Food - Farm - Frugal: More Steps on to Le Pays

Food

Loving Leftovers

Although I’m sure many others have put it many other ways, I can credit Joel Salatin, of Salad Bar Beef and Pastured Poultry Profits fame[http://www.polyfacefarms.com], with making the phrase stick with me (and I may be paraphrasing here): “The best way to make money is not to spend it.”

Begin with the fridge. Use up what you have before you buy more.

Most people I know have a fridge chock-full to the point that things become blue (and I’m not talking Roquefort here) and unrecognizable long before thrown out. And that’s the thing....the fridge should not get to that point. Things should be used up, not thrown out. But, because the fridge is so full, people don’t know what they have.

If you’re disciplined, date things as they go into the fridge. If you’re like me (and a poet for God’s sake) just set aside a bit of time on Sunday morning or whenever and go through and inventory what’s “IN THERE” and do some meal planning around that.

Make it into a challenge for those in your household: who can come up with the most interesting meal out of what’s “IN THERE?” The idea is to do as our ancestors did, and MAKE IT, MAKE DO, OR DO WITHOUT.


(A wonderful book that I often use in my Rural History course is Mary Neth’s Preserving the Family Farm, published by Johns Hopkins Press. The late Mary Neth wrote a stellar book, drawing upon prior scholarship by David Danbom and a host of others, to show how farm families and agriculture were transformed into ‘agri-business’ in ways that used gender stereotyping and other not-so-nice-behaviours to undercut patterns of rural community and household self-sufficiency.)


USES FOR LEFTOVERS


Leftover porridge/oatmeal/hot cereal:

Use as base for muffins or bread or pancakes(see next entry for sample recipe)

Leftover french fries (even if you forget and leave the pan in the oven over night!!!): French Fry Frittata (recipe here)

French Fry Frittata

Saute gently some chopped onion and sweet peppers in a skillet (cast iron is best, for you’ll want to put it under the broiler at the last). Chop up some tomatoes if they’re in season, or a few chunks of frozen or canned tomato if not. Other veggies you could add, if desired: summer squash, zucchini, eggplant, hot peppers. You could go Hungarian with wax peppers and appropriate sausage, or go the Mexican route with some salsa. But if this is for kids or hungover people, I’d keep it simple. Once the veggies have all softened a bit, add the french fries, and enough beaten egg mixture to cover the mixture well (about 1/4 inch or so above the veggie layer). Lower heat and cover. This is not an omelet, so high heat is not what you want. Cook until eggs have pretty well solidified; add desired herbs, salt and pepper (never add salt til end of cooking eggs, or they are tough) and then cheeses, and broil for a couple minutes so that you’ve got the top well done and the frittata attractive. Slice and serve after it's cooled a bit.

Farm

Farmers are, at heart, mostly producers. However, the current economic system for North American farmers (and here I’m assuming that I’m talking to people with no background in farming, so recognize this is a simplistic rendering of a complex system) is one that is demanding more and more that farmers be big, be commodity oriented, OR be able to direct market successfully. And, many of them are....but the current way that both the direct market and “commodity” agriculture realities are organized, policy wise, means that farmers are bearing the economic weight while the consumer gets high quality food for a song.


How we think about and navigate our world of taking from and giving to the land gets us to basic realities and ideas of le pays, which inform the concept of local food and terroir.
(And that is T-E-R-R-O-I-R, NOT terror. The former is a French term that doesn’t translate successfully into terrain, for it means the soil, the land, the eco-system, the topography, the customs and traditions that go into producing specific foods in specific places on the globe...think Champagne, or Idaho spuds for baking...or, where I am, the specific loveliness of Bay of Fundy clams OR the more stocky, more muscular delights of Prince Edward Island ones.....terroir, not terror, the latter being a word that entered the North American lexicon under such strange and awful circumstances that it clouds and confounds everything, even something so innocuous as local food).

If we think about what the land around us is worth, how do we picture that worth? I thought a lot about this one day, while listening to heartbroken farmers having to pick up and move their dairy herd because the land they’d leased was being sold to a Pennsylvania developer.....a developer who was going to profit from not from supporting local agricultural enterprises, but through building cookie-cutter houses with more floor space than anybody truly needs and selling them to people so disconnected to their work and lives that their best shot at happiness was truly that big house and a huge entertainment system...how sad, I thought. And how were they going to eat, I wondered, if this pattern kept going, where farmers could 'sell out' if they got tired of the battle against those who did not understand farming and were making it impossible to make a decent living from the land.... And yet the irony is, the more immediate question was how were the farmers and those cows going to be moved and survive.



Frugal

Frugal living: there’s some help out on the web. Here’s one method (envelope system). It doesn’t work for me, but perhaps for others?

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/moneymanagement/ht/Envelope_System.htm


Navigate this site for additional helps and ideas – the key is to find what works for you, and to jump off the consumer train that’s going to debtsville...and perhaps, a bit, get onto the producer train going to self-sufficiency village.

I've been taking a break from end-of-semester marking (in American lingo: grading papers and exams) through this blog. Time to get back at it. Till next time, Deborah