So-Called 30 Minute Mozzarella

I promised y'all that the next time I posted something about pizza that it would have homemade cheese involved. With a little help from my friends that is now being delivered. The objective was to get some creamy contraband from across state lines and try out Ricki Carroll's 30 minute mozzarella recipe. I'm not sure we actually believed mozz could happen in 30 minutes, but what was going to be a little afternoon road trip and fun in the kitchen turned into a 12 hour celebration of life, food and chance. Like all things local, relationships, knowledge and in this case, a little daring, were key to making this happen.

Best girlfriend R__* spurred this project on by attending and being, um, rather inspired, by a cheesemaking session at the recent Georgia Organics conference held in Athens. Armed with veg and non-veg rennet and "starter" we converged at an undisclosed location and proceeded to make a certain illegal purchase. The purchase of the illegal substance was pretty anti-climactic, and sort of underscores the ridiculousness of legislation around unpasteurized m___. What could be more uncontroversial and normal than visiting a farm and taking home a substance frequently described as the world's most perfect food? As I have pointed out before, this was a regular feature of my childhood and I'm still here to talk about it. It is ludicrous to imagine that it might have been more legal to transport wine (another heavily regulated perfect food) across state lines.

On the way home I noticed a man leave a gas station not more than a few miles from the farm we visited. He was carrying a gallon of milk. I mused for a moment on the thousands of miles, the countless gallons of petroleum and uncountable tons of carbon dioxide that were racked up, used up forever and released into the atmosphere in the supply chain for that particular gallon of milk. That customer has the option, but probably not the knowledge about the option, a few miles away to purchase a gallon of milk that has a supply chain of approximately five feet. Why can't we have more of this?

I think cheese, actually, is the world's most perfect food, and over the course of the day, I realized another reason why raw m__ is so scary to the dairy industry. That's because raw m___ WANTS to be cheese. Really really really badly. The ease of which cheese is produced from raw m___ should strike fear in the hearts of all dairy processors and they should immediately run to their state legislator and demand further restrictions on the rights of citizen eaters to purchase and process whatever life giving substance they want. The should also, while they are there, request further rights and privileges to support the waging of war in the name of cheap energy, to create permanent climatic destruction and to drive trucks around the planet mindlessly and purposelessly. All for the sake of a greasy buck. That's dumb. (Utah Philips, my favorite anarchist, said that, and I'm proud to repeat it).

After enjoying a lovely meal at a local restaurant we took a little break to enjoy the gorgeous weather and reconvened for some seriously subversive and illegal activities later in the evening. The basic process of making cheese is to add a starter, which is anything that will "sour" the milk and can include vinegar, citric acid or buttermilk. Then add rennet, which is a coagulant derived from the intestines of very young cows... (Vegetarians, if you don't want to think about that too much, you should try the very easy process of making your own cheese out of veg rennet. We did!) The next steps involve varying forms of cutting, kneading, heating, salting, etc, etc, to create the kind of cheese you ultimately desire. Our mozz required nuking the curds in a microwave, and kneading and stretching the resulting ball of fragrant yumminess.

Our cheese turned out delicious, but a little bit squeaky and rubbery and not exactly solid. It was ultimately fantastic melted on spinach, sun-dried tomato and garlic pizza which we enjoyed around 10pm with several glasses of wine. But that's not the most important part. The important part was that we were using recipes designed for pasteurized milk, and you all know we were using something else!!! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Timing is everything in making different kinds of cheeses, and when we added the starter, our milk instantly curdled. That should have happened when we heated it... But we pressed on and ended up with really gigantic curds that we then proceeded to process to a rubbery, squeaky mass. We concluded, perhaps, smugly (?) that maybe raw m___ doesn't actually need all that processing to make really nice cheese...? Or maybe we just don't know what we're doing? Maybe both.

We can't wait to experiment and we'll let you know how that goes too! That is if we aren't arrested the next time we smuggle the good stuff across state lines! Wish us luck!

*all names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent

Kale and Sweet Potatoes

I worked at Athens Locally Grown last Thursday for the first time since last summer when I was "laid off". For one reason or another, I was sent home with armfuls of vegetables. Now, some of my nearest and dearest know about my secret bachelorette habit of eating popcorn and drinking beer when I should be eating kale and sweet potatoes. I know, I know. But I come by it honestly...just ask my dad.

In my mind, the whole point of cooking and eating is sharing. So, cooking a lovely meal for myself and sharing it with approximately no one makes me feel more lonely than I already was feeling before I started cooking and made a mess of the kitchen. Guess who is going to clean that up? At least popcorn is something I can share with my hound dog--Ksanti--who finds the project of catching flying popcorn endlessly interesting.

To remedy this sad state of affairs, I've been having friends over for dinner once or twice each week. So when I brought home cauliflower, potatoes, spinach, carrots, collards, cream, milk, etc, etc, I knew I needed to cook for somebody(s), or all this loveliness was going to go to waste. Looking at a gallon of milk I couldn't dream of drinking by myself and two adorably little and lacy heads of cauliflower, I couldn't help but think of paneer makhani (fresh cheese in tomato cream sauce) and aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower). Best girlfriends, Regan and Erin, were more than happy to assist with dispatching the yumminess, and even volunteered to sample my ever-evolving attempts at making paratha (stuffed Indian flatbreads).

I am always impressed with how Indian cuisine lends itself to the produce available here, and everywhere but at the Arctic Circle, really. Regan pointed out that Indian cuisine just does a good job of working with vegetables, which is a really good point. Other cuisines tend to have wheat or other grains as an essential base. Italian has its wheat, Mexican its corn and Thai its rice. Indian food obviously has rice and wheat breads as an essential part of the plate, and you probably won't go anywhere in India without seeing one or both on a thali (platter of three or more main dishes complete with breads, dessert, salad and condiments, served family style).

Having said that, you could eat a plate of potato subji (vegetable dish), paneer (cheese) or gosht (meat) masala, sauteed greens and dahi (yogurt) and never miss the grains. Which is what I just did. And it was delicious. As a diabetic, I've never been too worried about whether I was eating wheat or potatoes--it's all carbs to me. I think this is an important strategy for local eaters to adopt. It's next to impossible (as I've railed about before) to get grains in local markets. Forget local, organic grains grown by small-scale farmers. Unless you're Amish (who do this for their communities) you won't be able to produce a large enough volume of grains to make it anywhere near affordable for people to buy...I think the buying and selling of it is actually the problem here...but I digress.

In an otherwise fiber rich diet (read, a base of fresh fruits and vegetables) the complex carbohydrates from grains aren't really that necessary. Regan related some statistics about vegetable consumption in the United States, which are actually too horrifying to repeat. Suffice it to say that the CDC is concerned enough about this to launch a whole new campaign of research and outreach around vegetable consumption as disease prevention. When I expressed some concern about my popcorn habit and my long term health, she said in reference to the meal I had cooked for her last week, "You have kale and sweet potatoes in your life. You're fine". Whew.

So, just a little bit of advice and encouragement--support your local farmers and don't worry about what you might be missing by not eating grains. They are overrated anyway, as Marion Nestle points out in her book, Food Politics. The FDA/USDA tells us what to eat with their cute little pyramid according to who pays them the most money. I guess if I had that kind of money, I would try to pay the government to tell you to eat local. But I don't. I just have this blog, so thanks for reading and get some kale and sweet potatoes in your life. You'll be fine.

Thanksgiving

I know I've been neglecting my blog responsibilities lately (and there's a good reason...) so bear with me as I catch up. Right now, I need to take a moment to give some belated thanks for old friends, new farmers and my family.

After almost a decade of Thanksgiving dinners in Maryland with my Dad and his wife, I elected to travel to Minnesota to visit old friends and family on my favorite holiday. Words fail me in describing the gifts of love, forgiveness and hope that I received on this trip. It was probably the most important road trip of my life.

But what I really want to tell you about is the turkey.

Let me begin with the fact that you can actually get a Thanksgiving turkey for free from a chain grocery store as a kind of brand loyalty marketing strategy. I understand the symbolic importance of turkeys and sheesh, they are expensive, as they are danged long-lived... It's harder to shorten the lifespan of a turkey (as opposed to a chicken which can be raised in a virtual nano-second these days) to extract as much profit as possible from it's short(ish) miserable life, but Tyson, Purdue and the like do their best to force farmers into selling themselves and their livestock for the lowest possible price. The fact that these birds are given away free by grocery stores who pocket all the profits from the sale of Cheetos and the like is a slap in the face of (no, actually, it's a dehumanizing act of thievery against the) honest hard work and sincere efforts to make a living by the working poor. Having said that, I appreciate the fact that a family who otherwise would not be able to afford a T-day turkey can get one free by buying all their groceries for several months from one store in exchange for a free one. Yup. Got it. But still. I don't want one of those.

I will not particpate in trading farming livelihoods for profit mongering.

The fact that I have the luxury to do so is a troubling and problematic reality. It the height of injustice that the very essence of life--food--pits the consuming poor against the producing poor and leaves healthy food to those who can afford it. I don't want to participate in this system either. But still, my family needs a turkey, or it's not Thanksgiving. My vegetarian nieces would disagree, and I'll give them that too. Next year, it's T-day at my house where carnivores, omnivores and herbivores will get their fill, and where local farmers are the biggest beneficiaries of our happy tummies.

But we really didn't do so bad this year on the local farmer score.

So, my first call home about my trip was to my dear friend Kristi, who farms with her husband in western Minnesota, and for whom reconnecting on this trip meant everything to me. Did she have turkeys? Did she know anyone who did? Turns out she didn't but her good friend Jessi had some. Was Fed-Exing my deposit going to be fast enough to get the last Bourbon Red in the flock? These birds had led pampered lives with free-run (notice, not free range--free RUN) of the farm all summer and were huge, healthy and semi-feral. Without going into two much detail, there was a smidge of a logistical and geographical problem associated with retrieving the bird on Saturday when it was available (and when I was in approximately po-dunk nowhere between GA and MN in my car) and Thursday when the bird was supposed to be on the table in all its roasted glory.

All logistical puzzles aside, retrieving the bird and it arriving on the table, involved being delivered into the arms of loved ones and loved landscapes again and again, which ranged from being smothered in embraces by five year olds to driving in silence through stretches of prairie visited only by the sunsets. Real life and real love showed up and danced to the song of life and death, and it was rich.

On the way to get the bird out of Jessi's freezer Kristi took me to the grave of her infant daughter--Nora--her daughet Anika's twin sister. We hugged while Anika played by the grave, and I felt a tremendous, devastating loss that can only be cliched in comparison to the grief of Kristi's family. It ain't right. No. It ain't right. But what are you going to do? When we got to Jessi's the spade-foot hogs were out and helping themselves to grain from the silo. Jessi shrugged when we pointed it out and said They're happier that way. I wrote her a check for more money than I ever thought possible for poultry and sat on the couch with Jessi and Kristi's kids while they told me about life.

I ask you...has this ever happened and will this ever happen to you on your way to get your free turkey from Giant?

When I left for Duluth the next day, after Kristi and I said a heartfelt goodbye, I got in the car with my heart in my throat...and a niggling feeling I had forgotten something important. Um, yeah, the turkey was still in Kristi's freezer. Later, with the turkey safely in a cooler, a half of a pig for my BFF Becky in Duluth and a leftover meatloaf sandwich (from Brad and Kristi's pigs and cows) in my pocket, I was ready for more adventures in love and eating.

In Duluth Becky and Brad treated me to grilled pork chops the best mashed potatoes ever, more hugs and kisses from young ones and long talks into the night that stretched into the morning when we walked through the woods and talked about how farming really is the answer to life. Becky sent me "home" to my brother's house with a bag full of red potatoes from her garden and I cooked up a kick-ass brine for that bird while she and Brad put the kids to bed. Rosemary from my mom's garden, garlic from Becky's garden and love wrapped up in it all.

Reuniting with mom, step-father, brother, sister-in-law (Tracy-didi, in hindi is so much sweeter, I must say) and grown-up lovely nieces, Taylor and Alexis and step brother Travis (the comedian) made all the driving worth it. We feasted on a golden delicious bird and more of the best mashed potatoes ever, sweet potatoe souffle, brussel sprouts, pie, etc etc.. It was superlative and especially so since it was enjoyed in miles of love that we came to after traveling through acres and acres of pain.

There is more. I wish I could share it all here, but let me just say that sincere efforts to do the right thing will always be rewarded with richness, healing and love.

You can't get that at Giant.

Georgia Department of Agriculture Raids Unsubsidized Legal Market

Today, at Athens Locally Grown, "investigators" showed up and threatened Eric Wagoner about his sales of "raw milk". Hear tell, Eric was told "you know, you can't sell raw milk in Georgia". Horrors! Selling a commodity that people want! Not to mention that it was sold in South Carolina, not in Georgia. Crossing state lines to share legally pre-sold raw milk with people are willing and able to pay for is apparently a federal offense. Hmmmm, where is the free market in all of this? Fine, Georgia, bureaucrats, be more backwards than the government in South Carolina which allows the sale of raw milk. Do you want a prize for being more in the pocket of special interest than your more conservative cousin?

So, what is the problem you might ask? Well, raw milk has only been sustaining human populations since the neolithic. It's only been since the advent of industrial agriculture that we have really worried about killing off the bacteria in our milk through pasteurization. Of course, we can appreciate advances in sanitation, but confinement systems certainly do not offer that. If you can imagine(or have seen as I have) cows standing knee deep in shit, you might be really glad to know your milk it pasteurized. But, pastured cows don't live in those conditions, and tuberculosis and brucelosis are virtually non-existent in these systems. It's not difficult to imagine which lobby (um, milk processors who own expensive pasteurizing equipment and are few and far between, if you don't have a clue) is behind this excessive and inexplicable use of tax dollars to illegally harass the owner of a small, grass-roots and local market.

Approximately 0 percent of your tax dollars in the form of agricultural subsidies go to small scale dairies who pasture their cows and direct market raw milk,while 35% (to the tune of 2.8 billion dollars) goes to growing feed grains which go to your corn syrups and your beef cattle, which single handedly contribute to all the leading health problems in the United States, which include heart disease, obesity and diabetes. Approximately 3.2% of all subsidies go to peanut production (the lion's share in Georgia) and we all know how well the Department of Agriculture manages to keep pathogens, like salmonella, with their root in human and animal feces (and certainly not legumes like peanuts...) out of our food system. The self-importance of the "investigators" at our market today was hypocrisy at it's finest. Where were these people when children were dying from salmonella poisoning from eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches???!!!

No, they show up and harass the facilitator of a completely legal market selling a commodity people want earnestly to buy (for whatever crazy reason they might have). This country prides itself on the freedom of its markets, all the while it subsidizes dangerous commodities like beef and peanuts that actually kill people when they unknowingly and unwittingly consume those products. At least people who buy raw milk know the risk they are running. And take it willingly and apparently bravely, in the face of imminent death if we can believe the Georgia Department of Agriculture. If drinking milk fresh from the teat of a cow or a goat or sheep or horse or a camel or a llama killed people en masse, then the human species would be extinct by now. Let's not pretend that raw milk done right actually hurts people. I drank raw milk every day of my life, and I'm still here to talk about it.

Give me a break, GA DOA. We know what you're really about. You're in bed with milk processors who bottleneck our milk supply and control the price. Don't be so precious about protecting people. We know who you're protecting and we aren't going to buy their processed crap no matter how much you lie to us about health and safety. Give us a free market and let the consumers decide. Live up to your free market ideals already!

Fig Gifts

During Ramadan, which has been observed for the last month and ends today, observers in central Asia often break the fast (iftar) at sundown with figs.

This week I observed a fast of sorts on Thursday. Under the influence of some absurd Midwestern work ethic, I went to work while sick with the flu, and of course, I didn't have the energy to pack a lunch. Not that I was hungry.

I picked up my order at Athens Locally Grown after work, en route to bed. My order included about 8 figs from McMullan farms, and I ate them in the car in the parking lot as the sun started to go down. Their sweetness was a revelation to my parched mouth and I swore they were a gift from god.

Avian Soup in a Can Influenza

I just survived more fatigue I ever thought was possible to endure. It was likely swine flu, although I didn't bother to go to the doctor to find out. I figured since I went to the doctor for my 121st diabetic checkup last week, and came down with this post-exposure to all the sick people in the waiting room, I probably would live (perhaps longer) not knowing whether I had regular old flu or some other allegedly more contagious kind of flu. In my opinion that falls under the category of too much information.

Other interesting symptoms of my flu included a salt craving that drove me just about crazy, and which I satisfied with garlic salt on toast and chicken soup from a can. Yes, dear reader, it was so bad I ate chicken soup from a can. I did buy organic and free range, yah da yah da yah da, chicken soup, two allegedly made by Wolfgang Puck. Yeah, right. This desperate act was necessary, however, because the very idea of cooking made me want to go fetal. The idea of doing anything but sleeping made me want to go fetal. I'd like to suggest a new name for this flu--the avian-soup-in-a-can-fetal-position-influenza.

Not only did I not want to cook, I also didn't want to eat. Not exactly nauseous, just not interested. Horrors! And for me, like most mammals I know, being off my feed is a pretty serious indication of illness. So, today, when a ferocious hunger started stalking me around 11 am, I figured I was probably gonna be alright. Whew.

Interestingly, I also ate the same thing for breakfast today (chicken soup from a can and crackers) and gave the same amount of insulin as I had for the last three awful days and *today*, I had a low blood sugar afterward, right around 11 am. When ill, the body releases stress hormones like cortisol that raise the blood sugar. In the diabetic body, which has no insulin to deal with this rise, the blood sugar stays inelastically high, which adds to the misery, have no fear. When my blood sugar finally came down, I took that as a bonefide indication of being back in the saddle--so to speak. (The real kind of getting back in the saddle will have to wait til tomorrow. Yaaaaaaaay!!).

So, what to eat, to break this influenza fast? I'm not much of a wheat-eater, but all I could think of was a big fat pizza--the quintessential comfort food. My good friends Amy and Jimmy Cox had given me some venison sausage a few weeks ago and I had lots of tomatoes and basil. Sometimes these combinations stick in my head like a tune, and I can't expunge them, except for to make them come to life. So, ole, ole, ole, come to life!

I cooked up some fast pizza sauce from my ripe Amish Paste and San Marzano tomatoes with some Sweet Nardello peppers from McMullen Farms and some super strong Inchelium Red garlic from Backyard Harvest with a little dried thyme from some huge garden I had in Pennsylvania in another life. I browned the sausage, and the gamey scent of it brought back memories of growing up in Minnesota. I piled the sauce and sausage high with onions from Cedar Grove farm, green pepper from my garden, more garlic and sweet nardello pepper, layered with heirloom tomatoes from Green Girl Gardens and basil from Roots Farm. Oh my. To make a kick-the-crap-out-of-influenza pizza it takes a whole county. Wolfgang Puck, eat your heart out!

More seriously, though, I would have really liked to have sourced the weat flour and mozzerella cheese locally, both of which I bought at the grocery and both of which have origins relatively unknown to me. I just made my students trace the ingredients of a favorite food, and I really should do this myself. Do I as say, not as I do, young ones! The King Arthur flour I know is processed in Vermont, but that's all I know, and it probably contains Bt wheat, which in a recent post, I just railed against. (Does it count that I had already bought it before I ranted against it?) The Sargento cheese is probably made from imported casein, and is likely to make me feel bad since I am lactose intolerant, and casein is usually made from a lactose-based waste product that is also used in cosmetics and paint. Yum, huh?

Ergo, my next big investment is going to be in a mozzarella cheese making kit. The next time you see a pizza, or it's facsimile, on this blog, it will include cheese made from milk from a dairy in Georgia and crafted by my ownself in my very own kitchen. I gotta think a bit harder about the wheat. In the meantime, I am soooooooooooooo happy to be cooking again!

Eat well, be well and love well.

New Foods

So, tonight, I enjoyed "lamb bacon" at the National with Eric McDonald of UGA's School of Environment and Design, before taking in Food, Inc. at Cine (I saw it again, I am such a dork--and this time I took NOTES = super dork). While savoring the impossible scrumptiousness of (already amazingly delicious) pastured lamb turned into salted, smoked, crispy, juicy, fatty heaven, we discussed the idea of a comprehensive lists of foods, so that we can check off edibles when we eat them (like birders do when they see birds that are new to them) and so we can add novel items like lamb bacon to the list when we find them. I suggested that the possible combinations of foods are probably infinite (limited only by our ability to imagine those combinations), so you couldn't really have a comprehensive list, like lists of species, which are allegedly (at least on the scale of a human lifetime) finite.

Let's put Amy-the-arguer in cold storage for a second, and talk for awhile about what would be on that list. High fructose corn syrup? Mechanically separated chicken? Xylitol? The more I think about this, the more I warm up to the idea. It would be a great exercise for us all to examine the ingredients of our diet and be shocked to find that it distills into a rather short list of hyper-processed ingredients that have their origin in corn, wheat and soybeans. (The birding equivalent would be seeing a few variants on crows, starlings and vultures every time you went birding. This revolting scenario is more likely than you imagine if we keep up the status quo in our food system). The production of these commodities destroys our bodies, our environment, our communities and our democracy. This is an empirically proven and validated fact. (See the movie, do some reading and talk to people if you disagree. Then we'll talk.) There is no more important struggle on this earth than to free ourselves from this illusion of choice and freedom, and to put some checks and balances on the control of agricultural transnationals over our food system.

I go out on a limb, and argue for a global movement against transnationals, because today, in India, farmers (some of whom are poorer than the poorest person you can imagine--think about it for awhile...start with no toilets and go from there) take to the streets in peaceful protest for the resurrection of the Doha Round of the WTO. They just want another chance to farm on a fairer playing field. They just want to turn the blood, sweat and tears they put into growing food into enough money to feed their families. In India, almost 50% of all children suffer from such severe malnutrition that their growth is stunted. This is directly related to the fact that US farmers get paid to grow commodities below the cost of production. (As the step-daughter of such a farmer, I can say that I never ever worried about my next meal and I definitely had a toilet). The chance for Indian (or Sudanese or Laotian) kids to have some good eats like the rest of us, is not gonna happen until we start asking Congress to stop spending our precious tax dollars on growing the corn, wheat and soybeans that poison us and the ecology of our country. Our money that we trust our government with, goes directly (IN CASH!) to farmers so that they can buy patented seed and grow the next crop of genetically mofidifed commodities, some portion of which will be sold (or dumped) on international markets, and which will undermine some of the poorest people in the world who have ALREADY invested time, money and energy into growing crops that are now virtually worthless. No wonder they drink pesticides. I would too. In return, we in the "developed" world (with our well developed asses) deal with diseases like diabetes because carrots and broccoli are more expensive than Big Macs. That is CRAZY! Do something about this!

After watching Food, Inc. again, I am absolutely galvanized in my opposition to the incredibly stupid waste of our resources on the production of corn, wheat and soybeans. We are so duped into thinking that our trips to the grocery store allow us to participate in some kind of choice about our diet that we don't think to look any further for our food than that oasis of inefficiency, creative destruction and death. Call me a liberal, and a communist and a tree-hugger, and a feminist and a fascist and then sue me for veggie-libel, but dammit, figure out what is in your diet, understand what your food choices contribute to, (and, yes, spend some time dealing with feeling really bad about it) and then go find and buy and eat some food that didn't hurt somebody, something or someplace already. Enjoy that meal. And do it again.