Quinoa Revisited

So let’s get back to the quinoa kerfuffle. Well not so much a kerfuffle but more like a foofaraw. Or really it was just me being ridiculous…

Who knew that not all quinoas are created equal? I didn’t. It doesn’t make any sense. The times I’ve made quinoa I’ve used Ancient Harvest brand (comes in a turquoise box). For my tabouleh quinoa I got some from Whole Foods in their bulk section. Both are organic. Both come from Boliva. But the pot I steamed up from WF was light, fluffy, very non-swamp like.  It had a nutty flavor and a tender texture more like rice. The tabouleh was great. I cooked up 1 cup of quinoa. Once cooked I tossed it in a large bowl with a peeled and seeded cucumber, a wodge of flat leaf parsley, a smaller wodge of curly parsley, big handful mint (all herbs coarsely chopped), some very thinly sliced green onions (I think it was about 3). I mixed together ¼ cup olive oil and ¼ lemon juice (some s&p) and tossed the dressing over the salad. Pretty easy and so fresh and deelish.

Even something as simple
as tabouleh makes a mess in
the kitchen

(“What?” you say. “No tomatoes?”  I took a pledge to not eat tomatoes until they are in season. When are they in season? When they start harvesting them at The Farm or when I harvest them from my garden. Barbara Kingsolver writes about eating in season in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. At first it was hard but then I didn't even think about "missing out". Just think how awesome that first bite of summer tomato will be.)

My friend Manny suggested quinoa with currants, celery and a curry dressing. Stay tuned for “Quinoa Re-revisited!”

The Agony and the Ecstasy

In the beginning…

Sarah Samantha battling
grasshoppers

When I was a kid, there was this one book I checked out over and over from the library. The Middle Sister by Marion Mason was dear to my heart. It’s the story of Sarah Samantha, a middle sister who was 8 (I was a middle sister and I was 8!) She wishes she were brave. Her Uncle Romeo (who works at a circus) strikes a bargain: in exchange for an apple dumpling (made with an apple from Miss Appleseed, a gift from Uncle Romeo) he will give her a lion’s tooth, a charm that will help her feel brave. The family travels to a homestead in Minnesota by covered wagon and Sarah Samantha has many opportunities to be brave protecting her beloved apple tree: uppity neighbors, greedy pigs, swarms of grasshoppers. At long last with just one apple left from the tree, Sarah Samantha makes the apple dumpling for her uncle and soon wears the lion’s tooth around her neck, ultimately realizing that she was brave all along. I never really wanted a lion’s tooth but I always thought apple dumplings sounded like the most delicious thing a person could eat. Mom made all sorts of wonderful pastries but never apple dumplings. It wasn’t until I was an adult, I made a pan full and they didn’t disappoint: a flaky pastry and tart apple island in a lake of cinnamony syrup. Sheer poetry!

A tree grows in California…

When Steve and I moved into our house 20 years ago, I knew I wanted to plant an apple tree. Not that I wanted to have my very own Miss Appleseed, but it felt necessary to have a tree...to climb its branches and pick fruit for pies and cobblers. The allotted space for the tree was small so we planted a Garden Delicious, a dwarf apple tree perfect for small yards. The first few years the crops were satisfactory. Then our sweet little tree hit its stride. We picked and picked and picked and still the tree produced. The apples were yellow and sweet and made the most delicious applesauce, were excellent dried but best of all, sheer joy to munch. We gave bags of apples away…to neighbors, church friends, co-workers…even once gave a bag to the UPS guy when he came to the door with a delivery. We didn’t do much for the tree…a cursory pruning now and then. But that’s about all.

And then there were none…

Two years ago, the tree didn’t look happy. Aphids were everywhere, leaves curled and got sticky, apples were stunted and we barely got one bowlful to eat. Last year we weren’t able to harvest one apple. Not only did we have the aphids and leaf curl, but every apple was infested with coddling worms and on top of all that, fire blight hit the tree turning large bunches of leaves brown. I asked Hank, an old farmer from down in south county, to come by and tell me what to do. He told me about setting traps for the coddling moths in the spring and about putting corrugated cardboard around the trunk of the tree. He said to get rid of the blight I needed to trim every affected leaf and branch, dipping my pruners in bleach after every cut to ensure I wouldn’t contaminate other parts of the tree. I started the blight elimination early fall last year when it was easy to see the crispy brown leaves. But it occurred to me that pruning severely in the fall would be premature. So I waited until early spring. By then all the leaves were gone and it was hard to tell which parts were blighted and which parts weren’t. And it was hard work: cut and dip, cut and dip. Steve helped me out and as a team we were able to do the job with little aggravation.  I forgot about the cardboard but put out the coddling moth trap at the right time.  Leaves started sprouting, blossoms showed their delicate faces. Blossoms morphed into tiny apples and I was hopeful that we had triumphed over nature.

A moveable feast…

And then, last week I noticed the aphids. Not just a few but hundreds. They caked the new growth way at the top of the tree which made rinsing them off with the hose impossible. My sister told me of a remedy for aphids she sprays on her roses: 1 tsp. baking soda, 1 tsp. dish soap, 1 tsp. vegetable oil and 1 quart water. Put it all in a spray bottle and drench the leaves of the plant. While searching for remedies for aphids, I found almost the same recipe on a website from Australia (Small Farm Permaculture and Sustainable Living…name just rolls of the tongue doesn’t it?!)  Be careful though…my nurserywoman said that the soap can burn the leaves of a plant if applied in full sun.

Small Farm etc also suggests that it’d be a good idea to introduce aphid predators. First on the list are wasps and hover flies. Not too sure I want those critters in my garden. Ah, yes, they also suggest ladybugs. That I can do. After a quick trip to the nursery, I had container in hand. But how does one get the little sweethearts to go from the container into the tree? The directions say to release them in the evening since they don’t fly at night. Climbing up as high as I could on the ladder, I dumped handfuls of bugs into the tree, with most of them falling on me and on the ground. (I have to say I felt a bit like Sarah Samantha bravely trying to save her precious tree.) Steve rigged up a scaffolding to place the open container and I left it there hoping the aroma of juicy aphids would entice the ladybugs to scramble out of their protective home into the nirvana of my tree.  

Now we wait. Did the traps stop the coddling worms from laying eggs in the apples? Will the ladybugs devour the aphids? Time will tell….in the meantime I’ve got a whole lotta other plants that will require my vigilance.

If at first you don't succeed....

Quinoa is the poster child for healthy eating nowadays. And rightly so since it is chock full of minerals AND  it’s a complete protein meaning it has all nine of the essential amino acids. For me, though, it’s the catfish of the grain world.  Catfish, in my humble estimation, always has a muddy underflavor more than likely due to the fact that it is a bottom feeder. The times I’ve eaten catfish, there’s this lingering taste of refuse with each bite I take. Needless to say, I don’t eat catfish on a regular basis…or really ever!

Quinoa has a kind of old gyms socks lingering taste that isn’t what I would call tasty. Bland would be a good adjective. Boring would be another. The aroma it gives off when cooking I would call….swampy. So why eat it? Because it’s such the darling of the real food world, I feel compelled to find a way that I can cook it and enjoy what I’m eating.

I subscribe to a blog 101 Cookbooks. Heidi  Swanson takes awesome photos of her food, has traveled the world, has written cookbooks so I consider her an  authority on vegetarian cooking. Last night I made her Lemon-scented Quinoa…garbanzo beans, quinoa, cilantro, red onion all tossed in a lemon-tahini dressing. Followed the recipe to the letter. Sigh. Didn’t like it. Was it the dressing? Was it the chunks of red onion that were overpowering even though I minced them? Was it the quinoa itself? More experimentation is needed.

Made quinoa for breakfast. I steamed up a pot full. Heated up soy milk with a cinnamon stick, currants, pinch of salt and a squeeze of honey. Poured this over the quinoa and topped with walnuts. Big sigh. Didn’t like it. Maybe some more salt and honey would help? Added those and still not a happy breakfast experience.  Maybe quinoa isn’t a breakfast grain? It lacks the creaminess of oatmeal. It lacks the nutty hearty loveliness of barley or groats. My guess is that because quinoa is gluten free, the starch found in other grains (which adds the creaminess) is missing. It felt like eating large grains of sand…from the beach of a swampy river bed. Ok, I realize I’m being a bit ridiculous but I’m just trying to be honest.

At the farmer’s market today I got the fixins for tabouleh. I love tabouleh. I’ve made it with barley, brown rice and the traditional bulgur. Maybe the earthy flavor and sandy texture of the quinoa will pair well with the parsley, mint and lemon. Let’s hope so. I’ll post again on this subject.

A few more thoughts on grass-fed beef...and meat in general

You may be saying to yourself after reading my last post:  “I want to get me some of that grass fed beef.” Here are some things to look for.

All range cattle destined for the dinner plate (or fast food wrapper) start out life grass fed. Cattle are allowed to graze on grass until 7 months. Then they’re moved to the feed lots to be fattened up. So theoretically a market could advertise that their beef is grass fed. Be sure to look for labeling that says “100% grass fed” or “grass finished”. This ensures that the steer only ate grass. You might see at the market “organic beef”. This simply means that the grass the steer fed on wasn’t sprayed with pesticides and that the corn it ate wasn’t genetically modified (those nasty GMOs). While that’s all fine and dandy the fact remains that the steer was fed a diet of corn which its body can’t digest.  The best of all would be organic grass fed beef (in yelp language: $$$$) which, come to think of it, I haven’t seen too often. I’m pretty sure they carry it at Berkeley Bowl if you’re fortunate enough to be able to shop there.  Whole Foods has grass fed beef but it’s not organic…and they just upped the price to $8.99lb! Like I said, I get my beef from Tassajara Meats at the Friday farmer’s market. Not too sure if it’s organic or not.

How much do I pay per pound? All I can afford is ground beef…$6.00lb. More expensive than Costco’s finest? You betcha. But in the realm of grass fed meat prices, a great bargain. I saw grass fed beef at Nob Hill ($5.99lb) but it comes all the way from Australia. Too big of a carbon footprint for me.  So we eat smaller amounts of beef...which is vital to the health of our planet. Read on…

If you want to jump on the grass fed beef bandwagon, come aboard! There’s plenty of room. But you must realize that it’s not a panacea that will solve all our problems. The United States has become a huge meat-eating machine. We consume massive quantities of meat: beef, chicken, pork.  Meat is a major portion of our diet. Other countries are eating more and more a Western diet…and so the demand for more meat rises.  But having everyone start buying/eating grass fed beef isn’t the answer. There simply isn’t enough grazing land on planet Earth to support the amount of meat that the USofA consumes. This is why factory farms were started in the first place: to conserve resources. So really the only solution is to eat less meat.

Mark Bitten (Food Matters) talks about being “less meatarian”. In other words, limiting meat to just a few times a week will make a drastic difference in the health of our planet.  The Environmental Defense Fund supports this idea helping consumers understand what kind of impact meat production has on our resources such as water, fossil fuel, greenhouse emissions:

“If every American had one meat-free meal per week, it would be the same as taking more than 5 million cars off our roads. Having one meat-free day per week would be the same as taking 8 million cars off American roads.”

We eat vegetarian 2x week. And when we do eat meat, I try to treat it more like a condiment (Bitten’s idea) or if we’re having bbq chicken, I limit the portion to the size of a deck of cards. I’m not always successful but I’m trying to be conscious of what we’re eating and that’s the first step. No, I’m not aiming to be vegetarian; just trying to have a shift in awareness.

Why I buy grass fed beef (aka why I don't buy factory farmed beef)

Corn: If I’m going to talk about beef, I have to talk about corn. Corn is being grown in massive quantities. And not the juicy sweet corn that appears at the farmer’s market begging to be shucked and grilled and slathered with herbed butter. Nope. This corn is industrial grade corn that is inedible for human consumption. Yet, farmers in America are being subsidized by Uncle Sam to plant acres upon acres of the stuff. In fact, to stay afloat financially, farmers have to grow more than is needed. What happens to the excess? The corn is dumped into colossal piles creating gargantuan mountains of inedible food.  (A lot of it is destined for highly processed foods but that’s another post!)

Cattle: Let’s take a moment for a short anatomy lesson. Cattle are ruminates. They have 4 stomachs for digesting food. They have a super capacity for taking food that has no nutritional value for humans (like grasses and clover) and extracting nutrients by chewing and swallowing, then regurgitating the mass (cud) to be further digested in each of the four stomachs. Pretty cool.  

Unfortunately, someone got the brainy idea that one way of eliminating the vast overproduction of corn would be to feed it to cattle, even though cattle do not have the ability to digest the corn. So what happens when you give an animal food whose body is not designed to digest?  Michael Pollan wrote an article in the New York Times about what happens:

“Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.
A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.”

Yea baby! Grill me up a burger from that meat! The remedy for the problem is to give the cattle copious amounts of antibiotics and other pharmaceutics to keep the animal alive until it can be slaughtered.  At one time cattle were brought to market when the animals were 4 to 5 years…now its 14 -16 months. Cattle need to be fattened up quickly to make the whole production profitable…enter the factory farm: huge feed lots where animals, standing in their own excrement, are corralled into small areas. There’s a whole bunch of other problems and ramifications from the production of factory farmed beef. Indeed books have been written on the subject. Suffice it to say, I think it’s pretty clear why I just can’t bring myself to ever spend one red cent on factory farmed beef.



Lucky me! I get my beef from Tassajara Meats at my
local farmer's market.



Grass fed beef on the other hand, is letting the animal do what it was created to do.  Grasses and clover are so conveniently converted into a high quality, healthy protein. Grass fed beef is lower in calories and fat than factory farmed beef. It’s high in omega-3 fatty acids. True, grass fed beef is expensive. So what I do is use smaller quantities and add to the meat beans and grains. Great flavor, awesome nutrition, humane animal husbandry. Hey, that would make a good bumper sticker. You heard it here first!

(PS...if you want to know more about the relationship between corn and factory farmed beef watch Food Inc and King Corn. Both are eye openers!)

We might just skip the dinner and head straight for the leftovers

Thanksgiving was a few weeks ago and I’m already missing the turkey. Well, not so much the turkey itself, or the carcass or the turkey soup that hangs around for days and days. And I guess I’m not really missing the stuffing and mashed potatoes and the creamed onions. So, I guess I’m not really missing anything about Thanksgiving except for the amazing strata I made a few days after Thanksgiving. I “created” the dish after we had already had two meals of leftovers and the thought of another plate of Thanksgiving fare wasn’t too appetizing. Besides, the gravy was gone and all that was left was stuffing and turkey. I can’t really say this dish is original since we all made something similar back in the 90’s. Remember when stratas were on every buffet table? My family made a breakfast strata every chance they could. So, with going retro as the “in” thing to do, putting my last few leftovers to good use with a “back –in-the-day” strata seemed cutting edge.

The stuffing got brown and crunchy on top and pudding like in the middle with the cheese and turkey making a happy pair. With a dollop of cranberry sauce and a tossed green salad, it was fabulous. Here’s the problem: to make this dish again, I’d have to make stuffing and that’s just not going to happen until next November. Guess this will be just one more thing to look forward to that makes the holidays special.

Cynthia’s Post-Thanksgiving Retro Turkey Stuffing Strata

3 to 4 cups of stuffing

1 to 2 cups cooked turkey, cut into small pieces

1 cup broccoli florets, steamed until barely tender

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

3 eggs

1 ½ cups milk

In a small casserole, layer half of the stuffing, all of the turkey, all of the broccoli, half of the cheese and then the rest of the stuffing. Mix together the eggs and milk and pour over the casserole. Top with the remaining cheese. Let sit for half hour in the refrigerator. Bake in 350° for 30 minutes or until egg is set and top is crunchy.

Blah, blah, blah...me complaining





A chimp in a chef's hat
can always make me
feel happy

So, I guess I’ve been in a bit of a slump. What started out as a fun adventure has turned into a lot of hard work.  Trying to think of something creative and interesting around a little tiny bit of meat or using up every little bit of vegetable floating in the veggie bin is draining. I’m still buying organic (it’s not like I’m horking down Big Macs at McD) and for the most part, doing so successfully. Thing is, every trip to the market is a laborious task: do I buy this dozen eggs that are organic but I don’t know where they came from or do I get back in the car and drive to another store where I know the eggs are from Northern California AND organic but they cost too much or do I drive to another store where I know they are local AND organic AND a decent price but they are always out of stock? I wander aimlessly through the produce section with a glassy, vacant stare as I mentally try to create a meal with what is on sale, organic, and fresh. It was a very proud moment for me when once, I left Whole Foods with only spending $9.62.

I think the slump started a couple of months ago when I interviewed for a job. Interview went well; I was stoked. Thing is 25 other folks also applied for the job. It wasn’t the best fit for me so it was no surprise I didn’t get the job. I’m not ready yet to apply at JC Penney or Kohls (both are hiring but I break into dry heaves just walking in those stores so working there might be a challenge). I know things will change and the right job will come along. I just need to get enthused again about this grand adventure. Try to get enthused about taking ownership of what we eat.

My garden? I don’t have a burning desire to tend to my vegetables. It’s cold and wet and slugs abound. I guess that’s why people plant gardens in the spring. Even with my inattentiveness, the veggies are giving their all…bok choy and kale are looking good…or at least they were the last time I was out there.

Blah, blah, blah. Ok. So, I’ll snap out of it. Quit my complaining. Hey, maybe I’ll make some bread…kneading is a great way to realign thought and purpose. Plus, eating the loaf tastes good. And I’ve got some huge squashes to cook…that’s always exciting, isn’t it? Maybe a pot of beans will do the trick and provide inspiration. Hey, I know what! I’ll write something scathing about factory farmed beef. That’s always a sure way to get my blood boiling. Yeah. I can do this.