Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  I can’t prove it, but the convenience of prepared food—takeout, fast food, prepackaged food—may allow us to eat more than we should simply because it seems so easy and cheap.

  Greater Togetherness

  For many couples, cooking dinner together is their daily dose of togetherness. Cooking with your children gives them both parent-time and a sense of usefulness, which psychologists say are two deep desires of children. Breakfast where everyone reads the backs of cereal boxes or competes for the toaster for their Pop-Tarts doesn’t add a feeling of home and family security to the day. Of course, for some parents, it simply doesn’t work to engage the entire family in this way. But for the parents who would like to do so, a shift is possible, and with it, support for changes in the way we eat.

  The Freedom of Resourcefulness

  You know by now that I have a self-sufficiency streak. Planning for old age for me includes the possibility that global systems might not continue to seamlessly, invisibly, and inexpensively bring food, energy, and whatever income I derive from investments to my door or PO box or bank. Knowing how to cook and preserve basic food is part of my long-term strategy for freedom in the event of a future in which global systems fail.

  Belinda’s Wisdom

  This week, after stashing Belinda’s milk, I went out again on my bike, whizzing down my steep hill and heading over to Nina’s for my illegal goat cheese with Belinda’s words reverberating in my mind.

  “Eating should be a research project too. If you don’t grow/know your own food, then know your farmer and his/her practices. Verify that their actions align with their intentions. It is not enough to want to provide safe food, it requires a knowledge base and follow-through. I don’t know where the answers will be found, but I believe there are many answers, not just one.”

  Sandra, the mother of cheese-outlaw Nina, waylaid me as I lifted my bike onto its kickstand.

  “Come with me. I have something for you.”

  Hal and Sandra’s property was small. The garden lay on a north-facing slope (the worst for gardening), yet it was lush with food, animals, fodder, and medicinal plants. The goats and chickens shared a cleverly designed octagonal shed. The milking parlor had just enough room for one goat to turn a corner and put her head through the narrow V-shaped stanchion that kept her steady for milking as she bent to eat her food. (I can identify—food steadies me as well.)

  From the garden we went out to their huge garage, where she pulled something from their freezer. “I want you to have this,” she said, handing me a three-pound package of a goat leg.

  I was left speechless—and my friends will tell you how rare that is. The remnant of my suspicious East Coast mind asked, “Why is she giving this to me?” My West Coast mind said, “Generosity isn’t an agenda, Vicki. This is a gift. The right response here is to just receive it.”

  I did take it, feeling both the heft of the package and the lightness of wonder at generosity. She told me about the goat whose meat I held in my arms. How it was happy from day one to day last. How they raised it and loved it. How it was born to the goats they milk now.

  I guess the way to this community’s heart is through my stomach, I thought as I packed Nina’s illegal cheese and Sandra’s non-USDA-approved goat leg in my now bulging pannier and cycled home in the waning light. I felt full. These relationships and these new thoughts were becoming as nourishing as the food I unloaded on my counter.

  That goat leg was too precious to improvise a dish and fail, so I went online and found a recipe for roast lamb. With reverence for my feeders and for this small creature I would be eating, I washed the leg, poked holes all around into which I put slivers of garlic, rubbed the outside with oil, a squeeze of lemon, salt, oregano, and basil, and roasted it slowly in my convection oven.

  Perfect fat/acid/salty/sweet. Perfect love. Yum!

  After dinner, I blogged:

  Generosity itself is kept at arm’s length in our everyday lives. We click PayPal buttons. We write checks between Christmas and New Year’s based on well-presented literature about people far away. But here I am being invited to eat Sandra’s kid (goat). How can we not be friends in the future? . . . Food is love. Every exchange is love. More love than any of us can bear if we are honest. And so I blog to digest it all—and to celebrate another part of my food system—the humans who spread the love around.

  And so ended week two of my adventure.

  Now It’s Your Turn

  Cooking

  Local ingredients, cooked with love, eaten with awareness, in the company of friends—that’s relational eating.

  How do you feel about cooking? Comfortable? Panicked? Unimaginative? Inept? Disdainful? Ashamed? You don’t have to cook to be a relational eater, but you may want to.

  If you don’t know how to cook, take classes from local chefs, caterers, or friends who know how to transform local produce into local yum. There are apps or Web sites where you type in ingredients and up come user-rated recipes.

  Or maybe you know how to cook but you just don’t for all the common reasons: time, time, and time.

  Increase your home-cooking time by 10 percent. Find regional eggs and cook your breakfast. Find regional greens and steam them to go with the box of Chinese food you brought home. Take the time to grow sprouts on your windowsill and add them to your salads. Do a home-cooked meal once a week. Or make a big soup or casserole on Sunday and eat it all week.

  One brilliant aid for home cooking is the pressure cooker. It saves both time and money. You can cook whole foods like beans and grains in far less time. Because all the action is hidden and under pressure, it can be unnerving the first few times you use it. You can’t peek or test for doneness. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s your friend for life in getting dinner on the table fast.

  Develop Your Signature Soup

  I’ve become a soup maker as a way to use the variety of local ingredients that pour into my home at least six months a year. Knowing the textures, flavors, and cooking behavior of my fresh foods, I now have a “signature soup”—a hearty minestrone with a touch of Indian. Here are some basics I use—not recipes but approaches:

  Some things to steam or boil and then puree in a blender for a creamy soup: cauliflower, leeks, summer or winter squash, potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, carrots.

  Some things to sauté and put in soup when tender but not mushy: onions, carrots, celery, garlic, green peppers, potatoes, green beans, snap peas, broccoli, mushrooms, cabbage.

  If you are an omnivore—as I am—then you can use chicken (boil bones or cook pieces and use the meat too) or beef (boil knuckles and bones) bones to make your broth.

  If you are either a vegavore or an omnivore, beans and grains add heft (you’ll read about Georgie, Georgina, and Lauren in chapter 9—they were my 50-mile diet suppliers). You can use anywhere quinoa, lentils, amaranth, oats, baked and chopped tubers (yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, etc.).

  Bouillon (chicken, beef, or vegetable) to make the stock if you don’t have fresh.

  Some other juicy elements: chopped tomatoes, chopped summer squash.

  Some herbs (fresh if possible) and spices: parsley, oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram, cumin (I used to think it smelled like gym socks, but now I can’t cook without it), coriander, fennel, curry (careful, some are better than others), tamari, salt, and pepper. Cilantro is good in Mexican soups.

  Add at the end: chopped chard, kale, mustard greens, beet greens. These will all cook as the soup slowly cools down after turning off the burner.

  Mess around with these ingredients. Check for FASS—fat, acid, sweet, salt—and adjust. I’m always surprised at how a squeeze of lemon can brighten a soup. Oh, now I really sound like a chef!

  Homegrown

  Growing food used to be a shared endeavor on the part of the whole tribe. Just growing sprouts on your windowsill shifts you from being
a food consumer to being a food producer.

  Even if you spend 99.9 percent of your time otherwise occupied, your experience as a grower will put you back in the tribe.

  If you don’t yet garden, here are some ideas:

  • Herbs in pots on your windowsill

  • Tomatoes in containers on your deck

  • Greens too can be grown in containers

  • Window hydroponics

  • Backyard garden plot

  • Take gardening classes

  • Volunteer at a school, community, food bank, or market garden

  Try These Recipes

  It turns out there was a better local alternative to zackers. Jess Dowdell shares her kale chip recipe. Kim Bailey’s rich bone marrow broth is a great example of simmering from scratch. Along with the recipe, Kim shares some of her own story.

  Kale Chips

  So easy and fun to have around. I just take any kind of kale, but my favorite is lacinato kale, and lightly spray it with vegetable spray. I use high-heat canola oil from Spectrum. Salt and pepper the leaves and lay them in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake at 300°F for 30 to 50 minutes, until they are crispy. Let them cool and store in an airtight dry container. You can crush them into a powder and use it as “kale salt” over many dishes for added flavor.

  And here’s another chip:

  Root Chips

  Beets, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and parsnips are all good for this technique.

  Thinly slice them, about 1/8 inch thick, then toss the slices with oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and any other herb that sounds good to you. Lay them in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake at 350°F for about an hour, until they are crispy like potato chips. Let them cool and chomp away!

  Kimberly Bailey of Pickles Deli says:

  I have a little deli that opened six years ago on the south end of Whidbey Island. Eating local, organic, and sustainable is very important to me. I have my own garden and utilize several farms on the island for my restaurant and home.

  During the months when the crops and harvests are bountiful on the island (which is quite long, April through November) I create a menu called “From Whidbey’s Palette to Your Palate.” This additional menu accompanies our standard one. This gives the customers a choice to eat local meats, cheeses, and vegetables. The menu focuses on all the fresh, local, organic, sustainable ingredients this wonderful island has to offer. I have a lot of customers look at this menu and ask, “What is a dragon langerie bean?” Or, “What is spicy lamb chorizo?” And, “Oh, I didn’t know you could grow or raise that here.” I love explaining who the farmers are, where the food was grown or raised, and the method of farming they use. Every second you have to educate someone on what their own community has to offer, the better knowledge they have now to use and teach someone else.

  I think it is important to support the hardworking farmers because they are growing/raising items that nourish our bodies—feed our souls. With rising fuel costs and a limited fuel supply it just makes sense to grow food locally so we don’t deplete all of our country’s natural resources.

  Grass-Fed Bone Marrow Broth

  Below is the Grass-Fed Bone Marrow Broth. I use Chia Farms Dexter cattle bones, Willowood Farm produce, Midnight Kitchen bay leaves, Good Faith Farm olive oil, and Whidbey Island Winery Malbec. I adapted it for my restaurant using Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions broth recipe.

  2–4 pounds beef marrow knucklebones—with meat on them

  3 pounds meaty rib or neck bones

  3 onions, coarsely chopped

  3 carrots, coarsely chopped

  3 celery sticks, coarsely chopped

  Drizzle of olive oil

  4 or more quarts cold water

  1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

  6 peppercorns

  2 bay leaves

  Splash of red wine

  Pinch of sea salt

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Place all the meaty bones and veggies in a roasting pan and drizzle with a little olive oil. Brown in the oven for 30 to 60 minutes, until well browned.

  Meanwhile, throw all of your nonmeaty marrow bones into a stockpot, and add the water and vinegar. Let them sit while the other bones are browning.

  Add the browned bones, peppercorns, and bay leaves to the pot, deglaze your roasting pan with red wine to get up all of the browned bits, then pour this liquid into the pot. Add additional water if needed to cover the bones and veggies.

  Bring to a boil and remove the scum/foam that rises to the top. Reduce the heat, season with a little sea salt, cover, and simmer for at least 12 and up to 72 hours. The longer you cook the stock, the richer and more flavorful it will be. If you find there is floating fat from the marrow or oil, skim it off with a spoon or wait until after refrigeration.

  When it’s done simmering, strain everything—use your hands to squeeze all the goodness out.

  Stick it in the refrigerator and let the fat harden on top of the pot. When hard, scrape it off and you will have a delicious bone marrow broth.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Week Three: The Week of My Discontent

  Okay, enough of the mysticism. While everything I just said about wiggling my toes in the grass and merging with life is true, it’s also true that by week three the self-constructed fence between me and unfettered eating was making me feel as dreary and burdened as the babushka’d peasants in one of those old black-and-white Russian epics of hardship and starvation. I know it’s not rational to compare my voluntary situation to famine, but that’s how it felt to me.

  I was finally getting into a groove. Days went by. I blogged. I cooked. By week three I had the hang of a new, preferred 10-mile daily fare. For breakfast I ate a frittata. I’d sauté some thinly sliced onions and potatoes in olive oil, and then add julienned zucchini or chopped fresh kale from my garden, some basil, and a crushed sun-dried tomato from Tricia’s prior season. I’d scramble one or two of Tricia’s eggs, stir in the sautéed vegetables plus salt, and return the mixture to my well-seasoned cast-iron pan. It cooked on low heat, covered, until the edges were done and starting to brown. Then the trick is to cover the pan with a plate, flip it quickly, and return the frittata—uncooked side down—to the pan to finish. Add tea from China, milk from Koren and Belinda, and honey from Island Apiaries, and I truly had enough.

  Lunch was usually a salad because Tricia supplied me amply with cucumbers, tomatoes, mixed greens, carrots, apples, basil, and sometimes even a pepper. Dressing of lemon juice, oil, and salt. Goat cheese on top.

  Snacks were often big flat Italian beans from my garden, steamed and coated with oil and salt.

  Dinner would be some creation utilizing frozen local meat and fresh Tricia produce. Liver and onions. Burger and oven fries. Stir-fried vegetables. Sliced tongue. Braised greens with onions and garlic. Don’t I sound like quite the cook?

  As long as I stayed home, in my ten miles, in my now familiar cycles of eating and cycling to gather food, I was fine.

  But I was also trapped. I’m used to mobility. I’m used to going where whim, will, or necessity sends me, confident that my destination will also be filled with mountains of food. My blissy little ten-mile loop was beginning to feel more like a chain getting yanked.

  In week three, for example, I wanted to attend a regional gathering of Transition Town groups. It was in Bellingham, a mere one hundred miles north. To survive for fifteen hours out of my teensy-weensy microbioregion I was going to have to schlep a day’s worth of food along with me.

  I packed a Conestoga wagon–load of salad, bags of steamed green beans and steamed kale, a pint of milk, the entire bottle of honey (decanting was too much trouble at five A.M.), several baked potatoes and boiled eggs, carrots, and an apple.

  All the while I packed the food I felt something between self-pity and irony. By choice I was sen
ding myself back a century in time or off to a less-developed country. I couldn’t moan, “Why me, oh Lord,” because it was evident that I had brought this on myself.

  I was brought up to think about those less fortunate, so my thoughts then turned to people I’ve known who have food sensitivities and must pack this way all the time. Allergies to wheat, dairy, gluten, chicken, oats, nitrites, peanuts, tree nuts in general, beef, eggs, shellfish, seafood, and soy are increasingly common. I once stumbled on a few people living in a tent colony in the desert who had just about every sensitivity in the book. They were like people quarantined—struck with the plague—except they had to keep us out to survive. Any whiff of perfume could send their bodies into a complete tizzy, and soap, detergent, deodorant, baby powder, shampoo, conditioner, face cream, salves, and toothpaste all stink to them. There are now thirteen thousand name-brand perfumes alone. I was quarantined—voluntarily—only to a ten-mile radius for a month. You are not suffering! I scolded myself. You are being slightly inconvenienced. Stop whining.

  Wine. I’d love a sip of wine, yet at that time none was purely local.

  See. I could say “Get my goat” or “Don’t cry over spilled milk” or “That sounds fishy,” and my nose would start sniffing the air, my tail would rise, and I’d be ready to hunt again.

  Yet this sense of deprivation was chosen and time-limited—and still something of a lark. The problems of the ill and underprivileged endure for weeks, months, and even lifetimes. On October 1 I could release my chosen constraints. But those with fewer resources often live in what are now called food deserts, city neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 20 percent or higher and the nearest healthy, affordable food is a mile or more away.1 Even more reason for me to refrain from whining.

  Still I kept on. My lovely cup of morning tea was now not ginger and not orange juice and not a banana smoothie. I sipped it as I waited for my ride to Bellingham, surrounded by what now seemed a steamer trunk full of food, and sniveled more.