Eating with the Seasons

Finding Local Food in San Francisco

My book club just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors. The book is about her family's journey into local foods - either grown by them or grown in their region. They live in Virginia, where they have seasons, so the book is a month by month tour of what happens on a farm. Some sections made me downright homesick. Others were inspirational. The story is peppered with bits about the industrial food system, that in turn evoked anger, sadness, desperation and hope. One major take-a-way for me was how important it is to support local, organic farmers, and eat what the seasons bring. I new this before, and now I understand the theory and practice behind it more concretely. Here's a quick list of reasons to eat local.

Over the course of reading the book, I began exploring more local food options for us, specifically what we can get in grain and meat. Along the way, I found many other wonderful CSAs (community supported agriculture). Here are some of my findings.

Let's toast to protein!
Meat CSAs in the Bay Area This is the best guide that I found for pasture finished meat CSAs.
Frazier lane organics has organic beef and pork that can be ordered.
Places to buy Hertiage Turkeys in San Francisco Bay Area
Mary's Turkeys is actually close to SF, relatively. I'll get one of her turkeys for Thanksgiving this year. She also raises ducks and chickens.
Wise Food Ways has another listing of local meats.

Grains
It was a bit harder to find local grains. Eatwell Farm sells wheat berries at local farmer's markets and you can use their mill to make flour.

Windborne Farm is in far north California, which isn't exactly local (closer than Nebraska though), and they have a CSA that has a delivery in Berkeley. She offers a wide variety of dried beans, legumes and grains. Many of the varieties are not commonly available to the consumer; a majority of them will be grown out from a few seeds saved by grass-roots seed banks. The grain shares are delivered to your drop site monthly, not weekly. To sign up for the grain shares, contact Jennifer Green at: (530) 468-4340, 4932 Scott River Rd, Fort Jones, CA 96032. I've signed up.

Produce
Vegetables and fruit CSAs are definitely the easiest to come by here. In fact, there are so many of them sometimes it's hard to choose. I've been a member of Eating with the Seasons for about five years now. They have the best strawberries ever! Besides the veggies and produce, I can also get eggs, chicken (occasionally), local olive oil, and fair trade coffee. Plus, they deliver to work.

Om Organics has the most comprehensive list of CSAs I've seen.
Live Power Community Farm delivers to the Presidio. They have a lot of partnerships with other farms, and you can also sign up for meat, grain, fruit, and rice.
Eat Well Farm has deliveries in San Francisco and the East Bay, but many drop off locations have a waiting list.
Full Belly Farm has a lot of Berkeley deliveries.
Terra Firma Farm
Farm Fresh to You has home deliveries.
The Berkeley Ecology Center has a pretty good list of CSAs too.
Wise Food Ways has another list of local CSAs.

So, what is permaculture anyway?

I took an urban gardening class today through the Solar Living Institute based on permaculture concepts. It was very interesting and inspiring. After a day of information intake, I'm usually overwhelmed, but today I'm not. I'm excited about all that there is to learn, and thrilled to notice that I have a solid foundation.

So, what is permaculture anyway? It's a holistic approach to working with nature that integrates consideration of the earth, consideration of people and being fair socially, economically and to future generations. This is very similar to the Blue Movement, but is more concrete in how it can be applied. Unlike many other fields, permaculture has a set of guiding principles that helps you think about the project at hand.

One major principle is efficiency, which manifests in many ways, including:
-No til gardening by heavy mulching and composting
-Plant selection for your climate, which for us is drought tolerant for less watering
-Planting edible perennials so that each year your garden feeds you more with less work

Basically, putting a little thought and effort into the planning and creation of your garden so that only a little maintenance is required.

Another concept is creating ecosystems in your garden. This is done by planting many different plants together that get along - tall and short, shade and light, plants that repel each other pest's, plants that pull up nutrients from the deep soil for other plants to use. This ties into efficiency.

There's a lot more to this, and there are lots of resources to learn more. That was one of the great things about the class. The teacher cited many, many books, websites and organizations that are available in the bay area. It makes me really glad to be here now.

Here's a list of the resources from my notes.

BOOKS
Gaia's Garden
Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer
The Soil Food Web
The Earth Moved
Ann LoveJoy's Organic Garden Design School
Food Not Lawns
Guerrilla Gardening
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands
Author Ruth Stout
Cornacopia
Golden Gate Gardening - a great book for gardening in San Francisco (Ynnej, can I have it back now?)

ORGANIZATIONS
Back Yard Orchard Culture
Village Harvest
GreenCollarJobs.com
Alemany Farm is the largest urban farm. It happens to be about a mile from my house.
Ploughshares Nursery in Alameda
StopWaste.org
Urban Permaculture Guild
Solar Living Institute


Other resources I've found:
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Valley of Heart's Delight run by a good friend of ours Susan Stansbury. They focus on reconnecting to local, seasonal, organic food on the Peninsula.
Urban Sprouts is an organization in San Francisco that brings gardens to schools, classrooms and plates.
Hidden Villa is a beautiful organic farm in Los Altos on the peninsula. They have a CSA program and a summer camp for urban youth and a hostel in the winter.
The Global Warming Diet written by a good friend of ours and a fabulous chef!
Ecology Center - does many, many cool projects, including farmers markets, an eco-house and demonstration garden in Berkeley
Slow Food Nation is a week long slow food extravaganza here in SF - all the information, food, and parties you could ever want. It's hosted by the US Chapter of Slow Food International. Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Three Stone Hearth is a worker-owned cooperative, offering
nutrient dense foods to homes and families around the San Francisco Bay Area. You subscribe, they make healthy food, you pick the food you want from the menu for the week, you pick up or they deliver (which costs more of course). Yum!
Food Declaration - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture which will call for healthy food, farms, and communities will be read aloud in a ceremony at Slow Food Nation on August 28th, in the Rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. Roots of Change will be working with Slow Food and other NGOs for the next nine months to collect hundreds of thousands more signatures using face-to-face meetings and the World Wide Web. These signatures will be delivered, along with a set of policy recommendations to policy makers in Washington in the Fall of 2009.
RSF Social Finance provides socially responsible investors, donors, for-benefit organizations, and social enterprises innovative investing, lending, and philanthropic services to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability.
UpStream21 puts financial resources into small, successful, eco-friendly, privately owned companies, such as small farms and timber companies
The American Food System - A Commonwealth Club panel
Local Harvest helps you find farmers markets in your area no matter where you are in the US.

And because I could do this all night, here's one last place where you can go to find all kinds of organizations of all varieties - WiserEarth with WISER standing for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, is the first online database of all issues and organizations doing good work and it can be edited by the community.

Some Tips and Ideas from the class:
Duck eat slugs
Call local tree trimmers and ask for their wood chips. They're often happy to give them to you for mulch because otherwise they often have to pay to dispose of them.
Consider turning your swimming pool into a swimming pond. There's a company doing this in LA.
Remineralize your soil with rock dust.
Comfrey and Nettle are nutrient rich plants.
Mushrooms clean water and can act as natural filtration systems and give you yummy food!
Throw seed balls into vacant lots to encourage plants.
Prune the top 1/3 of your fruiting trees in the summer, after the tree is done bearing fruit, for fruit trees that have grown too tall to harvest by hand.
Try nasturium leaf pesto.
Make a potato column.
Mine the group genius.



Whew.
Ok. I'm a little overwhelmed now. Still excited, but maybe just a little tired.
When I feel like there's so much to learn and do that I don't know where to start, I remember that I'll start where I'm at with what I have and who I'm with.
That makes it doable.

Please let me know your favorite gardening and permaculture resources.

I'm going to pick the raw food recipes I'm going to make tomorrow. More on that later...

What's your PSP?

Blue.
Sky.
Water.
Wal-mart...

A few years ago, Adam Werbach (see previous post) began working with Wal-Mart. Some said that Wal-mart had coaxed him over to the dark side of the force. But who better to help one of the largest companies in the world become more sustainable than a die-hard environmentalist? Yes, Wal-mart has made a commitment to sustainability. They set out three goals:
Produce zero waste
Be powered by renewable energy
Sell only green products

This is huge.

HUGE!

When Wal-mart says jump, suppliers JUMP. So, for one of the largest retailers in the world to begin greening its operations has an enormous positive impact. It creates markets for sustainable projects and green businesses that otherwise wouldn't think about it. Did you know that Wal-mart is the largest retailer of regional, organic produce? Think about that.

But making their products more green was only one step. They realized that it was also important to bring sustainability into the awareness and action of their employees and then their customers. To do this they implemented a Personal Sustainability Project.

From Adam's Commonwealth Club speech on April 10, 2008:

At the heart of the project was a simple voluntary commitment that we called a PSP, or a personal sustainability practice.

What are the qualities of a PSP? It:

Sustains the planet,
Makes you happy,
Affects the community,
Repeatable,
Takes visible action

Examples: Bike to work. Park in the spot that's farthest from where you're going. Change your lights bulbs to CFLs. Care for a park....The behavioral idea behind PSP is a simple one we call nano-practices. Nano-practices are the thousands of tiny things you do each day that make up your lifestyle. How you tie your shoes, the type of shoes you wear, your choice of socks, how you fold your socks, and whether you wear your shoes indoors. Instead of trying to change the big things about someone's identity -- whether they're a Democrat or Republican, for example -- we start by finding daily or recurring practices that can express his or her values. A personal sustainability practice, at its most basic level, is something that's a repeated action that's good for you, your community, and the planet.

My first PSP is to eat only fair trade, organic chocolate. I've been doing this pretty well for a few months now, which is great for a recovering candy addict.

My current PSP is to bike or walk one time a week when I would drive. My bike is pumped up and ready to go. I've been to the store once on it. Luckily, this is challenging because I don't drive much to begin with.

What's your PSP?

Canning with April - part deax

April and I did our summer canning last Sunday. In total, we put up:
-Applesauce - 4 quarts and 8 pints
-Tomatoes - 3 quarts
-Strawberry Jam - 5 pints (we ran out of half-pints) and two half-pints
-Blackberry Jam - 8 half-pints
-Peach marmalade - 10 half-pints
This is about twice what we put up last year.

With the little prep I did on Saturday, we spent five hours and 10 pounds of sugar on the production. It was fun. The house smelled like a candy factory.

Made with Love

This is a non-gluten, non-dairy, non-sugar strawberry "cheesecake." You may wonder how something can be at all good without flour, dairy or sugar, but the universal review is that it is. Just try it. It's easier than it sounds.

"cheesecake"
1 pound raw cashews, soaked for 12 hours (put in a bowl with water 1-2 inches over the nuts)
1 cup raw coconut oil
20 ripe strawberries
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 pinches sea salt
4 tbsp agave nector or honey
1/2 cup almond milk (made fresh) or 1 cup coconut water (what I used)

Rinse and drain cashews. Place teh cashews in the food processor until the batch turns to butter. Place one cup of coconut water into blender, then the topped strawberries, followed by the salt, honey, coconut oil, then the cashews - blending along the way, stirring towards the end, until it forms a creamy thick blend.

Original Crust
1/4 pound each of golden flax seeds, buckwheat and a nut of your choice
15 medjool pitted dates
Place all in a food processor for four minutes. Press into pan.

Velma's crust
Enough ground nut flour to cover the bottom of the pan, pressed in with about a 1/4 cup of melted coconut oil.

Pour the "cheesecake" into the pan over the crust. Cover and freeze for five hours. Serve with fresh cut fruit on the side.

Recipe courtesy of Chef Kristi-Sue Boone of Bloom Cafe in Yogi Times July 2007.

It's raw vegan bliss.


Really.

What's for dinner

Every time I experience a period during which I can't cook, such as before, during and after a vacation, or during the few weeks before the annual meeting, immediately following said period, I do an immense bit of cooking. We just got back from vacation on Monday, so here's my last 24 hours or so.

Thursday evening
Massive grocery shopping trip

Friday after work
Make dinner - pork chops, sauteed zucchini, and corn on the cob
Put dishes away
Put laundry in the dryer
Make 3 quarts* (six servings) of fruit smoothies for next week, complete with green algae and protein powder, three bananas, most of one cantelope, a pound of blueberries, and 1 apple.
Make a better than pumpkin (butternut squash) pie
Make carrot cupcakes
Wash the dishes
Pet the cat
Soak beans*
Soak rice*
Soak nuts*

Saturday
Try my smoothie, adding flax seed, cod liver oil and multi-vitamin powder*
Slow roast nuts*
Cook beans in crock pot with a dried chili pepper
Roast beets
Bake bacon
Talk to Grandma
Talk to Dad
Fold laundry
Type up recipes for library cook book
Make burger patties to freeze
Make cream cheese icing
Whip cream
Make hot cereal for lunch
Make kale chips*
Make kale salad*
Ice cupcakes
Put laundry away
Cat Nap with cat
Harvest potatoes - 1 gallon!
Pick green beans - a handful
Dig up garlic - six heads
Pick lettace - a big bowl full
Trim garden
Pick and compost plums (They're ornamental.)
Shower
Have a cup of tea
Eat some sliced turkey
Make rice
Hard Boil a dozen eggs*
Have beans, rice, eggs and kale salad for dinner
Read two magazines
Make a cup of cocoa (from my own mix)
Watch Babette's Feast, a movie starring food
Enjoy a piece of pie with whipped cream
Post on blog.
Pet the cat.

It's now 9pm, and I'm sure I'll be in bed by 10.

Tomorrow I'm going to put a beef roast and potatoes in the crock pot, make salsa, and maybe sew. Oh, and I still need to unpack.

You may wonder why I made so much food. Well, I like to eat, and I like to eat good food, and I eat a lot. I also like to make dinner when I get home for work during the week, which is way easier, when I have a base of supplies in the fridge to start with.

*I went to see a nutritionist this week. She gave me some good suggestions for eating better (more protein), some cooking tips, and some yummy recipes.

Soaking nuts and grains helps dissolve an outer layer of something that makes them easier to digest.
The smoothie was actually quite good and filling.

Kale Chips
Surprisingly good
Cut up a bunch of kale into small strips.
Bake for 30 minutes at 300 degrees F.
They turn into crispy little things that even Mark will eat.

Kale Salad
Cut up a bunch of kale into small strips.
Toss with two cloves chopped garlic and 1-3 tbsp each of olive oil, bragg's amino acids (tastes like soy sauce but better for you), and rice vinegar.
The longer it marinates, the better it tastes.

BLUE

AKA The Evolution of an Environmentalist - Part 3 continued from "The Evolution of an Environmentalist - Part 2"

To understand what the BLUE movement is, we need to understand what it grows out of - dead environmentalism. Environmentalism is dead because it's approach is outdated, uninspiring and not up to scale for the challenge we face today - global climate change. Traditionally, environmentalism has isolated a problem, such as air pollution, created a technical solution, such as emissions standards for vehicles, and worked to get it turned into law. This doesn't work very well when the challenge, climate change, is the result of our entire way of life. Plus, environmentalism has said "No, No, No" and "Don't, Don't, Don't" for everything from shopping to driving to eating, basically living in our culture. This doesn't inspire and, instead, sets up a seemingly unattainable standard, leading us to give up before we start.

Ok. So what is the BLUE movement?

From Adam Werbach's speech "The Birth of Blue" at the Commonwealth Club on 12 April 2008:

As vast and common as the ocean, BLUE is a platform for sustainability that goes beyond the deep, beautiful green of environmentalism. Green puts the planet at the center of the dialogue. BLUE puts people at the center.... Green is the beating heart of the emerging BLUE movement. Green represents the simple and inarguable wisdom of ecology: that all things are connected. BLUE brings together a broader set of human concerns, from practice to price, from nature to society. BLUE integrates all four streams of sustainability: social, cultural, economic and environmental. BLUE puts the way we treat ourselves and each other at the center of our focus....

There are three desired outcomes for the BLUE movement. First, to measurably improve the quality of life of people who join. Second, to engage as many people as possible in the effort, and third, to increase the effectiveness of their activism. The primary tactic is getting one billion people to create their own personal sustainability practices.

Remember, when I wrote that I didn't get into environmentalism for the environment, but for the people? This is what I was talking about.

So, what does "being blue" actually mean? What does some one who's "BLUE" do?
Since, it's my computer curfew, the answer to that question will have to come another night.
Next up, PSP and the big box...

It's my birthday!

I don't normally acknowledge my birthday to myself or anyone else, but it is a big deal. It is the anniversary of the day that I started breathing oxygen. It marks that I survived and flourished through another year. And this year, it's my 30th anniversary, which I'm really excited about. The 20s were great and all, well, actually... they weren't always so great, but they got me here and I like here - a lot. I'm healthier and happier than I've ever been. I love my life.

To celebrate, last night I copied a friend (thank you, L!) and collected the cards and gifts I've received and put them on the table with my birthday flowers (thank you, Gilby and S!) so that I could enjoy them first thing this morning. I'm currently taking a break from the scavenger hunt that Mark has designed for me to find my present b/c I can't seem to find the next clue. (Quiet, you hecklers! ;-) I'll make myself a yummy fried ham and eggs and potatoes breakfast soon, work in the garden a little, cut out my next applique project and then wake Mark up so we can go on our redwood hike at Butano (thank you, SRL!). We'll eat dinner out on the coast and spend some time at the beach (thank you, Frays!) with a few good friends.

Life is good.

Oh, and isn't it cool that I turn 30 on Friday, the 13th, one of my favorite dates ever?

From the mouths of babes...

The secret of eternal youth is arrested development. - Alice Roosevelt Longworth. (Eventually dubbed "Washington's other monument," Teddy Roosevelt's rambunctious daughter raised hell in her hometown...for nearly nine decades.

Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin. - Denise McCluggage - one of the world's fastest women on (race car) wheels

I am prepared to sacrifice every so-called privilege I possess in order to have a few rights. - Ines Milholland - Vassar girl who staged a women's rights rally...in 1909

The great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do. - Margaret Anderson - leading literary light of the early 1900s

A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. - Benazir Bhutto - Former Pakistani Prime Minister and prisoner of state

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. - Virginia Woolf - bisexual Bloomsbury novelist

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. - Charlotte Bronte - author of Jane Eyre

Men and women are like right and left hands: it doesn't make sense not to use both. - Jeannette Rankin - first woman to serve in Congress

Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, that are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid voume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eyes bright with battle. - Catherine Drinker Bowen - professional biographer

To be perfectly honest, what I'm really thinking about are dollar signs. Tonya Harding

I'm not one of those little things. I have a butt and boobs. It's great. I sometimes tell people I weigh ten pounds more that I actually do. - Courtney Love

A Bitch takes shit from no one. You may not like her, but you cannot ignore her. - Joreen - one of the biggest bitches in the Sixties sisterhood movement

Strong women leave big hickeys. - Madonna

Total absence of humor renders life impossible. - Colette, author

I've always said: I'm happy to take my clothes off if the man takes his off. If you're willing to let him run around with his willy hanging out, I'm perfectly happy to run around in the buff. But nobody ever makes that deal with me. - Michelle Pfeiffer

It's like magic. When you live by yourself, all your annoying habits are gone! - Merrill Markoe

I never said, I want to be alone. I only said, I want to be left alone. There is all the difference. - Greta Garbo

I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terrible what I will at all. - Catherine II of Russia

No man ever prospered in the world without the consent and cooperation of his wife. - Abigail Adams - Dear Abby, aka "Mrs. President"

A gentlemen opposed to their enfranchisement once said to me, "Women have never produced anything of value to the world." I told him the chief product of the women had been the men, and left it to him to decide whether the product was of any value. - Anna Shaw, minister

Men are more often defeated because of their own clumsiness that because of a woman's virtue. - Ninon De Lenclos - Seventeenth-century courtesan whose great gift to her fellow French women was teaching young nobles how to make nooky nicely

How My Garden Grows

My garden is very happy. The peas, cilantro and chard are delicious. Next up is lettuce and tomatoes. The poppies are blooming like crazy. We have a crop of other wildflowers, nasturiums and potatoes coming up too. We've planted a few vines to start leafing out the fence. Mark keeps the patio and walk tidy. And we finally got a little table and stable chairs for somewhere to rest our drinks!

I had no idea how much I would love fresh cilantro. I made salsa a few days ago with it.

Salsa Fresca Tradicional Recipe
Finely chop:
2-3 ripe, local farm grown, heirloom tomatoes
1/4 onion
2-3 sprigs cilantro (use scissors)

Sprinkle 2-3 pinches of salt.
Squeeze on 1/4 lime.
Add 1 tbs sugar if needed. (I didn't need it, because the tomatoes were sweet enough.)
Stir.

I used to HATE cilantro and anything that went along with it - ie mexican food. I'm really glad taste buds get refreshed every seven years, because now I enjoy mexican one-two times a week - either at home or out.

The diseased australian tree has finished dropping it really sticky pollen for this year, so we will no longer have a cat with filthy paws coming in all the time.


Orson is still loving the garden. He goes out all day and then comes is and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Except when he's on crack - or maybe that's the cat nip. I planted cat nip out in the yard a few weeks ago, it was lush and about eight inches high. I checked yesterday and it was a nub. If Orson ate it, it's the first time he's ever been interested in cat nip. We've put it out for him multiple times with no effect.

Here's a couple of pictures of a tired kitty!