Food, food culture, food as culture and the cultures that grow our food

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Grow your own dang food

January 30, 2006

Back in the eighties, as a student at the University California at Santa Cruz, I lived in a vegetarian commune with a bunch of hippies. As hippies, we produced our own sprouts, yoghurt and salsa fresca for the entire commune, approximately thirty people. I had all but forgotten this part of my life until recently, when my Food Atelier students at the Design Academy Eindhoven started working on ways to grow their own food. The work of two enthusiastic students got my wings flapping enough for me to dare revisit my past. These are the images from the first trials, theirs and mine.

After initial attempts at growing mung sprouts in bread (see above), Cygalle Shapiro is successfully growing a ready-made 'salad on salad'.


images top to bottom: sprouts in bread, salad on salad, sprouting experiments courtesy of Cygalle Shapiro, copyright Cygalle Shapiro 2005 - 2006. Contact culiblog for further information.

Liora Rosin is growing sprouts in labneh, a fresh yoghurt cheese, commonly made at home. For Rosin it is important that the seeds are grown within the labneh in order to transmit the flavour of the sprouted seed into the delicately tangy cheese.


images top to bottom: home sprouting installation, soaking, lactic fermentation sill; courtesy of Liora Rosin, copyright Liora Rosin 2005 - 2006

Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all had a designated windowsill for lactic fermentation?

Having resolved to practice what I preach in 2006, I am also working on growing sprouts on labneh and find that the experiments coördinate nicely with my developing a good recipe for yoghurt ravioli.

This is a cute disaster of basil seeds rotting into overly dry labneh. Seeds that become gelatinous when they are moistened (e.g., basil, buckwheat, watercress) are poor candidates for immediate immersion on or in the yoghurt medium.


images top to bottom: sprout collection 2x, basil on labneh, playing with mistakes, pretending sampler, curd seed brittle; Debra Solomon

The results of an unsuccessful attempt at growing woody spice seeds (dill, coriander, cumin, kummel) in yoghurt medium with the intention of flavouring the labneh were not especially delicious, although visually exciting. The linen and the seeds texture the labneh beautifully and I look forward to spin a few successful recipes from these experiments soon.


Here are other urban gardening solutions, mostly rooftop gardening related:

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Rural design conference scheduled for September 2006

January 21, 2006


(above: Wheatfield, a large public work by Agnes Denes, image copyright Agnes Denes)

Chapeau to John Thackara at the Doors of Perception blog who reports today about a rural design conference scheduled to take place September 4-7 2006 (somewhere) in the UK. Just have a look at what's being developed for the programme! I am pleased to see that it is all about establishing and strengthening real connections between (urban) cultural producers and rural agriculture producers to the benefit of both.

In a conference forerunner in July of 2005, this is what they were talking about: farmers as curators - an international Rural Biennale for 2007, sustainable farm diversification, rural tourism, food marketing initiatives and staging the Rural Biennale as an integral part of a European Region of Rural Cultures and Farmer Creativity celebration.

To the list of interesting subjects already discussed and in the planning for September 2006, I would like to add: 'rural farmer to urban farmer advisory partnerships for urban gardening/farming initiatives'. I can't help but wonder if the experience and knowledge of the rural farmer can help urban farming inititives such as this wonderful urban farming project in East L.A from being under threat of closure due to urban land-use issues. Injecting (cultural) life into family farms suffering brunt of (European) Agricultural Policy might be just the ticket for rejuvenating a way of life under threat of extinction. Might not the urban farmer benefit from being part of this discussion and network?


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Food-related film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival

January 20, 2006


Petrolatum Spirit, film still from Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9, copyright Matthew Barney, used without permission

Pack up your yurt, we're moving to Rotterdam for a little more than a week. January 25 - February 5, 2006 is the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The programming is dazzling, but I've created a short food-related film selection for anyone that believes it's time to move beyond Tampopo. Having not yet seen these films, I am hoping that their content can be interpreted as food-related, in the culiblog sense of the word: food, food culture, food AS culture, and the culture that grows our food.

Tickets are available from Saturday January 21, 2006 at 09.00 hrs until Saturday February 4, 2006 at 21.00 hrs at the Festival Box Office located in 'de Doelen' (entrance Kruisplein), Rotterdam and, by telephone through +31 0(10) 890 9000

The culiblog food-related film selection for the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2006:

Sunday 29.1
10.30h - Kitchen
14.30h - Fish Fall in Love, culiblog review of Ali Rafi'i's When Fish Fall in Love

Monday 30.1
19.00h - Drawing Restraint, culiblog review of Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9
21.45h - Eden

Tuesday 31.1
16.00h - Poulet poulet
17.30h - Mother of the Mother and also the Mother of the Mother's Mother and Her Daughter


film still from Mother of the Mother and also the Mother of the Mother's Mother and Her Daughter, copyright IFFRotterdam, used without permission

From Wednesday 01.2 until the festival's end, I shall attend as many films as I please regardless of their food-related content. If you're coming, drop me a line so that we can meet up and tuck into some excellent Rotterdam food.


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Madrid Fusion, only one more day, and you can't go

January 18, 2006

Because this gastronomical summit is all sold out. Tomorrow is the last day of the three day event, Madrid Fusion IV, International Summit of Gastronomy. The programme is filled with restaurant industry pomp and poodle, showcasing valuable marriages between top chefs and industry giants like Nestle, Knorr and Maggi. There is an all-star, all-male lineup of superchefs, save the lone Elena Arzak, but her blurb only blurbs on about her father Juan Mari's fathomless imagination.

Enough bitching and moaning, if I had gone, I would have been absolutely interested in the designer tapas competition, because frankly, many of the conference presentations are just camouflaged sales pitches. Example topic: 'Cheese trolleys and trays in restaurants, the last rage.' Yeah, that's the last rage allright, just not in my world.

My 'last rage' is the presence of the angelic Alice Waters, there to accept a tribute on behalf of the Summit of Gastronomy for being a 'Founder of New American Cuisine" (Waters is above all blame) when there are such uncool conference topics about the newest recipes for serving up a fish that is widely considered to be an endangered species. Although I'd be the first one to say that a restaurant is not a home kitchen, and therefore doesn't have the same responsibilities in terms of teaching or practicing good health and consumer behaviour, I do wish that the designers of such events would moderate their sponsors (content) and take a stand against bad practices by bad boys.

Because in the name of wishful thinking, if I had to name one food trend that I would love to see spread like wildfire this year, it would be that the world's league of exemplary chefs exclusively associate their names and restaurants with the best artisanal and local producers, producers of sustainable products. And maybe that IS just what the good folks at the Gastronomic Summit talked about today after the 'Cod: new recipes, a thousand flavours' presentation. Maybe there will be brilliant debate tomorrow during the Q&A after the 'Canned Fish in Haute Cuisine' discussion. Heq, I won't be there to check, but I'll ask Alice how it went when I see her at the Berlin Film Festival Slow Food Symposium next month.

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New Year's resolution No. 12: Make a good recipe for yoghurt ravioli

January 17, 2006

Ever since I've been back in the city, all I do is act like I'm not busy at all and that these short, dark days are endlessly long. It feels like I've got all the time in the world, which I'm guessing is a sign of mental health. Please don't let the Languedoc wear off.

In between all the other 'very urban, very important' things that absolutely must get done this week, all involving lots of writing and revising and asking for huge amounts of money from those that keep our culture out of harm's way, I somehow got the notion that now is the perfect time to develop a recipe for yoghurt ravioli. 'Make a recipe for yoghurt ravioli' is literally at the top of my to-do list. Imagine having my brain for only a day.

It's the journey, not the destination, and true to form, I didn't ask the source of my inspiration how they made their yoghurt ravioli, preferring instead to embark on a lengthy process of experimentation. Actually, all the experimenting has yielded some pretty important material information and several methods for preparation, so I'm glad I decided to not confer with those more knowledgeable and just figure things out for myself. When I think I'm done, I'll feel more like I'm sharing and give them a buzz. Fortunately the recipe so far seems to involve a fair amount of waiting for things to drip.

Yoghurt Ravioli (recipe in development)

These are not 'ravioli' that you are going to cook. This is essentially a recipe for little disks of Dutch 'hangop', or drained yoghurt, sandwiching a filling. The fattier the yoghurt, the easier it will be to make this recipe work.

linnen or tightly woven cheesecloth ~50x50cm
a big 'ol rubber band
a large deep bowl

Fatty Turkish yoghurt (10% fat! If you can't get this, add creme fraiche to 5% fat yoghurt - fat is good)
fleur de sel or finely ground sea salt

Soak the linnen in water and wring it out. Give the cloth a good 'snap' to shake out the big wrinkles. Place the cloth over a large bowl and secure it with a rubber band, spanning the cloth tight like a drum head and pulling down on the opposite corners a few times to achieve extra tautness.

In a wide mouthed jar, add the salt to the yoghurt and give it a good shaking. Pour the yoghurt mixture in blobs onto the linnen cloth. Make rows or a symmetrical pattern to help ease the removal of the ravioli. You'll see why you need to do this later, trust me.

Let the yoghurt drip for at least 6 hours. No need to refridgerate unless you have food phobias.

To remove the ravioli: Try to keep the linnen cloth flat, avoiding as much as possible letting it bend because this could cause the ravioli to crack. Slip the rubber band off the jar and carefully lift the linnen cloth onto a flat surface.

To fill and remove the ravioli: Place a filling on a ravioli bottom, and then, lifting the linnen cloth, fold it over to place a 'top' onto this ravioli, gently letting the 'top' stick to the bottom. Very carefully peel back the linnen, as you would remove the back liner from a sticker, and let gravity help you in this endeavour whenever possible. Do this to all of the ravioli.

Some of the many possible fillings may include:

roasted (pickled) red peppers out of a jar
saag (spiced creamed spinach)
a hunk of smoked herring or mackerel filet
tapanade
think of yer own dang filling

Serve up some soup that marries well with dairy, like spicy pumpkin, or borscht. It's too wintry to fuss with contrast. Contrasts are summer's business. Over the awaiting soup bowl, peel off the ravioli from the linnen, letting it slip gently into the soup. No plopping.

More later on this recipe as it develops further.

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Vegetation and art

January 13, 2006


(image: herman's meadow, copyright herman de vries)

This is an image of a meadow surrounded by farmland. Left to it's own devices, the meadow has developed it's own ecology, separate from the agricultural land surrounding it. The meadow is also an artwork by herman de vries, artist/botanist/publisher, who spells his name with small letters on purpose. As a land artist using the natural world as his medium, edible and medicinal plants feature frequently in his oeuvre. In an art in the public space work in the Netherlands, he planted a suburban neighbourhood with more than thirty-six species of heirloom pear and apple trees.

de vries' work aims to create a heightened awareness with our 'life-space'. A botanist trained in applied biology, his innovative publications frame natural products such as rose petals, thistledown, barks, mosses and roots, provoke a response far from scientific detachment. Think of an encyclopedaeic herbaria, dripping with passion and scribbles in Sanskrit, and you will have a good idea of his 'Natural Relations, eine Skizze'. The herbarium includes more than two thousand plants and herbs, collected and logged, but the selection comes from de vries' own memory! How's about them apples!

The text below is de vries' 10 theses on vegetation and art that I plucked from a book titled, 'Transplant, Living vegetation in contemporary art', edited by Barbara Nemitz.

vegetation and art
10 theses

* living things should be treated with repsect for their own message.

* nature is our primary reality. the experience of nature is a universal human value. vegetation is the basis of our existence.

*in art, nature becomes revolution.

* bonsai, constricted and malformed trees or plants are not art. they are perversion.

* in dealing wtih vegetation of plants in art, the artist needs in-depth knowledge about what he is working with.

* to bring plants and art together is a challenge for art.

* art in nature is totally superfluous. art can add nothing of significance to nature. the statements of nature are perfect.

* the restoration of natural relationships can be an artistic act.

* in view of what we imagine nature would do without human intervention, a park is, generally speaking, culturally impoverished nature.

* the ideals of the zen garden - asymmetry, simplicity, spontaneity, the absence of formalism - are nowhere as clearly accessible to visual experience as in naturally flourishing vegetation.
what wonderful things are "abandoned lots", terrain vague, where mugwort, blackberries, thistles and wasteland take over.

- herman de vries

(used without permission from the publication; Transplant, Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art, edited by Barbara Nemitz / Hatje Cantz Publishers, ISBN 3-89322-971-X) www.hatjecantz.de


(image of herman de vries, copyright herman de vries)

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Weedy plot, commuting, cover crops and humble pie

January 11, 2006

People who know me well would never say that I'm a practical woman. Now, all the more so. I've left my winter quarters in Occitania to return to the Polar Circle, where paid work is calling. Screaming, really. In gardening there's a time and a place for everything, and ever since I've had this garden, my commuting life-style has forced me to ignore this simple rule of nature and do things at the wrong times. Sunday, I finished turning the earth by hand on both allotments. One hundred and sixty square metres. That's seven in dog years, carry the three, and if you're not impressed, I don't care. I'm totally impressed with myself.

It's a funny thing in our allotments, all the women are organic gardners, and all the men are not. I don't know if that corresponds with some kind of hippy statistic, but that's the way it is. And there's a great deal of social control, you can't just let your garden go to pot, just because it's yours. I decided for this reason to experiment with growing cover crops, a crop just meant to keep out the bad weeds and condition the soil in the process. It's absolutely unconventional around here, and for this reason, I'd been preparing my neighbour, spending time talking to him about my experiment, to let him get used to the idea.

I'm talking about my very sweet neighbour AlGouche. The one who built the retaining wall/serre without my even asking for it, the one who waters my garden when I'm up north, the one who makes me sit down and eat a lunch of barbequed chicken and wine that he's prepared on his little fire when he thinks I'm working too hard (il faut manger), the one that feeds his garden little red and blue pills. I've been telling him for a week now, that before I leave Occitania, I'm going to plant a crop full of weeds, on purpose. Buckwheat, alfalfa, mustard, soybeans and adzuki beans, not for eating, but to improve the soil composition, keep down the real weeds, and give me an excuse to use that turquoise blue rototiller that we just bought. (I read that each time you use a rototiller you have to add 6% organic material to the soil so as not ruin it's texture.)

Plants not for eating? Al Gouche shakes his head, and tells me in a Moroccan-Occitanian dialect that I'm meshuggah.

The last days, I turned one hundred and sixty square metres of earth with a spitfork. The men of the allotments, bored out of their skulls with winter-lack-of-work, gather daily at AlGouche's shed for gossip and beer. That's 'man' for tea and sympathy, I guess. But on Monday, my last day in the garden, before departing for Amsterdam, I was completely shocked to overhear AlGouche defending me to the other men. 'She's not planting real weeds, just some plants that will improve the soil.' My heart lept.

And now I'm praying, and looking at the Occitanian weather report from Amsterdam, that the seeds that I have ever-so-crazily planted in January, and that really is meshuggah, will somehow sprout and thrive, beat the weed-race on my little plot of land, between now and March.

Subsistance farming really is a nerve wracking affair, part-time susbsistance farming, even more so. I keep telling myself that if this experiment doesn't work, nothing will be wasted but a few handfulls of seeds, one day of planting and a huge amount of pride. Which is expensive. Upon leaving the garden Monday evening, I say a little prayer for all the microbes and the earthworms, hoping they enjoy the oysters shells I crushed into the soil, hoping they enjoy the leaves and rotted corn husks, hoping the little legume seeds will grow, and win the growing race for the most light, water and nutrients. Please little legumes, winter cover crops, fix the nitrates in my soil, and produce as much biomass as you possibly can. I'm counting on you.

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2006 Bloggies, that blog awardish time of year again...

January 07, 2006

Wing-flapping all around! Thanks to the kind folks for nominating culiblog in the 2006 Bloggies. If you want to show your appreciation to the author of your daily dose, you can still nominate culiblog for the categories: best food blog, best under-represented blog (!) or... dare I say it, blog of the year?

But only until the 10th of January, so carpe diem your tochas on over to the 2006 Bloggies. I've nominated about thirty of my favourite blogs in the various categories: Doors of Perception weblog, BLDGBLOG, Pruned and FutureFeeder, to name just a few. In the food blog category, I'm keeping my nominations shtum for the time being. Well, as shtum as one can be with the linkage in the flanks of my blog...

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Brussels pearls neither bitter nor farty

January 06, 2006

Look what Maman brought home for dinner tonight! While everyone else in the valley is shooting at wild boar, I managed to wrestle to the ground and uproot this domestic brussels sprouts tree. Admittedly, that sounds like I'm getting the short end of the stick, but the pearly buttons and sweet leaves of this homegrown resemble nothing of the bitter fartiness that I know to be storebought brussels sprouts. I've been scheming on how to bring back a whole tree to the sorrel-eating Dishy Lad on Tuesday, when I return to Amsterdam.

As a kid, not liking the food dished up at the dinner table was not an option. It was more or less expected that one would come to the table with a good appetite, sit down, join in the bubbly conversation and not only eat your food, but enjoy it. There was only one thing that brother Aar and I didn't really like, and that was brussels sprouts. Not liking something in our house meant that it was prepared once a year in the name of good health, and that we ate it anyway, smothered in tabasco sauce.

Tonight we're having brussels 'pearls' as a snack, that's how freaky we are! Two handfuls thrown into salted boiling water for just a few seconds, tossed with lightly salted butter and a squeeze of lemon and served on cocktail skewers. The friends were eating right out of my lap.

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Green manure cover crops and another garden parcel

January 05, 2006

Yesterday I aquired another parcel of land when I went to pay my yearly subscription at Monsieur L. Thirty-five euros per parcel (roughly 100m2) and all the river water you can use. Still, with the chateau of the Comtesse de R. in plain view, we the serfs of the C'-ac allotments know that all of this could be taken away at any time. But for the time being, I have enough ground to grow and experiment to my heart's content. It's extremely relaxing when my largest concern is how to increase the biomass of my soil. I'll be experimenting by sowing 'green manure' cover crops (buckwheat, yellow mustard, soy beans and alfalfa) on my two parcels until spring planting begins in March.

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Another gushy garden story

January 04, 2006

Why is this eighty-seven year old man smiling? One possible reason is that he has a garden... and neighbours. If I am any sort of judge of things that make one happy, I can report that the addition of a garden and all the things it brings with it, fresh veg and fruit, new friends, a sense of community, has increased my happiness considerably. Yesterday for example, I returned to the allotments to find that my generous neighbour, AlGouche, had pressed the eighty-seven year old Louis into service, installing a petit serre (little green house) for me in back of my cabane! AlGouche (see below) is concerned that, once back in Amsterdam, I'll worry endlessly about spring planting, but with the serre up, in March I can just get down to business. My heart melted when I saw the two gentlemen happily digging and pounding away, just so that I wouldn't worry! They even turned the soil, Louis taking very special care to remove all of the topinambour and bits of glass, and they all joked that I shouldn't gush too much and keep them from their work.

By the way, the first I'd ever heard of Louis was not in the context of the garden, but in a dancing story. Having just returned from a village party last spring, Ktje rang me up in Amsterdam to report the party gossip and to tell of an amazing old man who was passionately dancing salsa all by himself for more than two hours straight. This old man was Louis, the kind of eighty-seven year old that I aspire to be, although it may take me awhile to develop an affinity for salsa.

image: AlGouche initiates the works for the retaining wall/serre with garden neighbour Louis

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