My Vegetarian Meals for a Month is far and away the most popular page on my blog (and the Vegetarian Meals for Another Month is also in the top 10). I’ve recently had some folks asking for some of my recipes that contain meat, which I’ve been cooking a lot more often now that I’ve discovered I’m allergic to almost all legumes. So I bring you the Omnivorous Menu for a Month! Some are the omni version of recipes in the veggie menus (e.g., stir-fries) and some are completely new (cabbage roll fry-up).

These menus also include recipes for making homemade stock from chicken, pork, and beef. However, you don’t need to make your own stock to use these recipes – in several places, I’ve included “super fast and easy” directions as well as “100% homemade” directions. Take your pick!

As per usual, there’s a mix of proteins, starches, and flavor families each week. This batch of recipes is pretty winter-oriented, it being January and all…lots of kale, potatoes, and tomatoes and not a cucumber or watermelon to be seen. Enjoy!

Meat/Omni Menu for a Month (download recipes as a PDF)

• General’s chicken
• *Salsa fry-up
• Dilled beets, apples, and potatoes
• *Meatball soup
• Cottage pie

WEEK 2

• Ginger-garlic stir-fry
• *Sausage, greens, and rice
• Stovetop paella
• Roast chicken with salt potatoes
• *Chicken enchiladas

WEEK 3

• Chicken stew with mashed potatoes
• Beef and broccoli
• Pork, apples, cabbage
• Roasted root vegetables
• *Homemade pizza

WEEK 4

• Cabbage roll fry-up
• *Pad Thai
• Posole
• *Something grilled with rice pilaf and veg
• Beef barley soup

* 30 minutes or less

I’m drawing up the schedule for the Ann Arbor group’s year of workshops, and would like your input. Would you take five minutes to answer this survey about topics for this year? Thanks!

Ben Sturtevant, from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, updated the list of seeds they get from Monsanto/Seminis. They now only get 21 varieties of seed from the Evil Empire.

I really appreciate the work Johnny’s does to breed their own varieties, avoid GMOs, and help me avoid buying from Monsanto, and I want to share that information widely. I’m afraid they got a bad rap when Barbara Kingsolver mentioned that Johnny’s sells Monsanto seeds – I don’t think Johnny’s deserves to be boycotted entirely, so I’m trying to get all the facts out there.

Here’s the updated list to avoid, as of Jan. 4, 2009:

103 SIERRA BLANCA onion
224 FREMONT cauliflower
240 HANSEL eggplant
241 GRETEL eggplant
568 BISCAYNE pepper
642 DULCE pepper
733 CELEBRITY tomatoes
2038 KING ARTHUR pepper
2063 BIG BEEF tomatoes
2212 PRIZEWINNER pumpkin
2260 FAIRY TALE eggplant
2309 X3R RED KNIGHT pepper
2365 ORANGE SMOOTHIE pumpkin
2368 PATTY GREEN TINT summer squash
2894 SERRANO DEL SOL pepper
2954 CHEDDAR cauliflower
2991 CANDY onion
122 BEAUFORT tomatoes
2794 GERONIMO tomatoes
2700 MAXIFORT tomatoes
2373 TRUST tomatoes

Rob (over at One Straw: Be The Change) had a great post last week about New Year’s Revolutions, and I am totally jumping on that bandwagon. His categories are re-localization, re-skilling, and re-building community. I might also add “reliance” to that – learning to trust your own skills to get you through.

What revolutionary acts am I committing myself to this year?

• Teaching through Preserving Traditions. This will include classes on food preservation and cooking. This year, we’ll do more intro canning classes, work days for preserving large batches of salsa and such, and also do some more work with animal products: chicken stock, butter, and probably cheese, too. This will address re-skilling and community in a big way.
• Make connections among the right people around a couple projects. Specifically, a local slaughterhouse and a gasifier project. I don’t think my place is in the middle of either project, but I may be able to connect a few dots.
• Start learning about large-scale cool storage of vegetables. To that end: build a root cellar and learn how to use it. I don’t know where this will go – helping others build home-scale cold storage or something on a larger commercial scale – but I need to start with getting a feel for the process. This will also give me a chance to finally learn some basic carpentry skills!
• Reduce fuel use and favor local fuels. To that end: use wood heat as much as possible and reduce propane use from 700 gallons of propane in 2008-09 to 400 gallons in 2009-10. (So far, we’ve saved about 150 gallons, I think. We usually have a fill-up around New Year’s Day of 330 gallons, and we’ve got 50% of our tank left.) I’d love to save more electricity, but I’m honestly not sure how to do that at this point. We’ve harvested all that low-hanging fruit!
• And on the gardening front, I will
  • build more compost. I’ve been slacking in this area, using compost mainly as a disposal system and resting on the fertile laurelsof newly-made garden beds. Time to step up my actual building of soil. First concrete step is to compost my existing garden beds with the compost I made last year. Second step is to build actual thoughtful, layered compost so I’ll have something to spread in the fall.
  • work on succession planting for peas, beans, broccoli, and kale to extend the fresh seasons of those crops
  • grow all my own kale, peas, onions, and potatoes for next year. More on that in an upcoming post…

Kate over at Living the Frugal Life asked the $64,000 question in her blog this week: just how many pounds of produce can one grow in a suburban lot? Some folks asked about how to track harvests, so I thought I’d post my system here. It’s overkill for most people, but here it is, and feel free to use what you like.

This is an expansion of my “insane crop planning spreadsheet.” Here’s how to use it:

• Sheet 1: Garden bed planning
  • Put in the length and width of each of your garden beds.
  • Put in your goals for what percentage of your garden you want to dedicate to legumes, grains, calorie crops, greens, and other. (These are defined on the spreadsheet).
  • Now start playing with percentages. What percentage of which bed will have which kind of crop? The spreadsheet will keep a running total against your goals, so you can easily see if you need more legumes, fewer tomatoes, etc.
• Sheet 2: Harvests <—This is the sheet that will be most useful to most people.
  • Each week has a space for the number of pounds of each crop harvested that week.
  • These are tallied automatically, and this data is carried forward to the next tabs.
  • I keep a copy of this printed out in my kitchen. When I harvest from the garden, I weigh it and note it on the chart. Then, a couple times a season, I tally everything up to date and input it into the spreadsheet. I find this much more convenient than booting up the computer each time I bring in a carrot.
• Sheet 3: Yields
  • This takes the total harvests recorded on the previous sheet and tallies up the total cash value of the crop.
  • Input your own values for each crop – either what you’d pay for them at market or what you could actually sell the crop for.
  • You can also put in the actual number of plants (or square feet) you planted and get a value-per-plant or value-per-square-foot figure.
• Sheet 4:  Calories per square foot
  • First, put in the number of people you’re growing for (M2). This will give you a target number of calories, based on just under 1 million calories per person per year.
  • Then put in the number of square feet you planted with each crop (column F). Or, use this more theoretically to see what you’d need to plant to provide enough calories for your target group.
  • As a default, the number of pounds of harvest per square foot is based off John Jeavon’s “How to Grow More Vegetables…” intensive raised bed system. Once you know how many pounds YOU harvest per 100 square feet, you’ll want to change the calculations to be working from your concrete numbers.

Download in Excel format

Share from Google Docs (save a copy to your own Google account)

I am so ticked off that Monsanto owns such a large proportion of the world’s food supply seeds (and then “retires” them) that I want to avoid buying seeds from them at all costs. This is especially difficult now that they’ve bought Seminis, one of the largest garden seed wholesalers in the world.

I know that my favorite seed supply company, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, does get some seeds from Seminis/Monsanto, and was worried I’d need to boycott them to avoid the real Evil Empire. But as it turns out, only 40 of Johnny’s varieties (4% of their stock) comes from Seminis, and they are actively working to replace those with seeds from other sources. That’s great, because they also breed their own plant varieties the old-fashioned way and support small growers/developers. The sell absolutely no GMO seed and the quality of their seeds is very, very good.

Tom Eickenberg at Johnny’s kindly listed for me every single seed variety they get from Seminis this year. It looks like peppers, tomatoes, and squash are the biggest things to watch out for. Here’s his message, and the complete list (after the cut):

Hello  Emily,

Thank  you for your email.  I have included a list of the Seminis varieties as an  attachment.

If I  can be of further assistance please do not hesitate to contact  me.

Sincerely,

Tom  Eickenberg

Customer Care  Representative

Johnny's Selected Seeds

See also their very thoughtful response to a customer letter about this at http://www.johnnyseeds.com/t-ownership.aspx .

Yesterday, in my post on local food, MK and Patty pointed out that if local eating is really going to take off, people need to know how to cook, and realize cooking isn’t necessarily more time-consuming than cooking from a box.

This got me thinking…what are foods that people could easily make at home, but think they can’t? The idea would be to have a series of cooking classes with the theme “Yes, you can cook it at home.”These things would ideally take no special equipment or hours of prep, and would replicate things that people think they “have to” buy because it’s way too hard to make them at home.

Here are some of my initial ideas:

• Chinese restaurant-style sauces (white, brown, sweet-and-sour, and spicy orange glaze)
• Crackers
• Pizza
• Fajitas
• Fish sticks & chicken nuggets
• French fries (oven fries)
• Lasagne

What else can you think of?

I was trying to figure out how to explain my local food preferences to someone whose only concerns about food are “cheap” and “easy.” I thought of this way of explaining it:

Everybody has certain things they are willing to pay for in food. You might be willing to pay more for convenience (pre-washed salad greens), for a particular flavor (those perfect ginger snaps from World Market), or tradition (must have Saunders Hot Fudge at Christmas). I am willing to pay more for food for two main reasons: preserving the environment and grocery insurance.

When I say I buy organic foods to “save the earth,” most people understand that well enough to be getting along with. I don’t like to pollute, I want to be nice to the plants and animals, I’m a tree-hugging liberal hippie freak and that’s just what they do, etc. I think it’s a little more nuanced than that – or perhaps not nuanced at all; I don’t think anyone should have to drink poisoned well water as a result of agriculture – but it’s close enough that I don’t feel a need to explain any further.

My preference for local food is a bit more complex. Yes, I want to keep my money in my community. Yes, it’s often fresher, and also organic (whether certified or not). But the real reason I do it is so my community will have something to eat thirty years from now.

Look, gas prices are going to continue to rise. At some point – and maybe that will be in ten years or thirty or fifty, but I’m sure I’ll see it in my lifetime – gas will hit such a price that we won’t be able to afford to truck products across the country. Not to mention the price of producing the beef in the first place, fed on irrigated, petrochemical-soaked corn. At some point, it will cost more to produce and ship a pound of hamburger from the Plains states than anyone is willing or able to pay for that hamburger – so Plains states farmers will produce less of it.

No problem. That’s when it will make financial sense to buy beef from the local farmer who raises her cattle on grass, right?

Wrong. Because if, up until that date, I refuse to pay a little more per pound for local grass-fed beef, my local cattle farmers will go out of business and probably sell their farms to developers because they can’t make a living farming. So not only will the farmer not be in business, the farm itself might be gone, too.

I am currently financially able to buy the majority of my groceries from local sources. I see it as my responsibility to do so, not just to support my local farmers, but to create conditions that will keep my local foodshed thriving so it is available to feed as many people as possible when the day comes when we really need it.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here. Think this argument will sway any WalMart devotees?

Found a great new blog this week at http://growthechange.blogspot.com/ by Canadian authors “Freija and Beringian Fritillary.” Guessing those aren’t real names, but wouldn’t it be awesome if they were? A few highlights:

• A knitted scarf/facemask for biking, which Kate should knit for Ken
• Recipe for making soymilk, plus what to do with the okara (soy pulp) when you’re done
• A review of harvesting grains by hand – why didn’t I think of a bread knife??
• …plus lots of great pictures, thoughts on sustainability, and essays of garden lore based on extensive observation (life cycle of their 4 types of ladybugs, fungal infections in the garden, etc.)

Also, Kate at Living the Frugal Life has inspired me to build a rocket stove – an outdoor stove built with very simple technology (bricks and a metal pipe) that will run on twigs. Paella, anyone?

R.I.P Gerald Martin

Hey, folks-

I may be blogging light for a few more days. We lost my father-in-law this morning after a long fight with cancer.

He was at peace with his decision to stop fighting, and we all knew it was time. We’ll be staying in Houston a bit longer to help out my mother-in-law, during which time you might not hear from me…or I might blog a ton just to have something else to think about once in a while.

Emily