Golden Gate Bridge Sunset

Sometimes you forget to do the touristy stuff.  But it sure is easier with longer daylight hours!  Awesome, made my worries go away instantly.

Transforming Leftovers- Taco Salad

I get a lot of flack these days after I embraced Pumpkin's exclamation that I liked eating "garbage."  But sometimes I even get lazy and you never know what leftovers will become.  Even in the realm of food, one man's garbage is another's treasure.

Such as what I had for lunch today:

I call it taco salad (and chocolate milk).  It was as tasty as it looks even though the bulk of it came from leftover nachos.  I know, a truly heinous piece of garbage.  After all, the chips get limp only moments after putting them into Tupperware and the whole thing in general is mangled mess.  But I took the nachos home from dinner out (a necessity of skiing) on Saturday, despite dubious looks from R+J.

Fast forward to just hours ago.  After throwing a mini-impromptu dinner party last night, I didn't feel like making an affair out of dining.  So I opened the fridge but found nothing from the same cuisine, very few things already cooked, and eggs.  Well, not entirely helpful.  But the leftover nachos saved me, because with the chips come cheese, olives, and jalapenos.  I put down a base of salad (one of our only convenience foods), topped on some more chips (these are now 4 months old and somehow have retained their crispiness- processed food kind of scares me), put on the nachos, put on some leftover refried beans (with the nacho cheese melted onto it), and topped it with freshly carmalized onions.  You can call it garbage, but I call it delicious!

I HAD STEAK!!!!!! An Elaboration.

While nobody I know quite shares my unbridled enthusiasm for meat, I feel like I have to disclaim the previous post.  That steak was exciting for many reasons.  (1) I haven't had steak in so long, I can't remember anymore and (2) IT'S STEAK!!!  But this steak was particularly delicious because (1) I haven't had steak in so long, I can't remember anymore, (2) it was grass fed Marin Sun Farms top sirloin, and (3) I BROWNED IT IN BACON FAT!!!!  To be fair, I think the caramelized onions and mushrooms contributed as well, but oh my goodness, so delicious!

As L cleverly asked me, how does one who only gets roast/braise end up with a steak?  Well, when one is an amateur butcher, one sees steak everywhere.  

First, 15 lbs of meat comes in an unassuming box.

Bike the meat box home!  The C in CSA stands for community so the box is delivered, amongst many others, to a neighbor.

That box is not as small as it looks ;).

Meat should never defrost in a bag of it's own juices, lest you want to taste iron.  Putting it over a rack and covering it with paper will allow it to breath and dry age a little.  See award winning River Cottage Meat Book.

Cut it up!  Just make sure it's against the grain.

One 4 lb roast becomes 3 steaks and 1.5 lbs of strips.  All separated into reused containers (SF doesn't recycle styrofoam) and labeled with dates and sizes.  The easier you make it for your future self, the easier it is!

Some slices are destined for grinding.

My perfectly marbled, oh so delicious, and sustainable steak.

I HAD STEAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've Been Thinking...

Recently I've been thinking about the wisdom of radical behavior.  On the one hand, it is far easier for me to theoretically stick to something 100% than to let myself have room for error.  Because when I think to myself, ok, you don't have to ONLY eat sustainable meat, then it quickly becomes a slippery slope.  And soon enough I'm buying 3 lbs of bacon, 3 lbs of sausages, and going to Popeye's.  So much for the quarterly report!

The problem is, while I can easily live with myself radically, I don't want to end up as a hermit foraging alone in the mountains, drinking my own distilled pee.  After all, I think happiness comes from those you surround yourself with, not just the ideals you hold yourself to.  But at the same time, when I want to throw an impromtu BBQ for biking down from San Francisco to Menlo Park, the fact of the matter is, my roast/braise meat CSA is not BBQ friendly.  The 3 lbs of sausages or chicken we picked up were far more popular and cheaper than the $40 slab of goat Pumpkin caltrained down. 

Don't get me wrong though, my diet has significantly changed, and the way I feed people has significantly changed.  While I'm discussing 3 lbs of sausage, we only used a fraction of the package.  The rest is stored safely in my freezer.  I only cooked 3 whole, out of desperation to eat sooner since everything else was being cooked from scratch.  That includes pizza dough, tomato sauce, lemonade, and butchering the chicken into proper pieces.  

And while we can debate the merits of having a BBQ in the first place, with it's emissions spewed directly into the atmosphere, I wouldn't have changed things for the world.  7 friends in the kitchen and in the garage (the theme being food AND bikes), cooperating to make a beautiful meal, which we then sat outside and enjoyed.  Beautiful indeed.

The Beginning- Quarterly Report

When I started this blog in the beginning I made a few [overly-ambitious?] promises that I wanted to update you on.  

#1 Pledging to buy only sustainable meat, B-.  Technically I could call this a win.  After all, for meat I'm cooking with, I've gone 100% sustainable.  Some parts were hard, such as  staring at the Monterey Aquarium seafood guide for each and every seafood choice (often so confusing I have to leave it for another day so I can cross reference the internet).  Some parts easy, such as with beef/lamb/goat because the CSA provides plenty.  We actually have leftovers from month to month!  But technicalities aside, I have to admit I cheat when dining out.  Popeye's Tuesday $.99 for 2 pieces deal still slips into my diet about once a month and I can't deny my popularity.  As for the temptress bacon, there has been some clever accounting where I'll host a eating-party and keep leftover bacon that somebody else has bought (this happened once, maybe twice).  Tsk, tsk.

On the other hand, there has been so much real improvement.  On Monday I inadvertently made a recipe from a vegetarian cookbook for rice and beans.  Certainly the pre-sustainable cow me (the mad cow me, if you will) would have recoiled in disgust.  Instead, I added a serving of beef, home-made tortillas, and wished for more vegetables (we had missed the farmer's market that week).  And when I say serving, I mean the USDA serving size, a mere 5 ounces.  I can distinctly remember scoffing at the equivalent visual (a deck of cards) in college.  These days it's totally natural.  I can even spend lunches without meat, without a problem.  Life is all about progress.  

#2 Seriously scrutinizing labor concerns of purchases, A.  This one was new but has been relatively easy.  Like I mentioned during my shameless plug for Rainbow Grocery, I loved that they paid their staff a living wage.  Marin Sun Farms is a small family farm.  I talk to the farmer's I buy from at the farmer's market (although admittedly, I mainly just ask for prices).  Even Costco has amazing labor practices, their cashiers get paid over $20/hr.  If I can't find a place where I trust their labor standards, I don't go in.  Sometimes this means waiting for the next farmer's market, but most times, I've planned better than that.

As for non-consumable purchases, well, my big purchase in 2 months was $11.91 in computer parts.  After that, another $18.39 for Aviator sunglasses, the only non-consumable part of our Valentine's Day extravaganza.  It was definitely out of convenience too, Pumpkin had forgotten her already old and beat up sunglasses and we were due for a lot of biking that weekend.  And I suppose it doesn't hurt that I find Aviators hot.  

#3 Pledge to take public transit/carpool/bike, A-.  This one was old and easy to continue. The more I bike, the more routes I discover and the more I remember where the hills are.  Google Maps now provides a bike routes.   Amar does it with grade, in the city.  Livestrong with a point and click style route planner, elevation, and time estimate.  And calories too, if that's your thing.  Public transit, whether Caltrain, VTA or MUNI provides an excellent supplement.  As does carpooling!  Even I was surprised that I could minimize my driving down even more.  I literally can't remember the last time I drove alone.  I can remember my last carpool though!

#4 Eliminate waste from my life, A.  This mandate suffers from vagueness but I'm calling this one a victory too.  From reducing water waste to eliminating food waste, this one is my favorite (and probably Pumpkin's bane).  What can I say, I love efficiency =).

Friday Friendsday (R+J)

While visiting my good friends R + J to start an early morning ski trip, I discovered they had soundly trumped my navy shower. Even in the haze of the wee morning hours, I knew this genius must be publicized!  So henceforth, Fridays are now the realm of my amazing friends and their equally amazing green conquests.  Friday Friendsday!

I had told R about my navy showers/water saving antics a while back and in response he engineered this:

This seeminly inocuous assortment of tubes and wires is a homemade pump system.  R+J's shower is now a resevoir for water, they've put the stopper in and take showers with slightly cold feet. Instead of going down the drain, the grey water is used for flushing toilets and washing laundry.

To do this, R simply bought a pump, which activates upon being dropped into the shower water.  It then pumps water out of the shower and through the clear tube.  The clear tube can be connected to either the low flush toilet toilet (shown below) or the washing machine.  Not too shabby for <$20!  And the tube usually stays connected to the toilet because it has it's own resevoir. As a low flush toilet, the tank actually holds enough water for multiple flushes.  Truly genius.

Hats off to R+J!