Polydactyl Cat Trowel/Fist

So I started to write a post about the issue of the Dervaes family trademarking the term “urban homestead” (oops, I wrote it).  If you need some background, Agrariana’s Part l post and Part ll post seems, from my limited knowledge on it, to do a good job summarizing and analyzing the situation.

But then, I realized I’m not sure I have the time or the authority to write about this! We’re rural now, so though I once dabbled in urban homesteading, we are now following our personal path to freedom by growing and producing most of our own food on a tiny mini-farm that is not an urban homestead. I can’t take much time to write about this because I’ve got to get busy planting the seeds that will grow the future veggies for our our garden, even though there’s already a riotous homegrown revolution going on under the grow lights in our living room.  Enough said?

Path to Freedom, Urban Homestead, Urban Homesteading, Grow the Future, Homegrown Revolution (and trowel/fist logo) are registered ® trademarks of Dervaes Institute.

Okay, okay, we’ve had our fun.  And I poke fun because it IS so ridiculous on a certain level, to try to own language and concepts that exist without you.  But, even though l’m shaking my head along with everyone else, I think I may have a wee bit of sympathy going for the Dervaeses.  This tiny sympathy takes root in my belief that, if they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.  Seriously.  I truly think some marketing giant somewhere would have made a move to own “Urban Homestead” sometime soon, given its sudden, recent uptick in popularity.  I imagine it to be some slick business school graduate, who probably made fun of the farm kids when he was in grade school.  And I wonder if we’d be so up in arms about it if it hadn’t been one of our own.  If a huge corporation started selling “Urban Homestead” trademark jeans and forbidding others to use their name - would we be this outraged?  Or would we just absorb it quietly like we have all the other words and phrases that have been trademarked by the big guys?  I’m not making any excuses for the grabby Dervaes behavior, either.  I just wonder if it’s as simple as the Dervaes saw coming what I described, and decided to thwart that, without realizing what “if you have a trademark you have to defend it” was going to cost them on this one.  And the mob will take them down, because they’re little enough that the mob can.  Probably wouldn’t have been able to happen that way to Urban Homestead® jeans.

Breakfast here tends to be pretty local.  There are no packaged cereal boxes in our kitchen.

Veggie hash with eggs

There are bulk rolled oats and steelcut oats, but honestly oatmeal is not my favorite, and breakfast usually involves  other things.  In the summer, autumn, and early winter, very often we have some sort of a veggie hash with a couple of eggs.  Veggies are whatever is available right out of the garden, but often uses peppers, a cole crop such as broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, or kale, and a onion of some sort.  Cheese on top is nice.  Homegrown potatoes are frequently part of it, sometimes as hashbrowns, sometimes refried from leftover boiled potatoes, or chopped and broiled quickly in the oven.  Our brussels sprouts have come in heavily and nicely this time of year, and a typical breakfast side is a quick steam of a couple handfuls of halved brussels sprouts with butter and balsamic vinegar.  It’s easy to get enough greens every day when they are part of breakfast too.

We’ve been doing well keeping up with making yogurt.

It is so nice to have yogurt that minimizes contact with plastic.  Local raw milk that stores in a glass bottle, and a glass container for culturing and storing the yogurt.  I have a hard time looking at the yogurt aisle in grocery stores, and seeing what a healthy food has been reduced to, and what an impact on the environment its packaging is having.  There is no need, and it is so sad, to contemplate the waste of the individually packaged yogurts, and the crazy overpackaging of a few tablespoons of heavily sweetened yogurt to appeal to kids.  The yogurt we make at home is heavenly-tasting, high quality, and free of plastic and landfill dependency.  If we want it sweet, adding maple syrup and canned pears, plums, peaches, or frozen berries, or homemade jam does the trick, and tastes so much better than flavored packaged yogurt.  When we were in Canada, I found some good yogurt (or…yogourt!) that tasted like the yogurts in Germany.  I brought it home and cultured it and was able to keep the culture from that one package going for a long time, with delicious results.

Lacto-fermented red pepper pickle

I guess we don’t have much of the ordinary imported fruit either.  Bananas, citrus, etc, have become rare.  Berries and canned fruits are local, and berries almost invariably handpicked from the wild or a local farm, and frozen. This summer we had a bumper crop of gorgeous blackberries (blackberries, not black raspberries!) from a weedy patch of brambles about 50 feet from our backdoor, that yielded all we could eat fresh, and at least two quarts of frozen berries.  A local diet doesn’t have to be deficient on vitamin C and antioxidants, just because imported citrus is a treat, rather than a staple.

Another way to access Vitamin C is through lactofermentation of certain veggies.  One of our favorite lacto-fermented pickles uses a lot of red bell peppers - a great source of C.  I can understand how foreign it must seem to think of eating vegetable kraut with breakfast, for those whose breakfast is cereal.  But it is delicious with potatoes and eggs, and as convenient to quickly grab out of the refrigerator.  For me, it is as foreign now to imagine pouring out boxed cereal and putting processed milk from a plastic jug on it and eating that.

The thing is - everything tastes so good!  It’s not as though we are torturing ourselves through a breakfast of some weirdly home-fermented stuff combined with choking down our daily greens.  So often we look at each other and just say, “oh, THIS is soo good..”  It is a high-quality, low sugar, usually low-glutin, easily digestible, low on environmental impact, and hugely satisfying way to have breakfast.

We eat veggies for breakfast a lot.  Quite a few people have looked at me like I’ve got a third eye in the middle of my forehead when I suggest having veggies and protein for breakfast, instead of carbs and sugar.  Thought I’d post a few pictures about how to do it.

Not shown - I make hashbrowns first that cook while chopping the rest of the veggies:  grate up a few potatoes, fry in olive oil in a cast iron pan with salt and pepper.  Set aside/keep warm while finishing the veggies.  If I’m in a hurry, I just start adding veg to the hash browns as they are nearing doneness.

The usual vegetable mix is onion or shallot, zucchini, pepper, and tomato, plus whatever else is available.  This time I added broccoli and the first 2 pods of okra of the season.  I chop the veggies in the order that they should cook in - onion and green pepper get the most time, then zucchini. Then greens or broccoli, tomato, or basil get just a quick cook at the end.  Start adding them to a hot cast iron pan in that order, with a little olive oil.  This can be spiced up with some hot pepper if desired, seasoned with salt and pepper.  Cooking is usually pretty quick - 5-10 minutes maybe, and ideally things stay colorful and a little crunchy, not soggy. It comes out of the hot pan, and fried eggs go into the hot pan.  Mix the hashbrowns and the veggies on the plates, top with eggs a few minutes later.  Yum. The only thing here we didn’t grow at home is the salt, pepper, and olive oil.  This is also really delicious with a little feta cheese topping it.

And the idea is that the eggs are somewhat runny, and the yolks run all over the mix deliciously.  In fact, there is little to compare at this time of year with the flavor of salty fresh tomato, basil, and egg yolk mopped up with toast or hash browns.

Yes, those words were chosen to conjure up Margaret Hamburg.

Margaret Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration chief, was recently featured on NPR as follows, talking about the giant egg recall:

“She also had some practical advice for consumers: Reject over-easy eggs. She said that as federal investigators continue their work with the companies involved, consumers should strictly avoid ‘runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.’ “  (National Public Radio, August 23, 2010)

Now, I’m an odd bird when it comes to runny eggs.  I’ve gotten nauseous at the idea of eating a soft-boiled egg before… when it was someone else’s eggs.  I won’t touch raw cookie dough because of an experience with getting food poisoning from eating it as a teenager.  But our own eggs, that we know the history of, we know the health of the chickens, and every detail about the eggs every step of the way, are another story.  Instinctively, I prefer them more softly cooked than I ever have any eggs with an unknown history.  And on occasion, I make ice cream, caesar salad dressing, or pasta carbonara with our raw eggs.

It’s a pity that all eggs are castigated in one fell swoop - after all, we can’t hurt the giant factory farms’ feelings by singling them out for criticism in comparison to the health of backyard and small producers’ chickens.  I am wondering what the fallout of this situation will be.  Legislation that punishes the small producers?

Well, time will tell, but in the meantime, I purposely cooked our homegrown eggs even just a little runnier than usual the morning after I heard that NPR report.  Must be that third eye that makes me so contrary.

Coffee is just one of those things for me.  I can (do) drink it pretty much all day, and even a bit in the evening, and not feel too much effect.  I like a good cup, but am not much a snob about it.  Well, not true… I don’t like bad convenience store coffee and dislike styrofoam-like cups (some are truly evil, especially some of the newer fine-grained foam ones).

But this isn’t about dislikes, its about what I like right now.  What I am liking right now.  Here is a photo of this morning’s Joe… Mandyrose’s cup is on the right, mine on the left, presspot by Bodum above, maple syrup from 2008 above left.  Our blend du jour is 2/3 ground beans of French Roast by Coffee Express here in Michigan, and 1/3 Irish Creme Decaf from By The Pound in A2.

Grind it medium-fine, add near boiling water halfway up the presspot and stir well, then add the rest of the water and set the top on.  Wait a couple minutes for just the right combination of caffeine and other goodies to move out of the beans and into the water (and perhaps even some of the ions in our well water to adsorb onto the coffee grounds) and then give it a slow, 30-second press to the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hot water has been warming our coffee cups.  Pour those off into the dishwater, and pour Mandyrose’s coffee first (she likes it hot).  Add maple syrup to sweeten a bit, pour in a dose of good (really good, fresh, non-homogenated) whole milk (shake a bit first so it’s not all cream), stir once and serve.  Then pour mine and sweeten, sans milk (ok, sometimes I add the milk too).

Creamy, a little bit Irish, mmmmm.

Now about presspots… there’s just something wonderful and clean about this coffee’s taste that I don’t get anywhere else.  I think it’s because no matter how fancy the machine, you just can’t get access to fully clean every part and hose and pipe that the water touches… or if you can, you don’t often do so.  Hot water with ions leaves residues when it evaporates away… period.  You can’t avoid it.  Distilled water? Maybe.  But not once it gets coffee in it.

But a presspot is glass and steel, with perhaps a bit of plastic near the top for a final strain (but my next one won’t have that plastic), but basically you’ve got hot water and coffee in an easily cleaned vessel, pure and simple.  And the taste of the coffee is all coffee, no residue.

My mother and I have discussed coffee over the years.  I had bought her some better beans a few times, and made my best for her, but she didn’t really like any of them.  Each time I visited I would try some different things to see what she liked, and finally one day she said, regarding a cup of joe I had not made, “Now this is what I’m talking about!”  The common denominator, after all these years, was the taste of the residue from coffee makers.  The particular coffee in question was from one of those enormous church percolator pots, with the big coffee basket on top.  The crew in charge had (fortunately) not over percolated this brew, so it was as good as such coffee gets, but was full of the unmistakable taste of years of hard water + ordinary coffee grounds with a simple rinse instead of cleaning.  Those big church-hall coffee makers are something else in that regard, building a patina of taste that lingers with me from my earliest coffee tasting attempts at church functions when I was 7 or 8 (lots of cream and sugar).  But that’s what Mom likes!  It’s that residue taste that is missing from all my other attempts to introduce her to coffee bliss.  So I just use her coffee in her coffee maker when I visit her, and all is well.

Ordinary coffee makers (of the Mr. Coffee variety) do the same thing, more or less.  Mostly less, of course, but unless you clean the heck out of them, with hot vinegar washes and the works, they gradually build up the same types of residue and produce the same types of extra tastes for you to get accustomed to.  I spent a week recently with a friend who makes espresso in a beautiful machine, a machine fastidiously cleaned… except of course it isn’t.  There are innards that get residue built up, and I could detect something like a residue buildup taste, or at least I believed I could.

But my presspot, it’s just coffee and the glass.  Pure and simple, and repeatable.  Our coffee always tastes the same.  Mom doesn’t like it much, but she doesn’t have to.  She knows what she likes.  We do too.  And with my third little cup finished, so is this post.  Have a good day.  Oh, and Hi Mom! :-)

Question from the market:  “Do you spray your vegetables, at all, with anything?”

mantis at home among the beanstalks

Thank you for asking!  It’s an easy and straightforward answer:  No!

I began growing my own food partly, as I’ve mentioned before, because of flavor and quality, and pleasure in the process.  But only partly.  The other reason has to do with my beliefs about pesticides, herbicides, and nutritional quality, and what we are doing to our health and our world by poisoning or compromising our food.  I reason that if I grow it, I really know what’s been sprayed on it, and what the soil it grew in looked like.  And I want food with no chemicals, to the extent that this can be achieved in a world contaminated by the drift from other peoples’ chemical applications. My family tree holds an enormous history of cancer.  All four grandparents, a parent, several aunt/uncles, a great grandparent at least. This is a conversation for another post, but the root of the matter is - I do what I can to avoid controllable carcinogenic exposures.  Please read Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, for insight into this issue.

Baby bluejays beside the garden

I am also opposed to harming beneficial insects, and unfortunately, several of the chemical applications deemed acceptable for organic growing methods can do just that.  Neem oil, pyrethrins, insecticidal soaps, rotenone, and Bt, for example, don’t discriminate among which insect to kill, at times, or damage other animals.  Too often, people don’t discriminate among insects either.  This is also another post for another time, but in brief, without insects, we are without many foods.  Most fruit or vegetable parts we eat that contains seeds, and most fruits or vegetables whose propagation involves reproduction by seed, will be damaged in productivity if the pollinating insect population is damaged.  And you can forget about honey.

We also do not “prepare” soil for growing plants by spraying it one season and growing without sprays subsequently.  I have been astonished to hear farmers tell clientele their food is grown without any sprays at all, then describe to other farmers how they are increasing their growing area by spraying with Roundup one year to get the weeds down, then growing food there the next year and saying they didn’t use sprays.  I encourage everyone to ask the deeper questions:  “Do you use any kind of pesticide or herbicide anywhere ever?”  “Have you ever used _____?” “What do you think about pesticide sprays?”

Tree frog guarding the zucchini

None of this should be confused with an opposition to killing individual creatures.  We handpick japanese beetles, potato bugs, tomato hornworms, and various hungry hungry caterpillars, and squish them, drown them, or feed them to the chickens with satisfaction.  Row covers, staggered plantings, crop rotation, and good soil (to grow strong plants that can handle a little damage) are preventive measures.

Today I picked tomatoes in the rain, and a frog hopped out from under the plants swiftly, too swiftly to identify.  A few days ago, I found a green treefrog contentedly nestled against a zucchini leaf, almost perfectly camouflaged. Praying mantises, garden spiders, toads, birds, and predatory wasps are a common sight among the crops.  These creatures tell me something of the health of the microcosm where our food grows.  Hopefully, where they can live, so can we.