Relocalizing my life

Maybe it's my mood, but all kinds of red flags are giving me this sense that the giant rotary fecal disbursement mechanism is nearly operational.

Slowly, very slowly, I'm making progress on things that are important to me. It's probably not really that slow, but it seems like it.

One thing that's really important to me is supporting local businesses and products. Making my community stronger and more resilient... more self-reliant. More "crisis proof" - especially when it comes to food and farms.

Thankfully, this is a region where it's much easier to do these kinds of things than where we were before. We're working on fruits and veggies and eggs on our own property, but you can get those locally in most places. But check out what else we're working on:

7 miles north - Milk & butter (& ice cream!) from a solar powered dairy farm
13 miles north - Beef, pork, lamb, & chicken from a diversified farm running a "meat CSA"
11 miles west - Locally grown and milled organic chicken feed
17 miles south - Biodiesel made from locally sourced waste oil

So not only can we be locavores, so can our chickens. And so can my car.

But I don't have to drive to all those places. I can get most of those things in town, within just a few miles. The dairy products actually cost less than the organic from the store. The chicken feed is a bit more expensive, but still pretty reasonable. The meat is not cheap, but I'm okay with that. And at $3.75 a gallon, the biodiesel is actually cheaper than either diesel or gasoline at this point.

There are days when I think the relocation is going to blow up in my face - especially with the job not always living up to its billing, and the Ohio house still sitting up there empty. But we're getting some showings again, and, well, I'm still employed.

But when I look around at what this area has, and what our old place didn't, I don't feel any hint of regret.

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One Local Turkey

We managed to get a local turkey from a nearby farm. The kids got to pet some big fluffy rabbits, feed some goats, and chase some poultry. Our turkey was (formerly) a Royal Palm, which I'd never encountered before. They're really beautiful birds.

We also had some potatoes from our garden. We were going to have sweet potatoes from our garden* as well, but the yield wasn't really enough to work with. I also used some carrots from our garden**. We forgot all about our home-canned cranberry sauce.

* By "from our garden" I mean "from our fill dirt pile where I stuck them when I couldn't find a better place."

** By "from our garden" I mean "from a giant plastic flower pot filled with sand, peat, and compost." I never, ever have luck with carrots in the ground. Probably because they're slow to germinate and I'm slow to weed. And I've always lived where there's heavy clay soil. But this year I decided on a whim to try the flower pot, and I'm really excited about the results. I did virtually no weeding or watering, and I got some baby carrots, but quite a few the length of my hand and as big around as a quarter.***

*** You know, you've got a smutty mind.

I'm thinking next year I'll plant carrots in 5 gallon buckets. I've heard that if you're storing carrots in a root cellar, you should keep them in sand. So after a frost or two (Eliot Coleman is right, they're sweeter if you don't harvest until after a frost), I can just pick up my buckets, move them to a sheltered area, and pull them as needed all winter. If any are left the next spring, I can just take them back outside and let them go to seed in their second year.

I'm really way to excited about this whole carrot thing.

Meanwhile, I've got other priorities to attend to, so I may not be posting much here for the next couple weeks.

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My Evil Plan

I'm happy to say that I've recently started implementing My Evil Plan.

For long-time readers, My Evil Plan could probably be considered a spin-off of My Crazy Scheme. For non-long-time readers, here is the Reader's Digest version of My Crazy Scheme. The four part opus, or as I prefer to call it, the Director's Cut, can be found here:
Part 1: Big Hairy Deal
Part 2: Little Tiny Steps
Part 3: Magnification
Part 4: Change the World?

A lot has changed since then, and I've learned a lot too, but I think the general plan holds up pretty well three years on.

I do have to say that I just love the fact that if you google "my crazy scheme," I've got the top few spots locked up, and even with just "crazy scheme" I've still got the #1 spot.

It also reminds me that I need to start taking credit for inspiring The Bullseye Diet. :)

Anyway, on to My Evil Plan: Simply put, it is to position myself, at least for now, as the middle man between my coworkers and local farmers.

I have at least four different people at work interested in buying naturally raised chickens (remember the Free Soup bird?) from the place we get ours. I'd pick them up frozen from the farm (which is about 2 miles from our house), bring them to work in a cooler, deposit them in one of several break room freezers (which are essentially empty), and pocket a modest delivery fee.

I'm also laying the groundwork for holiday turkeys, as well as any local produce, honey, baked goods, sides of beef, duck, fruit, or whatever else people might request.

I've been thinking for a long time about how cool it would be to get our production up to CSA level, or at least to have enough of a surplus to make it worth selling. But it's taking much longer than I'd hoped, what with the baby, the special needs daughter, the learning curve, not to mention the laziness and incompetence.

But with my Evil Plan, I can cheat a little bit by leaning on my more experienced neighbors, and maybe even run afoul of local food laws or company HR policies. I can gauge interest in various small farm products with no real risk. I might have people tell me they want okra, but if I can't grow it, or if I do grow it and they don't end up actually wanting it, that doesn't help anybody. If tell them what I can get and then bring them what they ask for, I can find out what and how much they really want, and then deliver a product that's superior to what I can currently produce myself. And at the same time, figure out what to focus on for our own production.

Then again, if we never want to raise meat turkeys or keep bees, I can still keep delivering those things, along with our own stuff. It still helps the local farmers, the local ecosystem, the local economy, it helps my coworkers have easier access to better food, and it helps me establish valuable relationships.

But now that I've written this all out, I don't seem to be making an especially convincing case for joining the Evil League of Evil.

I'll have to refine this a bit...

Somebody check my math!

There was a recent post in an online forum which was making a case that vegetarianism is better from a carbon emissions standpoint than eating meat. It referenced one of many articles that complain (rightly) about the greenhouse gas emissions generated by feedlot meat. It spurred me to look for some data on grass-fed meat, by way of comparison. Here's part of what I wrote - including some rather surprising numbers:

I'm all for ending the practice of stuffing livestock with grains, and turning manure into sewage. Not to mention the health and disease considerations for the animals as well as the people! I'm also all for drastically reducing the amount of meat consumed.

But (you knew I was going to put one in here!) I just did some quick digging and came up with this*:

Conventional beef:         2.13 kg CO2 / 1 kg meat
Conventional corn:         0.15 kg CO2 / 1 kg corn
Cover crop + no-till corn: 0.06 kg CO2 / 1 kg corn
Grass fed beef:            0.02 kg CO2 / 1 kg meat

* based on numbers in these two links, converted to common units:
http://tinyurl.com/lccjap
http://tinyurl.com/mgq65o

I picked corn because it was the easiest calorie dense crop I could find carbon numbers for. I couldn't find numbers for organic corn. I suspect it varies according to scale.

To be fair, I haven't added in electricity for the beef to keep it frozen or whatever. I guess it depends if you're keeping it all yourself for a year, or splitting it among many people, to be eaten relatively soon after butchering.

But even I found the numbers above surprising. (Maybe I should re-check my math.)

Is this a fair comparison? I don't know. Just throwing it out there. Is manure a methane disaster or a fantastic fertilizer? Depends how much you have and what you do with it I guess. Is growing perennials like grass and clover for grazing better for the soil than no-till corn and soy, or is that canceled out by cow farts? Did buffaloes fart? Can people grow veggies and beef using much less than the numbers stated in the referenced articles? (That I'm sure of. I'm trying to do both myself!)

But like I said, I'm all for getting rid of feedlots and cutting meat consumption in any case. And I salute vegetarians. It is a very effective approach.

My only point is that there's more than one workable answer, and the answers will vary based on many factors. There's no way in hell India is going to feed itself on pastured livestock. (I fear I could have stopped that sentence partway through.) Nor Japan. Nor New York or Los Angeles I suspect. But on our little 8+ acres, I'm pretty sure I can raise a cow on grass & hay for less fuel (and less money) than it would take to cover the whole property in annual crops.

(My dream is pastures with rows of mature nut trees in them....)

This line of inquiry was partly spurred by our recent purchase of a quarter of beef from the neighbor whose cattle are currently grazing on our property. He finishes his on grain, but I was thinking about how little fuel (and money) it would take for us to raise Meadow's (presumed) calf on pasture and hay alone. It couldn't take more than five gallons of fuel to cut hay for one bovine for one winter. And that's pasture I'd have to mow anyway! So what other expense would there be besides the butcher's bill? Water is abundant here. We wouldn't need any other feed. A few pennies worth of mineral block. And free fertilizer and mowing.

I bet we could beat that 0.02 / 1 ratio. Of course, if I was man enough to scythe and stack the hay, I could get to 0.00. But I'm not.

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Recipe for Free Soup

First, buy a whole chicken.

I know, I said it was free, but as any physicist can tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Free always has a price, even if it's sometimes hidden.

Anyway, soup.

So buy a whole chicken. If you buy it from a nearby small farmer, you will be helping your local economy, your local ecology, your health, your taste buds, and your soul.

Oven roast the chicken, and serve it for dinner with your choice of sides. If you don't have a good recipe, see if your local library has a cookbook called "Best Recipe" or one of its kin. Be amazed at how good a home cooked meal can be.

I know, soup. We're getting there.

Put away the leftovers. Pick the remnants of good meat off the carcass. Set them aside. You can leave plenty on the bones - fat, gristle, meat that's tough to remove, etc.

If possible, cut the bones in half, either with kitchen shears or a large knife. It's not absolutely necessary, but it will release marrow, which will really give some life to your soup.

Put the remnants of the carcass in a big stock pot, and add a bunch of water. At least a gallon, maybe more if your stock pot is big. Add some salt -- maybe tablespoon or so, and another tablespoon of vinegar. (Don't worry if your soup smells like vinegar for a while. It'll go away. The vinegar is supposed to help draw out some extra nutrients.) You can throw in a bay leaf if you have it. Turn on the heat. You want to keep it just shy of boiling - A few bubbles every now and then, but not a full boil.

Now, get out a stalk of celery, a carrot or two, a couple cloves of garlic, an onion, and a potato. Substitute other veggies as you see fit. In mine, I left our celery because we didn't have any. I included a little corn, because we had some left from the roasted chicken dinner. Soup is great for using up leftovers.

Peel the papery skin off the onion and put the skin in the pot. (This will give some color to your broth.) Wash and peel the carrot(s) and potato and put their skins in the pot too. Pull off some celery leaves and put them in the pot.

Cut up all the vegetables and mince the garlic. Heat some oil in a large pan. Wait for it to shimmer. Then add the garlic and all the veg to the pan, along with a good healthy sprinkling of thyme and some salt and black pepper. You can add other seasonings if you like.

When everything in the pan starts getting tender, take it off the heat. Put it in a bowl with the meat you set aside earlier. You want your broth to cook for a good hour before you go any further, so you may want to put these veggies and meat in the fridge for a bit, depending on how your timing is going to work out.

Once the stock pot with the bones, peelings, etc. has been heating for an hour or more (more is fine), get out a big bowl and a strainer or colander. Pour the broth through the strainer into the bowl. Skim off the top of the bowl if necessary, to catch any bits that came through the strainer. Discard the bones and scraps.

Put the broth back in the stock pot, along with your sauteed vegetables and meat bits. Simmer for another 30 minutes or so. Toss in a couple handfuls of egg noodles. Then toss in another handful, because it's hard to have too many noodles in your soup, as far as I'm concerned. Cook until the noodles are appropriately soft. Add salt or seasonings to taste, but taste it first. Depending on how you roasted that chicken back at the beginning of this process, it may be plenty salty. Or it may need a good bit of salt.

Congratulations - you just made some excellent soup. And it didn't cost you anything. Let's look at the ingredients: Chicken bones and meat scraps - You were going to throw them out, right? Vegetables - You had them in your kitchen already. You just used the ones that would have gone bad waiting to be used. Herbs and/or spices - That much less going stale in the bottom of the jars. Tap water. Noodles.

So maybe not COMPLETELY free, but pretty effin' close. For a few pennies worth of ingredients, and stuff that most people would throw away, you have the equivalent of about a dozen cans of some damn fine soup.

Besides, "Free Soup" does sound a lot better than "Chicken Carcass Soup."

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Freaky Mutant Strawberries

Check out these monster strawberries...

Independence Days

I've decided to participate in Sharon's Independence Days Challenge this year. It was interesting reading all the participants' regular updates last year, but more than that, it'll hopefully keep me honest, inspired, and motivated. I know a lot of people found it really helpful last year.

The goal of the challenge is to do at least one thing every week in the following categories:

1. Plant something - This one will be easy for a while. This week I planted potatoes (Butte, Caribe, and Yukon Gold), and onions - generic yellow onion sets from the garden center. I've got some Jaune Paille Des Vertus I started from seed that I'll be transplanting as soon as they're hardened off, but I've had bad luck with onions from seed in the past. Thus the hedging with boughten onion sets. I also transplanted some comfrey, and Lori planted a bunch of stuff in her part of the garden.

2. Harvest something - We harvested a bit of asparagus. After the agonizing three year wait from planting until the first harvest, I'm dying to finally try some. And eggs. Always eggs.

3. Preserve something - Ummm.... I've got nothin'.

4. Reduce waste - This is a bit of a cheat, but we got a SodaStream Fountain Jet, for making soft drinks at home. No longer will our soft drinks consist of pulling ground water from somewhere else (drought-troubled Atlanta?) and energy-intensive high-fructose corn syrup (with its possible links to diabetes) and shipped across the country. Reusable bottles, our own water, no HFCS. I'm hoping to experiment with some home-made flavor recipes.

5. Preparation and Storage - Lots of good stuff here. Got a copy of Small Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon, and The Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman. Haven't had a chance to read them yet. But Lori and I have both been working our way through Coleman's The New Organic Grower (me for a second time) with thoughts about another garden expansion next year. Also, found a local guy to help me with small engine repair. He seems to know a lot about a lot of useful subjects. Got one step closer to true rotational grazing with some reworking of our fences. There's more in the works here, but I'll save it for next week.

(And just for the record, I'm taking full credit for the new edition of Small Scale Grain Raising. I described here in this very blog my plea to the author two years ago for a re-release of this hard-to-find classic....)

6. Build Community Food Systems - Bought a couple frozen chickens from a neighbor. Sold surplus eggs at the office. Mailed seeds to a fellow gardener. (Anyone else need some?) Bought a few heirloom seedlings from the Adena Mansion Plant Heirloom Plant Sale. Talked gardening and offered encouragement to a neighbor.

7. Eat the Food - Ate some home-grown eggs. Ate some home-made banana bread (does that count?), and getting ready to eat some home-made pumpkin bread from home-canned pumpkins (that's a little closer....). Looking forward to that asparagus...

...a needle pulling thread

So this year, knowing we had a baby on the way, I didn't figure on much of a garden. Oh, I hoped for a garden. I pined for a garden. But realistically, I couldn't be sure I'd be able to pull off a full-blown garden.

So we decided to join our local CSA. We didn't actually know this existed last year, but we eventually found it. So it should be interesting, especially since this year they've added strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and peaches. So we are ensured a steady supply of fresh fruits and veggies from June to October. (Meanwhile, I'm hitting our favorite farm market to feed my local cider addiction, local meats, and for whatever else they might have.)

So I guess I'm going to start every paragraph with the word "so" today.

So anyway, due to some creative scheduling, it looks like I'll have my produce and eat it too. I managed to plant the garden anyway. So far I've got garlic I planted last fall, along with onions, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, chard, bell peppers, jalapenos, a couple cauliflower, a few cabbages, popcorn, pole beans, winter squash, and carrots planted. Still to go in the ground are a variety of bush beans, some summer squash, cucumbers, melons, herbs and flowers. And maybe some other stuff that I forgot about.

So I also think I may actually get to try my grand field corn experiment, planting up to a half acre of it depending on how far my seed corn goes. I'll probably fill the rest of the tilled area with sunflowers. Assuming I get the tractor running long enough to turn over the soil.

So if that's not enough, I've also got a whole mess of nut trees and a few cherry trees that I'm going to plant over the next several days or weeks. So that'll be fun.

So in case you are wondering, it's amazing how much you can accomplish with one hour first thing in the morning before the kids are up, and one hour after dinner in the evening.

So... I can't decide whether to reveal the big surprise project yet or not. But I will tell you that my muscles are sore, my hands are somewhere between leather and sandpaper, my tools are scattered, and I have to be on the road at 4:30 tomorrow morning. I guess you'll have to wait for my next post.

So I'd better get to bed.

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Giving us The Bird

I'm smitten with OEFFA. This year they offered a Thanksgiving box of local food that was pretty amazing. Our box contained:

5 lbs of potatoes
1 bunch of carrots
1 bunch of beets
2 lbs of onions
2 butternut squashes
1 pie pumpkin
1 head each of red and green cabbage
1 head of leaf lettuce
1 dozen fresh eggs
1/2 peck of apples
2 lbs of broccoli
1 bunch each of sage, thyme, and parsley
1 bunch of celery
1 lb of whole wheat flour
1 head of garlic

Throw in a 15 lb turkey and we must have a good two weeks' worth of food for our little household. Not to mention the fact that they also included recipes:

Squash sage bisque
Potato leek soup
Roast turkey
Herbed giblet dressing
Fried cabbage and onions
Herb roasted potatoes and vegetables
Winter squash puree
Boiled potatoes with parsley and chives
Honey-mustard glazed carrots
Parsley/walnut beets
Raw broccoli salad
Russian beet and egg salad
Squash biscuits
Baked apples
Spicy pumpkin pie
Prize-winning apple pie
...along with suggested menu combinations

We cooked our turkey with the brine method that's come into vogue, and I can see why it has. The meat was really tender and juicy. The potatoes were fabulous. The apples have been a big hit with e5, who never used to like to eat apples with the skin on. We tried the parsley/walnut beet recipe, and it was quite good. Of course we didn't get to eat it until the next day because it took a lot longer for the beets to get tender than we anticipated. So it cooked while we ate, and we just served it with leftovers.

Yes, I'm talking in the past tense, even though it's only Wednesday. Among other reasons that aren't worth explaining, we decided that since we had a fresh turkey, and no travel plans, we'd just toss tradition and cook it on Monday. And now the bonus is that we've got a fridge full of tasty leftovers and plenty of fresh stuff, and a four-day weekend to do with as we please. And I can assure you that I won't be getting up early or standing in line to buy junk we don't need. In fact, I'll do my best to not spend a single penny...

I know, I know. It'll ruin the economy, right?


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One Local Summer - Week of 8/19/2007

Despite our huge haul at the Farmer's Market - the chaos at our house has continued, in the form of chicken pox, goat sales, medical bills, car repairs, preschool orientation - but I digress. Despite the huge haul, we've had trouble putting it all together into a coherent meal for One Local Summer. So we weren't as local or as timely as we might have been.

Tonight's dinner was bratwurst and grilled vegetables over (local!) charcoal in the R2BQ.


Bratwurst (VanMeter Farm - 57 miles)
Zucchini (Ross county, 20 miles)
Bell peppers (Ross county, 20 miles)
Onions (Ross county, 20 miles)
Delicata squash (The garden, 0 miles)
Beer (Eliot Ness Amber Lager, Great Lakes Brewing, 169 miles)
Non-local ingredients: Buns, mustard, oil, thyme, cheap beer for simmering

If we were cooler, we'd have baked some buns, I'd have remembered that there actually was thyme in the herb garden, and I would have tracked down one of my favorite beers (and local to boot) from Columbus Brewing Company. (I can't seem to find Columbus Pale Ale in the neighborhood establishments). I would have also grilled those veggies for a bit longer. Some of them were still crisper than I would have preferred.

Even so, it was a good meal. The Delicata squash that I kept hearing about was quite good. Probably my favorite winter squash so far. The brats were as tasty as expected. And the beer was excellent as well.

Not bad for another time-crunched dinner window.

Late Summer's Bounty

A beautiful morning to go to the Farmer's Market...

Oops. I guess we can't go to that market any more...

What, we can't grow melons in Ohio?

Couldn't I just go to Kroger for those?

NOW WE'RE TALKING!

This morning at our local-only farm market, we picked up zucchini, bell peppers, garlic, two kinds of apples, a jug of cider, nectarines, raspberries, beef soup bones, bratwurst, a dozen croissants, sweet tea, a couple cookies, and a hunk of provolone cheese. I missed the last caramel apple pie by mere seconds -- for the second week in a row. We'll have to get up earlier next time I guess.

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One Local Summer - Week of 8/12/2007

It's a little late, but here is last week's local meal:

Country-Fried Steak with Cream Gravy
Beef cubed steaks from Buckskin Valley Farms, Greenfield, OH (36 mi.)
Whole wheat flour from a local supplier [but where? E4, can you help?]
Egg from our hens (0 mi.)
Onion and garlic from Ross Co. farmers (20-30 mi.)
Also - non-local flour (I used 1/3 local whole wheat, 2/3 all-purpose for the dredge), salt, pepper, baking powder, baking soda, thyme, oil, buttermilk, chicken broth and milk. It's too bad I didn't have it together enough to use local supplies for the buttermilk, chicken broth and milk, but... I didn't.

Mashed Turnips
Turnips from our garden (0 mi.)
Non-local butter, salt and pepper

Sauteed Summer Squash and Tomatoes
Summer squash, cherry tomatoes and yellow pear tomatoes from our garden (0 mi.)
Non-local oil, salt and herbs

The steaks were fine; the squash and tomatoes were also pretty good, although for some reason the red cherry tomatoes seemed a bit tart. The turnips were rather a failure, however. E5 and I both found them salty and rather bitter, while E4's only complaint was that it was very salty. I was using an older cookbook and had forgotten that it always seems to call for at least twice the necessary amount of salt (I mean, I like salt as much as the next person, but this cookbook calls for a lot of salt). That aside, I still thought them bitter as well, and that may be because one or two of them were probably too big by the time we harvested them.

One Local Summer - Week of 8/5/2007

We've got a kitchen full of homegrown cucumbers, tomatoes, patty pan squash, spaghetti squash, turnips, even some locally milled flour... and we didn't use any of them this time. We've got plans for them - oh, we've got plans. But for now our local eating has been of the here-and-there variety.

After all, as some of you have noticed, we're a bit distracted lately. But I still wanted to throw something together for One Local Summer.

So I did. It wasn't glamorous. But, oooh, it sure was tasty.



Scrambled Eggs and Bacon

Eggs (0 miles)
Bacon (Walnut Creek, Ohio - 126 miles)
Milk (0 miles)
Non-local ingredients: salt, pepper, butter.

... after which, I used some of the leftover bacon, a big juicy Brandywine tomato, some local Romaine lettuce, and non-local bread and mayo for a top-notch BLT. Sorry, no pictures. It didn't last long enough.

One Local Summer - Week of 7/29/2007

Summer Spaghetti
(Recipe improvised)

Vermicelli - Lancaster, Ohio (20 miles)
Tomato sauce - From last year's garden (0 miles)
Tomato paste - From last year's garden (0 miles)
Summer squash - Our garden (0 miles)
Ground goat meat - Our pasture (0 miles)
Basil (fresh) - Our garden (0 miles)
Rosemary (fresh) - Our garden (0 miles)
Sage (dried) - From last year's garden
Garlic - Chillicothe, Ohio (20 miles)
Non-local ingredients: Onion (forgot to get some), cumin, salt, oil

This was our first taste of chevon (goat meat). We had to drive 20 miles to find a butcher who processed goats. The ground chevon looked exactly like ground beef. The taste wasn't bad. Hard to describe, especially for someone who doesn't have many reference points for unusual meats.

The meal was simple and came together pretty fast. The dish itself was pretty good the night we had it, but the leftovers started tasting "goaty" after just a day or two. Not inedible, but not so great. So I'm not a chevon convert at this point. But we've got some better cuts to try yet, so we'll see.

One Local Summer - Week of 7/22/2007

I think we got doubled up on one OLS week, and missed the next one or something. Anyway, I took a turn at cooking our local meal this week. At my favorite, favorite farmer's market, they were conspiring to make me fire up the grill this week. (A grill/smoker/steamer that I affectionately refer to as R2BQ.)

So first, a youth group was selling some charcoal they made, for a fundraiser. Next, one of my favorite market gardeners had a bag full of tiny peppers, baby squash, mini zucchini, and undersized onions, which she was pitching as perfect for roasting on the grill. (They certainly were.) And finally, I realized that the naturally raised (and delicious) pork tenderloin chops that we enjoyed a while back were priced at $4.00 for four chops. How can you go wrong with one-dollar slabs of tenderloin? And that's not even a sale price.

And what goes better with pork than apple cider? Of course I get the cider every week anyway. Better than canned soft drinks, eh? I had to give some of my precious cider to the meal, but it was a worthy cause.

So you're probably thinking, "Get to the meal already!" Alright, you savages, simmer down...


Grilled Pork Tenderloin Chops
(recipe improvised)
Pork tenderloin chops - VanMeter Farm, Latham, OH (57 miles)
Apple cider (marinade) - Hirsch Fruit Farms, Chillicothe, Ohio (25 miles)
Rosemary - Our herb garden (0 miles)
Pepper seasoning - non-local

Roasted Potatoes with Garlic
(recipe adapted from Better Homes and Gardens Gas Grill Cookbook)
Fingerling potatoes, green onions, garlic - Kinnikinnick Gardens, Chillicothe, Ohio (20 miles)
Rosemary - Our herb garden (0 miles)
Non-local ingredients - less than a tablespoon each of: oil, salt, pepper, vinegar, dijon mustard

Roasted vegetables
(recipe improvised)
Green, purple, yellow and red peppers, white and red onions, baby zucchini, baby patty-pan squash - Kinnikinnick Gardens, Chillicothe, Ohio (20 miles)
Non-local ingredients - Italian dressing marinade

Beverage
Milk - Our goats (0 miles)
(I know, I got the cider for the meal, but for some reason, milk sounded better.)

I cheated a little on the marinades, but I made up for it by cooking with local charcoal. Or something like that.

Unfortunately, the potatoes were very undercooked, despite an hour wrapped in a foil tent over the charcoal. I'm not sure what went wrong there. I'll try something different next time. The pork was a tiny bit overcooked, but still very tasty. The roasted vegetables were excellent.

I'm finding that my favorite thing about local cooking is the forced creativity. Often, you can't just follow a recipe exactly, so you end up swapping, omitting, adding, or otherwise improvising, which always leads to something new and different. And so far at least, it almost always works out well...

Scratch-built weekend

We're loving the local food challenge so far. It's pushing us to do more, get more creative, and eat what we have instead of eating whatever we want. The food's been better despite the limits of what's in season. (Of course, just about everything is in season at the moment...)

But we have one steadfastly non-local eater: Amelia. Due to her sensory and communication issues, she has quite a limited range of textures that she'll willingly eat. We know all the food tricks and techniques and ideas for picky eaters, and as far as we can tell, she's totally immune to all of them. (Our son is a champion non-picky eater, eager to try almost anything he doesn't recognize.)

In fact with Amelia, sometimes it's even hard to get her to eat the foods she loves. Despite the fact that she 's been eating yogurt or applesauce (with medication mixed in) every single night for over half her life, the first bite is literally a struggle almost every night. Once she gets a taste, she realizes that we weren't actually trying to poison her, and (usually) happily gobbles down the rest of the bowl.

Her preferred food textures are crispy or pureed/creamy. And the latter is pretty dicey. So mostly crispy. We decided to see if we could make anything for her from scratch.

The first attempt was yogurt. I know - Make yogurt from scratch, are you crazy? Well, actually it was incredibly simple. Following instructions from Pat Meadows found here, I successfully made a quart of yogurt. (As much as I enjoyed Madcap's recipe, Pat's was the link I had on hand...)

Just to prove to you that it's easy, here are the basic steps:
1. Mix milk with dry (instant) milk
2. Heat to 180F
3. Cool to 110F
4. Mix in a little plain yogurt
5. Keep warm for 4-6 hours

Despite the simplicity, my first attempt didn't work for a variety of reasons. (I never said I was smart.) I was using whole goat's milk rather than 2% from the store, which could have affected things. I got the proportions of milk and dry milk wrong. I also accidentally grabbed the peach flavored yogurt rather than the plain, which I'm sure was the main problem. I realized my mistake as bits of peach flavored goo from the bottom appeared in my mix. I went ahead and strained them out, but I imagine even without that, the yogurt itself was probably sweetened. But I kept going, just to see what would happen. My final mistake was not keeping it warm long enough.

So for my next attempt, I made some adjustments. First, I made sure to use plain yogurt as my starter. (Powdered starter next time, probably.) Second, I let it stay warm longer. I checked it after about 5 hours and it was still liquid, so I went to bed. When I got up in the morning, it was still quite warm and had thickened to a yogurt-like consistency. It passed the taste test too.

I was using Pat's "haybox" method to keep it warm. A haybox is essentially a well-insulated box. I used a cooler with a bunch of newspaper in the bottom (to take up extra space). I lined the remaining space with foil, put a pot of warm water in, put the yogurt in the water, put the lid on the pot, and wrapped the whole thing up in a blanket to take up the remaining air space, and then closed up the cooler.

On my second attempt, I decided to make another adjustment. We use this cooler for many things, so I didn't want to use new foil every time I needed to line the inside again. So I got one of those shiny reflective windshield shades out of the garage and stuffed that in instead.

So the bottom line is that Pat's instructions, if followed work well. It looks like in adjusting for whole goat's milk, we may need a longer "warm" period, but with the haybox setup, that's trivial.

Our second Amelia replacement recipe was graham crackers. We tried a recipe from Organic To Be (where Gene Logsdon contributes from time to time). They were not a big hit. I didn't really care for them, nor did e5. Lori thought they were passable. Amelia (not surprisingly) wanted nothing to do with the unfamiliar, somewhat irregular monstrosities. We'd have to persist for a while to get her to consider even trying them. We'll probably try some different recipes before we settle on one to be persistent with.

We dug up a few other recipes for things like saltines and windmill cookies that we'll experiment with as well. The yogurt is definitely a keeper, especially since we have more milk than we can handle these days...

One Local Summer - Week of 7/8/2007

Roast Chicken with Rosemary - Our own chicken, butchered on Sunday (0 mi.), roasted with butter (local-ish, 168 mi.... maybe?) and fresh rosemary from our herb garden (0 mi.), with salt and pepper (not local)

Roasted Beets - Beets from a Ross Co. farmer (20-30 mi.), roasted in their skins, then peeled, sliced and tossed with our localish butter and salt

Blanched Green Beans - Green and purple pod beans from our garden (0 mi.), blanched in salted water. These beans start out looking like this:

The purple color (somewhat disappointingly) fades with cooking. They end up a shade darker than the other beans but definitely green.

This was a very simple dinner, but satisfying. The chicken was really good, although I couldn't bring myself to eat the skin. (I spent a lot of time trying to pluck all the @#$%! pinfeathers out - so much that most of the following day and night I was haunted by thoughts of pinfeathers. I still didn't get them all, either. I'm forecasting a lot of skinless chickens in our future.) One interesting note which I forgot to document with a photo: The dark meat was very dark indeed.

One Local Summer - Week of 7/1/2007

Slipping in under the wire....

Beef & Summer Squash with Basil
(Recipe modified from Recipezaar's Italian Beef & Zucchini Dinner)
Beef cubed steaks from Buckskin Valley Farms, Greenfield, Ohio (36 mi.)
Greek basil from our herb garden (0 mi.)
Summer squash and tomatoes from our garden (0 mi.), supplemented by a tomato from the Chillicothe farm market; again, I forgot to ask the vendor, but I'm going to assume it came from Ross County* (20-30 mi.)
Salt, pepper, garlic, and olive oil - not local

Boiled New Potatoes with Parsley
Red potatoes from Jones Farm, Chillicothe, Ohio (20 mi.)
Parsley from our herb garden (0 mi.)
Salt, pepper, butter** - not local

The steaks were rather chewy, although the flavor was pretty good. We still have another package of these and I'm hoping we'll find some local flour (or a flour substitute? Any ideas?) to make them into country fried steak. The summer squash and tomatoes, cooked in olive oil with garlic and fresh basil, were very good - I'm sure we'll use that combination again. The potatoes were simple and tasty.

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* This is not a terribly shaky assumption, as we've found out that the rules for the Chillicothe farm market are that at least 51% of a vendor's produce must be grown by them, and all the produce must be from the area.

** I did attempt to find local butter, with dubious success. At the Clintonville Community Market I found "Amish Gourmet" butter which purported to be from a dairy in Minerva, Ohio (168 mi.); however, upon closer examination, the words "distributed by" make me suspect it doesn't actually come from there. I could be wrong. I forgot to use it tonight, anyway....

One Local Summer - Week of 6/24/2007

Our very first local meal for One Local Summer - prepared by Lori


Sauteed Pork Tenderloin with Cream, Apples, and Sage
(Recipe from The Best Recipe)
Pork tenderloin chops from VanMeter Farm, Latham, Ohio (57 mi.)
Apple and apple cider from Hirsch Fruit Farms, Chillicothe, Ohio (25 mi.)
Sage from our herb garden (0 mi.)
Whole goats' milk (substituted for heavy cream) from our goats (0 mi.)
Nonlocal ingredients: butter, onion, salt and pepper, olive oil

Sauteed Zucchini and Summer Squash
(Recipe from Best American Side Dishes)
Zucchini and summer squash from Ross County (20-30 mi.) (This was purchased from an Amish vendor at the Chillicothe farm market; we didn't get the name or location of the farm but we're assuming it's somewhere around there....)
Lemon balm (substituted for lemon zest) from our flowerbed (0 mi.)
Parsley from our herb garden (0 mi.)
Nonlocal ingredients: salt, olive oil, onion

Wheat bread from The Roll Up Yonder, Adelphi, Ohio (21 mi.); with nonlocal butter. The bread was probably not made with local ingredients, however.

Everything turned out quite delicious, and our first OLS attempt has alerted us to a few gaps in our local eating resources: We need to find local butter (or find a way to separate cream from our goats' milk so we can make our own); we need to find local onions (or grow lots of our own and preserve them for year-round use); and we need to find more sources for local starchy foods like potatoes, pasta and grains (we're currently growing two kinds of potatoes, and hopefully we can harvest enough and preserve them for year-round use; also, we recently became aware of a nearby farm selling locally grown wheat flour and wheat berries, among other things).

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Comments from e4: Wow, the pork was really delicious. Actually so was the zucchini and summer squash. The bread was good, but not quite as good as Lori's best loaves. And I'm addicted to the apple cider. I've pretty much replaced soft drinks and other beverages with either our own milk or Hirsch's cider.

The OEFFA Conference

Last weekend, my family and I attended the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association's annual conference. Below is a report on our experiences.

Overall Impressions

OEFFA (pronounced oh-fah) has been putting on this conference for 28 years, and it shows. The organizers really have their act together: Creative childcare - free if you volunteer some of your time to help out; Member-provided local and organic meals - with fully compostable plates and utensils; A "Kids' Conference" for older kids - they built bird shelters and sold them to members to raise funds to pay for next year's kids' conference; Lunch tables organized by geography the first day (so you can find people near you), and organized by topic the second day (so you can find like-minded people); Audio recordings available for purchase of every single workshop, since there were generally nine different workshops at any given time, so you could never attend everything you might be interested in... I could go on, but in any case, my hat's off to the people who put the conference together.

Keynote Speaker #1: Sally Fallon

Sally Fallon is the author of Nourishing Traditions and the founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I will admit that I'm not a big Sally Fallon fan. She goes a bit far with her claims sometimes, and can come off more like an old-time snake oil salesman. My family drinks raw milk when we have it available, so I'm okay with the concept. But when you imply that raw milk makes kids smarter and better looking and more creative and more artistic, and that it cures asthma and cancer and autism and ... well, let's just say I have reasons to be skeptical. I also agree with her that modern nutrition science has a pretty mediocre success rate on telling us what's good for us and what's not, but again, I don't believe that following her advice will virtually eliminate the need for health care, as she implies. (And the anti-soy thing seems pretty far out there, but we'll just leave that aside for now.)

That said, she did have a lot of good ideas and messages. Her key point was that farms can be much more profitable by selling value-added products - i.e. yogurt instead of milk, apple cider instead of apples, prosciutto instead of ham, etc. The idea is that the increased value more than outweighs the work involved, and that high quality, local specialties can increase demand even further. This would help farmers a lot more than what she referred to as the "plantation model," where power and profit are centralized, and regulations begin to favor centralization, at the expense of individual farmers.

Keynote Speaker #2: Mark Shepard

Mark Shepard is a permaculture expert from Midwest Permaculture, whose 100-acre New Forest Farm embodies many permaculture principles. He gave two workshops as well as a keynote speech to close out the conference. I wish I'd been able to attend the first of his workshops, because the second one and the speech were both fantastic. He can rattle off so many ideas and concepts in such a short space of time, I was glad I went into it with some previous knowledge of permaculture.

[There was so much fascinating information, in fact, that I've decided to spin this section off into a separate article.]

Workshops

Maximizing Pasture: Management Principles

This presentation was made by Extension educator Rory Lewandowski, with assistance from author Gene Logsdon (Contrary Farmer, All Flesh is Grass). Rory led the discussion, with lots of great advice on rotational grazing, and how to get the most out of your pasture. Gene chimed in from time to time, and true to his writing, he was occasionally contrary - but in a good-natured way, with some hint of mischeif in his eyes. The dynamic was that of a bright young talent being checked by decades of old-fashioned farm wisdom. We learned a lot from both of them, and we'll be making adjustments in our pastures accordingly.

Gene Logsdon was very approachable, and just as amiable and intelligent in person as he seems in his writing. I asked him if it felt good that the Extension services are now advocating the things he's been writing about for years, and he agreed that it was a good thing. Then again, he said he learns so much from experience every year even now, that he gets embarrased by some of his older writings. (I did lobby for him to republish, or revise his old "Small Scale Grain Raising" book. He said it had been discussed, but that his publisher figured that an audience of about 500 people probably wasn't enough to justify it...) Gene was surprised to learn that you could download "Small Scale Grain Raising" for free. "Hey, that's illegal, you know!" he said with a grin on his face. (Oops!) But after discussing it, and telling him where we got it ("Oh right, those guys"), he concluded that either his copyright had lapsed or he didn't have a royalty contract on it. He seemed a bit amused by the whole thing. He asked me some questions about our goats, asked me if we'd tasted the meat - not yet - to which he responded, "I haven't met anyone yet who has!"

Forage and Pasture Species and Their Use in Organic and Sustainable Farming

My wife attended this two-part workshop, put on by Earnest Weaver, a dairy and forage specialist. This workshop gave us even more ideas for improving our grazing areas. They covered the different feed properties of orchardgrass, fescues, ryegrasses, clovers, timothy, alfalfa, lespedeza... I'll spare you the details because you'd probably get bored, but for us, it was very valuable indeed.

Building a Solar Oven

Annie and Jay Warmke of Blue Rock Station Sustainable Living Center gave a presentation on making and using solar ovens. While Annie discussed her experiences cooking with various home-made ovens, Jay built one out of a Bud Light box, a pizza box, some duct tape, some aluminum foil, a clear sheet of plastic, some newspaper, and a coat hanger. They said that the cheap cardboard version works just as well as some of the commercial versions.

The advantages of solar cooking are that it doesn't use any fuel, and that it's nearly impossible to burn anything. You put the food in early in the day, and walk away. When you're ready for dinner, the food will be cooked. Annie told us that she's baked bread, cooked caseroles, cooked vegetables, canned tomatoes, and a wide range of other cuisines. She recommended against most meat cooking, other than small pieces, or in reheating.

Solar and Wind Electricity (Hands-On)

This workshop was put on by Tom Rapini and his son Ryan. They gave an overview of solar and wind power systems, with some examples of large and small systems, grid-tied and off-grid systems, solar water heating, AC vs. DC, rated power vs. peak power on appliances, the different types of sine wave inverters, and a variety of other related topics. They showed us how to create a simple circuit with a battery to light a lightbulb. Then replacing the battery with a solar cell. He explained the difference between parallel and serial connections (higher voltage vs. higher current). From there, we built a small solar battery charger to charge the batteries we'd used earlier in the workshop.

Designing Your "Nourishing Traditions" Farm

This actually had very little direct connection to the book "Nourishing Traditions" or author Sally Fallon. Mark Shepard was the presenter, and he certainly discussed the idea of value added products and producing on-farm income, but there were few if any tie-ins to the book. That wasn't a problem to me. This was an excellent workshop. The contents of it have been included in a separate post on Mark Shepard.

Organic Grain Production in Ohio: From Seed to Feed

John Easterly and Doug David of Gerber & Sons presented information on small-scale organic grain farming. Even small scale was way too large for us, but we still learned a bit about what's out there, who's doing it and how.

Summary

Of all the sessions we went to, there was only one dud, and I won't bother discussing it here. Both keynote speakers had some great ideas. The lunch arrangements were fantastic. The child care was a huge help, and even the vendors were pretty much all relevent and interesting. There were booksellers, a hatchery (with baby chicks and ducklings - a big hit with the kids), an organic feed vendor, an Organic Valley booth, vermiculture, permaculture, agroforestry, book signings by Sally Fallon and Gene Logsdon (we were unsuccessful in our attempt to pilfer the only copy of Gene's yet-to-be-released novel), walk-behind tractors and their myriad of implements... only one or two vendors seemed out of place, and maybe only in my eyes. The speakers were usually available for questions long after the workshops were done. And recordings of every session were available at the end of the conference, or can be ordered online.

All in all, I was incredibly impressed with just about every aspect of the conference.