So, I had this great idea to start a weblog and write about cooking, veganism, and my cat. And then I got completely busy, side-tracked, and didn’t keep up with “the demand”. (Yeah, there was a lot of demand – so much I could barely breathe!).
So, to keep this from being a “nothing” website, I may add some more animal categories in, to poste cute pictures of my boys and girls. I don’t know how many people actually read this website, oh well.
Kallie joined us at the end of August. She is fitting in very nicely now. Here’s how it all went down:
Niko doesn’t know this yet… but tomorrow night she is getting a new little sister! (This photo is at least a month old… she’s around 3-4 months now).
Chris has been bothering me for some time about a second cat – to even out the score. Now we’ll have two people, two dogs, and two cats. Plus three boys and three girls – so we can gang up on eachother, or something.
Her Humane-Society given name is Tootsie, but we’ll be choosing a new name for her once we get to know her. We’ve never introduced two cats before… the new kitten will be living in our “Chill Room” for a couple of days until everyone sniffs her out. Then the plan is to put Niko in that room alone for a while, to give her a chance to smell while the dogs meet the kitty.
She has a lot of experience with other cats, and she’s really playful and loves to fight/play with the black lab that she’s being fostered with right now. Exciting!
I was researching Cargill when I found this interesting who-owns-who graphic. It was done by Dr. Philip H. Howard, Assistant Professor in the Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies at Michigan State University. He seems like he would be an interesting person to talk to; he did his pre-doctoral research at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California.
Dr. Howard has a lot of these graphics – most of them current as of July 2007 – on his website. I couldn’t find any poster-sized versions for sale, but if I run across them I may just have to purchase them… I wonder how well they would be received posted at the Food Co-op.
One of the biggest issues I struggle with at the food co-op is the whole Corporate Organics structure. Cargill, the largest privately owned corporation in the United States and also in the top four factory-farmed meat producers (others include Sara Lee, Hormel, and one more I can’t recall offhand because my Vegan Sourcebook isn’t with me… ConAgra?) is one of the primary suppliers to Hain Celestial, which owns/produces many, many, many of the products on our shelves. But, our store is here to serve our customers and most people simply don’t care who makes their food or who gets paid for it.
I’d like to do more consumer education (or at least volunteer and member education), but it seems – at least in our small town – people just aren’t interested in learning. We post signs and newspaper clippings that nobody ever reads. I printed some information on our chocolate in our recent newsletter, and nobody cares that Wilbur Buds are owned by Cargill. I even posted a Who-owns-who article on the bulliten board behind the counter (for volunteers to read), and someone threw it away.
The Wilbur Buds, especially, push my buttons. It’s a pain in the ass to order from the company, the food co-op pays retail price (no wholesale deals) for the chocolate – plus shipping/handling, the chocolate isn’t farmer-friendly, they won’t ship in the summer, they won’t accept checks (actually, I got a credit card for the co-op just for these stupid chocolates – better than using my personal credit card!), and the co-op whose principles are to “promote sustainable and locally grown foods” is giving money directly to Cargill with the purchase. Our volunteers and members know that Cargill owns Wilbur… but they all keep buying the chocolate and shrug, “What can you do about it?”
Inspired by GT’s Organic Raw Kombucha, a fermented sweetened tea drink, I started researching how to make Kombuch a few weeks ago. I got a culture, made some sweet tea, and set it to rest for a couple of weeks. Then there were two cultures (as the “mother” creates a “baby” during the fermenting process). Then, two weeks later, there were four.
There’s one of the newest additions to the family – and just a week old! I’ll be giving the cultures away to interested locals, and soon the whole town of Morris will be kombucha-brewing fanatics. It’s a delightful carbonated drink, in my opinion, though many may think it’s too reminiscent of vinegar. It gets better after bottling with time (and we’ve collected enough GT’s Kombucha bottles). Now I’m in search of more gallon-sized jars. They come with pickles for $5 at the grocery store but… how could we possibly use that many pickles?
Another step towards my goal of becoming self-sufficient. I got Chris a Beer-Brewing kit for Christmas – we’re waiting on our first batch (already bottled) to try. Just one more week or two… in the mean time, we got some Old Milwaukee returnables from the local liquor store. According to my calculations of how much beer one batch makes, how many beers we’ll drink between batches, and how many beers from each batch we want to save… we’ll probably need to buy another 3 or 4 cases of returnable bottles (oh, and some caps?) just to make sure that we have enough to bottle the current batch. I’m really, really hoping that one of us will find ourselves in a larger city soon – Old Milwaukee isn’t exactly the kind of beer that you get excited about drinking – even if the deposit (cost) is only $1.20 for 24 bottles.
Also, we’ve both become slightly addicted to kombucha recently. You can pick up a bottle at most health food stores now; even Cub Foods has them in their Organic Refrigerated section. Basically, it’s a fermented tea – raw food, loaded with probiotics and other benefitial bacteria and cultures. It’s kind of similar to making sour dough bread: you start with a culture; add black or green tea, sugar, and a few cups of the original beverage; let sit for a while and pour into bottles; separate the “mother” culture from the “baby” culture; make a new batch (or two!) using the culture, part of the kombucha, and new black/green tea.
Also, still – I received a Soy Milk Maker for Christmas! It came with instructions for making tofu! We made oat milk last week, but it was too watery and kind of slimy. The soy milk we just made seemed to come out wonderfuly, but we decided to turn it into tofu instead. Apparently, tofu can be made out of just about any bean: black-eyed peas, black beans, chick peas, mung beans…
I guess the next step is to start roasting our own coffee. Oh yeah – and to buy the land suitable for living on and farming all of the vegetables, grains, and beans that we need to create all these things “from scratch.” Plus, there’s a lot of learning to do – Chris has a “beer recipe” book, but we have no idea how to go from grains to malt to malt extract – yet. But, the beer-brewer can make wine, and if the climate stays on this track, we may just be able to grow coffee beans in our back yard in a couple of years…