Her Scattered Gold

Getting on for mid-July now and there were a goodly number of things in the kitchen to be processed and laid by against the winter. Among them were a couple of generous baskets of Golden Beets.

While processing things for the canner and freezer Et Ux commented on how staying out of the cash economy allows one to be immensely wealthy. The cash economy gives one a false feeling of poverty even after what really fulfills your wants and could make you happy is long since satisfied. Without that false focus it is quite easy to feel opulent and to spare.

It is much like the frequent theme in myth and fairy tale such as this one: A poor man lived in a cottage so small that he could open the front door, open the back door, and put the kettle on the hob all without stirring from his chair. One night he had a dream that he went into the town a number of miles hence and there beside the bridge was a pot of gold. He set out for the town, got to the bridge, and stood there in the sun all day where the gold ought to have been. The innkeeper, seeing him an being curious, asked him over and offered him an ale in exchange for his story. When the poor man told his story the innkeeper said, "Much as I suspected, I see you there all tattered and poor wasting in the sun and I said to myself, now that's what comes of a many who follows dreams. I myself have had just such a dream. I came upon a tiny cottage so small I could open the front door, open the back door, and put the kettle on the hob all without rising from my chair. There, under the hearthstone, was a pot filled with gold. Now do I go running off to find it? No, unlike you, I do not follow dreams.

The poor cottager rushed back home, lifted up the hearthstone, and there was a pot of gold.

The gold here being metaphorical. I've looked for that gold too. For years I planted these golden beets and every year the germination has been dismal and the growth and yield worse than that. There were a small handful of beets to be had raw, but never more than that. None the less, I planted them again this spring. The germination was nearly 100%! Nearly every transplant lived and made a bulb.

Like so much scattered gold brought back together, here was a thing of value, all the more outside the cash economy.

About 14 square feet of growing bed yielded 16 pints of pickled beets and four quarts of beet-greens.

I've planted another seed bed of them for the fall. How do I expect to fare? Well, there is a story that goes like this: There was once a gardener who planted a bed so small you could .......

Size of a Baseball

There are no sports fans in this household so sports references are generally lost on us. We come closer to visualizing area when referenced to furlongs or roods than to football fields. So in reading about USDA's definition of "servings" in their food pyramid and nutritional guidelines, referencing a portion as "the size of a baseball" was annoying. There's not one baseball on the place and I probably last hefted one forty years ago.

When the food pyramid was first published I was a bit taken aback by the recommendations. Five servings of vegetables and fruits a day minimum with six to nine being ideal. Wow! I had thought up to that point that I was doing OK. You see, southern cuisine is rich in vegetables, often seasoned with animal fat but vegetables none the less. When someone asks for recommendations for a restaurant, they are often quizzed as to what type: fast food, sit down, or meat & vegetable? The last one being a restaurant which serves a small portion of meat along with three or four seasoned vegetables. This opposed to the sit down type restaurant usually of non-Appalachian cuisine in which the notion of a serving of vegetables is odd by our standards. At such a restaurant one evening Et Ux was having a trout, the restaurant's specialty, and the only vegetable in sight was a sprig of kale as a garnish. When she asked for a side of green beans to go with it, the serving was six green beans. Six! Green beans are a staple here and a serving usually a large pasta bowl full. Things are not well when one can count the green beans in a serving at a glance.

So you can imagine my misgivings when I contemplated nine of what passes for servings of vegetables as I was used to them.

Then I read the details and found that a "serving" of green beans is half a cup. Yikes! We have spoons bigger than that! A typical southern meal of meat with seasoned vegetables provides ten or more servings of vegetables in just that one meal.

So in reading this and that I came on yet another of those studies that show that all manner of illness and malady is thwarted by regular consumption of fruits and vegetables along with the usual references of what 3 oz of meat or fish look like and that a "serving" of cooked vegetables is about what you could hold in the palm of your hand.

And salad? A serving of green salad is, as it said, about the size of a baseball. Here in the growing season green salads are eaten twice a day. Plans for supper are not what we will have for supper but what will we have with the salad for supper.

Here around the Freeman's Table this is a serving of salad for one person. It is a tall bowl, about hemispherical, and more often than not it is refilled during the meal. Since the reference to a baseball leaves me largely unenlightened, I calculated the volume of a baseball and the volume of our salad bowl. The bowl holds 4 1/2 servings.

The salad will vary from early spring until late winter and beyond. During a very good year there will be salads from the garden year round. Here at the height of spring the bowl contains lettuce, spinach, kale, broccoli-rhab, mizuna, tsa-tsoi, beet tops, radishes, garnished with feta cheese from the spring goat milk, and dressed with a little shoyu and olive oil.

Two bowls of this salad adds nine servings of vegetables to the evening meal.

Poke Salad

Around here it's just called poke. Farther north it's called pokeweed. Even farther north, among the tundra dwellers, it is likely unknown. South of here it's called poke salad. 'Salad' is in the older sense of the word meaning 'cooked greens'. It is a contraction of the Latin phrase herba salada, 'salted herbs.'

It is a hearty perennial that grows from a root often as big as a man's forearm so when it breaks dormancy in the spring, it quickly puts up thick, fleshy shoots. The stalks are sometimes cut into pieces, dredged with meal, and fried much as is done with okra (oh, that's right, if you aren't used to eating poke, odds are you aren't used to eating fried okra either). When the plant is older, the leaves are cooked like spinach, which they remotely resemble in taste. Our favorite way of preparing poke is to cut the early shoots leaves and all, chop them coarsely, and steam them or boil them as one would do asparagus, which taste they remotely resemble.

It isn't good raw. Raw poke is harsh and astringent. As the plant grows older, it develops mild toxins which can give you a good stomach upset so it's an early spring delicacy to be enjoyed in its season.

Poke is most often reckoned a weed and anyone doing battle with it in garden or lawn has squared off against a worthy adversary. Another 'weed' that makes itself know this time of the year is annual lambs quarter seen in the lower right of the above photo. I can't imagine there's a place anywhere it wouldn't grow.

I was looking into the nutritional content of various foods available to us and it is amazing to consider that the vitamin, mineral, and phytochemical content of some vegetables is so much higher that most of what we eat: kale, broccoli, and spinach stand out. But then I came across the nutritional information for some of our favorite wild foods: plantain, dock, fiddle heads, dandelion, purslane, cress, etc. and it is more amazing still to find that those foods have phytochemical and vitamin content far, far above any cultivated food in the garden. Lambs quarter is like that, as is poke. Poke even contains a substance called Pokeweed Anti-viral Protein (PAP) which is being studied as a treatment for AIDS.

As we enjoyed this year's poke, I thought about the nutritional poverty of the modern diet. Many people I know have never eaten more than an incidental vegetable and many have never tasted a bit of cooked greens, even finding the prospect revolting. Really nutritionally outstanding wild foods are all but unknown.

Glad to be pulling up my chair around the free man's table. Pass the poke salad!

Leather Britches

The harvest is yet a way off and so I suppose it is all the more fitting to talk about preserving it long before it gets here. This applies as well to purchased food gotten at any time.

There are five ways of preserving food that I want to address:

1. Canning
2. Freezing
3. Drying
4. Salting
5. Pickling/fermenting

Which one is better? That, of course, is a useless question. Each gives different results. This can be illustrated by contrasting the first two which are the most common ways of preserving food at home.

We can can or freeze, let's say, green beans. Which would be more like fresh beans? Ha! It's a trick question. Pressure can some green beans and a the same time freeze some. A week later prepare them both and the frozen ones will be much more like freshly cooked green beans than the canned ones. But six months later, the canned ones will be much more like fresh than the frozen ones. Not actually resembling fresh beans, but still much more like fresh than the frozen ones.

Canning modifies food more than does freezing. Not only are the bacteria and fungi killed, buy the enzymes are inactivated. Once it is properly canned, the food will modify no more for decades. Canned food done 30 years ago is virtually indistinguishable from that canned last year. Freezing food antenuates and slows down the bacteria, fungi, and enzymes but does not destroy them. They keep working on the food even at subzero temps and after time the food loses a great deal of its quality. Blanching or cooking the food before freezing slows this process but it doesn't stop it.

So to preserve the best quality of the food for the short term or for food to delicate to withstand the heat and pressure of canning, freezing is better. For a strategic stash of food and for food to fill in the 'hungry gap' and tide you over from year to year, canning is better.

To abandon other methods of food preservation in favor of one 'best' method is to have you food management inflexible and more vulnerable.

Canned food lasts a very long time, a hundred years at least. Best, of course, to rotate one's stock but a larder full of canned goods will tide you over the worst of times, be that a personal or common worst of times. True, some food value is lost in the over-cooking of it, but not much. Obviously then food that will withstand a lot of cooking are the ones that can the best: meats, soups, sauces, and the tougher vegetables such as beans, corn, carrots, etc. Canned broccoli doesn't work too well. The heat and pressure required to preserve it will render it to mush.

The largest drawback to frozen food is that, unlike all the other methods mentioned, it requires a continuous input of energy in order to maintain it in its preserved state. Still, it's energy well spent. We freeze most vegetables without blanching them. In the case of green shell beans, berries, pearl onions, etc. we freeze them on cookie sheets and when they are frozen like gravel, we put them in bags. That way the cook can take out what is required without disturbing hte remainder. In hte case of broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, carrots (only very small ones), and such we freeze them as before and then dip them into very slightly salted water to from a glaze and refreeze them. After several layers of glaze they are packed into bags and frozen. Some meat and fish are frozen as well. We also keep strategic butter and cheese in the freezers.

If you have the freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes whole, just as you pick them. Then after the season, dip the frozen tomato in warm water to loosen the skin and remove it. Place the skinned tomato in a colander with a bowl beneath. When the tomato has thawed, you will have a colander full of tomato paste and some excellent stock in the bowl.

Dehydrating will perserve food far longer than freezing but not so long as canning. Bacterial, fungal, and enzymatic action are suspended in the absence of water. Reconstituted dried food is not like the fresh counterpart. You can make an excellent apple pie from dehydrated apples, it just isn't the same thing as a pie made from fresh apples. For cooking, there's hardly any difference. Dried sweet corn, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, shallots, and the like in soup are almost indistinguishable from fresh.

You might be surprised how little salt it takes to perserve food. Concerns (over exagerated IMO) about sodium consuption can be mitigated by soaking the food in water to remove the salt before cooking it. Salted meat will keep for more than a year without refrigeration. We generally freeze it after it has salt cured to extend it even longer, but if the freezers or their electricity were to fail, the meat would be fine for months stil. A lot of vegetables can be salted as well, green beans, carrots, cabbage, and such.

Fermenting and pickling are not the same thing, although the mechanism of preserving the food is the same. The acidity is raised to the point that the spoilage organisms go into suspension. In the case of pickling this is rise in acidity is brought about by adding acid to the food, ususlly vinegar. In the case of fermented food bacteria are allowed to 'work' the food until they produce enough acid, usually lactic acid, to preserve it. Pickled and fermented foods also last a very long time and in many cases more nutrients are available than from the fresh food.

Many times, perhaps most times, some combination of the above methods gives the best resluts. As I mentioned, we freeze meat after we have slated it. Food that is slighly acidic will preserve by dehydration longer and by less heat and pressure by canning. Dehydrated food will last longer if it is frozen or heat sealed in jars.

Each method of perservation has its uses and yields its specific resluts. The photo above is a plate of dehydrated green beans, an Applachian staple for generations. The food is known as 'shucky beans' or 'leather britches'. Leather britches do not resemble fresh green beans, canned or frozen green beans. They are a food in their own right. Flexibility in preservation provides a lot of such foods.

Cold Cereal

Most of the time its a hot breakfast around here: eggs, whole grain toast, grits, hashbrown potatoes, whole grain pancakes, hot cereal such as steel cut oats. By noon we all will have done enough physical work that we will be in deficit on our calorie intake even with an extra bit of butter and jam. Heck, we get more exercise than the pitiful minimum recommended for three times a week when we walk down to the road to check the mail.

But this was a warm morning and I decided to opt for cold cereal. It might be of interest because it is the meal we have here that draws to the largest extent from larders other than our own.

There are several excellent blogs which examine the effects of a dwindling world oil supply and they have covered the fact that it takes a staggering amount of middle eastern oil to put a meal on the American table. The suggestions offered for minimizing the oil content of food is to buy locally, and failing that, buy in bulk. The meal described here is not oil free, but it is oil-light.

The very worst food deal of all is boxed cereal. It is expensive, wasteful of resources, and is a nutritional disaster area. The only mitigation of this last is the very expensive whole grain twigs and acorns type cereals. Don't mistake these with the granola-cruncher cereals which are heavy with hydrogenated oils. Rather the Healthier-than-Thou boxed cereals with whole flaked grains, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, dates, etc. are not that bad nutritionally. But their packaging, transport, and retailing hog up a great deal of resources and they are expensive often costing around $5 for 8 to 10 ounces. Let's go with 10 ounces and base a serving on 2 ounces of cereal. That's 50 cents a serving even before you pour on the milk.

The large bowl in the above picture is seven grain cereal, sold steamed and flattened much like Quaker oats. It costs abut $27 for 50 lbs. which makes a 2 ounce serving 7 cents. From left to right are jars of cereal garnishes: sunflower seeds, dried blueberries, dried peaches, dried wineberries, all from the farm. Then there are raisins and dates which were purchased as well as the smaller bowl of coconut which, of course was also purchased. The dates were $6 for 5 lbs and the raisins about $4 for 5 lbs. The coconut was also bought in bulk but I don't recall the price. Wasn't much. So my 2 ounce serving of Freeman's Cereal is a little less than 2 ounces of grain and some fruit and seeds and such makes up the difference. That might nudge the cost up to 8 cents.

There's the milk and a little sweetener too but we produce those things ourself. At any rate you are going to add those to the Healthier-than-Thou cereal as well.

The expense of our food, as well as its abuse of our resouces and dependence on petroleum, is often much more a function of the packaging and retailing than the food itself. Don't think of cold cereal as that box in the grocery store that you reach for and have one or two meals. Think of your cold cereal as a continual affair throughout the year, or longer. When fruit is available cheap or free or growing down the street on that neglected strip of land, gather it and dry it. Overripe fruit dehydrates wonderfully. Don't buy your raisins as a scant handful in cardboard box of cereal, rather buy five or ten pounds at once. Properly stored dried fruit lasts for years.

Sometimes we have flaxseeds, grain middlings, walnuts, hickory nuts, dried bananas (from overripe bananas the produce stand gives us free), wheat germ, malt, okara, roasted soybeans, and all manner of other things with our cold cereal. The flaked grains are good the way they are, but this morning I toasted them in a skillet and toasted the coconut as well.

The first and most effective step away from Babylon's oil soaked food is not to move out to the wilds as I have done. Rather it is to pass by the over processed, over packaged foods and plan on a wider scale than the next meal.

Post-Apocalyptic Cuisine

It has been my intention to follow up the previous post on storing grains and beans with comments on how to store other foods. Today I was dealing with just that as I began to unearth the caches of potatoes I'd buried in the garden last fall against seed potatoes this spring. The seed spuds fared very well over the winter and I will be "chitting" them this week so they can be planted in mid March.

It also reminded me to check some of the other stored items and the above picture was taken as I was going through the squash, cabbage, potatoes, and onions. These items will keep fresh for months, up to a year, with no refrigeration (fossil energy). The above picture is of items from my larder thusly stored.

Choose vegetables (and fruits) in the best condition and grown late in the season. Alas, this last year a severe drought cut the gardening year short and almost all stored vegetables had to be harvested in August and September. And yet here in March they are still in very good condition. But given a choice, harvest or buy as late in the season as possible.

Then store the food in the type of conditions it is expecting from its native habitat and it will last the longest time. Squash needs to be stored where it is warm and dry, so there is a great heap of squashes in the corner of the kitchen near the wood range. Onions need cool dry conditions so they were stored in an uninsulated room which stays cool all winter. Cabbage needs cool moist conditions and they are stored in the basement. One way of doing this is to hang the cabbage from the overhead joists by a string tied to the. The outside leaves will whither and sometimes blacken but the cabbage stays fine for months. Potatoes need cold, damp dark. Some are stored in a corner of the basement and many are cached in the garden by digging a deep hole, lining it with hay, filling it with potatoes, and covering it with hay and dirt to keep out frost.

Apples, pears, turnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, beets, parsnips, rutabagas, and a host of other things will keep fresh for many months, even up to a year, if stored in ideal conditions. Tomatoes will keep for many weeks and melons, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, and other things thought perishible will last for a good long time.

Take the case of the squashes in the above photo. They were harvested in early September, far too early, but we chose one for tonight's supper and here is how well it kept:

(By the bye, Deb, I'm sending you seeds from this very squash.)

The squash was baked and then half of it filled with farmstead salt ham and farmstead cheese, and the other half filled with butter, honey, sugar and cinnamon.

Using food shown in the first photo, we served up a homestead supper of squash, both cheezy and sweet style, baked potato with butter and sour cream, steamed cabbage, and grilled onions:

Am I serious when I say that it is possible to eat meals in which virtually no fossil fuel was used in bringing them about? Serious ... as ... a .... heart attack. The only thing we don't produce in my above menu is the cinnamon and brown sugar, both of which are optional. Everything else is produced right here on the farmstead. The butter and sour cream can be made as needed since there is always milk. The cheese is cooled and the ham has been frozen, but that is a matter of convenience, neither is necessary since both are salted enough to preserve them. As I have itemized above, the rest of the food has kept for nearly half a year now without refrigeration and is still in top condition. Nothing involved anything but hand tools and animal power to produce and the meal was cooked using wood from the place which itself was cut with handtools and hauled without the use of engines.

This is truly a post-apocalyptic meal.

Wheat from Another Time

There's a very pleasant story about a variety of wheat now called Kamut. During the second world war, the story goes, a serviceman was sold a pinch of grain said to have been taken from King Tut's tomb. He gave it to a farmer buddy who sent it home to his father. It was 36 grains. He planted them and 32 of them grew. From that start over a six year period he propogated the seeds into 1500 lbs of grain. No one had any interest in it until someone in the 70's heard the story and got hold of a pint jar of the wheat which is grown and sold commercially today.

Many botanists scoff at the story of 5000 year old wheat sprouting and have suggested alternate explainations such as some middle eastern farmers had been growing this rare type of wheat from antiquity until the 1940's when the airman rescued it from oblivion. But it makes me wonder. The species of wheat was unknown to modern botany until its supposed extraction from the Egyptian tomb and it is very different from modern wheat.

I'm not so quick to dismiss the story. Recently the pits of an extinct type of date palm was found in an archeological dig near Jerusalem and carbon dating confirmed that it was over 2000 years old. The archeologist planted one of the pits and it has grown into a palm tree! Likewise 3000 year old lotus seeds from Egyptian tombs have produced plants. I am also personally familiar with the story of some spelunkers near here who found a clay pot, sealed up in clay, in a cave. The pot dated from the pre-Cherokee era so it was at least 1500 years old and more likely around 3000. It contained corn and the spelunker, also being a farmer, planted a little of it and it grew. It was brown popcorn, what would be expected from that time of the corn culture, in tiny ears about the size of your thumb.

So I'm not so quick to dismiss the Kamut story.

At any rate, if wheat doesn't sprout after 5000 years, even the hardest cynic admits that it stays viable for 30 years. And if it is viable, if it will sprout, it is nutrive as well.

You can buy all the grains and dried legumes you want and they will be good to eat after many, many years so long as you protect them from their two enemies: moisture and insects. Alas, the insects that attack them do not need any moisture so you have to address the two problems separately.

But what about all that stuff we heard during the Y2K debacle about wheat sealed in metal drums sealed with nitrogen? Hype. The sort of thing that someone who would fall for the Y2K thing would have fallen for.

Keep the grains and legumes dry, put them in airtight glass jars, lock down barrels, or sealable (even ZipLoc type) plastic bags. Then if there is a possibility that they contain insect eggs, especially weavils, freeze the jars or bags for two days, let them thaw for a week, then freeze them for two more days. This kills any adult insects, allows the eggs to germinate after the cold layering, and then kills any eggs that hatch. Now your staples are good for decades.

You can't do this with four or meal. The grain's longevity depends on its ingenious seedcoat. Once that seedcoat is broken by grinding, the oils begin to rancify. That is why the germ, the most nutrive part, of all grains is removed before they are ground into flour or meal, otherwise the flour would rancify, sour, on the store shelf. Commercial meals and flours, already devoid of nutrients, have a short shelf life and lose what nutrition they have rather quickly.

Whole grain wheat and corn are just as they came from the plant. Rice, barley, oats, and buckwheat have a husk over the groat that is mechanically removed before they are consumed. Those grains are bought as hulled and are still whole grain. You do not want the 'pearled' or 'polished' variety of them because both the protection of the groat and its nutrients have been compromised. In the case of rice, a very little of the oil is disturbed in the hulling process and this oil will give whole brown rice a sort of rancid smell when you first open a closed container of it. It's harmless and in no wise indicates compromised rice.

Keep the grains whole until just before you use them. The only exception to this I'd recommend considering is the case of 'steel cut oats.' The hulled groats have been run through steel knife edges and cut into three or four pieces. This is the so called 'pinhead oats' what is sold for a fortune as genuine Irish oatmeal. Quaker oats and such have been steamed and then flatteded and dehydrated. Not a bad food all in all but far inferior to real oatmeal.

Whole beans, peas, and lentils don't store anywhere as long as wheat or corn, but they probably outlive us anyway. Treat them and store them exactly like the grains.

It is not necessary to freeze whole grains or beans to extend their shelf life.

Plenty Herring, Plenty Meal

Plenty herring, plenty meal
Plenty peat to fill her creel
Plenty bonny bairns as weel
That's the toast of Mairi.


Thus goes the last verse to the Scottish bridal song Mairi's Wedding. And when I wish at least the herring and meal on my acquaintances, one of the first questions is, "Yes, but how long can you keep that herring and meal, when will it go bad?"

Alas, it's a trick question.

It was a couple of seasons ago when excurding off to Babylon that I stopped by the garden on my way to town to inventory for the big salad I was going to have for supper. One of those really cool salads for the summer heat full of spinach, sweet onions, pear tomatoes, basil and dill, and ripe feta cheese from goat milk. But most of all ... cucumbers.

Cucumbers are curious things to grow. Grown in good organic soil they will produce profusely for a few weeks, four at the most, and then the plant short circuits. It is a sort of plant cancer and a geriatric cucumber will yellow in the leaf and all the cukes will curl in odd shapes. So I long ago figured to count on a patch for no more than a month's harvest and when that patch began to bloom, plant another one to take it's place when the geezer vines became confused. Sometimes I don't time it just right and a trip to the garden won't yield any cukes for a few days.

And yet, another trick the cucumbers pull is to hide their fruit. You can pick over a patch, then straighten up to take a breath, and there are more cukes right where you were just picking five minutes ago. Something's going on, I'm not sure what, and I'm not sure I really want to know. Maybe they should plant for new gardeners every month or so as well.

At any rate this July morning there were no cukes. None whatever. And I was really keen on that salad! So on my way back home I stopped by a grocer and got a few cukes. They didn't vibe right. My food sense told me there was something amiss, but then it always told me this about store cukes and in fact much of store produce. But it was the only cuke game in town.

Arriving back on the farm I stopped by the garden for the tomatoes and herbs and glanced over at the cucumber patch. Dozens of them! I'll be damned! So I picked the sizeable ones into the basket and made my way to the kitchen.

Given the choice of my cukes or the ones I'd just paid money for, I was glad to give the store ones to the pigs. But I got distracted and left the store cukes and my surplus cukes in the basket and the basket got set aside and forgotten.

Three days later I had need of the basket and saw the forgotten cukes. The ones from the store were rotten from end to end, but mine were just about like the day I picked them. Of course, I threw away the former but I kept the others in the basket at room temperature to see how long it would be before they went bad just as an experiment. A week went by, then two, then a month. They were shriveled but still edible! Finally after the gods only know how long, the cukes dehydrated to hard rattly shards .... but never rotted.

I repeated this experiment with a number of things from the garden and supermarket. In almost every case the supermarket produce rotted in a very short time when left at room temperature and in almost every case the produce from my organic garden dehydrated before it could rot.

Here's a characteristic of really good food, the type one should be eating: it lasts a very long time!

So when I attempt to address how long something will last in storage (as I will in the next few posts), it is a trick question. It greatly depends on the quality of the food to begin with. And it depends on your food sense to know the difference.