Dove's Eye View

Farming Urban Asphalt

Create business profits for poor people, feed the city, and reduce carbon emissions, too: City Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market - New York Times.

more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

...One key to financial success is having customers with the wherewithal to buy your goods. In New York, Bob Lewis, the head of the city office for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, helped make this happen by getting 21 farmers at 16 sites approved to accept checks from the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, a supplement to the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and senior nutrition programs.

...

But land and demand are not all that successful farmers need. They have to know how to run a business or a farm.

So Growing Power, the Milwaukee group, offers several training sessions each year, and Just Food’s City Farms project holds an annual series of workshops on running farm stands.

For more formal training there is the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1967, the center runs a six-month course for 39 students each year on its two farms.

Patricia Allen, the center’s executive director, said roughly three-fourths of her students today were interested in urban growing.

“We’re not looking at a back-to-the-land movement in any sense,” she said.

The article reports that the Wilkses of Brooklyn sold $3,000 worth of produce last year, and a high school group in Brooklyn sold $25,000, while a co-op in Philadelphia sold more than $60,000 worth of home-grown food. Look at the piece for more info and great pictures of a two acre farm in abandoned Detroit's "urban prairie."

Sitteh's Recipe: Bulghur with Tomatoes

My cousin N visited me for a long weekend, and busied herself in my kitchen making lentil soup, fresh yogurt, and bulghur with tomatoes. Strangely, nobody ever made the bulghur dish for me during my many long visits to Lebanon, and my father didn't cook it. N says it was a favorite of our grandmother and I should call it Sitteh's Bulghur with Tomatoes.

My husband is trying to low-carb his diet again but he can't resist this dish. He was eating the leftovers this morning...

1 cup medium grind bulghur wheat, rinsed in cold water to remove dust/chaff
1 28 oz. can tomatoes, whole or cut, in juice or puree - your choice
1 onion, chopped
olive oil
1/2 cup water
salt and pepper

Saute chopped onion in a couple of tablespoons olive oil until translucent and softened. Add bulghur wheat, tomatoes, and water. Cover the pot, turn down the heat to simmer, and cook for fifteen to twenty minutes, stirring occasionally. If it gets too dry and might burn, add water, a little at a time. When bulghur is tender, salt and pepper to taste, then serve.

This may be eaten hot, warm or cold. Lebanese like fresh green pepper, green onion, and cucumber as accompaniments. During the summer you would of course use fresh, peeled and chopped tomatoes.

Variations: Green pepper might do nicely sauteed with the onion; add various herbs of your choice near the end of the cooking time; add a handful or more of chickpeas to make a substantial dish featuring complete proteins. This is essentially a bulghur pilaf with lots of tomato, so be creative and experiment.

Update: This restaurant in NY features bulghur with tomatoes as a side dish. Look at the bottom right side of page 2.

Preston Vineyards and Pugs' Leap

Leila, Joseph & Jacob
Originally uploaded by Debbie MacLeod

Here I am with my children at an organic farm in Sonoma County, CA, at the end of Dry Creek road. We played hooky from school Friday to visit my brother-in-law's friends who have a goat ranch and artisan cheese operation; then picnicked at Preston Vineyards farm and winery.

Eric and baby goats, Pugs' Leap Farm and dairy.

What an idyllic day. The owners of these farms are trying to live sustainably, farm sustainably, and feed themselves from the product of their soil, integrating all into the natural environment of this fertile valley.

Spoonbread is back

Stick with me, folks, because my pet quirks sooner or later become hot trends. Here's one of them I called a decade ago: Spoonbread gets a seasonal makeover, California style.

I started serving spoonbread, a childhood favorite, back in the 90s here in California. I don't make it all the time, but I sure do like it for holiday dinners. It's a kind of custardy cornmeal bread/pudding that is baked in the oven and served as an accompaniment to meats. I love it with ham or pork loin. Spoonbread is a frugal side dish, too, and a good option for vegetarian menus that include dairy and eggs.

Go to the link for recipes, and to read about how you can update spoonbread to make it trendy.

Around ten years ago in a usenet food group I began referring to my dearest mom as The Spoonbread Queen. This was because I'd been calling my father the Tabbouli King of North Carolina and needed a matching moniker for mom. She wasn't sure she liked the nickname, but her Southern friends told her she should be proud. Stand up for spoonbread!

Then in about 2000 when I finally acquired a copy of Marion Cunningham's Fanny Farmer cookbook, I saw that she gives a spoonbread recipe. Good on ya, I thought.

To summarize: Leila's list of personal obsessions which later became fashion trends, plus earliest date I remember being obsessed:

Ecology - 1970
Permaculture - 1982 or so
Solar power - mid-70s
Urban gardens - 1981
Organic food - 1981
Farmers markets - 1981
Peasant food - 1985
Herbal remedies - 1984
The Lower East Side - 1977
Brooklyn - 1984
Energy healing -1988
Vegetarian food - 1976
Tap water (instead of bottled) - 1980s
Car-free living - 1980
Public transport - 1980
Lofts - 1977
Acoustic music - 1984
Electronic sampling - 1977
Hip-hop - 1979-80
Drumming, esp. Middle Eastern - 1989 but of course loved it from childhood
Simple living - 1976
Meditation - mid-1970s
Jung & archetypes - 1977
Physics, ecology and the nature of reality - 1981
Intersection of spirituality and science - 1981
Alfred North Whitehead - 1981 (just you wait - Old Alfred is the next big thing - I give him five years)
Oakland - 1994
East Oakland - 1999
Doris Lessing - 1979 (how about that Nobel Prize 2007? We old-time Lessing fans felt pretty smug)
The power of prayer - 1989
Complementary medicine - 1989

My pet obsessions yet to break out: Italo Calvino, Alfred North Whitehead, Jane Smiley and her literary theory, the teachings of Peter Elbow, Pat Schneider, Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron. Also - spontaneous remission of tumors through combined Western and complementary medical practices; the Koln Institute approach to cancer treatment (induced fevers and more).

My negative obsessions I'd like to ignore for a while: climate change (since 1990); peak oil (since 2006); food insecurity (2006); collapse (since reading Jared Diamond, 2005 or so).

Mana'eesh

Mana'eesh
I made mana'eesh - za'atar focaccia - for my sister-in-law on Sunday. The za'atar was straight out of Mieh-Mieh, courtesy of uncle Simaan.

I used a cast iron skillet on the stove top - never again. Too much work, and I am not sure how to keep the surface from getting sooty without adding oil. Next time I'll bake these on cookie sheets in the oven.

The dough had a bit of whole wheat flour, and I used corn meal with white flour to flatten out the rounds. If I really wanted an authentic taste like my grandmother's mana'eesh, I would use a sourdough sponge dough, and I'd figure out a way to cook it on a wood fire. We do what we can with the materials at hand...

High wheat prices

To fix this: High wheat prices raise grocery costs

You might want to try this:

Simple Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

From the Yahoo article: "Meanwhile, some consumers are taking the opposite path — baking more. King Arthur's Bittel said that while store-bought bread is running between $3 and $5, a home baked loaf will cost about 60 cents.

"That's up from 40 cents from a year ago, but Bittel said his company nevertheless has seen growing sales of bread-making machines."

Don't bother buying a bread machine until you make bread a few times with equipment you have on hand. Mark Bittman tells you how to make bread dough in two minutes in the food processor (How to Cook Everything) and if there's interest, I will post his recipe. You're not saving money on buying bread if you buy a new machine at $100-200 a pop. And if you don't have a food processor or heavy-duty stand mixer, you can always just knead it by hand. Or make the famous no-knead yeast bread.

More on surging food prices, with details, at the New York Times. Be sure to click on my Frugal Food category for tips and links on dealing with food price rises.

Photo by Tom Burke, from Wikipedia.

Preppies Farm Organic

I see myself in this new young generation of farmers: urban, college-educated, they have been studying the connections between food and the environment and they've decided to farm to live out their values. I never took such a step but I understand it.

Some will sneer at elitism but if it takes trust funds and land-banks and upscale markets to revive the small farm, why should you complain? All that excess money at the top of the US economy ought to trickle down to the land somehow or other.

We can survive and thrive - together

Yesterday I spent an hour in the Edible Schoolyard Garden in Berkeley. This place has so much press that the name and the idea seem like “elitist” Chez Panisse silliness. But being there reminded me that when I moved to that block thirteen years ago, the garden was one season away from its beginnings as an acre of asphalt. I lived in that neighborhood for three years at the time, before moving to East Oakland. Since 1996, the garden has gone from heaps of compost to a wonderland, with chickens, olive and other fruit trees, and extensive beds planted right now with cover crops, winter wheat, favas, herbs and dinosaur kale. Many materials are reclaimed from the site or other Berkeley locations.

Next I went to a spiritual meeting at a run-down but well-loved clubhouse not far away. It was for a twelve step program to which I do not belong - I went to hear a friend speak. The unity and power in that room, in that house, reminded me of the reach of this quasi-anarchist movement. It operates under the radar, on shoe-string budgets with no outside support, and provides community as well as recovery to alcoholics, addicts, and people with all kinds of other afflictions. People who need comfort, hope and restoration find it in this world, without having to avow a religion or a creed.

Between the “magic” of the schoolyard garden morphing out of asphalt, and the “magic” of the twelve-step clubhouse bustling with people, I was reminded of our power to take care of each other and the planet, just by joining together.

Yes, the schoolyard garden receives enormous sums of money and huge amounts of energy from the rich and powerful, through Alice Waters and her lobbying. But the actual labor of making the garden is achievable, and you can see how to begin just by looking. Each of us could do it given the energy; the materials are all around us. Anybody could make the asphalt bloom if she had a neighborhood to help her. The Schoolyard Garden is intended to show people what we can do.

Whatever is coming with financial and political upheaval, we can survive it. To do so, we need to reach out to each other and we need to turn to our Inner Source, whatever you choose to call that.

Eating Well As Markets Go to H***

So they're screaming about financial meltdowns in the media and internet. You are prepared. You have been reading Dove's Eye View and you have stocked your pantry. Now here are several dishes you can make using staples you have put by:

Basic Lentil Vegetable Soup
Red Lentil Soup (the Internet's most popular)
Mjaddarah (lentils and rice with caramelized onions)
Pumpkin Tahini
Arabic Rice Pilaf (Roz bi Shaghria). Add a cup of cooked chickpeas to the basic recipe to make a complete, vegetarian protein.
Hummous - chickpea tahini dip
No-Knead Artisan-style bread. Easier than pie.
Black-eyed peas and spinach.

You will need fresh items like lemons, celery, carrots or spinach for some of these.

Slow Food in Lebanon

Rami Zurayk writes all about traditional Lebanese food in Slow Food International - Sloweb:

Lebanon’s exceptional location and its singular morphology have contributed to making it a hub of botanic biodiversity. It is one of the nuclear centers of genetic species of wheat, barley, lentils and vetch, their cultivation dating back more than 5,000 years. Other agricultural species originating from Lebanon include olives, figs, grapes, pomegranates and carob. Foods made from these plants lie at the basis of the local culinary traditions.

... Wheat and bread, sheep and goat milk and cheeses, grapes and carob are foods that originate from the interaction of history, ecology and geography. They form the cornerstone of the Lebanese food traditions. They are the alimentary expression of the landscape.

Read the whole article to find out everything you wanted to know about ingredients and dishes in traditional Lebanese cooking.