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Getting better (food) mileage
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An interesting and hopeful thing has happened in the past year without many people realizing it: "food miles" entered the public lexicon, and not as some hair-brained concept coming from hairy-headed hippies, but as a serious way of thinking about the social and environmental impacts of what we eat.
"Food-miles are a great metaphor for looking at the localness of food, the contrast between local and global food, a way people can get an idea of where their food is coming from," said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.
Pirog should know. He's Mr. Food Miles. Pirog carried out the research that found that foods travel on average "1500 miles from field to fork". In fact, it's even farther if you consider that his study was focussing on the average distance produce travels from the point of production to midwestern markets. For the East Coast, the distance is closer to 2500 miles.
Pirog is careful to point out that food miles are just one indicator of food's environmental impact and other things need to be plugged into the calculation, for example, how the food was produced before it hit the road. Still, food mileage is a concept that people can get their head around. With gas at $3/gallon, we know that getting good mileage is important and that some cars are better than others. Tuning into our food mileage is not just about ruling out the bad options - the infamous 3000 mile Caesar salad - but discovering the many good options out there, including some just down the street from us. Heck, we might even make a new neighbor.
If a metaphor can do that, it's a very powerful one indeed.
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Urban fruit gleaning
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Here's a neat idea and yet another neat video from "Cooking Up A Story": urban fruit gleaning. And it features the work of a neat volunteer-led initiative in Portland, Oregon called "The Portland Fruit Tree Project." Check it out and start bringing together a gleaning corp in your area...the fresh fruits, jams, jellies and ciders are waiting for you.
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| 3. |
In a Lebanese kitchen garden
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We're delighted to feature a video this month entitled "Cooking With Love: Alice’s Kitchen" produced by the good folks at "Cooking Up a Story". It features Linda Dalal Sawaya who talks about how her love of gardening, cooking, and her own Lebanese heritage got passed down over the generations from mother to daughter. Linda shares a biteful of this oral history in this short video and a heaping portion in a book she wrote called "Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Recipes".
Related recipes:
Summer Squash Stuffed with Rice
My Father’s Tomato Salad
Easy Garden Fresh Tabouleh
Lebanese Okra and Tomato Stew
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| 4. |
Traditional Provencal aioli recipe
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Aioli is a garlic mayonnaise made of garlic, egg, lemon juice, and olive oil. In Provence, aioli (or more formally, Le Grand Aioli) also designates a complete dish consisting of various boiled vegetables (usually carrots, potatoes, and green beans), boiled fish (normally salt cod), and boiled eggs served with the aioli sauce.
While modern cooks have taken to making aioli in a blender or food processor, the traditional method is to use a mortar and pestle which gives the sauce a creamier texture. The technique described below comes from J.B. Reboul's classic cookbook, La Cuisiniere Provencale, published in 1897 and widely considered to be the bible of Provencal cooking.
Take two cloves of garlic per person , peel them, place them in a mortar, reduce them to a paste with a pestle; add a pinch of salt, an egg yolk and pour in the oil in a thin thread while turning with the pestle. Take care to add the oil very slowly and, during this time, never stop turning; you should obtain a think pommade. After having added about three or four tablespoons of oil, add the juice of a lemon and a teaspoon of tepid water, continue to add oil little by little and, when the pommade again becomes too thick, add another few drops of water, without which it falls apart, so to speak, the oil separating itself from the rest.
If, despite all precautions, this accident should occur, one must remove everything from the mortar, put into it another egg yolk, a few drops of lemon juice and, little by little, spoonful by spoonful, add the unsuccessful aioli while turning the pestle constantly. This one calls "reinstating the aioli" (relever l'aioli).
An aioli for seven to eight persons will absorb something over two cups of oil.
In his similarly classic book, Simple French Food, Richard Olney recommends toning down the recipe for non-Provençal palates unaccustomed to such a heavy dose of garlic. He suggests four cloves of garlic for an aioli serving 8 people. He also recommends starting with two egg yolks before starting to add the oil.
Photo courtesy of Chris John Beckett
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| 5. |
December 2007 Newsletter
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Dear Kitchen Gardener,
There are
different ways of knowing whether winter has arrived. If you're in
Maine, the joke goes, you know because the driving actually improves as
the potholes fill up with snow. You can also tell the old
fashioned way by looking at the thermometer. Mine read 8 wintry degrees
(-14 C) this morning. Consulting the calendar is another popular,
albeit controversial, way. Astonomically speaking, winter is due
this Friday, but,
meteorologically, the calendar says that winter already arrived the
first week of December. Hmmm.
As with other
perplexing life questions, I like to turn to my compost pile for
guidance. Northern gardeners like to say that winter hasn't really
arrived until your compost pile is frozen solid and hasn't really left
until your pile has thawed completely. Up until last week,
my hot pile of
leaves, grass clippings, and kitchen scraps was still chugging along
nicely, melting its way through all the white stuff the sky has been
dropping on us since late November. Coincidentally, up until last
week, we were also still harvesting salad greens from our cold frames,
arguably the best-tasting greens of the year (but I admit that part of
this is due to the "it's-winter-and-I-am-still-eating-from-my-garden!"
factor which is one nature's best flavor enhancers.)
The past few days
of snow, ice, and bitter cold, however, have changed things remarkably,
putting my compost pile's
soil bacteria and worms on the defensive. If you look closely at the
photo above taken earlier today, you can see a bit of melting taking
place, but I think it's safe for me to oil up my compost fork's handle
and put it to bed for the winter.
This winter was interesting in how suddenly it came
upon us in my area. One day, I was outside in a light sweater
raking leaves and
planting garlic, the next day I was all bundled up with a snow
shovel in my hands.
A
gardening article in the New York Times a few years back suggested
that instead of talking about global warming, we should be using the
term "global weirding". While the trend is definitely toward
warming, there'll be a lot of weirdness along the way. Speaking of
the New York Times, I've been following their coverage of local food
issues these days and even managed to contribute
2 cents of my own to the debate through a letter to the editor published
in last Sunday's edition.
Another item in
the "good news" category: I learned last month that I have been chosen
as a "Food
and Society Fellow" by the Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute.
I'm pretty excited about this and I don't excite easily. That
award and your generous support will help me to keep KGI going and
growing, even during the dark, cold days of winter.
Don't worry,
though, about the award going to my head, at least not this winter.
It will need to penetrate a thick wool hat first.
Happy holidays,
PS: I'm busy making your
holiday gift. It's not so much a new gift, but a better version of
an old one, a gift that will allow you to grow as gardener, learn new
things, contribute your knowledge to the gardening commons, connect with
and help new gardening friends, near and far. Have you guessed
yet? It might be too late for the holidays, but will be just in
time for those of you itching to talk about gardening before the ground
and the weather allow you to do any.
PPS: Stay tuned in January as
a "special KGI correspondent" will be reporting from Argentina on a
school garden project that we're helping to launch.
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