Early Spring, Hard Freeze, Fruit??

We don’t know yet how this week's freeze will affect the fruit harvest this year. The color of trees in bloom is still intact, but you know there will be consequences when the temperature has dropped into the low 20’s. Even if climate change gives us warmth in the early spring, when the weather turns those arctic winds still blow straight down on us, with too little time and distance to warm them up along the way.

A couple years ago I was selecting fruit trees for our orchard, and I ran across a paper on frost sensitivity. What I remember is that the risk of losing the harvest depends on how far along the flowers are, but that different varieties within a species may be more or less sensitive to freezing even with flowers at the same stage of development.  The most sensitive time occurs as the buds are opening, before they’ve been pollinated. If the stigma or the style freezes, there’s no way for pollen to unite with egg, and no fruit develops. I inferred from this that the ovary is more hardy (or better protected) than the rest of the pistil, so if the time for fertilization has come and gone, the harvest is more likely to come through.

The plums have been in full bloom, and humming with bees, for the past week. Any fertilization that was going to happen with those is already done. But the pears and apricots were just starting to open, and the cherry buds are swelling but still closed. The juneberries in the woods are in bloom, but the one in our front yard is at the same stage as the cherries. Apples are more cautious, being longer acquainted with our fickle northern weather. So if my memory is correct, it seems the pears and apricots are most at risk.

My roommate Rhonda grew up in a household where food storage was a way of life. When they had a boom year for peaches a few years ago, her mom processed non-stop for the entire season, putting away as much fruit as humanly possible. She didn’t ask, “How much is a year’s supply?” but rather, “How much time can I squeeze out of my day?”

Rhonda said at the time she thought her mom was nuts, putting away so much more than they could possibly eat before the next year's harvest. But the crop has failed three years in a row since then, and her mom still has peaches to eat.

Me, I just finished the last of the dried pears a couple days ago. I may try that strategy some day, but if I lose this year’s harvest, I’ll be doing without next winter.

Life changes in certain predictable ways when you switch back to a local/regional food supply, and this is one of them. A local diet reveals your dependence on the weather, and the climate, and the seasons, and the planet itself, in a much more intimate way. Weather rarely wipes out every region where a particular food is grown, all in the same year, but it can easily wipe out your region's harvest. For the people at the top of the global food chain – Americans, that is, with our ability to out-bid the rest of the world in the global marketplace – food shortages appear (for now) to be a thing of the past. But for people who are lower down the chain, and people who eat locally, and people who depend on the harvest for their income, a regional crop failure can be a disaster. This is especially true if the region is specialized to grow a single crop for a global marketplace, instead of a variety of different foods for local or regional consumption. 

Diversity is crucial, if you want your region (or even your home garden) to produce reliably. One of the things I've discovered in my garden is that, every year, at least one crop fails, and at least one crop does really well. So if I grow many different crops, the character of my diet may change from year to year, but I always have enough. So far, that's been my response to the unpredictability of the weather.

Weeds and MREs

It's weed-eating season. I'm starting to clear the garden beds, and all those tender bits of green are just too tempting to resist. I was amused last night to notice that Sophia had cleaned her plate of the cleavers with garlic and scallions, and had barely touched the kale (one of our winter mainstays). I guess she's getting tired of the monotony, too. This afternoon I had dandelion buds with lemon butter, and we've got a bowl of mustard greens and garlic mustard greens waiting in the fridge.

My shiitake log "bloomed" this week too, and we had those for dinner tonight with shallots and a red wine sauce. The rest of the meal consisted of flank steak, boiled beets, and sauerkraut, with an apple-oatmeal crisp for dessert. A lot of winter fare with just a touch of spring.

At the other end of the food(like) spectrum, Greg decided to break open his "week's supply of food" MRE box at lunch today, and try them out. The box is about four years old, but he hadn't opened it yet. The MREs were not (as I had expected) freeze-dried; they really are intended to be eaten straight out of the foil wrapper. Between the three of us, we opened six different packages to try -- "Peanut Butter," "Crackers," "Cheese Tortellini in Tomato Sauce," "Mexican Style Rice," "Cherry Blueberry Cobbler," and "Beverage Base Raspberry." Sophia and I tasted the rice, and Greg ate the other five.

He said the peanut butter tasted like peanut butter (aside from being sweetened and fortified,) and the crackers, though bland, were unremarkable. The most unusual thing about the beverage base (a.k.a. kool-aid) was that it was sugar free; he wondered what was the point of including it at all, since it has no nutritive value. I speculated that it might be intended to mask the taste of swamp water (properly boiled and sterilized swamp water, of course, but even so...) The ingredients lists were surprisingly ordinary -- most of the chemicals were already familiar from supermarket packages.

The big disappointments were the, um, edible food-like substances whose names implied actual recipes. The tortellini and the rice were incredibly mealy, and the cobbler was "the texture of overdone oatmeal."

Sophia and I both stopped eating after two or three bites. I found the chili powder flavor overwhelming, but it was the mealiness that really did me in. I'm not sure how Greg managed to choke down two entire packets of that stuff, but I guess we already knew he's not a picky eater.

Then again, Sophia's not a picky eater either, at least not by my standards. She's never even come close to the "eats nothing but mac and cheese" status of other kids her age. But she wasn't willing to finish the package of rice, even after she begged Greg to let her try it.

Shelf Life Issues

We've been all out of our usual snack nuts for weeks now, and I'm getting desperate for variety in our snacks. I opened a jar of walnuts yesterday -- a food I normally only use for cooking -- and started to munch. But they tasted a bit off, and on investigating more closely, I realized they're starting to go rancid.

Rancid foods are hazardous to your health, so I avoid them as much as possible. Avoiding rancid foods creates a conflict with our goal of storing a year's supply, as many oily foods go rancid faster than that. But according to Diamond Foods, shelled nuts should keep in the pantry for 18 months, or in the refrigerator for 24. The date on this walnut jar is 7/11, which means we've only had them for 8 months. Why are they going bad so soon?

It's hard to predict how long a food will keep, when you don't know how old it already is before you buy it. I tend to think of the origins of store-bought foods as mysterious and unknowable, but that's not entirely true. In this case, we bought the walnuts in mid-summer, and it's a fall crop, so I could have inferred that they were close to a year old already. Not surprising, then, that they're starting to go bad by now. I need to take store-bought foods out of that black box in my head, and remember that they were produced from soil and sunlight on a seasonal schedule, just like the rest of my food.

What to do, then, about preventing walnuts (and other oily foods) from going rancid? California Walnuts makes no predictions about how long they will last, but recommends storing them refrigerated or frozen. Refrigeration would put them in competition for a limited amount of energy-intensive storage space, so I prefer to minimize the need for it, but it is frustrating when food goes bad. We store unopened containers of almonds and oils in the root cellar, and there's plenty of space in there, but it's a lot less convenient.

Another approach would be to mail order direct from a farmer when the new crop comes in, the same way I do with my almonds. That way I would know for sure how fresh they are. We've mail ordered walnuts and pistachios before as an add-on to an almond order, when I was buying from a seller who had all three. But I would have to think about whether it's worth a separate order for something I use in such small quantities.

We could also switch to black walnuts, and harvest them ourselves (we have tons of trees along the stream bed at White Hawk.) That would mean dealing with shelling them, and getting tannin stains all over everything. Might be fun to try once, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready yet to incorporate that into my annual routine.

I guess I'll have to give it some more thought.

Rationing and Sharing

We've had a couple of experiences in the past few days that are related to shortages.

The first has to do with almond milk. First, Greg ran out of cow's milk, and started eating breakfast using my almond milk instead. All of a sudden we were going through almond milk twice as fast, and generating almond meal twice as fast, and our schedule got all disrupted.

I'd gotten into a routine where I would make enough almond milk to last Sophia and me for three days; I would make it twice during the week, and fix flapjacks or waffles on the weekend. Now all of a sudden we were running out in a day and a half, and I wouldn't notice that I needed to soak almonds again. We had several mornings where there was only enough milk for one or two people. This was particularly challenging on school days. Sophia's breakfast has to take priority, because she's on a deadline, and we don't have enough time to switch unexpectedly to fixing a cooked breakfast. And I found I was getting stressed out when I saw Greg reaching for the last of the milk, when I wasn't going to have time to eat myself until I got her out the door.

He found another carton of milk in his freezer, and switched back to that, but we're going to have to work out a new breakfast routine when he gets back from New Jersey (he left on Friday, and will be home later this week.) But in the meantime, I noticed that I'm almost out of flax seed, at *both* houses. I use about a tablespoon of flax seed in each batch of almond milk, and I realized over the weekend that there were only about three tablespoons left. I knew it was running low at my place, but I had thought there was another jar at Greg's, and it turns out there wasn't.

I had to decide whether to start rationing, and using less per batch, or whether to finish it off and then do without. During a food shortage, decisions like that hinge on predictions about what will happen next. I know that this particular shortage will end in less than two weeks, and I'll be able to restock. So I decided to drop my usage back to 1/2 tablespoon per batch, figuring that will come close to getting us through the month.

If I was expecting a long-term shortage (as might happen, for example, when a product is discontinued, or a crop fails and is unavailable for a year) then the question comes down to, "how hard is it to find an alternative?" You might want to just jump in and do it, or you might want to put it off as long as possible. In this case, the flax seed improves the consistency of the milk, which is a cosmetic issue that's easy enough to ignore. But it also changes the baking properties of the almond meal. Too much, and the bread stays pudding-like instead of developing a bread-like texture as it bakes. Too little, and it gets crumbly and falls apart. It may take time to adjust my recipes to compensate: it might change my usage of other ingredients, and I might need to find a different set of recipes that are less dependent on texture.

In a real disaster situation, many things would be changing at once, and we'd be all be maxed out on the amount of disruption we could handle. The ability to maintain a familiar routine around food -- or any one aspect of our lives -- could make the difference between feeling stressed out and getting overwhelmed and unable to cope. So we might not want to wing it and start experimenting right away.

I may need new recipes for almond meal anyway, since I'm generating so much more of it with Greg starting to use the milk too. On the other hand, I might plan for more mornings with hot cereal, which uses a lot less milk.

The other incident was about sweet potatoes. I'd been looking at our stash, thinking it was shrinking fast but we would have plenty to last through the end of the month. Then my roommate Rhonda reminded me that some of the sweet potatoes were hers, as a barter exchange for helping me clean them last fall. She pulled out an armful for her share, and I blanched when I saw how many she was taking. After some discussion, we realized (among other things) that I was feeling much more possessive of my sweet potatoes when I discovered we might run out of them before the end of the month.

That feeling is clearly not rational -- we have an abundance of other food, and the sweet potatoes run out every year around this time. On the other hand, hoarding is such a characteristic response to food shortages that it's no surprise to see that urge surfacing. This is another example of how disrupted routines -- in this case, changes in who is asking to share a food supply -- might exacerbate an already stressful situation. In communities with pre-existing tensions, shortages can even lead to violence, as people who need a resource clash with people who don't want to share.

Greg and I both live in intentional communities, but (so far as I know) neither has discussed how food and other resources might be shared in an emergency situation. In America, the default is private ownership, and most people feel morally justified in keeping our resources to ourselves, even when others around us are homeless or starving. But the boundaries around this are unclear. Some people would readily share with strangers, while others wouldn't share with their own extended family. Some people are willing to share when they believe others are needy through no fault of their own, but refuse when they perceive others as lazy or irresponsible.

How we respond to our own needs, and the needs of our neighbors and friends, could have a profound impact on our ability to pull together as a community in the face of a long emergency. So it's worth thinking through who we would include, and to what extent and why, if a real shortage were to occur.

Taking Stock: Meat

"According to the Agriculture Department, Americans eat over 110 pounds of red meat per year [5 oz per day] ... along with 106 pounds of poultry [4 1/2 oz per day]." -- Does-Eating-Meat-Increase-Your-Risk-of-Dying? That would not be us. We do eat meat, for a variety of reasons, but our meat consumption is way less than the American norm. Which is a good thing, because we simply don't have enough freezer space for 650 pounds of meat (a year's supply for three average Americans.)

My target rate for meat consumption is about two ounces per person per day. I got that number from a talk by Chris Peters, a researcher over at Cornell who does research on local diets. Chris did a study comparing omnivorous with vegetarian diets, with varying fat contents, to determine what kind of a local New York diet would feed the largest number of people. He concluded that, because we have so much land that is better suited to pasture than agriculture, we can feed more people locally on a diet that includes a little bit of meat.

So far, we haven't paid much attention to meat when stocking up -- we buy haphazardly, and haven't tracked usage at all. I know that a pound of meat serves the three of us for two dinners, and we include meat in our dinners a bit more than half the time, so doing the math, we probably use about 100 pounds a year for dinners. We sometimes eat meat at breakfast or lunch as well, so with that plus a little padding on the estimate, we might consume 150 to 200 pounds of meat a year.

Even at that rate, it would take a *lot* of freezer space to store a year's supply of meat. We do have a chest freezer, but the meat has to share it with fruits and veggies and random leftovers. So we don't try very hard to keep a year's supply on hand. (I figure we probably make up for it by keeping more than a year's supply of beans.)

Here's what I currently have in the freezer:

• turkey, 8 lb
• 2 chickens, 7 1/2 lbs
• ground lamb, 6 lb
• misc. lamb pieces, 6 lb
• lamb stew meat, 3 3/4 lb
• bacon, 3 lb
• eye round roast, 2 1/2 lb
• 
  
  pork chops, 2 lbs
• italian sausage, 1 1/2 lb
• buffalo steak, 1 1/4 lb
• ham steak, 1 lb
• buffalo sticks, ~1 lb (14 sticks)
• chicken sausage, 3/4 lb
• flank steak, 3/4 lb
• fish, 3/4 lb
• canned fish -- 11 tins (~4 lb)

The total weight is approximately 50 pounds, which according to my ballpark estimate ought to last about 3-4 months.

So, as a cross check here's what I think we've eaten so far this month (as of 3/15):

• turkey, 2 legs & 2 wings (guess: 3 lbs?)
• summer sausage & salami, 2 lb
• ground lamb, 1 lb
• italian sausage, 1/2 lb
• buffalo snack sticks, 1/2 lb
• bacon, 1/2 lb

If that reflects our typical consumption, it would put us at 180 pounds a year. Two ounces per person per day is about 135 pounds in a year, so we may be a bit over our target. Good to know; I should probably cut back a little. (The limiting factor comes down to advance planning -- beans, our primary locally-available alternative, require overnight soaking and long cooking times. Dairy and soy are out for two of us, due to allergies.)

Fukushima

Here we are at the anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on the nature of local and regional emergencies. One year ago, Japan saw three different kinds of disaster in quick succession, any one of which might have been devastating in its own right. Vast amounts of property were destroyed, many thousands of people were killed or left homeless, and an entire region of the country was evacuated or at risk of evacuation due to radiation leaks. Shortages of food, water, and shelter were widespread, and rebuilding will take years to complete. It's likely that long-term health consequences will continue to surface for decades to come.

Farther afield, spreading radiation was a concern, as were shortages of various industrial products. People mobilized all over the world for relief efforts, and the radiation monitoring industry flourished, but concerns about contamination of Japanese food products have largely been swept under the rug. Again, long-term health problems may surface over time, but they're unlikely to be traced back to the source.

This is only one of a series of real-world disasters and emergencies that we've witnessed in recent years: hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis; war, terrorism and genocide; drought, famine, flood; volcanic eruptions; nuclear disasters; recession, depression, and economic collapse. We haven't seen any major plagues recently, but fears of plague resurface each time a new disease is identified.

To some extent, all this turmoil is only life as usual, viewed on a global scale. Disruptions to the status quo happen all the time, all over the world. From a slightly different perspective, our ordinary day-to-day routines are no more than a lull between emergencies, just as summer is no more than a lull between winters. The urge to set aside a surplus in times of abundance, to prepare for times of scarcity, must by now be written into our genetic code: it's been our primary way of life for more generations than we can count. Our modern urban lifestyle -- where we assume predictability and continuity; where seasons affect little more than our wardrobes and leisure activities; where we expect to keep our houses at the same temperature year 'round and to eat fresh produce in the dead of winter -- may be the aberration, not the norm.

Running Out Of Things

We're starting to run out of some of the perishables. Greg is now officially out of cheese for his lunches, and he's running low on milk. Sophia and I still have some frozen bread left, and one package of GF bread mix, but Greg is all out of wheat bread. We finished the last box of sweetened Morning O's this morning, though we still have some sweetened rice cereal and the granola I just made. We usually mix these with unsweetened cereals -- of which we still have plenty -- in an attempt to get the sweetness without the blood sugar spike. We also finished off the tortillas last night, though we still have half a package of vegan cheese (which is reserved for making pizza -- we have one meal's worth of GF pizza crust mix.)

I sent Greg off today with a salami and some olive paté, which he can eat with crackers for today's lunch. I'm not sure what he'll be eating for lunch after that, though we do still have plenty of crackers and peanut butter. He was joking last week about breaking out some of his stockpile of MRIs, but I don't know how serious he was. (I'm not sure what MRI stands for, other than magnetic resonance imaging, but he's referring to those freeze-dried food packets.)

As a non-food-related observation, my gas tank is also running on empty now. So if our challenge had included fuel, this would be the end of life-as-usual tasks like driving Sophia to after-school programs and commuting between the houses. Greg has started taking the bus (almost) every day to get to work and back, as sort of an addendum to the challenge experience.

A Sampling of Menus:

• (dinner) hot italian buffalo sausage with collard greens, roasted beets & potatoes, kohlrabi salad
• (dinner) turkey, baked squash, sauerkraut
• (dinner) homemade rice nachos with refried beans, salsa, vegan cheese, and mache
• (school lunch) leftover turkey & refried beans w/rice, carrots, frozen blueberries
• (school lunch) leftover lentil/lamb curry w/rice, sliced jerusalem artichokes, frozen blueberries

The nachos were made with rice tortillas that we found in the freezer. We hadn't been using them because they get stiff so easily, and crack when we try to fold them, but the nacho idea worked out really well. I cut them in sixths and deep fried them, and they turned out a good bit tastier than I was expecting.

Nuts

I'm making granola today, and we are now all out of sunflower seeds and pecans. This was predictable: we overstocked our nuts at one point, and I stopped restocking because I was afraid they would go rancid before we used them up. Right now we still have:

• almonds -- enough to last until fall (or beyond)
• cashews -- 1 1/2 quarts
• walnuts -- 1 1/2 cups
• pumpkin seeds -- 1 pint
• sesame seeds -- 1 1/2 cups
• pine nuts -- 1/4 cup
• peanut butter -- 6 jars

We buy 1 quart of peanuts and 1/2 gallon of trail mix each time we bulk shop, and mix in about 3 cups of the peanuts and save the rest for cooking. The more trail mix we buy, the faster it disappears, so we limit our consumption (or, more accurately, Sophia's consumption) by not stocking up. We didn't do a bulk shop in February, so the trail mix has been gone for awhile, and the rest of the peanuts vanished late last week. Which is a bummer: I'm planning to make a Vietnamese Chicken (okay, Turkey) Salad sometime in the next couple days, and I'm going to miss the chopped peanuts. (This is another recipe from Extending the Table.) Our current plan is to substitute cashews, of which we still have plenty.

Every fall I organize a bulk buy of raw unpasteurized Carmel almonds from Bremner Farms in California, just after the harvest comes in. Last year we used about 12 pounds. This year we bought 18 pounds, because Sophia has started drinking my homemade almond milk instead of the commercial stuff. So our almond situation is similar to our maple syrup situation, except that we're 5 months into the year instead of 11 months in.

Peanut butter is one of Greg's discount bulk purchases. He prefers the store brand of the local store where his company is located, so he buys peanut butter in quantity when he goes on business trips.

Cashews are still plentiful partly because we don't eat them as much as I had expected when I bought them, and partly because I prefer them whole and Greg prefers them in pieces, so he bought another quart after I'd already stocked up (oops.) I expect we'll go through them now that we're running out of the other stuff, tho.

Taking Stock: Sweeteners, update on fruits & veggies

Other fruits & veggies in Greg's freezer:

• 6 pints jack'o'lantern (not the best flavor, but still edible -- primarily for pumpkin bread)
• 5 pints fruit juice (red currant and gooseberry) -- this is the home-made equivalent of fruit juice concentrate; it's intended for use as a beverage, once amply sweetened
• 1 1/2 pounds autumn olive (from a bush with unusually large berries)
• 3 1/2 pounds strawberries
• 5 1/2 pounds blueberries (this was a windfall; I've been skimping b/c I thought we were running low)
• 3 1/2 pounds raspberries
• 1/2 pound black caps
• 1 1/2 pounds tart cherries

Time to make a cherry pie; the tart cherries are getting old...which brings us to:

 

Sweeteners

Going through the fruit made me realize how dependent we are this time of year on sweeteners. A lot of our winter fruit dishes are sweetened, but I deliberately don't stock up on most sweeteners for health reasons (running out regularly keeps us from over-consuming.) So I guess I better pay attention to the supply...

• Maple syrup -- We use 5 quarts a year of maple syrup. I do an annual bulk buy of Grade B from the farmer's market, in April. I like this for several reasons: 1) Grade B is cheaper and more flavorful, 2) there's  less packaging waste, 3) I get the per-gallon bulk price instead of the per-decorative-container price. The down side is that in March we're almost out. Right now I have about a pint left. I guess I could buy a couple extra quarts one year, so the amount I have stored varies from 1/2 to 1 1/2 years' supply instead of 0 to 1 year. But this is a seasonal product, and if it's not available in the spring I'm going to run out anyway. I suppose the few extra months might give me more time to secure an alternative.
• Sugar -- 1 pint at my place, unknown at Greg's
• Sucanat -- 1 pint at my place, probably another pint at Greg's
• Honey -- 1 pint fresh, plus about a cup that's gone to sugar.
• Molasses -- most of a pint

We use honey for jellies & jams, maple syrup on flapjacks & waffles, sucanat to sprinkle on oatmeal, and all of the above for cooking. Looking at this list of supplies, I don't *think* I'm going to run out -- having a small amount of each of a variety of products adds up to a substantial amount overall -- but I do need to pay attention. In other words, it's probably not the best time to go on a jelly-making spree...

Ground Lamb and French Lentil Curry

Last night's dinner was a big hit, so it seems like a good idea to write down the details. It's based on a Ground Beef Curry from Kenya, a recipe I found in Extending the Table. My ingredients have never quite matched the ones they request, so I kind of wing it. Here's how I made it last night:

Ground Lamb and French Lentil Curry

1 cup french lentils, simmered in 2 cups water until nearly soft (about 20 minutes ?)

1/2 pound lean ground lamb
5 small onions, cut in eighths (about 1 cup)
1 T or so butternut squash seed oil
5 cloves garlic
1 pint tomatoes, with liquid
1 tsp sambar powder
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp ground ginger
(optional) cayenne to taste1 tsp dried mint
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt

Break lamb into 1/2 inch chunks and saute with onions in oil until browned. Add garlic and curry powders and fry briefly, adding tomato juice as needed to prevent sticking. Add remaining ingredients and simmer 20 minutes or so to absorb liquid and blend flavors. Add additional seasoning to taste. Serve over rice.

We had this with a side dish of baked butternut squash; the sweetness of the squash was a nice complement to the savory curry.

Notes on Ingredients

• lamb -- Northlands used to have a deal where you could order a half or full lamb and have it cut to order. I would have pretty much the whole thing cut into chops and stew pieces and ground lamb, because I rarely cook roasts and steaks. I discovered that I absolutely love the extra-lean ground beef that you get if you make it from the shank or the shoulder, much better than I like the more meat that ground lamb is usually made from. They don't sell whole animals any more, but they will still put in a special order for me once in awhile (though I have to pay the steak/roast price, for obvious reasons.) I think I bought ten pounds of it, back in November, which will probably last us the better part of a year.
• onions -- These are the Stuttgarter onions that I grew that didn't size up very well. They're about an inch and a half in diameter.
• butternut squash seed oil -- We discovered this stuff when we did the locavore challenge back in September. It has a strong flavor reminiscent of toasted sesame oil. I used it last night to help unify the flavor of the curry with the butternut squash I served on the side.
• garlic -- also home grown.
• tomatoes -- I peel, chop, and stew my paste tomatoes, seeds & juice & all, and freeze them in pints. They get used in any recipe that calls for tomatoes, no matter what kind (though I do use dried tomatoes sometimes for variety.) In this recipe, the tomato juice substituted for the water called for in the original recipe.
• curries -- There are as many sambar powder and garam masala recipes as there are cooks in India; the ones I linked here look at least similar to what I do when I make mine (I don't make them often enough to have a standard recipe yet.) I leave out things I don't normally cook with, like the asafetida, and my sambar has coconut flakes in it, but those are just variations on a theme.

A Sampling of Menus

I'm starting to feel like something is missing without the detailed menus I recorded for the Locavore Challenge back in September. So here's an overview of some of the other meals we've eaten in the past week:

• (dinner) gypsy soup with corn bread
• (dinner) ground lamb patties, boiled potatoes, and mache salad
• (dinner) refried black bean flautas with salsa, fruit soup with ice cream
• (dinner) chicken sausage with sauerkraut, baked sweet potatoes
• (lunch) summer sausage and olive pate on rye crackers, sauerkraut
• (snack) sliced apples with peanut butter
• (school lunch) buffalo snack sticks, crackers, dried apples & peaches, cooked carrot
• (school lunch) leftover curry & rice, frozen blueberries, sliced jerusalem artichokes
• (breakfast) waffles with red currant syrup
• (breakfast) cereal with almond milk

Taking Stock: Fruit

Well! I'm glad I picked a cold day to do the freezer inventory. Something yellow and gooey was spilled way down in the bottom of the freezer, where the things I've forgotten about settle in. So I piled the contents of the freezer in a shady spot in the front yard (15 degrees, according to Weather Underground) and cleaned it out. It was past time to defrost, anyway. I found a big bag of black caps down there that I didn't know we had, yum! Those are not long for this world, now that they've resurfaced...

Fruit is the food we are most likely to buy non-locally in the winter. We crave those clementines, grapefruits, mangos, pomegranates -- especially when the weather is cold and dreary. But we also freeze a bit of summer for future use, in the form of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, currants, gooseberries, grapes... Some of these, like the blueberries, we fresh freeze and then eat on waffles without fully thawing them. Others, like the currants, I juice and use for pancake syrup or jelly. Apples, pears, and peaches are dried, and apples are also sauced and cellared. Most of this fruit comes from u-pick farms, and I don't carefully track the amounts. What I have on hand currently:

Dried

• apples: 2/3 gallon (U pick)
• pears: 1/3 gallon (tree in our front yard)
• peaches: 2 cups (farm stand)
• mango: 1 gallon (Greenstar warehouse sale)
• miscellaneous store fruit (raisins, currants, cranberries, apricots, etc.): 3/4 gallon

Frozen (my freezer -- Greg's freezer is not yet inventoried...)

• black caps: 3 pounds
• strawberries: 2 1/4 pounds mashed + 1 1/2 pounds whole + 1 cup raw jam
• blueberries: 5 pounds
• raspberries: 3 pounds + 3 cups juice
• grapes: 1 1/2 pounds
• melon: 1 1/4 pounds (old)
• banana: 1/2 pound (old)
• hawthorn: 7/8 pound (old)
• red currants: 4 1/4 pounds
• elderberries: 1 1/4 pound berries + 4 cups juice
• fruit juice cubes (for syrup:) 4 1/4 pounds (half are getting old)
• melon juice (for making sorbet): 1 cup 
• fruit pulp (for making flavored ciders): 5 pounds
• apple cider: one quart

Apples

• in cold storage: 1/4 bushel (approx.)
• cider (going fizzy:) 1 pint
• cider vinegar: 1 quart
• applesauce: 6 pints

I celebrated the cleaning out of the freezer by making a fruit soup with a bag of (unfortunately somewhat freezer burned) strawberries. If you look up a recipe for fruit soup, chances are you will find a very specific list of ingredients and amounts, but in my opinion, pretty much any mix will do. It's a classic Scandinavian treat, traditionally made with dried fruits simmered in water until they soften. This time I started with a base of sweetened gooseberry and red currant juice, and added the strawberries along with some raisins and dried apricots for variety. Sweeten to taste, thicken with tapioca powder (or corn starch) and simmer until the raisins plump up. I usually serve it topped with ice cream; I like the tart-creamy hot-cold contrasts.

'Course, I noticed in the process that we're almost out of ice cream. This could become a problem...

Taking Stock: Vegetables

Local vegetables are hard to come by in our bioregion this time of year. March is the month when we're most likely to break down and buy veggies from Far Away From Here, mostly because we're getting so tired of living off roots. But we've been working for some time to expand our options, and life is not looking half bad right now. Here's an overview of what we have available this month for vegetables:

Home grown -- cellared, frozen, and dried

We planted the following vegetables last year for winter storage:

• two dozen sweet potato slips (yield: 3/4 bushel)
• five hills of winter squash, two of delicata (for fall use), one of pumpkin (for early winter), and two of butternut (for late winter)
• two onion sets, one of white sweet spanish (for fall use) one of stuttgarter
• two pounds (approx.) of shallots, one of french gray (for fall use) one of pikant
• 50 cloves of garlic (primarily german white, also german red, bulgarian, music, polish)
• approx. 20 fall leeks and 40 winter leeks
• a patch of evergreen scallions (approx. 2x4 feet)
• a patch of walking onions (approx. 2x4 feet, but neglected and weedy)
• two pounds fingerling potatoes, one of swedish peanut (for fall use) one of banana (for early winter)
• four pounds general purpose potatoes (keuka gold and adirondack blue) 
• eight paste tomato plants (yield: 30-40 pints, frozen, plus a dozen cups of salsa)
• twelve (?) bell pepper plants (yield: 2 1/2 full cereal bags, frozen)
• one jerusalem artichoke plant (yield: more than we will eat)

Of these, we still have:

• a dozen and a half sweet potatoes
• two butternuts
• a few pounds stuttgarter onions and one or two of pikant shallots
• two dozen or so miniature winter leeks (they didn't grow well this year) still in the ground
• approx. 2x2 bed of scallions still in the ground
• unknown status of walking onion bed
• 16 pounds keuka gold potatoes
• enough garlic and tomatoes and salsa and bell peppers to last until summer
• more jerusalem artichokes than we will eat

We also have about three cups of dried tomatoes, and a cup of dried red bell peppers (I was hoping to use these in Sophia's school lunches, but they were not a hit.)

We also froze the surplus of a few vegetables that were primarily intended for summer eating. We still have:

• snow peas: approx. 4 cups
• shell peas: approx. 5 cups
• shelly beans: approx. 3 cups
• zucchini: approx. 2 cups
• cooking greens (spinach and mustard): approx. 4 cups
• rainbow chard, approx. 6 cups
• several jalapeño peppers

In addition to this, we have an ungodly number of habañeros left from two years ago, which are still plentiful partly because we grew a sampler of three different varieties and they love love loved the weather that year, and partly because Greg uses hot peppers a lot more than I do, and he's not sure what to do with frozen ones. We have a half dozen anchos as well, which I'm intending to make chiles relleños with, some time when I'm feeling adventurous.

Root CSA

Really this is a bulk buying club, but we call it a CSA, I guess because that terminology is more familiar to people. We built a community root cellar a few years ago (this was Tina Nielsen-Hayden's last big neighborhood project before she started New Roots.) And one of our neighbors (Katie Creeger, owner of Kestrel Perch Berry Farm) organizes a bulk buy of roots from local farmers each fall, and stores them in the root cellar for winter use. We order what we expect to eat, and pick them up twice a month for the months of January, February, and March. We had our fifth of six pickups yesterday. Each of my pickups contains:

• 2.5 pounds carrots
• 1 pound beets
• 1 pound onions
• 3/4 pound parsnips
• 1/2 pound celeriac
• 1/2 pound kohlrabi
• 1 pound napa cabbage (done as of this pickup; it doesn't reliably last much longer.)

Hoop house
We have an unheated hoop house that we use for season extension. It has a 9x16 footprint, with ten 2x4 in-ground beds. We sized it by comparing Eliot Coleman's recommendations in The Four Season Harvest with the size of Greg's back yard. The size is turning out to be more than adequate, though I do run into scheduling problems because it does double duty as a summer growing space for heat-loving crops, such as hot peppers and watermelons.

I planted some early spring greens in there yesterday -- it's possible that we might have baby lettuce by the end of the month, but most of them won't be ready for harvest until mid- to late April. We still have a few things left, though, from our fall planting:

• one collard plant (mostly harvested yesterday, for use this week)
• two dozen kale plants, with some smaller leaves left on them -- still enough for three or four dinners. These will leaf out again once the sun gets stronger, yielding spring greens and kale raab, but probably not until April.
• about 10 square feet of mache, with a little bit of claytonia, wild daisy, lettuce, and wild mustard mixed in (we had a mache salad with dinner last night.)

Preserved and canned

We have about 3 1/2 quarts of white sauerkraut left from a recent batch, and one quart of red. I usually do two batches a year, one of each color. And we have some pickles -- a jar or two of cucumber pickles, getting old but probably still good, a quart of purslane pickles, and a small jar of green plum tomato pickles that we haven't eaten because they're so darned acidic (the recipe called for a pickling vinegar with 5% acidity, eeks!) And we have three cans of olives left, and possibly some pimientos and artichoke hearts at the other house.

Food Values

Our emergency food is the same as our day-to-day food, so it's helpful to know something about our overall food-related goals. Here are mine:

• I eat food that is healthy, local, and organic.
• I buy animal products from farms with humane practices.
• I spend as little money as I can without compromising these goals.
• I cultivate relationships with the people who grow my food.
• I grow, harvest, and process my own food.
• I don't waste food.

These goals are all interdependent -- for example, growing my own food saves money, and cultivating a relationship with the farmers allows me to determine whether the food is healthy and farm animals are well cared for. Organic food is healthier than conventional food, and storing food makes lower-cost bulk buying practical. And local food is more likely to still be available in the event of an emergency.

Greg's food values are similar to mine, but he differs in one significant way, which is that for some foods (staples in particular) he's willing to compromise quality to obtain a lower price. So although most of our food supply consists of my carefully selected local and organic foods, we also have a few conventional ultra-cheap bulk discount items.

I'd also like to mention two other, more general, goals that have an impact on how we manage food:

• I treat lifestyle change as an ongoing process, and make changes gradually over time.
• I allow myself an occasional splurge, and relax my standards when it's impractical to uphold them.

In other words, I try to cut myself enough slack to avoid getting hung....

Notes on Gypsy Soup

It seems like time to start getting into the nitty-gritty. So I'm going to describe a recent dinner dish in some detail.

Recipe: Gypsy Soup, from the Moosewood Cookbook
Ingredients:

• garbanzo beans -- we buy these in bulk from Greenstar, replacing each jar as it runs out. They're organic, but they don't grow locally, so we don't know much about their provenance. We store them in half gallon mason jars, like most of our grains and beans, to keep the bugs out. A year's supply for our family is one to two jars; we keep two in stock.
• sweet potatoes -- we grow these in our garden and store them in a covered basket in a cool north-side room (ideally 50-60 degrees.) I organize a bulk buy of starts each spring, which makes them very cheap, and plant two dozen myself. This yields approximately a bushel -- 3/4 in a bad year, 1 1/4 in a boom year -- which lasts from harvest time in mid-October until sometime between late March and early May. They don't keep well after the weather warms up, so this is a seasonal winter food.
• celery -- in winter, I substitute celeriac, which can be stored for several months in a root cellar. My community has a shared root cellar, and a neighbor organizes an annual bulk buy from local farmers, which we refer to as a "Root CSA." This year I ordered 1/2 pound of celeriac per pickup (1 pound per month) for the winter months: a pretty small amount, but it seems adequate for us. 
• onions -- every year I try to grow these, but my yields are typically pretty poor. The Root CSA is my backup plan, and that's where the onion I used last night came from. I ordered one pound per pickup this year, and figured I would get another half to one pound from what I grew.
• garlic -- we grow 50 plants a year, store 40 and use 10 for re-planting. White and Red German have worked best for us.
• bell pepper - I grow these and freeze them. I wouldn't use them in a salad, but they work fine for cooked dishes. I'm still a little unclear on how much to grow and how much they yield and how much we use; I've only been doing them for a couple years. It's somewhere around 8 to 12 plants for freezing, and about as many more (mostly short-season heirloom varieties) for fresh eating. The official yield is about a half dozen peppers per plant, which is pretty close to what we get.
• tomatoes -- I planted eight paste tomato plants the last couple years, and canned about 30-40 pints. That's not including what we ate fresh. We're not Italian, so this is easily a year's supply (after experiencing the labor of processing eight plants, I about died last fall when I read that Barbara Kingsolver plants 50.) The canning instructions call for 45 minutes of processing, which strikes me as excessive, so instead I cook them just long enough to soften them and then freeze them. Less secure if the power goes out, but much less heat-intensive (and in August, no less.) I imagine that if we do some day have an emergency without power, I can process them after-the-fact on Greg's wood stove. Hopefully in the winter.
• herbs & spices -- The basil was home-grown; the rest came either from Greenstar or one of Greg's ultra-cheap bulk buys. I have had mixed results with basil. For a couple years now I've tried interplanting it with the tomatoes, which is recommended for tomato pest control, but the basil seems to be a lot happier growing by itself at the end of the row. I'll probably switch back to that pattern this year. It doesn't take much to dry for winter use -- half a dozen plants is plenty -- but we use a lot more than that for pesto.

How we Manage our Pantry for Food Security

To be effective over the long haul, food security has to be integrated into your day-to-day lifestyle. Sure, you can find survivalist-oriented products out there, with descriptions like "One year's supply of hermetically sealed freeze-dried food packets," that offer a sense of security without the need for any immediate behavior change. But not only are they wickedly expensive, but they're not something anybody would ever choose to eat when other food is available, which means if you don't actually encounter an emergency, the product will eventually transform itself into garbage.

Unless you're an avid backpacker, you're unlikely to have an ongoing use for freeze-dried food, so it is (IMHO) a waste of money to buy it in the first place. No matter how carefully a food is preserved, it's an organic substance, and over time it will biodegrade and lose what's left of its flavor and nutritive value, and finally spoil or go rancid or be eaten by bugs or rodents. And there's nothing worse than thinking you've got your bases covered, only to find a pile of foul-smelling cobwebby dust when you open the package.

Yes, it's true, freeze-dried food packets are more likely than (some) other foods to survive fires, floods, and/or extended power outages, and if you're forced to evacuate your home at short notice and strike out on foot, you can stuff a backpack full and still be able to lift it. It probably makes sense to have some lightweight ready-to-eat travel food in stock as part of a complete preparedness plan. But it ought to be something you're going to eat anyway (for example, dried fruit, trail mix, or jerky), so it cycles through your pantry and stays fresh.

Here are some of our goals & practices related to food storage:

• The food we store for emergencies is also food that we eat on a regular basis.
• The amount we store matches, or is less than, the amount we eat within the product's shelf life.
• For foods with a very long shelf life, we keep a year's supply.
• We track how much we use from year to year, so we know what a year's supply looks like.
• We store at least two containers of each staple food, and size them according to how much we use.
• We date containers of food, and eat the oldest first.
• We shop for bulk discounts when we can; otherwise, we replace each container as it runs out.
• We change our eating habits over time to emphasize foods that store well over foods with a shorter shelf life.
• When a storable fresh food is in season, we harvest or buy a year's supply (or as much as we will use before it goes bad) and process it for storage.
• We change our diet with the seasons to take advantage of foods that are locally available.

Some of these items are more "goal" and others are more "practice," depending on how big the gap is between theory and reality. Since we're aiming for a year's supply, a month with no shopping ought to be a breeze, if our system is working well. In theory, we shouldn't run out of anything that has a long shelf life. But it's easy to get lazy over time and let things slide. So we shall see...

Not Stocking Up

Well, the day has arrived. We've even simulated an emergency event, in the form of a thunderstorm & freezing rain (just visualize a few degrees colder, and vast quantities of ice over everything) and we are now holed up with no opportunity to purchase more supplies... (Of course, the down side of imagining it as a weather event is that we're currently a two-household family, and much of our food stocks are holed up at the other house...so let's just pretend we have a teleporter booth to move from one house to the other...)

It took a lot of self-discipline (and several reminders to Greg) to avoid stocking up ahead of time. Each time I noticed something running low, I had an automatic better-get-it-now reaction, and I had to consciously evaluate each case and decide whether it was okay to replace it now, or whether I would normally wait for the next major shopping run. We generally observe Greenstar's "10% on the 10th" discount day, so most of our grocery store purchases happen on a monthly cycle. We skipped it in February, because we weren't aware of any shortages & it was an inconvenient day, so we're starting out a bit behind. But since missing it is not uncommon for us, I didn't feel right about going back and making it up.

Things I decided it was okay to go ahead and buy:

• Farmer's Market meat -- I knew they would be closed for the month of March, and I always stock up at the end of the season to hold me through until April.
• 365 Morning O's (imitation Cheerios) -- We used to buy the New Morning brand, until they were bought out last year by Attune Foods and discontinued. I'm peeved at the company for doing that, so we're phasing out Erewhon cereals too (another of their products.) So now we bulk buy boxed cereal from Whole Foods when we're on road trips. (I know the organic folks love to hate Whole Foods, but Sophia likes them better than the Heritage O's, which is our other wheat-free option.) We're trying to move more toward homemade breakfasts made with local/unprocessed ingredients, but it's hard to argue with the convenience of a cereal box.
• One bar of mint chocolate -- when Sophia heard we were doing this, her immediate response was, "But what if we run out of chocolate?" I told her we would just do without for a few days, but after thinking it over and assessing the supply, I decided we could justify replacing the mint flavor that we ran out of last week. We're still going to run out, unless we ration it, but it gives us a few more days. (We've been using a small daily dose of chocolate as a kinder & gentler home remedy for Sophia's ADHD.)
• One half-gallon jar of oat groats -- I'm getting ready to make a batch of granola, which uses a lot of oats. I decided we could justify it since the supply at my house was getting low, we weren't sure how much Greg had at his house, and he was going to Greenstar anyway to buy milk.
• Toilet paper -- we were running out, and I decided to buy two 12-packs instead of one (normally I would have bought one and waited until bulk day to stock up.) I basically decided that wiping with newsprint is beyond the scope of this particular experiment. I already know how it's done, and I'd prefer to save that experience for a genuine emergency...

Things I consciously did *not* stock up on:

• A couple months ago we accidentally opened three tubs of margarine at once, and all three of them are running low. One is now empty, and the other has about a tablespoon left; the third is still half full. I decided I wouldn't have noticed the low supply, and if I did I would have put it on the bulk list instead of buying it now.
• Fruits & veggies -- This is the time of year we usually get so tired of root veggies that we go out and start buying up tropical imports. I briefly considered getting something when I was at the store yesterday, but after looking over what was available I decided I wouldn't have found any of it tempting if I didn't know it was my last chance.
• Olives -- We use these off & on as a "vegetable" for Sophia's school lunches; I think there's some left at Greg's place but I'm pretty much all out.
• Snack foods -- We don't generally stock these, except for trail mix; we just buy them once in awhile as a treat. This is a conscious strategy to limit over-consumption (we deliberately allow the trail mix to run out, too, between bulk buys) so I didn't feel right about messing with it. They're so convenient, tho...
• Breads, bread mixes -- Because we're wheat-free, most of our "fresh" bread options come from the freezer. Recently we've started using a GF bread mix for sandwich bread, but I don't yet have a reliable home recipe (it's hard to get a texture that's palatable without being crumbly.) Normally I wait until bulk day to restock these, and use crackers or homemade quick breads to cover the gap if we run out.
• Toothpaste -- My tube is almost empty. I *think* Sophia's has plenty left, but she does the fist-grab thing instead of squeezing it from the bottom, so it's all crinkled, yecch. Oh well; I'll just have to brush in the downstairs bathroom if I run out, and put up with the aesthetic downgrade.
• Calcium supplements -- Both Sophia and I have started taking these, as a concession to our inability to consume milk. I'm not big on supplements: for the most part, I think food should be eaten in the form of food. But she's approaching adolescence and I'm approaching menopause --two critical periods in determining resistance to osteoporosis -- and it runs in my family so I'm concerned about it. I figured they're not that critical, and I wouldn't normally restock until I ran out.

Anyway, so far so good; we haven't run out of anything yet...