On the joys of not cooking "cooking greens"

Our garden gets too much sun for lettuce, but we have a LOT of cooking greens (mostly a variety of kale and chard).  Accordingly, we have gotten very creative at incorporating greens into just about anything - omelettes, casseroles, pasta dishes, stir frys, you name it.  And of course they are delicious wilted with olive oil and garlic, and drizzled with a little lemon from a friend's tree.  But I've gotten a lot of incredulous looks recently when I extol the virtues of eating our greens raw.  We don't buy lettuce anymore, we use the greens on sandwiches and in salads, something that I guess makes the kale-haters uncomfortable.

Everyone seems to have this idea that raw kale and chard are "bitter" and "hard to chew."  I stand here today (well sit here) to tell you that these are LIES and FALSEHOODS.  Raw greens are delicious (and super nutritious, but that's besides the point).  There are a couple of tricks that we have found that make kale and chard a delicious thing to eat raw.

1) Use an acidic salad dressing.  Most dressings have vinegar or lemon juice in them, but I know some people prefer a little drizzle of olive oil and nothing else.  But acid balances the bitterness of the greens.  If anything, we err on the side of ALL acid, and little to no oil.  In my opinion, lemon is kale's perfect compliment, and raw kale salad with a lot of lemon and a touch of olive oil, salt and pepper is just perfect.

2)  Put something sweet in there.  When I was in college, there was a little health food store (I know, health food in New Jersey?) down the street from campus that made this AMAZING raw kale salad that I have never quite been able to recreate.  It has lemon juice and olive oil (duh), pine nuts, and rice (yeah rice, it was awesome).  But the most important thing was it has dried cherries, or cranberries or something like that.  Those little pops of sweet were what made the salad and transformed the bitter kale into yumminess. I try to have Trader Joe's amazing dried cherries on hand or even better, fresh fruit, to make the greens salad more colorful and well balanced.

3) Chop the greens.  My dad is the king of the chopped salad, requesting almost every salad he orders to be chopped, even if it doesn't come that way on the menu.  Waiters hate him.  But I must say, I see his point of view.  When you chop everything up you get a little bit of everything in one bite.  And when you chop greens, the issue of them being "hard to chew" is moot.  They are small and crunchy and yummy.

So stop hating, raw-cooking-greens haters!  In fact, I think "cooking greens" is an unfair stereotype and should be abandoned.  Okay, that's a little much, I know, but I just wanted to share my love for raw greens.  Who needs lettuce?

King Harvest Has Surely Come

Play this as you read this post:



Last week was the harvest moon (the closest full moon to the autumnal equinox, when farmers could stay up late to pick their crops by the light of the moon), and it was particularly spectacular.  Our own harvest has been delicious, and I'm excited to have tomato and squash well into the fall.  Fall!  Yay!  My favorite season, filled with pumpkins, and festivals, and swirling leaves and crisp temperatures and amazing food.  I just got super excited thinking about it. And Halloween!  The best holiday EVER.

Anyhow I tried to take pictures of it with my cell phone, and they all turned out terribly.  So instead, I collected other people's awesome pictures of previous harvest moons to share.

Garden Part III: The Picking, and the Eating

Starting to look like a real garden!

The chard and kale keep coming, no matter how much we harvest them!

This basil from our garden made an amazing cashew pesto (I had a really bad experience with pine nuts, don't ask)

Our cucumber and our basil, but we had to buy the tomatoes because ours aren't ready yet.  I made cheese again for the first time in over a year, but it's still a little rubberier than I want it to be (it's the white stuff in the top of the picture).  This was the first time I used vegetable rennet and it worked out just fine, so I should get more and start using that.  I also need to order more cultures on the internet.  This caption is turning into a bit of a to-do list for myself, isn't it...

These green beans are so delicious, we haven't had a chance to cook them yet because we eat them all raw before we can get them into the pan.

Oh and while I was in Chicago (I just got back) Chris and Starchild put in a corn-hole court!

We have a little piece of Maryland in our stoop garden now, the state flower: Black Eyed Susan.  I've been experimenting with Instagram, hence the filter.

Sorry I haven't posted in more than a month. Things were crazy there for a while, in one month I was in:

1. Sacramento (work)
2. Chicago (data)
3. Yosemite (for Shirley's wedding!)
4. Los Angeles (for my mother's birthday)
5. Chicago (for almost three weeks this time) 
6. and back to Los Angeles (for a few hours before finally landing back in...)
7. Northern California

Things are finally slowing down a little bit, as I have two whole weeks of working from home before we go up north for my family reunion in August. Phew!  Here are some more photos of the garden and its bounty.

Happy tomato plant.

Rows of goodness, including some very happy cantaloupes in the back, which I am super pumped about.  Note that this picture was taken AFTER Chris cut back all the chard and kale he is holding in the picture above.

Pretty.  Waiting for me when I got back from Chicago.

More than a McNugget: Chicken Communication

Chickens can talk.  Kind of.  And they're delicious.  What's not to love?

I am a very strange eater. I tell people I'm a vegetarian so as not to bore them, but I'm actually just terribly picky about what animals I will ingest. I believe in transparency of consumption, and in equality of guilt throughout the chain of production (I'll save that for another blog entry). That being said, I like to eat animals. And I don't get to do it very often. So it was a special occasion when Chris bought us a locally farmed, free-range, organic chicken this week and endeavored to roast it in my grandmother's old roasting pan, using the crappiest apartment oven of all time.

The experience got me thinking about chickens. We Americans eat a lot of chicken, and we rarely think twice about it. Most people who decide to cut out only a portion of their meat consumption choose to eliminate pork and beef, often for religious or health reasons. But I think we also feel a stronger connection to the cow and the pig than we do to the lowly broiler chicken.  The former two are mammals, which means we have stronger family ties. Also they are furry, which reminds us of puppies. I could imagine hugging a piglet, a clean one, whereas I can't imagine hugging a chick. Pigs and cows are also a lot larger than chickens, which for some unknown reason seems to mean a lot to us (think of the big fuss over whales). And then of course there is the big I-word: intelligence. Cows and pigs are most certainly more intelligent than chickens.


Carnivores and vegetarians alike love to throw around claims about animal sentience and intelligence as if it is hard core scientific fact. But if I've learned anything studying assessment theory for the past six months, it's that intelligence is not something we can measure accurately even in humans, so what makes us think we can objectify it in animals? Still, there are certain basic mental feats that we consider indications of some amorphous type of animal smarts. One of those is representational communication. In other words, a certain noise or combination of noises that correspond to a certain meaning. The representational nature of human communication is what makes blogging possible; when I type the word chicken, I don't have to show you what I'm talking about, because the combination of the syllables chic- and -ken mean something specific to you already.

As kids, we are taught over and over and over by a myriad of animated movies and TV shows that almost all animals can communicate just as well as we can, and make intelligent decisions based on those communications.  If we are to take these childhood representations as fact, most of this communication is actually inter-species, a kind of encoded English.

Also they tend to wear warm weather accessories but no pants. Oh how those movie producers lie!

There are a lot of animal behaviorists interested in representational communication. Most of this research is on apes, our well known evolutionary cousins. But the creature responsible for the McNugget (or at least a portion of it) turns out to be an interesting research subject as well. Dr. Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia has found that certain rooster calls trigger nearby hens to look for specific information, i.e. food or predators. These calls have "language-like qualities," and indicate a level of social sophistication that has only been shown for a few mammals. This video shows a hen responding to a call indicating the presence of food.  She walks toward the loudspeaker and begins to peck at the ground, looking for the food.

Personally, I'm impressed.  It may not be Chicken Run, but these birds, which we stuff into windowless houses so pungent with ammonia that they develop sores all over their bodies, and breed to grow so quickly that they cannot support their own weight, aren't empty-headed idiots placed on this Earth as yet another commodity. They are the product of millions of years of evolution, including several thousand (at least) of domestication, which has given them a unique language-like ability to communicate, and I think that they deserve some respect.

So I got out the cloth napkins, and lit some candles.  Cheers to the talking chicken!

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Pick a little, talk a little, cheep!

A visit to TLC: a real ranch, with real pigs, and real pig sex

Today Carolina and I took a trip out to Aromas to visit TLC Ranch (Tastes Like Chicken), where I get eggs at the farmers market every Wednesday.  It was an unbelievably perfect day (a common California phenomenon) and the ranch was overrun by hundreds of new piglets.  And here's the best part: the piglets were running, playing and suckling, like real piglets.

A running piglet looks a lot like a puppy, with wildly flopping ears and a clumsy stop, sometimes tumbling into piles of other piglets.  Unlike most pigs in the country, who are raised exclusively inside and whose tails are cropped so that other pigs don't chew them off after they go insane (true story), these pigs looked like, well, pigs.  It warmed my heart.  And the chickens?  They looked like chickens!

A Brief History of My Relationship with Food

My mom's friend Laurien gave me the new book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer over winter break. Reading it has forced me to re-examine what I thought I believed about why I eat what I eat. I first began thinking about my own consumption as an ethical issue in my sophomore year of college in Peter Singer's class Practical Ethics. I had always considered myself an "ethical" person, despite not being a religious person by any means, but it wasn't until Singer's course that I encountered different systematic approaches to personal decision making. My college boyfriend fancied himself a deontologist and I fancied myself a rule utilitarian and we would argue for hours. Based on my rule utilitarian analysis of the world coupled with a heavy dose of Peter Singer, I became a strict vegetarian for a few months, eventually expanding my eating to animals that were "ethically treated," an ambiguous phrase that I wasn't even sure how to define myself.


In my junior year of college that deontological boyfriend gave me my first Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I devoured it. I went on to read The Botany of Desire and In Defense of Food and began to revise my definition of what it meant to eat ethically. I became obsessed with factory farming, corn and sustainability and decided that there were a number of factors that would impact my decision to eat meat. In In Defense of Food I learned the word "flexitarian" and adopted it for myself. Venison and other wild game became my meat of choice.


In my senior year of college I visited several farms for my journalism courses, including Bobolink Dairy. The owners of Bobolink, Jon and Nina White, were generous hosts and showed me what a farm could look like. Both Jon and Nina knew most of their cows by name, and could point them out to me from across snowy fields. They introduced me to a newborn calf named Beltane, and then invited me back in a few months for the festival of Beltane, when they would eat him. In those few months before the festival, I thought long and hard about what it meant to be eating an animal that I had met and been literally introduced to. Did it make it more wrong, or more right? Should it matter?

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who will eat absolutely anything unless it has eyes, or a beak, or some other feature that is a reminder of the animal the meat comes from. I used to be like that as a child, covering my eyes in front of the fish counter at Ralph's or while walking by the hanging ducks in the window of the Asian grocery. But this ickiness feeling is a construction of our culture, not a part of human nature, and a harmful construction in my opinion. Are we really so disconnected from the origins of what we put in our bodies that we can't deal with anything that reminds us of the fact that these animals were once alive? If we can't deal with the fact that these animals were once alive do we have a right to eat them? I say no. With this in mind I set out to catch a fish in Yosemite this last summer and insisted that the ranger who lent me his equipment let me kill it. It was hard, and there was a little ickiness in my stomach, but I did it and felt good about it because it didn't last long (and also the trout up there are not native). I breathed a sigh of relief and ate the trout for dinner (that's me on the left eating my trout). I have never felt so connected to what I was ingesting and it felt awesome. I can't wait to be in a place in my life where almost everything I put in my mouth was harvested or killed by my own hand or that of someone else I know.

Anyhow the point is I ate Beltane the calf and I liked it, and I felt better about it than any bovine I had ingested before or have ingested since.

Eating Animals takes a stance that is a lot more hard-core than Pollan's philosophy. Although Foer praises Pollan's writing, he implies that the author has not gone far enough in his recommendations. Foer is convincing, describing the horrors of factory farming in far gorier detail than Pollan or Food Inc. But I am halfway through the book and he has yet to address the possibility that one can eat eggs, dairy and meat responsibly. I am not going to give up my flexitarian status yet, but I am going to be a lot more discerning about food labels that claim things like "cage free" or "organic." I've also given up a lot of seafood. If Foer's statistics are correct, it is almost impossible to find real food out there from real farms. However, it is out there--I've seen it in New Jersey--and I can probably find it in Santa Cruz. That makes me happy.