Garden and Preserving Update

I've challenged myself to preserve something every day for a month, more or less through August 28 if I can keep it up.  I'm doing this challenge alone because I haven't been able to recruit anyone to join me. 

Food I've preserved in July (all Virginia grown):

• lamb stock, canned 3 qts., 4 pts.
• stewed tomatoes (from our garden), canned 3 qts., 2 pts.
• corn, canned 17 pts., froze some too
• beets, canned 2 qts., 8 pts.
• pickled beets, canned 8 pts.
• peach jam with honey, canned 7 half pts, one 4 oz.
• kosher dill pickles (from our garden), lacto-fermented 3/4 gallon
• dried a few sprigs of basil and some hot peppers from our garden.  (I don't have a dehydrator.  I've resisted buying an electric one, and the solar one I want to make is a big project for us, and won't get done this year.)

In the garden, this has been our best year yet for peppers, we have beautiful bell peppers this year.  Bugs have not been much of a problem this year, but weeds have, especially bindweed.  

The potatoes got some kind of disease that causes wet mushy spots on them and zero production.  We just harvested them today and we got less than what we planted.  This is a huge disappointment because I love potatoes and want to rely on them as a calorie crop.  Luckily, we won't starve this year because of it.  Wherever we garden in the future we will need to pay a lot more attention to both soil fertility and crop rotation.

I've planted a bunch of medicinal herbs in a new raised bed, and when they didn't germinate my husband planted them all again under a layer of straw while reminding me how bad I am at planting, but they still aren't growing.  

There is a volunteer watermelon trying to grow in our gravel driveway for the second year in a row, although we don't remember ever disposing of any seeds there.  It's doing quite well, in spite of not being watered or fertilized and my husband's affinity for spraying the driveway with Roundup, but it waited too late to grow and the frost will get it before the melons are ready, as it did last year.  If we're here next year, I'll plant a watermelon in the driveway on purpose, early enough for it to mature fruit. 

Nose to Tail Eating

I'm not going to start this post with the customary apologetic warning to vegetarians.  If either of my readers is a vegetarian, as I once was, I'll give you some credit and assume it's not because of squeamishness. 

It was Mexico that converted me from vegetarianism: I knew before I went there I would have to change my diet, but at first I was stuck eating chiles rellenos every day because I didn't know what most of the dishes were, and I was afraid my body had stopped producing enzymes to digest meat (which turned out to be untrue).  When I got going though, I didn't stop: chicken feet, cow feet, cow head, tripe, every part of the pig, almost nothing disgusts me.  My love of Mexican cuisine led directly to a love of nose-to-tail eating.  Really, nose-to-tail is not the best description of the meats I cook, maybe "nose and tail, and feet, innards and other cheap cuts" would be a better name for it, but that's too long.  Honestly, I haven't a clue how to properly cook a fancy steak, or a tenderloin, and I can't stand boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

I'm going to share with you some of the dishes I cook with offal and other underutilized (i.e. cheap) cuts of meat. 

I bought some pastured chicken hearts and livers from a local farm.  I parboiled the hearts and drained them, then fried the livers in some previously rendered chicken fat (I gather bits of chicken fat in a bag in the freezer until I have enough to render), added a sliced onion, 3 peppers, one small eggplant (optional, I just had one I needed to use), and then half a dozen Roma tomatoes.  I added back the hearts and tossed in the unlaid eggs I had saved from a hen my husband butchered.  I covered and simmered the dish while some rice cooked.

Another farm I often buy grass-fed meat from has lamb bones and livers on sale at a ridiculously low price, 60 cents a pound for both.  I can use some lamb stock somehow, and I'll cook some lamb livers as described above - that dish is pretty adaptable and it's a favorite of my husband's.  I ordered 8 of the livers, I may make some into a stroganoff, and I also found a recipe online for lamb's liver marsala that looked interesting. 

And speaking of liver (which is actually my least favorite organ), I have a salt-and-sugar cured pig's liver wrapped in a cloth hanging in my kitchen right now, a recipe from Fergus Henderson's book The Whole Beast.  It's to be sliced and fried and put on a salad that includes radish leaves (the radishes are growing in my garden).  I love having things like this, and vegetable ferments, living with me in my kitchen for days or weeks as I anticipate eating them.

I also ordered a beef tongue from the farm, which I pressure cook (15 minutes, or boil a couple of hours, then peel) and make into tacos.  That's a delicacy for us, and a very meat-heavy meal, but a pretty cheap one at $3/lb.  We also cook pork jowls this way.  Pork tongue and beef cheek meat are delicious too but my local farmers don't offer those.

I am always adding to my collection of recipes using stew meat, and we really enjoy these simple, hearty dishes, especially in cold weather.  Our favorites so far are hungarian goulash and meat and potato curry.  I tend to prefer a stew to a roast, personally, so I will buy a cheap roast and cut it up.  Last winter though we were given so much venison we didn't need to buy any meat.  I soak venison in a salt brine for 24-48 hours, that takes all the gamey taste out of it.  We bought a hand-cranked meat grinder and made chorizo with some of our venison and some pork fat.  We left some meat on the bones and made soup with them.

I love bony parts, and not just for stock-making.  I pull the soft bone marrow out of my stockpot and eat it spread on a toasted whole-grain bread crust.  I used to eat chicken feet (which means sucking the skin and gelatinous bits off the bones, like a poor man's buffalo wing), but since my son was born I find they remind me too much of baby hands, so now they go in the stock pot.  In Mexico you can buy roasted chicken necks at the chicken rotisseries, which are quite cheap and delicious, if, like me, you like roasted chicken skin (admit it, you do!)  I've never been able to find them here with the skin attached, sadly, and my husband tends to give me mangled and bloody necks when he butchers chickens.  Pork and lamb neck pieces are good in saucy Mexican dishes, with beans on the side and lots of corn tortillas to soak up the extra sauce.  I'm anxious to try a recipe in an Asian cookbook my mom sent me, a braise of pig's feet and pineapple.  I love pork belly poached with Asian spices, served with rice and steamed greens.  We make beef soup with short ribs, which are probably my favorite cut of beef; oxtail makes a fine soup too, as does sliced shank (a.k.a. "meaty soup bones").  Mexican and Central American soups are a hands-on affair, with bones, pieces of corn on the cob, and chunky vegetables.  A tongue in the soup is a special touch. 

On really special occasions, I make a Mexican octopus cocktail.  Fish, other than tilapia (which we fry whole, unbreaded) and most seafood is intimidating to me though. 

Brains are something I used to be squeamish about, but I'm slowly getting over it.  I don't often find them for sale, though.  I've tried to get my husband to save the heads from the chickens he butchers to put them in my stock, but he won't do it, nor will he save the intestines for me to try Diana Kennedy's recipe.  I did finally persuade him to put the feathers in the compost though.  In case you're wondering, there are some things I won't eat.  My husband gets the eyeballs from my fish and any other eyeballs go uneaten around here, and I always politely turned down the free samples of spicy grasshoppers in the Mexico city market, which made the vendor laugh.  Crawfish are something I don't understand, I can't find anything in them to eat.  I've had very good and very bad alligator, and although the though of eating an animal that would eat me if it had a chance is satisfying to me, I don't think I'll bother with it again.  Frog's legs are gross, and I won't eat lizards (e.g. iguana, which they cook alive in Honduras, where it is endangered).  A year or two ago I saw a news report on one of the Spanish channels about old racehorses being shipped to Mexico from the USA to be butchered, and the meat sometimes being sold at taco stands to unwitting customers.  That made me cry with horror and disgust, and I will be very cautious when I return to Mexico to be sure I never eat any horsemeat (again?).  Horses are sacred to me; I'd rather eat dog or cat than horse.

As the folks over at Well Preserved have pointed out, the nose-to-tail philosophy can be applied to vegetables too.  I'm determined to cook some sweet potato leaves this year, probably in an African dish.  African, and Asian cuisines are going to get a lot more love from me in the near future.

Recipes, and recipe requests are welcome!

Personal Safety

This is tangential to a topic over on greenwizards.org.  I didn't post this there because I didn't want to seem like I was picking on anybody.

I see a lot of extreme viewpoints about safety in the doomer/declinist community, from people who think it's not a concern at all if you aren't rich, to people who think collecting guns and ammo and moving to a hunting lodge is the only answer, and there isn't a lot of discussion that I consider realistic.  There is a whole lot of space between our current situation and roving zombie hoards, which a lot of people don't recognize.  It's in that space that most of the world actually lives, both today, and historically; but rather than learning from the people who live/lived this reality, Americans who think about these things tend to go in for paranoia, idealism, and other kinds of navel-gazing about human nature.  This is just one manifestation of our superiority complex; we tend to think we're so different from the rest of humanity that we have nothing to learn from their experiences.

Let me declare my prejudices up front: I have shot .22 rifles, handguns, and M-16's, but I don't like guns.  I'm not really anti-gun, but I don't have the time, money, or interest to collect guns, learn to shoot them well, clean, and maintain them.  I do feel safer when I have a gun within reach, but I also think there will always be someone better-armed than me no matter how well-armed I might be (and at some point, the police/military has to be counted).  I think this country is going to be more dangerous than some others in the mid-term future because there are so many firearms here and I wish that weren't the case.  Now, drugs: I am in favor of legalizing everything except PCP and other drugs that cause people to hurt other people, or are frequently used to hurt other people (like date-rape drugs).  The war on drugs was never winnable, and at this point we have given so much power to the drug cartels that they would not disappear even if drugs were legalized tomorrow, but at least they would suffer a setback.  The damage the drug war has done and continues to do in Latin America is unpardonable.  That said, I don't agree that violent crime would decrease at this point if illegal drugs were taken off the table, I think we're too far into economic collapse for violent crime to decrease more than a blip here or there.  I work in the criminal courts and I have observed, in the police reports I regularly read, that in the past year or so, robberies in my city are more likely to end in violence.  I expect this trend to continue; crime not only increases overall in times of stress, it gets meaner.  And we ain't seen nothin' yet.  I fear that the perceived value of human life in this country has a long way to fall before it hits bottom.

I have recently been called naive by someone in my own family for saying that if the lights went out for good right now, I would go outside and talk to my neighbors and try to work with them, rather than sitting on the front porch with a shotgun in my hand.  I honestly don't know which is more naive - this is an unprecedented scenario in the history of humanity.  But the more likely scenarios are not so unusual.

This is what I've learned from living in, visiting, and hearing stories from Latin America:

When the crime rate is high, you don't leave your house unattended overnight, or habitually during the day.  This is one reason it's practical to live in extended families.  If everyone in the household has to go somewhere, you ask a neighbor to come house-sit for you.  It's not that you have to defend the household in the way we might think - a child or an old woman can watch your house to deter petty theft, because the potential perpetrators are local opportunists and they don't want to be identified.  Violent home invaders are a different sort and they won't wait until you leave; fortunately they are less common.

You rely on family ties, you maintain civil relations with family regardless of differences, and family recognition extends out to anyone who can identify a common ancestor.  Neighbors are family too if you live in a small town - either because of tight community intermarriage, or you just decide to call your neighbors "uncle" and "aunt".  The downside of such an interdependent community is that when they are against you, you have no options: my father-in-law had some of his land stolen and his fence torn down to make a soccer field and he had to just put up with it.  A calm personality is important to avoid violence in these situations; it is the price to be paid for living in a stable community.

You don't wear visible jewelry or cell phones when you travel outside of your safety zone, however you define that.  But don't assume that just because you have nothing of value, you won't be targeted.  Try not to go into town looking, acting, and/or talking like a country bumpkin - people who are obviously from the country are targeted when they come to the city because they usually come for a reason that involves bringing the savings they had stashed under the mattress - be it for a doctor, travel expenses, or to make a special purchase.  In the old days, pirates and highwaymen preyed on travellers, and those days may come again; but nowadays you're more likely to get shaken down at police or military checkpoints.  Women must be more cautious about travelling alone and in small groups (including with a man).  Never assume a uniform makes someone safe; and never assume that if you cooperate with someone you won't be hurt.  One Honduran guy we know was kidnapped for ransom at the Mexican border, a common tale these days.  He pretended to be deathly ill, and they shoved him out of a car at a Wal-Mart, a risky move that probably saved his life, since no one in his family could have afforded the ransom.  Listen to your intuition, always!  The one time I was mugged I saw it coming and didn't listen to my intuition.  (If you haven't read any of Gavin De Becker's work, I recommend it.)

Pardon Our Progress

I've always felt like an outsider in my own country, but increasingly, it is the natural world that feels strange to me.  We have lots of these little black birds here now that make an ugly sound.  I'm always tempted to kill their babies in the springtime, but I never have the heart to do it.  Then there's the home-invading stinkbugs, and the tiger mosquitoes.  None of these things were here when I was a child.  I'm not against exotic species - everything came from somewhere else at some point - but the rate of change in my environment is disturbing to me.

I refrained from posting about my disdain for Independence Day, but I suspect that a good part of my feelings about the holiday are because I hate summer.  I don't mind hot, dry weather that much (we had a drought last year and I kind of liked it), but the soul-crushing humidity of typical Virginia summers puts me in a really bad mood.  I'm running the air conditioner (set to 80 degrees) and I'm still irritable.

The bathroom is torn out and awaiting tile work - the shower has to be custom-built because the pre-made fiberglass ones don't fit.  My son's reaction to the pile of debris in the yard (to paraphrase), "Oh no, bathroom!  Broken!" reminded me of the feelings I'm too grown-up to express.  Remodeling is an act of violence.  I feel so ashamed of the gratuitous waste that seems to be an inevitable part of home improvement.  My brother intentionally placed the disposable dumpster far from the street, his stated reasons being to keep anyone from salvaging anything from it (Why?) and, more reasonably, to keep anyone from putting anything in it, since the company that collects them prohibits using them for food waste.  I remember 15 years ago when my first husband and I were living in a rental house and the kitchen stove, an older but good-quality electric stove, had two burners that didn't work.  The landlord sent over some goons who literally pushed our stove off the back steps, and replaced it with a new, cheap stove.  Remembering that stove tumbling into the yard, getting dented so that it wouldn't be useful to anyone, almost makes me cry even now. 

A lot of things almost, or actually, make me cry lately.  Loneliness.  Fear for my child's future.  Frustration at the ever-widening gap between my goals and my accomplishments.  Thinking about the suffering that is in store for humanity as this age of relative peace and ridiculous prosperity (at least for some) comes to an end.

No good mother would ever say she regretted having a child, but I will say there's a lot I didn't know when I made the decision to get pregnant, besides the big things I didn't fully comprehend (peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, cultural decline, globalization, and all that).  I didn't know how difficult it would be to accomplish any task at home, finish a conversation with a friend, run simple errands, or travel, for several years (so far), or how urgently I would need to do some of those things during these years.  I've never been all that attached to my life, but now I have a child and I've realized there's no one on either side of his family I would want to raise him, so I'm terrified of dying and leaving him unprotected.  My panic is rising.  I feel conflicting needs: the need to keep my son close to family (though I don't trust them to raise him, it's even worse to think of dying while he and I are alone in a foreign country), and the need to not waste whatever is left of my life trapped in an unhappy situation.  

I seem to be stuck; but a recent conversation with a friend may offer some badly needed peace of mind.  More on that to come.

In the interest of some actual content, I'll leave you with the favorite summer recipe of the Zelaya-Carter household:

Cook a pound of pasta for 4 servings, and drain, reserving a ladleful of the cooking water.  We use plain ol' white spaghetti.  Finely chop about 2 pounds of fresh, ripe, unpeeled tomatoes.  We use Romas; if you use slicing tomatoes, put them in a colander briefly to drain some of their juice. Snip or slice the leaves from several sprigs of basil.  Coarsely crumble about 8 ounces of goat's milk feta cheese.  Put tomatoes, basil, cheese, and a little olive oil in a large serving bowl; add cooked pasta, a couple tablespoons of the cooking water, and salt to taste.  Toss together and serve.

Remodeling

I had an exciting and unlikely prophetic dream last night that, at some point in the future, there will be wild elephants in Mexico. 

My mother finally visited our hot and little-used second floor to see the extensive drywall repair work my husband had recently finished, necessitated by the much-regretted (on my part) joint decision 6 years ago to install a heat pump when we bought the house, and the unbelievably bad drywall work the installers did over the ducts (this is a Cape Cod house, so there was no space to do ductwork between the roof and ceilings.)  She peeked in the bathroom and made a decision to remodel it, something I've been campaigning for since we moved in.  The upstairs bathroom, victim of a very low-budget do-it-yourself remodel I'm guessing 30 or so years ago, features plastic wall tiles (where they haven't fallen off), a partition wall between the shower and toilet that is rotting at the base, and a space between the shabby homemade vanity and said partition so small you have to turn sideways to get to the toilet; I tell you this just so you don't think I'm frivolous in wanting to remodel it.  The whole room is about 5 by 5 feet and can't be expanded, far too small to contain a shower, but removing it and making the house a 1.5 bath would sacrifice "value", so we have to find a way to squeeze a shower in there better than it was done before.  My brother has been hired as the contractor, which is good because I know he won't treat me like a nutjob when I push for the lowest-environmental-impact options.  Remodeling this bathroom will make it easier to sell the house, and make it much closer to rental-ready if we have to rent it instead; it will also make it easier for me to share the house in the meantime. 

My job was supposed to end over a week ago, but when I emailed the HR person on the second-to-last day to inquire about my final paycheck, she told me she had emailed my boss on June 6 to tell her that I could stay through July 22, but my boss apparently was so busy with some personal problem(s) that she hadn't gotten around to reading the email 3 weeks later, which is not surprising to anyone who knows my boss.  So, I am employed for a little while longer, and Carmaggedon (what I'm calling my anticipated liberation from daily access to an automobile and the resulting life changes when my husband takes the car) has been postponed accordingly.  I think I've gotten my bike trailer operational - it needed a new tire.  The bike shop would not sell me a new seat for my bike, instead the guy adjusted the seat I had and told me to ride it until I could describe specifically what was uncomfortable about it.  I appreciated that.  I've still got to learn to do roadside repairs (tubes at least) and think through what I'll do if something happens while I'm out with my son, because I feel like the bike and trailer are much less reliable than a car.  Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that?  Maybe it's just that the familiarity of a car offers psychological security, while the bicycle makes me feel vulnerable.  I've never changed a car tire but that doesn't stop me from going anywhere in the car.

I dropped my mom at the airport this morning.  It may take me months to recover from this visit.  A few good things came out of it, but the status of my plans at this point, the way I see it, is that I'm on my own.  I'm going to need a lot of determination to change my life into what I want it to be.