Things have been slowly changing over the past however many years and i have been enjoying reading about nutrition and realizing more fully that food is meant to be delicious and nutritious. It doest seem too too long ago that my favorite breakfast was a diet coke, doritos and a cigarette… just typing that made me salivate a little. Yum! and GROSS!

Now I try to buy meat and produce from CA, I don’t buy a lot a of processed foods but certainly crackers and cookies sometimes. I like fancy cheese. I occasionally buy juice for Jack although I tend to only drink juice when I am sick. I buy a LOT of milk and cream, usually Strauss Farms but sometimes just whatever.

Sometimes I have my shit together and I make a weekly meal plan but really, that is not too often

I dashed across the street to the grocery store this morning and bought: cream, eggs (our chickens aren’t really laying right now), genoa salami, kalamata olives, an apple, my favorite Alvarado Street California protein bread, italian provolone, parmesan, sharp cheddar and.. that’s it, I think.

Sometimes I buy stuff in cans but mostly I try to make soups from scratch and buy dry beans instead of canned. Last week I made a crockpot chicken soup recipe that called for canned beans and I didn’t have any. So I soaked some dry beans over night and then added them to the crockpot… but I hadn’t COOKED them. So they came out crunchy. It was horrible. Resetting the crockpot to cook another 6 hours worked totally fine somehow and didn’t dry out the chicken or make it seem over cooked. major save! and that fed Vim and me for a whole week.

I make broth and soups and freeze them now that i have a crockpot. One of those tiny deep freezes would be super handy. I saw them at the store when we bought our fridge. They are cheap and when we have a basement someday I will get one. Then we can do that thing where you buy half a cow or whatever.

I also order food from Three Stone Hearth every week. This week I ordered Pastured Pork and White Beans with Greens, Beef Stew Osso Bucco Style and the Gremolata that goes with it plus more walnuts and their coconut date bars that are so damn good.

I grow some stuff. Just greens are growing now, I have kale, lettuces, bok choy and mustard greens ready to go. When I need some I just go out and pick it. All good for stir fry and soups.

What I ate today:
two egg omelet with olives, cheddar and walnuts.
two fish tacos from Rubio’s
curry lentil soup with yogurt cream
and like 3 cups of coffee
water
large spoonful of almond butter

That menu has a distinct lack of veggies in it, i guess the fish tacos had some…

What Jack ate today:
3 scrambled eggs with olives
cereal (some wheat flake kind) w/ milk
water
spanish rice and 1/2 a cheese quesedilla and a gross churro
some milk
2 strawberry mochi ice creams
2 bowls of beef stew with green beans and potatoes
1 small box of NERDS from his halloween stash

That’s more sweet stuff than he usually eats… oops. It was a holiday!

Here’s my fridge plus notes added with the app Skitch which is pretty awesome. Oh and if you like looking at people’s fridges, like I do, there is a whole flicker group for you to peruse here.

Today I embark on a pantry cabinet reorg inspired by Stitch and Boots, you can read her post on cleaning and organizing your shelves here. okay, wish me luck. I will blog about it hopefully today too.

oh and i wrote this on Friday but published it on saturday.

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So far I have made and canned a tomato confit and a lovely tomato conserve. Vim has made a lacto-fermented ketchup and plans on doing a few jars of pickled tomatoes, a relish and maybe a chutney as well. I froze a few large freezer bags full and cooked up a tomato gratin that Stitch and Boots sent to me. I recommend it as it was quite tasty.

I picked up a flat of dry farmed early girl tomatoes at the farmers market today and will can those tomorrow. I wish I had gotten two flats so maybe I will go get more next week.

We harvested all our zucchinis, carrots and green onions so that we could make way for some winter crops. Mostly I really need to get my lettuce and kale going again.

I’m going to try garlic, onions, shallots, brussel sprouts and cabbage this winter.

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Vm becomes obsessed with lacto-fermentation:

First he made whey and cream cheese with some strauss organic yogurt and then used the whey to make beet kvass. I think beet kvass is an acquired taste. I like it now! Poor Jack asked to taste it and spit it out and screamed I HATE IT and started crying. Poor baby!

Vim was left alone for a week the Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. It’sa good book, I bought it on a friends recommendation and because I wanted to read more about bone broth. I had never even heard of bone broth until I was pregnant with Jack and my (old) acupuncturist recommend it and basically all the food from Three Stone Hearth. She described it as a ‘nutrient dense’ diet an that was the first time I had ever heard that term as well. They recommend (and cook for you) lots of soups in bone broth, organ meat, raw whole milk, sprouted grains, soaked legumes and fermented foods. If you are in the East Bay highly recommend Three Stone Hearth for some good tasty healthy hippy food.

All this is is not to be confused with the ‘cleanse’ diet I did more recently with my NEW acupuncturist. The point of that diet was to lose some weight and to ‘give your digestive system a rest’ by eliminating all the things that are hard on the system to digest like legumes and grains.

All this always reminds me of this scene in Sleeper:

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Speaking of which, yesterday I started reading Good Calories, Bad Calories and I also watched the first hour of Capitalism: A Love Story and I had to turn it off due to the incredible stress of thinking about … everything. So far Good Calories, Bad Calories is pretty good and seems like ti will go into more detail about the politics of the things mentioned in Nourishing Tradtions. I’m interspersing it with reading some Georgette Heyer books I purchased on sale for the kindle. So romance novels and food politics is an odd combo…

We planted a million and one cherry tomato plants and now I am wondering what the heck to do with them. Can them? freeze them? grind them up in a food mill and then can that? Any suggestions?

Some day I will do the Eat Local Challenge as described by Stitch and Boots. For some reason I am not quite ready to commit and say out loud that I am going to do it. I bet I eat like 75% locally already. I think meat is the one thing I tend to buy organic but not necessarily locally. oh, also butter. I buy pastured butter but I don’t think it is local. If I shop at Berkeley Bowl they label where all the produce comes from and I try to stick to california but that doesn’t count as within 100 miles!

I decided to unsubscribe from my CSA. It’s so easy for me to go to a farmers market and actually choose the produce I want rather than be stuck with a ton of turnips I have no idea what to do with. And I forgot to pick up the last box and the host family didn’t get back to me until like a week later and I was kind of put out.

We have a jar of ladybugs we are going to release into the garden tonight! Yesterday I noticed black aphids on our corn plant. This shall not stand! Vim thinks the ladybugs will break my heart and fly away but I refuse to believe it.

Oh man, now i remember why i switched away from this template. It’s aliquot layout and I think I struggled (and failed) for entirely too long with the css to try to get the images to center. hmmm.

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We have a kick ass new blender. A BlendTec in a snappy red color. The BlendTec is in the same family as the Vita-Mix, one of those blenders that will basically pulverize anything into a delicious smoothie in 2 minutes or less.

I haven’t been particularly creative with my shakes. I use spinach, kale, banana, ginger and fresh or frozen berries in all combinations. Spinach, kale and ginger is very good and spicy and has the added bonus of making feel so very accomplished to have eaten 2 servings of leafy greens for breakfast. It’s like I expect some kind of angel of leafy greens to come down, bless me and give me a medal every time I have one. I’m so fucking smug about it I want to kick my own ass.

Our cute strawberry plants are steadily dribbling out 3-4 ripe strawberries a day and they are sending out runners like crazy. 3-4 strawberries is great and all…. but sometimes you just need LOTS of strawberries so today Jack and I and some friends took a mini road trip down to Davenport to Swanton Barry Farm to their U-Pick farm. I picked 14 pounds of strawberries! Okay, Jsack helped a little. Although mostly he ran around with his friend making up games until it was so cute I almost forgot how much of a huge pain in the butt he was this morning (almost).

There are quite a few places to pick strawberries around here but note that Swanton is organic and a union farm. It felt good to buy from them.

In local news the city of Oakland is going to change some laws so that people can legally grow food (read about it on Oakland North blog) on their residential lots and sell that produce. How cool is that? I’m so glad. I know that Ghost Town Farm was having some trouble with the city an I hope this helps Novella out a little, although I think she already shelled out like 3000$ for a conditional use permit. It also means that I’ll be sitting out on my front lawn selling snow peas tomorrow from 10am-12pm. (just kidding) (sort of).

On a totally different note – The food truck craze continues to explode into more and more ridiculous awesomeness. The other day Jack and I were at the playground and we got the most delicious potlatch seasoned french fries ever made on the planet from the Doc’s of the Bay truck. And our local play cafe has died a natural (if very sad) death in order to allow it’s owner to start a food truck called Sue’s Sassy Pies. Their menu sounds delish and I can’t wait to try them out. I can’t approve of the word sassy really in conjunction with food but I’ll let it slide.

If you’re in the East Bay I recommend coming to the Friday evening Bites on Broadway. Food trucks flock from all over the bay area like 3 blocks from my house and you can sample all kinds of stuff and then hang out on the Oakland Tech lawn. I hope it isn’t too crowded…

Is the food truck craze all over the US? Anyone?

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I finished up my 21 day detox diet last week. It was a diet that my acupuncturist recommend. She had a seminar about it and then ran a group diet. It was great having a google group and a group leader to ask questions of. Otherwise I don’t think I would have been able to do it.

It went really well and was pretty easy to stick to. I liked it because it wasn’t totally extreme and didn’t really condemn any one food group and it allowed me to eat enough carbs to keep me out of ketosis (which I find very uncomfortable).

All my protein came from these Standard Process products and lentils. I was getting like 75 grams of protein a day and that seems to be fine. Fats are coming from butter, olive oil and flax seed oil. I think I ate about 60/40 fruits and veggies in favor of veggies. No sugar and no refined grains, no soy and no beans. Some people probably don’t like protein shakes but I really like them. The best one is the spinach shake with ginger. It tastes good and felt really virtuous to eat.

I had tons of energy right away and although I haven’t weighed myself I must have lost like 10 pounds. I am wearing pre-baby pants and even PRE pre baby pants. So Wheeeee! I like being slimmer. Now I just need to get back to yoga so that I can be stronger too.

So I was actually totally FINE without coffee for 3 weeks. But I still craved it like crazy. I also craved nachos from Cesar, CTM from F.I., and cocktails of any description. So after 3 weeks I pretty much went back to my old eating habits: coffee with milk, cheese, cupcakes, pasta! So this week I am going to try to institute the 80/20 rule which lets you eat whatever 20% of the time and more like the detox diet the other 80. I’m not so great at figuring out exactly how to do that but I am going to give it a try.

The other interesting this about this diet was that it really forced me to be aware of why I was eating. The whole 3 weeks I would find myself wanting to eat when I was aggravated, upset, bored. Also, the pressure to eat when other people are eating and how easy it used to be to over eat.

Some of the keys to this for me was getting a really good balsamic vinegar and infused olive oils (lemon is best for salads!).

Anyway, it was interesting and a nice food experiment.

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I would like my yard to be mostly food. Although, also, when I look at the yard, I feel like I am 8 years old again. I remember how HUGE our yard was when I was little and how many secret places (despite it being mostly lawn) you could find to take your toys and create a new world for playing and I want to make a yard with lots of scope for the imagination, hiding places, twisty paths, unexpected things… I’d like to think it’s for Jack but really it’s for the 8 yr old me.

Recently we have planted 3 blueberries (early, mid and late) and a ton of everbearing strawberries. These were planted in 2 3′ round horse troughs that we ordered from McMaster Carr. We have one raised bed with fava beans, broccoli, arugula, and … something else I can’t remember. We planted a bunch of fruit trees. a Pink Lady and a Red Gravenstein and two avocados, a Holiday and a Fuerte. I planted my Bocking 14 comfrey roots this afternoon and now the chickens are over there sitting in the over turned dirt. Happy little chicken loaves!
We also started all our indoor starts and they are happily sitting on a seed mat.

My project over the weekend:

Planted around the brick (all bricks found in our basement) are elphin thyme, lemon thyme, lavender and orange mint. I want to plant some more natives and some good plants for birds and butterflies. None of the plants I wanted were at my close by nursery so I will have to venture out to some other nurseries soon. I’m looking for humming bird sage!

Upcoming tasks:
- build a larger hen house. – have plans for a chicken tractor sort of house. but it’s only for 3 birds. But I want more birds. So I need different plans. Anyone have suggestions?
- build at least one more raised bed.
- sweep up thick top layer of detritus in front yard and start it composting.
- map out other place for raising veggies and take soil samples for my soil class.
- put up chicken wire around raised beds so that we can take down other chicken fence. The chickens refuse to stay on the right side of it anyway.
- figure out how to clip chicken wings.

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What I can never remember is whether or not you drop the eggs into an already boiling pot of water or if you put them in and then boil the water. It’s the former. according to 99% of people who have written about it.

The other important piece of info is how to keep your hard cooked eggs from getting that grey green film covering the yolk. It’s important to make sure your eggs are easy to peel and are cooked through.

You can discourage the green film by plunging your hard cooked eggs immediately into a cold water or ice water bath. People argue that adding salt to the water makes them easier to peel but other insist that because salt increase the temp at which water boils you will be making your eggs rubbery from too high heat. Which brings us round to the argument about boiling vs. simmering. Some people add vinegar or baking soda.

How Minnie boils an Egg.
1. carefully put eggs in pot
2. cover to 1 inch over eggs with cold water
3. do not add salt
4. turn on high heat (lid on pot)
5. when water starts to simmer a bit and the eggs might be bumping around turn off the heat
6. leave cover on for about 15 minutes
7. plunge eggs into cold water bath (I use a slotted spoon to transfer them)
8. peel any old how.

Minnie’s deviled eggs
12 eggs-hard cooked, honey backed ham from honey baked ham store or any old ham will do, I guess. Celery, salt, pepper, mayo.
Dice the ham and celery
mush up the egg yolks
salt and pepper it
add mayo
put some more salt in to be sure
scoop into egg whites
sometimes I shake on some cayenne, sometimes I add paprika, sometimes nothing.

Apparently you can hard cook an egg in the oven. I need to try that but usually when i am making deviled eggs I need them immediately and do not want to risk the venture trying to use the oven. But think how in books people are always wrapping up eggs in leaves and cooking them in the fire.

Why is it that I could never sit down and eat 12 scrambled eggs but I could probably sit down to eat 24 deviled eggs?

Do you see the ruffle blue plate up in the first picture? I love love these plates. They are Hazel Atlas glass plates in Ruffle pattern from the 40′s. Eating off these makes me pretty happy. I’m a tad obsessed with jadite and hazel atlas right now. Quick! Someone put more money in my paypal account so that I can buy more of it!

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Tuesday menu

snack:
– red and green grapes
– cut up cantalope
– trail mix
Lunch
– chicken (2 breasts, organic) cooked in olive oil with salt and cut into strips
– carrots cut into cute shapes with these,
– brown rice with the cutout parts of the carrot and cut up green beans.
– Vim’s homemade corn tortillas

Thursday menu
snack
– apple slices
– trail mix
Lunch
– pizza – dough: olive oil bread dough from bread in 5 minutes a day
toppings: roasted beets sliced up, full fat mozzarella, goat cheese
– kalamata olives

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The tomoatoes were so pretty I had to take lots of pictures. Whoever packed this box for me lined them all up neatly in rows by color. AWWWWWW!

First we dropped them in hot water for about 30 seconds and then straight into a cold bath of water in the sink.

I was skeptical about reports that getting the skin off them would be easy after blanching but the reports were correct. Skinning them was easy! then we squeezed them over a strainer to get out the seeds and to extract some juice.

Here’s a photo of a large bowl of cutely colored peeled tomoatoes.

Then we canned them and did the hot water bath and cooling and here are a couple of finished jars.

Things I will do differently next time.
– put the same color tomatoes in each jar
– pack them a bit more tightly

Questions to anyone out there. My friend continued canning after we left and her jars might have been packed too tightly. they each leaked some juice after the hot bath although are tightly sealed. What think you? still good? Or should they be eaten and refrigerated?

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This is stressing me out on a few levels. First of all, we just moved like 2 days ago and I have no idea where most of our Tupperware is and also, suddenly having to figure out portions for so many people is hard. Oh, and what to cook is the other problem!

Menu for Tuesday Urban Forest Pre-School
SNACK
- grapes and watermelon and dried cranberries
LUNCH
– 6 chicken breasts, grilled and marinated in yogurt, ginger, garlic, olive oil. rubbed with salt and coriander. (is this going to be too spicy?!) We shall see!
– Sweet potato fries – using the convection mode on my new oven.
– sliced veggies – red, green, orange peppers and carrots
– maybe a plain yogurt dip for veggies?
– homemade pumpernickle bread and butter.

Menu for Thursday
SNACK
– apples

LUNCH
– peanut butter sandwiches cut into hearts.
– jelly on the side in case anyone wants it
– hard boiled eggs
– cheese sticks
– carrot sticks
– maybe left overs from Tuesday if they liked the food and if there is any left over?

Some possible future recipes:
black bean empanadas

Does anyone have any suggestions?!

FAIL Update:
important note! when using a convection oven you need to like halve your coking time. My sweet potato fries burned! phooey!

I also blog at IndieCrafts and on BlogHer.

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This article by the Cooking Issues Blog gives very detailed instructions on the best ways to infuse alcohol. They mention cacao nibs as something to infuse. I have a massive jar of nibs in my pantry (still! It used to be 3 massive jars.) that I need to use up. Cacao nib vodka anyone?!

And, obviously, the bonus here is that you have the vent the nitrous into the air… or, er, in case you need to do any in-home dentistry, you could just huff it.

I also blog at IndieCrafts and on BlogHer.

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I’m also super excited about our new house. Vim just stopped amidst our disgustingly messy kitchen and said, “i’ve got apartment senoritis”. Not that our place has ever been kept clean… but now I feel no incentive to clean AT ALL. My new theory is that I will just move the clean stuff that I can see and then I’ll just fucking torch the rest of it. My other new theory of packing and moving is that I will only pack the things I can see nd that I know already have a place to live at the new house. Like, I got a bug up my ass to move all of our board games. it was CRUCIAL that we get Big Boggle and Ice Towers over to the new place like yesterday. Now they are unpacked into the hall closet all waiting… for something.

I’ve bought 365000 million dollars worth of Ikea curtains. I also bought some chicken coop plans today The Garden Ark on the recommendation of @craftleftovers. Vim has a line on some RI Red chicks from a dude who has a guerilla chicken farm in west oakland. Then, I want to get either an orpington, an easter egger or a silver cuckoo marans. I confess, I want a colorful egg basket.

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First, the classic calendar style tea towel with sid vicious and some paint splatters:

And then another with God Save the Queen and a huge safety pin:

How to get a tea towel printed at SpoonFlower.

You can download an html (editable in Word) or a photoshop file of the calendar template over on spoonflower here.

I don’t know anything about Word so I have no clue why you would want to download something that is editable in Word. whatever.

- Create a new photoshop file that is about 27″ by 18″
- Copy and paste in calendar parts if you want.
- Grab some images and drop them in and arrange them. In this case I wouldn’t be to het up about your images resolution. Even a crappy downloaded from google images gif ends up looking mostly okay. Don’t sweat it but the higher the res the better.
- Once you have your image ready you can go to SpoonFlower.com and create a profile.
- Then go to http://www.spoonflower.com/designs/new and upload your photoshop file.
- Now it is time to order your tea towel. There are various fabrics you can choose from. I’ve made all mine with the linen-cotton canvas and printed it centered on a fat quarter. It’s the perfect size and easy as pie to hem. The linen-cottom canvas ends up being 14$ but I think the quilting weight cotton would end up working fine as well and those are 11$.

You can also order these tea towels straight from SpoonFlower here: God Save the Queen and the Sex Pistols calendar (comes complete with typos!).

Lat night Vim and I made English muffins with the Alton Brown recipe. DAMN! They are good. This recipe calls for cooking them on a griddle, which we don’t have. I just used a large pan and ended up sort of scorching the outsides of several of them. I would like to try an oven baked recipe next so that I can get that cornmeal on the bottom feel to them. I’m thinking on the pizza stone would work quite well.

Look at this lusciousness!

Coming soon: Some geek tea towels and more punk ones including Joan Jett!

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Vim made some cupcakes for me for my birthday using my favorite godiva cake recipe and with cream cheese frosting. he made some cinnamon cream cheese frosting and some strawberry cream cheese frosting. It’s weird how the strawberry one tastes sort of fake even though it was made with actual strawberries. Still, I continue to love a cream cheese frosting more than a butter cream one.

While making broth last night out of one of those pre cooked chickens i thought maybe it was time that i learn to make my own yummy chicken salad. I’m eating it right now and it’s not great. I need to work on it. Clearly I need to drive about 40 miles to get my favorite chicken salad sandwich and pay more attention to whats in there. The one I just made is chicken, mayo, red grapes, cashews, celery, pepper, salt, poppy seeds and some garlic salt. it’s not perfect.

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the thing is, I get obsessed with like one or two kids of food and I LUST for whatever it is. Some are transient and some stick around for years and years. This particular sandwich has been on my list for like 10 years. As has C.T.M from a couple of different Indian restaurants. Sometimes, I’ll go get whatever my obsession is and then I just have to keep having it. For weeks. If I dont have it, it’s all I think about.

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So he hands me an iced coffee and I took a drink and was suddenly transported back to RI, late 80′s. I was a grumpy teenager again, grubby with sand, chain smoking and reading bad novels while sitting in the air conditioned Bess Eaton on the pier waiting for a rotating number of equally grubby teenaged skater boys to come hang out with me.

WTF Blue Bottle?! You put cream and sugar in my order. I never have sugar in my coffee anymore. And now, I can’t stop.

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I mean, it was pretty good especially after I started putting the chips on my crackers with cream cheese. But it wasn’t as orgasm inducing as all the food bloggers would like you to believe. It was kind of pleasing to take a floppy lettuce-y green and crisp it up.

Kale is supposed to be madly nutritious and low in calories so health food nuts and dieters are all over this shit. i thought, I wonder how much baking the kale reduces it’s nutritional value? Which lead me via google to this article that I thought was hilarious:
Does cooking render minerals “inorganic” or less assimilable??
ahahahaa. In the middle of the article the author loses her cool and is like these people are DUMB! Well not in so many words. But I could tell she was thinking it.

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