Chickens!

There is an ordinance change going through in Ferndale. Well, I should say that the amendment has been written and it has a lot of support from the residents, but it hasn't actually come to council yet.

In the meantime, I'm reading up on raising chickens and building coops. I have found a few really nice designs that I might attempt, but I'm pretty sure I'll have to pull permits and get inspections for this kind of stuff if it ever comes to pass. Here are 2 of the designs I'm considering:

From Farming Vegan in the Big City

From Farming Vegan in the Big City

So far, this is just a pipe dream. Not that I'm not certain I could make it work, but I'm not interested in trying to bend the existing laws just to get what I want. I will have to wait and see if the new ordinance gets passed before I even consider getting into this. But the hope of having chickens gives me reason to educate myself on how to raise them!

I'm Going to Grow Tea Next Year

  I found this great website where I can purchase tea seeds and plants to grow at my house. I still have a lot to learn about growing tea properly and oxidizing and drying it to create delicious tea, but this is a start! The guy on the site apparently travels to China every year and purchases a lot of seeds and then gets the plants growing by the Spring so that you can grow your own tea all summer. I'm afraid I'll have to buy a grow lamp or something to be able to do it properly, although I've been planning on getting a grow room set up in my basement to get a jump on the season.

  I've been learning more about mixed farming lately and I am working on a comprehensive plan for my family so that we might be able to start saving some money, even on my meager salary. If I work hard at it, I think I might be able to start growing enough food to both save and eat as well as to sell within 2 years. I'll really have to concentrate on the task at hand though. I hope Ferndale opens their Farmer's Market again next Summer. I missed this year and I'm more than a little bummed about it.

Does Anyone Want To Learn to Make Kombucha for Free?

I'm in some scoby trouble. I stopped making Kombucha at the end of the summer because I got busy. The problem is, because of my neglect, I have a ridiculous amount of scoby (the stuff that makes Kombucha) and I have nowhere to store it right now. If anyone wants some, I have enough to go around!! Let me know via comments, email or Facebook. I'll even teach you how to make it.

Part Three: Going Vegan? Already One? There's an App for That!

  In my final installment of this series, I rate the worst apps I tried. Some of them are terrible because they don't work properly. Others are simply built on a bad idea. Now, I realize that I tried out 16 and only rated 6, but all that means is that the other 10 were either mediocre in design and function or not very noteworthy at all. The first two parts of the series are below as well as in the index to the right.

  My final critique only includes apps that were based on a bad idea or don't do what they say they do. As before, I list the app as well as the star rating it received in the store. Here is my list of the worst three and why I didn't like them:

1. Vegan Recipes (2.5 stars) - This app is functional, but very incomplete. Most of the recipes have incomplete ingredient lists. The descriptions of the steps get cut off because the screens aren't formatted correctly. The final issue with this app is that every recipe is estimated to take 10 minutes to prep and 50 minutes to complete, even the ones that have to be refrigerated OVERNIGHT.

2. VeganSteven (2.5 stars) - This app attempts to guide users to different vegan friendly locations for shopping and eating. The big problem is that the categories are not indicative of the businesses that are listed. For instance, when a user chooses "Vegan Shoes", the app lists a maternity store, a pharmacy, Whole Foods and even a barbershop. This app would be great if the creator hadn't royally messed up the categories.

3. Veggie Spots (1.5 stars) - This app also has potential, but the programming must be seriously flawed or incomplete. Ultimately this should allow you to enter your zip code and find local vegan "spots" in your neighborhood. It uses the GPS in the iPhone to find your current location, but instead of helpfully showing you where vegan restaurants are located, it forces you to play a kind of "warmer or colder" game using the map. My search results often numbered in the teens, but I almost never got to see them all thanks to the poor mapping.

  Food Additives 2 (3 stars) is the app I was in search of originally. It is a decent app, but the descriptions of the individual additives are weak. The Animal Free and Cruelty Free apps have very weak databases and could be promising with a large amount of user feedback. Honest Label is a really neat scanning program that would allow you to instantly see what is in a product without the hassle of reading the label. Sadly, the newest version of the software crashes every time I try to scan, rendering this app completely useless.

  So there you have it. The very worst "vegan" apps in a nutshell. During this project I learned that, while my iPhone functions very well as a phone, messaging device, camera, etc., it doesn't hold a candle to the combination of my eyes and brain when it comes to choosing my food. It's a handy assistant, but the flaws of its human programmers became evident very quickly. I guess the iPhone isn't better than a human quite yet!

Part Two: Going Vegan? Already One? There's an App for That!

So I downloaded some vegan-friendly iPhone apps recently. Technology being the friend that it is to us, I thought, "If my iPhone can function as a phone, computer and camera, why not take it a step further and let it help me pick my food choices?"

I narrowed my selections down to 16 from the 170 results I recieved when typing "vegan" into the App Store search bar. Part One of this series describes my criteria. Of the 16 I downloaded, I paid for 7 of them with a total bill coming to $14.77 after tax. This brought up a very valid question about how tax can be charged to a digital purchase, but I won't digress into that now.

For each app I will give a brief description as well as my thoughts about the nature of the program. I am also providing, as a reference only, the star rating each recieved from users in the App Store.

This is my list of the best apps in order from most to least useful:

1. Vegan YumYum Mobile (3.5 stars) - Obviously the fact that this app is linked to a very successful blog helps its chances of being useful. I found many of the recipes to be very appealing and the instructions are not complicated. One of the things I hate about vegan cookbooks is that some vegan cooks, especially the ones in hip Californian cities, tend to use unusual and sometimes strange ingredients that I am not always able to find, even in Ferndale. Vegan YumYum seems to have several recipes that use the normal kitchen items to make awesome food, like Pumpkin Whoopie Pies!
2. Happy Cow (5 stars) - A very close second (almost a tie for 1st) is the Happy Cow app. This website has always been helpful, but the app is even better. You can search using several different filters: zip code, GPS location, or address. Or you can search for vegan, vegetarian, or veg-friendly. It uses Google maps integrated into the app to display the results of your search and, as a result, you can select a restaurant or business and get address and phone number info as well as map location in the maps app so you can get directions. A great companion to the site.
3. 21-Day Vegan Kickstart (3.5 stars) -  This is a great vegan guide for day-to-day meals. Some of the recipes get a bit reused, but for the most part there are plenty of options and they are mostly simple recipes. After the first time you open the app, it begins the dietary program. You can't skip ahead to future meals, but you can see the progress you've already made. I am excited to try out the vegan rice pudding and the "facon bacon" looks good too. This app's primary purpose is lost to me but the recipes will be an excellent addition to my library of cookbooks.

A couple of other apps that I liked were Veg Quotes (5 stars), an inspirational app that provides famous quotes about an animal-product-free existence; Vegan Xpress (3.5 stars), a vegan shopping and menu guide; and Veggie Phrases (3.5 stars), a travel guide that translates phrases into different languages for eating vegan in different countries.

I also liked the Whole Foods recipe app (3.5 stars), despite the fact that it occasionally crashed and it seems like a marketing tool for the chain.

In the conclusion to this series, I will provide my rating for the worst three apps I tested. Stay tuned!

Part One: Going Vegan? Already One? There's an App for That!

First I will lay out the back story and the rules for this idea. To avoid making this post too long, I am splitting this experiment into several parts. I recently posted a blog entry about vegan Halloween candy and received many comments. A commenter mentioned that they would like to see a blog entry about the app that tells a person what is and isn't vegan. So I took the challenge and got on my iPhone.

I should warn anyone who hasn't already done this that just typing the word "vegan" into the search bar in the app store gets you 170 results. Many of the apps that come up after typing "vegan" are not even relevant to the subject, but isn't that true of many things you search for in the app store?

My rules were simple. I only looked at apps that seemed the most useful at a glance. I would gloss the description or base my decision solely off the title. I did not look at ratings or the number of stars an app received since I would be rating them myself. I went down the list until I got to a place where very few of the apps had anything to do with my intended goal.

Orcish Librarian was the first app that hinted I'd gone too far. As soon as I saw the title Animal Kill Counter, I quit looking.

Here are a couple of statistics and factoids that I found in my search:

• Ten of the first 25 apps are vegan/vegetarian recipe apps.
• Five of the first 25 apps are vegan/vegetarian restaurant finders.
• PETA has an app that pushes their ridiculous agenda right to your iPhone every day!
• There are three apps under the vegan search that run $9.99. The most I paid was $3.99 for Food Additives 2, one of the apps I was originally looking for.
• One of my favorite vegan cookbooks is for sale in its entirety for only $7.99.

My next installment will have my top rated apps and the final chapter of the trilogy will have the apps I found to be most useless or insulting to me as a vegan.

A new vocab word

I recently found an interesting article on this blog. The word "permaculture" came up and, of course, it made me a little more than curious. I suppose this is what I am striving for, even though I never knew there was a word for it. The idea that we all need to build structures and agricultural systems that are based on nature. When you look at the way America grows its food and builds its cities, there is very little "natural" influence. It's almost as if we are trying to ignore nature because of its asymmetry or chaotic habits.

Asymmetry and chaos are the reasons I love the natural world! Check out the post and let me know what you think.

P.S. I hate wikipedia because it is impossible to verify the factual content of the information, but it is often the easiest place to find great info...its a paradox.

A new direction...

  I haven't done very well keeping up with this blog since the Summer ended. Hell, I didn't do that great of a job while the Summer was still here! I intend on rectifying this issue.

  Since I cannot garden in Michigan during the next 7 months, I will be updating with good and bad vegan recipes that I will be attempting during the Holidays as well as the rest of the Winter. I'm not set up to can anything quite yet, but I have been doing a bit of baking and even more cooking lately. I also started blogging for the Ferndale Patch website and my latest blog there dealt mainly with veganism and technology. I will post the three part series here following this update.

  I recently tried a new recipe from Vegan Yum Yum that turned out great! They were vegan pumpkin whoopie pies and, while I normally am skeptical of new vegan recipes, these were a breeze and they turned out exactly how they should have, delicious!

  I am adding the blog link to my favorites in the side bar, so go to the source for the recipe. Just know that I fully endorse it! Here is a picture of how mine came out:

From Food I Made

  I also uploaded a few other pictures of food I've recently made to the Food I Made album. I will include a recipe of my own soon!

Rain barrel #2, almost complete...

I had a bit of free time in the last few days so I was able to complete construction on the rain barrel stand for one of the two 58 gal. barrels I'm installing. I also was able to get the lid completed on this barrel and get the gutter attached properly to dump off into the barrel. My one big problem is that the spout is leaking. I think it is because the rubber washer I used on the outside of the barrel isn't sealing the hole properly. I will most likely have to get an O ring and metal washer assembly in place to make it stop. Here are a few pictures:

From Stuff I Made

From Stuff I Made

As you can see, I built a 2x4 base and topped it with some wolmanized plywood for the barrel to sit on. Since one gallon of water is 8 pounds and these barrels will hold approximately 58 gallons, I needed to build something sturdy enough to hold the 464 pounds that a full barrel will weigh. I think this stand should hold up. I plan on attaching another section with the same dimensions next to this one. The only difference will be that the second barrel will sit about 2 inches below the first for gravity to work. The stand that is currently there is 30 inches up and the platform is 21x21. Here is a picture of it close up:

From Stuff I Made

And here is what the lid looks like before the gravel goes in to slow the water flow and filter out large debris:

From Stuff I Made

You will notice that I am using black fiberglass screen to filter small debris and to keep insects out. When finished, the lid will be covered with stone and the top of the barrel will be just under the fenceline.

The blue garden barrel is the next one on the list. I need to install new gutter and downspout for that one so it will take a bit longer since I can't do that kind of thing myself easily.

The garden is getting crazy. I need to get in and intervene. The cucumber plants are beginning to shadow the peppers and kill them. The bean plants went out of control and are ruining the brussel sprouts. The one tomato plant that I bought has taken over the corner of the garden. I really need to take the power back! Here are a couple pictures:

From Food I Made

From Food I Made

From Food I Made

Pictures of rain barrel #1

Here are a couple of pictures of the first of 3 rain barrels I will install soon. This one is very unlike the others since my father gave me his old water softener tank to convert. After scrubbing it out, drilling some holes and assembling the accessories, it makes a pretty handsome conversion. I think I may buy a can of brown spray paint for it, but for now, it will do just fine as it is.

From Stuff I Made

I used a simple brass hose bib for the bottom and a 1/2-3/4 threaded coupler for the overflow on the top. This part took me about 15 minutes to assemble.

From Stuff I Made

Now I have to build the 2x4 stand it will sit on and install the gutter to fill it. My other 2 barrels are cleaned out and ready to be assembled but the shape of the barrel is causing me trouble. The bottom of the barrel is angled in such a way that the hose bib would point downward when I finish. If I try to put the spout higher on the barrel I won't be able to effectively empty it. I'm thinking about a few options and I will definitely update with the finished product when I decide what to do.

Rain barrel #1: DONE!

My father was kind enough to donate his old water softener tank to me for conversion into a rain barrel. Since the thing held rock salt and water for the last 10 years in his basement and it still looks like new, I figure I should be able to get a few good rain barrel years out of it! It has taken me a while to finally get everything I need to convert it, but at long last I'm finally done. I just finished about 15 minutes ago, so it's too dark out to photograph, but I will take some good ones tomorrow.

Steve and I also drove to Imlay City and bought a few 58 gallon pickle barrels to convert. Since I had the baby, we could only fit 4 barrels in the van, which means that without the baby we could easily get 8 in there.

The basics of these barrels are these:

58 gallon pickle barrel (or any food grade barrel that has never held chemicals) with (2) 3/4" holes. Bore one hole near the top and one close to the bottom. We are using 1/2" brass faucets and 3/4" - 1/2" threaded hose adapters for the tap and overflow on the barrel. The final piece is the lid. Since the downspout has to run into the top of the barrel to fill it and you don't want debris or bugs to get in, you have to both cut a hole in the lid and seal that hole with screen to keep out the bad stuff. I chose to drill a gridwork of holes in the top of this particular barrel and then place a piece of screen beneath to seal out unwanted pests. The nice part about the softener tank is that the lid doesn't screw on, but it still makes a very nice tight connection. The barrels we bought have screw down lids, making it slightly difficult to open them without anything in them.

I'm very excited to get the other two completed and then I've got to alter the downspouts on my house and install some new gutter for the barrel by the garden. That is going to be the hard part. Mostly because I've only ever once hung a gutter. But that is what this blog is all about, right? Me figuring out how to do this homeowner stuff one project at a time.

New batch of Kombucha

I was having mold problems, but it would seem that I have that problem sussed out. I just got 2 more quarts finished and I would have started 4 new ones but the 2 oldest cultures were getting really grey and I'm not sure how much longer they will be effective. I put the two oldest ones together to see what would happen and I followed the standard formula for the other 2 jars I started. So far, each quart has taken about 3-4 weeks to fully ferment. I also found out that the only tea I can use to get a decent outcome is a Keemun-A loose leaf black tea. I had a couple of green tea batches go alright at first, and I tried a loose leaf oolong this time to see what would happen. But the best tasting tea I have made has been the Keemun-A. I also tried using a bagged brand which I won't name, and I ended up with mold in that one too.

So my final conclusion would seem to be this:

Only use organic loose leaf tea with no chance of additives.
Only use coffee filters to cover since nothing else lets enough air in to prevent mold.
Make sure to thoroughly wash the jars and then do a final rinse with filtered water.

So far I have only had success using these methods. Here are some new pictures of what I did.

From Food I Made

From Food I Made

Grass!!

Our yard has begun! It took about 15 days for grass to sprout but it finally happened. I think my hesitation to waste water has been a detriment to its growth, but to be honset, I would rather pay less for water and have no yard. Anyway, the parts of the yard that get more water have begun to sprout small patches of grass and so we have a start to a new yard after almost a month of no yard.

From Stuff I Fixed

We also have quite a few seedlings coming up in the garden. I didn't get all of the vegetables planted this year so I will have to be better about it next year. In my defense, I had to build the garden boxes and get the soil going before I could get started planting. I did put some tomato and pepper seedlings in that I had pre-planted indoors in April, but nothing grew well inside this spring. I think it may be due to the weird weather changes we had. I got the final boxes built and filled. I planted lettuce in these two hanging boxes to keep room in the limited space I have for bigger plants.

From Stuff I Made

I hope I get a decent yield this season despite my laziness in getting everything done!

I hate updating from my phone

For some reason my phone won't let me go widescreen on the keyboard using the blog app I have so I am forced to correct my writing all the time.

I got more new pictures of the planter and the garden beds uploaded to the Stuff I Made album. I went to the city offices with a friend yesterday and loaded up a truck full of compost. I mixed the peat in with the compost and now I have to balance the soil in each bed based on what I'm growing. I'm not really sure of what I'm doing when it comes to soil additives yet but I don't think it will be difficult.

The 4x4 posts will hold the framework for my hanging planters and then I just need to get the rain barrels in and I'm done prepping.

The yard has been seeded but we haven't gotten very much rain lately so I may have to water tonight.

- Posted using my iPhone

More projects complete

I finished the second raised bed for the garden on Sunday. I also dropped the posts for the hanging boxes. After I finished, dad came down and we seeded the back yard. We got a good rainfall that evening and now we have 4 or 5 days of sun, so hopefully we get some grass by the end of the week. I think I may need to water it, but luckily dad also brought me his old water softener tank to use as a rain barrel. I need to get it filled and up on a stand and then I need to get my gutter installed for the kitchen addition.

I decided to only go with 2 raised beds this year and add on to the garden later. This decision has mostly to do with money. It costs me about $30-$35 per bed for the lumber, not to mention the time that it takes to build and level the box. I like spending much of my free time with my family so I chose to be done with what I have. It should be more than enough to grow what we need for this year. After all is said and done, I have approx. 48 square feet of garden bed and I am planting the leafy vegetables in the hanging boxes. This year, from seed, I'm growing:

Roma Tomatoes
Heinz Canning Tomatoes
Cauliflower
Yellow Bell Peppers
Green Bell Peppers
Yellow Banana Peppers
Jalapeno Peppers
Serano Chili Peppers
White Onions
Green Onions
Lettuce
Spinach
Swiss Chard
Brussel Sprouts
Yellow Wax Beans
Snow Peas
Cucumbers (Pickling)
and a few other things I can't remember right now.

We will also have the herb garden out front and Gena is planting a pumpkin patch in the front yard somewhere as well. We also bought a blueberry bush to try to grow in the backyard somewhere.

All in all, we are going to have a huge garden eventually and hopefully we can get to a point where we no longer go to the market for produce. That is the goal, knowing where your food comes from and being self-sufficient.

Been busy

Since we got back from our little vacation, I have been incredibly motivated. I saw a lot of things in San Francisco that gave me some really good ideas about sustainable living. We came back and I got really excited about getting outside and getting things done.

The first thing I got working on was the compost heap. I have been neglecting it lately and I realized that this kind of behaviour must end. I knew it would be in the way if I decided to expand that garden at a later date and I also knew that I wanted it out of the lawn when we tilled up the back yard. So I moved it. There are pictures of what it looked like before and what it looks like now in the album Stuff I Made

I also tore out the ugly shrub in the front of our house. We are planning to replace it with peonies and other perennial flowers. We also will be planting some herbs in the planter box and another flower garden in front of the porch. Along with this small improvement, we also just tilled up the entire back yard. I will post some better pictures when it isn't raining outside, but for now the pictures are in the Stuff I Fixed album.

I also recently found out that the pressure treated 1x6 boards and 4x4 posts that Home Depot stocks no longer contain arsenate (arsenic), which means I don't have to line my planter box with plastic! HOORAY for the EPA! We will be staining it and planting in it soon I hope.

New pictures will come as I get more things done.

Got another project done

Okay, so this doesn't exactly have to do with farming, but neither do a lot of the projects we will be completing this summer. I love this hi-fi and I have been looking forward to working on it since my grandpa gave it to me like 4 years ago. The speaker plate took me the longest since I could never find a good time to bore the holes I needed. It may be difficult to see exactly where everything is located in relationship to the actual cabinet. If I am able to, I will take some more pictures of the bottom to show exactly what I modified. In the meantime, I took a few shots of what I finished tonight and put them in a new album called Stuff I Fixed.

From Stuff I Fixed

From Stuff I Fixed

More Kombucha

I'm sure this is going to start getting repetitive, so I won't post about it for a while after this. I just want to add a quick update about where I am with this stuff. I just put up some new pictures. I got one almost perfect quart on my first try and then when I used my new scoby to make another quart it got mold and I had to ditch the whole thing. I ended up with one more good quart using black tea instead of green, so this time I got 2 quarts going with black.

From Food I Made

I think the reason I got mold in my last batch was because the tea I used wasn't an organic loose leaf variety. I think there was something in the tea or the bag itself that tainted my culture and grew the mold. The reason you cannot use earl grey or any other type of herbal tea is due to the oil and potential other contaminates. I can't be sure that it was the teabags that caused the problem, but I had no issues with the 2 quarts I made using pure organic loose leaf teas.

I am about to go get all the stuff ready for the garden right now. I have a lot of catch up to do to get a positive result this summer. Hopefully every year that the kids get bigger it will be easier to take care of these details early in the spring. I also have my plans drawn up for the garden beds and hopefully this week I can obtain the lumber I need to get them built.

Wish me luck as I have plenty of work to do in the coming weeks! I am definitely wishing myself luck.

One project down, about a million to go...

I finished the vertical planter box tonight with Steve's help. We got it installed under the porch after about 20 minutes of fighting the tight fit. I think we will stain it dark since the front porch is going to be stained dark when we rebuild it next year. After the stain goes on, we can fill the boxes with soil and plant the herb garden.

We have seeds for Cilantro, Parsley, Basil, Chives and Mint. I also want to grow dill for pickling this summer, but that has to be grown from the ground because of how tall it gets. The rest of the herbs will supply us with ingredients for fresh salsa, soup, stir fry and so on.

My next project is to get the actual garden boxes built and dropped into the ground. I also have to drop a couple of 4x4s and build the framework for the raised boxes which will contain my lettuces and smaller veg plants. These high boxes will be built with what I have left from the vertical planter. The dimensions will be 6x6x48. The 4x4 posts will have a 2x4 rail every 2 feet and the boxes will hang from the 2x4 rails.

After the garden is built and planted, I can focus on other projects. I want to get the rain barrels in to supply the garden, but part of the barrel system I am constructing requires new gutter to be installed on the extension at the back of the kitchen. I also have to get new downspout on both sides of the house to adapt for the barrels. Between these and redoing the whole backyard I have my work cut out for me in the next month. Be sure that I will update the pictures of both the food and projects I am creating.

Speaking of food, I recently got into TVP. It is even easier to use than gluten and can replace ground meat in most situations. The one big downside is that TVP is made from soy, and therefore does not offer as much protein as gluten. I made a huge pan of homemade sloppy joe from scratch using TVP and tomato sauce with some other ingredients. Essentially, you mix the TVP with hot water and in about 2-3 minutes, you have a nice chewy meat replacement. Not a bad way to get taco meat or any other ground meat substitute. And it's cheap. you can buy a pound of dehydrated TVP for about $1.50. I only needed about one cup from this to make enough sloppy joe for 4 people to eat and I have enough of the pound left to make maybe 7-8 more batches! Talk about sustainability!

After this summer, we should be able to cut our grocery bill down to about a quarter of what we spend now. At some point we may be able to get rid of our "grocery bill" altogether.

Here is what I made recently:

From Stuff I Made

In addition to growing,

I am also working on many projects around the house. Right now I am in the middle of redoing our hardwood floors, starting in the downstairs bedroom, but eventually throughout the entire house. I also just finished the framework for Gena's vertical herb garden that will replace the lattice under our front porch and I am building a pantry in the kitchen. As usual, I don't have any pictures to go along with these projects yet, but I will take some tomorrow and post them in my next update as well as on the Picasa account. These projects will go under an album titled Stuff I Made.

For the time being, I created the album and added a picture of the mountains in the Scottish Highlands for you all to enjoy. The same print is hanging on the wall in my massage room at work. My list of tasks by priority this summer read something like this:

1.Complete tear-down and rebuild of back yard
2.Build garden beds and planter boxes
3.Plant the garden
4.Build and install vertical planter under front porch
5.Finish the floor in the downstairs bedroom
6.Install privacy fence on back property line
7.Build pantry in the kitchen
8.Build bedframe
9.Paint Kitchen, Livingroom, Bedroom...etc.
10.Have a kick ass backyard movie party to celebrate how productive I have been this summer!

I hope I can get even a few of these things accomplished before I run out of summer to do them.

Finished products...

As promised, pictures of the things I have been rambling on about.

Seitan in the pot. This batch has been simmering for approx. 30 minutes at this point.

From Food I Made

The Kombucha that I started tonight as well as the batch I started Friday night. The top shelf is the finished product made from green tea and brewed for 13 days. The bottom left is a new jar of green tea I started Friday night and the bottom right is black tea I started tonight.

From Food I Made

Let's try again!

I tried to make a batch of seitan from memory...bad idea. My memory isn't all that great to begin with. Add that to the fact that I've only made one batch and you have a recipe for disaster, which is exactly what happened in my kitchen a few nights ago. The dough fell apart and turned into a gluteny mush in the pot. So tonight I decided to use instructions and see what happened.

The dough is simmering now and I guess we will see if this one turns out any better. I bought a different kind of gluten flour this time and I used the recipe from the bag instead of one I found online. Of course, after looking into my numerous vegan cookbooks I found at least one recipe in each of them for seitan. DUH! At least I have many variations to choose from now. I think I posted the link and the recipe for the last batch. This time I will just say that the brand of gluten flour I bought is Bob's Red Mill and the recipe calls for marjoram and sage in addition to the garlic. Instead of using veggie broth, you make a broth from water, soy sauce and mollasses. The bag I bought this time has something like 22oz. in it and the recipe calls for twice the gluten, effectively making a batch twice as big as the last one I concocted. This time I will take a picture of the finished product.

My Kombucha took longer than expected due to the cool weather, but I have one finished jar and two more brewing. Thanks to the natural way that bacteria reproduces itself, my output has already begun to increase exponentially. For every one batch I make, I get 2 cultures. I now have 2 and when these 2 batches are done I will have 4. Here's where the fun comes in for anyone who reads this and is interested in joining me. As I make more and more of this stuff, I will have less and less room to store all of these cultures since they each need their own mason jar home. I want to give them away one at a time as I create more and more. Now I know of at least 2 people I have already promised a culture to, so the first couple are already taken, but even if you aren't the one who wants one, ask your friends. See if anyone you know is interested in getting into this stuff. It's easy and I will include instructions with the culture itself. Let's get this socialist movement rolling!!

Finally, it's already the second week of April and I haven't gotten my seeds into the dirt yet! What am I thinking? At this rate I'll never have a garden. I need to get a move on if I want my dreams to come true, right? If anyone has any suggestions on how to jumpstart my seedlings, let me know via email or comment on this blog. I welcome any and all ideas!

Think about where your food comes from. Did you grow it or did a stranger? Like your baggage at the airport, no one but you should be handling your food. This is the only way to make sure there is no tampering with the products that fuel your body.

The results

So the seitan was a bit rubbery. And a little too salty. But I'm working on ways to remedy this. The next time I make it I am going to try adding a couple of things. Some of the recipes I've found call for tomato paste or even flour. I'm hoping by experimenting with some of these alternatives I can control the outcome a bit better.

My Kombucha brew is nearly done. I waited the 7 days originally specified and got a little skim on the top, not nearly done. Gotta wait a little longer. I have a couple people interested in this stuff already so if you are an interested party that has not yet contacted me, let me know and I will get a batch out to ya. While I know there are folks out there selling the culture and making money on the product, I'm a big proponent of both freeware as well as socialism. I believe that if I make something and it takes very little time and energy for me to do so, the product should be something I share freely. Aside from the amount of material that my family and I need to survive, I don't need to hoard or charge for the simple results of my work. I enjoy gardening and cooking so why not show off my talents by sharing the extra?

If I give something to someone, they will be inclined to give to someone else and eventually it will come back to me.

Seitan

I forgot to post the recipe I used for the seitan I made the other night, so here is the link and below is the recipe: About.com: How to make Seitan

Combine 1 cup vital wheat gluten flour with 1 tbsp garlic powder. In a measuring cup combine 1 cup vegetable broth with 2 tbsp soy sauce or liquid aminos. Mix wet ingredients with dry and knead until well combined. Let sit for 5 minutes and lightly knead again. Cut dough into 3 or 4 cutlets about 3/4 inch thick. In a pot, combine seitan dough and 6 cups (one quart) vegetable broth and bring to a simmer. Simmer on low for slightly more than one hour. Remove finished swollen cutlets and use immediately or bag and freeze.

You can usually find vital wheat gluten at any health food store. I bought mine in a box made by a the Arrowhead Mills company. A 10oz package will make approx. 2 batches of the recipe listed above. One batch would be enough to make about 2 meals for a family of 3-4 people.

Seitan can be used in a variety of ways. You can cut it up small and put it in stir-fry or even use larger chunks to make sandwiches. It has a much better "meat" consistency than tofu and the protein in seitan is better than soy when it comes to bodily absorption.

Seitan isn't as versatile as many soy products though. Tofu is capable of taking many forms which means you can easily use it to replace eggs in many applications.

I have much more to say about seitan but I will leave it for another time.

First efforts

Saturday I started a batch of the super-tea, Kombucha. I have never made this stuff before so I will post again when it finishes to let everyone know how it came out. I am excited about planting when the weather gets better. I plan on starting my garden indoors this week since I have some time off finally.

From Food I Made

Last year I started a lot of plants inside in March and by the time the frost stopped coming, many of my plants had already grown too big for their containers and died. This time around, I am starting a bit later and then as long as I have some sprouts when the weather turns, I'll be in business.

Things I plan to do differently this year? Well, last year we closed on our house on June 24th, so that left me in the lurch for a good early start on my garden. I will definitely have the plants in the ground after the last frost this year. I also used Garden-Tone vegetable fertilizer which worked pretty well for me. This year I plan on giving compost tea a shot. From everything I read, not only is it better than any fertilizer on the market, but it is also as vegan as fertilizer comes. The garden tone had live enzymes and microbiotics to help increase the fertility of the soil. Compost tea is essentially the same, without the chicken feces as a fertilizing agent.

After a year of growth and stabilization I think the soil I am using will probably be pretty fit to grow pretty much anything and with the mixture of compost and peat I am planning on adding, the potential should be plentiful. I know that it can take as many as 3 years for a good soil base to form, but I am working on starting that base now. I also have my own heap of compost that I am tending to which may add to my efforts later in the summer.

In addition to the Kombucha, I am also making my own seitan now. I just finished my first batch and it looks amazing! We have been using this meat substitute for a while now, but buying it can be taxing. You only get enough for one serving and it costs between $3 and $5 a package, depending on what you buy and where you get it. A box of vital wheat gluten was $3 at my natural food store and it makes 2 batches, 16 servings. I love wheat gluten as a protein substitute because of the highly absorbable protein it contains. Soy is alright, but wheat gluten is better (provided you don't have a gluten allergy).

That's all for tonight. Just imagine how rewarding it will feel when you are able to make the food your family eats in an easy and plentiful way! I'm even more excited than you are!

In the beginning...

I'm starting this blog in an effort to become a better urban farmer by gathering information from many sources and combining all the info I receive here. I am reaching out to anyone who knows anything about farming in a urban environment to offer advice on best methods to grow plants, conserve energy, cultivate soil...etc. I am also planning on recording my ever expanding and improving efforts to garden and farm via text and images. I have many years of experience working on farms and growing vegetable gardens but I would definitely still consider myself an amateur farmer. What I lack is the knowledge of proper soil composition and plant cultivation needed to successfully sustain myself and my family and that is the point of this blog.

While self-improvement is my number one goal, my secondary interest is to provide accurate information to anyone reading these entries in the hope that we may all benefit from a self-sustaining lifestyle that is, at its very core, organic. I am using only the most natural and earth-friendly methods to grow, harvest and prepare my foods. I am vegan but that doesn't mean I want everyone to be. My purpose is to inform and to become informed about a better way to live, save money and enjoy my food.

Knowing where the things you eat and drink come from is important. Together we can all watch our food grow from the seed to the fruit to the table and know what went in and where it is from every step of the way.

This blog, the information within and my purpose in its creation, is to take back control of what sustains us all: FOOD.