This Garden Earth

Thomas Princen's book, The Logic of Sufficiency, is not an easy read but contains plenty of food for thought about the socioeconomic principles by which we live and their effect on our planet and ourselves. (Yes, I'll get back to the garden at the end.) He points to the ascendance through the last century of the concept of "efficiency", which is used here as a catchall phrase for many terms and practices that characterize the "market" approach (my summary, not his).

He contrasts this with what he calls "sufficiency"; "the sense that, as one does more and more of an activity, there can be enough and there can be too much." I love the illustration on the cover - the glass not half full or half empty, but full. And yet it is not running over.

The point is that "efficiency" is aimed at increasing yield or wealth for individuals or groups, which leads to more and more exploitation of resources, whether they are soil, water, trees, human effort, or the ability of the planet to absorb insults like pollution and global warming. But our planet is near its "biophysical" limits (see also "Spaceship Earth") and we need to adopt approaches that are sustainable on a system-wide level.

This is beginning to sound like an environmental text, but it is not, though he does refer to environmental concerns and endorses "ecological rationality". It is really more of an essay on economics and how assumptions and beliefs about economic mechanics have brought us to where we are, at the brink of a catastrophic tumble (again, my words, not his). One of the frustrating things about reading the book is that he teaches by long example, such as the story of Pacific Lumber (long-term management of old-growth redwoods) and a lobster fishery (deliberate restraints on fishing to maintain stocks). There is no list of bullet points for a quick take-home message; it requires really studying all the examples and what they mean about behavior that incorporates frugality, moderation, a sense of limits, and allowing respite (his term) for people, animals, and natural systems. (Note that "resources" is actually an efficiency-type term.) A great windup is where he shows that "efficiency" is to blame for mad-cow disease. He also mentions (in a book published in 2005) that we have been turned into "consumers" and driven into debt in order to support a society built on efficiency.

Since Princen doesn't supply sound-bites for his thesis, I won't try to either. It does have strong echoes of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. I heard Hardin speak in the 1970s and his favorite story was about the common pasture where 10 cattle could graze without harming the capacity of the pasture to renew itself. If 10 farmers graze 10 cattle, all goes well. But one of them decides that he wants more, so puts an additional animal onto the commons. It suffers just a little but then the others see that someone is getting more than they are, so they put additional cattle on too. Soon the pasture system collapses and can't maintain any cattle at all. That is where the market ideology (aka efficiency) has nearly brought us today.

Yes, I'm postulating that our entire planet is like that pasture - or like a garden. If we can learn to take only from it what is sufficient, while we continually build up the soil and understand the complexity of the plants, animals, and physical environment that make it up, our garden can support us for a long time. We should cultivate it wisely.

Memories of times past

I'm not Proust, but I had one of those experiences just now. I was cooking a recipe gleaned from a local blogger (Maan's Beans) and looking into the pot with tomato, onions, garlic and green beans and I was suddenly transported back to a Safeway in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where I was buying my very first zucchini. Where I grew up, we didn't have zucchini. We had summer squash, mostly pattipan. We cooked this by cutting it up and boiling it with butter and salt and pepper and probably some sugar. But I was a curious child and would browse the supermarket shelves for hints of new and better things. (Frozen vegetables were still not common.) So I found the Del Monte Italian Zucchini, and took my prize home to try it. It was boiled in a tomato sauce, probably with some onion and Italian seasonings. As I recall, it was pretty bland, but I was enchanted with this wholly new foodstuff. What kinds of people might eat this every day? Where did it come from and where was it going? Romance is half the battle with food, anyway.

Later, I grew (and ate) plenty of zucchini, mostly sauteéd in butter or made into ratatouille or a sort of squash-egg-brown rice material that helped get us through graduate school (this was my Diet for A Small Planet phase). I got thoroughly tired of it and there was definitely no more romance.

Lately, I've been experimenting with all types of summer squash, planting different types with a premium on flavor. So in filling out my seed order, I naturally gravitated to Costata Romanesco, said to be the most delicious zucchini. Of course, with my disillusionment with zucchini, that wouldn't take much. Still, something about it made me put it into my cart.

Only later did I wonder what I had done. Why did I buy this weird ribbed zucchini? So to Google, of course. I have now concluded that this may be the original Italian zucchini, before the hybridizers got to it. It is reputed to have a really excellent flavor. But there's more! It is also what the English call "vegetable marrow".

VEGETABLE MARROW! I've been trying to figure out what this is for years. It seems that C. R. ages very well and when it gets to be big (submarine), it retains an excellent, non-pithy structure and is very fine for stuffing. Expatriate English are reputed to pine for this vegetable, which as I understand is served with a white sauce. According to a farm blog I found on Google, the farmer was able to sell his big submarines at market to these starved refugees, though his CSA customers scorned them. But there's more!

When Hercule Poirot tried to retire from detecting at an estimated age of 101, for a time he retreated to the English countryside and grew vegetable marrows. One of Agatha Christie's latter mysteries began with him throwing these (presumably still edible) vegetables over the fence and disturbing some spinsters. I've always wondered what those were.

So the Romance of zucchini still lives. I just hope it really does taste good.

Garlic in Winter

I don't recall much fresh garlic being used in our house when I was growing up; I think it was limited to a clove here and there and maybe almost exclusively garlic salt in a few recipes. Most of my early cooking used garlic salt, until I realized that I was adding a lot of salt to get that garlic flavor. I started to use fresh garlic and then a lot of it. I was struck with Alice's rule early on. You know, Alice from Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant", that started "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant". Actually this song (1965) was mostly about the Vietnam War, but it briefly made Alice Brock a star, and she published a cookbook. Here's what she said:

"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good."

Did you get that last part? I seem to have, because I use copious amounts of garlic in every dish where it seems reasonable.

Starting around 2007 there were a lot of reports that most of our store-bought garlic was coming from China. This was a comedown for our famous garlic capital, Gilroy, California. Part of it was a disease that devastated the crop, and partly because of cheap labor in China. As one industry source explains, Chinese garlic has been found to be contaminated with arsenic, and its quality is also not as good. But China has often been the only source of fresh garlic readily found in winter. I was dismayed to see a big case of it in the back room of a grocery I patronize especially for their local produce.

I planted my first crop of garlic in the fall of 2007 and harvested it in late July, 2008. Since then I've been storing and using it. Some home truths I have discovered are that yes, there really are substantial differences in quality among varieties; and storage really is an issue. The cloves start to sprout. After dithering about where to store them, they ended up in my pantry closet. The garlic to the left is German Extra Hardy. It doesn't seem to sprout as readily (I pulled the clove shown off precisely because it was sprouting). This is a stiff-neck variety with very large cloves, and not many per bulb or head. The cloves and bulb to the right are New York White, a soft-neck variety that can be braided - but I didn't. Now as January draws to a close, I have almost used up the New York White, skating ahead of the sprouts. I hope that the German Extra Hardy lasts into the next harvest, but I doubt it. We eat a lot of garlic.

In spite of the facts that GEH lasted better and is easier to cook with because of those huge cloves, I'm planting less of it in 2009 in comparison to other varieties. The reason is that the flavor seems to be harsher than the NYW. Yet I'm not ordering NYW at all, because the heads are so small and it sprouts so early. But I'm expanding my planting and have ordered more of two new varieties, Music and Russian Red. It's a little strange - I have now ordered garlic to be planted in October-November of this year (2009) and harvested in 2010. Meanwhile under the snow this last year's plantings are waiting for spring.

I'm looking forward to trying a recipe another blogger listed. It uses a lot of garlic and looks like a good reason to get plenty of green beans planted next year.

Contrariwise

Since I've been predicting disaster for years, I particularly enjoyed an article in the January 26, 2009 New Yorker discussing "The Dystopians". It describes the people who have made it their career or at least their avocation to tell the rest of us about how bad things are going to get. An outstanding example is the author James Howard Kunstler, who has written such books as The Long Emergency. I only discovered him with this article. Another author mentioned is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan. That one I read last winter, before our economic system collapsed enough that everyone noticed. As the author of the article (Ben McGrath) notes, these days are great for celebration of "triumphant pessimism".

Now Taleb is getting a major following from newly converted financial professionals. His writing is very hard to follow; he alludes to chaos theory and various statistical models without really explaining any of them. The basic idea is that we fall in love with the current trend and situation and expect that things will go on forever as they are, only maybe getting better and better. His clearest exposition of this is with the story of the turkey who enjoys day after day of plentiful food, water, and sunshine. The turkey confidently predicts that this will go on forever, and his predictions are good - until Thanksgiving Day. This was exactly like our county's budget director who every year presented a budget with ever-increasing totals and the comment, "The best prediction of the future is the past." Now the county has a $10 million deficit and is closing entire departments. Unfortunately, my protests at the time had little effect, and someone once informed me that I was a "contrarian". "I told you so" after the fact is pointless and unsatisfying.

McGrath reveals a taxonomy of sorts of pessimists - "peak oilers", "back-to-the-land types", and generalized Cassandras, "doomers". My husband has been a "peak oiler" for decades and the Hubbert Peak was one of the themes of our household discussions. More recently we've both read lots of Jared Diamond. His book, "Collapse" gives a detailed backward look at how many societies have failed, and there are many uncomfortable parallels to be found with our own. There seems to be a fatal human tendency to ignore the long-term consequences of our actions. Since I see the universe in terms of thermodynamics, I have always had trouble with people who persist in believing in the free lunch.

My particular place in the taxonomy of "doomers" is the back-to-the-land type. I've been looking with horror for some years at our drawn-out food chain - how can we possibly be expecting a stable food supply from a distance of thousands of miles? Just as Voltaire cultivated his garden during the dying decades of the French monarchy, I am seeking to find a self-sustaining life to the extent possible. Thus the support for local enterprise, local farming, and thus I grow and preserve as much of our own food as I can. Food security is the most basic human need and it is not a given. We should be worried. I am. More on that later.

Part of being self-sustaining is learning a new way of eating and cooking. I've been learning new ways to use my bountiful sauerkraut production. Here is a new recipe I just discovered. It is modified from one I found among my mother's files.

Winter Slaw with Apples and Sauerkraut

1 quart sauerkraut, preferably raw (drain, place on a board, and cut up into smaller pieces)
1 apple, peeled and chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 small or 1/2 large sweet onion (Walla Walla type), chopped
1/2 sweet red pepper, chopped (I used frozen, roasted and peeled red pepper)
1 T seasoned Japanese rice vinegar (contains sugar and salt)
1 t sugar

Marinate the onion briefly in the vinegar, then add the other chopped ingredients, then the sauerkraut. Mix and chill for a little while before serving.

Note: no salt needed - the kraut is slightly salty, as is the vinegar.
Adjust sugar and vinegar to taste.

This has a nice fresh flavor and is a very light dish.

Red Peppers in Winter

As I related last fall, red peppers have become a major crop around here. We have a couple of days in the fall of broiling and peeling, then I have a wealth of little quarter-pound packages in the freezer where that sunshine is available all winter long. So what do we use them for? They are wonderful, just thawed, on egg salad sandwiches (and probably on any sandwich). Perfect on pizza. I sometimes make a roasted red pepper sauce out of all the little pieces (hate to use up the nice big slices in the blender). Of course, any mixed vegetable dish benefits from a dash of color and flavor.

But putting them into meat loaf is one of my all-time success stories. They add a richness and subtlety when chopped and mixed with ground meat.

Here is a meatloaf that is neither dull nor intrusively spiced up. I make it as a full loaf pan recipe and freeze slices for future use. It could also be made into smaller loaves.

Meatloaf with Roasted Red Peppers

1 pound bulk pork breakfast sausage, raw
1 1/2 - 2 pounds of lean ground beef, raw
1 medium onion, minced
1 1/2 t sugar
1 1/2 t salt
dash each garlic and celery salt
2 c breadcrumbs*
2 eggs
1 c milk
2T ketchup
2T pickle relish**
1 T horseradish
2 T hot paprika
2 T mixed chili powder***
1/4 pound roasted and peeled red pepper, chopped

Mix all together. Best to mix the meat with dry ingredients first (takes a lot of hand mixing), then the wet ones, finishing with the milk and eggs at the last. Don't be afraid of overworking the meat - makes for finer texture. Place in a greased loaf pan (will be very full) and bake at 375° for 1 1/2 hours.

*Use packaged bread crumbs if you must, but I dry heels and odd bits in the oven and grind them with my blender. They'll keep a long time dry on the shelf.
** Actually I use my green tomato relish, which has spices in it. Ordinary pickle relish should come close, or you could try a chunky salsa.
*** This is the kind of chili powder that has spices like cumin and oregano mixed in. I use Pendary's Original.

Cabbage for Sauerkraut

Not only do I like to eat cabbages, I like to look at them. I've always thought that there is nothing prettier in the garden than cabbages glowing against the earth. What a pleasure to find that others share this affection. On a page devoted to cabbage cultivation, the author states "There is no more regal a vegetable than a well-grown cabbage, three feet across, its giant silvery green or dusty purple leaves shining with health." Amen to that, brother.

When I began growing cabbage in my garden for the purpose of making sauerkraut, I was quite ignorant of cabbage varieties. I knew the difference between red and green cabbage, and that savoy and Chinese cabbage were different types, but otherwise green cabbage was cabbage. This was partly because green cabbage bought in the store is fairly nondescript and probably one of just a few varieties. For a while I grew "Stonehead", a nice compact cabbage that I now understand is an early cabbage. Then two years ago, a spectacularly bad decision: I planted "Gonzales". Rereading the catalog from Johnny's Selected Seeds, I have no idea why I selected that one. It is an early cabbage meant to be harvested young and small. When I held the plants into the early fall for the purpose of making sauerkraut, I lost a third of them to splitting.

I now understand that the reason cabbage splits in our climate is that it has had enough cool weather followed by hot weather to make it flower. In other words, splitting is the cabbage equivalent of bolting. The head splits and a flower stalk grows out of it. Since both Stonehead and Gonzales were early cabbages, they started to split in mid-August. Once the head splits, it is prone to bacterial rot and isn't very nice anyway.

Both of these cabbages also produced rather small heads, between 1-2.5 pounds with biggest exterior leaves removed. They were somewhat difficult to shred, since they didn't fit the large holder on the krauthobel very well. There was a lot of wastage after I cleaned off the exterior dirty and green leaves and cored them.

When I visited cabbage fields in Wisconsin where cabbage for kraut was grown, I was amazed at the large heads, the size of a beach ball. The interior was very firm and white. Finally I did some research and now understand that this was probably a variety of late cabbage especially good to use for kraut. The most popular among home kraut makers seems to be an old variety called Late Flat Dutch. It is so old-fashioned that most modern seed catalogs don't carry it, but I found it in R.H. Shumway. "Heads average 10-12 inches across, often weighing 15 to 20 pounds." Now, consider that a 3-gallon crock only holds about 15 pounds of shredded cabbage. These are clearly cabbages for the serious. Next year I'll grow these and also some other late cabbages. Early cabbages are supposed to be mature in 60 days. I was holding them past their prime. Late cabbages are about 110 days to harvest, so I'll plant early for a fall sauerkraut production run. These late dense heads are also the favored cabbages for winter storage. And I think they'll be fun to look at. (Edited for clarity)

Kaitlin cabbage (picture cropped from Johnny's catalog)

UPDATE (2013):  This post is one of my most-viewed, so I feel compelled to update it to be more useful.
In subsequent years I planted Johnny's Selected Seeds variety Kaitlin (F1).  This was a superior cabbage for sauerkraut and is bred for that purpose. (Note that the designation (F1) means that it is a hybrid and not suitable for seedsaving.) Here are some of the features that make it a good cabbage for sauerkraut:
Late.  As I explained in my original post, cabbages that are mostly grown as summer (early) cabbages for eating tend to split in late summer or early fall.  I was able to harvest Kaitlin in late September for excellent quality and yield. 
Light.  The interior is almost completely white, which makes for a very clean-looking kraut.  I also did not observe any internal tipburn, which is a flaw in some cabbages that leaves nasty little brown shreds in the kraut.
Heavy.  The heads were substantial.  I do not have a record of weights, but I recall that they were all in excess of 3 pounds and closer to 5 pounds.

 If you want to grow cabbage just for sauerkraut, this is a good one.  It is fine as a winter storage cabbage too. 

The Cabbage in Winter

Now that the garden is buried in snow, we are eating through our harvest. Most of it is preserved in some way, but there are still some roots in the produce crisper, and red cabbage in the basement refrigerator. Ruby Perfection makes heads rather late and they are very frost-tolerant. I brought them in just before the winter weather really hit. Now we are tired of rotkohl (German red cabbage), so it's time to try something else.

I wrote earlier about the lack of respect cabbage gets and its importance as a nutritious vegetable, especially to the world's poor. Now the New York Times has not only reinforced that point but includes some excellent-sounding recipes that are nicely frugal as well as nutritious. I like these recipes better than some of those in the links at the bottom of the article. As one of the authors notes, the answer to the blandness of cabbage and some of its less attractive flavor notes has been to smother it with pork, cream, cheese and such, thus to turn its nutritious, economical nature on its head (so to speak). Some of the recipes do that, and really I think using shrimp in stuffed cabbage is an aberration, especially since it is likely to be farmed shrimp. This Greek cabbage and feta pie sounds good, though.

Still, one of the articles reminded me that caraway seeds, a traditional flavoring for cabbage, also was used in medieval times as a digestive, thus offsetting some of the tendency for cabbage to cause bloating or other problems. It also reminded me of a recipe I think I'll use tonight.

Hot Cabbage Slaw

Core and shred a small head of cabbage, or 1/2 head green and 1/2 red cabbage. Toss it with 3 teaspoons of salt and allow to sit in a bowl for 30 minutes. Rinse and drain.

Cook 2 slices of bacon until crisp; set aside. Remove all but 1 tablespoon of the fat from the skillet.

Add the drained cabbage to the fat and cook until hot and wilted, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds, 2 teaspoons sugar, and 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar. Place on serving dish or individual plates and crumble bacon over the top.

Note: I have adjusted the seasoning from the original recipe, which called for adding 2 teaspoons of salt at the end, plus 2 teaspoons of caraway seeds. I also reduced the vinegar; add more to taste. Depending on how much cabbage you use, you may also want to use slightly more of the bacon fat. I found that 1/2 small head of cabbage was about right for 2 people, so reduced almost everything.