Yesterday Bob, Jeremy and  I explored the territory behind our neighborhood in what is left of the Kumasi Forest Preserve. The area is divided by a concrete ditch flowing with dirty water. The ditch is at least 30 feet across and probably 15 to 20 feet deep. The sides are steep concrete inlaid with large rocks.

Both sides of the ditch are lined with piles of glass bottles, dump truck loads from the nearby Guinness bottling plant. As well as corn patches, banana groves, cocoa trees, cassava, market gardens, foraging hump-backed cattle, rice fields and subsistence farmers living in shacks with their families.

We walked for an hour, due east from our neighborhood, turning north to walk along the ditch, then east across the ditch over a concrete walk way, then south to another concrete ditch crossing and north again back to our neighborhood. Along the way we encountered and chatted with people we met. Bob spoke with a man gleaning corn from a harvested stand of corn. He told Bob he was hungry. We stopped to exchange pleasantries with a man shoveling smoking charcoal while his wife and baby entertained themselves on the ground nearby.

As we approached the wide highway traffic bridge to the north, we noticed small shacks on either side of the ditch and what appeared to be a community living underneath the wide bridge. Surely, these folks were squatters, the poorest of the poor. Yet all greeted us with polite smiles and took time to converse with us.

On the other side of the ditch, we couldn’t help but notice with a mix of horror and fascination, the piles of human excrement clinging to the top few feet of the steep ditch wall. This is real poverty, when you have to hang your ass off a ledge to relieve yourself. And yet, what amazingly strong leg muscles these people must have! Surely, there must have mishaps. The image of such an accident was sobering. Tumbling down fifteen or twenty feet of shit encrusted rock into the nasty water below would be a terrible start to any day. We tore our eyes and imaginations from this subject and pressed on.

We had an interesting conversation with Prince, a Nigerian in a colorful suit who was overseeing the bagging of glass for shipment to the coast and ultimately by barge for processing. He was tall and sure of himself, spoke frankly about his reasons for doing business here rather than Nigeria and had tribal scars on his face, a short horizontal scar on the top of each cheek.

We, or rather Bob spoke with a market garden farmer working with his son. He was growing cabbage, peppers and eggplant, working with his son while his wife and smaller children did chores around their small wooden shed of a home. In another conversation with a man named Peter, Bob got the lowdown on a fairly large rice operation. We learned that Peter harvests his labor intensive crop three months after transplanting seedlings, then threshes it and takes it to market to sell to the rice polishers.

Back on the dirt roads in our neighborhood, we walked the street that parallels Dr. J. G. Wood to the east for the first time. Outside the home behind our kitchen window, the one with the angels on it, we met an older man. He invited us to come visit him in his home. “We see your house from our kitchen window,” Bob said, pointing up at our house, “Does your house have angels on it?” The man said it did. His name is Samuel, he is a doctor with a practice near the airport and offered to make a house call any time one of us fell ill.

At home, we shared our stories with housemates Justin and Joanne. Joanne remembered something Mother Teresa had said regarding poverty in the United States. So, I looked it up. “Mother felt the need to serve the poorest of the poor in this rich country,” said Sister Dorothy, “because she thought poverty in this country was quite different from poverty in India.” The worst poverty in the United States, she explained, is “loneliness, unwantedness, not being loved.”

The quote rings true based on what we had seen that morning. Although the people we met during our morning walk were mostly dirt poor, they seemed content and connected to one another with enough social energy to extend warm welcomes and take the time to share a little about themselves. It is easy to contrast this observation with the isolation we have experienced in the comfortable and affluent United States. Perhaps the knowledge that you have everything you want and need makes it easy to build a wall. Surely, air conditioning helps keep people sectioned off behind the walls of their choosing. All the comforts of home serve to keep one at home. Without those comforts, people tend to socialize more.

I like to think one can have it both ways, have their basic needs met without sacrificing community. Back in Moncure, this is exactly what our neighbors are trying to achieve – a happy balance between self-sufficiency and inter-dependence. Kudos to our good friends back home. We look forward to resuming our well-balanced life at the bend next year.

Roasted tofurky and root vegetables, mashed potatoes, golden gravy and the ubiquitous greens. This time of year we eat greens at every meal.

Here’s what we had to eat tonight: twigs and berries.

Jason and Haruka’s incredibly sweet and nutty Koshihikari rice, freshly harvested greens with radicchio from Matt and Jenn’s Dickinson College Farm, pan-fried quorm “chicken” patties topped with Mae Ploy sweet chili sauce. The only things keeping this meal from being vegan is the rehydrated egg white, whey protein concentrate and buttermilk powder in the quorn patties.

I’ve received many little nudges over the years, from Woody Harrelson’s 2003 movie, “Go Further” to recently released “Forks over Knives.” Lately, I’ve been admiring Jenny’s raw food choices when we eat lunch at the office and daughter Amy has been sharing gleanings from the Natural Chef program at Central Carolina Community College. But it was a series of conference workshops that supplied the push I needed to try on a smaller sized shoe.

Bob and I attended Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s 26th annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference for the first time a couple of weekends ago. For years, we’d been hearing about the incredible local food movement synergy radiating from the conference. This year, the conference was being held in Durham so we decided to go.

We found the conference as exhilarating as advertised. Most of our friends and local food movement heroes were there; Jason and Haruka, Lyle and Tami, Jenny, Jennie, Kate, Carol, Stevie, Jessie, Tess, Hillary, John, Don, Jane, Jonah, Tasha, Anna, Adam, Betsy, Linda Watson, Eric Henry, Doug Jones. Two great days of hi’s, hugs and networking!

The workshop choices were impressive. So much so that the topic in the halls was usually, “Which workshop are you going to next?” and “Oh! I’d really like to go to ‘Fun with Mushrooms’ but I also wanted to catch Tony Cleese’s workshop”

Ultimately, I chose five out of fifty-six workshops and traded workshop highlights with friends during breaks and meals. I picked:

• Rob Bowers’ “Commercial Fruit Production”
• Will Hooker’s “Permaculture: A Sustainable Living Methodology for the Home, Garden and Community”
• Zev Friedman’s “The Forest Cuisine Project: Permaculture Farming for a Living”
• “Update on the Organic Bread Flour Project” panel with the local organic grains grower, miller, malter, brewer and baker
• Jason and Haruka Oatis’ “Growing Rice in North Carolina”

Now, this may all sound like rather dry material but I’m here to report that what happened was pure magic! My eyes were opened wider than I thought possible and I actually heard angels sing during some of the presentations. Seriously.

Haruka and I kept catching each others eyes and squeezing our hands during Will Hooker’s Urban Permaculture workshop. He told the inspiring story of how he and his wife transformed a tiny urban home and yard into a haven, playground, and food producing garden with fish pond, gazebo, arbors and more. Ditto with Jason’s wonderfully entertaining story of how he and Haruka were inspired by Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka’s to grow organic rice using the natural farming method.

Bob and I found the panel on Organic Bread Flour sobering. I had no idea how much work went into the growing and processing of grain and it made me question my flour-dependent footprint.

This is the same epiphany I had when I realized how many pounds of grain go into producing a pound of beef. I now realize how many man hours go into producing a pound of grain and how many more into a pound of flour! Surely, I can’t need that much flour to satisfy my protein and carbohydrate needs? Especially when much of what I bake with is unbleached bread flour, which by definition has had the protein milled out! Better I meet my nutritional needs with sweet potatoes and chick peas which I love every bit as much as seitan sandwiches.

And then there was permaculturist Zev Friedman, self-admitted wild food vagabond, who introduced me to the concept of an interconnected food web. He suggested we cultivate food groups that work together, observe and replicate natural patterns, and learn to harvest the bounty that already exists. Zev pointed out that Monsanto will never be able to patent all the seeds in the forests, making yet another case for reducing our dependency on corn, wheat and soy.

I love the way all of this information neatly ties in with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just walking away from the established methods of food production and distribution absolutely requires we change the way we eat. We need to rethink our food patterns and learn to work with nature. We need to learn more ways to do for ourselves and decrease our dependency on the big corporations.

It occurred to me that our culture is at the same pivotal point as the Mayan culture was at the end of their empire. It isn’t a mystery what happened to this vibrant civilization that lay buried for centuries deep in the rain forests of Central America.

When population and resource demand got too unwieldy, the Mayans increasingly found themselves unable to weather drought and other natural threats to their corn crop. Those at the top continued to eat well while making heads roll down the sides of their pyramids. Many of the rest stuck around, hoping things would get better, too afraid of the unknown to leave civilization as they knew it.

And some of the Mayan people simply walked off into the jungle and created a new way of life. These were likely the ancestors of the resourceful and confident Mayans we worked with in Belize. Rolando and Nikki and their families knew how to get virtually everything they needed from the forests, from building materials, to medicine, to food.

As Bob and I walk away from the ambient culture, our footprints continue to shrink. Changes are already becoming apparent in our home menus. One step at a time, I am steering food choices towards whole and raw foods, choosing rice over pasta, salad over sauté’s, fruit over juice and chick pea patties over bread. Smaller footprint, here we come!

But, as I discovered with mangoes and peaches – when you move around the planet, what the left hand taketh away, the right hand replaces with something equally good.  Peaches are one of my top five favorite fruits and peach pie remains my number one most favored and scrumptious dessert.  When we moved to the tropics where there are no peaches, I discovered mangoes and decided early on that they were a suitable substitution.  And the green coconut pie.  Well, that was something from another world!

Back when we were managing Mountain Equestrian Trails in Belize, we were often amused at the short sightedness of some of our guests.  One lady asked us point blank, “How do you live without strawberries?”  Another sighed at dinner before announcing that “Someday, I’m going to go to the REAL rain forest.”  “Real rain forest?”  I asked, “What would you find there that you aren’t finding here in this rain forest?”  “You know,” she said “where there are orchids hanging from the trees.”  Our assitant manager, Rolando was seething, “Step into the forest with me now and I’ll show you all the orchids you want.” he said through his teeth.  Never mind the enormous cubic yard of oncidium cascading from the Stinky Toe tree beside the barn.

Well, until I had my chestnut epiphany yesterday, I was talking like one of those small minded people who think whatever they left behind is somehow better than what they have today.  Yesterday, it was “Ow, winter is coming again and I haven’t had any breadfruit for years!”  Today it’s “Breadfruit, smeadfruit – it doesn’t grow here.  Get over it!”

As a child, I recall my father driving me to Jersey through downtown Manhattan on a nippy fall day and while paused at the light, a vendor walking over to the car window and handing my dad a cone of piping hot roasted chestnuts in exchange for a couple of dollars.  In case you don’t know, heaven on earth is a paper cone of hot chestnuts to share with your dad!

Now, I love chestnuts and always have.  They are fluffy and nutty and sweet – almost like cake.  The perfect balance of savory and sweet, protein and carbohydrate.  In fact, chestnuts have a very similar taste and texture to breadfruit as it turns out.

Every Thanksgiving of my childhood, I would sit at my Nana’s huge dining room table with her other seven grandkids awaiting the arrival of her incredible chestnut dressing.  Never mind the turkey.  And most years since then, I’ve made a point of bringing chestnut dressing to the Thanksgiving table.  Hard pressed to find local chestnuts, I’ve had to buy expensive imported chestnuts, many of which were inedible, having molded from weeks of travel and storage.  Alas, local chestnuts were unheard of.  The mighty American Chestnut tree, once ubiquitous in North America, all but disappeared after a blight was accidentally introduced and billions of trees died from the foreign disease.

Happily, chestnuts are making a come back in our area.  A few weeks ago, Jason and Haruka discovered that Esta and Murray of Cohen Farm were selling chestnuts at the Farmer’s Market.  They happily picked up a couple of pounds for us which we promptly roasted.  Bob and I ate chestnuts to our heart’s content and froze a pound for Thanksgiving.

Hoping for more, I asked Haruka to shop for us again but alas, the Cohen crop had all been sold.  And then two days ago Lyle and Arlo drove up out of the blue with a beautiful basket of chestnuts from their own tree down the road.  I practically cried!  “These are for us?!”

These are exactly the kind of neighbors one can only hope for.  Lyle had thought to plant chestnut trees on his property years ago and now they were bearing fruit.  He and Tami are happy to share and willing to plant trees and wait years for the payoff.

That’s when I had my moment of clarity.  Chestnuts are food from the gods in the same way as breadfruit is.  In the same way as strawberries, mangoes and peaches are.  Every region has it’s own bliss.  It’s up to us to seek it out and embrace it.

It’s Christmas Eve.  Or Holiday Eve, if you will. Bob and I have a little preparing to do for the big holiday tomorrow.  I’ve already begun by moving the Tofurky roast from freezer to refrigerator.

I’m planning to make gingered molasses cookies this morning and if they turn out well, I’ll take some to Fred and Reda next door.  I promised Jason and Haruka I’d bring a chocolate beet cake to Christmas dinner tomorrow.  Bob will roast the tofu and seitan beast and I’ll make gravy.

We dressed up the front porch with new lights and sparkly garlands cast off by an unknown person.  Spot is wearing a red holiday bow in anticipation of meeting many new visitors to Trouts Farm on the first day of 2011.  Our second annual Hoppin’ John New Year’s Day Party is bound to draw some new faces.

Bob bought two cases of champagne and we’ve been amassing a supply of bottled orange juice.  I bought six pounds of organic black eyed peas, and rice and corn meal and checked our deep freeze to make sure we have enough greens to go with the Hoppin John and corn bread.  We’ll have plenty of cleaning and cooking to do next week in preparation for our big party.

But today is a quiet day.  A good day to reflect upon our good fortune.  We moved into this house the day after Christmas last year, joining a neighborhood of great people.  We traded garden harvests with Fred and Reda all summer.   Big bags of sweet corn and peppers came across the fence in exchange for potatoes and carrots.

Most Tuesdays we picked up a big box of freshly harvested produce from Jason and Haruka at Edible Earthscapes.  Beans and rice!  Butterhead lettuce, arugula, tomatoes, edamame, carrots, beets, daikon, shishito peppers, garlic, white and sweet potatoes – the list goes on and on.  Nearly every Thursday evening, we shared a meal with anywhere from two to twenty neighbors and friends.  Spot’s scrapbook has grown to eight pages, one new face at a time.

The list of activities we enjoyed over the past year without having to drive anywhere is impressive. There was a trail crawl and numerous games of disc golf and badminton thanks to Lyle and Tami.  We plugged mushroom logs, participated in work parties, harvested mushrooms in the woods and cleared trails together.  Tami and I occasionally walk through the woods to work at each other’s homes.

We are also fortunate to be connected to the larger community in meaningful ways through Bob’s work with Central Carolina Community College and my work with The Abundance Foundation.  Our roles, both professionally and personally are to put positive energy into promoting local food and renewable energy.  Our work connects us to a diverse group of like-minded people and puts us in the path of the growing stream of people drawn here to learn how to create community resilience.  Our ultimate, collective reward is watching local self reliance bloom and grow.

January 1, 2011 will be an extraordinary day.  Perhaps even a spectacular day.  Our home will be filled with old and new friends and co-workers.  The synergy will make our heads spin.  As will the mimosas.  And then the next day will just be another day.

I love harvesting them – pawing through the soil, uncovering each new spud with anticipation – kind of like scratch-off lottery tickets, only better tasting! I love the fact that they store well – often “discovering” some in our pantry when we’re looking for a quick, comforting meal. I also love their ability to generate an enormous return on a relatively meager investment. Average potato yield is 10 times the amount you planted! For me, potatoes embody the concept of getting more than you bargained for out of humble beginnings.

We are fortunate here in Chatham to have a number of hidden gems in our little town, testaments to the inspired foresight of those who believed in the significant future benefits of community based investments. Chatham Marketplace, the General Store Café, “The Plant” at Lorax Lane, Angelina’s Kitchen and more are testament to the beneficial effect that local businesses can have on the quality of our lives.

Finding opportunities to invest your time, money, or patronage in current or future community “gems” will often pay off in ways you may not have imagined. Making new connections with the people, food, and businesses our community has to offer enriches your life, and the life of our community. Making it a habit of frequenting these local institutions is like brushing the soil off another mound of potatoes. You often reveal more benefit than you bargained for.

Now, back to harvesting potatoes!

We fully intend to eat all of our summer harvests, we just can’t eat it all now.  So we are shifting gears into canning mode.  Bob ordered a pressure canner at the same time Jeremy and Jennie expressed a desire to get some canning experience. Now, that’s a win-win if I ever heard of one.

It’s been years since we canned.  I gave away my old canning equipment in 1997, after we sold our house and before we moved to Belize.  I’m really excited about getting back into the canning groove.  Today, Bob and I sorted out a couple of closets so we can use them to store canned goods.

Tomato sauce will surely be one of our first canning projects.  We’ve got so many tomatoes coming in the door that we’ve taken to popping them whole into the freezer inside the back door before they even reach the kitchen.  We took the biggest one over to the scale before freezing it, a great white which weighed more than two pounds!  At some point, we’ll thaw and process them in our new canner.

Jennie suggested peaches, but I’m afraid they will be out of season by the time we’ve given the new canner a trial run.  Besides, I eat them too quick.  Bob brought $10 worth of peaches home from the farmers market on Thursday and by I’m afraid I only have nine left two days later.  I just can’t be trusted around fresh peaches.

I tell them about the tomato tsunami going on at our house.  Jeremy doesn’t like tomatoes but loves spaghetti sauce.  We agree to turn tomatoes into sauce.  Peppers are just now coming on and Bob has already harvested plenty of onions and garlic.

But back to the zucchini and the yellow squash.  Despite numerous opportunities to sauté them in a little coconut oil with onions, garlic and peppers, we are losing ground. Another good way to use summer squash is to make ratatouille.  Sauteed onions, garlic, squash and eggplant go great with pesto and pasta but the eggplant isn’t quite ripe yet.

With the tomatoes already in the freezer, waiting for our little canning party, I realized that I could do the same thing with the squash.  It only took me about twenty minutes to chop and freeze three quarts of summer squash Now, when ratatouille season rolls around, I’ve already got a head start.

Between the canner and our freezer, we won’t have any trouble keeping up with the garden and our CSA’s and we’ll be eating summer sunshine out of a jar come December!

This week Bob and I found ourselves with a couple of pounds of parsnips. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but decided to give them a chance. So I went to my computer and found a recipe which looked promising:

Sweet and Gooey Parsnips

1 pound parsnips
2 Tablespoons butter
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation:

Scrape or peel the parsnips, then cut them into sticks about the size of your little finger. Dry well.

In a heavy skillet, melt the butter; then add the parsnips, shaking to coat. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Cover tightly and sauté on medium heat for about 5 to 10 minutes. The parsnips should be tender and gooey, and slightly caramelized. Add salt and pepper to taste.

I got right to work, peeling and chopping up the hard, little roots. I spent enough time with my pile of parsnips to begin seeing pictures in the horizontal lines. I superimposed the face of a farmer atop one craggy, dirt-stained root in an attempt to visualize the person who grew these pale, pithy wonders. All it needed was a tiny straw hat!

Meanwhile, farmer Jason of Edible Earthscapes came over and was enjoying some of his home brew on the back porch with Bob. As the parsnips simmered away in the pan, I walked outside and asked Jason “What do you do with parsnips?” Bob laughed because he had just asked Jason the same question.

Jason had told Bob that Fall parsnips were one of his top five favorite vegetables and that Spring parsnips with their winter-hardened root cores were only good for the compost pile. “Great,” I said, “I find this out now!” As I turned to go back inside the house, Bob was already making plans to plant parsnips for Fall harvest.

I checked on my pan of parsnips. The nutmeg complimented their flavor nicely, and some of the pieces had indeed turned sweet and gooey. Unfortunately, nearly all the gooey parsnip morsels were hiding an inedible, woody core. Unwilling to throw them on the compost pile just yet, I put them in the refrigerator.

The next day, I decided to turn those parsnips into soup. Soups are something I’m really good at and this would be a cream of chard/kale soup with pureed parsnips. I started re-heating the cooked greens and on a whim, added in some acorn squash I’d frozen last fall. I heated up the parsnips and pressed them through a sieve, leaving all the hard cores behind. Adding soy milk, I pureed all three vegetables and added a few spices.

Voila! I had made a big pot of something resembling Baby Food! Well, there’s no baby in our house and I don’t know anyone who would feed what I made to their child. My “soup” had bad color, consistency and flavor. Well, I could thin it down some, I though, reaching for some vegetable broth.

I was on the verge of chopping up some chives to add in when Bob walked into the kitchen. Seeing what I was up to he said, “Let it go – it’s enough already!” Putting the knife down, I picked up the pot of gooey green puree, walked outside and poured it over the compost pile.

Compost piles need to eat, too, throwing good energy after bad is never a good idea, and if you are afraid to make mistakes, you will never learn anything. Knowing when to let go is as important as knowing how to dive in. And I’ll probably be ready to give parsnips another go in the fall.

Prolific and inexpensive, greens are packed with an impressive array of vitamins and minerals including vitamins B1, B2, B6, C, and E, calcium, carotenes, copper, folic acid, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus and potassium.  Our immune systems are bursting with vigor from eating so much kale, chard, spinach, beet, turnip, and mustard greens.

Greens weren’t a part of my childhood.  I was raised in the north on northern vegetables, many of them frozen, taken from the freezer and plopped into the steamer as solid bricks of peas, corn, broccoli, spinach, lima beans or brussel sprouts.  My least favorites were okra, a slimy mound of fibrous discs and frog’s eyes and the whole leaf spinach which made me gag as the long veins worked their way down my throat.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I began cooking with fresh greens.  It began with stirring a pound of chard into a pot of curry and evolved into greens as a side dish in its own right. This time of year, we’re eating half a bushel of greens a week.

Each week we pick up our weekly half bushel of fresh picked produce from Edible Earthscapes.  This week it was packed with kale, chard, mustard greens, mizuna, carrots, and salad greens. This past Friday, Bob brought home a grocery bag full of kale and a half bushel of radishes, turnips and carrots, greens attached from Central Carolina Community College’s Land Lab.

The challenge of turning all of these greens into food can be daunting.  Last night while I stood at the sink, rinsing and chopping greens, I couldn’t help but stare at the enormous kale plant outside our kitchen window, crying out to be harvested.  “Any day now” I thought “Bob’s going to walk inside with his arms full of kale.”  I caught myself hoping today wasn’t going to be that day.

Last year I froze a fair amount of greens and that worked out great.  I just wash and chop and put them into plastic freezer bags and squeeze out the air.  We cooked and served these frozen greens at a New Years Day party and they were just fine.

This year, I’ve challenged myself to keep up with the greens by cooking them as I get them to eat that night or keep for another meal.  Save the freezer space.  Get the vitamins at their fullest. It doesn’t take that long to fix them up when we get them and a grocery bag full cooks down into six or seven cups which takes up a lot less space in the refrigerator.

Here’s what I do.  I chop an onion and sauté it in peanut oil in a large pot. I put all the greens in the sink and rinse them, then stack the leaves on the cutting board and chop them into bite sized pieces.  I’m finicky enough to remove the large veins from everything but the chard but that’s up to you.

Stir the chopped chard stems and the heavier greens (kale, chard, mustard greens and collards) into the onion, add a couple of tablespoons of tamari or soy sauce and cover to let them steam.  After a few minutes, I stir the greens up with the onion and add the lighter greens – spinach, turnip, radish and mizuna to steam for another minute.

This delicious green vitamin dish is now ready for storage or can be cooked a little longer and served immediately.  And that’s how easy it is to keep up with the greens!