For anyone who is interested in attending the 2010 PASA Conference in State College, PA, today is the last day that you can pre-register.  If you are interested, you can register at:

http://www.gifttool.com/registrar/ShowEventDetails?ID=1946&EID=5895

I use roux primarily for making dried beef gravy to be served over fried potatoes.  Making it with masa harina is just as effective as doing it with wheat based flours, but you must be mindful that the flavor is much different.  As it starts to take on color and lose the raw taste, it will start to taste like a fresh corn tortilla.  As it darkens it will become more nutty and develop an earthy undertone.

Ingredients:

Equal parts butter and masa.   1T of each per cup of liquid in the final dish is a good rule of thumb.  If you don’t like how it turns out, raise or lower that figure as appropriate.

In a heavy skillet or dutch oven melt the butter over medium-low heat.  Once it is melted slowly stir in the masa, stirring constantly, until well blended.  Cook until you reach your desired color, this can be anywhere from the light golden color of the just combined ingredients all the way through until it is the color of an old penny.  I like it a golden brown, as it has a nice roasted corn flavor.  Do not rush this process by turning up the heat!  You want a nice slow cook and color change to really bring out the flavor.

Once it has reached the color you like add it to the pot you wish to thicken and let it work it’s magic.

If you want to cook the roux ahead of time and save for future use, you can.  Put it in a tightly sealed container in your fridge and it will last a few weeks, but I prefer to cook it fresh as needed.  That rich smell of buttered corn is addicting.

Be safe and eat well.

The World Community Cookbooks, as I know them, consist of More-with-Less, Extending the Table…, and Simple in Season.  They were commissioned by the Mennonite Central Committee, “in response to world food needs”, “to promote global understanding and celebrate the variety of world cultures”, and “to promote the understanding of how the food choices we make affect our lives and the lives of those who produce the food”, respectively.  Though these goals are laudable and I believe in the work the MCC does, I look to them primarily as excellent cookbooks.

Though the overall tone and recipes of each book varies, the underlying themes of each is to provide high quality, wholesome foods, with simple readily available ingredients.  Grab a book, flip to a page, and you can probably find something there that you can make right now. For a family always on the go or if you are a few days late getting to the grocery store due to a busy schedule, this can be a godsend.  With but a bit of planning around a few go-to recipes, you can always have the option for a quick, hot, home cooked meal.

Many of the recipes are also vegetarian friendly if you so desire, though vegans will probably want to look elsewhere.  This is important as my family and I look at eating less meat.  Even if you are not looking to do as we are, they are worth a look.  Individually these books are priced at $24.99 for the spiral bound editions, a few dollars less for the paperback, or you can get a boxed set of all three spiral bound for $55.99.  If you buy through those links you will be directly supporting the MCC and their mission of food and relief.

Be safe and eat well.

After watching Food, Inc. our oldest daughter decided that she would like to know more about where her food is coming from, especially when it involves the death of an animal.  As my wife and I are dedicated omnivores with wide ranging palates we committed to helping her explore this path. In doing so, we will also show her how life must change in order to seek this goal.  Simply put, locally organically grown meat is expensive compared to industrial agri-business products.  We are fortunate that we can afford to buy these items, but not without some changes.

We must eat less meat to do this.

To do so, our meat-centric diet needs to be curtailed.  Initially, my thoughts were simply to reduce the amount of meat served at any given meal and up the starches and veggies, we are after all a stereo-typical meat and potatoes family.  My wife recalls growing up in a family that served up a large portion of meat, some form of potato, and a vegetable.  Though she left out one small detail about the vegetable portion that I have gotten to experience first hand with her mother’s cooking: there will be butter.  After searching through our recipes and putting some thought into what to serve and how to par back while increasing other portions so that it is still balanced about the same, our conversation changed; the problem with these thoughts is that meat is still the main portion of the entree.  Steak with potato gratin is still steak first regardless of the portion size.

I am looking at our meals in this new light and see that there will need to be more changes to our eating than just choosing to put less meat in. New recipes will need to be found and developed for our liking that have less meat to begin with.  They will need to incorporate it so that it is not the focus. Eventually, we can change our family’s decades of eating habits to a new lifestyle that includes vegetarian meals and only a few servings of meat a week.

Has your family made this kind of change?  How did you do so?  What recipes are now staples that you wouldn’t have eaten before?

The 19th annual PASA Farming for the Future Conference is being held February 4th-6th.  PASA is the Pennsylvania Sustainable Association for Sustainable Agriculture which seeks to “Promote profitable farms that produce healthy food for all people while respecting the natural environment”.  A laudable goal that supports local fresh foods throughout the state of Pennsylvania.

The conference brings together a plethora of individual and organizations who are expanding responsible agriculture within Pennsylvania and beyond.  Keynote speakers this year are Michael Reynolds, an architect responsible for the Earthship Biotecture, and Lisa M. Hamilton, author of “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness“.  In addition to their lectures there will be a number of educational tracts and workshops held each day.

It is the workshops I am most interested in as for the first time I am attending the event.  My day starts early however as I am making a day trip of it and will need to leave by 530am to make the  7am opening. Being tardy will likely see the classes I want already filled.  For the AM this means Beekeeping for Beginners I and II. Running my own hives has been a goal for sometime but first hand knowledge from mouth to ear is better than page to book in this case.    The afternoon is less specific with a short list of possibilities, in order of interest: Itching to Farm? Start from Scratch: No Land Solutions, Earthen Building from the Ground Up, or Luscious Landscapes for Everyone — with Fruits!.

If you are interested in attending the conference, registration is open up until the day of the event, though early registration ends on Sunday, January 24th.  After that prices go up $15 until the 31st.  After that, add an additional $25.  If you are not a member, it is worth signing up as you can get a membership and register for the conference for the price of a non-member registration, this provides you with a number of benefits including a bi-monthly magazine.

I hope to see you there!

As my wife and I are planning to limit our gardening this year, we have decided not to buy any additional seeds and instead put our 2009 remnants to good use. A few days ago I wandered through the seed bins and came up with a large menagerie of ornamentals and edibles to populate the earth with once the soil can be worked.  Flowers, brassica, leaf lettuce, kale, spinach, asparagus, brussels sprouts, peas, peppers, and more will be available to us this year at no extra cost.  Though some will be lost due to decreased germination rates, for our reduced space this year it should be more than enough.

One place we will be getting around the no new seeds is that there will be some new plants.  Tomatoes are hard to get going here in our valley so 4 or 5 plants will be bought from our local garden supply shop.  An additional 25 crowns of day neutral or everbearing strawberries will also be added to our strawberry patch after suffering more than a few losses over the past two seasons.  Keep your fingers crossed that the ones I find this year are as good as our initial purchase.  Those produce these lovely perfectly sweet quarter size strawberries from early June through until the first heavy frost in mid October.  Though not nearly as productive as June bearing, we can harvest a pint a day from our 60 square foot patch every few days while they are in season.

Overall I am looking forward to this season as one of change.  The time saved on shopping, shipping, and sorting will be put to planning.  That planning should lead to a garden that I can look to as productive and enjoyable rather than stressing over where things are going wrong.

Can you tell I’ve been looking for as many chain restaurant’s as possible that offer gluten free menus, not just individual items?  As I find more I’ll get them posted for you.

Bertucci’s Italian Restaurant, with locations in 10 states and Washington D.C., offers a very nice GF menu offering everything from appetizers through desserts.  There isn’t one close enough that I’ve been able to make a trip out, but the food sounds great and I want to plan a trip to try it.

If you have eaten there, please let us know about your experience.

http://www.bertuccis.com/#Gluten%20Free%20Menu

If you have a problem with cross contamination you will probably want to avoid anything off the grill.  The GF menu bears a note that many of the items come from the same grill and there is not a gluten free grill.  I am thankful however to see that more chains are working on offering gluten free menus.  It provides more options for enjoying a meal out.

http://www.carrabbas.com/menu/pdf/GFmenu.pdf

My wife and I sat down a few days ago to decide on what direction our garden was going to take.  After spending several years struggling with too much space and not enough time, we started by deciding how much we were going to plant.  Answer?  Not nearly as much as we have tried in the past.  Currently there is gardening space in front yard, side yard, and field, with approximately 220, 400, and 800 sq/ft in each area.  Our desires to grow great are huge, but time requirements elsewhere have proven to be substantially more demanding than we expected when we first started down this road 3 years ago.

That leaves us wanting to do a kitchen garden in the front yard focusing on the essentials: cucumbers, peas, onions, tomatoes and strawberries.  Cucumber, peas, and onions will start from seeds indoor well before the last frost so we can have an extra planting or two as the season progresses.  Tomatoes will come from our local garden supply house.  The variety and quality are hard to beat for not much more than a pack of seeds, without the frustration of getting them to germinate.   Ever-bearing and daylight neutral strawberries adorn the strawberry patch already, but there are a few places that could use a few fresh crowns.  One pack of 25 should be enough.

The side yard are is getting dismantled this year and the cinder blocks that form the perimeter moved back into storage.  It was a nice location but I have learned through experimentation with this area just what a difference a micro-climate can mean to growing conditions.  Moisture would settle in after a heavy dew and never quite evaporate.  When the rest of the yard is comfortable and windy, the air around this section was humid and stale.  So many differences abound on our little acre.

Experiments will go out into the field.  In an effort to not buy any new seeds this year and put the remnants of 2009 to good use, anything left over that doesn’t go in the front will get placed here.  With that unknown multitiude will also go some planned for Halloween pumpkins and birdseed sunflowers.

Last on the list is another test: transplanting brambles.  Six blackberry canes were potted up during dormancy in the very early spring and allowed to set good roots over the summer.  Once the hard frosts break and the ground becomes workable again they will get placed along the periphery of the field.

Planning gets the process started with the first plantings only a few weeks away.  A few short months from now the work can begin in earnest and before too long winter will be a memory and we can harvest the first taste of summer: a ripe, juicy tomato on the forth of July.

I know that I have been writing a lot lately about Celiac disease, living gluten free, cooking gluten free, and reviewing products safe for those with gluten issues, but that has all been because it has been a large part of my life since the diagnosis.  Simply put, it is a huge change that has ramifications over your entire life.  Food is one of the 4 essentials for life.  If you haven’t been exposed to it before, the other requirements are water, shelter, and clothing.

As I get into the swing of things with the diet and life in general as a Celiac patient, it isn’t as all consuming on my consciousness. The rest of life opens up and I can focus on the other large aspect of this blog: gardening and actually growing food.  Stuff you dig up out of the ground, covered in dirt, run under water to wash off, and turn into something fantastic for your family and can then sit down and eat and share camaraderie while nourishing your body.

It is great exercise to boot.  Nothing like wielding a hoe with vengeance in 90 degree summer sun to work up a good sweat and remind you of what it is like to be alive.  Warm moist earth is the smell of life.