Carl Honore at TED 2005, "In Praise of Slowness"

You can check out the entire TED series on YouTube if you haven't already. There are tons of amazing talks by interesting individuals in a wide variety of subjects.

Wednesday Potluck: Roman Lentil Soup

We decided to give Nourishing Traditions another chance, and like last time, we weren't disappointed with the recipe, but we were disappointed with the commentary. Take for instance, this passage:

"The hearty Roman soldier carried 80 pounds plus his armor and walked 20 miles per day. His fare consisted of coarse bread and porridge of millet or lentils, supplemented with fermented fish sauce. This condiment supplied him with nutrients from the animal kingdom on a daily basis. Made from the heads and organs of fish, it is especially rich in iodine and vitamins A and D and thus contributed to the robust strength of the Roman legions."

Here she goes again. Have an opinion, find ethereal connections between your fringe opinion and widely-held opinions via red herrings and then proclaim, "voila!" Give me a break.

Nonetheless, the meal was enjoyable with an accompanying flax-seed ciabatta and quick-sauteed cannellini beans and romaine. It was a typical lentil soup but extras include sweet potatoes instead of carrots, curry powder, and the aforementioned fish sauce. As you can see in the picture, it was a hit.

Wednesday Potluck: Traditional Beef Stew (with book review of Nourishing Traditions)

I got this recipe from a Christmas gift cookbook: Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, by Sally Fallon. If you haven't seen the book, I could summarize it as an anti-establishment rant on fats, meats and processed foods. But overall, I'm not a fan of the cookbook. It's the by-product of someone who has a particular opinion (fats are good, processed foods are bad, aminos and other ju-jus in meats are healthy) who then cherry-picks in nutritional literature to support her opinion. And nutrition is a field with radically-varying studies and "opinions" by "experts".

Our eating habits include meats, fats (generally "good" fats like olive and butter), no hydrogenation, minimal processed foods, and plenty of fresh froots and veggies. To us and our foodie-peer group, this is healthy eating. So I don't really need an opinionated preacher to tell me why these kinds of foods are good. Basically, I'm not a good target for this book.

Ms Fallon has some rails against foods and eating which naturally come from her perspective, but she fails to attempt to understand any other perspective. She mentions that kids raised as vegetarians are deficient in all kinds of vitamins and minerals. Sure, a lot of vegetarians don't eat well-balanced meals, and getting complete nutrition from a vegetarian/vegan diet is quite difficult, requiring education and planning. But education and planning is exactly what she's advocating in this book! From personal experience, I know plenty of life-long vegetarians who eat healthily and are nutritionally well-rounded.

In another scenario, she decries the Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) distributed my the US Military. Sure, they're laden with processed foods, sugars, hydrogenated oils and include candy or gum in every pack, but she's certainly not offering any alternative. MREs are shelf-stable for many years, and in fact can survive unblemished underwater, dropped from an airplane, run over by a tank, in 100+ degree weather and more. I've spoken with a few soldiers and they all regard MREs as better than the alternative: going hungry. MREs are rarely if ever eaten by soldiers. These kinds of opinionated, uneducated manifestos abound in the book.

If you want a guide to eating minimally processed, healthy-fats foods, I recommend Laurel's Kitchen and the various Moosewood cookbooks.

But back to the post topic. The beef stew was good. I used tip roast ($3.49/pound), carrots, potatoes, canned toms, a little tomato paste, thyme, rosemary and squirts of red wine and orange juice. Oh and some orange zest. Now that I think about it, it was only marginally based on the recipe in the cookbook. I don't think I'll be grabbing Nourishing Traditions to do my weekly meal planning any time soon.

Next week: two quiches. One meaty, one veggie-y.

Wednesday Potluck: Chicken Barley Soup

This is the second time in recent memory that we've bought a whole roaster on the weekend, cooked it for a meal, then used the carcass and bits for a broth to make chicken soup. Tonight's soup was definitely better than the last time, but that might also have been due to the fact that we had fantastically complimentary accompaniments: shredded carrot salad with horseradish, dill and garlic brought by Jody and mixed greens salad with burned pecans and fresh pears. Ken and Selene brought the salad and he burned the walnuts first, so tried again with pecans, but burned them too. It was entirely edible though - so much so that I think we'll be seeing a mixed greens salad with blackened pecans on the menu at Wildwood in short order.

Book Review: On Good Land by Michael Ableman

It seems like Michael Ableman wrote this book for himself primarily. Basically, it's a pleasant retrospective on an obviously formative period of his life. The farm he managed (Fairview Farms in Goleta, a suburb of Santa Barbara) is interesting in and of itself, but much of this book is about his time spent there. He keeps a pleasant balance between romantically describing the growing seasons and tribulations encountered along with the hard times suffered managing a for-profit farm in a dense suburban environment.

This book isn't a how-to for aspiring urban farmers nor is it a guide to creating community agricultural lands. He only mentions in passing how he combated peach leaf curl and the process of forming organization which ultimately managed the land for educational purposes. He roughly describes how he dealt with irate neighbors and the profusion of urban trash blowing in. Don't read this book expecting to learn anything.

That being said, it's a very short read - I finished it in one day and I'm not a speedy reader. The pages are heavy stock chocked with glossy photos and it's only about 130 pages. Where an urban diva relaxes on the beach reading a summer fluff novel, an urban farmer sits on the back deck reading this book. Simply put, it's a fun read.

I've been to Goleta. If fact, I've sat on the back-yard pool deck of a McMansion which can't be very far from Michael's Fairview Farms. What he managed to do in preserving those acres for farmland for future generations is impressive. In time, will all our urban farms end up that way? Is there any other option in this age?

Three weeks in Florida

We've been out of town for nearly a month, enjoying the warmth, family and relaxation. I mean real relaxation. Like a week's activities consisted of going to the beach, going to the playground a few times and cooking dinner once. We spent the rest of the time letting grandma entertain the Lion.

A long trip has its drawbacks though, mostly that you can't live your regular life. This household uses paper towels, Northwest Florida has no mixed paper or plastic recycling, organic produce is impossible to come by and the cities are built around the almighty automobile. The in-laws do really well though. Grandma has a compost pile in the back yard, they tsk-tsk about having to throw away cardboard and live intentionally despite probably not thinking of it that way.

In the meantime, I've decided on the Ornamental Layer Collection from Murray McMurray, but I need to get the coop remodeled after the raccoons killed the flock last year. And I've got seeds picked out for a salad garden, but I need to finish pulling the dead tomato plants from last season. I've got a pneumatic floor nailer rental scheduled to put bamboo in the back office, but we're here another few days and I'm doing Sudoku and writing blog posts instead of Getting Things Done. But that's what vacations are for.

Of particular note from this trip is that the Lion has made it over the hump of learning to read. Of course we've done next to nothing to "teach" her, beyond letting her play Starfall every now and then. Last night she read about 20 words that Grandma wrote for her on the computer: hat, bat, rat, cat, sat, mat, fox, box, lox, sox and the piece de resistance: veterinarian. It helps that she's obsessed with veterinarians and "sick animals", so by the time she sounded out v-e-t, she assumed it was veterinarian. Nonetheless, I'm most interested in watching her memorizing word symbols, not sounding out words.

This Wednesday, we're starting the potlucks back up. I'll use my new kitchen knife to cut something up, my cotton salad keeper bag to preserve the greens, and maybe even my new frying pan handle cover if the meal will require sauteeing. See you there!