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.

Dark Days Eat Local Challenge!

We are lucky to live in an area with an overabundance of fresh local food. During the summer, we have a CSA share with a farm located just half a mile down the road. In the winter, there's a farmer's market every Saturday, and we split a large winter farm share with another couple, which gives us about 45 pounds of roots, squash, etc to eat through the winter months. 

What we don't have is an overabundance of time. Even though our pantry and refrigerator is full of local food, and even though we love to cook, I'm embarrassed to admit that these days we eat out far more often than I'd like. Aside from not knowing the sources of the food we're eating, eating out takes a toll on our health, not to mention our wallets. 

We've been trying some new tricks to make it easier for us to cook meals at home on a regular basis. Menu planning has been the most effective, and when we do it properly, we can cook at home every night, and enjoy it. With our current system, we each come up with three meals we'd like to make for the coming week, then we share our choices and make a schedule and a shopping list. We plan our meals around what's already in the house to minimize grocery shopping, and most of the year that means we only go to the store for meat, dairy and staples like dry beans and rice. And in the winter, we'll also pick up fruit and maybe a few green veggies. 

Of course, there are pitfalls, especially lack of motivation. That's why we're so excited to participate in the Dark Days of Winter Eat Local Challenge. Our friends over at D.I. Wine and Dine turned us on to the challenge (if you read this blog, you know we love a good challenge). The basics of the challenge are to cook one meal each week featuring SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, ethical) ingredients, and to blog about it. 

With 45 pounds of winter share hanging out in our pantry, we'd better be able to handle that.

Hot Pepper Jelly

Hot pepper jelly has been on my to-do list for years. It's one of my very favorite foods, and yet somehow I've never gotten around to making it. Until today.

I had 7 or 8 hot pepper plants in the garden this year, and needless to say we have a bumper crop of hot peppers. Poblanos, serranos, jalapenos, and thai hots went into this jelly.

Recipe:
1 lb. mixed hot peppers (mostly seeded)
1 c. peach vinegar (from Peach-a-palooza 2011)
5 c. sugar
1 packet sure jell

Yield: 2.5 pints




 

I was hoping the peach vinegar, which is a gorgeous ruby pink, would give a nice color to the jelly, but it came out looking pretty normal. It tastes terrific, though. These will be going into my holiday present arsenal (minus a few jars to get me through the winter). Yum!

Peachapalooza 2011

I have managed to miss nearly every pick-your-own fruit opportunity this season. The strawberries passed me by before I even knew what hit me. The blueberries and raspberries too. So when I learned that there is a low spray peach orchard not far from here, I was determined to go, and to make up for the lack of fruit in my freezer and pantry.

So a few weeks ago we went with a friend up to Quonquont Farms. We went early. The orchard was misty. The trees were dripping with fruit. Heaven.

Before we knew it, we had picked over a bushel of peaches. We could barely carry them back from the orchard to the car. We headed back to the house for a processing party.

In the end, we yielded something like 12 pints and 8 quarts of canned sliced peaches, 2.5 quarts of peach nectar, and two gallon freezer bags of frozen peaches. Our friend, who lives in a prospector's tent without electricity, is over the moon to be able to bring so much shelf-stable fruit home with her.