What's Been on My Mind

What's been on my mind: in a word, FOOD! I had my wisdom teeth removed on Monday morning, and since then have been longing for my return to the world of solid food, crunchy food, and anything that involves excessive action on the part of my molars.

It hasn't been all bad; oatmeal with cinnamon and mashed bananas, pureed sweet potatoes and carrots, and gallons and gallons of pudding! But while I've had several hours a day to "enjoy" my spring break oral recovery, I've been thinking about all of the wonderful food I will be able to devour again very soon.

One relatively recent adoption to our kitchen has been our sourdough starter, aka "mother" (I want to come up with a more clever name for it, but creativity is lacking recently). Every morning, I add some whole wheat flour and water to it. Then, after it has absorbed a sufficient amount of yeast from the air, we take some of it and combine it with flour and other ingredients and bake a delicious sourdough loaf. It is so easy! This week, we are planning on making a few smaller loafs that will act as bread bowls for the tomato soup we just bough from Raikowski Farms at the winter farmer's market. I'm excited!

Another Pizza Post!

Friday night pizza just got even better! Yesterday, I decided that I would make my own dough from scratch. There was more than a slight chance of eating subpar pizza, but I didn't care. I was feeling adventurous, darn it, and I wanted to stop relying on pre-mixed doughs, dough from cans, and anything having to do with dough in boxes and/or lovable, obese dough boys. I googled "pizza dough recipes", clicked on the very first one, made a few adjustments, and watched my hope and anticipation rise along with the dough.

And rise it did. As you can see from the pictures below, the dough expanded like Charlize Theron preparing to be in the movie Monster. And it turned out really well! I had to ask Amanda several times while we were enjoying the pizza if she really liked it, because I have found that I genuinely enjoy things that I make for myself regardless of whether they are truly good or not. After several confirmations that, indeed, the pizza was one of the best we had made, I feel like I can declare this a success.

Friday Night Pizza Dough

1.5 tsp dry active yeast

1 cup warm water

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp salt

2.5 tsp white sugar

2 tsp basil

2 tsp oregano

1. Dissolve yeast in warm water. Let stand about 10 minutes.

2. Stir yeast mixture in with the rest of the ingredients. Cover and let rise. Preheat oven to 350 while you wait.

3. Roll out on pan, pizza stone, or whatever you are baking with. Top with pizza toppings and enjoy!

The All-American Meal

While trying to eat more healthfully and more sustainably, meals like burgers and fries seem to go by the wayside. Not purchasing factory-farmed meat and avoiding deep-fried genetically modified golden Freedom Fries can be an impediment in enjoying an occasional indulgence like this. However, with a few minor adjustments (and education), this meal is well within reach.

It is unbelievably easy to be apathetic about a concept such as how meat is produced. When I have tried to talk about those close to me about why I am striving to become a locavore and the topic of meat comes up, I have heard, "Oh, don't tell me! It's really gonna gross me out!!" on several occasions. Now, I'm not trying to be preachy and I feel that I am generally pretty unassuming in the presentation of my points. But I will take my opportunity now to step up on my soapbox and hopefully (when I actually have readers), I can educate some people about making appropriate food choices.

CAFO's, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, is likely where your meat comes from when you go to the supermarket and pick up a pound of ground chuck to grill some delicious burgers. These operations place tremendous stress on the animals, not only by forcing them into an intolerable living space, but by injecting them with growth hormones, dosing their feed with antibiotics, and forcing them to trudge around in an exorbitant amount of fecal matter. The videos that floated around the internet a few years back of people doing absurdly inhumane things in order to get animals to stand for long enough to slaughter them were not an isolated incident. This happens all over the country, and these animals are the origin of the meat you buy. Yum!

Purchasing local, free-range meat accomplishes several things. First, you are supporting local farmers who desperately need help in this era of enormous commercial farms. Second, you have more of a direct connect with the ecosystem than with commercial meat. Third, you can generally ensure that the animals were treated humanely during their life and are free of residues from antibiotics and pesticides when you actually eat them. The origin of the ground bison for my burger, pictured below, is a small farm just outside of Stevens Point. Amanda and I have passed by on our bikes before, and it is quite reassuring to know exactly where this meat came from.

In lieu of deep-fried french fries, I baked some thin slices of sweet potato until they were crispy and delicious.

If you want to read more about why you should avoid factory-farmed meat, I recommend Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, What to Eat by Marion Nestle, and Grub by Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry.

NYC Green - No Impact Man

I recently decided upon New York University to finish up my education in the field of physical therapy. A rational person might think I would be mildly concerned about moving to a city with a population approximately 350 times larger than where I currently live, but I cannot wait to make the transition to life in the greatest city in the world.

Since Amanda and I have recently been attempting to live even more sustainably, I wanted to find out how I can continue with this lifestyle, OR become even more sustainable. Some things are quite obvious; New York has a terrific mass transit system, so our greenhouse gas emissions are bound to decrease. But there are some things that I wanted to know more about. Luckily, many of the books I have been reading lately have many potential applications to my new life in NY.

The first of these books is No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process by Colin Beavan. Beavan says that he always described himself as an environmentalist, but really didn't know how his actions were very different than anyone else's. With that in mind, he undertook a yearlong project to not only reduce his impact on the environment, but through various organizations and simple actions, leave a positive impact as well. Beavan lives in Manhattan, and during his year of no impact living, he gives up packaging, buying new things, all transportation with the exception of walking and biking, and eventually, electricity. While his eco-experiment may seem a little extreme (and it may well be), it teaches us some very important lessons about how our small individual actions can lead to large collective action. It inspired me to make several changes in my daily life which, hopefully, will inspire others to make subtle yet important changes in their actions which hopefully will inspire many, many others.

I strongly recommend No Impact Man (and Colin Beavan's blog) to anyone who cares about the future of our planet and how they can play a role in making that future as bright as possible.

Pizza!

For the last few weeks, we have set one dinner a week as pizza. I think I can say with some certainty that our unofficial "Pizza Night" is here to stay. And as a hungry college student with access to some wonderful cheeses, I am quite happy about it.

Since beginning this blog, our weekly pizza has already evolved. We used to buy those Pillsbury cans of dough at the supermarket (which, don't get me wrong, are very delicious), but have advanced ourselves to buying mixes of "95% organic ingredients" dough from the Co-Op. Not only does it taste much better, but we're putting more of our dollar back into the community by shopping at the Co-Op than at County Market. We also don't buy those convenient bags of pre-shredded cheeses that are ubiquitous at all big chain supermarkets. Instead, we buy cheese that we know is from Wisconsin (and preferably from Rudolph, WI - Dairy State Cheese Co.) and shred it ourselves. These changes may seem small, but it is ensuring that (1) we have the freshest ingredients, (2) the ingredients have less food miles on them, and (3) more of our pizza money stays within the area.

The Food So Nice They Named it Twice

Couscous primavera was on the menu the other night, and this simple and quick recipe did not disappoint. Couscous is another item which we now purchase from the bulk bins at the Co-Op and store in a used sauce jar. We seem to be accumulating more and more jars and other containers that we would have thrown away or recycled, and I'm excited to fill them with things I would have bought anyway to cut down on superfluous packaging.

Anyway, the couscous primavera took about 25 minutes to make (including prep time), and was not only delicious but inexpensive. However, we may shelve this recipe until the spring and summer, at which time we can get all of the ingredients from the farmer's market and make this a very local dish.

Tofu!

This post is long overdue, but I'm finally putting it up! Last week, Amanda's experimental dish was Tofu Rigatoni Casserole. Since we could not find any bulk rigatoni at the Co-Op, we used some penne we had previously purchased and seem to always have on hand these days. This was a pretty easy meal to make, and one that produced a considerable amount of leftovers, which is always good - until we forget about them in the fridge...

Eating this meal reminded me of how delicious baked pasta dishes are, and made me want to make more dishes with a delicious layer of bubbly, baked cheese on top. But alas, while eating thick layers of cheese on top of everything may be a gesture bursting with Wisconsin pride, it is also bursting with saturated fat. Oh well. Every once in a while is certainly okay though.