go, back to school…

I think this is what it means when people talk about “community.” In the past, I’ve studied and even written about community in the educational context: “community based organizations,” “community-school collaboration” etc., but I feel now like I never really understood what it could mean to be in a vibrant, healthy, active community where a weekend in August means non-stop music and free food at the Island Village Barter Fair, Sunday mornings mean brunch and yoga at Sweet Earth Farm or coffee at Credence and Andreas, and there are so many potlucks you’re always afraid you’ll run out of enough quinoa to cover them all.

I guess that’s a lovely small town for you.

And not just a small town, but a town that seems to attract a certain kind of individual who cares about his neighbor more than the average Joe.

I guess some folks come to the island to retire and hide out and lay low, but it seems like most people, especially the young ones, are looking to carve out a niche in a place that’s different from your run-of-the-mill city. A place where you can go see your lamb being slaughtered, where you can work-trade a jar of jam for a haircut, where you know your server in a restaurant and the cashier at the supermarket and the teller at the bank, and so on.

I’ve only been here 6 months, but I already feel the island creeping under my skin. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s not just that. It’s also that there’s this overwhelming sense of connectedness and support and enthusiasm for each other that is like a super contagious mega-virus, the tropical kind that you think you’ve kicked, but that comes back to haunt you 10 years down the road.

I heard a story on NPR today about Flint, Michigan considering a physical downsizing of the city as a means to lowering costs and improving services to a core of city-dwellers. Interestingly, the story offered a community garden as an example of the potential benefits of this sort of plan, the idea being that as residential buildings were consolidated, it would leave more land for parks, gardens, and other shared community spaces.

I know this touches on many different issues: sprawl, infrastructure costs, homeowners’ rights — but I’m most interested in how this sort of change will actually affect interactions between people, everyday.

How do you experience community? In your family, in your neighborhood, through an organization or club?

Tonight Pritha and I are giving a presentation at the San Juan Island Library: an intro to Community Supported Agriculture and a farm-fresh cooking demo.

We’ve got a powerpoint.

But don’t worry, it’s mostly pictures like this:

If that’s not enough excitement for you, click here to download all the slides. They really are spartan, though! Our notes are where the substance’s at.

None of that nonsense of slides dripping with words so small they can’t be seen. We’re trying to keep it simple and charm people with our enthusiasm for small farms and chard and community love.

After we do a little indoctrination on the wonderfulness of community-supported agriculture, we’ll try to further ingratiate ourselves by appealing to the audience’s stomach.

Pritha’s making a simple summer squash soup, and I’m going to do poached eggs on kale and tomatoes, and green beans in thyme and butter. I devoured my test run on the eggs as I started this post — just a little tomato splashed on my screen as I shoveled from plate to mouth.

It’s been such a very long time since I’ve done anything like this. I was over in the tackroom at Heritage Farm last night where Pritha works, both of us huddled over my little black macbook, walking through our “talking points” and feeling like we were in college again.

This morning before we headed out for the Friday harvest, I blanched the green beans and chopped the garlic and started to put together my bag of supplies:

• knife? CHECK
• cutting board? CHECK
• veggies? CHECK
• utensils, plates, napkins? CHECK

and so on and so on.

I love that it was so easy to make this happen — all it took was an email exchange with the lovely library’s programs coordinator, Adrienne. She even offered to pay for the supplies for the class. Only on this island!

Or maybe not? I should try to do this again when I return to Orange County. I feel like they would cite health code and tell me the fire marshall wouldn’t allow an electric burner. Am I too cynical?

With all these foodalicious sustainabodacious, socially aware thoughts crowding my brain it feels good to force the thoughts into action and do something, not matter how small.

What kind of little actions have you taken lately on something you care about? Change a lightbulb? Plant a tomato? I’d love to know.

I’m applying for graduate programs in food & sustainability for 2010 and it is hard.

It’s hard for your average smartie-pants and in nearly a year of operating outside of your traditional “get-it-done,” information heavy, fast-paced, analytical work environment, I’ve definitely lost some of my so-called edge. My brain was never a knife — more like an awesome antique grinder that chews up various pieces of meat and adds some spices and leaves it to age until it’s spicy and delicious and totally new — but now the grinder’s dull and I’m feeling like I may never get back into any sort of game or groove.

I’m trying to juggle work here on the farm with packing up to go and setting up appointments with professors. And as if that wasn’t enough, I feel like I have to go into these meetings with my future life already laid out in my mind’s eye and my mind’s eye has pinkeye or perhaps is permanently nearsighted and there’s no lasiks doctor to be found.

So instead of impressing the hell out of professors with my intense focus and passion for just one thing, I’ll have to settle for telling the professors the truth. The less sexy, and quite complicated truth that I’m not sure what I want to do, but I do know that it has to do with figuring out the role that social enterprise and social responsibility and business innovation plays in creating a more sustainable food system and using what I learn to do something.

Does that mean I want to open a french-fry truck that grows its own potatoes on the roof and uses excess fry grease as biofuel? Maybe.

Or perhaps I’d like to work as a program manager for someone like these guys. Or do research and teach and consult on the side for small food start-ups. Who the heck knows? If I’m honest, not me. At least not yet.

What I have realized is that I do know some things about food and sustainability and business and I need to start sharing what I do know with others instead of just piling up knowledge in my brain without really processing, organizing and using it for something.

This puts me in mind of a story I heard once (or maybe it was a dream?) about a hermit who holed himself up in a shack for years and years and years and read and read and read exhaustively, refusing to talk to anyone or engage with the world until he had figured out the meaning of life and secrets of the universe. Eventually, when he was old and wizened and barely able to stand, he emerged from his shack in the middle of the desolate woods, pronouncing triumphantly that he had solved the secrets of the universe. Then, if I recall correctly, he fell down and died.

Let me not be that hermit.

I hate the ferry this morning. It’s nothing against the boat really, but just the way the rigid, unsympathetic inflexibility of the schedule seems to mock me — makes me feel secure in a plan, and then pulls out of the harbor with a naughty smirk just before I arrive to board.

Really, this morning’s ferry debacle was all on me, but that’s the rub with the ferry — sometimes the system actually foils you, and sometimes it just makes your personal inadequacies really really obvious.

Like it was not my fault the time Jim and Jacqueline came to visit for Jaime’s birthday and arrived more than an hour in advance of the next ferry and were told they could not wait in line until 6 o’clock. Then at 6 o’clock, when they pulled round to get in line, they were told “no, not time yet” by a harried ferry worker on a stress-induced power trip. And by the time Jim had made another round with the car, there were no spaces left and he had to wait for the 10:55 pm ferry. Totally lame.

But today was way lame-r. Sean arrived yesterday with my car, which he drove all the way from LA to the farm. We planned to send him off this morning on the early ferry so he could catch a shuttle to Ferndale to meet up with an aunt and then get to the Bellingham airport in time for his afternoon flight.

I checked the schedule: 6:10 am.

So we both roused ourselves in the dark foggy morning, I fixed him some fig bread and blackberries and fake mocha drink; like the good Navy boy he is, out he came at seconds to 5:50.

We headed out and arrived in town at 6:00 am just in time to see the 6:00 am ferry pulling out of the dock — literally 10 feet away. I was tempted to tell Sean to jump, but he was a sonar technician and not a Seal, so I figured maybe it wasn’t in his MO.

I hadn’t checked the schedule and neither had he and somehow I had gotten it wrong. All I could say was “oh my god, F@#&!, I’m so so sorry” and watch as the ferry continued on its journey.

I’m generally pretty on top of things like schedules, but somehow, today of all days, when I was supposed to get my friend to the ferry on time, somehow TODAY I let things slip and the unforgiving ferry made me pay.

GR!

Last Sunday, I came back from a visit to the Bullocks’ Homestead on Orcas Island in the afternoon, tired, dirty, ridiculously happy, and ready to collapse in a heap on my little blue sofa with some iced tea and The Taste of Place, which I had started on the ferry. But then Lucy came and roused me and told me she had been invited over to Rob’s to pick figs.

Rob is a fellow farmer, known for his pasture-raised meats which he sells at the farmer’s market along with his buddy Guard Sundstrom. Their Meat Wagon is always busy with folks looking for fresh, local, humanely-raised ridiculously tasty meat. Both Rob and Guard are members of the Island Grown Farmer’s Cooperative which is a group of farmers who banded together to design and launch a mobile slaughtering unit that allows for local processing of beef, lambs, and pigs. This unit was the first of its kind in the US and since then groups of farmers’ around the country have come to these folks for help replicating the model in their own communities.

But Rob isn’t just a lamb man, he’s a true farmer and, dare-I-say, homesteader.

In addition to his animals, Rob takes care of a lovely orchard, and a garden on an adjacent property. He started out 30 years ago in a little trailer; he built a lovely yurt, then a beautiful home where his older son now lives with his wife and children.

When Lucy and I arrived at Rob’s place, the two big dogs ran out to greet us, barking madly. No one was home so we poked about behind the house, amidst the chickens and the trees, looking for the fig tree. Being city-folk we weren’t exactly sure what a fig tree looked like, so we stopped off at the walnuts and the pears and the apples before finally we sighted the little bush close by one of the mobile chicken coops.

Right as we started picking, Rob arrived, clean and spiffy from his granddaughter’s birthday party. We picked a basketful of ripe figs, then Rob offered us cling peaches from his trees.

We walked through the orchard, asking about the different pears and plums and apples — Asian pears, Bosc, Red Anjou, Santa Rosa plums and about the history of the place.

Rob told us of wheeling his pregnant wife to the car in a wheelbarrow back in the days before there was a proper driveway to the house. She vowed not to come back until he built a proper house. He built the yurt where he still lives today.

Then he showed us the house that he built back in the early 90s with help from his brothers, one an architect, the other a woodworker. It was a well-conceived house, and very beautiful; white adobe-style walls and huge windows facing out on the orchard and the pond. Inside, the exposed wood beams and gorgeous live-edge counter gave the house a cozy woodsy smell and a warm, friendly feeling. The wood came from trees felled and milled on the property and Rob described the process of forestry management — taking skinny, distressed trees from beside the thicker looking counterparts because their skinniness was indication of slow, dense growth.

Then we went up to the area where his younger son was just laying the foundation for his own home. We toured the sweet outdoor kitchen, composting toilet, and the wooden frame ready and waiting for the concrete truck which would arrive the next morning.

I was inspired, to say the least. My own dad and I have been talking about building a home together. I can’t think of very many things that would be more satisfying.

I ate most of my share of the figs fresh within a day or two — subtle, sweet soft flesh popped into my mouth whole. All that remained was a little pile of stems in the compost bucket below the sink. But then, the remaining fruits started to get a little soft. I didn’t want to eat them all at once, so I looked for a way to turn them into something else to savor.

I wanted to pair the figs with anise — one of our local bakeries makes an amazing yeasted Fig Anise Bread and I’m obsessed with the combination. It’s warm and crunchy and slightly spicy. But I wanted to make a breakfast bread, so I looked around for recipes with fresh figs and fell upon instruction for a Fig Tea Bread by Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes. It turned out that the tea in the recipe gave the bread a deep, smoky richness and lovely color and the seeds from the figs distributed through the bread gave a lovely crunch — something like poppy seeds in other breakfast breads. I reduced the other spices and the sugar, so the star anise flavor came to the fore, perfectly complimenting the soft sweetness of the figs.

Figs, raisins, tea, star anise and nutmeg make up the flavor body

I kept the fig chunks pretty big so they’d stay whole in the bread

The figs soak in the tea for just over 10 minutes, then part of the tea is reserved for the bread

Wet ingredients

After the dry ingredients are in, mix in the tea, figs and raisins

The finished loaf is dark brown and almost savory…

Black Tea, Star Anise, Fig Bread
Adapted from Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes

1 cup figs, stemmed and coarsely chopped
1 cup Irish Breakfast tea, brewed double strength
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup golden raisins
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 sections star anise, ground
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup olive oil
2 eggs

Gently combine figs and tea; let stand 10 min.

In a medium sized bowl, beat sugar, oil and eggs to mix. Sprinkle flour, spices, baking soda and salt on top and mix until just combined.

Drain tea from figs, reserving 1/4 cup of liquid. Gently stir in figs and ¼ cup tea; pour batter into well-greased loaf pan; bake at 350º F for 1 hour, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool in pan 10 min., then invert onto a rack. Keeps on the counter in plastic wrap for up to 1 week, or freeze slices in plastic baggies and thaw in the toaster or microwave.