A Week in Garden Harvests

Climate March: Menu planning to reduce food waste

One of my goals for the year, related to Climate Action. A monthly post, around a theme, of household actions to reduce climate change. Small ideas, it is true, but, “step by step, the longest march can be won.”

“No Food Left Behind” is the name of a local initiative which teaches people how to both store fresh food more effectively and compost the (hopefully limited) remains. They give out lovely countertop compost buckets. I have one for my classroom. At home, we use an ancient yogurt container. Both topics are important, but pre-planning is also essential, especially if you are trying to eat mostly local foods.  Reducing food waste and eating closer to home are two easy, effective, inexpensive, and positive ways to mitigate—and adapt to-- climate change.

I’ve always been a menu planner. My mother taught me, although she was more of a pantry cook, working from what she had on hand every night and doing semi-weekly shopping expeditions. I pulled the meat from the freezer when I came home from school before I tackled the dishes and she cooked when she came home from work around 6:30. I sat on the counter and watched. When I left for college, I was in charge of meals in the household. Every week, we decided what we were going to eat, I made the shopping list, and we headed to the local produce and meat market. I learned, several years later, that my roommate and I were known as the “Three Chicken Legs Girls” because we always bought three legs, never breasts or thighs. Two for a dinner and one for the Thursday night soup, which gathered all of the left over rice and veg from the week.  We ate well  within our 30 dollars a week for two budget. Years later, when I shifted over to local foods, especially veggies, I returned to that more formal planning system.

Step One: What’s out there?

Start with the question.  What veggies do we have to work with right now? This week, the list reads: winter squash, onions, and potatoes in the larder, a few tomatoes n the shelf, frozen peas and corn,   canned beans, roasted  tomatoes, and sauce, garden  collards, carrots, celery, and cabbages. Salad mix later in the week.  I could dig one of the parsnips in the back yard if I wanted it. I think there is a beet or two back there as well, if the rabbit hasn’t found it. List all of the options! Check the fridge for accuracy.

Step Two: Recipes

Although I don’t use a formal recipe for every meal, I do have a file where recipes are divided into six week segments, depending upon ingredients. It’s all on notecards.   Because I’ve been working on the file for several years, it is pretty accurate.  If you are shifting to local veggies, it is important to find tasty meals that do not require red peppers in January, unless you have them frozen from August.   There are cookbooks that have used this concept for years. Check out Deborah Madison to begin.  This is really fun; good  cookbooks make excellent reading at bedtime.

Step Three: Menu planning

Lay out the week, Monday to Sunday. Note the evenings you have to be somewhere before or after dinner, so that you are not making something long and complicated on those nights. Consider making a huge pot of soup for the week’s lunches.  Put the veggies that will go bad, like greens or something that was left from the week before, early in the week.  Consider the oven—can you bake bread, a squash, and dinner quiche all at the same time? Do you need a round of beans in the crockpot?  Move your dinners around to consider all of these issues.   We are more likely to have greens and mushrooms on Monday night and save the winter squash for Thursday. Write up the final plan and hang it on the fridge as a reminder.

Step Four: Weekly Shopping

We do a Big Shop once a month, filling in all of the bulk items, dairy, and cleaning supplies. The food co-op offers a monthly discount to encourage bulk purchases and we take advantage of it. We have a list that guides us, which I update occasionally. Because of this, our weekly shopping can take place on the way home from a walk, tucked into one backpack.  Vegetables are more complex. We raise our own, store what we can for the winter, buy direct from Sunbow Farm, go to the Farmer’s Market, and then fill in what few gaps there are at the co-op.  There’s no reason for all of this complexity aside from freshness and supporting local farms; you can purchase all of your veggies from Fred Meyer’s.  

This week’s plan:

Thursday: Pasta with tomato sauce, salad.  Also, bake bread and the winter squash

Friday: Cream of Squash soup, salad

Saturday: left-over soup, toast

Sunday: Mushroom risotto, cabbage and apple salad

Monday: Chinese Buffet (New Year’s Eve!)

Tuesday: Black-eyed peas and collard greens (New  Year’s Day)

Wednesday: greens and tofu and rice

Climate Challenge Day Three: Full Ovens

Full  Ovens!

How to use your data! We have a smart meter, so I checked our electric usage for Friday, when I was NOT being oven aware. We woke up in the morning to no bread, which means, no lunch. Because I had dough, I baked a loaf, all alone in the oven, and Mark brought me a sandwich before lunchtime. Then, when I finally came home around six, I tossed two sweet potatoes into the little toaster oven we use for small batches. I was able to sort out about how much electricity each used. Both were on for about the same amount of time and at the same temperature.  The big oven used about .9 KWh to bake a loaf of bread, and left its heat in the house. The small oven used about .6 KWh to bake the potatoes and only warmed the back hall.  The small oven is more efficient and should be used for small batches. However, the ideal would be to bake both sweet potatoes and bread in the same oven, saving .6 KWh of energy.

I make our own bread, using locally grown, home ground wheat combined with white flour from eastern Washington State, which is the closest I could find.  Because of this, our oven is on several times a week. My goal, which I am working on this month, is to never bake just bread. Something else has to be in there, too.

Our  Bread Recipe

3 cups of warm water

1.5 T yeast

1.5 T salt

6.5 cups of flour—I usually use half whole wheat, half white.

Mix it all together.  Let it sit, covered, on the counter for a couple of hours, then put it in the fridge overnight.  The next day, take half of it, form it on a ball, let it rise for about 15 minutes, and toss it onto a baking stone on a 450 degree oven. Bake until it sounds hollow—like thumping a dog on the base of the spine with a cupped hand.

You can use the dough for pizza, sticky buns, onion and cheese rolls….anything that wants a yeasted dough.  You can also add all sorts of things to the dough or mix in different flours. I, of course, have a chart.

Options:

Learn to make one food that comes in single use packaging, like bread or yogurt.  Commit to making, rather than purchasing, that food for one year.

Set a goal of the percentage of local, whole, unpackaged foods your family will eat in the next year.

Check your smart meter data! Every day for a week, so that you remember what you were doing when. Make adjustments accordingly.

2018 Harvest

Blueberries: 3 quarts dried

Plums: 6 quarts, dried

Apples: 8 quarts, dried

                8 pints, sauced

                15 quarts, pressed for juice

Tomatoes:  48 half pints, roasted

                  17 pints, sauced

                9 pints, salsa

Figs: 6 quarts, dried

                14 half pints of fig butter

Pickles: Dill—8

                Bread and Butter—5

                Senfgerkin—11

Pears: dried 5 quarts

                3 pints, sauced

Honey- 1 quart (more in the spring!)

Black beans: 1.5 quarts, dried

Potatoes: 69 pounds, total

                Deseree—18 pounds

                Butte—10 pounds

                Blue—21 pounds

                Yukon Gold—20 pounds

All of the bold was grown in the backyard, of within walking distance of the house.

               

Harvest Reckoning

The Harvest Season is about over. I pulled the tomato and squash vines from the back garden today, preparing for leaf fall, which began during the winds and rains of the weekend. It was, overall, a good year, although being gone for the month of July has impacted our fall garden crops.  We all decided it was time to “Eat Down” on the stock of jams, butters, and pickles already on the shelf.

This is what we have in storage for the winter (bold indicates from our yard):

Blueberries—

                Three quarts dried

                Two quarts frozen

Apples—

                12 half pints of apple butter

                4 quarts dried

                5 pints in sauce

Peaches—

                3 quarts dried

                10 pints canned

                12 half pints chutney

Figs—

                7 quarts dried

                4 half pints apple butter (more next year!)

Plums—

                3 quarts dried

Tomatoes—

                14 pints of sauce

                1.5 quarts dried

                30 half pints roasted

                14 pints of salsa

Cucumbers—

                4 pints of Bread and Butter

Green Beans—

                5 pints

Gooseberry jam—

3 half pints

Potatoes:

                6 pounds of All Blue

                31 pounds of Desiree

                30 pounds of Butte

                17 pounds of Yukon Gold

Dried Beans—

1 quart of Indian Woman

1 quart of Cranberry

1 pint of white

There’s also cabbages, beets, and parsnips in the garden and six small pumpkins and several squashes in the larder.  I’ve ordered 70 pounds of onions, more dried beans and winter squash, hard wheat berries and oatmeal (which came today!) and garlic. We are almost set for the winter.

Canning Season

       

   

  It is canning season. The garden is full of tomatoes, fruit is ripe everywhere, and school is about to start. Because we were gone for six weeks of the summer, I am not preserving as much as I usually do. This winter will be the Eat Down Winter, when we finally clear out that jar of salsa from 2014 which has slipped to the back of the shelf every fall despite my best efforts. There are way too many half pint jars of jam downstairs  for any small homestead as well.  “Eat More Jam” is posted on the fridge as a reminder.  Still, there is canning to be done.

                Small batch canning works well for our household—there are two full time eaters and we focus on eating locally. My goal is about 95% local produce, which is not impossible or even unreasonable with a little planning. Right now, I am saving tomatoes for the winter. Thirty pounds from Sunbow were roasted and put up in half pint jars early this week, perfect for pizza, soup, and pasta this winter. I cooked down two soup pots full for sauce—10 pints. There are already dried tomatoes on the shelf and tomato chutney in a far corner. A pile of black tomatoes balances on the table, ready for lunch sandwiches.

                I can work this processing into my daily routine because of the steam canner I bought years ago from Territorial Seed. Rather than hauling out the big canning pot and rack, filling it with water, and waiting for it to heat-- which takes about an hour!—I can heat up  a batch of sauce, pour it into jars, and seal it in half an hour. The steam canner heats up in less than five minutes, uses about a pint of water to seal the jars (you pour a quart in, but most of it remains), and saves an immense amount of time and energy. I can prep a batch of apple butter, set it in the crockpot to cook down overnight, put it in jars in the morning, and have a box full of food ready for the basement shelf before I leave to prep for school in the morning.

                The jars are filling up, slowly and steadily. Every time I take a batch of something down stairs, I re-adjust the food already on the shelves to make room and spend a few moments admiring  my efforts. 

No meat?

                Earth Day presentations at high school are fraught with issues; the usual recommendations are to change your lightbulbs and buy solar panels, with not much in between. This year, they added “Don’t eat meat.”  “Will you tell the whole school why you don’t eat meat?” they asked. “I don’t think so,” I replied. “It’s not a simple answer.” After all, it goes back to a rainy college summer….

                It was my last summer at home. I was to be a senior, graduating in June, and no longer able—or willing—to move back home after graduation. It was not the best summer. First, everyone else was doing something cool, an internship, traveling, anything but living with their moms in Hampstead, New Hampshire. I was lonely. Second, my boyfriend broke up with me via letter as soon as I unpacked my stuff.  Then, it rained every Monday all summer long; I know, I checked the records. It was damp and cool and nothing grew. And, I was a meat wrapper.

                Meat wrapping is a job that has gone out of fashion, but, at one time, all beef and pork arrived in slabs, like a quarter of a cow, to be cut to specifications in the grocery store. It was the half way point between a real butcher and pre-packaged meat. If you wanted, say, a thick London Broil, you could ask for it and the butcher would carve you off a section. They also de-boned chicken and thin sliced other cuts of meat. It was a good, blue-collar job. Men were butchers, women meat wrappers. My job was to take the Styrofoam trays of beef, pork, and chicken, toss a plastic wrap over them, and then price and display the food.  I worked with two men—one older, one my age—and an older woman. The younger guy was prone to flirting with young women at the deli counter and saying things like “I have Male Intermission. I know when it’s time for lunch.” It was a trial. On Monday mornings, I arrived an hour early, (walking down the road in the rain at six thirty am), wash out the meat case, and set it up for the week.  Honestly, it was a good job. It was within walking distance of home, paid a little over minimum wage, forty hours a week, and good working conditions (if you don’t mind being in a 45 degree room all day) and generous co-workers. However, by the time the summer was over, I was sick of the sight of meat.

                That fall, I lived by myself in a tiny two room apartment with the bathroom down the hall. It was cheap. It was cozy. It was on the bus line. My food budget was fifteen dollars a week. I made my own bread, muffins, and soup, baked beans, experimented with crepes—and realized that meat was taking a huge chunk out of my food budget every week. This is crazy, I thought. I don’t even really like pork chops! Slowly, I cut them out of my diet. Chops, bacon, sausage—no sacrifice. They went in September. By October, I was no longer buying beef or chicken. I felt great! And my food money went a lot further, even with an occasional Dunkin Donuts from the shop down the street.

                Worried about protein, I bought a copy of Diet for a Small Planet and read about combining beans and grains, dairy and nuts. I grew more intentional about my meals. I read about the efficiency of a plant based diet, how it used far fewer resources to eat beans rather than meat, wheat rather than dairy. I was convinced.  Meat was bad for the planet. I would no longer eat it. My mother was horrified.

                Even in my most extreme vegetarian days, I was never perfect. I have always eaten pepperoni pizza—pepperoni is not meat. If I was served meat, I ate it.  Now, I feel less determined to be pure. I no longer like the taste of beef or pork, so they are easy to not consume. I will eat an occasional piece of chicken or fish, usually when I am very tired and stressed. I am no longer convinced that grass fed beef, raised humanely and eaten in small quantities, is a bad thing for the planet. In fact, it might be good.  My partner eats meat—it makes him feel better. We have, after all, become adults. All things in moderation.

                

Zucchini!

                There is a small Zucchini problem in our back garden this fall. The bush plants started pumping out fruits in mid-June and slowed down in August, just in time for the Italian climbing variety to shift into high gear. We have been well supplied with zucchini this year. One is four feet long and hanging off of the back trellis; it has not grown in a few days, so I think it is as big as it is going to get.  This means that we are creative in our zucchini cooking; it appears everywhere. Tonight—cream of zucchini soup and some zucchini muffins. Tomorrow—fritters. Wednesday—calzones. And then we will have to shift to cucumbers and tomatoes again.

Zucchini Muffins:

3 c flour—half whole wheat

1T BP

½ t BS

1t salt

2 t cinnamon

1 t nutmeg

½ t cloves

½ c milk

½ c oil

½ c sugar

2 c shredded zucchini

1.5 c ground walnuts

Large handful of dried blueberries

Mix dry together. Mix wet together. Mix dry and wet. Scoop into muffin tins and bake in 350 oven.

Blueberry Picking

          Blueberry picking….the ultimate July experience in the Willamette Valley.  Our valley is packed with farms—berry, vegetable, fruit, nuts, wheat and oats, mint—and many have farm stands and u-pick sections, but, everyone agrees, blueberries are the best. They are tasty, there are lots of subtle variations in the flavor, they have a long season, and, best of all, there are no thorns to dodge while you pick.  I went out to pick earlier this week, armed with two large Nancy’s yogurt containers (just enough for a pie, with some table nibbles left over) and a bucket.

            In was a warm, sunny morning and the place was hopping. Everyone picks early here, to avoid the mid-day sun. A little breeze blew across the fields.  I wandered  to the far corner, searching for the perfect combination of ripe berries, loaded bushes, and quiet.  I started to pick.

 Plonk, plonk, plonk. The berries landed in the bucket as I stripped them from the laden branch. Nearby, two college kids discussed the relative merits of small, but flavorful, berries versus large, easy to harvest berries.

              Plonk, plonk, plonk. My bucket began to fill. In the distance, I could hear a small family picking. Two women  discussed the merits of various elementary schools in Corvallis (a preferred topic in our town), while their kids ran around eating and picking. As always, one small boy was on the constant look-out for the biggest, ripest patch and called everyone over every time he found a new one. “Look at these!” echoed over the fields.  “Don’t eat them all,” his mother admonished.

               Plonk, plonk, plonk. My mind drifted from the deeply philosophical to the pragmatic. Picking berries is one of those perfect occupations that require just enough of your brain so that you can think. A pie. Dried berries. A bowl for eating…is there enough to can as well?

        

        Plonk, plonk, plonk. The big bucket was filled. Onto the pie and traveling containers…I tucked the bucket into the shade of a bush. Cars hummed by on the secondary highway near the farm, creating a quiet background sound. The family left. It was only me and a few other serious pickers left, the people who pick fifty pounds for the freezer and eat our local berries all winter long on their cereal.  I could hear their berries hit the bottom of the bucket as well. “Good picking this year,” someone comments. “But early,” someone else replied. Climate change hung in the air for a moment, but we all brushed it aside. It was warm, and sunny, and the blueberries were ripe.

Blueberry Pie

Make a double crust.

Six cups of blueberries
1/2 cup of sugar
peel of one lemon
3 T flour
pinch of cinnamon

Mix it all together and pour into crust. Either weave a lattice top or use a small cookie cutter to create an attractive top. (Stars or hearts work well.) Back in 350 oven until bubbly.

Winter Storage

The end of August and beginning of September is harvest time here. The house was not designed to hold a wide variety of winter stores—we do not have a root cellar—so finding good storage places for all of the winter foods can be tricky.  This is where various foods are stashed.

Basement wall, warm and dry:

• All canned and dried goods, in mason jars
• Wheat, oatmeal, and barley in large tin containers (there ones that held Christmas popcorn mostly).
• Beans in mason jars.
• Bulk pasta and teas in the original containers
• Honey in mason jars

Basement by the door, cooler and damper:

• Apple crop, laid on one layer thick in seedling trays

Stairwell of the basement, constant temp:

• Potatoes, sorted by variety in bags and then resting in milkcrates
• Next years seed stock is in bags, tucked way back in so we do not eat them by mistake
• Garlic hangs above the stairs

Larder, which is an insulated space, vented to the outside, accessed in the stairwell:

• Squash and pumpkins
• 60 pounds of onions
• loose garlic
• longkeeper tomatoes
• Fruits waiting to be processed
• Seed tin

As the weather grows colder, the larder also holds:

• Greens from Sunbow
• Leftovers
• Soup for the week
• Box of oranges over Winter Solstice

Garden Beds:

·        Greens

·        Parsnips

·        Leeks

·        Sprouting Broccoli

·        Not carrots—slugs eat the tops and I can’t find them after early November.

 

Late Summer Pasta

Roasted eggplant (cubed, rolled in olive oil, and roasted in 350 oven for about 45 minutes)

Half pint jar of roasted tomatoes (I use the one that did not seal…)

Sauteed onion and garlic

Can of the Good Tuna from Sweet Creek

Fresh basil

Toss them all together and serve over whole wheat pasta with  lots of Parmesan cheese.

Embracing My Inner Peasant

When I first started gardening in my mother’s back yard, she called me a Russian Peasant. It was not a compliment. I headed out back in the evening with my head wrapped in a scarf to keep the mosquitoes at bay, wearing old sneakers, and carrying a pitchfork. In the late summer, I brought turnips and carrots to her customers, who loved them. Years alter, when I actually met a Gardening Russian Peasant in Portland Oregon, I had to agree—I did look like a peasant. Maybe Irish, rather than Russian, but the general outline was the same. Same big grin. Same scarf around the head. Same old shoes and pitchfork. She raised cabbages and potatoes, chickens and a rooster, in her back yard long before urban farming was cool, even in Portland. We compared notes on our vegetables and the weather by waving our arms and smiling.

Since then, I have embraced my Inner Peasant.

·        I grow potatoes. We eat potato bread in the winter.

·        I raise chickens. (no rooster, though. Too loud.)

·        I wrap a floral scarf around my head in the winter and own an old wool coat with a sparkly brooch.

·        I can whatever I can glean from the streets of Corvallis.

·        I collect animal manure for the gardens.

·        I make soups with beans and root vegetables.

·        I wear old  hand knit cardigans and mud boots.

·        I knit by the fire.

·        We grow gooseberries and red currants as well as raspberries and blueberries.

·        Pickled beets are a preferred food in March.

·        I haul hay in my van.

·        I have bean seeds in my pockets, even in January.

·        I compost—everything.

·        We eat from the farms that surround us, worry about crops and weather, and consider the land a sacred place.

Pickled Beets—from the Joy of Pickling

Harry had two plus pound beets in the fields this week and they were not fibrous. It has been a year for gigantism. 

Making pickled beets turns our kitchen into a massacre site, with red liquid everywhere. Just be prepared. Do not use the new kitchen towels. This makes six pints of beets.

7 pounds of beets—peeled, cubed, and cooked until just tender.

2 cinnamon sticks

1T whole allspice

1t whole cloves

1 c white sugar

1 c brown sugar

2t pickling salt

1 qt cider vinegar

2 cups of water

Simmer spices in liquids for ten minutes while you pack the beets into pint jars. Strain out spices and pour hot liquid over the beets, leaving  ½ inch of head room. Close jars and process in boiling water bath for 30 minutes. Allow to cool before putting away.

Eat in the middle of winter on cold grey days.

Sunday Night Suppers-- April

Rhubarb Cake--potluck supper

Beets and chard, cabbage with tuna

Sweet potatoes, sprouting broccoli, rice

            It was a banner year for winter squash in the valley this summer, even if my crop was underwhelming. I purchased five or six delicata from the co-op and two beautiful Winter Luxury pumpkins from Crooked Furrow Farm, saved a very yummy Sunshine squash from the CSA, and hauled home some Butternut and Blue Hubbard from Sunbow. They have been resting peacefully in the larder, lined up on the shelves to the left, for the past three months while I hunt down recipes in all of my cookbooks.

We have eaten:

1.      Squash bread (add 1-1.5 cups of squash to basic bread dough)

2.      Pumpkin quick bread with chocolate chips

3.      Pumpkin muffins

4.      pumpkin pie

5.      cream of squash soup

6.      Soup with squash, beans, and tomatoes

7.      roast delicata with sage

8.      roast delicata with almonds and dried tomatoes

9.      Squash with red pepper, corn, and cheddar cheese (Moosewood)

10.  Squash gnocchi

11.  baked squash with curried lentils (Recipes from the Root Cellar)

12.  Braised squash with apples (same)

13.  Risotto with squash

14.  Pumpkin Shepard’s pie (Sunset)

15.  Lasagna with squash and kale, tomato sauce (twice!)

And it is only January. There are still seven squash on the shelf. Squash pizza, anyone?

Cream of Squash Soup:

Bake a squash. Peel it and puree.

Sautee a chopped onion in butter and oil until well done and lightly browned. No sharp onions here!

Add the squash—about 2/3 of a cup per person. You can always use the extra in bread or muffins or gnocchi, or….

Add milk until the desired thickness—I like a pretty heavily squashed soup, myself. A little cream is nice…

Season with salt, pepper and allspice—a light pinch.

Warm slowly. Eat with muffins and salad.

Transcontinental Lettuce

“The transcontinental head of lettuce, grown in the Salinas Valley of California and shipped to Washington D.C., requires about 36 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it provides in food energy when it arrives.” (Eat Here—a worldwatch book)




We are eating oil, not food. It is not an efficient use of resources. This inefficiency of resources—namely grains—was enough to convince me to shift to a vegetarian diet back in college. It was also cheaper….and then, I decided that I didn’t really like meat anymore. Maybe being a meat wrapper and watching all of those bloody London Broils go by had something to do with it, too. And the intellectual appeal of eating closer to home did have some affect on my decision to shift to a more locally grown diet. But it wasn’t enough to change our habits.



It really started three Decembers ago. We had been eating only local produce since early June, between my garden and our Early Winter CSA box. But, a week after the box ended, we ran out of veggies and I had to go to the co-op once more. I bought a lovely head of broccoli, came home, and placed it on the chopping block. The stems were tough! And desiccated! A little brown around the edges! “What is this,” I wondered. “A dead broccoli?!” It wasn’t tender, or sweet, or a lovely light green… and I did not want to eat it. That was it. Local produce, even a month of kale and mustard greens, was a better option than dead broccoli. And, despite an occasional banana, or a red pepper in March, we haven’t looked back. Local produce is just tastier.