Suburban Entwife

I was going to track what food I ate this week, and probably next week as well, just so I could have a good idea of what bulk stores and fresh foods we actually eat and how much of them we go through on a regular basis. But this week was evidently not a good week for it. Between trying to clean up a disaster-area apartment and write a paper and it being all hot and stifling here, I’ve had difficulty just getting around to cooking anything. Last night, despite having just brought home a lovely farmshare, neither of us were capable of making dinner, and we had to pay the nice Thai people to bring us dinner in little boxes. Oh, well. After Tuesday, it’ll all be downhill in terms of coursework, and Ben is being a wonderful beloved and organizing the apartment.

And it’s a bit odd tracking this stuff in high summer anyway, because optimally we should be eating a minimal amount of grains and beans with lots and lots of fresh vegetables and a bit of tofu and eggs and such. Ideally, I should have been tracking this in winter when we’re at peak stored-food-consumption anway.

Three days ago I washed and chopped up a smallish chinese cabbage, stuffed it into an empty half-gallon kimchi container, added some ginger and a small cayenne pepper, and then poured over a brine solution (3.5T salt to 6 cups water).  I put a bag of water over the top to keep out oxygen and it sat in a corner of the kitchen.  It is now kimchi!  That was evidently not really enough ginger or pepper, but it makes a pleasant mild pickle, highly suitable for throwing into stirfries and such.  It will stay in the fridge and continue to ferment at a manageably slow pace.  Without the onion (the recipe I followed called for scallions), it totally lacks the unpleasant acridness that makes me unable to handle large quantities of standard kimchi.  I will be making this a lot.

Yesterday started the first day of Sharon’s sustainable food storage class. Her suggested goal, which seems both highly useful and doable, is three month’s worth of stored food. Using the handy Mormon food storage calculator, two people for three months need:

150 pounds of grains: done! We actually might have a bit more than that, especially since I’d like to add a big bag of jasmine rice and some quick-cooking pasta.

30 pounds of beans (and TVP, etc): We’re at least halfway there; I need to weigh some of the containers and find out how much is in them. I should add a bit more than that since I’m not going to add the dried milk the calculator wants. Maybe throw in some of those local kippers and/or peanut butter to join the baked beans as quick protein-rich food.

15 pounds of oils: We have almost no stored fat except coconut milk. I’ll pick up a couple of those big things of oil…this isn’t so much of a priority, since neither of us really need quite that much concentrated calories, but so long as we’re not storing absurd amounts, we will actually go through it before it goes bad.

30 pounds of sweeteners: Evidently, Mormons like cookies. But we do actually have that much stored sweetener, assuming we’re ok with most of it being jam. And looking at the way we cook, using strawberry jam for most of the things we use sugar for would actually work pretty well, even for savory things. In curries and things it would just give a nice fruity overtone like mango.

28 gallons of water: Actually, this is just two week’s worth, but if we’re without water for three months, something is badly enough wrong that we probably should have evacuated before then. The stored water in the fridge is probably no longer good; it’s just being used as thermal mass to help keeps things cold. I’m going to get some good sturdy containers — apparently milk bottles tend to break eventually, which sounds messy, as well as dangerous if you’re actually depending on them for water.

We’re good for salt, and should pick up a big thing of baking soda, some vinegar, and maybe another tin of baking powder.

This doesn’t include vegetables and fruit (other than jam) or vitamins. A couple of big bottles of multivitamins will be an excellent idea. I have some canned collards which can be added to stews and casseroles and such for green vegetablyness and calcium, but I might want to pick up some calcium supplements as well. Most vegetables and fruit will come from the CSA, but I also have a couple cans of pumpkin, some yams, and some tomatoes. We have a box of raisins and some home-canned fruit left over from last year (note to self: you enjoy applesauce but do not actually eat it on any kind of regular basis).

Equipment: A solar oven and one of those little indoor-use sterno stoves will be an excellent plan. The solar oven will be generally useful in the summer so that we don’t have to turn on the stove when it’s broiling out, but will be less useful in the even of, say, an ice storm. A Very Good water filter is also on the shopping list, because then stored water becomes less of a critical issue.
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Why are we doing this?

Well, first off, because Sharon said so. ;-) But seriously, there are several not-too-unlikely situations where having stored food will be very, very useful:

1. This household consists entirely of absentminded graduate students. Stored food = fewer last-minute grocery expeditions.

2. New England is not an especially disaster-prone area, but there have been ice storms that cut off power and make travel dangerous for up to two or three weeks. There is also a non-trivial likelihood of some sort of flu or other pandemic, which could cause quarantines of a month or more.

3. The economy is nose-diving and food prices are rising. If we can afford to stock up on high-quality organic grain, that will benefit the local food economy while ensuring that we buy stuff now, rather than later when it costs twice as much. Relatedly, while we’re both fairly well-off for grad students, and have savings and parents and such, this is a hedge against unexpected bills and price jumps so that there doesn’t come a month where we have to chose between going to the grocery store and refilling the oil tank or paying the rent.

4. In any of these emergency situations, there will probably be other people in the same boat. If we are more prepared than is perhaps strictly necessary, we will be able to help other people. If the canned goods are approaching their sell-by date and we haven’t eaten them, we can donate them to a food bank.

Dinner tonight was roasted pattypan squash, salad turnip (just one huge one), scallions (all from the CSA), and tofu (locally made from nonlocal beans), with nonlocal olive oil and salt. Very tasty — I like the way the turnip turned out when roasted. We made some chapatis to go with them out of local homeground spelt flour and a bit of oil. Lesson of the day: do not turn on the oven in that heat. And if you absolutely must, do not turn on the ceiling fan in the kitchen. It just whips the hot air around, making it feel sort of like some sort of desert windstorm.

I also froze some bok choy and started some experimental kimchi. And I have an 8-10 page paper due next Tuesday. I forsee lots of caffeine in my future. On the plus side, censorship issues in Israel turns out to be a really interesting topic.

I spent most of this past Friday cooking.  Friends came over for an excellent weekend of much discussions, and I had the whole day off, so there needed to be pie.  I made a butternut squash pie out of one of the butternuts from December and a pecan pie with pecans from a family farm in Texas and some of our local buckwheat honey.  It gave it this wonderful dark molassesy taste, and was dentist-defyingly sticky.  The butternut pie was a little too strongly squash-flavored for my taste, but wasn’t bad, and other people seemed to like it.  I also made challah, and Ben made breakfast bars.  And then we went to the store and got more flour and sugar :-)  

I made the pies while reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the Post-Apocalyptic Book Club…I have no idea why I liked that book at age 12.  Realize that I was almost entirely politically oblivious until early college and thus most of the political intrigue went completely over my head.  The political intrigue was *most of the book* and I’ve never been a huge fan of laser gun space opera.  *shrug*  I liked it then, I like it now, and that’s really the important part.  The women are less annoyingly objectified than in many of Heinlein’s books.

In other news, our CSA is teaming up with a start-up bee farm to do honey shares!  The hives are near the farm so that the bees pollinate the farm crops, the shareholders get to learn about beekeeping and can buy honey shares, and everyone is happy. :-)  Except maybe the bees, who might feel a bit miffed at having their honey taken away.   Or, at least, they might if bees were capable of doing “miffed”.

Ben and I just came home from seeing WALL-E.  It has temporarily restored my faith in humanity.  I have been walking around petting plants and saying “Directive!”.  I may have more profound things to say about it at some point, but meanwhile, directive!

When we went for the pickup  yesterday, the lower CSA fields were still a bit damp, but nothing looked actually flooded.  The lettuces were a bit squashed, a few branches were broken off of tomato plants, and our lovely little squashes had little hail-craters in them.  But everything should recover nicely.  Some of our yard potatoes are broken, but they seem to be perking up again.  I’ll stake them up.

It is torrentially raining, thundering, the wind is blowing so hard that it’s sometimes hard to see out the window, and half-inch hail is falling.  Our potatoes are flattened, but don’t actually look broken.  It seems to be somewhat letting up as I type this, so hopefully I’ll be able to go back to work before too long. (I went home for lunch.)  And I hope the farm is ok.

I’m now keeping track of consumer goods more exactly for Riot goals — the 90% target is $1000 per year, which works out to a little over $80/month. This is including all types of “stuff”, other than food, education, and medical costs. Used goods count as 10% of the original cost, since most of the environmental impact went to making them in the first place. I’m not sure how I’m going to track event-type costs…I think I’ll document them anyway and then decide what to do with them.

So, for June I spent $158, on some much-needed clothing and used books. That’s about 18% of US average and was, I think, more money than I usually spend. I’ll see how things go for the rest of the year; I started off July with buying two dozen canning jars.

I’m not sure whether I’ll have time for more completely-local meals, so I might as well write up the pancakes I had for breakfast yesterday and today:

Home-ground spelt flour (spelt from Wood Prairie Farm in Maine) combined with NH eggs and nonlocal baking powder made a lovely batter, fried with some nonlocal oil.  I alternated spreading them with homemade strawberry jam and local honey.  A lovely way to start the day :-)

Question for you OLS New England folks: has anyone discovered a source of local (unfermented) grape juice?  It must exist…once they’re ripe, I’m going to ask if the person with the grape arbor down the street actually does anything with them.