Back in Brooklyn

The day after farm camp ended - the same day I was hosting a family-and-friend party in honor of my daughter's fifth birthday -- my laptop got into an terrible, nearly fatal accident. Accidentally knocked to the floor, its screen cracked. Since then, my three-month-old laptop has been in a computer coma, its power light blinking, but just a black screen staring back at me.

ppphhhhhtttt.

That's the sound of the wind going out of a massive amount of sails, each of them representing a part of my creative and financial lives.

We had only a week left in NH, so I sucked it up and let it go. Why think about a potential $700 bill with a dwindling number of days hiking and river trolling?

But now we're back in Brooklyn, and it's time to think. I'm on my husband's middle-aged desktop computer, with its cranky mouse, slow internet, and all his .... stuff. Record album covers, ebay auction lists, dept of buildings research. It's like trying to get comfy in someone else's living room. Or, more aptly, in my husband's dusty cluttered antiquated study. Can't even make an italic on this blog without summoning some archaic html code.

I'm off to Tekserve on Tuesday to cough off almost the original cost of my computer to fix it. Blech.

Gettin Farmy

We're so farmy. We feed apples and onions to the oxen, chuck citrus fruit past the pigs into the mud, and argue over who gets to carry the eggs. Eggs are magical and must be fought over to gain possession. Some get broken every day.


Hens always escape and must be held.



This is the Cobb Oven, an outdoor clay situation, built around a discarded steel drum.


Tyler built a fire. We gathered blueberries and blackberries to make a bruise-berry pie.

This five-year-old brushed the pie dough with a beaten egg yolk.


Then this nine-year-old slashed the top, and we brushed it with egg yolk again.


While the pie baked in the Cobb Oven we gathered eggs!!


This hen was not budging.


Voila! Beautiful Pie! Two of the kids had to leave early, before it was done, so we agreed to wait until tomorrow to eat.


Tomorrow is our last day.

More Farm Camp

Here's what we did today at d'acres:

We started out the day with Tyler loading up the solar cooker with rice and lentils. The solar cooker! Who knew there was such thing as a solar cooker!


Then we walked over to hear this guy telling us how they get used oil from restaurants and filter it and use it to run their truck and wood chipper.


Then it was time for everyone's favorite activity - feeding the pigs. The local supermarket gives the farm all the food that it's going to throw away. Like I said yesterday, it's truly shocking what gets thrown away. Like this entire cornucopia of mostly perfect food.

We have to unwrap everything, like these sliced portobello mushrooms.

Then we drag it over to the hogs.

I think this is Pretty Eyes and Big Mama. Either that or Pretty Eyes and Big BIG Mama. Big Papa isn't in the picture. We have spent so much time every day, mesmerized and content, tossing food to the pigs and watching them eat. Why is this so satisfying?


The pigs eat almost everything, except citrus and peppers. But we still give them the citrus and the peppers, because they stomp on it, and it gets composted into the soil. The pigs also clear the vegetation == they pull out almost everything green, until it looks like an atomic wasteland inside their fence. In a few years d'acres is going to plant a vegetable terrace up here. It will be cleared and composted by then, and ready for planting. Amazing, the eco-system that exists on a farm.

The out house was a subject of fascination. We'd already had a lesson on how to use the composting toilet inside the farmhouse, but this was something new -- a three-sided, off-the-ground outhouse nestled in the woods, with a magazine rack and a sign that said "don't pee in pooper". A couple kids actually used it after our group had thoroughly checked it out. I was sort of amazed too -- no smell, no flies. The receptacles are 5-gallon buckets that get emptied either daily or weekly, depending on whether you believe my or my son's memory recall.



This is either August or Henry. These gorgeous, gentle, brute-strong oxen were tethered to graze in one of the pastures. The kids were awed by them, and fed them ferns and clover (and then started catching grasshoppers to feed to the nearby henhouse.


Eventually we headed back to the main area of the farm. This is the greenhouse, which I love because it's so crammed with hanging tomato plants and lettuces and other garden creatures, and also because it's made entirely of recycled doors.


These hens cracked me up. Inside their coop, all the kid are gathering eggs. You could hear a maelstrom of activity, including a conversation between Tyler and a child about what to do about an egg that had clearly broken. If it were a cartoon, there would be fists and feet and puffs of smoke coming out of all the chicken coop windows. Meanwhile, the hens gathered on the ramp outside the coop, nervously clucking and looking around at each other and trying to figure out what was going on inside.

This is my son telling me how he had to reach under a hen to pull this egg out.

One hen got out of the coop, was caught by a kid, and then duly held by each kid. The kids and the hen were so gentle with each other.

The kids kept asking all day when they would get to "steal an egg" from the hens. They loved gathering the eggs, and were reverent about them. They all wanted to take the eggs home, wanted to hatch them, and carried them around like they were pets.

Okay, it's not really camp. But it's just so great.

Quote of the day: "I LOVE composting toilets! YOU DON'T HAVE TO FLUSH!" - my daughter

Farm Camp

I'm up in New Hampshire for the month of August now, and as usual in a state of semi-paralysis when it comes to food.

It's partly due to being in my mother's kitchen -- my mom is lovely and a great cook but something still happens and I just don't feel so motivated. Any Freudians out there? -- and also due to New Hampshire's short growing season and sluggish nature when it comes to embracing the foodie local yokel thing.

For example, I have to drive 25 minutes to get organic milk. I am not a total freak, so I just drive 2 minutes to the local Cupboard and buy regular milk for my coffee. There's no Applegate Farms turkey for my son's sandwiches, so I just get the Sara Lee at the Hannaford. And there are only 2 farms within 25 miles when I do a search on eatwellguide.org, so... I bring a cooler full of frozen meat and chicken and fish from Brooklyn.

I love New Hampshire, so I'm happy to weather these food challenges, but I do find it ironic that being in NH for the month of August means I eat more crappy food than I would if I were in NYC.

And anyway it is changing -- dramatically, even since last year. Bigger farmers markets, more produce, tons of publications about the local foods. Watch out, Vermont. New Hampshire is on the move.

One of the leaders of the change is d'acres, an "educational homestead" in Dorchester, NH. It is a super-groovy place with hippie interns who live in tree houses, and a dreamy farmhouse kitchen with a bunch of musical instruments and beautiful carvings and a composting toilets. They raise pigs and chickens and vegetables, and hold workshops and circle dances and do a lot of educational outreach. But they don't do a lot for kids, as I learned when I was searching for a farm camp for my kids. So I contacted the farm and offered to help them start a farm camp for kids. They took me up on the offer, and so here we are, taking part in the first ever Kids Week at d'acres. Two days into it. Here are some of the highlights:

Feeding the Pigs. We meet at the recycle station in the morning, where we help unpackage a truly alarming amount of food that the local grocery store throws away every week. Perfect bananas, whole watermelons, celery that looks better than anything in my fridge. It is appalling, and that's not even getting into the amount of packaging we amass. Anyway, we gather it up and help take it to the pigs, who gallop to meet us. The kids have been climbing right into the pen and helping unhusk the corn and break open the watermelon. These are the piglets, just a few months old and very funny and sweet.



This hen got loose, so all the kids took a turn holding her. She got very quiet and let them all take their turns. This is the first time either of my kids got to hold a chicken.
On our way up to the pasture to see the oxen, we picked apples off the ground, where they'd fallen from a 100-year old tree. They were a small yellow apple that I've never seen before. To quote one of the kids, "this is the best apple I've ever had in my life." It really was -- tart and sweet and crisp. No one on the farm knows what kind of apple it is.

We picked millions of blackberries!


This kid kept hugging the pigs.


The hen house! The kids gathered over a dozen eggs, and we made thumbprint cookies with blackberry jam.


What a great time. The kids are having so much fun being farm kids, without the chores.
ps don't ask me what d'acres stands for. Nobody knows.

Brisket on the Grill

I am really fond of cheap cuts of meat -- because of the price, the flavor, and also because traditional styles of cooking usually come up with up with kickass ways to get around the shortcomings of the cut, while still getting all the flavor.

Brisket's a perfect example of this, except... I've almost never had a brisket I liked. Too stewy and soft, with some kind of bland tomato sauce, at least one time I had it, and it scarred me for years to come. But this year my friend Nick served barbecued brisket at his summer birthday party and it was delicious. I got to thinking I'd serve it at my daughter's late August birthday party, which is usually a family/friend affair more than a kid's party. Because... why settle for dogs and burgers?

First I had to test it. I can't be cooking a brand new dish while making sure the table's set, the kids didn't break into the marshmallows and my mom's not putting too much tequila into the margaritas. While I was musing on all this, Cook's Illustrated sent out a recipe for brisket cooked on a charcoal grill. Yes, because who wants to keep the oven on for hours in the summer?

I followed their instructions to a t.

You have to use a combination of wood chunks and charcoal, and set up a bowl of water to steam the meat. I made a bowl out of tin foil.

Then the meat cooks slowly for hours. After three hours you swiftly add a few more chunks of charcoal.


For the first few hours you shield the meat with a piece of foil. I made this on a HOT day, and it was really nice sitting in the backyard under the fig tree, drinking iced tea and playing cards with my daughter, while I kept an eye on the grill.


It was truly delicious. My kids loved it, too. "It's kind of like bacon," one of them said, bestowing the most powerful compliment possible.
We are definitely having this for my daughter's bday. Following my friend Nick's lead (who is following Southern America's lead) we'll serve it with barbecue sauce, cole slaw and burger buns. YUM!

More Bad News About HFCS

Not that I am complainning -- only this time it's plain old innocent-seeming fructose too.

A few years ago people started getting freaked out about high fructose corn syrup, blaming it for the obesity epidemic. The hfcs industry fought back hard, and the issue became sort of muddled and nobody really wanted to lay it on against this poor harmless totally industrialized food product.

But the evidence keeps trickling in -- and now it's about fructose, even the naturally occurring kind that comes in fruit.

Yesterday Tara Parker-Pope reported on her blog about a study in Texas that showed that
"the body converts fructose to body fat with 'surprising speed,''" ... The study, which appears in The Journal of Nutrition, shows how glucose and fructose, which are forms of sugar, are metabolized differently.

When glucose is consumed, the liver basically figures out if the body should store it as fat or burn it as energy. It seems that fructose skips the liver and goes straight to your thighs.

Sort of takes the wholesome shine off all those Tropicana OJF cartons.

That Other Life

Ever think about it? That other life you could be leading right now... if not for this, this, this familar life you've constructed?

A high school friend just contacted me via Facebook -- she's left the east coast and started a sustainable organic homestead in Colorado. I'm not entirely sure what a homestead means these days, but it's definitely a cousin of my we-could-have-horses-and-chickens-and-lots-of-closet-space alternate life fantasies.

Anyway, here's one for the back burner: organic farming in Kenya, anyone?

Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a UC Davis graduate of class 2003. I am currently working with CA non-profit that is starting Daraja Academy Kenya , www.daraja-academy.org a free boarding school for the disadvantaged children near Nairobi Kenya.

The Academy is hoping to set up set up an organic farm on its 150-acre property. The farm will provide fresh produce and an education source for the school and the local community.

The Academy is currently looking for an intern with an education or experience in organic agriculture who will advise them in organic practices and methods.

Internship credits are available for those interested in academic credit. Accommodations and meals are provided.

Cold Salad Days

I'm a drive-by eater this time of year. I don't want to cook or chop or turn on the stove every time I'm hungry for lunch. I want to hit the fridge and come away from it in one easy motion on my way to the table to eat. Sounds impossible, I know. But keeping a cold salad in the fridge facilitates my sniper attacks on the fridge. It also helps me eat more grains, veggies and legumes.

This is my method:

1. Cook up a bunch of chickpeas or wheat berries or green lentils or quinoa or bulghur or millet or what-have-you. If you make too much, freeze the extra.

2. Chop up a mess of veggies. (I know I said I don't want to cook or chop a lot, but this is one time investment. I am cooking/chopping once and will eat many times.) (I like: celery, scallions, cucumbers, red and yellow peppers, and radishes, but anything will do.)

3. Don't forget lots of parsley and mint.

4. Add a little goat cheese or feta or ricotta salata. You could do olives, too, or sun-dried tomatoes or dried cranberries...

5. Toss with olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice.

This salad with a can of sardines and a half an avocado, some sea salt and pepper, makes a big fat dreamy summer lunch. I also have it for breakfast, as a side at dinner, or by itself for a small lunch or snack. Just having it available in the fridge, cold and ready to go, is the best part.

More Medication on the Way for Kids

We may have officially hit the low point in our culture's harrowing plunge toward full-blown stupidity around food and nutrition.

In today's Times, Tara Parker-Pope reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending statin drugs for kids as young as 8-years old who have high cholesterol.

According to the article, children's cholesterol levels have remained stable in the last few years, and their tri-glyceride levels have even dropped. So... what gives?

Meanwhile, according to this other article, also by Tara Parker-Pope, statins don't even really work: "But many statin users don’t have established heart disease; they simply have high cholesterol. For healthy men, for women with or without heart disease and for people over 70, there is little evidence, if any, that taking a statin will make a meaningful difference in how long they live."

In today's article, Pope says that the AAP is also now recommending that one-year-olds with a possibility of developing a weight problem drink low-fat milk. I- I- I... I'm speechless. Well, almost.

More than half the calories in breast milk come from fat, and much of that is saturated fat. Obviously, one-year olds need fat. For one thing, fat is necessary to help the body absorb the fat-soluble vitamins like A & D (which have been artificially added to the low-fat milk, since they got taken out when the fat was removed). Here's an article by Nina Planck in defense of whole milk.

Haven't we figured out yet that parsing down our foods doesn't work?

The only slightly reassuring aspect to the article is the amount of infuriated sounding-off that's happening on Parker-Pope's blog. We are not alone, people. This alone will help me make it to dinner.

Magic Grill Pockets!

I can't take credit for these nifty little packets -- except to trumpet my scary ability to remember often useless tidbits of advice from magazines. (Want to know how to trim your bangs with nail scissors, or tone your tummy in 5 minutes a day, according to Seventeen magazine, circa 1982? Just ask.)

I think it was Cookie magazine that suggested making individual dinners for kids -- you can put cut up veggies and fish or chicken or shrimp, with a dash of olive oil or butter and a pinch of salt. Seal up the foil and set on grill for 20 minutes.

We were already grilling whole mackerel, with olives and lemon, a recipe from epicurious.com. So I asked my kids to help make individual (and a few group-version) veggie packets.

We used every last veggie we had on hand: diced potatoes, butternut squash, frozen edamame, broccoli and garlic. A sprig of rosemary from the garden, just for the hell of it, because I like sending my kids out in the yard with the scissors.

I gave them each a square of foil and told them to go wild. Pick out your own veggies, kids, from this bounteous platter of choices!



This was daughter's selection. Wow, is she living large, or what?



Then, because I've worked in Japanese restaurants and am remarkably facile with a square of foil, we made the packets into birds. Of course, like thousands of children across the U.S. taking home their teriyaki leftovers, they LOVED this.




This is the fish, strung up with lemon slices as outlined on epicurious. I threw in the halved yukon gold potatoes because I figured I'd roast everything I could, as long as the grill was going to be fired up.


Here it is, in its moment of grilling glory.

It was all good. The fish: amazing. The veggie packs: a little on the steamed side, having been... steamed. I'm not crazy about steamed veggies, but they were tasty. My kids weren't so thrilled. They had some potatoes and broccoli, but wouldn't touch the edamame.

The best part was the roasted potatoes, thrown straight on the grill, no oil or anything. They were awesome, and we had hash browns the next morning.

Next time I'll use more garlic, and leave them on the grill for a shorter time. (No need for no 20 minutes, when all I'm cooking is veggies.) The kids really loved the packing part, so it's worth another shot.