the wooden bowl

Besides my all consuming bag passion, I have a new and present love. One i have been meaning to indulge for a while but never found what i was looking for, at a price i was willing to pay, nor with wood i was willing to purchase. Since experiencing the pleasures of eating from wooden plates and dishes at my sister in laws house in the epi-centre of hippieville in Marin county, i have harboured my own secret desire to emulate this luscious and rather medieval experience, in the comfort of my own home. Something about curling up with a wooden bowl filled with organic fare really appeals to the earthy, primitive me. I like to couple my wooden bowl experience with a wooden handled fork...as we dont eat slabs of meat we rarely use knives, so a fork and bowl does fine for curry, pasta and rice. I didnt buy much in Bali, but i did come home with 10 of these coconut wood bowls filling my suitcase. Beautiful, organic, sustainable, emminently ethicurean. Its the small things that make me happy.

Haiku Friday

hauled from the cellar;
summer pomme. Frozen berries
found. Crumble and cream.

cloth produce bags

I have to admit to having a love affair with these and if only I had a dollar for how many times I have been asked where i got them when Im out shopping. I really hate admitting I that "i got them in California" . I feel a bit sheepish, a bit of a toseer and extremely unhelpful. I have spent countless hours and nights searching online for a wholesaler in India or China who makes such bags with fair trade labour from bamboo, hemp or organic cotton. I do that coz i cant find them anywhere for sale here in Oz.


These fine gauze bags meet all my requirements; they feel wonderful and soft to use, theyre washable and are the perfect answer to plastic single use fruit and veg bags that all the shops still offer, despite the big plastic bag ban. As they are made from fine fabric they store easily in the fridge without needing to remove the fruit or vege and also absorb excess moisture, keeping food fresher for longer. Additionally, they are multipurpose and can be used for grains and flours; parachute (chico) style bags and mesh bags just dont let you do all of this with one small bag.

They feel right, they fall right, they look right.
Today I finally found a manufacturer in India which looks like they make the right bags with the right fabric and they print them up as well. My queries to all of you are, firstly,
a) if you saw these in a shop or at a stall, would you be interested in buying some? and
b) how much would you be prepared to pay for these? US retail price of these bags are 3.75 each, so say an Aussie equivalent of around $3.50-4.00 each.

The average, unorganised shopper for a family of 4 would need about 15-20 of these to do the shopping with no headache. What say you?

Stretch It- the container challenge

In lead up to World Environment Day i thought a challenge was in order. Inspired by the deliciously funny post by Katrina at Kale for Sale I thought that it's the kind of post i really love reading; amusing commentary on someones life challenge to step outside the comfort zone and do something a little unusual in the name of saving just a little bit of plastic stuff from its disposable lifecycle. Katrina writes about her self consciousness and inner musings as she walks the footpath with her big red plastic bowl to transport home her takeaway chicken.

The idea behind Stretch It is that by sharing ideas and experiences about how to generate some small changes, push the social boundaries, redefine the norms of acceptability which surround dispoable... we reduce our fear by encouraging interesting and amusing alternatives to food and goods transport, from supplier to home. This way we can share the humiliation and exhiliaration around and have a good laugh along the way. I find that knowing someone else is doing something, that i share the pain makes a challenging behaviour more palatable and I learn from the ingenious ideas that others have that i never thought of.

Not put off by the fact that its generally big gun bloggers who start challengers either, I thought why the hell not? we all have to start somewhere and i thought it was a great way to showcase everyones small actions and attempts and foibles at reducing superflous plastic consumption.

Write a post on what you do thats a stretch to your comfort zone, ouside the norm or about something thats been bothering you and some alternatives you've been pondering which you might challenge yourself to do...take a tub to the cheese shop and buy off the wheel, use the wheelbarrow instead of the car, take your ceramic cup to the upmarket coffee shop, whatever and link back here!

Lets Stretch It

so they look awful...

but they taste and smell divine. What to do with an excess of wild mushroom after you've given kilos away and eaten as many fresh as you can? You dry them. Perfect for soup, stock and risotto. 4kgs of mushroom now rest in a 8ooml jar after spending the night on trays on the wood heater.

Here's an excerpt from a piece on 'Hunting' in the Adelaide Review by Roger Haden, Gastronomy lecturer at Adelaide University.

"Over the years, wild fungi have had a bad rap, while the white button version known as “the cultivated mushroom” (Agaricus bisporus) has become the mono-cultural mushroom of choice. Now, thankfully, the meatier “large flat” and the more fragrant Swiss Brown have appeared on the scene. Yet nothing commercially grown comes close to the variety of flavour and texture of the wild species. The “piney” flavour of the very common Saffron Milk Cap (Lactarius delisiosus), which grows plentifully under older stands of pine trees, is indeed delicious (it’s the most popular wild mushroom eaten in Catalonia).


Once you’ve been on a hunt with a mushroom fanatic you’ll see how easily recognisable the edible varieties are. Moreover, what great fun it is to forage after this sometimes elusive prey. After a good shower of rain at this time of year, the fungi emerge in all their glory".

The adventure continues.
Im very addicted to this new behaviour. What is incredible is that we have discovered a very public place where the mushrooms are growing but no one else is picking them. Thousand of them, all walked past, kicked over, squashed underfoot. The damn things sell for $30 kg in the markets!
Crazy.

Pandemic preparedness

As an epidemiologist i have to confess to finding an emerging pandemic quite a fascinating occourrence. However as a planet member, I know that the destruction which a virus can wreak on the population is devastating.

The emergence of any zoonosis is a worying thing. The transfer of a virus from one species to another is quite a rare event and flus are particularly problematic as they mutate very quickly, making treatment tricky. By the time the scientists have developed a vaccine for one flu strain, its mutated to another and being a socially transferred illness, it spreads quickly. So flu shots are rarely beneficial unless youre a medico in a hospital and get exposed to many strains at an intensive level.

So when the Queensland Chief Medical Officer yesterday advised members of that state to start stockpiling food and was promptly contradicted by the Federal Health Minister i wondered what was going on, thinking that some 'other' pressure must have been at work to make Ms Roxon object to such a simple suggestion.
I came upon an interesting article from the food industry which i believe explained MS Roxons 'dont panic' response. This article on food supply shows that Australias urban food supply is one of the most vulnerable in the world. Our reliance upon 2 big guns in food distribution who at best are shown to have only 3 days supply on their shelves, without panic purchasing, and 80% of Aussies get all their food from these distributors. I found this incredible and rather worrysome.

Another article which was very interesting from the Medical Journal of Australia was 'the food lifeboat developed by Sydney University which details energy requirements and energy allowances for general non perishable foodstuff which we should all have in stock in case of a major disaster of any kind. The biggest danger is probably panic buying if you rely on supermarket food! Its an easy to follow read and really quite interesting.

Now Im not one to run around shouting 'the sky is falling' and I think the international response to this emerging flu strain has been incredibly efficient and well co-ordinated and I dont actually percieve a level 6 pandemic being declared due to the diseases timeline. However i am relieved to know that we have just over 2 months food stock in the pantry, just as a matter of intellectual and practical interest.

a comment on crunchy food waste

Here was Crunchys report from yesterday on the final week of her no food waste challenge.

1 cup sour cream
12 oz buttermilk
3 jalapenos
1 cup salsa
3 heads of broccoli
1/2 cup black olives
1 head lettuce
1 lemon
1/3 onion
1 cup basil

Im not sure if it sacreligious to pass comment on Crunchy or not, but im doing it anyway. This just needed a comment from me as her role as a 'big gun' in blog land. Now people can fail, im not expecting perfection ( am i?) but this was pretty huge and for all her commentary and knowledge and committment im surprised. Most of that stuff could have gone in the freezer and Im sorry, well, wasting a whole cup of basil...just criminal! I suspect it may have something to do with the size of standard domestic American fridges ( you can get lost in those things!) The last time i commented on her blog i got shot down in flames by her devotees so im doing it here! lol

Im shocked. For an eco-guru, that was a lot of food waste for a week.

intentional leftovers

we're a leftover lovin' family here at Chez Pan, its the main reason i bought the Pyrex, so we had a loving home and a display space to store and observe the delights that are leftovers! If we cook, we do extra... extra pasta, extra rice, extra noodle, extra dough, always with manana in mind. its evolved over the years mainly as the vegetaian B2 hates sandwiches and school lunch times (and home lunch times for that matter) began to cause stress. either she would toss the sandwich, bring it home but leave it in the bottom of the school bag or just plain refuse to take it. thats when i started to really take it on board; if i wanted her to eat during the day then she needed an alternative. I must say im a bit over sandwiches for lunch too. So we started making more of the nights dinner so she could take it for lunch and the habit spread. Now we fight over the stuff. yesterday it was the leftover dough to make englsih muffins to go with the eggs and tomatoes for breakfast and this morning we tucked into yesterdays plain rice as rice pudding for breakfast. Leftover pasta can bring the house down on a weekend. B1 made rice for lunch yesterday so last night before i went to bed i added milk so the brown rice could soak in a bit more liquid overnight and this morning added an egg, cinnamon and some maple syrup and zapped it in the microwave for a few minutes. Warm rice pudding for breakfast. YUM.

Whats your favourite leftover??

root cellar

Well the wine cellar is officially holding its first root crop...umm how big does your loot have to be before you can call it a crop? Yesterday, after work, i took the bean into the garden, hung him from an apple tree and pulled the up smallest planting of carrots. This is what i ended up with after removing all the imperfect ones which are in the fridge ready to be eaten; a motley crew of knobbly heirloom roots. I am leaving the bigger sowing for another week or two, making sure i leave some of the big, non bolters to collect their seed for next year.

We have been pulling carrots for weeks and they are sweet and juicy, nothing bland or woody yet, so im pleased for my first ever carrot experience. So the first 'crop' has been cleaned, sorted to remove potential spoilers (carrots with splits, small holes or broken ones), dried and lain out on paper on trays and ready to be eaten.

Next up, beetroot and apples. Any suggestions for storing these?