Productive chickens

Despite a bit of drama with a red-tailed hawk in our chicken coop on Friday (we lost a hen), we have been making use of the productivity of the chickens.

We're consistently getting one egg a day now. So Bill has been enjoying one home grown egg and one store-bought egg for breakfast. It is hard to tell from the photo, but the yolk in our eggs is more orange AND, our eggs (on the left) are now roughly the size of those found in the store:

Last weekend we cooked one of our meat birds. Bill boiled the whole bird in a stock pot for about 8 hours. When he took it out, the meat all fell off the bones - half of it was slathered in Dinosaur and eaten on a hard roll and the other half had garden beans and carrots added to it, along with a bit of stock and cornstarch and was eaten over egg noodles.

Yesterday we made our first attempt at canning apples (u-picked from our local orchard) to keep for winter baking. We learned valuable lessons on "packing" the jars. The first two jars looked really full to me...but then we added the syrup and processed them:

From Pictures

We did a little better on the third but there are still lots of air bubbles. I think I need special canning implements (and practice) to perfect this technique.

From Pictures

We also made our first jelly from local apple cider and store bought cranberry juice. Jelly is so easy - and very pretty:

From Pictures

Finally, we were inspired by Julie and Julia to start baking our way through a cook book. Ours, however, was probably a Barnes and Noble bargain book, though it is very pretty (also, as it is a cookie book, we won't have to worry about boning ducks.). First up: bacon cornbread muffins.

Reading through Julie Powell's initial blog, I came across this, alternative view of food, which I found interesting. Thoughts?

Enough of the $40 olive oils and imported semolina flour and "please, Turkish oregano only." If I read one more dining guru gushing about "honest ingredients, treated with respect," I shall vomit, sir. And "Market Menus"? Dont get me started. The well-meant "food revolution" Alice Waters instigated some thirty years ago has metastasized horribly. The Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our organic, dewy heirloom strawberries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they're doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn't have to work for a living.

My favorite web comic

From Toothpaste for Dinner:

Community Supported Fisheries

Heard a story on NPR this afternoon about using the Community Supported Agriculture model for fisheries in the north east.

Buying and eating fish always stresses me out because of the double worries about health and environmental consequences. The long-lasting guilt factor alone limits my sushi intake to about twice a year.

This seems like a possible solution to the environmental issues at least and, according to the story, the group organizing the program provides education for their consumers so they should have a place to go to get health questions answered. It has been well received with 500 people on a wait list to join the program.

Check it out!

Food, Inc.

There is a new documentary out this summer called “Food, Inc.” I don’t really want to see it, but felt a little guilty about that decision until Pajiba - my most favorite movie review site - gave me an out by saying “Food, Inc. is that warm smug self-satisfaction that comes with having a Trader Joe’s reuseable bag full of five dollar tomatoes.” And perhaps a blog about sustainable food?

So, I haven’t seen this movie, though we may Netflix it. I’ve only watched the preview and read some reviews. I’m going to talk about it anyway…

The movie seems to take a dash of food-related ideas that have been known for years, and combines with beautiful/shocking/inspiring visuals to goad people into actions they didn’t take when they initially learned the ideas without the beautiful/shocking/inspiring visuals. Maybe this works? But my cynical self seems to think it won’t do much beyond giving the hipster crowd fun new things to talk about over organic wine and stinky cheese. (Which, BTW, is a great activity, but perhaps detracts from useful action on these issues.)

Shocking thing you already know #1: Corn is subsidized by Uncle Sam (thanks for paying taxes!) and is in everything. Are there people who are not yet aware of high-fructose corn syrup?

Shocking thing you already know #2: Fast food/slaughterhouses are assembly lines and seriously, seriously gross. The inclusion of footage from slaughterhouses is one of the main reasons I, myself, have no desire to see this movie. This is for many reasons (including the fact that I sat through K-Pax) but mostly because I have slaughtered my own chickens and made the commitment to only purchase other meat from small or local family farms. We have found this to be the absolute easiest modification to our food purchasing habits. I will admit that I don’t pay as much attention to meat when I am eating out. We still occasionally eat at Olive Garden and I’ll bet their chicken is likely gross. And what are the possibilities that the cashier at Five Guys knows what their beef was fed? I think I’ll have to work on this…

Shocking thing you already know #3: Big Agribusiness is in it for the money. Disclosure: Big Agribusiness pays for my house. The film spends a lot of time talking about Monsanto owning patents on the “biology inside” the GM crops it produces which is an argument that has been a talking point of anti-GM lobby for years.

I also take serious issue with the idea that you can’t eat well inexpensively. Bill and I had a grocery budget of $30/week when he was a grad student. We were able to eat plenty of fine food without resorting to BK and Taco Bell.

There is something that seems to be absent from the reviews and previews that I’ve seen – the idea that we could not sustain 6-7 billion people on this planet without industrial agriculture. I wonder if the movie includes any consideration of the things we enjoy in life that are made possible specifically because we designate a small number of people to produce lots of cheap food for the rest of us. I would hypothesize that a well considered list would include such things as the women being able to “work outside the home,” children going to school for 9 months a year, a lack of serfdom and movie theaters for independent documentaries.

So, this movie isn’t so much for me. And I’m not entirely sure what my beef with it is…perhaps I’m just annoyed that it throws a glaring spotlight on the idea that people have been eating under this system for so long and not paying attention.