So Cheesy (and Cracker-y)

I had a revelation: I can make crackers AND I can make cheese...It is not only possible, but relatively easy to make crackers and cheese. It all started when I tasted some oat crackers my mom made, with just a few ingredients: oat flour (oats ground in an electric coffee bean grinder), salt, water, and rolled onto sesame seeds. I had given up eating crackers because I didn’t like how many preservatives the ones that tasted good had in them, but these little oat crackers were really tasty! I started experimenting using different types of grain from the bulk aisle at the grocery store, and started using a pastry stamp I picked up at a garage sale and voila! tasty multigrain pretty little crackers! I love using local wheat from my Farmer K, too, grown in Carver, Oregon, that I helped harvest last year. Also, Eric bought me a hand crank grain mill as a holiday present last year, which does a much better job (in terms of fine grain and consistency) than the coffee grinder. So I guess I can always fall back on my cracker making skills as a job if I need to :-)

Here’s a very basic cracker recipe (I’m not ready to share my super tasty secret recipe quite yet):

½ cups Water
1 ½ cups Flour, Oat flour is the tastiest
1 teaspoons Salt
4 tablespoons Seeds (sesame or flax)

Directions

1. Mix water, flour and salt in a bowl
2. Roll onto seeds directly onto baking pan, to between 1/4 and 1/8 inch thick
3. Score with pizza cutter into 20 crackers. Stamp with pattern (optional)
4. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 min (depends on thickness), until completely firm

I mentioned a grain mill earlier. It’s a really great thing to have if you’re really into baking, because you get more control over your flour. Fresh flour is a completely different food than store bought flour, it smells pungent, sort of piney, and is more moist than store bought flour. The local wheat I get from my farmer is a softer wheat as well, so when I bake with it things are less cakey more corn-meal-like, but very delicious. I got a Wondermill Junior Deluxe grain mill, with stone burrs, so it can’t do oily seeds like flax or any kind of nut, because it will gum up the burrs, but works great for all the grains I’ve tried.

Here’s a picture of me trying out the mill. It takes me about 20 minutes to grind 2 cups (I think, still need to time it more), but it’s good arm exercise, so I’m not really worried about the practicality.

As for the cheese-making, I found out about the New England Cheese Making Supply Company from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (look for a future blog post). From there, I discovered the founder of the New England Cheese Making Supply Company, Rikki Caroll, and her book, Home Cheese Making

Neighborhood Organizations

On December 24th, 2009 there was a drive-by shooting at a duplex half a block away on my street. Eric and I jumped out of bed onto the floor, and I called 911. No one was harmed, the shooter just hit a car and the duplex a few houses away. The shooter was apprehended a few days later, but the whole event was a big wake up call to the entire neighborhood. We had noticed what looked like drug dealing involving two of the young men who lived or hung out at the duplex, but didn’t really want to get involved, but after the shooting we went to our Neighborhood Association meeting to see what we could do.

We are part of the Brentwood-Darlington Neighborhood, which has a fairly active Neighborhood Association that meets every first Thursday of the month. Our Association was a great place to start, everyone was very supportive and we met more neighbors who lived near our street and were also very concerned.

The house that was shot up (the “drug house”) was a rental, so we decided to write the owner and plead with them to evict their tenants (the drug dealing ones, not the tenants on the other side of the duplex). We looked up the owner using PortlandMaps, wrote a letter with our neighbor, then took it to most of our neighbors on our block for their signatures as well.

Some of our neighbors hadn’t heard about the shooting, but still had a lot to say about what they wanted to see change on our block (and at times I had to stop them, not wanting to hear more accusations, gossip, or rumors about various groups of “those people”). All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet my community and come together on an issue we were all concerned about (or became concerned about once they heard about it).

We worked with the owner of the property that was shot at (she didn’t even know about the shooting, her Management Company didn’t tell her and she lived out of the city), and there are now new tenants in the duplex. We also formed a Neighborhood Watch for longer term community building and increasing public safety (I’m the block captain). That’s been a little slow to move forward, but there was a great first meeting. Again, it was great just to meet neighbors and start to build more community. Here are some projects the Neighborhood Watch is probably going to work on in the near future:

• Foot Patrol, in the evenings around Woodmere Elementary (to increase community presence and discourage drug & alcohol use in the park and school grounds)
• Increased street lighting on the south side of the Woodmere park
• Neighborhood Watch signs
• Graffiti removal (especially at Duke and 78th on the fence and on traffic light posts)
• Bus Shelter at Duke and 78th, Westbound
• Recruiting and welcoming more / new neighbors to the Neighborhood Watch

We’ve already seen more of a police presence around the school, which is nice to see. Growing up I was very anti-police, it seems like they had nothing better to do than harass us kids when we weren’t doing anything against the law (being an unschooler out on the town during school hours probably didn’t help, but still), or trying to give kids their police-baseball-card things (message: Cops are cool when they harass people!). But in this case, I’m really happy to see the police, and all interactions I’ve had with them (or witnessed) has been good. This is not to say I’m completely pro-police in Portland, I know there’s a lot of issues people have, but I think near our school, it’s nice to have the police around to discourage vandalism, drugs and alcohol, in addition to our community safety efforts.
I plan on going to the Neighborhood Association meetings as much as possible, and staying engaged in my very local community, it feels great to know more of my neighbors and increase my social sense of place!

Resources

• Office of Neighborhood Involvement - Crime Prevention website
  http://www.portlandonline.com/oni/index.cfm?c=28395
• Establishing Your Neighborhood Watch brochure
  http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=79548
• Graffiti Abatement Program website
  http://www.portlandonline.com/oni/index.cfm?c=32420&
• Street Light requests website http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?a=192894&c=47271
• Non-Emergency Portland Police line: 503-823-3333
• Pothole Hotline: 503-823-BUMP (2867)
• Northwest Grocery Cart Retrieval Hotline: 888-55-CARTS

Urban Gardening - The Front Garden

The ready-to-plant Front Garden!

Here's a picture series showing the building of the front garden, from burlap-covered-grass to compost dumping to retaining wall.

Urban Gardening, part 2

Delightful picture of the season

The more we sow the less we mow, Urban Gardening in the front yard, part 1

We’re sick of the front lawn! Why mow all the time? It’s a pain, and the grass is all different kinds, it looks like a kid who cut his own hair, and as far as I can tell, we don’t get any real benefit from it. I want more garden space, so we’re going for it, we’re converting our front lawn into a garden.

We have an 800 square foot yard (not including the few plants we want to keep, like a rose bush and a dahlia).

So, how did we do it?

After talking to people in the know (Garden Fever, Farmer K), we settled on the “sheet composing” or “smothering” method, because we wanted less work, we didn’t want to dig up the sod. The process is:

1) Cover the lawn with some sheet thing that is organic and will decompose (newspaper, burlap bags, craft paper). This will smother the grass, because it won’t have any light or much air. We did dig up some of the grass, because it was crab grass that is usually hard to kill with this method.
2) Cover the organic sheet with at least 6” of compost
3) Wait a while for the grass to die, time depends on what type of grass we have, which is a mix, so anywhere from 3 months to 6 months.
4) Till and plant!

We decided to start with converting half the lawn (the north side), then in a few weeks do the other half (south side).

More details:
1) Cover the lawn with organic sheet:
We got burlap bags from Stumptown’s roasting facility’s dumpster, they are supposed to be more durable than newspaper and have less inorganic ink. And they were free! We had to cut the burlap bags open, to make them single layer.

2) Cover burlap bags with 6” of compost:
We got 8 cubic yards of mushroom compost from Mt. Scott Fuel Co., which is close to our house, and when we did a quality check it smelled great, and was nice and steamy.

Don’t dive in!

Queen o’ the pile

And...we’re done for now...

But what will the neighbors say? We’ve already seen our neighbors seem less than excited about our new plot. But it doesn’t seem like there are any strong objections, but I’ll happy to talk to any of them if they want to. Our neighborhood doesn’t really feel like the kind of area where our neighbors would be really excited about “strange hippy stuff”, but they probably won’t object too much either.

I think I need to put a sign in the front yard, so when people slow down the stare (already happened when we were working in the yard), they have something to read.

Farmer K has started saying “the more we sow the less you mow”, which is pretty catchy. I also like “America: feeding itself one yard at a time” from Eric. Here are a few more ideas:

It's not a grassroots movement, it's a sunroots movement
Our front yard, seeds of change
Bringing back victory gardens
Mowing is for wussies, real men garden
Friends of sunroot gardens CSA
Plotting (a garden) for change and hope
Garden of eatin'
We're pro bush...bush beans!
Ohh that smell, can't you smell that smell? . . . It's hope
Me and my ho(e) love gardening
This garden'll pop you collar(ed greens)
Food, not lawns

We may also be working on a “Bringing Garden Back” version of “Bringing Sexy Back”

To be continued...

I (heart) Carrots and other delicious winter veggies

Look at those colors!! And that’s not even close to the best part...the taste, Ooooh the taste! I’ve been getting lots of delicious carrots from my winter CSA, and I’ve been eating so many of them, my skin might turn orange.

They are so...carroty...sweet and crunchy without the strong parsnip-ish/”nail polish remover” taste and smell from summer commercial carrots. And each kind has a very different flavor, some are sweeter, some are crunchier, some are spicy, some are a little sour (in a nice way), some are buttery. Oh winter carrot!

Pacific Northwest Blueberry Bonanza, Urban Gleaning, and other almost free food

Jam! Cobbler! Smoothies! Muffins! Blueberry Bites!

We found a U-Pick blueberry place (orchard?) in far South East Portland, spent an hour picking, and got 10 pounds of blueberries, $1/pound.

They were so tasty! I made 5 half-pints of jam (my first attempt at jam, no pectin, using agave not sugar), and ate the rest of them.

They were so good, that we went back a few weeks later, and got 15 pounds! These had much more blueberry-ness, they were riper (some too ripe), and made sweeter, more jam-y jam (6 half-pints, I used honey to sweeten the jam, 1:5 honey to berry ratio). The rest of the berries I froze for the winter, for making smoothies. They are certainly cheaper, and much tastier that store-bought blueberries.

This year I also got free walnuts from someone Eric works with. They needed to be shelled, but they are very tasty, much more tender than store bought. We’re getting plums from the same friend, and I’m really excited. I tried doing some Urban Gleaning this year, but didn’t have enough buddies and only found a few cherry trees and a plum tree by my bus stop. The plums were bitter and didn’t pit well, so I couldn’t freeze or dehydrate them.

Next year, more urban gleaning, and maybe I’ll by an extra freezer to store more extra food.

Community Supported Agriculture in Portland

This year I’m part of a Community Supported Agriculture call Sunroot Gardens, with my farmer, Kollibri Sonnenblume.

It’s been great to have very local produce, and to have a good relationship with my farmer. Every week I get fresh, beautiful produce from South East Portland, grown in urban Portland, transported and cared for by a farmer on bike.

There are tons of CSA options for the Portland Area, but I chose Kollibri because of his urban, bike-powered gardening (that was competitively priced with other CSAs in the area).

Willamette Weekly Article

Edible Portland Mention

East PDX News Write-up

So far this year I’ve got a very wide range of fresh, delicious veggies each week, from radish pods (seen above), garlic spears, lambs quarters, salad mixes, beautiful multicolored carrots, string beans, french beans, green beans, potatoes, multicolored beets, green onions, red onions, leeks, garlic, basil, rosemary, pattypan, zucchini, spinach, english peas, and even a taste of homegrown tobacco.

I’m also very excited about the Staple Crops project, which is not part of the CSA shares, but an extra project growing grain. I’m hoping to volunteer next year to help the harvest and processing, Kollibri says about the project:

Much attention has been given over to growing vegetables and scoring fruit in the city, and many creative approaches tried out; yet those foodstuffs comprise only a small percentage of the typical human diet, which is heavy on grains augmented with proteins (the majority of it vegetarian). The less-than-an-acre plot we harvested on Saturday is part of one attempt to address this issue.

The only things I’d like to get more local easier is meat (especially rabbit and pork) and eggs, oh, and honey. There’s a meat CSA in Estacada that I am thinking about joining for the meat and eggs portion.