I have put off blogging about this topic for far too long. It's felt overwhelming. I don't know where to start or how detailed to be before becoming boring. I suppose that is the writer's constant dilemma.

If Only Sophie Had These Choices

I have discovered in my months living in Atlanta that there are many local farmer's markets to choose from. My "favorite" has changed with the seasons and for a variety of reasons. The first market I went to was the Morningside Farmers Market which was down the street from where we were living at the time and the one Cindy had heard about.

I would end up regularly going to the Peachtree Road Farmers Market, East Atlanta Village Farmers Market, Piedmont Park Green Market and Decatur Farmers Market, just to name a few.

Each trip would be an adventure of one sort or another, meeting new vendors and hearing new stories and trying all sorts of goodies. One huge difference between the farmer's markets of Atlanta and those in LA is the changing of seasons and thus the change of foods. There is a little of that in LA, certainly, but it doesn't compare to what it's like here.

While it has been amazing to see real seasons and its affect on my culinary endeavors, it also highlights another key difference between here and L.A. The farmer's markets themselves are seasonal and one by one, they have almost all closed for the season.

So while there were a dozen vendors with lots of great stuff, it was around a tenth as big with relatively little selection.

If you wanted eggs, you went to the one stand that sold eggs and if he was out, you were out of luck.

This was fine, because at the time I was visiting other farmers markets and so always had more than enough to choose from.

Now it's fine, because I've been learning to do with a lot less and make due with what's at hand. This has "forced" me to experiment with stuff that I used to avoid, like beets and cabbage, which now I love.

A Few Shout Outs

This is the part of the blog where I feel like how people who win Academy Awards must feel, the part where they can't figure out who to thank and in what order, not everything else.

I've had so much good food, shared so many stories. It is impossible to relay them all and would end up being about as interesting as the droning buzz of a beehive.

Johnston Dairy Farm
Most all the vendors at the markets are pretty nice. But the guy we get our milk from is super nice and a real character. Some of his jokes might miss the mark, but he always succeeds in putting a smile on my face.
Skye has been taking a lot of great photos recently, this however is not one of them. Our dairy man is the one in the blue cap.



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A Fun-gi 

Okay that was a bad pun, but in this case it holds true.

I often get "stuck" at the mushroom guy's stand,Deep South Mushroom Co. because we both have such a passion for mushrooms. When he found out that I had actually had heard of Paul Stamets  and had his book, he knew that he could use more technical terms and such. Talks on foraging and growing methods followed.

We have had so many amazing mushrooms and meals thanks to this guy.

Also, one of my latest facebook friends, so know I actually know his name now. So thanks again Taylor, a.k.a, mushroom guy for all the wonderful goodies from the Third Kingdom.

Give Me Some Chuice

I couldn't not mention Chuice, since I've gotten Cindy addicted to the stuff.
I use it as a meal replacement or when I need a boost.
Chuice is raw food in a bottle! DescriptionMade fresh daily from more than 45 fruits, vegetables, herbs, nuts and seeds, Chuice is packed with proteolytic and fibrinolytic enzymes, which aid both the digestive system and the immune system.

That's my Chuice card. I highly recommend it.

Chia Pets and more

Who knew chia seeds did more than make green sheep. Over at Tia's Chia she bottles and bakes with the magic seeds.

Doug's Wild Alaska Salmon brings to market amazing and delicious sockeye salmon that he and his sons catch up in Alaska.

Produce from The Funny Farm, and Besmaid Garden Essentials have ended up on our table and in our bellies.

And there are so many more, like I said too many to mention and so sorry to those who I may have forgotten.

I would say that I'm on the verge of obsessing over our family's garbage/waste/refuse, if I wasn't painfully aware of having gone overboard long ago on the subject of waste management.

Particularly when it comes to the matter of wasted food.

When I came across Jonathan Bloom's book, American Wasteland, and website, wastedfood.com, I became even more committed to my goals of less consumption and waste.

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Now, being in an apartment, where I could conceivably have a worm farm and would if we weren't subject to move every few months, and even then I have contemplated(very briefly) taking it on the road with us, now, I have been forced to be much more careful with my purchasing patterns, which has been a very good and eye-opening practice.

But as careful as you are, there will be food waste and by-product. The "pesto" I made from carrot greens while being again an "interesting" experiment was not a recipe I would pass on or use again, so once more the tops of carrots find there way towards a waste bin.

Notice how I don't say garbage.

What I do these days with the carrot greens, egg shells, moldy bread, apple cores, banana peels, etc. is throw them in a plastic bag in the freezer and when the bag or sometimes bags get filled up, I take them to whole foods and dump them in the bin of compostables, which always gets me an odd look or two.

It's just one of the many transitions and changes in our every day life, since becoming semi-nomadic.

Everything Else

Our house is cluttered, much to Cindy's dismay with "garbage" waiting to be re-used, re-purposed, or disposed of properly.

Egg cartons are lined up on the top of the kitchen cabinet waiting to be returned to our poultry people at the farmer's market.

A variety of jars and plastic containers get rinsed out and reused. We have empty boxes of all shapes and sizes.

We have way more stuff that goes out to recycle than "garbage"

I was inspired by Kamikatsu, a small community in the hills of eastern Japan, that aims for "Zero Waste".  Residents there have to compost all their food waste and sort other rubbish into 34 different categories.

To us that might seem like a pain to them its become their normal.



Don't forget to click on the links if you come across something of interest.

I'm sure I'll do more trash-talking in the future, but I have to run, literally.

Sandwich Fatigue

I remember as a kid getting so sick of turkey leftovers after Thanksgiving. It invariably consisted of turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce day after day for what seemed like forever.

I've grown to love leftovers as an adult, mostly because of its ease, but I like to also think that I'm not being wasteful.

As it turns out we didn't have a lot of actual turkey meat left over, but we did have a substantial carcass and I was determined to make the most of it.

For the last few years, I have become obsessed with waste, recycling, garbage and trash. I read a wonderful yet disturbing and very eye-opening article by Jonathon Bloom, author of American Wasteland.  In it he points out that,"Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce for consumption. That comes at an annual cost of more than $100 billion."

My Broth Floweth Over

I woke up around 3 am and couldn't sleep, so I figured what better time to start cooking something that would take several hours. I never thought about were I would put all the broth, so I had to get pretty creative. The first batch was incredibly rich and barely qualified as a broth, much more of a soup,

It was delicious.

I ended up remembering that I had an almost empty 5-gallon Sparklett's water bottle in my car. I came close to filling it in the next couple of batches.

It looked like Skye and I were going to become well-versed in making soup.  Skye made an incredible shepherd's Turkey pie. I made a hearty Turkey-Barley soup, doubling the recipe so that it was almost too much for my 7qt Dutch Oven to handle. Skye then made a chunky-vegetable soup full of potatoes, radish, and carrots. Next on the list will be a turkey noodle soup and that should just about do it. I'll freeze some of the remaining stock.

I did some research on what to do with the fat and entertained the idea of making some biscuits but then remembered that we were all trying to lose weight and if they tasted good it would be less than helpful for the cause and if they tasted bad, well then it would be a waste of time, money and energy. I am sure I could do something with it and the broth by-products and the extra couple gallons, but given the space in our kitchen and the likelihood that we'll be on the move in a few months I opted to "waste" it.
All in all though, I am very happy with how much I was able to make use of that turkey, in the conversations it started, the friends and family that he feed, the culinary adventures and so much more.

Yesterday, I finally was able to complete my turkey journey.

Less than a week before, I had started the trip and took a Thanksgiving Turkey Butcher class at Nature’s Harmony Farms. Since then I have been working ridiculous hours on a movie my wife is decorating, “Neighborhood Watch”. The set I was working on is supposed to be a Costco, but as it often goes it was “easier” to create our own Costco than film in a real one.  I have always had my issues with the massiveness and consumer-glut that is Costco and I have on more than one occasion left a full cart and retreated because the place freaks me out so. And yet it was my charge to help make this huge empty warehouse look like the real thing.

By the time I arrived the lion’s share had been done but I was up to my elbows in its madness, right up until late Saturday afternoon when I started preparing the turkey that had been sitting in our fridge for the previous week waiting…

Waiting for me to figure out what we were going to do with it.

What? What, say what?

I signed up for the class weeks before because we were planning to be with family on the turkey day. Because of aforementioned job, that plan got high jacked and we ended up going to a friend’s house for the day, a friend who already had a bird, and who, by the way made an incredible spread of food. But the point is/was my beloved turkey had no home.

As the days passed and I raced around Atlanta trying to help make a non-Costco warehouse into a Costco, I would try to think of what to do with this amazing corpse in my fridge, something that would suit its beauty and justify(at least in my mind) it’s death and evisceration at my hands.

Which is when I ran across/was forwarded or I don’t quite recall how I got wind of 7th Annual Atlanta Dirty Southern Burners Orphan Thanksgiving Potluck Dinner!  These were a group of folk who were part of the Alchemy Festival.
Now I didn’t know if I “knew” them or had ever met any of them before, but they were “burners” which means we would be more than welcomed. 
Big asterisk here, as in, there are several blog posts related and growing from this “burner” thing but not here and not now.

We are talking turkey.

To sum up why and what I have been babbling about for the last few paragraphs,( I sadly make light of my writing and not getting to the point because of how we look at words, writing, etc. these days. After reviewing “Oliver Twist” as part of Skye’s home school adventure, I remember how lovely words and lengthy exposition can be, not that I am in anyway comparing myself to Dickens, except perhaps using a lot of words to get from point A to point B, and remembering that the journey truly is the more important than the destination)

Go On

I got home racing and started the turkey too late and with not all the necessary stuff, all I was missing really was parchment paper which was not something I got.
So I’m looking at my time, which if I were to believe Tim (from Nature’s Harmony) is more than sufficient, but I am a skeptic, a non-believer as my default setting and I can’t believe that this big friggin’ beast taking up half of my fridge can cook in a tad more than 2 hours.
People spend a week figuring out time, the brining and cooking, so that 3 days out might be sufficient and here I am 4 hours from wanting to be somewhere, 30 minutes away with a 15-lb hulk of poultry not in the oven.

I was f---ked for lack of a better term.

So I would go along with Tim’s nonsense and be “right” about my misgivings and show up around mid-night with a properly cooked bird.

Cindy got home with the meat thermometer, one of the “non-essentials” I forwent and I grabbed it from her and jammed it in the thigh of the obviously undercooked bird.  It was done. I mean, in theory, I mean according to this new-fangled meat thermometer. It looked done.  It smelled done, but it couldn’t be done, not in the short time I cooked it.

Or it could be done and because I cooked it at such a high heat, it would be dry and inedible. Screw it, I didn’t even know these people. If it was unfit, well let’s just say you get what you pay for.

It was amazing. Never had I had such a succulent turkey. I am not saying this to be boastful or anything of that ilk. It just was. How it was, was a mystery, until I started cutting up the left-overs the morning after.

And now out of laziness and an ode to/nod to/respect for, really….back to the lazy truth of it I will just quote verbatim, “ If you’ve only ever eaten the plumped-up grocery store version of ‘turkey’, switching to heritage breeds, might surprise you in more ways than one. ….(OK not verbatim completely but..) Lastly, taste. Believe it or not, turkeys do have flavor! At least heritage breeds do. All the way through to their bones. We found it largely a waste of time to make stock from grocery birds, but with heritage turkeys, one turkey carcass seems to equal two chicken carcasses when it comes to flavoring stock”

Which brings me around to concluding/not concluding this blog post. I came upon the Beekman connection because I “inherited” their cookbook, The Beekman, 1802 Heirloom Cookbook, and when I grabbed it because maybe, just maybe they might be able to point me in the right direction as to what to do with aforementioned (yes, I do like that word and may overuse it) carcass, I got the perfect answer and a wonderful explanation about heirloom turkeys to boot.


No end in sight

I promised/threatened to end this post before I was ready, so….

As I was tearing the bird apart this morning, Tim’s words were rattling in my head, rattle is a good word given what is going on in the orb. I thought about him saying the bird was fattier. What? How could that be? …Oh you mean the bird has more fat in normal places, not that the thing is “fatter” as we would think of it.

Oh and "dark" meat, I have never encounter more flavorful dark meat and....
 
So much more to say and so much more on my mind.........

I have to end, I would not be OK with not acknowledging the burners, the farmers, the regular folk who don't ask for or want the spotlight, so forgive my indulgences to acknowledge them...

In the past few years, I have been making a very conscious effort to know where my food comes from and how it was produced. Questions that until recently (in terms of human’s existence), one didn’t need to concern oneself with.

Hunter-gatherer types obviously were aware, in a first-hand way. And for most of the time since agriculture has existed, one’s food would never travel too far to land on a dinner plate. By necessity food was local and seasonal. Obviously, much has changed in recent years and the repercussions and impact of industrial farming is only beginning to be looked at and understood.

 I started looking around for a local source for a sustainably raised turkey. Time and time again, after finding such a place, I would also come to find that the farmer had long ago sold out, which is great for the farmers and the local food movement, but not so great for me. I finally found a farm that reserved a few of their birds for their “Thanksgiving Turkey Butcher Class”.

I was more than hesitant about this and continued to look for alternatives. But I eventually came back and signed up for the class. I had been interested in doing something like this for quite some time. I reasoned that if I am willing to eat animal as I have been for most of my life, (I had a brief fling with vegetarianism, another eye-opening experience), I should be able and willing to do the killing and processing that accompanies it, the “dirty work” as it were.

It was a three-hour drive each way to the farm, so I had a lot of time to think. On the way there, my thoughts were, “Am I really going to have to kill the animal or will they do that part for me?”, “Will I be able to do this?” , “What does it say about me as a person that I would want to have this experience?” My thoughts and feelings on the drive back were quite different.

The farm I was going to is called Nature’s Harmony Farm, which operates using very sustainable methods, incorporating a goodly amount of permaculture into their farming techniques.

Upon arrival, I noticed a lot of animals wandering around freely.  There were fences and pens to be sure, but there was also lots of different types of animals intermingling as well. The turkeys I saw were rambling around in several of the different pastures.

There were four of us there for the class, so it was a pretty intimate experience, although there wasn’t too much talking. I think we were all pretty focused on the task at hand and the implications.

Our birds had been caught the day before and were waiting for us in the back of a horse trailer. So yes, I would be killing the animal, although Tim had offered to do this if anyone didn’t feel up to it. We could also catch the turkey and carry it over to the killing area if we felt we were up to it. For me catching and handling the live animal was not a problem at all.

I was supposed to get him in a bear-hug so that he wouldn’t fly away or beat his wings, but I was nervous about him getting away so I grabbed him by the neck first and ending up getting a face full of flapping wings.

In a video about Polyface Farms, I had seen a clip about how he kills his chickens and I have talked about these “kill” cones with other urban chicken farmers, but these for the turkeys were bigger. And for the large toms that we were dealing with, we would be using the large converted orange construction cones

I was expecting much more blood and for it to splatter everywhere. The reality was much less "Hollywood", much more serene.

Tim, the farmer had explained that our concerns about killing the turkey were more likely than not “selfish” concerns, where should be entirely focused on the task at hand that being killing the bird in the most painless and therefore efficient way possible. I wouldn’t realize how true this was until perhaps half-way home.

I wasn’t worried about whether my cut would be fast and deep enough. I knew I was more than capable of this. I was not worried if I would lose my nerve and not be able to follow through. I had come this far, and not going through with this was not an option.  I wasn’t worried about the turkey. I knew as far as an animal bred to be eaten, it had had the best of lives and its passing would be the most gentle possible.

No, I was truly being selfish, because my biggest concern was if this was easy for me, what did that day about me as a person. What kind of person would choose to kill, if there was an alternative? And if that killing were easy, which it was, what kind of person was I? 

So I cut the carotid artery, held the turkeys feet, feeling the life kick out and him attempt to fly away, all the while kneeling down, looking into his eyes as if do make his death more important or something, trying to make me feel less monstrous for the deed I had just committed.

I would not make the connection, until hours later that what I had just done was far more natural than what I had taken as the norm for more than 40 years. That is, it is more natural, more normal to kill the food one eats than to pay someone to kill it for you. In the most immediate way that is a “modern and civilized” response, and in the broader sense, it can only be a human response.

But again these conclusions didn’t come to me for hours, I was much too focused on the task at hand.

After the bird is dead, you have to scald it so help the feather removing process. Ideally the water is hot, as in scalding hot, but sometimes we deal with not ideal situations. The wind was up which kept blowing out the flame and I ended up being the last to “scald” my bird. The water was a little more than lukewarm, which meant that the plucking process would be a bit more entailed.

The big white drum is where you place the bird. It spins it around and has rubber fingers which help pluck the feathers.  As cool and efficient as it was, I still spent the bulk of my workshop pulling out feathers, particularly  the “pin” feathers, little nasties that were a real pain, but like everything else, I was doing, all part of the work that goes into eating meat.

This is where we spent most of our time during the class, in the “clean” room. Mostly, we continued to pluck feathers. The time spent actually eviscerating the fowl was short. She probably spent more time explaining what we were to do than we actually spent doing it.

When I shoved my hand in the body cavity and it was warm, very warm, I was reminded of what I had so recently done and that less than an hour before this carcass, that now looked like what we buy every year at Thanksgiving was a living breathing creature that I had had to catch. By now it was a job that I wanted to be finished.

And just like that it was done. I had killed something I was going to eat, a beautiful animal that I was going to cook and share with family and friends. I had learned some very, very basic butchery lessons. And now I was to head home. It was over and done before I knew it. All with very little fanfare, as it should be.

I snapped this pic on my way out of the farm. I was already beginning to rush. The pastoral experience with its ups and downs was already being pushed into the realm of my memories and experiences because I had to get back to the real world.  A couple of hours later, when I was pumping gas, I began to think and realize what a weird place we've gotten to, that the very normal and natural act I had done, that I had paid to do and drove hours out of my way to do was the odd thing, an act of a  tourist. How did this come to be?

Skye is holding the feathers I managed to yank out before throwing the poor thing in the feather plucking drum. I showed her all the pictures and went into bloody detail about my adventure and at the end of it she said she felt better knowing how and where her food came from. Yes, I know a certain part, perhaps the lion's share was said for my benefit, but it only a sliver's worth was passed onto her, it was well worth any discomfort I might have endured. 

IThe Metro Dash is a race that is a series of 30 obstacles laid out in a parking lot. It is a sprint, around 600 meters in total.
I was a bit nervous about this race, nervous in the way that I am about 5k's and 10k's and stairclimbs. I have no doubt about finishing. It's more about how fast to go. In most of the races I do, finishing in one piece makes for a success, the time is almost irrelevant. They don't even keep time in the Tough Mudder. But for shorter events, it is very much about the time, so pacing isn't geared at just finishing, it is about finishing with a good time.

I did not pace this well.
I have not been training much as of late and have been in a weird emotional state. My confidence has been lagging. I started out and did 90 percent of the course at what could be seen as a jog or warm-up. When I rounded the corner and realized I had 3 obstacles left, I turned it up, but by then it was far too late. I  crossed the finish line at 10 minutes and 13 seconds, which sounds fast because most of my races take over two hours, but the winning times were in just over 6 minutes. More importantly, I did not feel like I gave it my all. So rather than feeling really good about finishing a race, I left the event pissed off at myself, which is kind of lame and unfortunate. But it did strengthen my resolve to get back to serious training. It did throw off my day though.

To try to get back on track I decided to go to an outdoor festival in downtown Atlanta, Atlanta Streets Alive.

"Imagine a street full of people of all ages and backgrounds, walking, biking, creating and laughing, together. A street temporarily closed to cars, but open to people. Imagine residents safely enjoying their city, socializing with neighbors, and engaging in healthy activities. Imagine if all of this were free, with absolutely no barriers to participation. By the people, for the people. Sound good yet?"

That's how the website read. I was ready for that. What I got after bicycling in the 90+ degree heat with a ton of humidity was was something else though, particularly the "street full of people"

The streets were all blocked off, although one of the police helping to manage the event had no idea what was going on, when asked if there was a festival she answered, "No, it's something for bikes and scooters"  There wasn't much in the way of entertainment or activities. The few booths and such that were there, were spread out over mile or so and in spite of their good intentions were lack luster at best.  I stopped by to offer support and engage.

One booth GreenPlate was aimed at using less plastic which I'm all for. I was the only one visiting the stand so it was like preaching to the choir. There was a booth for ZipCar, a car-sharing service that I had read about and was interested in, so I picked their brains a bit which I think was good for all parties involved. I think I will be joining up at some point. I have a goal to have only one car for our family, which is what we have right now. ZipCar could be a cost-effective way of maintaining this goal/lifestyle without much sacrifice.  I avoided the fixie bike booth because I didn't want the temptation. And somehow I missed the stilt-walkers which was one of the main reasons I biked on over. All in all it was good to get out on my bike and it changed my mood so....