The Autumn Squash Challenge Round #3

OR

Butternut Squash Vegan Mac and Cheese - The First Success

It's ridiculous how quickly time goes by when you're older. Everyone and their grandmother remarks of this at least once in their lifetime - "Back in my day...!" - but it's true that as you grow up days fly by inexplicably faster than they used to. I'm of the belief that it's because we don't mindlessly play anymore; we're overaware of the hours of the day and days of the week and everything we have to do before certain dates. It doesn't help that a good chunk of North Americans have very few, but very commercialized holidays throughout the year. About once a month there's a date we have to plan and buy gifts and make food for, and the stores we buy the supplies from are always two months ahead of us. You want Easter decorations? Start looking on January 2nd. If you're trying to prepare for Thanksgiving, you'd better have that eighteen pound turkey ordered three months ahead of time. Christmas is its own special cup of tea, shoving grinning pumpkins out of the way well before it's reasonable and putting a disrespectful screen in front of November 11th. GF and I actually went to our first Christmas craft show, because we're old ladies like that, just this past Friday (with poppies pinned to our chests, thank you very much). While I understand the jumping of the gun in some respects - craft shows are fun any time of year - it makes us overall more paranoid of time going by.


It was almost a full month ago I decided to learn how to cook squash, and it was with a bit of a shock that I realized I've only made about five attempts since then. Any time now, our craft show reminded me, we'll start getting snow here on the east coast (Manitoba's already had some), and it's a slow decline of fresh gourd availability after then. I've got to get my shit together! Especially now that I've finally gotten a grasp on how to cook pumpkin seeds. That's right, folks, I've finally figured out the trick. Thanks to the tutorial on Oh She Glows, I now know I need to boil - yes, boil - the seeds for ten minutes, then toast them for twenty at 325F. Perfection. Even my mother liked them!

Pumpkin seeds, by the way, not only have magnesium (muscle relaxation), potassium (nerve health), protein (everything) and healthy plant fats (brain and joint strengtheners), but are rich in tryptophan, that amino acid in turkey everyone says puts you to sleep. It is, consequently, beneficial if you suffer insomnia or high levels of stress, and is a precursor of serotonin, the brain's mood-regulating chemical. Folks who have depression often don't make enough serotonin, which is why SSRIs (meds that convince your brain you have more than you do) are so popular for treating it. The added bonus of cooking your own pumpkin seeds is that their hard shell is built of an insoluble fibre, which helps build and move feces along your large intestine. Hear that, everyone? If you're stressed, depressed, or can't sleep or poop, start downing gourd seeds.

My other success, with the actual flesh of a squash, was a batch of vegan mac n' cheese. I've come to the quick realization that I'm not as talented an inventor in the kitchen as I'd like to be, so I've been latching onto recipes and following them to a T, with fantastic results. You'd be surprised at how actual measurements can help make a concoction taste good. This recipe was also from Oh She Glows, although the first time I whipped up a batch I actually used honey mustard instead of dijon, so it was rather sweet. Can't decide which taste I preferred, though. The roasted squash by itself was fantastic, too.

It's a shame I can't claim to have figured out both these recipes by myself, but such is life. Maybe I'll stick to promoting other blogs' food inventions. Appreciate what talents you have and accept those you don't.

In related news, do you realize how many pumpkin seeds you can get out of two cheap jack o' lanterns? Manna from the heavens, I tell you! The world really does provide for us - you just have to know where to look. Now is prime time to start stocking up on homemade pumpkin paste and toasted seeds. Before you know it, the Christmas snowmen will have taken over!

Shortly put,
- Leah

The Human Lawnmower: A Grimm Fairytale For Baby Plants

OR

Growing Greens For The Lazy, Cheap, and Yardless

Alfalfa sprout salad

"It was a bright and sunny morning," said the Kalanchoe ominously (or would have if it had vocal chords), "just like this one." The African Violets nodded earnestly in agreement. (They could also have been swaying in the wind - it's hard to tell with Violets.) The Kalanchoe waved his branches as if warding off evil and loomed over the jar before him. Tiny sproutlings quivered in his vision, tightly packed as a yard of clover. 

"Little sprouts like you sat her not long ago... but that day they disappeared, and I never saw them again."

"What happened to them?!" shouted one of the taller seedlings, leaning forward. The Kalanchoe eyed him pitifully, noting the flush of chlorophyll in his newly formed leaves and knowing the same fate was to befall him soon. The table began to shake as monster footsteps drew near.

"The Sprout Eater."

Has anyone noticed how short lettuce season is? I mean, if you shop at a grocery store or eat other salad greens more resilient to cold then probably not, but the natural Canadian season for lettuce is only a few months long. We hardly start enjoying fruit salads before it's on to the cob salads and then pumpkin and whoops it's snowing you missed it. From the first of September this year our temperatures took a nosedive and parts of the country have already experienced frost and snow. Poor, gentle lettuce doesn't have a hope in Nunatsiavut of surviving very long up here (unless you're Niki Jabbour and make cold frames for the little guys).

When you're a stickler like me and picky about where your grocery store produce comes from, lettuce is basically a no-go in everything but peak season. I've made a rule of not buying anything from outside my country that can be grown in my country. So avocados and citrus fruit are an exotic treat, but berries or veggies from the States are forbidden. It's no 100-mile diet, but it's a small reduction in my carbon footprint that's not hard to maintain. Even GF's on board with it. The warm fuzzies of buying "local" turn into a pain in the butt, though, when I really crave something I can't get, like lettuce in the winter. It's all from California, and generally looks like hell (sorry).

Sprouted alfalfa seeds

Enter the horrific sprout-eater story. If that didn't make a crazy, "I only eat food that fell from the tree," fruititarian out of someone I'll be surprised. GF was actually alarmed when she realized what I'd become. I've been growing baby plants, letting them think their life's adventure was just beginning, then eating them by the bowlful just as they turned green. I've become an infant plant murderer.

Like my mother, many of you may have alarm bells ringing in your heads at the word "sprouts". Images of yellowy, bean-like plants in plastic containers with warning of E. coli may be flashing in front of your mind's eye. A boy in my elementary school, bless him, used to eat those pale plants by the handful, and my fellow students used to tease him endlessly about them (while eating their oh-so-healthy Lunchables). His mother was onto something, though, and obviously ahead of her time in the holistic world, if not quite on the right track. I urge anyone wasting money on these supermarket bean sprouts to hear me out, and anyone unfamiliar with all this baby plant consumption to relax about all the germs.

Sprouts are the beautiful little beginnings of edible plants, and they are both delicious and cheap. They're made by soaking raw seeds, nuts, or grains periodically in water over a few days and lettings the baby plants hidden inside those shells to start to grow before mercilessly snatching away their life once they're a few hours/days old. Sprouts are hailed for being full of enzymes, antioxidants, and amazing, life-saving chlorophyll (plant blood, rich with magnesium). They are by far one of the most raw, pure sources of sunlight we can pump into our bodies, and they make a lovely (if a bit different) replacement for lettuce in a salad.

This being said, a supermarket sprout is pale (although those kind of sprouts are anyway), dry, and probably a few weeks dead before you buy them, therefore those lovely perks that make sprout-eating worthwhile are completely null and void in those yellow bean sticks. Plus they've been sitting around in stagnant water for a while, so E. coli has time to multiply. Yum yum. Sprouting at home ensures you're getting the benefits of living, germ-free plants, while saving money and experiencing a bit of variety, should you so choose. It's ridiculously easy to grow sprouts - you need no special equipment, no particular heat, no parental supervision, and no yard or balcony. You don't even need a south-facing window. 

Sunflower seeds, pepitas, buckwheat, chia,
mung beans, adzuki beans, spelt, alfalfa,
teff, amaranth
(All bought for UNDER $10)

As a general rule, you can sprout all seeds, most nuts, lentils, chickpeas, adzuki and mung beans. You can find specifications of what sprouts best and how long they need to do so (like on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ) all over the internet, but I mostly just avoid large beans and eat'm when they're green.

A good starting bean for sprouting are lentils. To be honest, I've never actually sprouted lentils, but where most other sprout seeds can be hard to find outside of a health or specialty store, lentils (or chickpeas) can be bought dry in bags at the local supermarket. Grab a small handful of beans (they're going to expand to about 8x their size) and dump them in a glass jar. Most people use mason jars, but I've got washed out salsa containers, and a glass cup would be okay, too. A clear plastic cup might work, but I haven't tried. You want something that will allow the seeds light and create a little greenhouse effect. Over the lip of the jar you'll need some sort of mesh to hold the beans in but filter water out. I use some muslin cloth I found in the sewing scraps. Many people use a plastic or metal wire screen. Again, your call. Stretch your barrier over the top of the jar and grab something to hold it in place - I use rubber bands or hair elastics. Fill your jar with water and let your beans soak for a while. Like with the ingredients in a stock, the bigger your seeds, the longer you should soak them. Alfalfa seeds take four or so hours, lentils maybe five or six. I usually just let them go until the water looks cloudy. Sometimes overnight.

Soaking alfalfa seeds

Once your seeds have had a good bath, drain all the water, rinse them, then find a place where you can sit them to dip-dry. The water needs to seep out and the sprouts need to breathe, so don't put them face down on a plate or anything. I put mine on the lip of a soup cup at an angle, but you can flip yours fully upside down as long as they're on a dish drainer or something equally elevated and holey. They don't need to be in the sun right away - for mung beans, some folks suggest they should never be in light. You can let them grow on your kitchen counter, if you want. Just poke them in the sun during their last day so they start making that beautiful chlorophyll and turn green.

Now comes the easy part. Let the sprouts do their thing. Rinse them at least once a day (twice, once in the morning and once at night, is usually recommended, but ain't nobody got time for that) and eat them when they've got decently long tails on them or are turning green (again, the amount of time you let them grow for depends on the type of plant; consult the Google). Lentils should be eaten before they grow leaves. You can eat the seed husks or rinse them off. It's totally personal preference. Use them on/as salad, top a burger, dehydrate them and use them in bread, throw some in a casserole, whatever. Generally you should avoid cooking sprouts, though, because putting any sort of baby in an oven is guaranteed to kill off anything you like about them.

Spelt and adzuki beans sprouting
(Kalanchoe in the background)

Important things to note!

1) As a VERY IMPORTANT NOTE, you can sprout kidney beans (and it's cousins, like navy, pinto, and black beans), but you HAVE TO COOK THEM. This does kill off enzymes, but eating big beans raw, especially kidney beans, will make you violently ill. They're poisonous. Sprouting and then cooking beans of any sort, though, makes them much easier for our bodies to digest by turning their complex carbohydrates into simpler ones and making their nutrients more bio-available. If you're prone to gas when you eat beans, sprouting them beforehand will more than likely prevent that. 

2) Always get your sprout seeds from a food store, NOT a gardening store, where they may be cheaper but coated in pesticides/herbicides. Even if they're organic, it's a much safer bet to find some at food-grade. 

3) As anyone who clicked on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ link may have noticed, some people drain their sprout jars and then leave them right side up to grow. You can do this too, but I suggest the face-down method because it ensures there's no water pooling at the bottom of your container for mold to grow in.

Jar-sprouted teff. Bad idea.

4) Some very small or gelatinous seeds, like teff or chia, can't really be grown in jars. For those you need to use the toss-them-on-a-plate-and-attack-them-with-a-spray-bottle method, which I haven't tried. I did try doing the teff-in-a-jar method, though, and it just got moldy and attracted fruit flies. Alfalfa seeds are probably the smallest you should go with jar sprouting.

5) I use the green-tinted water the sprouts drip off to water my other plants, and they seem to love it. Good (cannibalistic?) sprout food for all!

Sun-filled and growing,

- Leah

Recipe: Herbed Croutons

OR

Salad Toppings From Bread Heels: A Story of Seagull Deprivation

Have you ever been to one of those really ritzy home decor stores? You know, the kind that're usually privately-owned and tucked into some secluded corner of a city? They sell dishware and tablecloths, as well as beautiful, unique pieces like bronze chandeliers, abstract art, and tablecloths made of the Golden Fleece. The few times I've been in one of these places (wondering what it's like to drop a couple hundred dollars on an ugly horse sculpture without being intoxicated beyond intelligent thought), GF has pointed out objects so ridiculously silly and expensive that neither of us can wrap our heads around them. For example, one Christmastime we saw a silver bonsai tree in a store window downtown I would call "the minimalist style of today's high-class urbanite" in that it was all branches and sparkled something fierce. We were struck both by how pretty and how audacious it was to be asking $200 for something we could make with a walk in the woods and a can of glitter paint. A few months later GF saw spindly silver (it's the "in" colour) decorations that were equally pretty and equally expensive, and was so enraptured with them that she went to the Dollar Store, bought foam and paint, and made duplicates for a fraction of the price. We now have six sparkling silver carbon atoms hanging from our living room ceiling.

I love grocery shopping. I take to it like some girls do to shopping for clothes or makeup. Be it at the local supermarket, farm market, or convenience store, I get a huge thrill out of picking out food. I love trying to figure out what my most cost-efficient option is. I love filling up carts and baskets. I even love paying for it (gives me that accomplished feeling). I get the warm fuzzies from shopping for necessities. I am totally for hire if somebody wants me to grocery shop for them. Dream job, I'm telling you.

What I don't especially love when I'm shopping is finding pre-fab food I could make myself. I get that convenience is king for most people, but who doesn't have time to make mashed potatoes? It's just silly and a little bit frustrating, in a way. Why would I pay three dollars more for something that would take three minutes to do myself? (That would be an excellent job, too. A dollar a minute? Talk about rolling in the dough - pun intended.) There are some things I absolutely refuse to buy just because the Average Joe could make it in under ten minutes. Ready-for-baking tinfoil-wrapped potatoes, pre-layered salsa chip dips, pre-cut vegetables of any kind, salad kits, and pre-seasoned meats top the list.

Also, croutons.

Like with her ingenious crafting, GF has become a pro at mimicking recipes on cookbook pages, meal boxes, and sample tables. I'd like to say she's the art girl and I'm the inventive chef, but this is real life and I've long since accepted that the only things I'm especially good at cooking are pasta (which is bad for me in large quantities) and quiche (which I should really make more of, but responsible eggs are expensive). Still, I'm quick to learn, so when GF showed me how to make real croutons from scratch, well... I actually promptly forgot, and will probably get the finer details wrong the next eight or so times I make them. But I promise I got her to double-check this recipe before I posted it.

Croutons (and for that matter, stuffing, but I'll pick on Stove Top another day) are stupid easy to make. In the same way I can't fathom spending $400 on carbon atoms for my ceiling, I likewise can't reason why anyone would spend $3 on a salad topping. Croutons are entirely made of stale bread. Birds don't pay to eat your hot dog bun ends - why are you paying to eat overcooked bread heels? Croutons sit in the same boat soup stock does; they're made of scraps.

To make croutons, stop feeding birds. It's bad for them anyway. Hoard your bread heels, broken toast pieces, freezer-burnt slider buns, and the cheesebread logs your cousin brought for tea. Pop them in the freezer in a Ziploc bag next to your stock chunks. When you need them, yank'm out of the cold, preheat your over to 325F (so they can witness their impending doom), cube/rip them up, dump them in a bowl, add enough vegetable oil to coat them, douse them in spices (we usually use garlic powder and Italian seasoning), then sprawl the oily nibs on a cookie sheet ("Draw me like one of your French breads!") and cook them for about fifteen minutes, until they're toasty and brown.

Or, if you're me, put them in the oven, forget about them, cook them for too long, eat the black ones, and save the nice bits for your girlfriend.

Oops.

 Summing it up:

 1)
- Save up bread scraps and freeze until needed
- Preheat oven to 325F
- Rip or cut bread chunks into bite-sized pieces
- Place breadcrumbs in a bowl and coat with vegetable oil
- Add seasoning (garlic powder/Italian spices/whatever)
- Spread on cookie sheet
- Bake for 15 minutes, give or take, until they're golden brown
- Eat

 2) We have sparkley silver carbon atoms on our ceiling and GF is very proud.

 Cheaply crunching,
 - Leah

A Note On Orts

OR

Wasting Not When You're Already Wasting Not

Don't you just hate when people give you conflicting messages? I know I do. "We really want you to get an education!" say the universities, "But we're going to charge you thousands of dollars to do so!" or, "As a charity, we want to provide the funds to help these unfortunate people live/heal," say the TV ads, "But we're going to keep 89% of the money we get for advertising!" Mixed messages are frustrating because they're oxymoronic; you tell me to do one thing, but then tell me something that is the complete opposite, yet you say both are true? What do you mean?

Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a hypocrite and a wee bit forgetful. Today, whilst making soup, I realized I'd forgot to mention something regarding the construction of stock, and wanted to reiterate so we were all on the same page. I'm about to deliver a few mixed messages of my own. (But I promise I'll try to make them clear.) Sorry.

Orts are an old 15th century English word for "morsels from a meal" or "scraps", the same things I've been telling you to scrounge whenever you can from other people's houses and your own finished meals. They are the bones, decorate pieces (lettuce leaves, parsley), vegetable tray and sandwich platter leftovers. They are the bits that nobody else knows what to do with, and plans to throw out. But we say "nay!" (I'm getting a little too into this old English crap, I think) and take them back to our own kitchens to construct new foods out of.

In my How To Make Stock post - which was not called that at all - I noted that my mother never cooks the meat (in animal-based soups) with the bones and cartilage while making broth. This is a tried-and-true method of keeping your meaty bits tasty. When you boil something, you suck all the nutrients and taste out of it and force them into the water like a bad swimming teacher. So if you boil the crap out of bones that still have the meat on them, strain the lot of it, then pick the meat off the bones and throw it back into the soup, the meat is going to be pretty tasteless. Therefore, if you're making a meat-based soup, always pick the good parts off before you cook the bones.

Now's where I contradict myself.

Exhibit A: Separated broth and chicken
 bones/sweet potato peelings

The other day I was at my parents and we had a roast chicken for dinner. Mom had already taken the majority of meat off the bird bones, and had no desire to make broth. "I can always go buy another bird," she said. Not all of us are that lucky. So I asked if I could have the orts of the meal - the chicken scraps. They sat in my freezer for a few days, then I cooked them up (along with some veggie scraps) and made myself a stock. Once I'd strained my finished stock, I realized the bones still had a fair bit of meat on them. Therefore I contradicted what I'd said a few posts ago, picked the meat off, and threw it back in the pot.

There is a reason for my madness. The meat may be mostly tasteless at this point, but it is still edible. I decided against using the potato peels (even though they're fine to eat once they've been cooked), but I saved the meat because it's crazy expensive, I wanted something to help fill up the pot, and it becomes one of the two main filling-bits in the soup as the main source of protein. (New potatoes were the main source of carbohydrates, if anyone was wondering.)

The short version:

Exhibit B: Chicken meat separated from the bones.

1) Keep the majority of your meat out of broth preparation, but if there's meat left on the bones you've boiled, pick it off and put it back in the pot.

2) Always take free leftover meat bits (if you include them in your diet). They are expensive, they contain useful nutrients, and these foods are too resource-intensive to be wasting. It takes much more food, oil, and energy to produce meat than it does for grains or plants. Chucking useful bits of meat into the trash is a middle-finger salute to the Earth and the poor animal that was dinner. (This being said, animal products, especially those raised the conventional way, can contain antibiotics, hormones, adrenaline, bacteria, and are harder than plants for your body to digest, which is why I stick to broths. They also leave an acidic residue in your alkaline intestinal tract. Go easy on the animal products for their health and yours.)

Controversially,
- Leah

What's That, Lassie? Jimmy Fell Into A Well?

OR

How Wild Blackberries Almost Got Me Killed

Once upon a time, a jealous witch who didn't get invited to the baby shower for GF teamed up with a couple of errant gods, a swarm of malicious gremlins from the 80's, an amazonian witch doctor (no relation) and that voodoo guy from The Princess and The Frog and cursed her family line. Poor GF grew up as the most unlucky woman in the world, and has a thousand and one stories detailing how she dislocated both her shoulders with a glass coffee table, broke both her ankles by jumping, permanently damaged her knee by tripping over a cat, or became on of the two people in Halifax to get E. coli poisoning. Since we began living together in 2011 she's been to the hospital no less than twelve times. Murphy's Law was written for the girl - "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment," - with a special addition of "to me."

One of the tamer stories entails GF as a kid. She fell through a friend's deck. Young GF was a few inches away from breaking her legs and came home with quite a few bruises and a couple of deep scars (frighteningly close to her femoral artery) which are still very obvious today.

Let's just say my trip to the Kempt Shore this weekend made that story a bit less of a novelty and much more imaginable.

The field at my second cousin's cottage. (This is actually a
photo from two years ago. Sorry.)

They say if you don't like the weather in Nova Scotia, you should wait five minutes. Chances are it'll change. This past Saturday my dad and I had taken my grandmother out to see her niece and sister-in-law in the Valley, and although the day started in torrential rain, by the time we arrived at their lovely old cottage the skies had turned blue and I was dying of heatstroke in identically-coloured jeans. My second cousin (Dad's cousin and my Nanny's niece - it's all very confusing to keep track of, despite this being the small side of my family) was thrilled to announce their field had wild blueberries in it, which they had been collecting to make jam.

Anyone who's been reading this blog since the beginning (a whole five posts ago) knows that:

A) I compulsively collect food

B) I bought a shit-ton of blueberries from a U-Pick less than two weeks ago

These in mind, you'll understand why A could not say no to baking in the hot sun to pick wild berries (totally different from high-bush) and why B therefore was disregarded. I knew, however, that GF would tease me for bringing home more blueberries (which she dislikes), so I decided I'd delve into the just-ripening patch of blackberries (which she adores) near the cottage to keep her exasperation at bay.

It's understandable, considering that everyone except my dad and I were over 60 years old, that my second cousin and grandmother couldn't get anything more than a half-pint of berries. There were hardly any ripe suckers on the outside of the blackberry bush. But having spent hours as a child hunting out and eating all sorts of wild berries, and being as spry as I am, I knew what I had to do: I got right down on he ground and crawled into the centre of the blackberry bush. I collected armfuls of scratches, a sunburn, and a few upset spiders' webs (sorry), but ended up two full pints of the little gems. Being as I don't particularly care from blackberries, it was either unconditional love for GF or a rush of childhood nostalgia that made me willing to grass stain the crap out of my jeans. I made sure I'd collected every non-red berry on that plant, and was just doing my final lap around the bush when it happened.

Wild blueberries!

The giant cast-iron faucet sticking out of the ground should have been an indication, but I can be dumb as a post when I'm distracted by food. There was a wooden pallet lying on the ground next to the blackberry bush, which the faucet was coming out of. I stepped on it, and moved forward in search of the last few berries. Suddenly, I wasn't standing up.

Being as there was a barking collie next door, if I had fallen in, I'm sure jokes would have been made. I had broken through a couple rotten boards on the pallet and was sitting with one leg hip-deep in an old well. I could see a couple of flat rocks siding the hole in the ground, but below my foot was just darkness. I have no idea how far down it went, but had the boards given way I would have at least broken my legs.

As it was, I very carefully crab-walked my way out and off the boards, gathered my spilled berries, and hightailed it out of there. Food was no longer especially interesting.

The moral of this story:

1) Always take free food, even if you already have lots of it - but only if you're going to use it. Hoarding food you won't eat only takes it away from someone who could.

2) Don't play near old wells! To people who own them: please check to make sure they're still holding up! PLEASE.

Bark, bark!

- Leah

Who Invited The Herbivore?

OR

A U-Pick Adventure and The Vegetarian Who Doesn't Preach

Oxford, Nova Scotia, calls itself the Blueberry Capital of the World. It's got fields and fields of blueberry farms and a blueberry festival, and a giant, slightly horrifying metal blueberry statue at the first rest stop off the highway, complete with a Tim Hortons. 

"Oh heeeeeeeeey."

I was nowhere near Oxford, though. That was useless information for your next trivia competition at the pub. Now you know the answer, should anyone quiz you on the obscure and rather sad slogans of towns in my province.

Bedford: A Traditional Stopping Place

Stewiacke: Halfway Between The North Pole and The Equator

Truro: The Hub of Nova Scotia

Two weeks ago we went to my new favourite place in the Valley, Dempsey Corner Orchards. GF and I went last year, but too late in the season for anything really good. This time we brought friends and sunscreen and plaid shirts (lesbo chic) and completely forgot to pack a lunch. Oops.

We got our hands filthy and fed screaming kids and pulled a really heavy wagon back and forth in the blazing summer sun for hours - for fun. 

Dempsey is a gorgeous U-Pick farm in Aylesford, Nova Scotia. As the name implies, they grow the food, and you pick it off the trees/bushes or dig it out of the ground. Not only are the workers super nice and the farm full of variety and the animals adorable, but the owner is a riot. She appeared during our U-Pick 101 session, draped herself all over our teacher, wailed about how she'd been missing her since a whole day ago, then offered us a pregnant cat. She also tried to sell us a book by asking, "Do you like to read? Do you poop? If you keep it in the bathroom this book is perfect for extended stays." My kind of woman.

I mentioned before that I generally don't get to eat fruit because I can't afford to. Despite Oxford being only about an hour away, blueberries can cost anywhere from $4-$7 per two handfuls. Just about a cup of berries hardly feeds one person, let alone two for two weeks. For a poor almost-student, fruit is just out of the question. U-Pick fruit is the exception to this rule. Not only did I score enough blueberries to satisfy me for probably a good chunk of the winter (six boxes), but I got them organic and for $2.50 each.

GF also got a huge kick out of digging white potatoes, and we came home with probably three or four pounds for less than $3. There's absolute benefit to buying in bulk and doing the harvesting work yourself. Provided we can keep them at an optimal temperature (Warm Apartment Hates Potatoes: A Memoir), we'll have three months worth of food for $18.

On a related note, we also picked up 8 kilos (16 pounds) of rice for $15 from the grocery store. Rice and Lentils are a very cheap, base staple for really tough times that everyone should be aware of - it's much healthier and less expensive than, say, Hamburger Helper (and requires less attention to cook).

"Little Dog" begging me with his beautiful
two-coloured eyes to feed him more cookie.

Dempsey has a beautiful big yard besides the gardens that kids can play in. Around it are pens full of farm animals, enjoying their day-to-day life and so used to attention that the goats, pigs, and baby cow (named "Daisy" - can you believe that?) will come running when someone approaches, screaming for affection (and probably food). There were rabbits, ducklings, two hilarious piggies, two breeds of hen and a rooster, sheep, goats, and the cow, plus four absolutely precious old dogs, whom I referred to as "Fluffy Dog", "Fluffy Puppy", "Dead Dog" (he laid around so still), and "Little Dog" and fed under a picnic table. I had my hands all over any animal that would stay still long enough (pig noses feel so weird!) and had to help get Daisy the calf into the goat pen without the goats escaping, during which time I had my fingers licked and became a cow whisperer.

For the last year or so I've gone from a relaxed vegetarian to more of a flexitarian (someone who generally avoids meat but won't disregard it completely), but it struck me when I was feeding Daisy how like the dogs she was. She had such gorgeous big brown eyes and was so dainty and polite as she took grass from my hand. I think I fell in love with her and her shyness and little hooves, and it kind of hit me while I was petting her neck that I've eaten bigger versions of her. That thought upset me the whole drive back to the big city.

Everyone knows how food animals are treated in developed countries. I don't have to quote any hippie books or activist websites on the horrors of feedlots and slaughterhouses. It's sick. But we don't make the connection of hamburger = tortured cow because we're not seeing it daily, and because we much prefer the delusion of the happy Dempsey-esque farm life for Bessie or Daisy the Former. I've let myself slip into that delusion, going, "I'll buy humane, grass-fed, local beef when I have the money, but I can only afford regular stuff right now." Really, I should be taking responsibility for the practice I'm promoting with my appetite, and just avoid eating those animals who have as much personality (if not as much brainpower) as my childhood dog. I wouldn't want my boy or Fluffy Puppy in a slaughterhouse.

(I will, however, continue making broth from animal bones, because GF does eat meat, and I will not waste food.)

So the herbivore has returned. Admittedly, I've gotten used to eating meat now, so stopping is a bit of a challenge. But I'm determined, for both the sake of the baby cows in the world and for my own health. Next stop: hummus.

Things to pick from this:

1) Buying in bulk is almost always cheaper than pre-packaged. Picking your own food lowers the cost even more. If you can get to a U-Pick before winter, do so, and stock up!

2) Go to Dempsey Corner Orchards, or, if you're too far away, check out their quirky Facebook page.

3) What you eat is your business. Take a second to reflect on your business expenses. Could you eat less of something and splurge on the more humane/antibiotic-free/local version? Would it save you money? Could you consider limiting what meats you eat? Could you be passionate about your food choices without criticizing others for theirs? Let's all be open-minded!

4) Dogs love carrots.

With love,

- Leah

Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?

OR

How Putting Bones In The Freezer Helps Keep You Fed

I'm one of those people who knows the words to 90% of the songs that come on the radio.

Ask me who the song's performed by or what it's called and I'll stare at you like a deer in the headlights, but I can generally memorize at least the tune of a song the first time I hear it and know a good chunk of the lyrics by the third. I have no idea how I learn them, I just do. 

Like how double-jointed people don't know how they freakishly dis-form their limbs. Ugh.

In my tiny apartment freezer I have a bag of green bin-worthy vegetable scraps, and, until recently, a bag of leftover chicken bones and skin. They get tucked away on the freezer door or in the back by the compost*, ignored until I find potatoes that are going soft (always cut them open before you toss them! If they're still white they're still good!) or score free veggie tray leftovers from a party. Then I pull one out and make myself some soup.

Making stock from scratch is one of those things an alarming number of people don't know how or are too hesitant to try to do. It's not hard, but the convenient cartons or cans of broth at the grocery store are just so much easier, and make the task of making from scratch seem, especially to a busy student, worker, or parent, really daunting and unnecessary.

Not to knock the canned stuff - we do keep a couple cartons on hand when we need something quick, and for flavors we don't really have bones around for, like beef - but while homemade may not be necessary, it is worth it. Not only is homemade stock 100% less salty (figures are just pulled out of my arse) but it has no preservatives, hasn't been pasteurized, and often has more, or an actual amount of - in the case of meat-based stocks - gelatin, which is super good for those of us with achy joints. Plus it tastes better, and is made of things you already have lying around, instead of costing you an extra $2.29.

It's like Mr. Christie VS Grandma. Christie's stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing like a homemade chocolate chip cookie, Grandma-style. Not that my grandmothers really baked chocolate chip cookies, but they did make homemade bread, and that stuff is beautiful.

Making stock is stupidly easy, too. I was going to say that GF taught me how to do it, but actually, I think it was my mother. Mom's a very "throw stuff together and hope it works" sort of cook, but she's good at it. "Mix and match" suppers and "The Great Fry-up" are specialties of hers. She also makes a damn good turkey soup. She once showed me how to make that soup, but never told me how to make the broth. I must have gleaned the technique from watching her every Christmas day.

It's like the music thing. I don't know how I know it. I just do.

Start by saving the crap everyone else tells you to throw out (unless it's fuzzy or blue or smells bad). Those almost-slimy lettuce pieces from a salad. Onion skins that aren't quite brown. Celery leaves or asparagus bottoms or the tiny roots on beet greens. If you roast a chicken or have another sort of meat product with bones, keep everything you don't eat, including the cartilage or leftover meat. You can mix the veggies and meat or keep them separate. I generally keep mine apart (in case of vegetarian guests), but I recently made a ham and pea soup with a bunch of veggies and half an apple-roasted ham as the base (plus ham I'd scavenged from the dinner table of a family get-together).

Before

Once you've got a medium-sized Ziploc bag full, dump the contents into a big pot (no need to defrost) and fill it with water. You can put as much water in as you'd like, but the more you have the more diluted your stock will be. A 2-to-1 ratio is usually good. Feel free to add bay leaves or any other spice you'd like. Turn on the stove to about medium heat and let the suckers boil!

After

(Maniacal laughter)

Depending on what you're boiling, this step could take one to five hours. Bigger animals = more time (a good analogy for digestion, by the way). Give beef bones four to five hours, pork three to four, poultry one to two, and vegetables one to two, depending on how potent you want your stock. Once your water's turned a rich colour (anywhere from gold to brown to red, if you used beets), strain your stock through a colander - or just tilt the pot while holding the lid at an angle - into another pot. TA DAA. The pretty leftover liquid is stock! You can use it right away or freeze it or... drink it, I guess.

On an ending note, for all you folks who fit the "I'm too busy" category, remember:

1) Homemade stock is free, especially if all your scraps are scavenged instead of bought.

2) Homemade stock isn't loaded with salt (unless you dump it in there) and contains lots of vitamins and minerals that the process of preserving canned stock kills off.

3) You don't have to make stock right away (although you can; Mom always started making turkey stock as soon as the bird had cooled and been picked over). Even freezer-burnt meats and vegetables make tasty stock, so you don't have to stuff soup prep into an already busy day. Wait for a lazy Sunday.

4) An excellent tip from Mom: If you're making an animal-based soup, don't put the meat in with the stock bones. Add the meat last (because it's pre-cooked anyway) during your soup construction to keep it flavorful! 

Sweet Simmering!
-Leah 

*We keep it there to avoid smells and fruit flies. The apartment is so warm in the summer that vegetables, fruit, and bread will go bad within a couple days if we keep them out of the fridge. There's such thing as silicone buckets specially made for folks with our problem, but a reused plastic bag is way cheaper than a $50 tub, thank you very much. 

Embrace Your Inner Seagull

OR

Scavenging Whenever The Opportunity Arises (And Being Prepared To Do So)

You know that saying, "You eat like a horse?"

That horse is me. I am that horse. Someone in seventeen-hundred-whatever saw into the future and called me a horse (an endearing term, I think, when horses were a main form of transportation) and made up that saying when they saw how much I eat on a daily basis. I'm not just being dramatic, either - coworkers, friends, and my grandmother have all told me I eat ridiculous quantities of food. Part of it is nutritional deficiency, I'm sure; as much as I try to eat healthy, the fact is that I'm a student making minimum wage, and vegetable are fricking expensive. Someday I'll earn above $10 an hour and get to shop the crap out of the farmer's market, but today is not that day.

Did you know that you're probably starving? Even if you're 200 pounds overweight and eat like me (the horse), your cells are probably screaming for things you're not giving them. Imagine your insides are babies. Err, wait, imagine your cells are little baby heads? This is a terrible explanation, but work with me on this. Your trillions of body cells are babies, okay? Imagine that. These babies are being little shits and making a huge racket, so you give them a cup of water to drink, because they're not pooping, so they're probably hungry. They drink the stuff (they know the importance of being hydrated, after all), but they continue to make a fuss because they want MILK, and water is not milk. But you keep giving them water. Eventually their screaming drives you berserk because they never stop (and that would get really annoying). That's kind of what happens every day when you don't eat well. Your body goes, "I want vitamin B! I want carotenoids! I want fructose that doesn't come from purple Koolaid!" and you say, "Too bad! LOL! Have some meat and overcooked broccoli and french fries!" So they make you fat. The little bastards.

If you're a person who eats "well", you're probably a bit offended right now. Sorry. But the fact is our living bodies love living food. The more raw or single-ingredient food you can plug into yourself (minus meat - it takes forever to go through your super-long digestive tract and makes your insides all acidic), the better off you'll be. I'm no raw foodie (it makes me too cold and I'm not especially fond of crunchy food), but it's well-known scientific fact that basic - and especially uncooked - fruits and veggies have more of the "milk" your guts want.

Which comes back to me being a starving student. I can't afford the living food I function best on. I eat like a horse, but only because I'm trying to pump myself with nutrients I can't get from breads and junk food. I - and my screaming baby cells - are constantly hungry. Therefore I make a point of searching out things I wouldn't be able to consume normally. If I'm eating in a restaurant I'll order something full of veggies, and make sure I take all my leftovers home if I don't finish. I'll eat off other people's plates (at my own table, okay, not just at random). I'll fill up on the fancy pre-main course bread or salad.

I grab good food anytime I get the chance. Recently I went to a family potluck, and my family is huge (my mom has 97 first cousins) so there was a lot of food made, and therefore a lot of food left over. Not only did I spend a good chunk of my time at the party standing by the dinner table eating fruit, but I purposely brought Tupperware with me to pack leftovers in. I came home with a bowl of couscous, half a ham, some chicken breast, and a full container of whatever I could snatch from the veggie tray. These things provided me with two salads, two lunches, a breakfast, and a giant pot of soup. For free.

Most times the leftovers from parties (especially staff parties) get thrown out when everyone goes home. I make an effort to be the first (and often only - what's with that?) person to ask, "Can I take some of this?"

 I am a seagull in horses' clothing. Err, fur. Whatever.

Test time! What would you pick from this spread to bring home?

When you can't afford fresh food, that food becomes a huge treat. I can grab 36 cookies for $6 at the grocery store, but a handful of blackberries costs the same amount. When you have $50 to feed two people for two weeks... well, you say "screw you" to both options and buy a $3 pack of rice. But the point remains that fruit (and for that matter, vegetables, especially when you try to buy from within your own country) is a luxury to me. So when I find myself at a function of some sort, I take what I can. I come prepared. I don't expect to get anything, but the general rule is "ask and ye shall receive". This doesn't just apply to berries, either. Sandwich quarters, chicken bones, bread, sad-looking veggies from the supermarket vegetable tray someone bought last second - all of these leftovers are perfectly good to eat. Even the yucky-looking stuff, if you know what to do with it.

Do yourself a favor, though: a leftover plate of Oreos may be delicious, but it's only going to make you sick. Junk food is the water your baby cells don't want. Whole foods - things that were pulled out of the ground or picked off a tree and don't have ingredients listed - are the kind of things you want to seek out. They are the "milk". These are the things that are good for you, and, nine times out of ten, they'll be the things that are most simple and most expensive. They are the luxury. Your body thinks of good food in the same way my Dad does: "You can have as much salad as you want." I eat like a horse, but I haven't gained weight in years.

Developed countries waste more than a third of what they buy in food. Feed yourself and help stop the waste. Eat like a horse. Be a seagull.

Step by step:

1) If you know you're going somewhere where there will be leftovers, bring containers to put them in. That may sound Crazy Old Baglady-esque, but the party hosts will be more willing to dole out scraps if they don't have to donate dishes.

2) Grab whatever you know you'll eat. Even stuff that looks shoddy. Old veggies and less than prime cuts of meat can be made into stock for soup!

3) Don't whip out the Tupperware right away. That's rude. Fill up on as many whole foods as you can during the event and ask to take things home after the food table has been mostly abandoned.

4) Grabbing free tiny tubs of butter/jam/peanut butter from restaurants is not frowned upon. If might make you look a little desperate if you scoop handfuls into your bag, but hey, it's another peanut butter toast breakfast you don't have to pay for.

Yours Hungrily,
- Leah