If you read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the idea of global warming, and you know that it is going to have serious effects in the coming decades (see this image only if you want to be depressed). You may also know that scientists are suggesting there is a “point of no return” where we won’t be able to stop or reverse global warming. This point is usually described as a ratio of how much carbon (or more accurately, carbon equivalent[1]) is in the atmosphere. There’s some debate about the exact number, but somewhere between 300 ppm and 450 ppm is considered the “safer” level that will prevent the worst of the effects.

Individual people can have a lot of impact on the total CO2 emissions dumped into the atmosphere. The average American household dumps 18 tonnes of carbon equivalents into the air every year. The sustainable level of carbon emissions – that is, the level that every person in the world could emit and keep the greenhouse effect from worsening beyond the point of no return – is one tonne per person per year [source].

If that sounds like a pretty big drop, well…it is. There’s a group of folks who are committing to make that reduction within a year. They’re calling it the Riot4Austerity, and I take my hat off to them for their bold undertaking, and I hope to reduce my carbon to at least 75% below American average in the next 2 years.

But for me, right now, it’s just too much to change all at once. Anyone else out there feel the same way?

I wanted to come up with a more manageable “chunk” to whittle away at, and I wanted to know the relative merits of various actions. Take the bus for 45 minutes or drive 5 miles? Eat 100% local or go vegetarian? Give up the hair dryer or turn off the A/C? Give up my car, or airplane flights? If I can do one thing to reduce my footprint today, which thing should it be? If I can’t give up my car, how else can I make up the difference?

And so, I bring you the One Stone Carbon Challenge. The basic premise is simple: I’ve created a list of activities which produce, on average, one stone (14 lb) of carbon emissions. You choose activities that prevent 14 pounds of carbon equivalent from entering the atmosphere, and you mark one stone off this chart (200Kb PNG). When you’ve crossed off the 157 stones on the chart, you’ve prevented one tonne of carbon pollution.

I’m putting the detailed calculations on a static page, here, to prevent any further clogging of people’s feed readers.

So, let’s make this a formal Challenge, in best blogging fashion. The One Stone Carbon Challenge runs from now until May 1, 2009. Comment below and tell us:

1. That you’re participating
2. Your goal – how many stones will you reduce by May 1?
3. If you like, tell us your current carbon footprint, and at the end, recalculate your footprint and tell us the difference. Feel free to skip this if it sounds too much like a Weight Watchers weigh-in.

Feel free to snag the icon above to post on your blog, for thems what like badges.

I’ll check back in on May 1!

Here’s the recipe for the amazing breakfast we had last Saturday.

Beat together:

8 eggs
2c milk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1-2 tsp sugar

Slice a loaf of stollen into about 16 slices and put into shallow pans in one layer (or two, if you can’t help it). Pour the egg mixture on top, turning the slices over so they are completely coated. Heat a cast iron pan to medium heat and fry the slices until golden and the egg has cooked completely (even in the middle of the slices). You should notice them firming up noticeably as they finish cooking. Serve plain, or with powdered sugar or real maple syrup if you fear not the sugar shock!

I’m sure many of you know about Heifer International, which provides livestock and training to folks around the world (including the US). You can “give a gift of a flock of chickens” to a friend; your friend receives a card, and a family somewhere in the world gets the chickens.

Oxfam has a similar type of system, though their gifts include a wider range of items: not just livestock, but mosquito nets, school books, water pumps, and the like.

With both of these programs, you’re actually giving a cash donation to the organization to be distributed as need dictates. So, you’re not actually giving a hive of bees; you’re giving a cash donation roughly equivalent to the price of setting someone up with a hive of bees. In fact, your money might be used to buy five flocks of ducklings instead of a hive of bees.

I’m fine with this arrangement. The “gift” pretense makes it much more fun to personalize the gift to the recipient, and also gives the organization the latitude it needs to do its work. I trust that they will do good things with my donation; Charity Navigator gives Heifer 3 stars and Oxfam 4 stars.

I’m a fat captain. Are you with me?

A friend and I went strawberry picking this weekend, so Sunday arrived and I had to make jam…or expensive compost. I had planned to make freezer jam, as I’m feeling a bit lazy about the whole canning thing, but when I saw that freezer jam requires twice as much sugar as fruit, I was a little put off.

Then I discovered Harriet Fasenfest and Marge Braker’s Portland Preserve web site and their Small Batch Strawberry Jam. It’s a brilliant and simple recipe: 3 c. sliced strawberries, 1c. sugar, 2Tbl. lemon juice. You cook it in a skillet, and it makes about a pint. I put it up in half-pint jars, which hopefully won’t dry out before we eat them. I also followed their directions for inverting the sterilized jars, which will hopefully keep without refrigeration.

This recipe and method is perfect for me. We don’t eat a lot of jam, so I was perfectly happy to come away with five half-pints from the half-flat of berries I’d picked. And that was actually three different batches, so I got to play with the recipe some. The process felt manageable, too; I’d been dreading hours spent over the stove, five pounds of sugar used, and enough plain old strawberry to last us three years. This recipe is so do-able, I could see doing a batch from a quart of strawberries as the whim takes me during strawberry season, without feeling the need to mark off an entire weekend to pick, clean, cook, and can jam. Brilliant! Thanks, Harriet and Marge!

The first batch was straight strawberry. The second had candied, dried, and grated fresh ginger. The third batch – and I have no idea where this idea come from – had fresh rosemary (about 10 leaves) and sage (2 leaves) shredded and added in the last 3 minutes of cooking. Sample tastes suggest it’s going to be a fabulous flavor combination, especially with slow-risen wheat/rye bread.

And if you’re counting, this is local except for the lemon juice (actually, lime juice in my case) and ginger, because Pioneer and Penninsular beet sugars are grown and produced in Michigan’s thumb area. Strawberries were from Rowe’s U-Pick farm, and herbs came from the deck.

I just had a lovely belated Mother’s Day dinner with my mom, and I’m so excited by what she’s doing I had to share.

Mom and Dad run a bed and breakfast in Jonesville, Michigan, called the Rooms at Grayfield. The building is the 100+ year old Lakeshore and Michigan Southern railroad station that I grew up in – it was converted to a home in the mid-70s and the garage and most of the station converted to a B&B in 2005.

Mom cooks the gourmet breakfasts and also caters private parties. I have to brag a little about my mom…bragging and the local food connection after the jump…

Mom’s always been a great cook, but a long-time dream of hers was to study at a real cooking academy. She decided that when she retired from her job as a high school librarian, she would do just that.

Six months before retirement, she came down with a combination of health issues out of the blue that knocked her literally flat on her back for months. For a while, she thought she might have to change her plans, but no – that fall she set off to attend a six-month course at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Alone.

Now, Mom’s no rube, despite living most of her life in a town of 2000. But NYC is a pretty daunting proposition, even to someone in prime health. And at first, she was pretty daunted. The housing she had arranged through the school fell through (a blessing in disguise), but she found an efficiency apartment that she would eventually share with a friend who was doing a 6-week course. She has asked the rental agent if she would be able to cook dinner for six in the kitchen. The agent replied, “Yes, but they’ll have to come in one at a time to eat it.”

After no time at all, though, she settled into the big city routine. I’d call and ask what she’d done that day, and pretty soon, every explanation of where she was included the complicated combination of buses and subways she’d taken to get there. She walked miles every day, her health continued to improve, she carried a briefcase full of knives on the subway, she gave the young whippersnappers in her classes what-for, and oh, my, did she learn to cook. She was a very good cook before; now she is a great chef.

One of the things that tickles my fancy is that as Mom is seeking out the best ingredients she can find (and she roams far and wide looking for them!) she often finds the best ingredients are from the small farms right near Jonesville. She has local sources for organic milk and cream, fruits, vegetables, meat, and eggs. She has, on occasion, bartered fresh goat milk and cheesemaking classes for cooking classes she’s taught. She sources some prepared items, like cakes, from other local folks – mostly women, as it happens. Sometimes her demand outstrips local supply – but she delights in fresh, seasonal, regional foods, like the leg of lamb with wild leeks and asparagus she made for a party last spring.

So yes. I’m rambling on because she’s my mom, but I’d write this article about her even if I’d just found her in the phone book. If you’re looking for a great weekend getaway in southern Michigan, or if you’re celebrating a special occasion in the area, do look them up. You’ll not only have a wonderful night’s stay in a gorgeous B&B, you’ll have amazing food – simple or fancy, and made to order – that you can feel good about.

By now, you’ve probably heard the reports that Americans are going hungry. In Michigan one in EIGHT people currently receives food stamps – twice as many as in 2000. Mostly, it’s related to fuel prices, directly or indirectly, and the rising cost of food, which is related to fuel prices and the push to grow corn to put in our gas tanks. I’m going to leave off the rant about these “whys” for now and get back to the bit about people going hungry.

These are not bad people or stupid people. They’re just hungry. Groceries – and especially healthy foods – somehow seem “optional” when the mortgage man suddenly asks for another $200/month and it now costs you a day’s wages to drive to work each week.

So what are we going to do to help? Our money’s not going as far these days, either, so it’s hard to find cash for charity. But most of the people who read this blog have a garden, right? I say we all Plant a Row for the Hungry. This project was started several years ago by members of the Garden Writer’s Association, and now has branches all over the US. The idea is simple: when you’re planning your garden, plant an extra row of crops destined for a local food shelter. It’s not that much more work for you (and gardening is fun, right?) and someone else gets to take vegetables home from the food bank instead of Mac-n-cheese.

In Ann Arbor, take your food to Food Gatherers (directions). This is the central clearinghouse for literally hundreds of non-profit food-distribution agencies in Washtenaw county – and something like 120 of them have the facilities to handle fresh produce. Growing Hope in Ypsilanti has a strong partnership with both Plant-a-Row and Food Gatherers. If you’re in the Detroit/SE Michigan area, I believe Gleaners Community Food Bank takes produce. Folks in other areas – if you’d like to list your local food banks that take produce, you can do so here in the comments.

Plan to plant crops that are nutrient-dense and easy to transport: hard squash (like butternut), potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, greens (kale, collards, chard), carrots, peppers, beets, green beans, and apples. Tomatoes, alas, are too squishy and zucchini aren’t all *that* nutritious, so they are not preferred…thought I doubt they’d turn it down completely.

I’m setting a goal of 500 lb. of food to go to Food Gatherers this year. Ok, close your slack jaws and listen to my reasoning here: I grew 65 lb of butternut squash from 4 plants on about 12 sf of dirt last year. (The vines ran out of the raised beds for quite a distance, but they didn’t take up more than half of one of my smallest garden beds). And that included eating an equal number of squash at an immature stage because I didn’t know what I was going to do with all that squash. So I’ll plant four butternut plants, let that all grow to maturity, let me keep a few, and I should be able to clear 100 lb of squash to the food bank.

I’ll also grow chard again, which is beautiful, but I can’t eat nearly as much as I grow in just 3-4 plants. Another good candidate! If I harvest it regularly, it’ll just pump out more leaves. Even though it’s light, I bet I can easily grow dozens of pounds of it. I’m also planting oh-my-god pole beans this year, about 30 square feet on *proper* supports. I figure my yields could easily triple from last year, when I grew only bush beans. So perhaps another 50 lb there.

But the other big-weight item will be apples. It’s my mission to “rescue” a couple hundred pounds of apples from trees in my neighborhood this summer and fall. I can think of half a dozen apple trees within half a mile of me – and another half-dozen in one yard across town, and I don’t think any of them really get harvested. Even without treatment, there have to be *some* good apples on these trees, and I plan to approach homeowners to see if they’ll let me harvest them and get them into the hands of people who need them. This is a big wildcard – how many unblemished apples will I realistically be able to pick? Maybe not 350 lb…but maybe so. That’s only 7-8 bushels, so that’s where I’m setting my goal.

And who knows…maybe this year I’ll finally plant a “tower” of potatoes. Supposedly you can grow 100lb of potatoes in a 4′ cube (hmm, old packing pallets?) and I’m going to be ordering dirt this year so I’ll finally have something to fill the cube with…

Ahem. So we’ve established that I’m crazy serious about feeding people. You don’t need to sign on for anything like these quantities…but will you sign on? Who’s with me to do this one thing: to grow an extra bit of something and take it to the food bank? Set yourself a goal, in servings perhaps. How many servings of vegetables do you think you could spare this year?

Looking for a simple tool to plan a square-foot garden? Try my new drag-and-drop garden planner! You’ll need the latest Flash plugin for your browser. Each plant icon shows several phases of growth (optimized for US zones 5-6):

• The colored dots show you how many to plant in one square foot. So, one eggplant per square foot, four lettuce plants, or sixteen carrots. The garden bed ix 4′x4′.
• Click on each month to see what stage of growth the plants should have. When you see the seeds, for example, it’s time to plant the seeds out in the garden.
• Most plants keep growing until October…though that will vary depending on when you get your first frost, and whether you cover your plants or not.

Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome!

This was going to be a tale of two breads, made by two strikingly different methods, but after tasting the results, there’s really only one bread to talk about. This one.

I can’t express my excitement about this bread adequately. All the bread I’ve ever made by hand was dense and heavy, with a crunchy crust that almost got in the way. This, on the other hand, has a nice open crumb, an elastic texture, and a crisp, crackly crust. The first one was with all white flour (actually “Gold-n-wheat” flour, which has germ but no bran or some such intermediary between white and whole wheat flour). The second loaf had some whole wheat and rye flour, plus a splash of olive oil. Freakin’ amazing, is all I can say.

Another neat aspect of this is that it makes use of some other food prep gear I procured in recent months: the muslin I originally got for cheesemaking, and the cast iron pot I got for making stew…that’s actually too small to cook much stew.

And did I mention the part where this takes about three minutes of actual work?

Also on the list next time I’m in Kansas: Local Burger in Lawrence. Read the story at Ethicurean.com and see their web site! Anyone for a pastured elkburger with a side of homemade cinnamon applesauce? And if you have a wee one, they’ll blend their organic peas and carrots side into a baby-friendly puree and serve it at the table.

Anyone in the area – especially who’s made a resolution lately to try new restaurants – should totally check it out…and bring me a pack of their homemade veggie burgers…