It occurred to me a few years ago that there was something fundamentally wrong with all forms of ism. Communism, socialism, capitalism all seemed to be different forms of colonialism whose only claim to greatness according to it’s advocates was this decidedly chauvinistic claim that, for instance, Capitalism is good because Socialism is bad. Not much of a recommendation since all any of these did was promote a hierarchy of opportunists that game the system for their personal pleasure to the detriment of the vast majority of the people who like good herd animals willingly follow the latest strong man as long as he is packaged in the appropriate phraseology and images.
One of the latest crazes, a slight improvement over medieval feudalism, is Capitalism, generally an English invention that was spectacularly successful in launching the widespread exploration of the planet on tiny wooden sailing ships and then the industrial revolution. I will lump all forms of ism together with the name of capitalism for the remainder of this discussion since it is the only form of ism that really exists today despite what corporate propagandists would have you believe.
What made capitalism so successful in part was what started out as Lloyd’s of London, a service that sent young boys as runners out to solicit subscribers to invest in different capital projects that would have been impossibly large for the English government to fund at the time. Although there were some short lived examples of large scale enterprises funded directly by the government in other European countries during this same period, it was the direct involvement by the middle class in these investments and direct participation in the rewards of these projects had a much more lasting effect, allowed for much more rapid and enduring growth and in fact those same financial markets have grown, become more complex, and drive the world economy today.
What was a novel way to finance large projects without interfering with traditional ways of feeding, clothing, and attending to the health, education, and welfare of the people has now been applied to every aspect of life much to the detriment of our economy as a whole and the ability to deliver high quality services as the corporate model of cost reduction has been applied to systems that have gotten far too large and complex to be sustainable in this kind of system. Strangely, what made the system so robust has come full circle to not being able to exist without the direct intervention of the government in every economic and public service sector. The economy has gotten to the point where it is no longer sustainable and the situation will continue to deteriorate until there is a paradigm shift into a new system beyond the current era of colonialism whose last and ultimate expression of capitalism is the corporate fascism and it’s addiction to handouts by the government at taxpayer expense.
No system is perfect and people, being the adaptable creatures they are, will always find a way to manipulate the system to their advantage. After taking care of chickens for a few weeks I call this chicken behavior-they are always trying to steal food from each other and if one starts to bleed then the entire group will attack that chicken and peck it to death while they eat it’s flesh. Nothing describes capitalism better than that in which every kind of opportunism is not only expected but encouraged. It took me a long time to come up with something that might replace fee for service capitalism but after discussing cooperative and community life with people from every economic sector I think that cooperatives and guilds are worth reviving and that they would work better than ever before especially with the communications technology available today. Guilds and cooperatives aren’t new. They were a traditional method of doing business before the capitalization of the industrial revolution created a system of people that controlled the ability to create things people wanted and another class of consumers that were subordinated to service them. Described like that I don’t discern any difference of the worst excesses of those two twins Communism and Capitalism.
I define guilds as professional organizations that produce goods or services. People that belong to guilds could negotiate with other guilds and cooperatives to receive compensation, services and goods. This isn’t a radical departure from the way things work now, just more honest about describing the relationships. For instance, doctors currently decide how doctors are going to be trained, how many are trained, and even have a lot of influence over the cost of the training. The doctor industry has a virtual monopoly and have been the driving force in keeping fee for service medicine alive at all costs and preventing any reform for over 100 years that interfered with their ability to charge what they will with complete disregard for the efficacy of treatment or the cost to our economy.
The American Medical Association fought the establishment of Medicare in the 1960’s but, since Medicare institutionalized the fee for service system in medicine, they have reversed course and now fight any attempt to change the way they are compensated preferring to pursue a corporate model of increasing revenues by providing as many goods and services as possible and always charging as much as the market can bear for each and every delivery whether it is a benefit to the receiver or not. In a system that is twice as expensive as the next most expensive country in the world on a per capita basis, that means that we are paying providers over a trillion dollars each year, in other words-more than the entire cost of the Iraq war every year, more than we should be for a high quality health care system. The cost to our economic development in other areas has been enormous. Instead of being the most progressive and well educated country on earth we are the largest debtor nation subject to theatrics and theft by our government with little to show for it.
Cooperatives can be operated by workers, producers, buyers, or even guilds. Typically members of cooperatives are owners. They can negotiate to buy or trade goods and services with others and participate in a democratic and equitable way with the proceeds. There really isn’t any point in talking about all the different types of cooperatives because they are endless. The point of this is that we need to move beyond the quaint and inefficient separating and isolating individuals to promote the counting and accounting of money. The worth of individuals can be based more on their worth to their community, not their ability manipulate and compete with other in a system that disregards the needs of communities. We also need to move beyond this kind of compensation as the sole reason to do things that we all agree need to be done anyway.
People need to have housing, eat, receive healthcare and clothing. In order to maximize production and communication we need to have a robust education system, but not this factory model that is common today where we mostly produce cheap labor for corporations. Not providing those things or not giving everyone access to basic resources actually costs more than providing basic essentials if you assume that society at large will feel the effects of every sickness or disability in one way or another and really unless we are going to start culling what we see as the weak and disadvantaged from our society by various means of mass murder then we will be affected in a negative way for failing to care for everyone. What is happening now is more like a slow death for many people that are simply ignored if they can’t be utilized as a profit center for an investor and we all pay the cost of deferred maintenance either directly or in the increased cost of goods and services.
By identifying the needs of groups of people in a system of guilds and cooperatives it is possible to have a much more honest discussion about how to meet the needs of individuals and to concentrate on the quality of enterprise as opposed to the cost or profit. We waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year regulating enterprise under our current colonial model and the larger the systems get the less able regulation is able to solve problems like the spread of infectious organisms in a highly distributed food supply. These complex systems are not just prone to failure. Failure is predictable and a sure thing as we have seen repeatedly. One of the things that we have learned from the local food movement that applies to all of our enterprises is the importance of knowing your farmer and the source either directly or through someone else that you trust. That lesson goes far beyond a discussion about the food supply. It is a metaphor about how business can be conducted in general.
When there are no community ties or the ties are known to be unreliable, as is the USDA and all of the schemes that Congress has been foisting on us in an attempt to rationalize a system that by it’s nature will always defy any attempt to bring order, then the means does not exist and cannot be artificially created to replace community and personal communication back and forth and up and down the chain to ensure that the system is not only robust but that communication is timely. Trading between guilds and cooperatives limits the size and complexity to make a more open and safer society.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Spring Training-To Till or Not to Till
I mix batches of COF (complete organic fertilizer) from a list of ingredients including fish meal, seed meals (canola, linseed, alfalfa, etc), lime, dolomite, gypsum, green sand, glacial dust, rock phosphate, azomite, fish bone meal, and kelp meal to use in my garden every time I plant. These ingredients are not usually found in garden centers. I happen to be fortunate to live close to a wholesaler that specializes in supplements for the organics industry. You need 4-6 quarts per 100 sq ft. of bed or 50 feet of 18” wide row with a plant in the middle. Bagged fertilizers don’t have near the mineral and micronutrient content and may contain large amounts of arsenic, especially if it was sourced from commercial poultry operations. I mix two different blends, one for lush green growth and another for fruiting vegetables. Leafy greens like more nitrogen but with tomatoes and other fruiting plants that will just get you a huge plant with little or no fruit. Many soil scientists at land grant colleges like Oregon State University’s chief soil scientist, John Hart, don’t believe anyone should bother with the time and expense to add minerals to their soil and that the only important thing about food is that it should be competitively priced with produce grown by commercial farms in Mexico, Chile, and China. Maybe you understand my unending tirade against the USDA and how land grant colleges are funded (mostly by corporate interests). Since most family farms aren’t a good model for taxation there is no interest at Congress to support them.
For those of you getting your rototillers out, it may be too early to till, especially if you have clay soil. To see if you should be tilling, brush aside the organic matter on the surface to dig out a clump of soil. Squeeze the soil, without any organic matter in it, into a tight ball with both hands. If the ball breaks apart when you drop it on hard ground from waist level then you should be ok to till. If it mostly just goes splat, tilling will compact the soil and join the clay particles together like glue. If there is no soil line visible below the organic matter at the depth you would be tilling, generally 6-8”, then you might not need to till at all. This generally means that your soil is humic and tilling will just kill off most of the living organisms in the soil, the vast majority of which are beneficial to your plants, and you will end up with a net reduction in the amount of organic matter.
Tilling isn’t something that I recommend doing very often and usually only when you are breaking new ground and need to chisel through stuff that hasn’t been maintained well. The one exception is if you are growing green manures that you need to incorporate into the soil. Depending on the green manure you should be doing that at least two weeks ahead of planting and more if you are seeding rows with a row seeder. Once your beds get established and have adequate organic matter, 7-10% by weight, all you want to do is gently aerate the soil every year just before planting. When you till, it generally creates as many problems as it solves.
You might not need to wait weeks or months to be able to get out and till the garden. Sometimes it just means getting a few days in a row of no rain. If you don’t have enough organic matter on the soil or plants to break up the impact of the rain on the ground, then successive rain storms could compact the ground back to the way it was before it was tilled. This might leave you worse off than if you had done nothing because the tiller will break up whatever humus is already in your soil and burn up some of the organic matter by exposing it to oxygen. Even if you have deep organic matter in your soil you should test down as deep as the tiller will go to make sure that you don’t create a hard pan.
It’s best to wait until it is closer to time to plant to till the soil unless you are turning in green manure. That way the soil will still be a nice planting bed. You want to add at least 2” of organic matter to your beds each time you clean off the last crop and that can sit on the ground until you are ready to plant. You can till some organic matter into the soil and then cover it with some more to protect it from the rain. It will feed the soil and increase the biological activity while suppressing weeds. The weeds that do come up will be easier to remove because the organic matter will help loosen the soil. I get compost for $20 a cubic yard which is the capacity of those little $300 trailers you can buy as a kit in most large hardware stores. Instead of buying bags of compost for $3-5 a bag, maybe you know a couple of people that would like to split some yards of compost/soil mix for the same price you would pay if you were buying it by the bag? You would get a lot more bang for your buck and maybe get a little needed exercise will mean that you use less water and have a nicer garden with fewer weeds and you can relax more this summer when it gets really hot.
For those of you getting your rototillers out, it may be too early to till, especially if you have clay soil. To see if you should be tilling, brush aside the organic matter on the surface to dig out a clump of soil. Squeeze the soil, without any organic matter in it, into a tight ball with both hands. If the ball breaks apart when you drop it on hard ground from waist level then you should be ok to till. If it mostly just goes splat, tilling will compact the soil and join the clay particles together like glue. If there is no soil line visible below the organic matter at the depth you would be tilling, generally 6-8”, then you might not need to till at all. This generally means that your soil is humic and tilling will just kill off most of the living organisms in the soil, the vast majority of which are beneficial to your plants, and you will end up with a net reduction in the amount of organic matter.
Tilling isn’t something that I recommend doing very often and usually only when you are breaking new ground and need to chisel through stuff that hasn’t been maintained well. The one exception is if you are growing green manures that you need to incorporate into the soil. Depending on the green manure you should be doing that at least two weeks ahead of planting and more if you are seeding rows with a row seeder. Once your beds get established and have adequate organic matter, 7-10% by weight, all you want to do is gently aerate the soil every year just before planting. When you till, it generally creates as many problems as it solves.
You might not need to wait weeks or months to be able to get out and till the garden. Sometimes it just means getting a few days in a row of no rain. If you don’t have enough organic matter on the soil or plants to break up the impact of the rain on the ground, then successive rain storms could compact the ground back to the way it was before it was tilled. This might leave you worse off than if you had done nothing because the tiller will break up whatever humus is already in your soil and burn up some of the organic matter by exposing it to oxygen. Even if you have deep organic matter in your soil you should test down as deep as the tiller will go to make sure that you don’t create a hard pan.
It’s best to wait until it is closer to time to plant to till the soil unless you are turning in green manure. That way the soil will still be a nice planting bed. You want to add at least 2” of organic matter to your beds each time you clean off the last crop and that can sit on the ground until you are ready to plant. You can till some organic matter into the soil and then cover it with some more to protect it from the rain. It will feed the soil and increase the biological activity while suppressing weeds. The weeds that do come up will be easier to remove because the organic matter will help loosen the soil. I get compost for $20 a cubic yard which is the capacity of those little $300 trailers you can buy as a kit in most large hardware stores. Instead of buying bags of compost for $3-5 a bag, maybe you know a couple of people that would like to split some yards of compost/soil mix for the same price you would pay if you were buying it by the bag? You would get a lot more bang for your buck and maybe get a little needed exercise will mean that you use less water and have a nicer garden with fewer weeds and you can relax more this summer when it gets really hot.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Researching Nothing
OSU sponsored a Small Farms Conference last weekend. Nobody’s farm is smaller than mine so I felt right at home. I went to the first session on alternative poultry feeds. It was very surreal. The small producers were talking about having smaller but great tasting birds but looking for ways to cut the cost of supplemental feeds and Jim Hermes from OSU was explaining how it wasn’t economically viable to feed anything but corn and soy if you are raising birds (that he got donated for the “research”, as if this was something new, from Foster Farms) bred for commercial meat production.
Great tasting means a lot more to me than what it does in my mouth. We evolved to recognize the difference between nutritious foods and garbage. Garbage can kill you, good food-not so much. Things that don’t taste so good either have some kind of toxin or depleted nutritional value. Fortunately Naomi Montacre of Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply was in my session and blurted out that she has organic non-soy/corn feed that people seem to be doing well with at a reasonable price. Carol Miles, a WSU extension agent that used to be located in Clark County but was transferred to Mt. Vernon when WSU gave up on agriculture in SW Washington, reported on how her fava bean experiment failed because they were winter killed-which happens about 50 percent of the time in many parts of the PNW according to the Extension bulletins I read after the conference. Most people in this area plant favas in February because it isn’t a reliable winter crop. That would be especially true in Skagit/Whatcom County where Carol does most of her work. Miles and Hermes are very talented people but it seems like they are being turned into weapons of mass destruction against the democratization of food instead of agents of change to help rebuild our country.
I need to point out that this isn’t the research that these folks wanted to do. This is the only thing they were allowed to do by WSU and OSU because the university's internal rules for what and how research has to be done excludes doing anything of intelligence. That reminds me of the Samuel Clemens line about not letting schooling get in the way of your education. When the land grant colleges can’t even get their act together to do research based on what is of interest to the vast majority of the producers because of their institutional incompetence, maybe we should count our blessings. If it ever got out that family farms were economically viable, corporate agriculture would probably press even harder than they are now to make them illegal.
I also went to the Small Scale Grain Production session and was astonished to learn that people were getting $2.50-4.50 a pound in the farmer’s markets for unmilled grain and beans. The normal price when sold by the bushel on the commodity market is closer to $.03 a pound. I don’t think that is a huge market but I don’t think you can have real food security in any county or region without local grain and pulse production. Unfortunately, there is no land anywhere in the area that would be suitable for research or agriculture ;-) as evidenced by ceding the 80 acres of our local research station back to those soon to be world famous agricultural historians-Clark County Parks and Recreation. Or, is it that the real mission of the Extension service is to make sure that nothing gets in the way of cheap food and corporate agriculture?
Probably the best thing about the conference was hearing Mas Masumoto (Epitaph for a Peach) give the keynote address and then to attend the “Farmers as Writers” session which he led. A third generation farmer of Japanese descent he has an easy charm that comes from having days at a time to spend playing with his mind while alone going back and forth up and down the rows working the fields on your tractor. I have been a Josh Volk fan and took a class he taught on managing cropping systems with spreadsheets and read several articles by him and several more that I sent you. He writes some of the best technical articles on small to medium scale vegetable processing and farm equipment published anywhere. But to also have Zoe Bradbury there who has been writing “Diary of a Young Farmer” in Edible Portland magazine all talking about how and why they write I was in writer’s heaven. It is so interesting to me to hear these particular people talk about their craft. I couldn’t figure out if so many people attended that last session because they wanted to hear Mas some more or if there were that many budding literary talents in the young farming community. We had to move out of the little session room back into the main hall because so many people wanted to hear this discussion. Masumoto is a lyrical writer and speaker. It looks like I will have to find time to read a couple of books for pleasure, a former passion of mine that I haven't done in quite a while.
Great tasting means a lot more to me than what it does in my mouth. We evolved to recognize the difference between nutritious foods and garbage. Garbage can kill you, good food-not so much. Things that don’t taste so good either have some kind of toxin or depleted nutritional value. Fortunately Naomi Montacre of Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply was in my session and blurted out that she has organic non-soy/corn feed that people seem to be doing well with at a reasonable price. Carol Miles, a WSU extension agent that used to be located in Clark County but was transferred to Mt. Vernon when WSU gave up on agriculture in SW Washington, reported on how her fava bean experiment failed because they were winter killed-which happens about 50 percent of the time in many parts of the PNW according to the Extension bulletins I read after the conference. Most people in this area plant favas in February because it isn’t a reliable winter crop. That would be especially true in Skagit/Whatcom County where Carol does most of her work. Miles and Hermes are very talented people but it seems like they are being turned into weapons of mass destruction against the democratization of food instead of agents of change to help rebuild our country.
I need to point out that this isn’t the research that these folks wanted to do. This is the only thing they were allowed to do by WSU and OSU because the university's internal rules for what and how research has to be done excludes doing anything of intelligence. That reminds me of the Samuel Clemens line about not letting schooling get in the way of your education. When the land grant colleges can’t even get their act together to do research based on what is of interest to the vast majority of the producers because of their institutional incompetence, maybe we should count our blessings. If it ever got out that family farms were economically viable, corporate agriculture would probably press even harder than they are now to make them illegal.
I also went to the Small Scale Grain Production session and was astonished to learn that people were getting $2.50-4.50 a pound in the farmer’s markets for unmilled grain and beans. The normal price when sold by the bushel on the commodity market is closer to $.03 a pound. I don’t think that is a huge market but I don’t think you can have real food security in any county or region without local grain and pulse production. Unfortunately, there is no land anywhere in the area that would be suitable for research or agriculture ;-) as evidenced by ceding the 80 acres of our local research station back to those soon to be world famous agricultural historians-Clark County Parks and Recreation. Or, is it that the real mission of the Extension service is to make sure that nothing gets in the way of cheap food and corporate agriculture?
Probably the best thing about the conference was hearing Mas Masumoto (Epitaph for a Peach) give the keynote address and then to attend the “Farmers as Writers” session which he led. A third generation farmer of Japanese descent he has an easy charm that comes from having days at a time to spend playing with his mind while alone going back and forth up and down the rows working the fields on your tractor. I have been a Josh Volk fan and took a class he taught on managing cropping systems with spreadsheets and read several articles by him and several more that I sent you. He writes some of the best technical articles on small to medium scale vegetable processing and farm equipment published anywhere. But to also have Zoe Bradbury there who has been writing “Diary of a Young Farmer” in Edible Portland magazine all talking about how and why they write I was in writer’s heaven. It is so interesting to me to hear these particular people talk about their craft. I couldn’t figure out if so many people attended that last session because they wanted to hear Mas some more or if there were that many budding literary talents in the young farming community. We had to move out of the little session room back into the main hall because so many people wanted to hear this discussion. Masumoto is a lyrical writer and speaker. It looks like I will have to find time to read a couple of books for pleasure, a former passion of mine that I haven't done in quite a while.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Black Salt, Bread and Other Treats
Many of my friends know that I have been experimenting with off label uses for supplements for plants and animals. Many of the things we take for granted, bread for instance, was surely an accident where some cereal grains started to ferment before being cooked over a fire. I can’t even imagine the excitement the very first time it turned out really good. Then there is my friend whose religious beliefs include the idea that it is a sin to eat anything that can be turned into a fermented malted beverage. I am guessing that it was bread that transformed herds of man beast hunters into villagers but it may have been the beer. I imagine that a lot of our early ancestors didn’t have to think too hard about whether they really wanted to go track down a dangerous wild animal when there was good bread to be had.
This week I decided to dry some of the SEA-90 that has become a part of our regular diet as it seemed like it was getting a little damp. I noticed of a jar of Celtic sea salt crystals I was given to sample was also starting to get water drops in the bottle so I put both of them with their little glass jars into the oven with a nice pork roast I was finishing up and left them for about an hour at 425 degrees. I couldn’t have been more surprised when I took them out. The SEA-90 turned a medium charcoal grey whereas the Celtic salt turned only slightly darker. The SEA-90 also glued itself together so I had to chip it back into crystals which were now slightly smaller, harder and crunchier. It grinds much better now, maybe because it is just drier. Black salt is the best tasting salt that I have ever tasted and clearly is far more than just salt. It also is much saltier tasting than SEA-90 and when I grind it onto eggs in the morning it is clearly visible because of it’s color so I say goodbye to white salt at least to put on my food. It’s kind of like white bread, not so good unless it is fermented.
The natural soy and corn free pork roast was fabulous. Braised on all sides with a little salt and pepper in a frying pan with just enough oil and butter to keep it from sticking to the pan until it was nice and crispy all over and then into the hot oven in a cast iron roasting pan with a lid where it could continue to develop it’s color with a little garlic and a little more salt and pepper until it is done all the way through. We cooked potatoes, onions, carrots, and garlic in a Pyrex roasting pan with a lid for the last hour until they were steaming. A quick roux gravy made with the juice from the roast and there was one of the simplest meals to make and one of my favorites. Searing then roasting the pork seals in the juices and makes for a very tender meat. Roasting it in a lidded roaster helps it cook without the outside becoming too dry as well.
I had been brought up to slow cook roasts but when I added “Roasting, A Simple Art” by Barbara Kafka to my collection of cookbooks I reversed that permanently. Kafka calls for 500 degree ovens which is doable but even with an exhaust fan going continuously it was just too smoky inside a house. I found that my personal limit was about 450 degrees and that 425 did just fine, although it takes longer and not quite as crispy. You get almost the same effect by braising. Kafka doesn’t just roast meat, however. One page shows Red Plums with Spiced Syrup, Pears with Asian Glaze, and Whole Roasted Peaches with Ginger Syrup. Another non-meat page shows Roasted Bread (gourmet toast basically) topped with Roast Shiitakes with Soy, Roasted Garlic Puree, and whole head of roasted garlic (all on the same plate). Maybe we can do a “roasted” tea party and get a consensus of what a few people can bring or help make that are all roasted to try some of these strange and wonderful looking things. The nicest thing about roasting is that it is so simple. The only downside I can see to this plan is portion control. That may be a problem.
On another note, I checked out “Hungarian Cookbook, Old World Recipes for New World Cooks” from the Ft. Vancouver Library and was really pleased to find a number of traditional European recipes. Although I question the use of tomatoes in some of Yolanda Nagy Fintor’s recipes, like some of the cabbage dishes, many of the recipes were similar to a lot of the food I enjoyed while visiting with friends in a village near Munich. Cabbage was always on the menu there and I developed a deep appreciation for that vegetable which is mostly abused and not served nearly often enough in this country. Probably the biggest abuse is that most of the cabbage you can find is trucked in so it has to be a variety that is suitable for mechanically packing and trucking thousands of miles then sitting someplace without rotting for several weeks. Thanks to this group I now drink tea that has more nutrition than the cabbage you can buy in a supermarket. I know because I left a couple of jars of tea on the counter for a week and they got moldy. I have never seen that happen with a supermarket cabbage. If you end up getting cabbage from someone you don’t know then look for a savoy cabbage and see how you like that. Savoy’s have really crinkly skin and as a rule are among the sweetest tasting. Sweet enough to add to a salad or just eat a leaf of it. It is luscious and tasty. I would also recommend planting savoy versions of most vegetables for another reason. I found that they are much more resistant to predation by insects and are just more interesting looking to boot. If you are looking to add something to your repertoire by adding some traditional healthy meals then this book is worthwhile checking out.
You can see what is going on in our food forest at
www.camaspermaculture.org
tom@camaspermaculture.org
Tom Gibson
Ask your Congressman and Senators why the US Department of Agriculture subsidizes toxic industrial chemicals like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) but not fresh vegetables!
This week I decided to dry some of the SEA-90 that has become a part of our regular diet as it seemed like it was getting a little damp. I noticed of a jar of Celtic sea salt crystals I was given to sample was also starting to get water drops in the bottle so I put both of them with their little glass jars into the oven with a nice pork roast I was finishing up and left them for about an hour at 425 degrees. I couldn’t have been more surprised when I took them out. The SEA-90 turned a medium charcoal grey whereas the Celtic salt turned only slightly darker. The SEA-90 also glued itself together so I had to chip it back into crystals which were now slightly smaller, harder and crunchier. It grinds much better now, maybe because it is just drier. Black salt is the best tasting salt that I have ever tasted and clearly is far more than just salt. It also is much saltier tasting than SEA-90 and when I grind it onto eggs in the morning it is clearly visible because of it’s color so I say goodbye to white salt at least to put on my food. It’s kind of like white bread, not so good unless it is fermented.
The natural soy and corn free pork roast was fabulous. Braised on all sides with a little salt and pepper in a frying pan with just enough oil and butter to keep it from sticking to the pan until it was nice and crispy all over and then into the hot oven in a cast iron roasting pan with a lid where it could continue to develop it’s color with a little garlic and a little more salt and pepper until it is done all the way through. We cooked potatoes, onions, carrots, and garlic in a Pyrex roasting pan with a lid for the last hour until they were steaming. A quick roux gravy made with the juice from the roast and there was one of the simplest meals to make and one of my favorites. Searing then roasting the pork seals in the juices and makes for a very tender meat. Roasting it in a lidded roaster helps it cook without the outside becoming too dry as well.
I had been brought up to slow cook roasts but when I added “Roasting, A Simple Art” by Barbara Kafka to my collection of cookbooks I reversed that permanently. Kafka calls for 500 degree ovens which is doable but even with an exhaust fan going continuously it was just too smoky inside a house. I found that my personal limit was about 450 degrees and that 425 did just fine, although it takes longer and not quite as crispy. You get almost the same effect by braising. Kafka doesn’t just roast meat, however. One page shows Red Plums with Spiced Syrup, Pears with Asian Glaze, and Whole Roasted Peaches with Ginger Syrup. Another non-meat page shows Roasted Bread (gourmet toast basically) topped with Roast Shiitakes with Soy, Roasted Garlic Puree, and whole head of roasted garlic (all on the same plate). Maybe we can do a “roasted” tea party and get a consensus of what a few people can bring or help make that are all roasted to try some of these strange and wonderful looking things. The nicest thing about roasting is that it is so simple. The only downside I can see to this plan is portion control. That may be a problem.
On another note, I checked out “Hungarian Cookbook, Old World Recipes for New World Cooks” from the Ft. Vancouver Library and was really pleased to find a number of traditional European recipes. Although I question the use of tomatoes in some of Yolanda Nagy Fintor’s recipes, like some of the cabbage dishes, many of the recipes were similar to a lot of the food I enjoyed while visiting with friends in a village near Munich. Cabbage was always on the menu there and I developed a deep appreciation for that vegetable which is mostly abused and not served nearly often enough in this country. Probably the biggest abuse is that most of the cabbage you can find is trucked in so it has to be a variety that is suitable for mechanically packing and trucking thousands of miles then sitting someplace without rotting for several weeks. Thanks to this group I now drink tea that has more nutrition than the cabbage you can buy in a supermarket. I know because I left a couple of jars of tea on the counter for a week and they got moldy. I have never seen that happen with a supermarket cabbage. If you end up getting cabbage from someone you don’t know then look for a savoy cabbage and see how you like that. Savoy’s have really crinkly skin and as a rule are among the sweetest tasting. Sweet enough to add to a salad or just eat a leaf of it. It is luscious and tasty. I would also recommend planting savoy versions of most vegetables for another reason. I found that they are much more resistant to predation by insects and are just more interesting looking to boot. If you are looking to add something to your repertoire by adding some traditional healthy meals then this book is worthwhile checking out.
You can see what is going on in our food forest at
www.camaspermaculture.org
tom@camaspermaculture.org
Tom Gibson
Ask your Congressman and Senators why the US Department of Agriculture subsidizes toxic industrial chemicals like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) but not fresh vegetables!
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