Blurred, and finally Procrastinated

Ersatz Mohnkuchen-machen, ein dizzying untertaking. (Focus on the center of the stir, and the dizziness may subside.)

So there was this bake sale, bloggers raising money for the food bank. Collateral benefits may have helped drive up traffic for some of the fine bakers who contributed, but I slacked off and put off until I had nothing to put in the packages: no cards nor stickers proclaiming the name of my bog.


And it's best I didn't, because there are some talented and committed folks cooking and writing about food in our town, and probably in yours, too. Read them regularly, procrastinate here intermittently.


My blog sleeps for weeks, and upon awaking may croak only some snore-snort rant with nary a recipe nor useful fact at hand, only to slip back unto comatosis. But now that I am comfortably in the next month, I can blog about the bake sale. 

I'd spent the week prior in a desultory/manic oscillation, and a test run on the granola bars had me confident about that recipe, so what remained was how to handle my obsession with using up a bunch of poppyseeds I had, a few cups from the past year or two Hungarian Breadseed popping up. The county health department seemed especially leery of custardey type stuff, so the lemon bar things I'd been thinking of were out. 


But hey, I had a bunch of rhubarb, and that's tart, right? So I decided that a quick bread, using rhubarb sauce (and as it turned out, winesap applesauce as well) in place of eggs and some of the liquids. Plenty of it, too, to make it a dense moist bread, atop which would be the farina-poppy-vanilla concoction that you find in Mohnkuchen, Poppycake, a European treat. 


A test batch on Bakesale's Eve turned out pretty well, and after finishing 4.5 dozen granola bars (another post, maybe) I went to bed satisfied and ready for the next day, which I had wisely taken off to devote my full energies to baking, and drinking coffee...and surfing without writing...and gardening. And then it was 2 hours before the bake sale and not only were a couple of loaves of fake mohnkuchen not done (crowded oven, and did I mention that the batter is dense and wet?) and none of it was sliced and packaged. "Probably too late to conceive, design, and print labels now," I procrastinatorily realized, and set my elder daughter to work on getting baked goods in ziplock bags.

And it turned out fine. I got to meet some other people willing to bake for a good cause (the Thurston County Food Bank, to be specific), not to mention Arts Walkers happy to happen upon a big table full of cookies, confections, and treats for a dollar a piece. Lots of them donated more. Generosity flowed, and swimming in that stream feels good. Us blogger-bakers agreed that we'd crammed well over a dollar for ingredients alone into these $1 delectables, but what we spent helped maintain jobs for farmers and millers, and it was fun. About half of my stuff sold, and the rest was headed for hungry people. To top it all off, I had a really nice time with my elderkid, who reacted to me making her help out at the bake sale with a stellar performance. 

Agreeing to deliver 100 pieces of baked goods, fresh at a certain hour, to raise money for a fundamental feeder of fellow people, is more cooking responsibility than I'm used to. Creative indecision (which is what I sometimes call "procrastination") made it more off-kilter and last-minute frantic than it needed to be, and the day leading up to the sale looks from this vantage like a blur, but a comfortable '70s warm-toned buzz of a blur, with none of the careening vertigo you might sense from that first photo. But then again, not the static clarity of the second, either. Motion all day--arms stirring and whipping and folding, mind pulling body from pantry to stove to counter. Too much to account for without criminal dullness, blurring together into a single simple goal: get the stuff ready by 4:00.

And at 4:00 my truck parked illegally and me hoping that the traffic cops were themselves procrastinating, I was delivering rhubarb-poppy bread and locavore granola bars to the bakesale tent. At 7:00 I was back with daughter in tow, and we sold til 10:00. Missed Arts Walk myself, but enjoyed the night, the people, and of course the bag o goodies I purchased for us. Drove home and fell asleep, glad there was nothing to do the next day til late afternoon and the Procession of the Species parade...which is yet another post I'll get to....some day.

 

 

Bake Olympia!

Are you hungry?

I am. Always, more or less, feral neural nets omnivorously considering the surroundings for a quaff and a morsel, shoots and berries beaconing, "I'm ripe right now, eat me." Sirens less corporeal call too: what is the blog but an answer for the hunger to write? So I share a recipe or a way to simplify, throw in some nettles and a garden, and I'm full til I'm hungry again.

But some people are literally hungry, and it's a shame to say that I've been posting here for six months without saying anything about it. Among us are people out of work and out of luck, people with addiction hungers and people with the myriad of woes that converge on simple hunger. More South Sound kids suffer empty bellies than you want to believe, and become famished over breaks and ice storms when there's no school nutrition program. 


When that happens, and any other mundane day for that matter, the Food Banks feed people. Here in Olympia and everywhere else in our downtrodden economy, they need our help to help out the hungry. 


So when I got an email suggesting that Olympia food bloggers put on a bake sale during Arts Walk to raise money for the Thurston County Food Bank, I was really happy that somebody stood up and did something. Jenni Crain, who creates The Plum Palate with Chie, heard about a similar thing in Seattle, and organized it here. I'm just a willing contributor, but even that is a meal to sate my hunger for good karma. 


This will be happening during Arts Walk (on Friday April 27th), and is called Bake Olympia--link to the other blogger-bakers and get details at that site--look for us on Columbia Avenue, somewhere between 4th and 5th, within the Make Olympia area (Thanks for waiving the vendor fee, MO!). Come by and buy some tickets that you trade for delectable treats made by some talented cooks. The Food Bank will get all the proceeds, and you can pay with food, if you want. And it need not be canned; they can accept perishable food, too. 

Like some fresh produce from the Farmers Market just down the way; they close at 3:00 and we start at 5:00, but promenading about with a bag of broccolini and kale makes for a fine Olympia afternoon (and a farmer at closing time may give you a good deal if it's headed to the Food Bank). People will admire your healthy locavorism, and you can casually mention that you are supporting the Food Bank, as you sip coffee and snack on good vibes. 

Then later, you can feast on brownies and cookies. I'm thinking my contribution will be lemon-poppyseed bars and granola made with wild and local ingredients. What everyone else is bringing, I don't know, but there will be talented bakers there, and I'm looking forward to meeting my virtual community. And if you come by, in addition to the good feeling you get from supporting the Food Bank, you'll get that baked-good boost you need to Walk the Arts, and you won't be carrying around all that brocollini, or all those heavy cans and cash. 


We'll see you there!

In the Beantime

I usually take a photo, or drag one up from the archives, but today's subject is beans, and they're just not that photogenic. Sure, I could hunt down some pretty heirloom variety, dried orbs speckled with color, shot according to foodblog standards (set in an interesting bowl, viewed from 20 degrees above horizontal, depth of field centered on the most pleasing cluster, a utensil adding either haute or rustic flavor to the scene), but nah, I am not so inclined. And besides, the honest portrayal of a mess o beans ain't pretty.*

Pretty is not the point of beans. Maybe for a lithe young snap bean, but such things are daydreams at this time of year; if you're a globavore, I suppose you can find a limp old crone of a pod, worse the wear for its journey. No, I'm talking about dry beans, humble fare. Even the fancy ones that jump into the pot clad in cranberry tones or the height of black-and-white bovine fashion emerge somewhere along the brown-grey-black backwaters of the spectrum. 


Beans have gotten me and billions of others through hard times. Protein without the expense of meat, filling meals on the cheap. Campesino fare, but also a fair part of pencil factory heir Thoreau's back-to-the-earthedness. My sister survived years of brutal underemployment on red beans and rice blessed by the Cajun bean deity, Zatarain. 


Lately, even though personal finances have improved from my own economic nadir, I've been getting back to bean basics. Partly to get protein without pink slime and feed-lot meat. Partly to preserve funds for better purposes (better beer, book sales, and, uh, whatever else). Partly to simplify my life.


For years, I've been eating canned beans, especially after reading Skinny Legs and All, in which Can o Beans is a main character and minor deity (thanks, Tom Robbins, for lifting the veil). But cans these days have chemical linings (or cost a fortune), and are filled with beans cooked who-knows-where according to food safety standards weakened by successive corporate onslaughts. And besides, I figured I could save some money by cooking my own. The stew of autonomy and frugality has always been irresistible to me.


And so in recent months, I wait til bags of dried beans are on sale, and pick up a bunch. A pound of beans and some water put in the crock pot yields a couple meals worth of beans, salted and flavored however I want. Usually it's pintos or black beans, although today it was garbanzos made into hummus. Whatever is not eaten at the first meal goes into a jar in the fridge, ready to be doled out for lunches (yes, I am lucky enough to have a first grader who loves to bring a little container of beans to lunch), or another dinner. 


The economics are compelling. Every so often, beans are on sale for a buck a pound. A dollar buys the main protein for a couple of meals for a family of four. And of course they are good for your heart, and who can put a price on that?



* Are you not a Southerner? Then you may not be aware that the "mess" is the unit of bean-meals, like a hand of bananas or a murder of crows.

Spring Garlic

Garlic pokes up through colder ground and shorter days than a lot of its garden compadres. Even in my yard's procrastinating Spring, only a day after Equinox, the vee-creased shoots are ankle high. This is in a new bed enriched with fireplace ash, maybe a hundred or so plants. There are a few odd rows here and there in the yard, and of course a few heads I missed last fall sprouting green tonsures.


Contrary to the Fall-planting orthodoxy, I pulled up and split up some of the volunteer knobs, replanting willy nilly just a couple of weeks ago. Others I let be until a hankering for scallions or scapes, maybe an autumnal bulbil, brings me back. Freebies for the rest of the year, with the extra spice only disorthodoxy can summon.


Meanwhile, inside the house, the cloves awaken. As soon as the mature heads are pulled from the soil, garlicians struggle to make them last as long as possible. A cool dry garage and some jars of olive oil did the trick this year. At least until the Solstice, when even under roof and Winter's cloudy grey, the cloves hear the call of the lengthening days and begin their six-month stretch. Either I've selected better keepers or I was lucky this time around, because by this time in previous years, all the dry stuff had long since decided to be a new plant.

The last of the dried cloves, just now sprouting, don't inspire foodies. They're yellowing and getting a little soft; the only crisp part is a green shoot through the heart of each one, reaching out the top for light. Meanwhile, at the other end, octopodic roots begin to reach out, hoping to get their tentacles into some soil. Some people would plant them, others (under the thrall of Autumnist dogma?) would waste them, or at best relegate them to the compost. 


But being frugal, I use them up. Sliced, each piece is an eye with a green pupil, a look I like. Then again, doing nothing more than peeling them (easy, at this late stage) and tossing them in whatever happens to be in the works works as well. A recent desire to cut out the chemicals and other afflictions of canned beans, I've been buying them dried, and cooking them in a crock pot. A head of past-prime garlick cloves added to this gestation is a fine and nearly effortless addition. I will end this entry with proof, in the form of another of my so-simple-it's-not-even-a-recipe recipes:

Crocked Garlic and Beans

• Clean and rinse 1 pound of dried beans
• Peel however much garlic you want
• Put it all in a crock-pot with water
• Turn it on
• Wait

While you are waiting, decide whether you want to add anything else. You'll have hours to think of extra ingredients, such as: beer, salt, schmaltz, celery,... You should probably stop obsessing about bean cuisine right about now. It's unbecoming of simple staples, which have humble souls that are put off by high-falutingness (but tolerant of flatusness). Just let 'em cook until you are satisfied with their mushiness. And turn whatever epicurean inspiration that might strike toward something to go with your crock o beans. 

 

Heavy Nettle

Tongue-stinging goodness

Last year, I noticed a blogorrific frenzy over nettles, and I guess I joined in. This year, I hit them a little earlier, and they came easier. The cool thing about foraging a stinging weed is that nobody complains, no naturaestheticians upset that you've removed the scourge from trailside, no wildlife defenders upset at loss of something precious.


Like many weeds, nettles are precious if you know the rules for using them: protect yourself while harvesting, harvest early and young, and cook the irritant out. The harvest season is brief--over already down at sea level even up here on the 47th parallel--and so unless you only want to eat them for a week or so, you have to face up to the next rule: put some away.

Picking isn't hard. Except on your back, and on any skin you may leave exposed. If you go out early, picking before they reach 6 inches or so, before they start to stretch out, way prior to flowering. I use the light-touch theory of picking, which mounts to reaching down from the top and snapping the tip off. If it does not snap easily, you're beyond the young tender leaves; usually, I reach just below the first set of leaves that stick out sideways, below the liko, the emerging leaves in their bud. If they're higher than your boots, let them grow; they'll turn into fiber (the stalk was broken down into fiber for fishing lines, nets etc), or just live out the season and come back next year.

 Processing doesn't amount to much. Boil some water, dump in some nettles for a dozen or two seconds, and pull them out. I use a steamer that fits in m stock pot, so I can life the whole thing out and move on to the next step: run them steamin' leaves under cold water to stop them from cooking into mush. Save the boil water, and drink it as tea, or wash your hair with it..good things happen either way.

More than a lifetime supply, for most Americans

From there, it's a matter of storage. I stuff them into quart-sized bags, squeeze out the air, and pop 'em into the freezer. Later on, I may not eat a whole bag, but I can cut off however much I want and steam or stew, pesto-fy or stir fry, or otherwise cook to perfection. Season to taste, repeat. Seriously, repeat, because nettles are damn good for you, and don't taste nearly as nasty or grassy as some greens. 


I'll head out again, at a higher elevation. So far, though, the numbers are this: roughly two hours of picking yields two grocery bags of raw shoots, which turns into 6 quarts of blanched, frozen nettles, which should last for 12-24 meals. Shamefully, I drove to the park several blocks from home, so there's the cost of maybe 0.03 gallons of gas, but there's no cost otherwise. No fertilizer, no pesticides, no nuthin. Just greens.

 
 

Scrap Mustard

Now and then, the plague of near-empty jars and their litters of ziplocks rattling with yet un-et dry goods just gets out of hand. Before they lure in some hungrier critter, it's time to clean out.


But not throw out, if you can help it. So it was that I assembled assorted packets of mustard and poppy seed, two jugs' last glugs of vinegar, and a bottle of beer into a big-ass jar of mustard. It's the same 'run what ya got' spirit that gets credit or blame for  lot of my efforts, and which animated stock car racing back when it was with stock cars. And like racing's bootlegging roots, this recipe sneaks in some alcohol.

 Saying that I 'made mustard' is incredibly pretentious. The fact is that I poured liquid on seeds and later smashed it up. It being late and me being lazy (Lord, when will the hillbilly stereotypes end?), instead of a mortar and pestle I used a wee food processor, which is also more practical for small batch production that doesn't merit a stompin' party (which is like with grapes, but wearing pointy cowboy boots). 

 Not rocket science. Give it a day to soak, and then mush it up. Add a little salt if you want. I have enough of the basic mustard and experiment with other flavors, maybe puree or pound some to a finer texture, maybe do something completely different. Then feed it to people. So I guess it is some kind of science. 


 There is also faith, that some permutation of this concoction will taste pretty good. If I were a proper food blogger, I'd have gotten fancy vinegar, maybe some wine, and definitely not have used that photo with the plastic jugs. But I'm just a son of a scientist and an Appalachian, a squatter in epicurean territory: no exquisite photography, no mustard lore, not even a great how-to or recipe. Even my blog layout is inexpertly tweaked prefabbery.


 But the mustard is good, and cheap, and will take up space in the fridge til it's gone. The recipe's right after one last photo, illustrating the finished product in all it's baby poopish glory.

 

Scrap Mustard
 Get a jar, and fill it a third of the way up with:

• Mustard Seeds - as many colors as you have, living in harmony
• Poppy Seeds - a couple of good fistfuls of the ones I grew a couple years ago

 Then, mix up some type of liquid, enough to pour into the jar til it's 2.3 full. For instance:

• One  12 bottle of stout 
• Several ounces of the leftovers from bottles of apple cider vinegar and white vinegar.

 You can probably do better than that last ingredient, and maybe you like some other kind of beer better. Pour it in the jar and let it sit for 24 hours. Check it in the meantime and add liquid if the seeds aren't covered. When the time is up (or, a day or two later when you pull it out of the fridge where you put it when you realized you weren't gonna get around to it), mush it until its reached your ideal smoothness. I like the way the whole seeds pop whe  you bite them, and even held some aside during the food processing, but the machine is small and weak, and I didn't have to worry about it ending up too homogenous.  


 

Hunting for So-called 'Gatherers'

You cannot be a couch potato and get cous potatos

I think maybe the wild celery is already peeking through snow along the middle Columbia, and the other day I saw nettles delicately shouldering their way up through San Juan forest litter the other day, so the season for foraging has begun. Shoots and roots, then greens and seeds, and finally berries...Washington offers an abundance.

Years ago, as an anthropology student, I learned about the hunter-gatherers, and was told that the peoples of the Pacific Northwest were unusual in having developed Chiefdoms and Stratified Societies based on Hunting and Gathering alone, that their weirdly rich environment enabled Social Complexity without resorting to Agriculture. Textbooks may not have capitalized all of these terms, but you better believe that the Discipline of Anthropology did.

Reality always outstrips Theory where Complexity is concerned, and so it is with the Gatherers. I knew this from Hawai`i days, when I realized that beyond the Agricultural Fields recognized by explorers and anthropologists were surrounded by concentric ripples of Informal Horticulture crucial to long-term Survival...Hedges in every sense of the word. And so it is that the Gatherers of the Northwest, far from being passive beneficiaries of kind Nature, had the system wired.

Harvest roots at the time when seeds are ready to produce the next generation, and aerate the soil in the process. Blind luck, or Cultivation?

Pry out individual roots instead of ripping up acres of sod. Savage lassitude, or Sustainable Harvest?

Burn prairies to keep the trees at bay, fertilize the soil, and maintain habitat for tasty ungulates. Primitive pyromania, or Sophisticated land management?

Producing food without massive inputs, dependence on trans-continental transportation, or global corporations. Witless subsistence, or Wise food policy?

Just asking.