Happy Girl Kitchen Party

There's a great fundraising party in Oakland this Saturday to help raise the money for a delivery truck for Happy Girl Kitchen, the makers of local tasty canned goods.

Details are below or visit Happy Girl

“a party to pay for a delivery truck so that we can deliver the bounty of the harvest to your neighborhood”
Saturday, November 14th 2-6pm
in the oldest surviving barn in Oakland!
Old time drinks, local organic dinner, cuban folk music, raffle, preserving contest with prizes and more!

$35-$200 and up donations.
all proceeds go to paying for a delivery truck so that we can deliver the bounty of the harvest to your neighborhood.
For every $5 you donate, you will receive 1 raffle ticket. Raffle items include: happy girl mega sampler (22 jars), antique canning kit, workshop gift certificates, catered dinner party for 10 and more!

canning contest: show off your canning prowess and share your preserved bounty to become Prestigious Processor of the Pantry!

old time drinks: Featuring hard cider made by Todd Champagne with champagne yeast! Fancy that!, wine by naki, chai cola, kombucha on tap and more.

dinner: Buffet style delicious dinner catered by Happy Girl Kitchen Co. using all organic and local ingredients. This is going to be good!

Music: Bluegrass and old timey music that will move your feet for you and a special visit from SF DJ Juggle Geof. (maybe he will even juggle for us?)

Raffle items: For every $5 you donate, you will receive 1 raffle ticket. You may buy more at the event once you see how fabulous the raffle items are!

Farm City on Public Radio

It was so so good to hear our friend Novella on the radio the other day talking about her book, Farm City, on KQED's Forum and The California Report. Novella's Ghost Town Farm in Oakland is a huge inspiration. You can listen to Forum streaming and see a slideshow of the farm from the California Report.

Cuturing Vinegar

What do you do with a partial bottle of that nice red wine you had with dinner a few nights ago and forgot to finish? If I uncork a bottle of wine for cooking and drinking, chances are in my house that even if a vacuum seal topper is used to preserve it, the wine will be too oxidized before I want another glass, making me hesitant to open a bottle unless there are friends around to share.

Here is a solution. I'd been intrigued with the thought of making my own vinegar since hearing an episode of Good Food with a segment on reusing wine. When a midsummer bonfire left me with too many partial bottles, I decided it was time to start an experiment.

You can buy fancy vinegar-making kits online that come with small oak casks and sell for $150, but what you really need is a nonreactive vessel and some vinegar culture. A spigot at the bottom is recommended to draw off finished vinegar, because often a thick, gloppy layer of "mother" culture develops on the top. Many folks use nice crocks or other pottery vessels, such as a ceramic water dispenser for around $50. I thought an economic alternative would be a glass sun tea container I bought at the hardware store for $6. For the vinegar culture, if you have a friend with a culture, you can take a piece of their mother culture. I found a red wine vinegar culture at Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley for $12.

Vinegars can be made from nearly any sugar-containing solution. Yeasts, from the air or introduced by the maker, convert sugars to ethanol, in the familiar fermentation process utilized to make alcoholic drinks. A genus of microbes known as Acetobacter in the presence of oxygen convert the ethanol to acetic acid and other organic acids, which give vinegar its distinctive flavor. Winemakers and brewers consider Acetobacter a contaminant and do everything in their power to stamp it out. It produces cloudiness and gives and "off" flavor to alcoholic drinks. You can imagine an Acetobactor outbreak converting an entire cellar of wine to vinegar. But to make vinegar from an alcohol solution, such as wine, the fermentation step is skipped, and an Acetobacter culture from the air encouraged to develop.

The Household Cyclopedia of General Information, published in 1881, encourages all households to procure two barrels for vinegar making. The first is to be placed in a sunny spot, the bung covered with a piece of slate, and a small tap installed at the bottom of the barrel. After several months of culturing the finished vinegar should be drawn off and stored in the second barel in the cellar, with a pint of spirits added for preservation.

For my vinegar experiment, I sterilized the jar, then mixed the wine, culture, and a bit of water as directed. The opening was covered by a layer of cheesecloth to keep out the vinegar flies but allow in the necessary oxygen and the lid was screwed into place. The vinegar culture has been sitting quiescently on a shelf in my storage closet for almost two months now. In a month I'll bottle the vinegar and then age it for a few more months. If you'd like a bit of culture to start your own, let me know.

Onion Saver

Here's a helpful food and garden tip, the kind of old timey advice you'd find in a corner of my small hometown newspaper.

I've been getting a lot of onions and garlic from our CSA. Normally I'd braid the stems and hang them in a cool but dry dark place, but these are coming with the stems off. Knowing that with so much piled in the onion/garlic basket in the kitchen, it would be only a matter of time before rot set in and wanting to hold these alliums for fresh use if at all possible, I was thinking of ways to best keep them. Then I remembered Alton Brown's Vidalia onion episode where I'm pretty sure he hung the onions in old pantyhose, with knots between each onion. When hanging you can work from the bottom up, cutting the section holding the bottom onion below the knot and the rest remain in place. It's been a few weeks and everything looks fine. The stockings allow plenty of ventilation and cradle the bulb to avoid bruising.

Independence Day

A quick note wishing everyone a happy Independence Day. Before you head out to a barbecue for some all-American SOLE food, here's a postcard I recently received, reminiscing about summer cookouts past.



It's from the MoMA collection by British graphic designer Abram Games, commissioned by the British War Office in 1943 as part of the war effort. Of course, this was to encourage the British equivalent of the Victory Garden campaign. The visual parallels between field/table, pitchfork/fork, shovel/knife are just great. On a day devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I can think of a better move that could be made to secure individual freedoms and national security than to follow the advice from this poster and grow your own food!

Emptying the squash savings account

Doing some spring cleaning the other day and thinking it was June and enough with the winter squash already, I hauled the last Cinderella pumpkin and butternut squash out of the "root cellar" (a cool, dark shelf in a closet). Here they are sliced in half for roasting.

It's a small miracle that the rich, nutritious flesh can be grown and harvested in the late fall and protected all winter and spring by their hard rind. It must have seemed like an amazing caloric savings account to our agrarian forebearers. I'll think of them and celebrate the gift of these squash in a meal, then tend my deposits in the form of seedlings reaching for the midsummer sun outside.

Winter Projects

Before the season slips too far into spring, making it too late to mention, let me summarize some of the cooking projects that kept the hearth going this winter.


Lebkuchen are a German holiday cookie my father remembers fondly from his youth. I'm trying to revive the family tradition by modernizing a recipe attributed to my great-grandmother Anne Hammersley (nee Frank), tracked down from handwritten copies from estranged relatives and transcribed an unknown number of times (if you'd like to try it, or give helpful pointers, here is a copy). The instructions say to start before Thanksgiving, but due to other commitments I put off the baking experiment until after the new year, which fortuitously is when Buddha's Hand Citron is available locally. I candied it per the instructions in the Tartine cookbook to delicious results and used it in the recipe. The notes added to the typed version of the recipe call for molasses and brown sugar, which I tried this year, resulting in a cake-like gingerbreadish cookie, which were tasty, but not what my dad remembers. I suspect Great Granny Annie's recipe really did use only honey and I'll try again with this adjustment next holiday.

Also at the beginning of the year, when apples from cold storage were still crisp and fresh-tasting, Jennifer and I made apple butter. We know a few families back home who still have apple butter making days, where they set a huge kettle over an oak and hickory fire to boil, stirring great amounts of apples into the brown spice-infused spread, and we have fond memories of gifted quarts. Some 10 or 15 pounds of "cosmetically challenged" apples were procured from the farmer's market for an extremely reasonable price. The first step is to wash, core and chop the apples, then make applesauce on the stovetop. The rest of the conversion to apple butter occurs in a wide crock pot. The low even heat slowly drives away moisture and concentrates sugars until the sugars eventually caramelize. Only a few pints made it into long term storage, so I think the effort will have to be redoubled next year.

For Saint Patrick's Day I corned brisket of beef, a food full of American history and ingredient in many fine dishes. I took inspiration from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall, but ultimately more closely followed a recipe of Martha Stewart's because Fearnley-Wittingstall called for what seemd at the time to be an impertinently large piece of meat for only two people. I bought a beautiful piece of meat from Prather Ranch, boiled and cooled the brine and set it to pickle in the refrigerator for a week. The result was exactly what you would want from a piece of corned beef. Tender, not stringy, and deeply infused with brine flavor and melting fat when cooked. But after only one meal of corned beef and cabbage, a couple orders of corned beef hash with eggs, and a round of Rueben sandwiches, the corned beef was gone. I've learned my lesson that there can never be too much corned beef and will never doubt the wise words from the River Cottage again.

It is always a great thing to retrieve food cached away at the peak of its flavor, and it's even more enjoyable when you can do it twice. In February, just as the earliest dafodils were blooming here in the Bay Area, I pulled out blueberries and blackberries quick frozen on trays in the freezer during the height of the last summer, when I was too busy to do canning, and converted them to a deep, dark jam. It was incredibly nice to be able to add a new jam flavor at the end of winter to remember the quintessential taste of summer and enjoy the harvest in a second format.

The projects described are a great way to stay involved with your food when winter has driven you inside from the garden. These projects cultivate lost and subtly nuanced flavors you can't find with "quick and easy" recipes. But they are suprisingly easy in an markedly earnest and homespun way. These foods require patience, which builds anticipation, and heightens the joy of remembering recent seasons or family gatherings of many years past. They bubble slowly in the kitchen while you play a game or watch a movie while a rainstorm batters the windows, and that is about as comfortable as food can get.

Farming opportunity in Thailand!

If anyone is interested in exploring the reaches of experimental alternative rural community activism into the lush lands of Thailand, read the letter below from my friend Watjai, whom I was fortunate enough to spend time with as a WWOOF volunteer last February. Him and his wife, Chabaa, are two amazingly generous and openhearted individuals who live on a gorgeous and tranquil piece of land near the Burmese border in southern Thailand. 

Seeking partnership for alternative living project.

Dear Friends,

My name is Wat and I live in Thailand with my wife, Chabaa. WE are a young couple who have a dream of seeking an alternative way of life. We do not believe in the modern mainstream life style under consumerism, because it forces us to work too hard to become wealthy and indulge in natural resources extravagantly for greater happiness. For these reasons, we decided to leave the urban life for the rural area. Two years ago we bought 17 rais (7 acres) of land at Pa-La-U (about 50 km west from Hua Hin) for experimental simple living. Our land is surrounded by beautiful mountains protected by the National Forest and close to Pa-La-U waterfall and Kang Khra Chan National Park. We believe that living simply and close to nature allows us to gain peace within. 

In our two years here we have begun to learn about organic farming and making as much as we can by hand. We grow fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, and forest trees. We make compost and create our own fertilizer with waste and microorganisms we collect from our land. We cook healthy food and eat mainly brown rice, vegetables, legumes, and fruit. Sometimes we also have fish or seafood but no chicken or meat. We love cooking with different styles from around the world using local ingredients. We enjoy making what we use and need by hand. We produce our own natural soap and shampoo. We stuff pillows with Kapok fruit and make things from coconut shell, bamboo, etc. Other interests of ours include permaculture, sustainable technology, holistic healthcare, local wisdom, including religious and spiritual aspects.

For a future dream we would like to build up an alternative community and open this land to become a place of retreat for people to understand themselves and other by learning about living simply with nature. We will share some of our skills such as mud house and bamboo hut construction, Thai vegetarian cooking, hill-tribe weaving style, organic farming, and Thai massage. In doing this we will cultivate the seed of peace within to share with other people. Together we can change the world.

All of this we can not do alone. We are looking for partnerships with people who are interested in contributing to the project. We are looking for people who have ideas to help this project grow and who have English skills that would help us publicize the project in order to connect and bring people here. We need someone to share the long-term responsibility of the project, but we are flexible about the specifics of the partnership. This means a partner wouldn't have to live here year round.

We are currently trying to expand the project to be able to house more people so we can plant more seeds of peace. This means we need to build some more houses and a larger communal area. For this reason, any donation you can give would be very appreciated. 

If you are interested, please contact us and we can work together to outline the details according to your needs. 

For more information, visit our website at: http://mantarniwas.exteen.com/

Our e-mail is: watjai@gmail.com

Sincerely, 

Wat & Chabaa

Whey cool!

A few weeks ago, SAFE hosted a lacto-fermentation workshop on the UC Berkeley campus, led by our very own Monika Roy. Moni spent last semester farming in the Caribbean and developed a fermentation fetish after discovering the book Nourishing Traditions. Upon returning home, Monika continued refining her recipes, trying out new techniques, and incorporating these foods into her diet.

Lacto-fermentation is a process that uses lactobacilli bacteria to preserve foods. While many of the foods at the workshop used whey and other dairy products to facilitate the fermentation, lactobacilli can be cultured in vegan foods as well. Moni explained all of this, plus told us the benefits of eating fermented foods (better digestion, more available vitamins and nutrients, really tasty) and talked about the gaps in nutrition in our current industrially produced diets. Afterwards she let us have a go at sampling at two long tables worth of projects she had ready. These included buttermilk, kefir, curds, fermented ketchup, ginger beer, kraut, and double fermented orange cake. She also gave a short demo on how to set up your oats to ferment overnight for a faster, creamier version of traditional oatmeal. 

Everyone stuck around for a long time eating, asking Monika questions, and just hanging out. I think the best part of this workshop was Monika's ability to appeal to both the beginning fermentation dabbler as well as the seasoned lactobacilli junkies. One woman commented that she even liked Monika better than Sandor Katz! I love them both!

For more info on fermentation please check out:

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz

Also, if interested please stop by the UCB Student Organic Garden (Virginia and Walnut St) on Sunday March 29th around 1pm for a work day and impromtou kimchi making party! Monika and I are both facilitators of the Organic Gardening Decal at UCB and will be in the garden from 12-4 hanging out, doing work, and talking about veggie ferments. 

Travis Meinolf: Interactive Textile Artist

Anya and I were recently brainstorming for our "letter from the editor" for our soon-to-be-published third issue of Lettuce Turnip the Beets. This issue has the theme of Reclamation. Reclamation of land, skills, words, traditions, and more. While we were raving, ranting, jotting notes, and prowling the world wide web, we came across the blog of this wonderful fellow...

If any of you hang out in the Mission, you may have spotted Travis Meinolf perched at the top of one of the sloping hills of Dolores Park with his loom. He is a weaver and a textiles artist who "advocates for alternative economic and pedagogical models through a craft-based relational art practice." The blog is filled with some pretty amazing pictures of things he's made and a few videos of the creative process. I hope that it will inspire you as much as it inspired us!

Forcing Bulbs for Color on A Grey Day

From 2009_2_Forced Bulbs

Forcing many flower bulbs indoors is extremely easy and a great way to bring spring color to your home when those rainy days keep dragging out. It's probably too late this season, but buy bulbs next October or November to brighten your winter kitchen table. The narcissus and hyacinth above are forced in water and pebbles, probably the easiest method.

Clear, glass containers with pebbles work well. Place the pebbles in the bottom third of the vessel, then put the bulb on top to the pebble layer and fill in with more pebbles to the top of the container. Add water to the container to just below the bottom of the bulb. If the bulb is in water, it will rot. The vase is then kept in a cool, dark room (preferably under 50 degrees F) until the root system has developed and a green top elongates. At this point it should be placed in a bright window, where the plant soon will blossom.

Directions say to throw out the bulbs after forcing, as they will never flower well again. I prefer to "let them out to pasture" in a underutilized part of the garden. They might grow and gain strength and some spring years from now you'll be greeted with new blossoms. You never know.

Interesting graphic showing obesity trends

From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. There's a neat flash animation showing the trend through time, but unfortunately we can't embed it, so you'll have to go see it

Visit to Devil's Gulch Ranch and Clark Summit Farm

Here's a slidehow from our rainy and wondrous Valentine's Day visit to Marin County farms




And a short video clip of vignettes from the day. The cacophony was amazing!

Abraham Lincoln on community food security

Excerpt from Mr Lincoln's address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural
Society.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1859

"...And thorough work, again, renders sufficient, the smallest quantity of
ground to each man. And this again, conforms to what must occur in a world
less inclined to wars, and more devoted to the arts of peace, than
heretofore. Population must increase rapidly -- more rapidly than in former
times -- and ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of
deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No
community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of
oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of
crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings...."

Source: Full text at USDA's National Agricultural Library, Special Collections

My heart beets for you

In light of Valentine's Day approaching this weekend, I've decided to share one of my easiest and most trusty recipes. Though I make these beet muffins for just about anyone at any time of year or day, they have great potential as a lovely accompaniment to a romantic breakfast in bed that no lover could resist. Their pink color, high vegetable content, and sheer deliciousness make them a favorite among my housemates. 

Ingredients:

2/3 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs (to make vegan, use 4 tbsp of cornstarch and enough almond or soy milk to make the mixture batter-y)

2/3 cup sugar or evaporated cane juice

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 cups shredded beets

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degree Fahrenheit 

Grease and flour muffin cups

Beat oil with eggs (or substitute), sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla

Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon

Combine wet and dry ingredients, stir well and add more almond milk now if it seems dry

Fold in beets

Fill muffin cups 3/4 of the way up

Sprinkle with more cinnamon

Bake 20 minutes or until fork comes out clean

Eat them warm with jam or butter!

(artwork and post by jackie: jackieclark88@yahoo.com)

Meet your Meat

The Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology is proud to announce an upcoming series of tours, panels, and workshops on good, clean, and fair animal husbandry and meat production. The series, called Meet Your Meat , is a portrayal of the local meat economy in the Bay Area and how that model can be improved and spread. We want to show how animals can be part of a vibrant and diverse agricultural system and some part of our diet as responsible omnivores. Meet Your Meat is offered as a counterpoint to the brutal industrial meat system and the rightfully appalling PETA video of the same title.

The series will metaphorically follow an animal from farm, to slaughter, to butcher, to cook, to plate in the following events:

Visit to Devil's Gulch Ranch and Clark Summit Farm

Saturday, February 14, 8am-4pm, Marin County

Meet at 8am in the West Circle on the UC Berkeley Campus

With Mark Pasternak (Devil's Gulch Ranch) and Liz Cunninghame (Clark Summit Farm)

Limit 50 people, please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Marin'

Potluck picnic lunch hosted at Devil's Gulch Ranch (please bring a dish to share and your own plate, silverware, napkin, and cup). Come prepared for inclement weather.

Local Slaughterhouses, Local Meat

Thursday, February 19, 7pm, UC Berkeley Campus (location TBA)

With panelists Sallie Calhoun (Cutting Edge Meat, Inc., Paicines Ranch), Sam Goldberger (North Coast Meats), Mac Magruder (Magruder Ranch), Mark Pasternak (Devil's Gulch Ranch), Paul Canales (Oliveto), Marsha McBride (Café Rouge), and journalist Heather Smith as moderator.

Please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Slaughter' so that we may secure a location with adequate space.

The Art of the Butcher

Hosted in collaboration with Meatpaper

Thursday, March 5, 7pm, UC Berkeley Campus (location TBA)

With panelists Ryan Farr (Ivy Elegance, CHEFS Program), Nate Appleman (A16, Urbino), Melanie Eisemann (Avedano's), Mark Pasternak (Devil's Gulch Ranch), and Marissa Guggiana (Sonoma Direct, Secret Eating Society) as moderator.

The discussion will be followed by a demonstration by Chef Ryan Farr on how a whole carcass is broken down into cuts of meat.

Please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Butcher' so that we may secure a location with adequate space.

Fête du Cochon and hog roast

Saturday, March 7, details forthcoming

A working visit to Soul Food Farm and a tour of Meridian Jacobs Ranch

Saturday, March 14, 8am-4pm, Solano County

Meet at 8am in the West Circle on the UC Berkeley Campus

With Robin Lynde (Meridian Jacobs), Alexis Koefoed (Soul Food), and Samin Nosrat (Eccolo)

Limit 50 people, please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Solano'

We will be helping with chores at Soul Food Farm. Come dressed for work and prepared for inclement weather. Please bring a picnic lunch. Samin Nosrat, Sous Chef at Eccolo Restaurant in Berkeley, will discuss using Soul Food Farm products over lunch.

Hide Brain Tanning Workshop

April 11-12 or April 18-19, all day, Ghost Town Farm in Oakland

Cost $100

With Tamara Wilder (Paloetechnics, author of Buckskin: The Ancient Art of Braintanning ), and Novella Carpenter (Ghost Town Farm)

Braintanned leather is a beautiful, soft, durable, and washable material which is made using the same natural, non-toxic, and biodegradable methods employed by most Native American groups. In this two day class, participants will partake in the whole process using using goatskins and/or deerskins—from scraping the hide to smoking the softened hide.

Limit 16. Please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Tanning' with your preferred weekend so that we may pick the weekend with the most interest.

Salumi Tasting

Hosted in collaboration with Slow Food Berkeley

April 20, details forthcoming

Unless otherwise noted, there is no admission charge for any SAFE event and no one will be turned away for lack of funds. We do request a $5 donation to SAFE for each event attended to defray the cost of the event and reimburse the travel costs of the panelists who so kindly donate their time. We ask those with more resources to consider a greater donation to underwrite the attendance of students or community members with limited means.

Please distribute this announcement freely. If you received this message indirectly and would like to be reminded of future SAFE events, please visit Agrariana.org and subscribe to our announcements list.

For more information, please visit Agrariana.org or contact Ma