First harvest!

Got the first season's harvest this week!!! Cut some pea shoots on thursday that i had planted for a spring cover crop. Used them in tonight's dinner with some raw apple cider vinegar and olive oil. Also made kale with garlic, mashed purple potatoes with parsnip, and oven fried chicken which i had brined, floured, egged, and corn floured. Was probably on of the best chicken meals i've made!! The corn muffin i did not make but picked up from the co-op, caramelized onion and sage! Washed everything down with a mirror pond pale ale. Not a bad meal...

FOOD!

Recent meals. Deer burger with homemade everything. Sauerkraut, hummus, bread, sprouts.

Mexican, homemade everything. Mystery item: corn chili breaded fried tofu!

Just finished Brian Mclaren's book, Finding our way again. A book on rediscovering ancient spiritual practices. Here are a few thoughts of his I enjoyed.

“Those who reject religion are often rejecting a certain arid system of belief, or if not that, a set of trivial taboos or rules or rituals that have lost meaning for them-each the thin residue of a lost way of life.” p. 4

“I wonder what would happen if people today were to rediscover their religions in this light. Moreover, I wonder what would happen if we were willing to risk everything so that people could be not just indoctrinated and informed by dogmatic abstractions and ritual observance, but formed and transformed by spiritual practices, people who learn a way of life so they can move together in movements of peace, shalom, salaam?” p. 38

“My concern is that by making heaven after this life the destination of our way, we are spiritually forming people who run away from fire, disease, and the violence of our world... My concern is that Jesus was more like a firefighter or doctor or social worker who walks boldly into the danger in order to try to stop it. If a healed and healthy earth is your destination, the way to that goal promotes involvement, engagement, risk, and participation. If the earth is a lost cause to you, then you will abandon this life and world for the afterlife. You will choose the way of withdrawal, isolation, self-protection, and self-distancing. By choosing one destination, you follow the way of incarnation and transformation; by choosing the other destination, you choose evacuation and abdication. Very different destinations, very different ways to them.” p. 71

“And maybe imagining that happening is a lot like having faith; in fact, maybe that song was John Lennon’s way of sayng, beautiful even if imprecisely, ‘May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ And maybe the ancient way is about letting that harmony spread in and through our lives.” p. 202

Pizza night!

So believe it or not, but this is the first time I've made pizza in our apartment. My goal was to not buy any ingredients that we didn't already have. This is probably how pizza was originally developed, bread with leftovers on top!

First course: Local salad greens, hood river pears (thanks to mom and dad), raw almonds and sunflower seeds, simple vinaigrette.

Pizza 1: I called it the Rustic; potatoes, sauteed collard greens and cabbage, crimini, sharp cheddar, marinara.

Pizza 2: Marinara and crimini; cheese is expensive!

Pizza 3: Sharp Cheddar, Pear, Herbs. Before and after. Olive Oil it when it first comes out of the oven, Delicious!

Even Portland can be beautiful in Spring!

Taken from the parking lot behind our apartment. Its amazing that we have blossoms in February! More to come...

Weekly Rations

Well, here is what I brought home from the food co-op last week. Its basically our week of food, missing some farm eggs and a few more veggies from the farmers market. I usually buy yogurt and butter every other week, as they last a couple weeks. The nice thing about the co-op is that everything they carry is organic, so you aren't tempted to compare prices. They also make everything very affordable and buy from local farms so there is usually some local veggies even in winter (this week's local stuff was garlic, onion, cabbage, kale, and the yogurt too).

Heirloom Grains

Went to a presentation a couple weeks ago about heirloom grains. The guy doing the presentation was a farmer living in eastern washington. He has been cultivating several varieties of heirloom grains and pulses on his farm that only gets 8 inches of water a year! Since industrialization has wiped out most of our old world grain production, there is very little heirloom grain seed that is sold commercially. This farmer had to start with a gram of seeds (a small handful) that he received from a federal seed-bank. He grew that small number and started doing his own selection and cultivation. Thus, it took him several years to be able to grow enough quantity and quality to sell.

Modern industrial agriculture grains are grown for qualities like lodge resistance, ease of transportation, hulling, dependablility on chemical fertizers and herbicides, endosperm size, etc. This kind of grain production is not only harming the soil, but is becoming less and less nutritious for us to eat. For example, modern wheat grown is selected to produce less bran and germ because most wheat is refined into white flour. We're constantly breeding out of our food the very stuff that we should actually be eating more of!

This same logic is followed in many elements of grain production. Another example is the height of the grain. The taller the grain the more subject it is to lodging (falling over due to wind). This doesn't harm the grain but makes it more difficult to harvest. Modern grains have now been bred to be much shorter, a seemlingly beneficial solution right? Well, because the plants are grown to be shorter, their roots now don't grow very deep leading to less nutrient uptake and more dependence on artificial fertilizer/hebicides and irrigation. Well thats just great! We're breeding grain to be less nutritious and more dependent on inputs and chemicals. Who is this benefiting??

There are many examples of why heirloom grains are superior to grow and to eat, I encourage people to do some research, its very fascinating! The reason that we don't know more about this is that heirloom grains don't fit well into our capitalistically driven society that is powered by 'cheap' oil and greed. Our shallow understanding of agricultural 'efficiency' has led us to do some extremely devastating things to our land and our bodies. Heirloom grains are just one example.

So go buy some spelt, emmer, and teff! Check them out http://www.lentzspelt.com/