Homestead, PhD

I was writing a response to Mrs. Q’s blog post about meal planning, grocery shopping, and pantry stocking earlier today. (If you haven’t been following along with Mrs. Q’s quest to improve school lunch, then get thee to Fed Up With Lunch with all due haste.) It got me thinking about how local eating is different from commercial eating.  You can’t rotate a set list of recipes – the ingredients won’t be available 365 days a year. You can’t plan meals weeks or months in advance – what if the tomato crop fails? You WILL have a well-stocked pantry but it will have dried beans, nuts, whole grains – not mac and cheese and (commercicially) canned tomatoes.

That’s when I realized that its not just knowledge about food systems that is keeping the masses off the local eating wagon, it’s also a lack of skill-set. We have too-perfect housewives and 1950’s cookbooks to tell us how to plan meals revolving around Cream-of-Eww-Soup – what we need to know is how to keep down costs and keep our sanity when you don’t know the ingredients until you get to the market.  It can be done. I promise. By people who don’t live in Stepford, have lives outside the kitchen, and aren’t rolling in the dough.

I’m going to write a series of blog posts with tips for making it work. I will have advise and lots of linky-love with a bit of snark for spice.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge that this is the first blog post in 5 months. There – I did it. Can we all just move on now? No? Ok, but 5 months of update is a little daunting right now so can we at least take a rain check? Great. Moving on…

You might not believe it when you hear my accent (the locals don’t) but I grew up in Louisville, Ky.  I always loved the fun and funky vibe in Louisville but nowadays I have another reason to love Louisville: the Keep Louisville Weird campaign.

Keep Louisville Weird is a campaign to preserve all that is unique – weird – about Louisville. That includes all the homegrown businesses. Matt and I don’t leave our local ideals in Illinois when we go on vacation. After all, when in Rome – buy Roman. So while visiting relatives this summer we did our part to keep Louisville weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Champaign county, Illinois may have some of the most fertile soil in the world but there are some things that just won’t grow around here, atleast not without a heated greenhouse and supplemental lighting.  Coffee and cocoa fall safely on this list.  While we’ll never be able to get a locally grown coffee and chocolate, we can get locally processed coffee and chocolate. It still cuts out some of the food miles and helps to bolster the local economy: double WIN!

A few weeks ago we happened to wander into Columbia Street Roastery while browsing the downtown shops.   The owner spent the better part of an hour chatting with us, explaining the intricacies of the international coffee and tea market, discussing the various methods of decaffeination, and showing us around the roastery.  He also explained why he doesn’t carry any fair trade certified coffee: he personally brokers all his coffee guaranteeing a price that is above the current Fair Trade standard. In the end it helps the growers by guaranteeing them a higher price and cuts out the middle man.  An hour and half later we walked out with an armload of freebies and a personal connection to the only coffee roastery in town.  The free samples of coffee and tea were great.  So good in fact, that I don’t have any photos to share because it’s all gone.

More recently someone in the Champaign area has started supplying the food coop with fair trade chocolate bars.  Again, it was gone before any pictures could be taken (ahem) and they sold out in under a week.  Looks like we’re not the only ones to approve of this persons hobby.

A brief pause from capering to look cute for the camera

While doing our grocery shopping at the food coop Sunday afternoon we spotted a flyer for a baby shower. For goats. Prairie Fruits farm sells fruit and some of the best goat and sheep cheese around. I’m not just saying that, either. They’ve been featured in culinary magazines and they’ve also been recognized by the Chicago convivium of Slow Foods international. They’re also pretty well represented in the blogosphere: here and here and here for example. And that’s just the first page of Google hits. Oh, and they’re also a measly 10 miles north of us. So how could we possibly pass up a chance to sample some free goat cheese and watch the ridiculously cute kids?

And boy were they cute.  The older kids ran and capered and generally were incredibly cute. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday was the 2nd Annual seed swap. In addition to picking up a few seeds and talking to the guy at the bee keeping demo booth, we learned about a cool new project afoot in the Chambana area. The Champaign-Urbana fruit map is a google map with markers and entries for fruit trees and bushes that are “public domain” (that means free) or likely so.  The idea is similar to the Fallen Fruit Project in California. The hope is to document the local perrenial food infrastructure in the Champaign-Urbana area (and also get some free fruit). It’s a volunteer-driven project that relies on community members to add entries as they discover local fruit sources.

View Champaign-Urbana Fruit Map in a larger map

Not all areas in Chambana are covered at the moment but there’s already a lot listed. Check it out, add fruit in your neighborhood, and start planning for all the jam, wine, and hard cider you’ll be making later this year.

We’ve been busy at work prepping for the gardening year.  Believe it or not the gardening season is almost upon us – we need to start on indoor propagation in the not-too-distant future. Hard to believe when there’s still snow on the ground.

In preparation we’ve tweaked our garden plan.  Last year, I put together a really comprehensive multi-year garden plan which we first used in 2009.  DH made some adjustments to the plan based on our experience of using it last year.  The result is the new and improved garden plan v2.0 which we plan to use this year (all the gory details are listed over on our myFolia.com account).

Last night we put together our seed order for 2010. Between that and the nice stash of seeds we’ve have from previous years we should be set, although that’s not to say we won’t pick up a few extras at the Seed Swap this weekend

Sometime in the next few weeks we’ll have to pull all the seed starting trappings out from storage.  I think we’ll wait a little longer, though – nothing makes the winter seem interminably long like waiting to start seeds.  All the more so when your lights and flat are all prepped and ready to go.  In the meantime we’ll just have to keep ourselves busy with more paper gardening – cleaning up my seed stash and tasks on Folia and the like.  Sigh.

Blue Moon farm chicken guarding the spinach

Sadly our wonderous Farmer’s Market is closed for the winter.  One of these days, when we a root cellar, a chest freezer, and a hoophouse for overwintering, we’ll be able to supply ourselves with fresh veg through the winter.  In the mean-time we don’t really have the means to do much stocking up for winter, other than canning. Luckily, we don’t have to go a full season(+) without fresh, local produce.  Our food co-op has been getting a steady supply of hardy winter veggies from Blue Moon farm.  Better yet, Blue Moon is now organizing a bi-weekly off-season direct sale.  Customers (like us) pre-order what they want and pick up the booty on weekends.  Personally, I think this is a great idea.  It gives a market-garden farm like Blue Moon a chance to drum up a bit more business in the “off” season without risking lack-of customers and it gives us a way to get just-picked spinach and carrots. Win-win.

Spreading the word about the second annual seed swap in Champaign-Urbana.  This is co-hosted by the Common Ground Food Co-op and Block by Block cooperative.  We went last year to the first annual seed swap.  It was a nice chance to meet up with other local gardeners and learn a few tricks of the trade. Plus there were free seeds.  Score!

It’s Sunday February 7th, from 1-3pm at the Common Ground Food Co-op.  See you there.

Tomorrow is the start of classes.  When I was a kid I looked forward to school starting again.  Breaks were long and boring in those days and a geek like me enjoyed a chance to learn.  Nowadays I welcome the start of a semester with both joy and dread.  I still enjoy learning but assignments and readings just feel like a hassle these days.  I like teaching and research but there’s a lot of dull grunt-work involved.  I especially dread the long-hours and lack of free time.  My breaks are a lot less boring these days too.  For one thing, “break” is a misnomer.  Being a graduate student isn’t like being an undergraduate – breaks are spent catching up on grading or working on research instead of lounging on a beach.  (Of course, when I was an undergraduate I spent all my breaks working…) So although tomorrow is the official start date, I’ve been working full-time on my research for most of the break.  Breaks are also a lot less boring these days because, as an adult, I can pursue my ever-growing list of hobbies best described as “homesteading”.  That’s precisely what I’ve been doing this break.  Everything from acquiring and setting up a weaving loom to making wine and expanding our dairying skills.  Plus lots of really good cooking and prepping for baby.

This semester is looking pretty light – not taking or teaching any classes.  Even my qualifying exams got pushed back in favor of getting more research done. (One perk of being at a R1 research institute is that they don’t really care when you finish requirements as long as you’re making good progress on your research.)  So it’s shaping up to be a light semester except for one teeny, tiny little thing: the 2-pound (and growing) bun in the oven.  Oh, and all the research that has to be done prior to D-day (delivery day).  So this semester will likely be just as harried as every other.  That means less time leftover for the homestead and the homestead blog.  I apologize if it gets a little quite on here in the next few months.

The first batch of wine we ever made was a beautiful (and delicious) blackberry wine.  We were college students at the time and Matt was working for the summer in the forestry department of our college.  He and our good friend Josh would scope out patches of fresh blackberries as they went through the college forests building and maintaining trails.  I was working in the college weaving department along with another good friend, Mary Beth – the wife of Josh.  On our lunch breaks Mary Beth and I hiked out to the forest and picked wild blackberries which I froze until we had enough to make a gallon of wine.  We crushed the berries, added some yeast and other ingredients and set it to ferment – all the while hoping that the flamingo-in-a-blender color of the concoction wasn’t permanent.  A few months later we had a gallon of flamingo-free wine that still stands as one of our all-time best batches of wine.  It tasted of green forests and wild brambles sweetened with summer sunshine.  It was so amazingly good because it was fresh and made from absolute scratch.

This is not a story about that kind of wine.

You can also make wine using kits.  You purchase a prepackaged ingredient kit that contains a large bag of concentrated grape juice from a particular variety of wine grape and a bunch of smaller packets containing your extra ingredients.  The directions have you reconstitute the juice and set it to ferment.  The kits also include a lot of ingredients we normally skip – things that make the wine clearer but don’t change the flavor – all in little numbered packages so you know what order to add them in.  It’s all so easy that it feels almost like cheating in comparison. Read the rest of this entry »