Food Nerd Odyssey

Persimmon and pomegranate tasting

 

Hauling pomegranates away by the bushel

Bombloads of grapes

Olive tree or banyan tree?

Understand your bread

Big chestnut burrs

$50 worth of chestnuts?

Baby chestnut trees

The cornucopia

I’m bitter like an uncured olive

During a field trip to Duarte Nursery I found some amazing Central Valley Olive trees lining the parking lot. Laden with large fruit never before seen by my coastal Californian eyes. I picked the plump round miracles off the trees like a madman.

When I got home I googled olive curing, found a large jar, put enough salt in it to float an egg, shoved the olives in, and put them in a cupboard. Now I just need to wait! A loooong time.

Speaking of bitter tree crops you have to process, I gathered a few pocketfuls of acorns over at Windrose Farm, ground them in a blender and leached them in the toilet tank.

I boiled them in water for 15 minutes and then put the water and acorn mixture in the freezer.

After a couple of days I took it out and made :

ACORN & EGG BREAKFAST

For this I have on hand cold boiled potatoes. Make

sure the potatoes are cold, if they are warm they’ll

mush.

Sauté 3 Tbs. chopped onion with two chopped cold

potatoes in 2 Tbs. vegetable oil. Add 1/4 cup leached,

cooked, cooled and strained acorns*, and 3-4 beaten

eggs (or egg whites). Mix together then top with

shredded cheese and cover. When cheese is melted

it’s done.

From Acorns and Eat ‘Em by Suellen Ocean.

Cooking the recipe

This was the best breakfast I’ve had in a long time, even from a restaurant! If I were to start a wild foods greasy spoon, this would definitely be a featured menu item! I think I am going to gather acorns for many years to come just so I can make this dish.

Bizarre Fruits of the World

If you can correctly guess what this uncommon edible fruit it is, I will give you an insanely awesome back rub.

Coming soon:

Updates on my food forest work and my greywater work!

Cornucopias

jujube

prickly pear

paw paw

“No one can say exactly how many plant species there are, but scientists seem to constantly raise their estimates. Yet of the several hundred thousand that are known, at least 20,000 have usefully edible parts, such as seeds, tubers, fruits or leaves. Although humans have tasted them all at one time or another, only three or four thousand have ever been used on a regular basis.

“Over tens of thousands of years, these plants have been mankind’s bulwark against starvation. Moreover, during the past 5,000 years or so certain specimens of certain species have been slowly molded to fit human requirements…they have become ‘domesticated’. During the last two centuries, a burst of breeding and crop development has yielded thousands of selected cultivars, collectively suited to meet almost any climate, soil type, or disease or pest threat. This seemingly vast cornucopia of food resources represents one of the best of all human efforts, and is our greatest treasure — more valuable than all the industrial development that has grown in parallel with it.” — Noel Vietmayer, Preface to the first edition of Cornucopia.

I agree with this. Probably the only sense that modernity can be said to be “progressive” is that it has diversified our gardens, making the flora of the world available to us (even while it destroys that world). Most of the technologies and industries that capitalism has developed might as well be thrown on the shit heap, but I’d never want to do away with a single useful plant. This diverse and worldly cornucopia is almost like insurance against future starvation. Grow food.

Stranger in a Strange Land

“A tropical jungle is so rich with life that you simply cannot become desolate if you feel the whole universe in every insect, in every lizard, in every bird’s chirp, in every rustle of leaves, in every shape and color of flower. But, once in a while, I did have a sort of a spell of fright and a sinking in my heart. It was something like being on a solo flight, surrounded by clouds, with the motor idling and with no instruments to guide you. Or like sitting alone in a small boat, far off the coast, with no bird in sight, on a quiet sea, and dusk falling.” — B. Traven, ‘The Night Visitor.’

“In my possession I had an old cardboard case in which, once upon a time, shoes had been packed. This cardboard affair served me as my medicine chest. It contained some medicine, if you will call a few aspirin tablets medicine. But besides medicine there were sewing implements, trouser buttons, a torn typewriter ribbon, a few used razorblades, an empty tube of toothpaste, one big fishhook, two small fishhooks, five newspaper clippings, a pocketknife with a broken blade, the other small blade rusty but otherwise in good shape, strings in different thicknesses, four different screws, a few nails, a pencil stub, a leaking fountain pen, the tooth of a donkey, the tail of a rattler, and some few other things which I no longer remember. During my early youth I carried all my earthly goods in my pants and coat pockets. Since the, I have become in the meantime well-to-do, I carried all my earthly riches in that shaky cardboard box. It makes you wonderfully independent.” — B. Traven, ‘Midnight Call.’

These passages from B. Traven short stories were particularly moving to me. In context, they excellently evoke a feeling a what it’s like to be a stranger in a strange land.

Two out of three of the only fiction authors I have time for these days (Ursula K. Le Guin and B. Traven; the third being Borges) continually write about being a foreigner in a culture far different from one’s own.

I think I like them because they bolster my desire. I want to live in another country again, for a long time.

Long walk

August 9th –> August 14th.

Quail Springs –> Ojai.

My pack was like a ghetto Afghani thing with plastic bags coming off and an Oasis soap bottle for water. My water tasted soapy.

The first night we slept near a very post-apocalyptic pile of old cars in the Cuyama river bed.

The sun was red and smoke hung high in the air. A fire burned not too far off. It felt like the end of days.

We trudged all next morning through the Kalahari desert of the Cuyama riverbed. The sand and the way it impedes one’s momentum made me think of the word “slog.” Finally we made it to the relative oasis of the Ozena fire station and slept in the lawn despite the loud blare of the fire radio.

We made it up the hill in the afternoon towards Pine Mountain and slept in the Manzanitas.

Next day was a hard uphill hike to McGuire Spring, a beautiful little spot green with horstetail. After a long siesta we continued and went over the ridge of bouldery Pine Mtn. We camped at Chorro spring. A bat landed on my sleeping bag in the night.

We went down Chorro Canyon in the morning to Highway 33, passing two cagey Latino men who may have been backcountry ganja growers. We found an abandoned ranch and then trudged up the 33 in the mid-day sun to see what was happening at the “Pine Mountain Inn,” which we saw on the map. It was a closed biker bar. Luckily, the proprieter, Tom, was there picking up trash, and gave us a cooler-full of bottled water to quench our parched throats.

We siesta’d near an informal shooting range in Cherry Canyon and then walked up the dirt road. The creek was healthy with plentiful alders and nettles that Colin picked. The entire road was dotted with shooting ranges and everything had bullet holes in it. We crested the ridge and started down into the majestic Matilija watershed. We camped at Maple. I cooked macaroni and cheese and nettles. It was good.

Next day I got naked and wallowed in the stream and there were little fish. We camped that night in the main Matilija creek bed and told each other our life stories. Colin is a consummate wanderer. His life inspires.

Our last day, we nabbed fallen fruit in an orchard on the way to the Matilija waterfalls. The falls were gorgeous delights, well worth the effort climbing up the canyon. The geology is a mind-fuck. There was a group of hipsters camping and shrooming.

We made it tiredly back down the canyon, immediately got a ride to Ojai and chilled at The Farmer, with Chai and beer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Planet of Exile.

It was awesome. Huge shout out to Colin for getting me out there! Thanks!

Bounty

My bomb-ass garden! After three months of neglect (props to my housemate Jon for watering) I return to my overgrown garden and harvest the bounty. I eat lunch, dinner, and another dinner practically entirely from the garden — not through any kind of locavore exercise, but just because I have no other food in the house yet.

The blackberries are going off! Normally an annoyingly thorny weed, the summer harvest makes it a welcome and sweet friend. The other characters on my plate are potatoes (they didn’t even get watered, yet multiplied, magically), amaranth, lemon cucumbers, kale, fava beans, and some kind of perennial spinach.

Coming up, a slurry of solanums: tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and tomatillos! Hell yeah Nightshades!

Sustainable Aid course at Quail Springs

I have no illusions about “Aid” and the way it has functioned to support the extensive and intensive development of capitalism in poor countries. It’s clear that no technological or technical solution will solve the fundamental problem of continuous enclosure on every level of the spaces that were previously common. This impoverishment can only really end with a radical change in the social system.

And, because we are moving into the future, not returning to a past that is forever gone, a radical change in the agricultural system as well — the way we produce what sustains us. Towards polyculture, resilience, security, diversity, nutrition, dynamism, lasting fertility, conscious design and what the Permaculturalists call “permanence.” There are real changes that must be made in this alternate direction as we head toward an apparently catastrophic future. A lot of this is land repair and just stopping the damage being done to the land and to people’s health. Every victory here, in my opinion, is a victory for a potential radical change in the social system that will need a basis in reality, on the ground, in the soil and in the people who live on it.                                                 .

The Sustainable Aid: Permaculture for the 2/3 World course was taught by Robyn Francis, a permaculture teacher from down under. She has worked and taught in many countries, especially India, Indonesia, and Cuba. She’s an intimidating and sternly intelligent teacher, with many incredible stories under her belt. She’s a realist in that somewhat jaded way that many people that I’ve met working in this field are. Since I’m already jaded, I liked her attitude. Nothing is worse than false and grasping Hope, and we needn’t wear kid gloves when we knock it down.

Robyn at left

I got a lot out of the course, which covered — among many other things — nutrition deficiencies and how to deal with them, kitchen garden programs, and the climate zones that most of the 2/3 World (an awkward term, for sure, but isn’t it better than “the South” or the incredibly outdated “3rd world”? We are talking about roughly 2/3rds of the world) falls under: the humid tropics, the wet-dry and monsoonal tropics, and the arid zones (80% of which are man-made).

Robyn had a great story about giving a farmer-teacher in Bali conscious competence of the sustainable traditions of his culture. He returned from her Permaculture course understanding the reasons for these practices, and proud of them. His ancesters were unconsciously competent, had forgotten the reasons for what they were doing, and many people fell prey to the bedazzling racket of new varieties, monocultures, and reliance on big external markets that the Green Revolution ushered in. Now he’s fighting for a new future of taking the best of the traditional sustainable practices and combining them with the best of modern knowledge in a system of conscious design. Rock on!

Crawdading 101

Procambarus clarkii -- yummy!

What you need:

1 bucket

2 pairs of tongs

1 friend

Go out to the creek where there’s a population of the “invasive” Louisiana red swamp crayfish. They can’t see in the dark, so they’re easy to catch. Catch a bucket full. You will probably get wet. Bring the bucket home and put them in clean water. Next day, boil and pot of water and spice liberally. When it’s at a rolling boil, put the crawdads in. Make a dipping sauce with melted butter and garlic. Boil the crawdads for twenty minutes, remove them from the water, and begin cracking them open and eating the soft and delicious meat. There’s nothing like self-caught animal protein! Sorry, vegans!

As for fishing, all you need is a lake, fishing poles, and a neighbor with a boat.

And a complete non-attachment to catching anything.

Guerrilla horticulture

I cross-reference books and drive around Santa Barbara on a fervent search for multipurpose trees. It feels like I’m an explorer in a vast, labyrinthine botanical garden where the trees long ago lost their labels, and the inhabitants long ago forgot about the trees.

A single Enterolobium cyclocarpum in a small hillside park is now flowering, I’ll come back in a month for seed. The pods on the various Carob groves around town are still green, they probably also need a month to ripen. I find a Pithecellobium but it looks like it already went to seed. The only Leucaena leucocephala in town has tiny inflorescences on it now.

Finally I hit the jackpot. The Ice Cream Bean tree at the Lifescape Garden at Santa Barbara City College has pods on it! I leap up and grab one with glee. Its pulp is deliciously creamy and sweet.

Inga feuillei, a.k.a. Inga edulis

Uses

Plants cultivated for the edible white pulp of the fruits, eaten out of hand or used in flavoring various desserts. Trees extensively used in Central and South America for shade for cacao, coffee, tea and vanilla, especially at lower altitudes, and for parks, avenues, and watershed preservation. Allen and Allen (1981) note that Inga species have been associated with cacao and coffee since pre-Colombian times, their desirability enhanced by their: (1) rapid growth for quick shade, (2) ability to withstand drastic pruning, (3) usefulness in maintaining soil fertility, and (4) effectiveness in preventing erosion. Colombian Indians prepare an alcoholic beverage from the aril. The beverage, called cachiri, is consumed at a festival of the same name. Choco Indians of Panama use this or related species for making their upright house beams, believing they do not rot in contact with the soil (Duke, 1970). Nearly half the Choco houses have this tree cultivated nearby. Source: Purdue University Center for New Crops and Plant Products.

Propagation. Inga edulis seed can only be stored up to two weeks. Semi-shade should be provided if possible. The seeds germinate readily (95 to 100% germination rate) within 2 to 3 days. Source: The Nitrogen Fixing Tree Association