Food-Farm-Frugal-Frivolity!

Happy Boxing Day!

If you’re in Canada or from one of those other “Commonwealth” post-colonial places on the planet that celebrate it.....It’s somewhat offensive if one is unrepentantly class-conscious and wanting social justice in a Bolshie kind of way (offended by the idea of giving to the poor and lower classes to mitigate class prejudices, instead of working in some real fashion to end poverty and inequality), but lovely in the sense of trying to do what you can to help others, to deal with what’s real in the here and now, and....well...to have, as we do here in Canada, essentially a four and a half day weekend break....that’s so wonderful!

And so, in between the gratuitous feasting on (about 95% locally-produced) foods, and my son and I hauling in firewood on this gorgeous sunny crisp winter’s day, this Feast of St. Stephen Day, I’m catching up with this online journal, and the promised recipe for muffins.




Uses for Leftover Oatmeal/Wheat/Multi-Grain Hot Cereals

Yes, we all want to be virtuous, and eat, in the winter, a bowl of steaming hot grain-based cereal. But....after a (small) bowl, I’m usually full up....and what to do with the leftovers? And, trying to get kids to eat this stuff is tough. What I used to do, when my son Ed was little, was mix applesauce, brown sugar and cinnamon, or maple syrup and brown sugar, into old-fashioned oats. This usually worked to get him to even eat a bit...and he loved those quick little ready-paks of “instant oatmeal,” so what I was doing was creating homemade versions of his favourite flavours of these little industrialized paks of god-knows-what...which even inspired a poem about what I was saving money on, avoiding the purchase of which (please, please, big corporations, don’t sue me for this!)

technological possibilities

these apples could be onions

they crunch like onions
they have no taste, though
they could be anything
they could be chopped grass
or dandelion stems
or fried pork skin
but since they're in this instant cereal
they're probably just
fake apples
(this poem is part of my manuscript, still unpublished, known as burninghouse; poem was first published in The Writing Space Journal 9.1 (Spring 2002):17. [This journal is reviewed in a reputable Canadian ‘zine, Broken Pencil, at: http://www.brokenpencil.com/reviews/reviews.php?reviewid=984]

FRUGALITY IN MUFFINS

I love Speerville Flour Mill’s [http://www.speervilleflourmill.ca] 12-grain cereal, which is available throughout most of Atlantic Canada, I believe. But again because of the virtue/anti-virtue factor, I always end up with extra cooked. I came up with a couple muffin recipes to use the excess, both of which are my vegan-friendly and adaptations of the recipe, “Muffin Madness,” from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) 54-55. For information online about Moosewood, check out: http://www.moosewoodrestaurant.com...

Speerville Mill’s 12 grain cereal muffins

To ¼ cup vegan-acceptable oil, add 1 ½ cup of leftover 12 grain porridge (or, whatever you have, and add water to make approx. 1 ½ cup of mixture/goop). Add ¾ - 1 cup brown sugar (you can make part honey if not feeding to strict vegans) and 1 t. real (organic if you can!) vanilla. Mix all these wet ingredients together well in a large bowl, and preheat over to 350 degrees. Put muffin papers into a 12 cup muffin tin or equiv. (I use these papers because I can compost them, and it saves the hassle of lots of scrubbing; however, if you can’t compost them easily or don’t have them, just grease muffin tins well on bottom and halfway up the sides with a vegan-acceptable fat.)

In small bowl or sifter, add two cups of flour (I use a mix of Speerville’s whole white and whole wheat, buckwheat from West Virginia, and white), 1 ½ teaspoon baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt. Sift through/mix and add along with a couple handfuls of whole flaxseed, to wet ingredients, just till combined. DO NOT OVERMIX. Spoon into muffin cups and back 10-20 minutes, depending on size of muffin cups (knife inserted into a muffin should come out clean).


Speerville Mill’s cereal “pumpkin” muffins

I prefer using leftover Japanese kuri squash or butternut squash to using pumpkin, but use what you have.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line muffin tins with papers if desired (or grease).

1 ½ cups cooked 12-grain OR St. John River cereal
1- 1- ½ cups cooked squash or pumpkin
1 t. cinnamon
¼ - ½ t. ginger
¼ t. nutmeg (best if from grated whole)
pinch allspice, cloves
may substitute half honey for sugar, if not making for strict vegans...

Mix the above and add 2 T. oil (vegan friendly) and ¾ cup brown sugar (adjust to taste if using some honey), and ½ t. vanilla.

Add 2 cups of flours you want, 1 ½ t. baking powder, ½ t. salt. DO NOT OVERMIX. Spoon into cups and bake 10-20 minutes depending on cup size.


Saving Time & Money

Climate change being what it is in Atlantic Canada, I decided to take advantage of the snow we had this Christmas Eve (and were set to lose, through rain, by evening) and ski to the farm that had raised our holiday turkey.

It took an hour to get there by way of the Station Road (it’s only a couple miles; perhaps no more than 5-6 k?); the snow/snain began to make my non-wax skis pick up snow, refuse to glide. I took the Spencer Cross Road back, wishing (a) that Frank and Marguerite’s turkeys had not grown so well (15 lbs. was the smallest they had), and (b) that I’d bought waxed skis a long time ago, as mine picked up so much snow I was tempted to leave them by the side of the road several times during the 2 hours it took me to come back over the hill. Still, the landscape was stunning: everything, every hill, every tree, blanketed in white; on the breast of the hill, the tallest of blueberry plant growth, that cranberry red, showing above the whipped cream blanket; the greys and blacks of birch and other tree trunks and of the river running between the snow-covered banks. While I contemplated leaving the turkey in a tree somewhere, and coming back with a vehicle of some sort to reclaim it, I nixed that idea with the thought that here, the animals are thrifty and I’d likely have some coyote or other handy carnivore figuring out how to haul it down before I got back....I often give (by tossing into the woods behind my house) little gifts in winter, of steak bones or pork fat or boiled poultry carcasses; and they are always cleaned up and dealt with tidily by the carnivores living in/near the village. Well, I was selfish enough about this lovely fresh turkey that I kept going, despite the weight of the snow on my skis, the bruising of my shoulder from the bag holding the 15 pound turkey and a surfeit of giblets given me by the family, which make the best broth for stuffing/dressing, gravy, turkey rice soup base, etc etc...once I got onto Scrabble Hill Road, there was a bit of compressed snow from the passage of the plow, and I was able to actually ski down the hill to the house, so I was grateful that I’d not ditched my skis, either, along the way. Kept hoping somebody would come along and stop, though, and take that turkey down the hill for me....


Oh, but it was worth it. Today, enjoying the leftovers, and preparing to freeze some for giving away later, I recall the giving of thanks at the table yesterday—not to God, but to nature, the turkey, the farmers, the producers of bread/pickles/all else (my own efforts minutely represented in the mix, at this meal) who had provided this bounty. We should all be this fortunate. And, while I think that perhaps some would argue it would have been better to use that time to catch up on my writing, or correspondence, or wood-hauling, or whatever, in my view I was getting much needed exercise while bringing home the holiday turkey while feasting on the landscape of the Cobequid Hills....


Even just putting a bit more thought into the process of selecting one’s food is a step forward.

This morning, I gulp a bit of a blueberry juice bottled over the hill, just on the border of Cumberland/Colchester Counties, Nova Scotia; and I am so so thankful that the acid soil in the Northeast provides the environment needed for this giant of anti-oxidant power berry....and that a few folks in the region have begun to bottle it for those who don’t always want to eat the real McCoy....while the fibre is good for one, too....but sometimes it’s just nice to have the essence, the juice. And I’ve also found that my system seems to do better on cranberry, apple, and blueberry juices, rather than what was the norm, orange or grapefruit juice. And, too, I noticed that if I only had orange juice on that rare occasion that someone else in someone else’s house offered it to me, all of a sudden a whole range of flavours were dancing on my tongue as I tasted it. In a word, orange juice became SPECIAL. I can only equate the feeling to those stories we’ve all heard, about how our grandparents/great –grandparents enjoyed the Christmas time orange in the stocking, because that was the only time they saw an orange....

There’s an interesting look at how trucking played a role in getting us all (even us in the “North”) taking oranges for granted, by the mid-20th century. I’ve not yet read the book, but read an early article based on the Ph.D. dissertation of Shane Hamilton, whom I met at a conference (or rather, if memory serves me, on the shared shuttle ride back to an airport from a conference we had both attended). I found Hamilton’s analysis useful in understanding some of the forces at work in rural 20th century America.
Here’s a link to the website for the university press who has published Professor Hamilton’s book:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8740.html


While an economic and personal crisis was what got me started thinking about the connections between food, farming, and frugality, my professional and personal life are intertwined in this struggling to understand what has happened, what has changed, how, and why (and how to write more intelligently about all this). Of course, food is what connects us all. But if we can begin to see how the act of producing food—and likewise the practices of frugal living—are connected to this basic premise, food, then perhaps we’re on the way to making better sense of our world, writ large...and banishing the unhealthy economics of unfettered global capitalism, while embracing, in healthy and helpful ways, our global as well as local community.

For those wanting to find organic producers in the Atlantic region to buy food from, or to get information on organic agriculture, you can go to: http://www.acornorganic.org/ and the link to the database where you can do searches to find markets, producers, etc., near you, is at http://www.acornorganic.org/acorn/databaseregional.html.

For those in Maine, check out: http://www.mofga.org/ and the link to “Find Local Food” is http://www.mofga.org/Resources/FindLocalFoods/tabid/221/Default.aspx


Happy New Year....with hope having won south of the border, let us keep hope in our hearts and work to get local food in everyone’s bellies following Solstice, Chanukah, Eid-al-Adha, Christmas, Kwanzaa.....

toujours,
Deborah