Like home-sickness, but with dirt under my nails

I am planning a class presentation for the course I'm taking.. a 10 minute mini-lesson on whatever you want. I'm doing 'Advantages of Eating Local Seasonal Vegetables' of course. Searching for content caused me to stumble on several cool bloggers, like My Tiny Plot and Eat Local Northwest. AND to have summer garden-sickness, from sorting through pics.. almost time to start sprouting for next summer! Well, that's a lie, who am I kidding I'm in Calgary.

Ah well, time to turn my mind to the present, to try whackiness such as Old-Fashioned Ginger Ale (fermented like kombucha), and milling my own wheat. Because why do it the easy way! A friend gave me an extra flour mill she had and I could hardly hide my glee at being given a tool I had hoped to have at some point, but seemed too expensive to buy.

Advantages to milling your own wheat:
1) Cheaper. Yes wheat is arguably quite cheap, but organic can be pricey.
2) Tastes better.
3) Stores better. Whole grains store much longer than flour.

Now all I need is a full time baker to make the bread and I'll be set..

Chard pie

I actually buckled and bought chard in the store, even though it was trucked from California (forgive me birds and bees...). But we got great mileage out of it, and I finally made a recipe I'd been meaning to try forever. I modded this recipe, since I didn't have any feta, and used a bit of 3 yr old cheddar (there is no going back btw..) and some soft tofu for protein. Don't be scared, it was pretty good. I just upped the salt in the recipe to account for the salt that would have come from the feta and that was that.
Phyllo is fun to work with, silly and time consuming but it looks impressive when it's done. I figure it takes as long as it would to make my own crust, so there you go. Here is our pretty pie before it was devoured. Note the rather awesome Battle of Britain tea towel courtesy of Evan's mom.

Cheap Vegetable Gardener Blog

A blogger after my own heart! I'm going to have to keep an eye on this one for good ideas heading into spring. Check this project out: a cheap way to make a grow box for starting seeds using LED Christmas lights. Clever..

I dream of greenie

Seriously, this is a dreamy greenhouse. So beautiful.

Good news, bad news..

OK, bad news first. It's easy to be discouraged by the number of stories about food systems collapsing due to monoculture cultivation and other destructive agricultural practices. Take Why Bananas are a Parable for Our Times by Johann Hart for example, a feel-good story full of illegal coups, poison and death. Sigh.

I also heard from a friend that bee keepers she knows in B.C. are anticipating a catastrophic collapse of North American colonies in the next two years.

This is the problem with the easy access to news and information we have these days, after 5 stories like Bananas, who wouldn't want to curl up in the corner and give up. I try to remind myself that the internets isn't the only source of information in my life, and the day to day information I receive is pretty good.. Right now, I eat well, and live well. That is a privilege, no doubt. If I value it, then I should fight for it, even if the only way I can do that right now is to pay attention to what I consume. I am encouraged by stories like Will salmon be back in 2009? by Jacoba Charles, and people like Taras Grescoe. Here's what he said in a recent interview about his new book, Bottomfeeder: How to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood:

"I was getting sick of food writing and of writing food porn. I thought the form was shot. There are the Anthony Bourdains having these "to die for" meals and having a great time, but no one's really talking about what's at the end of the fork and where it comes from. There's this food-writing convention where you're not supposed to think about the origins of your food and suspend any judgment against people who eat endangered songbirds, or whatever. It's been a real privilege to be able to write articles about this kind of thing. But after a while, you know what? You're contributing to the impoverishment of the world. In a way this [book] is a bit of a "F**k you" to the food-writing world."

Love it.