I should have taken a photo of my garden basket today, as it would have looked better than the finest farm-to-table article in any fancy wine magazine. I had blueberries. I had strawberries. I had potatoes. I had fave beans. I had beets. I had baby onions. I had artichokes. And of course, the usual greens, fennel and lemon balm.
I am harvesting and drying the lemon balm in earnest, especially after a trading partner asked for another container. She said she would even go in on a dehydrator, because the lemon balm was so important and helpful for her family. I probably gave her about $100 worth of dried lemon balm this season, that is, if she had to buy it on the open market as packaged tea.
Today's breakfast was the usual, along with grapefruit from trader Eta. While commenting to my family that I might even run out of lemons, I ran into a lemon bonanza from traders Humberto and Delta, and so have plenty. Delta also gave me several giant grapefruit, so there won't be any vitamin C deficiencies here for awhile.
Lunch was cold chicken burgers with pickles and feta cheese from trader Felix, beet and lemon juice, nuts from trader Dean, kumquats, blueberries, strawberries and the other half of the avocado. I also finished the last of the olives and the last tangerine from trader Humberto.
Dinner was chicken, fava, potato, leeks, greens, beets, artichokes and nuts from trader Dean. Oh, and kumquats. I also finished the last of the buffalo, with pickles. Dinner took a long time, because so many of the food selections for the day needed the pressure cooker or extra preparation.
A vegetarian friend send me a link to the "archaeological scientist" with vegetarian leanings. I must say, she should stick to something she knows, maybe like science or or maybe archaeology, because she sure is effin' clueless about real food. Her talk is also a great illustration of how there is no good review process for choosing TEDx lecturers.
She made some crack about the stupid paleos who think they are OK with eating a meal of eggs, blueberries and avocado, when EVERYBODY KNOWS that blueberries all come from Maine and there aren't any avocados there. Hey paleo peeps, I would like you to make this post viral. I DID eat real-time eggs, avocados and blueberries on the same day. It is not hard to do. Millions of people in SoCal can do this all through February to May, that is, if they can source that many local eggs. This is the time of the year where backyard farmers are selling their excess eggs, their blueberry plants are bursting at the seams, and the avocados are ready. Yep, fully available for one in ten people in the US in February, and more and more, as the blueberry harvest gets in full swing all the way up the coast.
Maybe she was spending so much time in the scientific lab studying ancient animal scat to notice that avocados do not ripen until they are removed from the tree, resulting in an extremely long season, and the ability of long-distance transport. Even by food, the avocados could reach over 100 miles away from the orchard no problem.
No food purchases today, leaving me with $18.42 in the kitty.
South Cal is unique. I wonder what Native people ate there? In my area of Northern Florida they were eating mostly game, fish, oysters, alligators and small amount of food from plants(berries, nuts, young shots, cooked palm core). It looks for me that we humans are wired to seek a pleasure from our food, and plants are mostly for that, and for complex festive food preparations which could be important for social rituals.
ReplyDeleteThe Chumash ate mostly acorns and seafood, with a few berries (toyon, mainly), a few bulbs and tubers (like Mariposa lily), and a few other seeds. There is a kind of native chia that came from a small plant and was therefore, expensive. They also collected yucca blossoms and made a sweet paste out of it, suitable for trade (and probably for making alcohol, but that is just my guess). So much for paleo being VLC, at least at all times of the year. That this TEDx presenter mentioned several grinding tools and failed to mention their use for grinding nuts shows how biased she really is. There are tons of examples of grinding stones, and in areas still populated by oak trees today.
ReplyDeleteCalifornia is not that unique. There are tons of places that relied extensively on acorns. Most of these places just had no place to grow grains. The entire east coast is forest, there would have been no room for grains. Prarie areas actually had few grains, and the nutrition was accessed by animals with rumens. Modern agriculture relies on plowing and constant soil amendments to get the grains. This just doesn't happen any other way, and really just doesn't happen without animals, because there would be no other reliable fertilizer source unless you lived near a guano cave. OTOH, you can visit an oak tree once a year and get a bunch of baskets of acorns per tree. That is what they did here, mainly, live on the coasts where the weather is great and the seafood is plentiful, and venture inland when the yucca or acorns were in season.
We have a lot of native oak tries and wild pecans, so Indians had consume some of it, but it was very seasonal food, unlike animal food sources. I tryed to extract kernels from the pecans, but it was disproportionally hard comparing the amount of job with very massive shells which was not only hard, but also reacted as rubber balls on my hammer.
ReplyDeleteI once tried collecting and harvesting hickory nuts (not locally!). They are lots of work, but they are tasty. Grains, otoh, and also tons of work, and not all that tasty.
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