That’s pretty much all I want to eat right now, and Theo’s sipping chocolate (organic! fair trade!) is doing the job nicely.

But I think the key to this time of year is balance. We just entered a new year and everyone is either sick, detoxing, or breaking their resolutions. It seems like this has already been a year of extremes; it snowed yesterday, it’s 55 degrees today. Wouldn’t it be nice to just mellow out, eat some kale but have your hot chocolate, too?

On a recent trip to Boston and Providence, even though I ate my way through two states, I got to thinking about which foods actually make me feel good. We stopped at Wildflour Bakery in Pawtucket, RI – and decadence was in full effect. This bakery has the most amazing display of vegan baked goodness but the ambience is minimalist and cool. It begs you to drink a freshly squeezed juice. Instead, I had a cinnamon bun, some pizza, and a scone for the road.

The day wound down to Foo(d) at AS220, the performance space/gallery/bar/restaurant run by a nonprofit and dedicated to community arts. It’s sleek appearance again belied what would fill my plate: seasonal farm-to-table (and in my case, sriracha-spicy) food! Definitely a place to go back to on a future trip.

And finally, back in the old stomping ground of Cambridge, MA, we checked out Life Alive. This place is packed with super healthy dishes centered around whole foods like quinoa, rice, and loads of veggies. Never mind the new age-y space, sometimes a little extra purple ambience gets your appetite rumbling.

These meals all had a few key “spice” ingredients: chiles, ginger, garlic, and cinnamon.

All of these components, besides being delicious, have the added benefit of warming the body! Maybe during this global warming winter you’re thinking more about ice cream, but getting the pulse racing and a little anti-microbial sweat on your skin isn’t the worst idea. Research has even found that the scent of cinnamon boosts brain function! For me, it gets my stomach growling. Maybe I’ll try a big cup of chai before my upcoming midterm – the caffeine and sugar should at least do something!

I wanted to share with you two meal ideas that contain some or all of the ingredients on this list, plus lots of veggies for health and feeling light on your toes. At Live Alive the ginger nama-shoyu sauce was so good that Eleni and I had to try it at home, with great results. Neither of us used the raw shoyu, but tamari or soy sauce works just as well. The sauce can be poured over quinoa and steamed or stir-fried veggies for a seriously flavorful meal. Don’t be bashful about eating so much garlic, it’s just exciting!

A vegetable vindaloo would also be a great way to incorporate all these warm-in-the-belly ingredients, plus the addition of turmeric. Turmeric, like ginger, has been found to calm inflammation and boost the immune system, which certainly can’t hurt! I haven’t tried this recipe that calls for tamarind, but I love it’s sour-sweetness. Most vindaloos include tomato paste or puree, which would work just as well.

Garlic is available at farmer’s markets right now, and Allandale Farm in Brookline, MA is experimenting with growing ginger. I have lots of dried chiles from the summer’s harvest!

Fortunately, all these things mix nicely with chocolate, too… but more on that next time!

Yum

[Edit: The above was all that WordPress posted despite having written some words about fun plans for 2012. But I'll just leave you with this veggie dog, smothered with home-fermented sauerkraut, local mustard, and rooftop pickled hot peppers. I want more.]

But farms – and hungry stomachs – don’t ever really sleep. The rooftop farm will be bedecked in cover crops for the winter, those fantastic sort of weedy plants (clover, vetch) that infuse the soil with critical nutrients so that it will be brimming with healthy plants next Spring. Fortunately we had one last public day on the farm a couple weeks ago, and I poked my head up to see what was happening. I’ve mostly seen it in the dark, at night, as I pull handfuls of what I hope is clover for the rabbits. That Sunday, I saw kale still growing and loving the cool weather, people mingling with chickens, and flowers popping everywhere. A sight for sore eyes in November.

Look at the compost bin! Full of my scraps which, like many city folks, I keep in the freezer until I get a chance to visit a compost location.

But I have to confess, I recently got my hands on a copy of the new Candle 79 Cookbook, and a few recipes have been calling my name since then. Candle 79 is the delectable vegan restaurant here in NYC that I’ve visited only a few times, but always enjoyed. On a whim I decided to make the dish below, despite it calling for a few ingredients that I don’t use much in my local cooking:

This amazing recipe layers not one, but two sauces, between a bed of veggie quinoa pilaf and hunks of marinated tofu. The avocado-tomatillo sauce is piquant and smooth, while the smokey chile sauce is rich and exciting. I could not find guajillo chiles, but this great website suggested New Mexico chiles and it was superb. This cookbook is obviously going to wow us as much as the restaurant itself.

It’s nice to be back in the kitchen, and as always planning to get my hands dirty in the Spring. I hope to carve out a little more time to report on the fantastic foods and workshops I have coming up, and a few news items that have caught my attention. For now, I’ll sit at my new kitchen table and breathe deeply the smell of Orange Cranberry Bread to inaugurate this holiday season.

2. Peace Meals, and borscht. The book “Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories” might seem like a strange juxtaposition: where food meets atrocious violence. I used to think about this when studying peace and conflict issues in my undergrad – couldn’t we just all get along over a meal? Everyone loves to eat! But as Anna Badkhen points out – meals can bring us together, but a lack of meals can fuel wars. In some places, every meal is a celebration of living another day. Her life stories from traveling as a journalist in Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and beyond remind us that the kebabs and dumplings and vodka that we consume together are more than just a quick gulp… they are a rite (and a right!) and hopefully, a sign of our humanity.

I happened to be reading the chapter on Russia when I realized I had a beet situation on my hands. Too many! So for the first time, I made and ate BORSCHT! Click the link for this amazing NY Times recipe that caused me to consume 6 bowls of beets in the last two days. I’d recommend sour cream (tofutti) in place of yogurt.

3. The peaches in this photo expose that I took it a couple weeks ago, but the third inspiration of the post is trying new things. Not just borscht, but sweet potato greens, and Italian plums. Sweet potato greens can be cooked like spinach but with a drier, hard-to-describe texture. The internet says to blanch them before adding them to a recipe, and also says that eating these leaves will make you a “completist.” I can accept that.

I’d love to hear about your inspirations for the month. I’ll be back with more, I’m sure!

I went to see The Harvest/La Cosecha recently, having first learned about the plight of child farm workers in Human Rights Watch’s “Fields of Peril” report. Both of these expose how these underprivileged kids miss out on schooling – and therefore future opportunities to change their lives – as well as risk their health and relinquish their childhoods in order to work the fields with their poverty stricken, often migrant families. This is here in the United States. Never mind the rest of the farm workers and their lack of access to health care, sanitary facilities, homes, steady work and fair wages.*

Human Rights Watch also released a report recently on South African farm workers in the fruit and wine industry called “Ripe with Abuse.” There’s more than nose bouquet to think about when reaching for a bottle of wine from this, and many other regions. Consumers can pressure wine distributors to offer ethical and sustainably produced wines, while continuing to enjoy and support the wine industry.*

Now for something a little less dismal (unless you start thinking about tomato farming)… I love these sclafani cans, as the tomatoes are painted right on. You can drill holes in the bottom and use them as little planters, as done here with morning glories on my fire escape. Since this was taken, they’ve started climbing up the sides!

*My views and opinions do not necessarily represent the views of Human Rights Watch, on anything, ever.

I’ve been in and out of town, and in and out of stomach bugs, and out of time. But, a few good things have come up.  Leftover rice was sauteed with chopped tomatoes, sweet corn, and homegrown basil, stuffed into peppers and braised in a pan for breakfast. Stuffing peppers allows them to shine, as you get each softly crunchy bite with its full spectrum of pepper flavor still intact.

And then there was tonight’s dinner: not photogenic, but worth mentioning. Bryant Terry’s recipe for triple corn grits made with organic sweet corn, and on the side – sauteed chard, curry coconut tempeh, and slices of heirloom tomato with basil. I’d eat it all over again if I could, but in this household you can’t count on leftovers.

This weekend was part staycation, part Philly trip. I of course planned part of the day around food, then ended up feeling too under the weather to splurge on vegan philly cheesesteaks. I did go to Mi Lah for brunch, and had really great masa cakes smothered in black beans and mango salsa. The boo’s vegan omelet was pretty great, too. And dinner was inevitable: Blackbird Pizzeria. My vegan caesar salad was very refreshing, and I can vouch the pepperoni slice was very good – much better than my Brooklyn vegan pizza standby.

In short, even if the compost bin is getting more of my produce than I’d like, we are definitely still eating well over here and enjoying end-of-summer tomatoes, corn, peaches, and basil like crazy.  I can even foresee a peach pie in the near future!

Bunnies curl up even on 100 degree days

My weekly farm chore includes getting clover and vetch for the rabbits, and collecting eggs

Sunflowers stretch above anything else on the roof

Lots of flowers keep the pollinators happy

A Guernsey St mystery

My own windowsill garden

This lady means business

Greenpoint before the storm

• Awesome
• Important

Hmm. But then the following things happened:

1. I started reading “Food Fray” about genetically modified crops. Y’all have heard me talk about that before.
2. I attended a fantastic talk at the NY Horticultural Society by Shanyn Siegal of Seed Savers Exchange (SSE).
3. I thought about how many seeds I had on hand, in my apartment, and how important they are just for edible foodstuffs, let alone for the future of civilization etc.
4. I started re-reading the book that got me interested in local foods, “Coming Home to Eat” by the amazing Gary Paul Nabhan. He is one of our nation’s most ardent promoters of seed saving and his book touches on the SSE Heritage Farm, which I’m dying to see. More on his book later.
5. National Geographic released a fabulous article on seed saving and the importance of biodiversity last month. You can see it all here.

I think seeds are amazing and slightly magical. “Gnarled knots of built-in urge.” They don’t resemble their final product; in some cases, they look like nothing. Try planting arugula on a windy rooftop – the seeds look like grains of soil and will fly from your hand to grow in a crack of pavement, somewhere.

But these dense pin-points of energy are the most important thing we have in this world, along with soil, sunlight and water. A diversity of seed is our best hope in a future of climate change. As Nat’l Geo points out, lessons should have been learned from the potato famine of the 1800s, periods of drought and starvation in the horn of Africa (nothing is more relevant than this right now), the recent and current pestilence affecting our food grains, and the many other risks involved with planting only a monoculture of our most important crops. If they are wiped out by disease, our food is wiped out.

As Shanyn from SSE showed us in her photos, the Heritage Farm that they run in Iowa looks like a blissful counter-example to the dominance of commercial hybrid crops. I am dying to see it, myself. As Nabhan mentions of his visit, “Inch for inch, row for row, this was the single most diverse farm on the continent, and perhaps in the entire world.” Field trip, please! Their seed bank is technologically advanced, as Shanyn showed us, although not quite on the scale of the incredible Svalbard Global Seed Vault, near the North Pole. Also field trip?

Seeds are a precious store of energy for our bodies, too. We eat the seeds of wheat, ground into flour and baked into our bread. Beans and other legumes are seeds, incredibly dense sources of protein. Seeds, from where many of our oils are pressed, are often plentiful with energy-rich fats, where lipophilic toxins such as pesticides and herbicides are stored.  So, as if there isn’t enough to think about when it comes to the wild world of seeds, organic oils are the safest bet to not ingest the poisons that are liberally applied to conventional oil crops.

Oh dear. I could go on about how delicious coriander seeds are and easy to save from your own cilantro plants. Or, about the ingenuity of plants and their seed-dispersal mechanisms (dandelion fluff! shot weed [the seeds, literally, "shoot" out]! whirlgigs from oak trees!) But so many places are doing a fantastic job at making good quality, regional-specific seeds available to us, that they are a much better source of knowledge than I. It’s all the places where that knowledge is dwindling that are the real concern, where input-intensive high-yield GMO or hybrid seeds are being touted as the only solution to hunger and starvation. I wonder if there is enough happening to harness all the vital local knowledge (and seeds!), everywhere, before mono-crops win out.

www.seedsavers.org/

So this pesto was everything in the fridge and on the window sill, pulsed together before leaving for a mini-vacation. I mean, not everything; there is no sweet chili sauce (oh that sounds good!) or Sweet & Sara marshmallows (although I wish there were…). Just two kinds of basil, parsley, mint, marjoram, oregano, tarragon, garlic galore, almonds, pecans, and pistachios. Sea salt and olive oil binds it together.

It was mixed with warm rotelle and kamut pasta (!! again, using up the contents of the cupboards) and served with beet greens and marinated tofu.

Please note that my backyard is resplendent in trumpet flowers.

Please also note that ALL ingredients of the pesto, minus olive oil and salt, were courtesy of my mother. Thank you for feeding me.

 Behold, the organic soil of Four Seasons farm in Maine – food for your eyes! Anyway, the BFA’s purpose is to research, inform, and guide farmers and gardeners in order to enrich their soil, and therefore enrich their crops. Of course, it’s not just a matter of slapping on some fertilizer and calling it a day. A symbiotic approach is urged, where the entire ideal environment for your crop is created, and the living soil system is continuously fed. Starting with the best seeds, inoculating with bacterial and fungal spores, using potting soil with high mineral sophistication, transplanting without shock, and continuing to monitor the health of your soil. There was even some mention of being in tune with vibrational frequencies!

I have to admit, the idea of having extremely healthy soil hadn’t really fomented in my mind. Composting, sure. I understood not having unhealthy soil (e.g. testing for lead). And surely you need soil that is properly aerated, appropriate pH, etc. But Kittredge described the process of growing and caring for your seedlings as if they were in early childhood development – because they are! – and being extremely attentive to soil health, watering, and a bit of coddling during this time to maximize the potential of the plant. That makes sense! And the benefits of continuous soil health are huge: many crops currently only absorb a tiny percentage of the minerals they could  contain, they are stunted, and tasteless. A good seed grown in a great soil system will not only be much healthier for us, but the plants themselves are much stronger and able to fight off pests through their complex carbs, proteins, and phytonutrients! Yaaaar!

All of this has implications for some of our greater social and environmental issues. Perhaps instead of focusing on greater yield-per-acre of crops to solve world hunger, the emphasis should be on more nutrient-dense produce that will provide longer lasting sustenance and combat malnutrition-related disease. And then the climatic benefits of healthy soil: carbon sequestration (unless you don’t think that’s a real thing), capturing runoff (and less fertilizer runoff to begin with), and sustainability of this important medium that sustains life on the planet. As I recently read – and finally tying it back into my blog title! – “Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.”*

The BFA also has a research project component wherein they want to develop a consumer handheld tool for quick analysis of produce in the supermarket, to determine their quality. Should be interesting to see what they come up with!

I’m looking forward to hearing more about the series of workshops that should be heading to Brooklyn, but in the meantime there’s loads of food for thought. More info on soil health can also be enjoyed through the very watchable documentary, “Dirt! The Movie.” I am just now probing the surface of the complex science behind soil. I have to admit, to me it’s still a little bit magical. But it’s under my fingernails…literally.. I should wash my hands!… and is a vital part of our ecology. So let’s learn a bit more!

*Brown, Lester R. “The New Geopolitics of Food” Foreign Policy, May/June 2011, p. 62. (I am too lazy to cite this correctly).