One quick thing!

Tomorrow (Sunday 2 Aug) I'm giving a low key, informal presentation at the Museum of City and Sea on 'Harvesting Without a Garden.' I'll be at a table from 2.30 to 5pm to chat about foraging and fermentation, and blending the two. I think it'll be fun!

Before that, Donna Lee will be presenting on home-made cosmetics (from 11am-12.30) and on natural household cleaners (from 1.30-2.30). I'm really looking forward to seeing her.

Pedal power

Wellington sustainable food fan David Stuart has started a blog about his and his family's adventures ... Take a look at their new pedal powered blender!

As an aside, David's wife Charity runs the very wonderful Honeychild cloth nappy business.

Sugar beet and old women's magazines

My Mum sent me this lovely and fascinating email the other day, and I asked her if I could repost it here.

By way of background, my mother has a popular (among spinners) NZ spinning wheel site, and a book in the pipeline.

Here's her email:


I spent much of yesterday going through World War 2 issues of the New Zealand Countrywoman, the newsletter of the Women’s Division of the NZ Farmers’ Union (now Women’s Divn Federated Farmers). Didn’t find much on spinning wheels, but it was interesting and would make a great research topic for someone (not me).

There was a Mrs Cocks-Johnston, for example, who seems to have spent most of the war travelling from place to place giving demonstrations to branches on home gardening and preserving.

There were lots and lots of little branches, as villages were very isolated. The organisation couldn’t afford to provide her with a car, and there wouldn’t have been enough petrol anyway, so they bought her a bicycle and she mostly cycled from the nearest train station or from one little village to another, over what must often have been bad roads, with a big pack of samples for her demo.

I’d love to find out more about her if I didn’t have other interests. One could go through the reports from the various branches and note where they said they’d had her and track her across the map!

There were lots of articles about coping with shortages. Here is one, from April 1944, by M.E. Annan, Dunstan Orchard, Clyde:

SUGAR BEET
I wonder how many of our members know what a helpful substitute Sugar Beet is for sugar in cooking fruit for immediate use. Unfortunately it cannot be used for preserving fruit as fermentation sets up within a very short time.

It is very easily grown, requiring little attention, and every household garden would do well to have a small plot to help out the sugar ration. Planted in the early spring, the beet should be ready for use from January on, and in the autumn can be stored in pits like mangles for winter use.

The method of using is to peel and cut the beet up into small pieces, put on in cold water, and boil for 30 minutes, strain off the liquid and put back in pot. When boiling, add the fruit to be cooked and simmer until tender... I find it more convenient to make enough syrup to last three days, but in very warm weather it is not wise to keep it longer...

(presumably it’s the liquid you put back in the pot)
..............................

I also had occasion a few days ago to skim through a few issues of the wartime NZ Women’s Weekly. There are lots of things in there that could stand re-publishing now.

Made me realise just how unthinkingly dependent we now are on gadgets and having things pre-processed.

Our suburban honey adventure

This is the closest to from-scratch honey I will ever get I think! (I just don't have it in me to keep bees.)

At the end of last year we bought an entire frame of honeycomb from Windy Bottom Farm (through Naturefoods).

I think these frames are now selling for around $30, but I'm not completely sure. Hopefully Deb or Ian from Naturefoods will read this and correct me if I'm wrong.

Sadly I seem to have lost all my pics of my son and daughter having a glorious, sticky time processing the honey! Well, you'll just have to use your imagination ... :)

Lost picture 1: Shows the children carefully using knives to cut bits of honeycomb from the frame - to eat as is.

Lost picture 2: Shows the children cutting MORE bits of honey comb from the frame, to eat as is. (It really was particularly delicious honey.)

Lost picture 3: Shows me trying to get organised to extract the honey from the comb, while the children ditch knives and dig out blobs of honey comb with their fingers - to eat as is.

Lost picture 4: Shows the children squeezing cut-out bits of honeycomb in their fists, and collecting the drips in containers, to extract the honey from the wax. (This is how it's done in some places sometimes apparently.)

Lost picture 5: Shows us scoring one rather ravaged frame of honey all over with a knife.

Lost picture 6: Shows the scored frame left to drip over a bucket, to extract more honey from the comb. This method was suggested by Pip in Kerikeri.

Lost picture ... Oh! Actually somehow this picture managed to survive! This is how much honey we got. The honey collected in the bucket using the score-and-drip method is on the bottom. The honey collected by squeezing is on the top. It amounted to over 1 kg. Note that the honey collected by score-and-drip is clearer and purer looking!


I think we could have collected more in the bucket if we'd scored it a bit differently. Next time I would use a finer blade (probably a craft knife) - and make more scores, closer together.

Anyway, after the comb had stopped dripping into the bucket (the next day) there was still quite a bit of honey left in the comb, so ...

Lost picture 7: Shows my children at it again with the squeezing ... I tried to keep track of how much extra honey we got doing this but lost my scribbles. It might have been another 150g?

Lost picture 8: Shows the empty frame (good for kindling) and the crumbly looking remnants of wax after all the scoring and dripping and squeezing was done.

And then this was interesting to me ... I saved those remnants of wax for ages. They sat in a bowl on the kitchen bench for a good three weeks, frequently eliciting from visitors an, 'Ew, what's that?!'

Well, I told them - it's wax. And when I get around to it, I'm going to melt it down to separate the last bits of honey out from it, and then I'll use it to make balms or lotions.

Finally I did get round to melting it down, and lo and behold - it produced only the thinnest crust of wax on the top. The rest was actually still honey! I'd say around 300g of it!

So the lesson I learned from that is that there's a lot MORE honey and lot LESS wax in a honeycomb than I thought! (The wax was fun for the kids to play with, pouring it over ice-cubes, dipping things in it, and making a couple of wax stamps for envelopes, but there wasn't enough for more than that.)

I'd estimate that overall we got about 1.5kg of honey from the frame, plus all the comb my children ate! But the money we spent on the frame was worth it for the children's experience alone.

If I did this again, I'd probably be more methodical:

First cut out some tidy blocks of comb for the children, and also to give as gifts to people who like honeycomb.

Then do the score-and-drip thing, with a finer knife so as to get as much raw, unheated honey from the comb as possible

Then melt all the rest down at the gentlest heat I could manage.

I'd probably dispense with the squeezing altogether (although it was fun!)

Earth Hour, and getting ready to go fridgeless

We will do Earth Hour tonight I think, yes. But Keith Ng makes some very good points about it on his blog at Public Address.

I'm getting excited about the challenge of going fridgeless, and heard from a friend last night that she is thinking of doing it too.

Also, I have really appreciated some comments from Kate about it, containing great ideas and advice. I'm especially interested in the Nigerian invention of zeer pots, and the cooling possibilities of evaporation.

But the first step is to start using up everything in our fridge's freezer box, in preparation for switching off. (I recently started stocking up on frozen stuff, so this is a bit of a reversal and it'll take some time to get through everything that's stashed in there ...)

Fridgeless and fancy free ...

Ruth has written a great post about going fridgeless, which we hope to do this winter ourselves.

I think we would need to make some kind of outdoor cool store as we will have meat and milk ...

I wonder too about how much we would add back onto our powerbill by turning off the fridge, but getting a chest freezer instead. Apparently chest freezers use quite a bit less power than fridges, but I'm not sure exactly how much less ...

Coffee and the crisis

The two reasons I've just started home-roasting coffee are:

1. It's way easier on my wallet - even taking into account electricity use.

2. Green beans keep a lot longer than roasted beans. (I've read that if stored well, green beans can keep for 2-4 years with little loss of quality.) I'm keen to start storing coffee in case imported supplies become unreliable. Given how long they keep, it makes a lot more sense to store the beans at the green stage.

Of course I could solve all the issues in one fell swoop by giving up coffee, but I'm not quite ready for that!

I used this website's instructions to get started.

I buy green beans - Ethiopian Yirgacheffe - from People's Coffee.




I roast them in our little old electric popcorn maker.

The first time I did it, it took eight minutes.

Now I've got it up to nine.


Dan, one of the lovely People's Coffee barristas, says the ideal amount of time (for a dark roast I think) is about 16 minutes. If you roast too fast it doesn't taste as good.


Apparently electric popcorn makers can sometimes roast coffee much, MUCH too fast, but Dan seemed to think that 8 or 9 minutes was pretty respectable for one of these appliances.

A few notes:
I was relieved to find that the smoke produced during the process wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

As the beans heat and puff up, they crackle and pop a bit. I put a bowl under the popcorn maker just like I do for popcorn, and during the roasting, when any beans come flying out and land in the bowl, I quickly drop them back into the popcorn maker.

The husks that fly off have to be cleaned up afterwards, but it's really not that bad.

I'd like to try roasting beans in our cast iron frying pan. That way I could do it over the woodburner in winter and avoid electricity use. I think I'd get a more uneven result, but I might be able to control the overall speed of the roast better.
Ultimately I'd love a proper stove-top popcorn maker to use.

I've just found out that Sharon and her family roast their own beans too - have been doing it for ages. Hopefully I can pick up some tips and ideas from her.

Small honey update

I just got this comment from Pip in Kerikeri, about separating honey from its wax comb. It's so useful that I'll cut and paste it in here, since I know things in the comment section often get missed:

Hi Johanna, we have just removed the frames from our hive. To start with we score the surface of the honeycomb, to open up the comb, with a normal fork. Then we leave it to drip into a bucket overnight. Most of the honey flows out this way and if there is any left we still want then we squeeze it. Enjoy, its so much fun!

Also, I put a basic honey junket recipe up on Wild Concoctions, and will put up some variations soon.

Lastly - a quick plug for Peanutbutterland peanut butter - available through Nature Foods. This is lovingly and labour-intensively made by a guy in Kapiti. (At least I think it's Kapiti. Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong.) And it truly is the best peanut butter ever. It's not just ordinary home-made peanut butter. It's gone through a whole soaking and drying process, and been mixed with coconut oil, so it's way more nutritious and digestible than 'regular' peanut butter.

The reason I mention it in a post about honey is that my son and I have become addicted to having it with honey!

Honey!

We don't have the room to keep bees, but even if we did, and I was prepared to put the time and effort in, I don't think I would. I LOVE the idea of it, but whenever I've read those 'Is Beekeeping For You' articles - there is one sticking point. Beekeepers get stung. (I know, I know, it makes no sense - I've given birth to two children, but I'm scared of the pain of a bee sting.)

Having resigned myself to never producing my own honey, this might be the next best thing - buying complete frames of raw comb honey, and doing my own processing.

You see, Deb and Ian at Nature Foods have just started supplying some delicious locally grown honey from 'Windy Bottom Farm'. If you haven't seen the Nature Foods website, take a look. There are all sorts of interesting, healthy, and yummy foods there. (They may not have put the honey up yet, but just enquire if you're interested.)

Some of the Windy Bottom Farm honey that they stock will be raw, some finely filtered, and some coarsely filtered - depending on what's available at the time.

I've got us some finely filtered manuka honey, some coarsely filtered kamahi honey, and of course that raw frame, which the grower says was 'collected in the Battle Hill area and so will be a mixture of pasture (clover) and bush honey, with probably also a high manuka content.'
It is absolutely oozing with honey, and our entire household has been tasting the drips, and exclaiming over their heavenliness. I have no idea why, but it is so much yummier than 'ordinary' honey.

My son may have nailed it when he said, 'Actually THIS is ordinary honey, and the stuff you buy in containers in a shop isn't. That's why this is yummier.'

Well, wish me luck with my processing. These are the grower's instructions:

The raw honey can be separated from the comb by squeezing the honeycomb in your hands over a collecting vessel (bowl) and the honey will run through your fingers to the bowl and you will be left with a lump of wax in your hand. This is how it's still done in some countries in South America.

If anyone reading this has done it before and has any tips - I'd love to hear them!

The frame weighs about 3kgs. I can't wait to see how much honey and how much wax I get from it. I'm looking forward to the wax almost as much as the honey, and yes, every one will be getting home-made balms for birthday presents during 2009!

Fermenting juice with milk kefir (Cheat's Apple Cider)

Hooray! I've just heard that Rebecca has some water kefir ready to send us - so soon I'll be able to ferment all sorts of different sweet drinks (assuming I can keep the kefir grains alive this time.)

In the mean time, my son and I have been fermenting apple juice using milk kefir. The apple juice is from our CSA and is very sweet and concentrated so it lends itself well to fermenting with kefir I think.

Opinion's divided over whether milk kefir grains can or should be used to ferment anything except dairy products. In Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz writes that you can use them to ferment almost anything you like, as long as you give them some time to recuperate in dairy straight afterwards - so we thought we'd give that a go.

We've developed a system where we use half our grains to ferment apple juice, while the other half ferment milk or cream. Then we do another dairy ferment with all of the grains in together, then divide them in half again and go back to the beginning of the cycle.

I think that means that, taken over time, each milk kefir grain is spending roughly a third of its time in apple juice and the rest in dairy. (Any mathematically minded person able to confirm that?)

Here's some apple juice we fermented - with the grains still floating in it.


We call it our Cheat's Apple Cider. Apparently milk kefir can be very slightly alcoholic, so I suspect this apple juice is too, but only a little. When you take the first gulp, you get that warm feeling flowing through your veins ... but none of us have ever managed to get tipsy from it!

Gather it, cook it.

I reckon wild food foraging is the perfect companion to solar cooking. Gather your ingredients wild, then cook them with the sun. As activities they complement each other perfectly.

Both are about utilising free, abundant resources that you can find almost anywhere. Both allow you to wander. Both promote self-reliance and independence from any system. And both, if you engage in them with care, are utterly sustainable.

Okay, it's not exactly solar cooking season yet. (Did you see that hailstorm today?) But I did manage to use our little solar oven as a haybox cooker last night, sort of. And I did forage for a little bit of the meal.

On the stove, I brought to the boil a pot of huakaroro potatoes (very waxy and dense), then quickly took them off and put them into the box cooker, which I'd lined with an old cot quilt.

I wrapped the quilt over the pot, tucked towels around it, and laid my son's folded swanndri over the top. I added a couple of my old jerseys over the top of that - just for good measure! Then I put the cooker lid on, and weighed it down with a couple of books. (Not sure if that last bit with the books was necessary, but what the heck.)

I didn't keep track of how long I left it, but I guess not long enough, because when I opened the pot, the potatoes were still too hard to eat. Since I'd now let a lot of the heat out, I put the potatoes back on the stove and brought them to the boil again before re-ensconcing them in the cooker.

Some time later (I really should have kept track!) I opened the cooker a second time, and the potatoes were nicely soft.

After draining and cooling them, I chopped them up and made a salad of them, using home-made orange mayonnaise and finely chopped onionweed. We had them for dinner on a bed of puwha, along with cold slices of the previous night's lamb roast.

The foraged bits were the puwha and the onionweed, both of which grow prolifically around our neighbourhood. I love wild onionweed! I'd choose it over store-bought spring onions any day.

Funny how things change. As a child helping my parents with their weeding I loathed the very sight of onionweed - and the stink of it as we pulled it up by the handful.

Now, when I see it down the road, or up the bank next door, or in our back yard, I think instead, 'Yay, onionweed.'

Our home-made box cooker

Yippee - we finally finished it last week.

I think it'll need adjustments though. I suspect the lid isn't tight fitting enough. Hmmm ... and I don't think that bit of coathanger wire will hold up the reflector for long when the Wellington wind gets going! But all in all, my children and I are quite pleased with it.

I've written about our beginner efforts at making and using solar cookers for World Sweet World magazine. Hopefully that'll be in their spring issue.

As a basis for our box cooker, we used the instructions in Cooking with Sunshine by Lorraine Anderson and Rick Palkovic - a detailed and comprehensive book. There are also instructions for making box cookers and other types of solar cooker here. (Take a look at the Cob Solar Oven - it's beautiful.)

I've been feeling impatient to try out our newly made cooker - but there are weeks and weeks to go before we'll have enough sunlight to do it. Then just last night I was reading about heat-retention cooking, and it dawned on me ... In its off season, our solar cooker can double as a haybox cooker.

A haybox cooker is just a box that's well enough insulated to retain cooking heat. You start your pot cooking on the stove, and once it's boiling nicely you take it off the stove, snuggle it into your haybox cooker, and leave it to keep cooking in its own retained heat. No extra energy needed. There's a lovely article about haybox cookers here.

Although the walls and base of our solar box cooker are well insulated, the lid isn't, so to use it as a haybox cooker I'll also need to find something thick and and insulating to wrap around and over the pot before I put the box lid on.

I think I'll have a go at this for tomorrow night's dinner. Hope my son isn't needing his swanndri ...