Ramps

Alliums are pretty much my favorite thing in the universe. Garlic, onions, shallots, leeks--I adore them all. And I am crazy about ramps.

These wild leeks are an early spring delicacy native to parts of the US. As ramps have become one of the trendy hallmarks of the local food movement, these wild leeks are being overharvested in much of the Northeast. Whole stands of ramps are being dug up for sale to NYC restaurants, and at big supermarkets like Whole Foods. (So, if you harvest ramps, do it responsibly--gather mostly the leaves. If you dig the bulbs, take no more than 1/3 of each clump). This threat to one of my favorite native foods has inspired me to try to establish a ramp patch in my yard. They grow on the forest floor, so if you have a shady, cool area on your property where most edibles don't thrive, ramps could be just the ticket.

 We waited all week to meet up with some friends who would show us the way to a local ramp patch. Of course, after weeks of dry weather, the day of our ramp excursion was cold and rainy. We, of course, went anyway. The ramps did not disappoint--the stand was quite large, and we felt comfortable harvesting a few bunches without making the slightest dent in the patch. I dug mine carefully, trying to keep them in the soil, so that they have a better chance of surviving transplant. I'll let you know if they make it.

 While most of the ramps we collected will hopefully live to see another spring, we couldn't resist eating some of them. Taking a tip from Hungry Tigress, I decided to try ramp pesto. I mostly followed this recipe from Food 52.

Here's what I used:

About 2 cups chopped ramps (steam 'em in the microwave for one minute)
1/2 cup walnuts (toasted)
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup grated parmigiano reggiano cheese
sea salt
pepper
juice of half a lemon

Wow. This pesto is probably only for true allium lovers. I'm not gonna lie--it's pretty stinky. But it is also super delicious. Just don't eat it on a first date.

Nailing The Homemade Tortilla

When there's nothing in the pantry, a quick batch of tortillas can make a meal. A can of lousy beans transmorphs into a delicious filling when encased by a tortilla. Tortillas are cheap, but they're even cheaper when you make them at home. A cup of flour makes 6 tortillas, so were talking a few pennies on the tortilla. I had tried several times to make tortillas in the past, and though they were acceptable(ish), manifesting all the aforementioned powers, they quickly became hard and dried out discs resembling a stale cracker (bleck). But today I made delicious tortillas that were flexible and supple discs of soft chewy dough... and now hours latter while writing this post, they are still flexible supple discs of soft chewy dough - yes! There were three things missing from my original attempts. They were all revealed to me in this recipe from The Fresh Loaf that worked for me. Enjoy!

Lard

Yes, lard. Please pause before you write it off. It's a great cooking ingredient that is still used today by many bakers! It improves texture, and adds a great deal in flavor as well.

Milk

Use milk as your wetting agent. Milk actually softens dough through some chemical process that I'm too lazy to look up right now. But it's true.

Kneading

Kneed the dough thoroughly to develop gluten. This will help with that awesome chewy texture.

Now we can make burritos out of our home made tortillas, instead of just tacos. I'm anticipating breakfast burritos in my near future, if we don't eat all of them before the morning!

Garden Planning

Still tucked in, waiting for spring.

After a nearly snowless winter, it's been spring-like and sunny here for the past few days. That has me itching to get out in the garden--we've purchased our seeds, and I've been working on our garden plan. This year we'll have about twice as much growing room, thanks to our neighbor and garden "manager". He's been gardening in our rowhouse's yard for over a decade, and he's nice enough to share some space with others in the building.

This year we succumbed to a few impulse buys while perusing the amazing selection of Seed Savers Exchange seeds: 


Strawberry Spinach. This is a salad green that also produces fruit?!? Sign me up.


Rat-tailed Radish. A radish variety cultivated for the seed pods, not the roots. Supposed to be good raw or pickled. I've never met a radish I didn't like. Yum!


I'm also going to expand my hot pepper obsession by trying a few varieties from seed. I picked varieties I haven't seen available in starts around here: Pasilla (the dried pod is used for mole) and pepperoncini, to make my greek salad obsession more homegrown.


Now that we've been through a season with our CSA, we have a sense of what we can rely on them to grow. We'll be passing on the heirloom tomatoes, bok choy, beets and carrots this year, since we had more than we knew what to do with in our farm share. Instead, we'll be growing roma tomatoes for canning, more green beans, and parsnips--all things we felt a little short on last year.


We'll also be growing a little differently this year. We're aiming for a Ruth Stout-inspired heavy mulch, no till approach. The garden has been snuggled up under a few inches of hay all winter, and we plan to simply push it aside to plant when the time comes. If you're not familiar with Ruth Stout, you should be. I leave you with this: 

Locally Grown Tropicals

Every aspiring locavore has her hangups. Foods native to far-away lands and warmer climes that you just can't pass up at the grocery store. I can't tell you how jealous I am of urban farmers in California, blessed with citrus trees and artichokes. Green with envy, I tell you.

What's a girl to do? Grow them inside, of course! The (perhaps vain) hope is that some day my lemons, tea, and other tropical treats, will be part of my 100' diet right along with the kale and tomatoes. Here you see my meyer lemon and dwarf banana, along with a very productive thai hot pepper and some scraggly rosemary that we transplanted from our CSA farm.

With most of these plants, I'll have to wait years before I see any fruit, if ever. 'Til then, it's quite a challenge to keep them thriving. Well, if we're being honest, it's a challenge just to keep them alive, especially in the dark winter months. A lot of these plants are rather finicky, and since I'm notorious for killing even the "thrives on abuse" variety of houseplant, it's a miracle I haven't lost any of these exotic friends. But hey, I like a challenge.

The first year I had the lemon tree, it flowered profusely and produced two teeny tiny lemons. They were the most amazing thing I ever tasted. I had hoped to see some flowers on my meyer lemon tree again this winter. Instead, it's spent the last few months regrowing the leaves it lost when I brought it inside in the fall. It might have been transplant shock, or stress from the hasty transition inside. 

My tea plant is looking great--don't let the browning leaves fool you. When I got it, it was a tiny stick with no branches. It's supposed to be a shrub, so I've been practicing my pruning skills and encouraging the plant to put out new branches. Here you can see new leaves unfurling where I cut it back. It seems to really love a good haircut.

And the dwarf banana, looking a little more dwarf than it should. This variety supposedly fruits when it's about three feet tall--we're looking at about a foot of growth right now. I almost killed this one several times this winter, until some research revealed that bananas actually prefer a sandy potting mix, the same that you would use for cactus. I had it in regular potting soil, and it became clear that I had been making a classic rookie mistake--over-watering. I re-potted the banana, rescuing it from certain death at the hands of root rot.

This crazy plant is a pitaya vine, or dragon fruit. It's a night-blooming orchid cactus--a vining cactus that grows on trees and produces the most amazing dinner plate sized blossoms at night. These plants grew all over the place in the Nicaraguan town I spent a summer in, and I have fond memories of seeing these flowers caught in my flashlight's beam. The fruit is equally incredible. Delicious pink alien looking things.

It took me almost 10 years to find a place selling the plants stateside--it turns out you can get them from Logee's, which is only a few hours from here. This plant has grown from about 1.5 feet tall to nearly 6 feet in the year that I've had it--talk about fast-growing! As you can see, I'm struggling to contain it. Supposedly, it will start to flower and produce fruit once the plant weighs about 10 pounds. I have no idea how I'm supposed to know how much it weighs...

Some people turn into crazy cat ladies as they get older. I aspire to be the crazy plant lady--surrounded by an ever-growing collection of bizarre tropical fruit plants. I'd say I'm well on my way. I just hope that by then I'll at least have figured out how to get them to fruit.

Habaneros at Home

Would you believe me if I told you I harvested these habaneros off of an indoor plant in late November? How about if I told you that I managed to escape this dangerously bare-handed photo op unscathed? Seriously, I'm not sure how I managed it. Capsacin seems to really have a thing for my mucous membranes, but this time I managed to avoid sticking my finger in my eye.

This summer I grew 6 different varieties of hot pepper in the garden. Come fall, some of the peppers still hadn't ripened, though frost was imminent. I dug up several plants and transplanted them into pots, which I placed under a grow light and hoped for the best. They all survived the shock and the peppers ripened--habaneros, cayenne, and thai hots. What's more, the thai hots and habanero continued to flower and even set fruit!

I think I can expect to have fresh thai hots throughout the winter, and the habanero may continue to flower.

As for these? They went into a peach habanero hot sauce, made with a jar of our canned peaches. Yum!

Whittled Down to Zero

Our first attempt at zero waste shopping. We cheated twice: the tofu and the sherry.

I am on a quest to eliminate as much packaging as possible from my life. As with most lifestyle changes I undertake, I'm doing this gradually--that's why the blog is called Whittled Down, after all. This is just the first post of many, I hope, documenting our experiment in zero waste living.* We've already been working at it for a few weeks, and this week we saw a dramatic reduction in our trash. We filled just a single bathroom-sized trash can with household garbage.

Now, we're not starting from scratch here. We have had a low-waste ethic for several years. Our commitment to the practice has ebbed and flowed. Recently, we've lapsed pretty badly. That said, here are some practices we already had in place which have made the transition easier:

Compost. We have a worm bin in our kitchen and a compost pile out in the yard. Most of our kitchen scraps end up here, though sometimes I get lazy when the compost container is full and food waste ends up in the trash.
Recycling. We regularly recycle, though I sometimes get lazy with the paper. Bonus: our recycling is picked up by a bicycle-powered trash removal service!
Buying in bulk. We buy many things in bulk, but sometimes bring it home in bags rather than in the jars we use to store the food. Sometimes we get lazy and forget to look for something in the bulk section, buying a similar item that comes in packaging.
CSA and a backyard garden. Self-explanatory. This food is never packaged. Once or twice I have used a plastic bag to weigh items at the CSA shed. Never again (I hope).

It's astonishing to me how much waste I still produce. Even though I shop around the outer aisles of the grocery store. Even though I have a CSA and go to the farmer's market. So where does this trash come from? Let me count the ways:

Oops! I forgot my reusable shopping bags. Forgetting my reusable shopping bags doesn't stop me from filling up my cart. Even though paper bags are recyclable and compostable, I'd rather not use them at all. 

Oops! I forgot my jars for bulk goods. Our co-op has paper bags for bulk as well--if I arrived at the store unprepared, I used to just grab one of these instead. 

Plastic produce bags of doom. Even if I don't need the plastic produce bags to get the food home, I would need them to keep the food fresh in my refrigerator. So I usually ended up taking a plastic bag when purchasing refrigerated produce. I ended up with so many of these. And I don't have a dog. 

Local meat. Wrapped in plastic. Cheese too. This is one of the toughest sources of waste for me. Meat and cheese comes wrapped in plastic, or plastic lined paper. Not only do I feel badly about the waste generated, it grosses me out. I hate having meaty garbage hanging out in my trash can. Ew. And the cheese? Plastic is actually bad for cheese--cheese connoisseurs (and Europeans) will keep their cheese wrapped in paper. But here in the US, cheese comes  wrapped in plastic as a sales tactic--it gives the consumer a visual preview of the cheese in all its gooey, textured glory.

Plastic-lined milk cartons. Where we live, we can either buy local, organic milk in a carton, or local, non-organic milk in glass. We have usually opted for the organic version. But milk cartons, even though they're recyclable, are lined with plastic. 

Too shy to say no. When shopping at more traditional stores, if I miss that golden opportunity to pre-empt the clerk's bagging of my purchase, I'm usually too shy to tell them I don't need a bag.

So what's our strategy for eliminating waste in our household? Here are some of the solutions we've employed so far:

Eliminating spontaneous trips to the store. Not only does a weekly shopping trip up my odds of remembering my reusable shopping bags and containers, turns out it saves me money by preventing impulse buys. I go with a list, and I buy only what's on the list. Anything I find myself tempted to buy spontaneously usually comes in packaging, making it easier to pass up. 

Menu planning. Planning our meals helps us make a shopping list that does not require us to buy anything in packaging. It has the added benefit of encouraging us to cook more meals at home and to use what's already in the pantry.

Making use of my scrap pile. I'm not much of a sewer, but I do know how to crank out a simple bag. I saw this video of a woman making a variety of reusable shopping bags out of old shirts, and I finally had the inspiration I needed to cut my scrap pile of old clothing down to size. I use these bags for bulk items and produce, and the larger ones for grocery bags.

Reusable containers for the meat and cheese counters. This has been the biggest challenge for me so far. The solution seems simple--bring reusable containers to the store and ask the butcher to put your purchase in the container rather than in a wrapper. Unfortunately, making this request is extremely awkward, and gets you lots of weird stares. I'm not gonna lie. Half the time, they can't figure out how to tare the scale to account for the weight of the container, or they wrap the purchase and then plop it into the container. Bea from Zero Waste Home has some tips for overcoming this challenge, and I'm going to keep at it. 

Compromising on milk. We've switched from the local organic milk in cartons to the non-organic local milk in glass. This way the only waste is the plastic lid.

Finding a friend with chickens. Or an art teacher. We give our egg cartons to a co-worker of mine who has chickens, or to my mother, who is an art teacher and uses them for paint palettes and sculpture projects. This doesn't eliminate the packaging, but at least it gets reused. 

Creative refrigeration. We are still learning how to properly refrigerate produce without plastic. We've turned our sauerkraut crock into a root vegetable refrigeration unit, tucking them all in with a damp cloth. Our most enlightening discovery so far? The salad sack. I made a bag with a drawstring of an old terry cloth towel. We keep it damp, and fill it with lettuce, fresh herbs, and other delicate green things. They keep longer in this towel bag than they ever kept imprisoned in plastic. We had a head of lettuce in there, fresh as can be, for over two weeks.
Make More from Scratch. We love to cook, but often our busy schedules get the better of us. Our zero waste project encourages us to make more of our staples from scratch. Since we started this experiment we've made our own gravlax, yogurt and seitan, for example.

Honestly, I could go on and on. It's pretty tricky business avoiding packaging, and we have a lot to learn. If you've been experimenting with zero waste in your home, I'd love to hear about your trials and tribulations.

*Disclaimer: This blog is a judgment-free zone. I am not judging you for the trash in your garbage can--promise. Everything I share on this blog I share out of genuine enthusiasm. These crazy projects bring me great joy and personal satisfaction, and I hope to spread some of that to others. I couldn't care less what you buy or what it comes wrapped in.

Dark Days Challenge #1: Dinner Pie

While we've made several mostly local meals this week, we keep gobbling them up before we remember to pull out the camera. Tonight we had a little more foresight. This meal is our weekly contribution to the Dark Days Challenge, in which we will make at least one largely local meal a week all winter, and blog about it. The best thing about this week's contribution?

Pie for dinner. That's right.

Here's the breakdown:

Butternut Squash Pie

The Local: butternut squash, semi-local flour (King Arthur's, up in VT), local eggs, butter and milk, and local ginger--yes, we are amazingly lucky to have a source of local ginger here in MA.
The Non-Local: organic sugar, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, salt.

Pasta with wilted arugula and oyster mushrooms


The Local: Arugula from the farm down the road, onion and garlic from our winter CSA, oyster mushrooms from an amazing foraging haul, butter from VT.
The Non-Local: macaroni, parmesan.

Oh yeah, and the wine is not local, but it is imported locally and purchased from a locally-owned shop. There aren't a ton of local wine options here, but there are a few--perhaps we'll showcase some over the course of this challenge.