Dork Chow

Archive for August, 2008

We took advantage of abundant fresh figs and made this yummy dessert the other day. This is probably not the most nutritions of recipes but one must be moderate in all things, including moderation.

Find more photos like this on Great Cooks Community
My husband and I do an August winery food bike tour every August. They are supported bike tours organized by Eola Hills Winery in Rickreall, OR. The idea is that you bike through the wine growing country in the Eola Hills and visit the wineries along the route. Most of the neighbor wineries are happy to cooperate and offer special tastings and deals to the cyclists. Airlie Winery is the traditional lunch stop for the southern route. If you happen to purchase any wine along the way, not to worry, the sag wagon comes by after everyone has finished, picks up the purchases and delivers it all back to Eola Hills for pickup. This summer we are doing two trips — we did the southern route on the 24th, and we will do the shorter but much hillier northern route on the 31st. For a slideshow of the actual cycling, it was professionally photographed by Liza Newcombe and you may see the entire trip slideshow at whizphoto.com. Tom and I are pictured in slides 44,45,51,52,128,215,191, and 262-266.

One of the highlights of these tours is the food at the end. Bicycling builds up an apetite. I snapped pictures of the salads; the angle and lighting wasn’t so good for the main dishes, and of course they have wine with the meal.

Because I like to showcase  various technologies, I uploaded my bike tour food photos to the Great Cooks Ning community. Ning automatically builds a slideshow, and I embedded the resultant slideshow widget here in the blog.
No techie skills necessary — Ning is really awesome that way!!! And by the way I highly recommend the Great Cooks community if you are into cooking. There is always something going on there.

Don’t those look fabulous? Maybe when we show them this posting next week, we can get the Eola Hills chef to give up a recipe or two!

Picture a mile long lane lined on both sides with the juiciest blackberries you have ever seen, in profusion, on a sunny but comfortable August morning. The birds are singing, the bees are buzzing and you and your faithful canine companion are harvesting God’s gift to the Pacific Northwest, Himalayan blackberries. An invasive exotic treated as a weed by the natives, don’t try to grow these in your backyard unless you want it completely full of brambles in a year and complaints from your neighbors. Picking goes slow, because you either squish, drop, eat, or reject at least half the berries you touch. Pick them when they are soft but not dried up or squishy. Beware of stink bugs and thistledown that sticks to your berries. But mmmmm….. are they worth it! We chip off chunks of frozen blackberry for smoothies too.

My early translucents are still coming on, and now the really beautiful firm perfect fruits are here. It looks like I will be able to make some dried apples after all.

If you want to do the peeling coring and slicing efficiently I recommend the Apple Master. Just poke the spikes into the rear of the apple, turn the crank and it automatically peels, cores and slices it. If you do not have an Apple Master, you can do it manually but it takes longer. I dry them in a food dehydrator, so technically they qualify as “raw” because the dehydrator does not get hot enough to qualify as a cooker. You can also do it in the sun if you have a sunny place that will not be disturbed, or in your oven heated to its lowest setting. If you do it outdoors, cover apples with a screen so that nature doesn’t come along and mess it up.

Re: the formatting, I will redo it when I get WP 2.6 installed. They say you can do real captions in WP 2.6 So please bear with, because I am having a hard time to get the blurbs to go with the pictures.

The applemaster!

A bowl of water with a couple of vitamin C, or a little vinegar.  You plunge the sliced apples into this solution before setting them on the dehydrator tray.  It gives them a little more flavor and helps prevent over brown (although your finished dried apples will be a nice tan color.)

When using an AppleMaster, apples you use must be firm and they must be straight from butt to core.  If they are mushy the AppleMaster will just squish them.  If they are not straight, you will get bits of the core where you don’t want it. If the apple is otherwise OK, you can just do the asymmetrical ones by hand.

Voila!  All peeled, cored and sliced! I toss the beautiful green peel in the blender along with the not so beautiful apples for my sustainable applesauce, since that’s where all the quercetin and fiber is.

This cuts in a spiral, so you need to run a knife through it to get slices.

In a dehydrator, the drying process takes about 3 hours. You will want to monitor them, as the ones on the bottom will dry first, so you will probably wish to rotate your trays. Don’t do what I do and overdry them to crispy flakes. They are dry enough as long as they feel dry to the touch, they can still be soft and flexible. Voila! Dried apples.

This is me with my very good friend Shannon Dealy.  Every year Shannon does demos at the local technology festival of Cobb construction techniques.

Shannon lives in a 70 sq ft. cobb cottage and he also has a larger cobb structure on his property which I helped him build about four years ago.

Here is a cool video of cobb being made.

Why is this on a food blog?  Because this blog is about sustainable, and cobb is a waaaay sustainable building practice.  Cobb buildings have been known to last for centuries. Shannon buys the sand and the straw to assure quality, and uses the local dirt but he did fool around once with a cobb hut from all stuff he dug up on his farm, including the bottoms of old coke bottles for windows.  

OK, to bring it back to food:  In his cottage, Shannon has a fridge and a microwave, both 100% powered by solar.  No oven, but I’m gonna see about getting him one of SolReka‘s when they are ready. Shannon is completely off the grid.  He also runs a bank of servers in his cottage, and I should know because I drove up there to reboot them one  cold and stormy November night when they went down while Shannon was gallavanting off in Australia.

Shannon’s blog contains a gallery of work by Kiko Denzer, who designed and built the Cobb wood fired oven at our local Fireworks restaurant. Check it out!

Please send Shannon some LUV at cobcottage.com — he deserves it.  Dorky prediction:  Many more people will be doing things like this in the future, and it might even be within our lifetime.

Thanks to trailblazers like Shannon, we’ll have some guidance when the economy will gradually force us to abandon the unsustainable aspects of our lifestyle.

As per my custom for restaurant reviews, I’ve outblogged my main  review of Fireworks restaurant at FoodBuzz, to give Fireworks the additional benefit of being inserted a worldwide restaurant database. Pictured at left is “Maya,” their signature wood-fired oven, which is something you can’t do at Food Buzz.

If you don’t read the link, at least take this away: Fireworks restaurant is a must-do if you happen to be in this vicinity. 

We have exceeded 350 parts per million (ppm) of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere, and bad things are happening to the planet.   Scientists have determined that below 350 ppm the bad things will reverse. All of humanity should be focusing on what we individually and collectively can do to get that number down to 350 and below.

Food entails a certain carbon foot print. How big is yours? What are you doing to reduce it?

• Eat less, drink more water.
• Reusable bags when shopping.
• Choose local more often than exotic.
• Choose fresh rather than processed.  Packaging leaves a footprint.

Can you think of more? Please comment and add to the list. Also please spread the 350 word through the grass roots. You are not likely to hear the “powers that be” volunteer anything about it, because that could bring up uncomfortable policy questions for them.

Shiitake mushrooms are loaded with chitosan, a natural component that is said to attract fat and cause it not to be turned into blubber on your thighs, hips or middle. They also have a lot of antioxidants. Plus they are delicious.

We have adapted this recipe from Christina Pirello’s macrobiotic cookbook. Don’t let the macrobiotic designation deter you–she has hundreds of recipes in there, and a large number of them are delicious and not weird at all. I highly recommend this book if you are into healthy and yummy and vegan, vegetarian, or just minimal meat and animal products. Please leave a comment and ask about any recipe you are unsure about.

We are lucky to live in Oregon, a very progressive state regarding environmentalism. (At least people from all the other states think so until they move here and get involved in the constant wrangling.) My family personally have been composting in a happy-go-lucky fashion for 21 years. Basically what we do is throw our non-meat non-oily fat food scraps in with dirt, weeds, lawn clippings in a bin. We have two bins, since we reappropriated one from a neighbor who owns a rental. The renters had let their back yard get so overgrown with brambles that no one even knew the bin was back there. We knocked down the fence between our properties to build a new one and we did a lot of clearing of brambles so we figured we were entitled to the bin. Believe me the current neighbors would not use it any more than the last ones did. The bin we “rescued” from the neighbors is a closed black bin with a lid and a little chute. The other one is an open fence affair. You can take one side off as I have it in the picture and dig out the bottom. The dark area you see at the bottom is a hole where I have dug out some rich garden soil. We don’t turn it or worry too much about the mix. The only disadvantage to that method is it takes much longer to compost. I tend to put things I want to compost more quickly into the black bin because the black helps it heat up and “cook” faster.
Our compost bin does not smell much, and if it ever gets smelly we toss a layer of weeds or grass clippings on the top and that takes care of it.