At last week's fermentation lecture with Sandor Katz, a nice woman gave me some kefir grains (which have since multiplied - let me know if you want some), and I decided that I want to use predominantly raw milk for my kefir. Today I was tooling around on the internet and found an somewhat amusing, informative video that someone on youtube made about raw milk. The man is impassioned, but he's got good facts, too.
The brining of the olives.
recipe and essay by Severine von Tscharner Fleming
This is a visual instruction to brining olives—an easy thing to do, and a very affordable way of bringing this tasty snack into your life. Many of the olive trees in California, especially urban olives, end up as an oil-slick on the pavement. Rescue these olives by laying down a tarp or old bedsheet and using both hands to ‘comb’ them down.
Once you have harvested the olives follow the instructions below.
The olives were harvested at UC Berkeley, in front of Giananini Hall.
after a ten day custodianship by Bonnie Powell-during which the water was changed every day.. them came to live at my office under an orange tree. The cooler was found on the street, as were the olive amphora—well, on the street outside the cheeseboard.
here the olives are soaking. Amazingly, everyday the water that poured off was brown.. clearly there is some major leeching of tannins or other bitter brown substances as yet unknown to this author, and amateur olive briner.
so, after about seventeen days of soaking in pure water. Here I am draining the olives. And putting them into the amphora filled with brine,
Brine: Brine is salty water. You don’t have to worry that much about the proportions because water will only dissolve a certain amount of salt. The rest stays on the bottom, like a precipiate. Basically that is a waste, so my recommendation is to add the water first and then gradually add the salt until no more can be dissolved. That way you don’t waste the salt.
Be aware. Salt kills plants. Do not splash salt all over the lawn.
This is the clean amphora.
here I am adding salt to the amphora. Do as I say, not as I did. I added too much salt.The salt came from Rainbow grocery. I went there on my bike and carried it home on the bart and it was heavy. The problem is that I wanted to use sea salt, not salt produced by Cargill on the edges of the bay. (weblink) The total cost for the sea salt was $3.25- and I have a whole bag of salt left over. Also I bought a few olives (maybe
twenty) at Rainbow and they costed more than $5—so a better deal by far is to brine own’s own.
Water into the salt makes brine. Here come the olives.
olives, meet brine.
And now for the additions>
For extra flavor.
1. bay leaves.
2. harvest from tree. California Bay Laurel. Ubiquitous in Berkeley. Native.
rinse urban grunge off leaves.
wear play clothes. peel garlic. This garlic was a hardneck variety grown by Ned Conwell and Ryan Casey at Blue House Farm.
chop it up. By whatever means feasible. I am quite satisfied with this method, I must say. I cleaned the blades of my Felco 2 prior to use.. and they were plenty sharp thanks to that wonderful man at the farmers market who sharpens knives.
hot chillis from Full Belly Farm. WholeSage from the hardy little sage plant that lives in my office. It was propagated by Spiral gardens.
Everything looks good. Everything comes from a good local place, everything is beautiful and well loved.
Combine and mix. Be aware. Salty water is quite an experience for your whole arm, and the driplets make salty stains on everything. But is very exhilarating, and the olives float.. like in a fairy tale where the
bandits hide the gold underneath the olives. et. Voila. Our very own olives, curing away. To be served upon
completion to all those who helped with the harvest, and even some who never did lay a finger on a tree at all who none the less love olives. Sharing is caring. Especially when you have more than ten gallons of olives.
After a few weeks of brining we’ll remove the brine and preserve the
olives in olive oil.
The end. Bon appetit!
Please join the SAFE email list to be alerted of the olive-tasting party. I think we’re going to make it a political event. So keep your ears pricked.
This is a visual instruction to brining olives—an easy thing to do, and a very affordable way of bringing this tasty snack into your life. Many of the olive trees in California, especially urban olives, end up as an oil-slick on the pavement. Rescue these olives by laying down a tarp or old bedsheet and using both hands to ‘comb’ them down.
Once you have harvested the olives follow the instructions below.
The olives were harvested at UC Berkeley, in front of Giananini Hall.
after a ten day custodianship by Bonnie Powell-during which the water was changed every day.. them came to live at my office under an orange tree. The cooler was found on the street, as were the olive amphora—well, on the street outside the cheeseboard.
here the olives are soaking. Amazingly, everyday the water that poured off was brown.. clearly there is some major leeching of tannins or other bitter brown substances as yet unknown to this author, and amateur olive briner.
so, after about seventeen days of soaking in pure water. Here I am draining the olives. And putting them into the amphora filled with brine,
Brine: Brine is salty water. You don’t have to worry that much about the proportions because water will only dissolve a certain amount of salt. The rest stays on the bottom, like a precipiate. Basically that is a waste, so my recommendation is to add the water first and then gradually add the salt until no more can be dissolved. That way you don’t waste the salt.
Be aware. Salt kills plants. Do not splash salt all over the lawn.
This is the clean amphora.
here I am adding salt to the amphora. Do as I say, not as I did. I added too much salt.The salt came from Rainbow grocery. I went there on my bike and carried it home on the bart and it was heavy. The problem is that I wanted to use sea salt, not salt produced by Cargill on the edges of the bay. (weblink) The total cost for the sea salt was $3.25- and I have a whole bag of salt left over. Also I bought a few olives (maybe
twenty) at Rainbow and they costed more than $5—so a better deal by far is to brine own’s own.
Water into the salt makes brine. Here come the olives.
olives, meet brine.
And now for the additions>
For extra flavor.
1. bay leaves.
2. harvest from tree. California Bay Laurel. Ubiquitous in Berkeley. Native.
rinse urban grunge off leaves.
wear play clothes. peel garlic. This garlic was a hardneck variety grown by Ned Conwell and Ryan Casey at Blue House Farm.
chop it up. By whatever means feasible. I am quite satisfied with this method, I must say. I cleaned the blades of my Felco 2 prior to use.. and they were plenty sharp thanks to that wonderful man at the farmers market who sharpens knives.
hot chillis from Full Belly Farm. WholeSage from the hardy little sage plant that lives in my office. It was propagated by Spiral gardens.
Everything looks good. Everything comes from a good local place, everything is beautiful and well loved.
Combine and mix. Be aware. Salty water is quite an experience for your whole arm, and the driplets make salty stains on everything. But is very exhilarating, and the olives float.. like in a fairy tale where the
bandits hide the gold underneath the olives. et. Voila. Our very own olives, curing away. To be served upon
completion to all those who helped with the harvest, and even some who never did lay a finger on a tree at all who none the less love olives. Sharing is caring. Especially when you have more than ten gallons of olives.
After a few weeks of brining we’ll remove the brine and preserve the
olives in olive oil.
The end. Bon appetit!
Please join the SAFE email list to be alerted of the olive-tasting party. I think we’re going to make it a political event. So keep your ears pricked.
Between a rock and a hard place, we find winter squash and stone fruit
Thanks to Sev for letting us know that locavore is the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year
Between Global Warming and Peak Oil, it is more important than ever to get the oil out of our food.
“Of all the tools for social change, the fork might just be the strongest.” Roger Dwaran
check out
http://locavores.com/
Between Global Warming and Peak Oil, it is more important than ever to get the oil out of our food.
“Of all the tools for social change, the fork might just be the strongest.” Roger Dwaran
check out
http://locavores.com/
Forest Restoration Project
I thought this post I wrote for my own blog might be appropriate for SAFE
Behind my apartment, on the slope between Glen and Monte Cresta Avenues, is a neglected and degraded remnant parcel of land. It's severely overgrown with non-natives - Cape Ivy and Acacia trees. Despite being a marginal habitat, I've seen lots of birds and squirrels, raccoons, opossums, turkeys, and even deer in this little woods. The owners of the properties don't much care about the land (I've asked) and it's an occasional campsite for the homeless and clubhouse for no good teens. I'm trying to create a sense of place for myself here in Oakland, a connection to this landscape, and I just can't stand to see any piece of land so uncared for, so I've launched into a restoration project. I have been, when I get a chance, heading back to "the woods" to clear half-fallen Acacias and brush and clean up some trash, including a dumped couch. My idea is that if I can bring back the native trees I can later think about adding understory plants and eventually some components of a forest garden, such as a beehive or mushroom logs .
This fall I've been picking up the seeds of California Coast Live Oak, California Buckeye, California laurel, California Black Oak, Big Leaf Maple, and Madrone from locations in Oakland, Berkeley, San Anselmo, and near Olompali (8000 years of habitation! Amazing!!). Following the directions for seed propagation from the Native Plant Network, I've been soaking the seeds. Today I did the final preparation for cold stratifying (simulating cold winter dormancy) by soaking the seeds in a dilute bleach solution and packing away in perlite.
All the seeds are now sitting in the refrigerator until they sprout. Check back for updates on the project as I keep an eye on the progress of the seeds. When they're ready I'll be transplanting them into tree pots out in the garden. If you have native understory plant suggestions (or better yet some, seed to give me) let me know.
Now I have to decide what to do about that damn Cape Ivy. It's covering a huge area over several properties and if you don't get it all, it grows right back. It's a huge amount of manual labor to remove it and I just don't think I can put enough time into it to make headway against the weeds. The Golden Gate National Receation area has a a small army of volunteers working to remove it. Do I dare give it a spray with Roundup? That seems like an all out act of war on the woods. I've found a few references online to using goats to control Cape Ivy. I don't have a goat, but would be interested in borrowing one. I'm not sure what the milk might taste like when produced on a Cape Ivy diet, so I wonder if we'd have to throw the milk away while the goats are on the ivy. Any ideas?
Behind my apartment, on the slope between Glen and Monte Cresta Avenues, is a neglected and degraded remnant parcel of land. It's severely overgrown with non-natives - Cape Ivy and Acacia trees. Despite being a marginal habitat, I've seen lots of birds and squirrels, raccoons, opossums, turkeys, and even deer in this little woods. The owners of the properties don't much care about the land (I've asked) and it's an occasional campsite for the homeless and clubhouse for no good teens. I'm trying to create a sense of place for myself here in Oakland, a connection to this landscape, and I just can't stand to see any piece of land so uncared for, so I've launched into a restoration project. I have been, when I get a chance, heading back to "the woods" to clear half-fallen Acacias and brush and clean up some trash, including a dumped couch. My idea is that if I can bring back the native trees I can later think about adding understory plants and eventually some components of a forest garden, such as a beehive or mushroom logs .
This fall I've been picking up the seeds of California Coast Live Oak, California Buckeye, California laurel, California Black Oak, Big Leaf Maple, and Madrone from locations in Oakland, Berkeley, San Anselmo, and near Olompali (8000 years of habitation! Amazing!!). Following the directions for seed propagation from the Native Plant Network, I've been soaking the seeds. Today I did the final preparation for cold stratifying (simulating cold winter dormancy) by soaking the seeds in a dilute bleach solution and packing away in perlite.
All the seeds are now sitting in the refrigerator until they sprout. Check back for updates on the project as I keep an eye on the progress of the seeds. When they're ready I'll be transplanting them into tree pots out in the garden. If you have native understory plant suggestions (or better yet some, seed to give me) let me know.
Now I have to decide what to do about that damn Cape Ivy. It's covering a huge area over several properties and if you don't get it all, it grows right back. It's a huge amount of manual labor to remove it and I just don't think I can put enough time into it to make headway against the weeds. The Golden Gate National Receation area has a a small army of volunteers working to remove it. Do I dare give it a spray with Roundup? That seems like an all out act of war on the woods. I've found a few references online to using goats to control Cape Ivy. I don't have a goat, but would be interested in borrowing one. I'm not sure what the milk might taste like when produced on a Cape Ivy diet, so I wonder if we'd have to throw the milk away while the goats are on the ivy. Any ideas?
Peak Soil- An Inconvenient Truth
Soil erosion as big a problem as global warming, say scientists
Saturday February 14, 2004
The Guardian
Erosion of topsoil - already a serious problem in Australia, China and parts of the US - threatens modern civilisation as surely as it menaced societies long since vanished, researchers warned yesterday.
Jared Diamond, a physiologist at University of California Los Angeles and author of Guns, Germs and Steel, told the AAAS yesterday that Iraq, part of the Fertile Crescent in which agriculture started 10,000 years ago, was once the wealthiest, most innovative, most advanced country in the world. But today it was a "basket case", mainly because of "soil problems, salinisation, erosion, coupled with problems of deforestation".
An area big enough to feed Europe - 300m hectares, about 10 times the size of the UK - has been so severely degraded it cannot produce food, according to UN figures.
In many places, soil is being lost far faster than it can be naturally regenerated.
Attempts to irrigate arid lands have produced soils so salty that nothing will grow.
One speaker, Ward Chesworth of the University of Guelph, Ontario, told the conference that farming had produced an "agricultural scar" on the planet that affected a third of all suitable soils.
Societies in the past had collapsed or disappeared because of soil problems. Easter Island in the Pacific was a famous example, Prof Diamond said. Ninety per cent of the people died because of deforestation, erosion and soil depletion.
"Society ended up in cannibalism, the government was overthrown and people began pulling down each other's statues, so that is pretty serious. In another example, Pitcairn and Henderson island in the south-east Pacific, everybody ended up dead. Another example was Mayan civilisation in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and Guatemala. Again, people survived but about 90% of the population was lost," he said.
Other examples, he said, include Iceland, where about 50% of the soil ended up in the sea. Icelandic society survived only through a drastically lower standard of living.
He said the media focused on fossil fuel problems, climate change, biodiversity, logging and forest fires, but not on the soil because it was less spectacular.
"There are about a dozen major environmental problems, all of them sufficiently serious that if we solved 11 of them and didn't solve the 12th, whatever that 12th is, any could potentially do us in," he said. "Many of them have caused collapses of societies in the past, and soil problems are one of those dozen.
WELCOME!!!!!!
hopefully this blog will become a useful tool for cyber congregation, for s.a.f.e. and friends.
check out agrariana's website for information about our organization.
check out agrariana's website for information about our organization.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Subscribe to events feed
Posts
