Hearty, Healing Onion Family Winter Soups

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Ann Lovejoy
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Eating Well When Pollen Puffs And Rain Pours

For my family, January opens the snuffle season with a vengeance. Plump hazel and alder buds spill their casual abundance freely and the relentless winds bring it all home to us. Cool, damp days let molds and mildews flourish in the garden (and indoors as well). For indoor molds and mildews, I use Bac-Out (a combo of live enzyme-producing cultures, citrus extracts and essential oils) instead of the usual deadly arsenal, some of which trigger worse sensitivities than the mold does. In the garden, well, I just sneeze and bear it.

Many allergy experiencers share the red-eyed, snuffle-nosed state pollen induces, though we all wish we did not. Pollen is a huge culprit, since pollen-rich shrubs and trees abound, from natives to garden varieties. This is especially so because so many tree and shrub cultivars are males, chosen for the lack of sloppy fruit. Sadly, these studly guys are major pollen producers, while those fruity females are not.

Restorative, Preventative, Wholesome, Healing

Not only does January mark open season for pollen production, it’s also the traditional time to experience colds and flu. Happily, the noble onion family is especially good at helping those who suffer from stuffy noses and sore throats, whatever the cause. Indeed, when researchers figured out that Mom really was right and chicken soup actually can help heal a cold, the benefit had nothing to do with chicken; it turned out to be largely due to the combination of steam and onions. The entire onion family contains compounds that boost the immune system and help fight infection naturally. Since they also add savor and warmth to almost anything, why not harness those powerful antioxidants at every meal?

On chilly days, nothing is more warming, of both body and heart, then a fragrant pot of homemade soup. Besides, soup is fun to make and a supremely good way to clean the fridge. One secret to great soup is to make it ahead and reheat it. Another is to cook soup slowly, for long, patient hours. When neither choice is possible, good cooks just get more creative. Here are some quick, satisfying, and inexpensive soups that will taste terrific tonight and fabulous tomorrow, should there be any left.

A Sturdy, Vegan Italian Classic

If French onion soup is a family favorite, rich-tasting Italian Garlic Soup will also please. A snap to make, this sumptuously silky soup is lively with garlic and onions, both of which are famous as cold and flu chasers. The addition of raw garlic makes this soup especially lively but you can simply stir it into the soup before serving and let it poach gently for a minute or two to mellow the bite if desired.

Italian Garlic Soup

2 tablespoons fruity olive oil
2 large onions, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3 plump heads garlic, cloves peeled and lightly crushed
3 cups chopped potatoes (Yukon Gold, Carola or any)
1/4 teaspoon dried hot pepper flakes
4 cups Tuscan kale, sliced in 1/4-inch ribbons
1 cup chopped Italian parsley
2 slices crusty rosemary- or herb-bread, toasted and cubed

In a soup pot, cook half the oil, onions, salt, and all but 3 big cloves of garlic over medium heat to the fragrance point (1-2 minutes). Add potatoes and pepper flakes, cover pan and cook until sweated (3-5 minutes). Add 8 cups water, bring to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes. Add kale and cook until barely limp (4-5 minutes). Puree remaining olive oil and raw garlic with an immersion blender or in a food processor, set aside. Puree hot soup with an immersion blender and serve, garnished with toast and raw garlic oil. Serves 4.

Potato Leek And More Soup  

Potatoes are always comfort food, and savory Potato Leek Soup is especially welcome on a cold winter’s night. This vegan version is made very simply, but various additions from spinach to smoked tofu are also excellent in this rich-tasting yet speedy soup. For freshest flavor, make a self-stock instead of greasy broth: Simmer the onion and garlic peels and ends, carrot and potato peels (if you prefer them peeled), celery ends and foliage with a little salt and 6 cups water, then strain.

Mostly Potato Leek Soup

1 tablespoon fruity olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 leeks, thinly sliced (white and palest green parts only)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3 stalks celery, chopped
4 medium potatoes, scrubbed and chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 teaspoon thyme, chopped
1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika

In a soup pot, heat oil over medium high heat with onion, leeks, and salt and cook, stirring, until tender (4-5 minutes). Add celery, potatoes and carrots, cover pan and cook until sweated (3-5 minutes). Stir in hot strained broth, thyme and paprika, adding water as needed to cover potatoes by an inch. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, cover pan and cook until vegetables are tender (15-20 minutes). Serve as is or puree with an immersion blender. Serves 4.

A Dollop Of Seasonal Greens

Hearty winter greens, whether Black Tuscan kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, spinach, or a mix, give this simple and flavorful Curried Sweet Potato Soup fresh flavors and splendid nutritional value, while cilantro and fresh lime juice add a lively lift.

Curried Sweet Potato Soup

1 tablespoon avocado or safflower oil
2 large onions, halved and thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 cups (or 1 can) cooked garbanzo beans, drained
1-2 teaspoons curry powder (mild or hot)
2 tablespoons dried tart cherries or golden raisins
2 tablespoons raw jasmine or basmati rice
1 15 ounce can organic coconut milk
6 cups chopped mixed winter greens
1/2 cup stemmed cilantro
1 lime, in wedges

In a soup pan, combine oil, onions, garlic, celery, sweet potatoes, cumin seeds and salt over medium high heat. Cover pan and cook, stirring often, until vegetables are sweated (3-5 minutes). Add garbanzo beans, curry powder, dried fruit, and rice and stir to coat. Add water to barely cover, then add coconut milk and greens. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, reduce heat to low, cover pan and cook until rice is tender (18-20 minutes). Adjust seasoning and serve hot, garnished with cilantro and a squeeze of lime. Serves 4-6.

Posted in Nutrition, Recipes, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Save The Bees, Please

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Ann Lovejoy
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Protecting Our Beloved Bees

A reader recently asked me to write about bees. Most gardeners are aware that  if ripe flowers don’t get pollinated, no zucchini–or whatever–can happen. Fewer people realize that a large percentage of all fruits, flowers, vegetables and herbs are pollinated by bees (helped by other insects like moths, mosquitoes, ants and wasps).

Unfortunately, our bees are beleaguered. If you’ve been baffled by poor fruit or vegetable set on healthy looking plants, you may be seeing the side effects of excess insecticides. For too many years, advertisers (and experts who ought to have known better) urged us to rush out and buy poison spray the moment some poor bug annoyed us. Never mind that over 95% of all bugs are helpful or harmless: If we are inconvenienced by wasps, just zap them all dead. If ants get in your peonies, wipe them out before they get somewhere worse.

By-kill Is Still Dead

Few people actively try to kill bees, yet like most other pollinators, bees are just as susceptible to all-purpose bug sprays as the target pests. What’s more, many commonly used pesticides will kill bees a long way from your yard. Spray drift can carry toxins clear around the block. Sprays that run into an active sprinkler can be carried into the sewer. Downstream, those powerful toxins can kill fish that never harmed anybody’s lawn.

It’s comforting to assume that wind and water will dilute any poison we use before it harms anything unintentionally. However, we are not alone. Millions of home gardeners are out there with us. When we find cause to spray, they do too. The result is deadly. In the Northwest, honey bees are vanishing faster than bee keepers can replace them. Weakened by frequent exposure to pesticides, they succumb to pests and diseases that healthy bees can usually resist. Two tiny pests, varroa and tracheal mites, can devastate a hive, choking weak, newly emergent bees to death before they can replenish their food levels in spring.

Persistent Pests

Varroa mites have been beekeepers’ nightmares since they arrived in the United States in the late 1980’s. For about a decade the mites were controlled by bee-safe miticides, but by the late 1990’s resistant colonies appeared, initially in Florida, compromising crop production of everything from citrus fruits to vegetables. Resistant strains are now commonplace in the US and elsewhere, though the Pacific Northwest was for years less affected than most of America’s prime growing areas. Beekeepers have been scrambling for years to find miticides that don’t affect colonial bees. There is hopeful evidence that formic acid fumes can kill mites without harming bees.

To experience formic acid at work, place a handkerchief over an active ant hill for a few minutes. Shake off the ants and hold the cloth to your nose for a sinus-clearing experience (great when you have a cold–wow!). Formic acid is quite toxic in concentrate form but fumes that literally melt mites are not harmful for honeybees. Until a safe miticide is found, growers and gardeners alike must depend more and more on native bees.

Native Beauties

Honey bees are not native here. Our natives are mainly solitary bees, like Mason bees, which nest alone rather than in hives. Solitary bees do a fine job of pollinating, albeit over a shorter season than honeybees. Even though most and possibly all solitary bees are immune to the varroa and tracheal mites that decimate honeybees, they still need our active encouragement and a clean environment to thrive. Like imported European honey bees, our native populations can be decimated by even light contact with many pesticides.

Certain herbicides can also harm both native bees and European honey bees. Some ecological watch groups have been estimating that the native bee populations are only about 10% of what they were twenty ago for several decades now. That means that in the past half century, we have been consistently destroying about 90% of our native pollinator bees. We didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are gone. It won’t be as easy to undo the harm as it was to cause it. Luckily, if we want to make amends, we can.

How To Help

First, if you haven’t already, stop using toxic pesticides and herbicides. Seek organic or ecologically benign solutions |to disease and troubling insect relationships. If you aren’t sure what these might be or where to find them, ask your local nursery. If they don’t know, find another nursery that does. In the meantime, let’s try a little counseling before we kill anything. Every gardener can help protect and welcome bees. Not using poisons is a huge contribution. Also, never spray anything, even environmentally friendly pesticides, when bees or other pollinators are active (usually in midday).

Providing housing also helps, and many nurseries carry Mason bee kits. Like little apartment houses for solitary bees, these are blocks of wood with specially sized holes in them. Some models come with paper straw sleeves, so you can change the sheets after each season’s guests have gone. Most are simple rectangles with utterly regular grids of holes. More artistic models are irregularly shaped, perfect for naturalistic gardens. The bees don’t really have a preference and will use either kind indiscriminately.

Native Bees Are Great Pollinators

In return for your hospitality, Mason bees will pollinate your garden. Though some are wide ranging, most bees have a fairly limited range, so if your neighbor keeps bees, you will probably reap the benefits as well. If you have a large, isolated garden, you may want to invest in a bee keeping kit. Most bee keepers suggest beginning with Mason or solitary bees because their care is very simple. Honeybee care is far more complex and poor bee keepers can add to disease problems rather than resolving them.

If you love the idea of keeping bees, experience low fruit and vegetable production, and want to taste honey from your own garden, contact your local branch of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association. These kindly and informative folks will give you all the buzz on how to get started with honeybees and solitary bees.

For more information, check out the website of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association (www.pugetsoundbees.org).

The Northwest’s premier bee source, Knox Cellars, offers books about native solitary bees, orchard mason bees, bee houses, and kits. Contact Knox Cellars at www.knoxcellars.com for information and cool bee stuff.

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Reefer Purging

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Ann Lovejoy
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Decluttering Condiments

New Year’s is all about fresh starts, which is fine by me: I can’t remember a year that didn’t include at least a few things I’d like to reframe or reconsider. However, I find it best to work up to large shifts of habit or consciousness by starting small. Thus, I decided to take on my refrigerator, home to many nameless bottles and tubs, especially in the freezer compartment. My old fridge had a top unit which my kids called The Freezer Of Death because whenever you opened it, slippery, crammed-in packages tumbled out, causing panic, discomfort, and sometimes significant pain.

My brother, who manages a restaurant, was recently hit on the head by a 30+ pound box of soup in a walk-in. My freezer never held anything that potentially lethal, but I did break a toe once when half a ham hit my foot just right. My mom was famous in our family for repackaging and freezing unsuccessful meals, usually with labels that said ‘needs work’. I was formerly famous for hosting what my kid’s referred to as The National Collection Of Blueberries (now there’s just one bag, so change IS possible).

Bargains & Moral Imperative

When the old reefer died and one of my boys’ girlfriends helped me swap out the frozen stuff, she asked me tentatively why there were 15 pounds of pasture butter to schlep. I thought that was a weird question and explained that I always buy nice butter when it’s on sale. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? I also buy tea on sale, which is why I have 38 boxes of it (mostly different kinds) in my tea cupboard at this very moment. (Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody?) Oh, and really good pasta, of course. And and and.

When I really considered it, I discovered that I actually believed that buying things on sale is morally superior in some undefined way that probably connects to my parents’ growing up during the Great Depression (and depression runs in both families to this day, imagine that!). The bargain habit was not as ridiculous when my kids lived with me and all their friends ate here daily. It even wasn’t as silly when my mom was with us and her caregivers were here for several meals a day. In between those two periods, however, lie a stretch of years when only one or two people were regularly fed from this kitchen, yet it was always stocked like a flood of starving refugees might appear at any moment. I’ve alway wanted to work in a soup kitchen…

Back To The Fridge

Anyway, this year I am celebrating the new by experiencing a fresh start with my refrigerator. Taking on the whole thing at once seemed a little daunting, so I decided to do one section a day. The vegetable bins came first, since they get cleaned out pretty regularly so are not scary. Next I did a shelf at a time, purging anything I didn’t recognize. Yesterday was Door Day. My reefer door was home to dozens of little bottles and jars and cans of condiments, all of which were super cool at some point but less so now.

After removing over a dozen bottles of salad dressing, home made and not, I could wiggle out ten or fifteen jars of…something that had once been amazing (I don’t save the failures, yet another example of  the possibility of changing up family patterns. (See? It all works together, really; pick up anything, as John Muir once observed, and you’ll find it is inextricably connected to everything else in the universe.) Perhaps I need to remember that I only care to be culinarily amazed so often, else why would I fill my fridge with amazingness that I don’t seem to feel the urge to experience again?

Out With The Old

Some purging is quite easy: if it outlived its use-by date, it’s doomed. If I don’t know what it is, farewell. If it looks or smells dubious, so long. If it triggers no memory, ciao. With other things, it’s a bit harder; that really quite lovely vanilla-infused vinegar, for instance. Maybe with so much less stuff cramming the door, I might remember it’s there (fabulous on boiled beets, roasted carrots, and fruity salads, among other things).

Perhaps my biggest take-away is that novelty no longer rules my kitchen, since I rarely use most of those gotta-have-it condiments above once. Back when I was doing more food writing, I made and tried new stuff all the time. I still do, but far less often, since the pull of new life patterns has drawn me to different paths. What’s left? Several kinds of mustard (but not over a dozen anymore). One kind of ketchup (the only one everybody likes). Five kinds of vinegar and two kinds of ponzu, which I actually use. Fish oil and flax seed oil (they make a big difference to my eye happiness). Organic tart cherry juice, my morning sip. A jar of toasted sesame seeds, dated a few weeks back. A jar of sourdough starter, which gets used often. That’s it. It’s a new year indeed!

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Recycled Manure Creates Power And Great Poo

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Ann Lovejoy
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Garden Gold From Digested Cow Pies

This summer, I received a load of crap that made me very, very happy. I’ve been using aged cow manure in the garden for years, especially appreciating its soil conditioning qualities. Cow manure is weed free, thanks to cow’s multi-chambered tummies and the tiny seed-eating aphids that live in manure piles. It’s also the best top dressing I’ve ever found, looking (if not smelling) like chocolate frosting, a most handsome effect.

My newly prepped front entry beds are looking exquisitely prepped just now, thickly coated with digested cow manure. This is the ‘new’ form of poo I’ve been experimenting with and so far, it’s fabulous. Digested cow manure is what’s left over after manure is mined for energy. Here’s how it works: Dairy farmers collect cow manure in pits when they wash down their barns. The liquids are sprayed back on the grazing fields and the solids (often mixed with field crop waste) are trucked to an anaerobic digester facility, where the methane is stripped out and converted to electricity, which gets sold to local power companies, partly offsetting trucking costs.

Turning Poop Into Power

Anaerobic digestion produces biogas (mainly methane and carbon dioxide) by composting organic materials in an oxygen-free environment. When manure breaks down outside, the biogas becomes a ‘greenhouse gas’, but when it’s captured in an anaerobic digester, the result is clean power and a big pile of digested poo. It’s not exactly like aged, composted manure, but it has similar nutrient levels, low pathogen levels, and is an excellent soil conditioner. Because it is not as aged, it does smell more ripe, as holiday visitors to my home have noted.

Anaerobic digesters are hardly new, but today’s technology makes them far more efficient. In Washington State, dairy coops share local digesters to create energy and manage their mounds of manure. It took time to figure out how to get that end product into gardens, but today, you can buy it as bags of Magic Dirt, USDA certified, biobased potting soil that has been approved for organic growers by the Idaho Department of Agriculture and the Mulch and Soil Council (bet you didn’t know there was one!).

A Great Bulk Buy

You can also, as I did, get large loads of digested manure delivered by the same folks who sell composted dairy manure. In the soil, the digested stuff works like a more nutritious form of peat moss, opeing tight soils and absorbing and holding up to three times its weight in water, but without the environmental damage caused by peat moss extraction. (Besides harming the peat bogs, peat moss harvesting releases 2,400 tons of methane per acre. Seriously.) In contrast, each cubic yard of digested cow manure has generated over 100 kWh of green, renewable energy.

Also known as ‘digestate’, digested manure brings a lot of nutrients to the soil, including nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and sulfur, as well as absorbent cellulose fibers. Lots of folks are trying to figure out how to manage these digestates, some of which contain ingredients other than manure and field crop residues. For gardeners, the answer is very simple; stick to manure-and-crop-waste based digestates and spread them far and wide. You can rake this yummy stuff into a struggling lawn, spreading it about an inch deep, and see better growth within a season. Spread over beds and borders, it helps nurture hungry roots and looks tidy to boot.

OK For Edibles?

Digestate is low in pathogens and is starting to be more widely used on farm fields, golf courses, and some parks as a fertilizer and soil conditioner. As more gardeners learn about the value of digested poo, that market will grow as well, especially among those of us who value green, renewable resources. By using manure and promoting its use, we can help to reduce America’s massive accumulations of manure and other organic leftovers, keeping them out of waterways and turning them into an asset.

To find out who might deliver digested poo to you, contact your local Agricultural Extension Agent or ask a Master Gardener. In the meantime, here are some cool links if you want to learn more.

farmpower.org

http://www.agweb.com/article/two-steps-forward-for-dairy-digesters-NAA-catherine-merlo/

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?

http://agr.wa.gov/fp/pubs/docs/343-washingtondairiesanddigesters-web.pdf

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