Cabbie Gardens

Big, yellow blossoms drew my attention to a plant at the Beacon train station recently. It's sort of miraculous for me to notice anything at the train station, since I'm there not-yet-awake in the very early morning, and dog tired after dark. So let's just say they were bright, miraculous blooms.

I kept watching this particular plant, and grew more interested when it became clear that it was a) a cantaloupe; and b) thriving. I had designs on one of the huge fruits I saw growing there, but realized it must belong to someone: someone must be tending it. That was confirmed when the biggest of the fruits was one day intentionally "hidden" by a clump of dead grass.

I had a chat with Raphael of Raphael Taxi this morning. You see, this particular plant is right by where all the cabbies line up to vie for fares when travelers get off the train. Yup, this plant (and the several others Raphael pointed out to me) are planted and nurtured by the cab drivers. They're particularly proud of that watermelon sized fruit that caught my eye.

It's exciting to see that people all over Beacon are claiming unused space to grow food!

Beacon Live

Easing the transition from Northeast of Brazil to Northeast U.S. is the brand spanking new raw restaurant that opened last weekend in Beacon!

I've already had juices, a wrap, and a truffle, and plan to frequent this place. Back in its day, Juicy tried to feed Beacon's vegetarians and health conscious folk, and since it closed, left us with years of carnivorous-only restaurants. Welcome to town Superfood Citizen Cafe! We've been waiting for you...

Tropical Fruit

I'm sorry to be a wimp, but, it's cold here in the mornings. I know it's all springy and pretty and the cherry trees are blossoming early and you can get away with leaving a window cracked over night. But when you've just come from a praia next to a turquoise ocean in América do Sul, forty five degrees is downright frosty. Um, and where's my fruit? With Brazil's delicious heat comes delicious food, and now I am very spoiled. Blog readers will know there's a slight fruit obsession round these parts.

Mornings in the Northeast of Brazil went something like this:

• Wake to sounds of saguim whistling and carambola hitting the ground.
  
• Open shutters and gaze at mamão tree to see if any are ripe yet.
  
• Pull on shorts and put coffee on to brew. Wander out in bare feet to say good morning to monkeys.
  
• Putter through the neighborhood chatting with said monkeys, picking and eating azeitona, pitanga, and acerola.
  
• Marvel at the size of the jaca fruit. Some are as big as toddlers, I swear!
  
• Imagine I might actually see a sloth someday (preguiça).
  
• Pick and take home huge abacate that needs time off the tree to ripen, and pick up small, fallen manga for a snack later.
  
• Collect carambola that have dropped overnight, and eat them whole on the porch with a cup of coffee.
  
• Decide to go to the beach.
  
• Curse at yet another truck that says "100% Jesus." Declare yourself 100% pansy, 100% monkey-lover, 100% bummed that evangelicalism has colonized the Brazilian mind.
  
• Smell roasting castanha along the road, slam on brakes and buy a bag.
  
• Swim and lounge. Buy abacaxi and boiled amendoim from vendors when hungry. Drink coco, which is a fresh coconut with a straw in it. No container necessary.
  
• Visit farmers market on the way home.

You can see why waking up without access to bananas, to graviolas, to maracujá, would feel like a morning lived, well, not quite as well. Yes, there are down sides: my gringa skin is peeling off in great sheets and....that's all I can come up with for downsides. I'm making an effort to get back into the rhythm here. I'll do what we do in the Northeast of the U.S. in spring: wear flip flops with sweaters, enjoy flowers and seedlings and the appearance of leaves, eat the first edible weeds of the year (dandelions, garlic mustard, spring onions, fiddleheads), and watch for the emergence of all the pawpaw trees planted last summer. Soon we'll be ankle deep in juneberries and mulberries, and I'll wander around the yard barefooted talking with the cats and eating off the trees. I can't wait!

Bottle Trees

Here's a tree you can "grow" outdoors in deep winter, and one that conveniently traps bad spirits.

VD Present Perfect

I just got a sweet valentine in the mail from my sis'. She must've noticed the wintergreens kitchen towel craze, or be tuned into my brain vibrations from across the country, because she sent me a hand printed tea towel from The Heated (a lesbi-printi-furnituremaki-musician, apparently) featuring one of my favorite animals, the ratbird. Al, how'd you know it's what I've always wanted?

This leads me to wonder, what are the ideal ways I can think of to show love this VD?

There's always gifting: burning the hell out of someone you love's mouth with the Vegan de Guadalupe Cookzine; getting the garden started with a set of artpacks from Hudson Valley Seed Library.Or you could go deeper, my friends, much deeper. You can buy revolutionary versions of good ol' valentine standbys at the Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti. Better yet, bring your sweetie to the sale, and fill a box with their favorites.

No sweetie? No problem. Bring your dog, your neighbor, or someone you just picked up in a dimly lit bar and come hang with us. Let your pocket change help people who really need it. Now that's showing the love.

Ice Cracker

At the market the other day, someone walked out onto the ice on the river, with a kid trailing behind. It was a controversial move—just hearing about it made me unable to breathe.

The week before, someone had seen a fox way out on the river ice, in the middle of the day. What was that fox doing? Fishing? looking for birds? for fresh water?

The ice on the Hudson River holds my attention and imagination every winter. I think of my grandma ice fishing in a little shack in Minnesota; of the woman I met in Hudson (the town) running across the icy Hudson (the river) every morning to the factory where she worked, scared of the cracking and groaning, but crossing nonetheless; of the scene in The Shipping News when the house is dragged across the sea-ice from an island to the mainland of Newfoundland's coast, and cabled there to keep from blowing away; of stories of my dad delivering ice, huge cubes, lifted with big, sharp tongs. And current events, too: the Newburgh-Beacon Ferry being unable to cross the river; bald eagle and seal sightings; dogs and men falling through the ice and drowning in Central Park.At a dinner party a few nights ago people were talking about harvesting river ice, and keeping it in sawdust to use in iceboxes the following summer. Indeed, harvesting river ice used to be a major industry in the Hudson Valley. I don't know about the big tongs, or the conveyor belts of huge cubes, but we could notice this ice, this snow, and use this natural resource locally, on a small scale.

I did live in a New J. apartment for a winter with no refrigerator, and hung my food out the second story windows in bags to keep cold. That, and floating a six pack in a stream, are the closest I've come to using winter for cold storage, but I'm thinking on it. The wintergreens root cellar half counts, since it's moderated at an above-freezing temperature.*Photos courtesy of Boat Nerd, China Daily, and Tessa Lau.

Wild Food & Wild People in San Fran

My little heart is warmed by the great outpouring of people working on the Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti. And still, just for a moment, I'm wishing I were in San Francisco.

That's because of the San Francisco Underground Farmer's Market, where food gatherers and producers who aren't certified and who don't work in commercial kitchens can offer their wares for a suggested donation. I'd love to cut out all the extra costs and let people pay what they think an item is worth!

The underground market was brainchild of Iso Rabins, a wild forager, and the founder of ForageSF, who run a "CSF" or Community Supported Foraging. Wouldn't you love to get a wild distribution as beautiful as the box pictured?

Taste of Home

I've been trying to set up this book recommendation thingie, which isn't working because I'm having trouble with the blog settings tool. I tell you this because I keep thinking of interesting books to include. Today it's Foods of the Americas. Like many books I recommend, it's not vegan or vegetarian, but acts as a starting point, ideas for flavor combinations, and different uses for foods you thought you knew how to use. Most cookbooks I'm interested in have something besides recipes to offer, and that is the case here.

I was happy to look through this book which I hadn't cracked in the past year, to think about ways to use ingredients like espazote and masa and annato and hominy that taste like home to me, and new ones, like cattail flour. Because this book is about native recipes, and native people, I'm forced to think about MY HOME, Arizona, not really being mine, and that thinking is interesting combined with very familiar smelling and tasting food. Yes, I can smell and taste just by reading. So there. There is overlap, and influence both ways. Some reviewers of this book have complained that the recipes have been altered to be "too white," which I think in this case meant able to be understood and used by the average non-native reader. Indeed, the Smithsonian was involved in the project . . . it's bound to be a little more sociological and a little less "authentic." And the Americas are kind of large get a taste of. What makes Vegan with a Vengeance, for example, such a great cookbook is not the recipes, but the context, and that is true here, though here it's many contexts. (I know, I used a wildly different book as an example, but you can think of Isa's cat Fizzle giving you Brooklyn junk store tool tips, and understand what I mean. It gives you something to think about, and play with.)

I used to go tamale hunting around Christmas in front of Safeway stores. Women would make huge batches and sell them out of shopping carts in grocery parking lots before the holiday. The trick for me was chatting up enough ladies to find one who was traditional enough to be making shopping carts full of tamales at Christmas, but nouveau enough to do it without lard, or manteca.
This year, I didn't need to hang out in parking lots, because Tucson Tamale has opened, uses only vegetable oil, and were selling tamales (and very good salsa) at the farmer's market. It's like living in a gentrified neighborhood: you're glad for easy access to good coffee, but you worry after all the old neighborhood characters who begin to disappear. Where will everybody go? Tucson Tamale took me one step further away from a familiar culture. Foods of the Americas takes me the other way, one step closer.

It's frightening to think that the shopping cart tamale women might only ever appear on book pages from now on.

While we're on the topic of "this land is not my land," see two interesting tidbits:
1) The work of No More Deaths, activists who leave water out in the desert for border crossers who find themselves in dangerous situations. It was heartening to find signs supporting them in front of many houses and businesses in Tucson this winter.
2) The closing of Arizona's state parks.

*Lostmissing, in picture two, is a project of my dear friend, mattilda, for all the things and animals and people who go missing.

Summer in Snow

Today's predicted "late afternoon rain" is turning out to be thick, wet, snowfall. Some days you have to pretend: sweat it out in the steam room at the gym imagining you're in the tropics, or wear too few clothes while sitting close to the wood stove and eating summery foods. Let's think warm thoughts, shall we?

Here are some warm places I go back to in my head: making friends with a sweet dog in Buenos Aires, Argentina; driving to a faraway beach outside Recife, Brazil; checking out purple prickly pear cacti while wandering around San Xavier Mission outside Tucson, Arizona. All this mind travel is helped by eating one of my favorite summer foods, summer rolls.


Summer Rolls with Spicy Peanut Sauce

There's not really a real recipe for the rolls, but I'll tell you my favorite things to wrap up in rice wrappers:

• rice sticks - Make sure not to get bean thread, cuz it's a bit slimy. The rice sticks give the roll good texture.
  
• matchstick carrots
  
• matchstick red pepper
  
• matchstick cucumbers
  
• matchstick scallions
  
• fresh mint leaves
  
• shaved fresh ginger
  
• crunchy lettuce leaves

Cook the rice sticks according to the instrucs on the package (not very long). Drain. Don't worry about making extra—you can always eat them on top of salad with sesame dressing. Ditto for any extra chopped veggies.

Heat up a large frying pan of water, then turn off the fire. Soak a wrapper in the warm water until pliable (also not very long). Drain. On a cutting board or clean surface, put in some of each herb and veggie and a little portion of rice stick & roll up like a burrito. I like to put the colorful stuff on the outside, to show through the skin. I put a couple colorful pieces down first, then a lettuce leaf which will cradle and contain the rest of the ingredients, making it easier to roll. Your first few will look wonky, but you'll get the hang of it! Pretty soon you'll be dazzling your friends at parties, preferably parties on a beach or near a campfire.

There are zillions of variations on these rolls. I particularly like the scallion/ginger/mint interaction, but if you've got cilantro, go with that, get rid of the mint and ginger, pump up the scallion and red pepper, and include avocado or a little bit of spicy guacamole. A lot of people put in baked tofu or replace the lettuce with spinach. You get the drill: take what you've got and put in a rice wrapper!

Here's the sauce, which there is a recipe for:

• 1/4 c soy sauce
  
• 1/8 c brown rice vinegar
  
• 1/3 c warm water
  
• 1 Tbsp maple syrup
  
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
  
• 1 inch piece fresh ginger, minced
  
• 2/3 c chunky peanut butter
  
• 2 Tbsp toasted sesame seed oil
  
• 1/2 tsp paprika
  
• 1-2 teaspoons hot pepper sauce, or more to taste

Use the warm water to soften and blend the peanut butter. Once blended add other ingredients. Best at room temperature.

Desert Food

Someone at the market said they thought I'd be bummed living in the desert, because there wouldn't be any local food. Hogwash! Or, more appropriately, javelinawash! The food literally grows on trees...










A taste of the Sonoran desert includes (in order of appearance) pomegranates, mesquite, saguaro fruit, prickly pear tunas, pecans, kumquats, grapefruits, dates, and olives. Swap Meet vendors had the beds of pickup trucks overflowing with oranges and lemons.

Thanks to The Firefly Forest for the saguaro fruit picture. Check out that blog to see beautiful bats eating from a hummingbird feeder.

Eat the New Year

Whether you're eating black eyed peas in Hoppin' John, eating grapes or sauerkraut for a cleanse, or trying to swallow a long noodle without breaking it, celebrating New Year's Day with foods that are superstitious or traditional, depending on how you look at it, can't hurt!Here's a recipe for veggie Hoppin' John:

• 1 cup dried black-eyed peas
  
• 6 garlic cloves, divided
  
• 1 dried hot pepper
  
• 1 bay leaf
  
• 1 c uncooked brown rice
  
• 2 c vegetable oil
  
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
  
• 1 large onion, chopped
  
• 1 jalapeño pepper, chopped
  
• 3 celery ribs, chopped
  
• 1 big bunch collard greens, large ribs discarded and leaves sliced into thin ribbons
  
• Juice of 1 lemon
  
• Sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Soak peas in cold water for 4 hours or overnight. Drain. In a large pot, bring 3 cups of water to boil over high heat. Add peas, 2 whole garlic cloves, hot pepper and bay leaf. Skim off any floating peas. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until peas are tender but not mush, about 1 1/2 hours.

Add brown rice and broth to pot. Cover and simmer 20 minutes. Turn off the heat, but leave the pot on the burner.

Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, jalapeño, celery and the remaining 4 garlic cloves, chopped. Sauté for about 5 minutes, stirring, until the vegetables soften. Reduce heat to medium. Add greens by the handful, and cook until wilted, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. Fluff rice and beans. Remove whole garlic, dried pepper and bay leaf. Stir in collard mixture, lemon juice and salt and pepper. Makes 6 servings.

Have a happy new year!

*Please note, no feet or rubber boots were used in the making of your sauerkraut. However, happy older people may have enjoyed themselves while pounding.

Figs and Other Fruits I Don't Have

2009 is the year my fig tree died. It was given to me as a gift many years earlier, because I love the fruit and also love those big floppy elephant ear leaves. I think fondly of the short and stout fig tree that grew in my backyard "on base" (Davis Monthan Air Force Base, that is) when I was kid. It was a grand climbing tree, for me, since I'm scared of heights and was terrible at climbing trees. It thrived there, with no t.l.c.

I still don't know what I did wrong with my coddled fig: it survived last winter (pouting) indoors, by a cold, drafty window with a lot of southern light. She'd shed all her leaves in a tantrum in about March, and then come back strong. Soon after she made the transition to the porch in May, she up and died.

I work in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I've spotted several figs there that fruit year after year. I made friends with some of the neighbors, and helped them pick the fruit this year and planned to use some figs for the C.S.A. We decided that their cool cellar was a good place for storing them. I'd checked in a couple times, and they were holding up just fine. When I stopped by this week, I was told they all had recently spoiled. I'd waited one distribution too long, thinking because of the association of figgy pudding with Christmas, that these delicate fruits would last until the end of the month/year/decade. This lack of judgment goes in the annals of failures and mistakes.

Because of losing my fig tree, losing the figs harvested in Brooklyn, and having missed Southern Arizona's fig season, I'm taking this opportunity to pout about fruits I don't have.
Oh yeah, 'tis the season for want-want-want, so let's start with hardy kiwis. I'm reading the kiwi (a.k.a. Actinidia) chapter in Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden. Reading about them and their edible skins and their pop-in-your-mouth deliciousness is making my mouth water. Oh, I have plans to plant them, on a side of my house that needs its ugliness covered by pretty plants, where there's enough room for them to grow like crazy, as it seems they do, and in a place with lots of sunshine. But I have to build mega support for the vines, and house projects tend to back up around here. People get distracted by starting up C.S.A.s, by pickling for farm markets, by train commuting to paying jobs. Thus, walls that are halfway torn down stay only halfway torn down. So, though I feel very determined to get these kiwis going (soon, soon), I wish planting them were going to be as easy as walking down a shady road where the mowers never come and shoving pawpaw seeds one inch under the soil, all along that road.
So, even though I was just complaining about the California Rare Fruit Growers teasing me, part of me suspects I should turn my mid-winter fruit blues toward fruits I can't grow. Just look at them, pet the pages, drool, dream, and move on. (This month's mag features kumquats, which I will be eating in four days. But last month's cover showed Ecuadorian mystery fruits.) What fruits will 2010 bring?

Homeward Bound

One week from today I'll be sniffing desert air. Yep, I'm going to be a tourist in my own hometown, because I've been away too long. I'll be checking out the sites (bat caves!), eating Mexican food that tastes like Mexican food, taking long walks in the desert (secretly looking for jackrabbits and javelinas), and seeking out all of Tucson's local food. I've been reading Tucson bloggers and bloggers headed for Tucson in preparation. Tucson farmer's markets, here I come!

What's in season foodwise in the Sonoran Desert right now? Olives. Citrus. (Oranges and grapefruits and lemons and tangelos and kumquats, oh my!) Pecan, oh, pecans.

I've missed some things, too, like chiles, nopales, prickly pear tuna, and pomegranates, but maybe just maybe I'll find preserves. I've also missed the season of organized mesquite millings, but know I can still get my hands on some mesquite flour to give it a try. It's a little silly to think I have to taste my way through my visit, but fresh orange juice and green chile tamales won't make terrible guides.

Last time in Tucson I attended an animal rights demo, and ended up at Earth First! HQ having dinner and stuffing envelopes with my eighties activist hero, Rod Coronado. Who knows what this visit will hold? Except, of course, plenty of gorgeous food, gorgeous scenery, and gorgeous weather. And that smell...

Beets, the New Eco Graffiti Tool

I'm a fan of some of the illegal arts. I get, grudgingly, that gorgeous, bright colors of spray paint and mop markers are toxic. That's what makes moss graffiti, botanigrams, clean tagging (literally erasing grime), and other, newer forms of graffiti interesting.
As if beets aren't delightful enough, their gorgeous color calls out for brine reuse. And there are uses. If you're not drinking it as a tonic, or dyeing paper, clothes, or food with it, consider beet tagging.
Note that it does take some practice to get both your method and message right. Consider this grossness:
While you're practicing, why not be digesting this lovely Mediterranean Beet and Yogurt Salad? Here's how to make soy yogurt so that you can get the tang without the dairy.