La Finca Week #1

I’m going to attempt to log how we use our produce from the box that arrives Thursday afternoon via Charlie and Tzeitel Kersey at La Finca CSA. The descriptions of “what’s in the box” come from Tzeitel.

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~Salad mix – this a mixture of different lettuces that are grown in a wide bed, harvested by hand, cooled and soaked in water, spun, sorted and bagged. You still may find an occasional weed. The process of growing, harvesting and cleaning salad mix takes awhile, but we think it’s worth it!

~French Breakfast Radishes (bunch) – The first radishes of the season. Should be kept in a plastic bag in the fridge.

Jeff and I split the salad mix the first evening, slicing several of the radishes on the mix and tossing lightly with balsamic vinegar and raisins. This was our dinner. Mmmm.

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~2 heads of Black Seeded Simpson and/or Oakleaf Lettuce (bag) – Most of you will only receive Black Seeded Simpson. This is the earliest of the green leaf lettuces. Characterized by a light green color.

Both lettuces went into Ethan’s daily morning green smoothie. Each smoothie takes about half the head blended with 6-10 organic strawberries, half a banana, 3/4 cup water, and 1/2 teaspoon WFN Green Food Feast.

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~Saute Mix (bag)- This is a mixture of mustard and other greens. Saute with rice and beans, or try raw if you like a stronger flavor in your salads. Could mix 1/2 and 1/2 with the salad mix.

Thurs 6/25 lunch in Finland: “Saute mix” from La Finca Box #1 with two very ripe ataulfo mangos, 1/2 cup kombucha, 1.5 cups water, 1 T WFN Green Food Feast. Mmm…spicy!

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~Bok Choi – This is a great asian green to get the season started. I think it makes a good stir fry with mushrooms. Keep in a plastic bag in the fridge.

~Green Garlic (bunch)- this is the immature garlic bulb, the stem, and leaves. It is milder that the garlic cloves, so just saute very briefly. Can eat raw like you’d use an onion. Keep in plastic bag in fridge

Thurs 6/25 dinner in Finland: Used these to make the Bok Choi Shiitake Ginger Soba dish in the bok choi section of the MACSAC cookbook. So, yes, I did cook. We’re mostly raw these days, but I make this exception in the spring for the first bok coi of the season. It’s one of my favorites. And Ethan even enjoys it now, too! Note to self: stop trying to cook pasta in the solar cooker.

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~Spinach (bunch) – The cool weather has been great for spinach. Spinach has been tough for us for the past couple of seasons, so it’s good to see such beautiful spinach.

Friday, 6/26 lunch in Finland: This will likely go into a green smoothie with about 4-6 apricots, a cup of blueberries and 2 cups water.

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~Arugula (bunch)- a bit bigger than usual. You will notice that it gets more peppery as it grows. Good lightly sauteed or just thrown in fresh into warm pasta.

This will likely go into Saturday’s lunch smoothie with some peach and kombucha.

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Since we’re up north, our Week #2 box will be delivered in Duluth, and we likely won’t receive it via the Ilse Transportation Relay until Saturday evening.

Savory sucess!

Wow, I’ve been meaning to post lots of stuff about food and recipe trials over the last few months, but just don’t have enough screen time lately. I’ll back-date some photos and reviews when I get around to it, but at the moment, I’m so excited about tonight’s development that I’m making time to document the fact that we all ate the same dinner tonight. Woo-hoo! We’ve made so much progress on the food-front with Ethan that I am beside myself with joy. He has been taking a small shot (about 1-2 tsp) of wheatgrass juice along with his enormous salad for breakfast every morning. (Salad consists of torn green leaf, romaine or bib, chunks of baked/seasoned tofu, and Seward’s yellow onion white miso dressing.) Every day he has numerous servings of apples and carrots. And tonight…yes, tonight…drum roll…

He ate exactly the same dinner as Jeff and me!

http://jeffilse.zenfolio.com/p509463616/h1b5f88f#h1b5f88f

Wild Rice Caviar and Shiitake Mushroom Rolls from Renee Loux Underkoffler’s _Living Cuisine_, p. 331 with Miso Wasabi Dipping Sauce, p. 343.

The sauce was a bit too “spicy” for Ethan, so he used plain shoyu for dipping. He also requested one roll with avocado instead of the marinated mushrooms, which I accommodated. While I was rolling the sushi, he enthusiastically requested a side of plain avocado, and I enthusiastically accommodated. Later, he requested regular servings of avocado for lunch. Is this a dream, or what?

We all enjoyed this recipe, and I really enjoyed preparing it. Some of Renee’s recipes are more complex than I prefer for a simple family dinner, but now that I’m more experienced “sprouting” wild rice (and I have lots of sushi-rolling under my belt), this one pulled together rather easily. Now, if only I had a larger food processor…

Well, I’m watching craigslist and working on manifesting that one. Turns out I only had to run two batches in my puny 4-cupper. It’s worth mentioning that while the quantities of “caviar” and marinated mushrooms called for in this recipe seem like way too much for four sheets of nori, they’re actually quite suitable. I did end up making five thick rolls, and I could have done 6-8 thinner rolls just fine. The thick rolls are nice, but next time I’ll slice them into 6-8 shorter pieces, instead of just four large ones. I suspect any leftover caviar would dehydrate nicely into tasty crackers.

An error in this recipe is that it calls for 2.5 cups long-grain wild rice for sprouting (yields 2.5 cups). Well, which is it? I started with 2.5 cups, but then I used only 2.5 cups of the expanded rice for the recipe. I intend to use the remaining rice for something else.

Also worth mentioning is that I use only Native Harvest wild rice, which grows naturally in the lakes and rivers of Northern Minnesota and is hand harvested and wood parched by tribal members using traditional methods, available from White Earth Land Recovery Project. Wild rice is controversial among raw foodies due to the industrialization of what’s available in most grocery stores.

In Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine, Dr. Gabriel Cousens says, “Wild rice has long been thought to be a raw food product in the live-food movement because of its said ability to sprout. Apparently this information is incorrect. Industry processing of wild rice to remove bacteria and the husks involves high heat treatment. Growers and processors in the wild rice industry inform us that the seed is subject to 300 degrees F temperatures for about one hour forty-five minutes. Unprocessed wild rice is amber-colored and turns the familiar dark brown color only after this high heat processing.”

In Living Cuisine, while she cautions against rice that is grown in “commercial diked paddies from hybridized seeds wtih toxic agrochemicals and is mechanically harvested,” Renee Loux also says, “Wild rice, or long-grain rice, is neither a grain nor a rice, but the fruiting seed of a tall, aquatic grass indigenous to the Great Lakes of North America. It is one of the oldest foods still in common use as a great and tasty source of protein, iron, and B vitamins.”

I usually default to Cousens’ guidance, but since I know where my manoomin is coming from, I’m delighted to incorporate one of my old favorites into living cuisine dishes. Native Harvest manoomin is available both in packages and in bulk at Seward Co-op and many other metro area co-ops. Hand harvested manoomin is also available from Sam and Melissa Thayer.

Kombucha Bottling 090107

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This morning I bottled nine crocks of kombucha while enjoying Herman Dune‘s Next Year In Zion. This round ought to have an interesting energy. It’s been brewing for sixteen days, so it’ll have some bite. Instead of bottling each crock individually, I combined four crocks at a time in a new 2-gal glass jar (that I bought for veggie ferments)–to possibly even out any *really* strong crocks–and then bottled. I forgot about Crock 9 until the end, so that one was bottled on its own.

The first fifteen bottles (#s 32-45, plus one unnumbered) I left plain. Bottles #46-54 I flavored with about one tablespoon of canberry/orange/ginger juice (see photos). Jars #55-60 I flavored with C/O/G juice and sweetened with about 1/2 teaspoon buckwheat honey. Jars #61-72 I flavored with about 1/4 teaspoon of ginger juice.

I’m aiming to bottle again on the 15th…that’ll give it eight days.

third custom framing project

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I am pleased to have finally finished my third custom framing project and gifted it to the not~so~newlyweds~anymore. Now I really need to get crackin’ on my brother’s wedding gift. He was married in…oh…let’s see…*2003*!

This was my most challenging project so far, thus the procrastination. It has multiple openings, six of which were double matted. The two word inscriptions have a stepped-cut mat, and the little spiral embellishment has a hexagonally-cut mat. I made a mistake (well, two mistakes, actually, but we can count it as one); I’m hoping nobody but me will notice.

Gratitude out to Amanda S. for helping me print the inscriptions and to Gregg and Cathy for the long-term loan of their Logan mat cutter. I used David M. Logan’s book Mat, Mount, and Frame It Yourself as my main primer to learn mat cutting and basic framing techniques.

For this piece, I used a store-bought 16 x 20 frame, acid-free Crescent mats #____ and #________ from Blick, and glass from a cheap poster frame that is now displaying the poster from the “On The Day You Were Born” show at Orchestra Hall.

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I completed my first custom framing project just over one year ago. In the late summer of 2007, I reorganized Uncle John’s bookshelves in Finland. This little fairy was peeking out from behind the shelving. I thought it a most unsuitable home for such a sweet fairy, so I set about providing a proper home. I confiscated said fairy for a number of months, procrastinated until December, and then framed her up *just* in time to offer her as a Christmas gift to Uncle John. This was a single-opening double mat. The biggest complication was the size…very long, narrow dimensions. Also, I constructed the frame myself from molding a selected on ebay.

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Jeff asked me if I’d be interested in offering this service for his clients. My initial reaction was, “No way! This is a labor of love.” The only space I have to do these projects is my hardwood living room floor. The only time that space is available is in the middle of the night, when the boy is sleeping. Also, I have no room for an inventory of mats and molding.

But on second thought, I do think I would enjoy messing about with a limited number of carefully selected client projects, especially if they were flexible about the timing. I really enjoy this particular creative process, and I certainly wouldn’t mind actually earning an income again. Perhaps I could earmark the funds for health educator training at Hippocrates or Tree Of Life, or perhaps one of those women-only offshore sailing classes.

GRACEsprings recipe trials – cracker experiments

I am testing a bunch of new cracker and flatbread recipes for the upcoming GRACEsprings meal. My intention is to create an allergen-free meal this time around, so I want to expand my repertoire to include nut-free crackers. Of course, I’ve started with Abeba’s recipe books.

I made the Poppyseed Ginger Kracker/Cookie from Absolutely Abeba’s Krazy Krackers, page 15, on New Year’s Day. It’s thin, but not very crispy, with a mellow flavor. The poppyseed is dominant; the ginger is not strong. Jeff says, “Straight up yummy!”

I made the Buck’s In Town and Can You Believe Buckwheat Again? from Absolutely Abeba’s Edible Treats, pages 8 & 9, on Sunday. Both crackers have a buckwheat/flax/tomato/veggie base, with a similar savory flavor. Buck’s In Town is a bit tangier with a light, thin, crispy texture, while Buckwheat Again is crunchier and heartier.

Jeff says of Buck’s In Town, “Crackerlicious…ya know, kinda like pizza.” Jeff enjoys the sturdier Buckwheat Again for topping with hummus and sprouts.

Hello world!

Soon I’ll be launching the WordPress version of Joyful Girl Enterprises. For now, it primarily serves as a warehouse for my most-frequently shared kombucha thoughts, so I don’t have to keep emailing the same information. I’m trying to have it ready so I can offer the link in my “holiday e-greeting” for friends and relations. If you’ve landed here from some other source, allow me to extend a hearty welcome. Enjoy! ~H