Noble Bean Tempeh

I've never been much of one to indulge in soy products, myself. Whilst vegetarian (and then vegan) and living with an omni partner, though, I did tend to pick up a lot more soy-based substitutes to have around the house. We had a meat-free home and he really enjoyed the subs, perpetually swigging back glasses of chocolate Silk or piling soy meat analogs into sandwiches packed for work.

One thing I've come to like in recent years, though, is tempeh. Unlike the blank slate that is tofu when it comes to preparing it, tempeh has a mild nutty taste (as well as an interesting crumbly sort of texture). It also escapes a lot of the recent criticism and disputes over the possible issues with unfermented soy products that seem to be all over the internet right now. I'll leave that topic for another time...

Strangely, although every supermarket in my city carries tofu and soy dairy substitutes of all kinds, I can only find a good selection of tempeh at the two small health food stores in the city. One of the major supermarkets carries Green Cuisine tempeh burgers (which are decent enough), but both health food stores carry my favourite: Noble Bean tempeh. At a time when most soy is GMO and most meat analogs in the stores aren't organic (and therefore, almost certainly GMO), it's also a plus for me that the Noble Bean tempeh is organic. I just recently picked up their Sea Veggie Tempeh and pan-fried it with a little bit of garlic and lemon juice and it was amazing. I quartered it to make tempeh burgers with tomatoes, lettuce and diced red onions on Vegenaise and Dijon-smeared multigrain buns. I can't recommend it enough.

I think that I'd like to tackle making tempeh on my own, sometime. The starter required to make it can be ordered online from a number of places and there are tons of instructions available on how to make it. For instance, this PowerPoint presentation and this step-by-step Instructable.

Seasonal spoils!

It's been a pretty busy week. Between dealing with preserving the tomatoes from my garden and taking advantage of cheap produce at the farmer's market, I've been donning my invisible apron more often than usual. The nights have been getting more and more chilly over the past few weeks, so after harvesting some straggler-veggies early one evening, a good old frost warning led me to pick all of the rest of my tomatoes. (The photo of the tomatoes is after my having indulged in tabouli and / or tomato salad over 2-3 days.)
My first project with the tomatoes was to try oven-drying some for the first time earlier this week. I never did get around to building a solar dryer (a project for this winter, maybe?) and the days are cool and my vacation days have run out, so regular old sun drying (something else I've yet to try) seemed as if it would be a bit tricky to attempt. After Googling a few times, I realized that the simplest thing to do would be to slice the plum tomatoes lengthwise and set them on a tray with the cut side facing up, then heat them at the lowest oven setting (140 F) until they seemed about right -- sort of leathery. Various websites stated they'd take 8-9 hours. Some of the tomatoes were a bit large (next time I'll use more common sense and choose tomatoes of the same size), so the whole thing actually took 9-10 hours. They supposedly keep really well if you cover them in a high quality olive oil in clean jars. I just stuck mine in a baggy and tossed them in the fridge. I figured they wouldn't last very long and was right -- I'm now around halfway through them! They're delicious, but I figure that considering the energy used to dry them in the oven that I won't repeat this experiment. If I dry any next season, it'll be without gobbling up that much electricity. All sustainability issues aside, there's also the more practical point that it would probably cost me less to buy the sun-dried organic tomatoes one of my local health food sells than run my oven at 140 F for 9-10 hours. I've also been doing a bit of canning. I pickled (and froze) around 10 lbs of beets, made around 3-1/2 quarts of Lady Ashburn Pickles and pickled a small bunch of zucchini using my mom's friend's recipe. This week, I plan to pickle and freeze another 5 lbs of beets and deal with the rest of my tomatoes -- maybe make salsa.

Realistic gardening (and some links on storing and preserving what you grow)

Energy Bulletin has a short article by Zachary Nowak touching upon what he calls the ''illusion'' that those concerned about Peak Oil have about being able to adequately feed themselves with their own gardens. He presents some hard and realistic questions that prospective gardeners should ask themselves and he makes a handful of suggestions. The gist of it is that there's a difference between being a backyard hobby gardener and on literally needing to be able to fill your cupboards with what you grow. It takes a lot of time and energy and a lot of knowledge to grow food. At least to grow enough to feed yourself adequately. Nowak has recently written a book called Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil which looks at his 7-year-long attempt to become self-sufficient and addresses the challenges of post-Peak life. You can download the intro and first chapter for free, as well as order the entire book itself on his website.

Oh yeah... I added a new links section called ''Food Storage'' earlier today, and I posted a link to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)'s information on storing horticultural crops. Further along in their document, they have a section on processing horticultural crops, including info on solar drying, canning, etc. Most of the information is designed to be used by a non-technically oriented audience. If you nose around their site, you'll find tons of useful information there, including Ecocrop, a searchable database of over 2300 plant species that provides environmental crop information.

Skills, sustainability and self-reliance links

I'll be adding these links to the left of the page over the next few days, but thought I'd share them here first.

Here's a new foraging link -- a free e-book about acorns, a wild edible found readily across North America.

You'll find out almost everything you want to know about preserving food here at the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

This was by far one of the most intriguing (and potentially dangerous) things I've come across in a while. I've only glanced through it. It's a .pdf guide about practicing medicine in austere conditions where appropriate technology and professional assistance are unavailable. (I'm no medical expert, so I'm certainly not recommending any of the info in that guide, which is full of disclaimers itself.)

Then there's Howtopedia -- the Wikipedia of practical skills, where users are invited to write articles to contribute to this self-described practical knowledge library.

Finally, here's a simple guide on how to make homemade cider vinegar.

Peak Oil, The Disposable Society and Exchanging Skills

I was speaking to a friend a few weeks ago about wanting to start up a local group to trade off skills -- the kinds of practical abilities these last few generations have more or less lost, thanks to plentiful and cheap energy having enabled (and accelerated) our consumerism. We're a disposable society, and I mean that in every sense of the expression. On one hand, long after we wipe ourselves out, life on this planet will keep on going on. On the other hand, we're also disposable in the sense that cheap oil has allowed us to evolve into wasteful creatures, to the point where we no longer even know where the hell to put all of our garbage.

A friend of mine frequently points out how our city is constantly littered with disposable Tim Horton's coffee cups, for instance. We leave our homes in the morning, spend minutes idling at a drive-through for a cup of coffee in a paper cup with a plastic top, which inevitably ends up on the ground or in a garbage can. For someone with a mean caffeine habit, investing in a travel mug and brewing a pot at home in the morning would pay for itself in a month. You can even buy a container of Tim Horton's coffee to make yourself (I say this in response to some Tim's addicts who insist that they like the specific taste of their coffee). What's the fascination with having something to throw away?

The ridiculousness of it all struck me yesterday as I popped into the local supermarket to discover a new entry in the ''cheap plastics 'r' us'' book of wastefulness. In the produce section, I discovered small clear plastic containers, each holding smaller plastic bags with what looked like prewashed and cut fruit. For instance, one baggie contained 3-4 grapes in a smaller baggie, and then a couple of orange segments in a second baggie. Fruit -- something sold loose and with its own skin, wrapped in plastic baggies inside bigger plastic baggies inside a plastic container, undoubtedly carried home in a plastic bag. I don't get it. It's obviously not about convenience since I could peel an orange faster than it would take me to cut open all of that plastic.

When I was a kid, I remember reading old Little House on the Prairie books with wonder at the lengthy descriptions of how food was grown or gathered, and preserved. Things were dried, or salted, or pickled in those Tupperware-free days. I grew up in a home where pies were made from scratch -- from strawberries we picked ourselves, with a family that engaged in the annual fiddlehead picking ritual so popular in the Maritimes and Maine. Once a year, my mother and some of my older cousins would head out to a relative's farm or large garden and load up pillowcases with string beans and then bring them home, where she and my grandmother would spend an afternoon sorting through them and snapping off their ends to prepare them for canning.

Even with that, though, I still remember leaving home for my first year of university and not even knowing how to do anything but open a can or follow the simple instructions on the side of a box. I made Kraft Dinner and ate Mr. Noodles. I had frozen pizza and Campbell's Soup. I jumped into consumerism head-first because I could. It wasn't until years later, when I became a vegetarian and became mindful of the foods I ate, that I actually learned to cook whole foods; it wasn't until I had my first garden that I learned how to preserve herbs and vegetables. These were skills I should have and could have learned from my mother and grandmother, but at the time, there was no sense of a need for them to be passed on to me. After all, a strawberry pie could be bought frozen at the supermarket, where canned or frozen string beans were also plentiful.

So oil's running out. Cheap plastic and cheap energy are running out. Consumerism is convenient for us for now, but at the price of leaving us dependent on cheap plastic and cheap energy instead of learning hands on how to prepare and preserve things ourselves. And it's not just about food. Which brings me back to the original idea I mentioned in this post. Since consumerism has led to a breakdown in the traditional passing on of skills that enable a certain amount of self-sufficiency (and that certainly lead to a less disposable lifestyle), it seems to me that the best way to go about remedying this is to find others who have some sort of expertise in this or that area (composting, knitting, bicycle repair, foraging, wine making -- heck, even darning socks) and to trade off these skills with each other in some sort of informal but organized manner. Anyone in my area interested?