Robin Wheeler’s new book, Food Security for the Faint of Heart: Keeping Your Larder Full in Lean Times, may be a mouthful of a title, but that’s appropriate when you consider that the author’s purpose is, in fact, to keep your mouth full when the going gets tough.

Wheeler has a background in the kinds of skills that are just plain handy, whether you’re in a crisis situation or not.  A Canadian, she teaches traditional skills (like canning and seed saving), gardening, and medicinals in British Columbia.  She also started the Sustainable Living Arts School in Roberts Creek, British Columbia, and has previously written one other book, entitled Gardening for the Faint of Heart.  Considering that, perhaps it’s not surprising that the structure of Wheeler’s book reminded me a bit of an eclectic neighbor’s garden: a patch of earth richly populated with the old stand-bys, some intriguing and unexpected nuggets here and there, and an unusual twist on some staples.   She covers a surprising amount of ground, going from how to salvage as much food as possible when the power goes out indefinitely, to how to plan and plant a garden.  She talks about water collection, cooperatives, and how to cook a surprisingly good meal out of what you can scavenge from your surroundings in a disaster.

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Caitlin D. of Feasting on Pelops just tipped me off to an interesting challenge going on at (not so) Urban Hennery.  (Not so) Urban Hennery is a fun site that was first created by a husband and wife team wrangling chickens in Big City, WA.  (Think “shenanigans.”  Shenanigans are good, right?)  They’ve left the city but kept the chickens, and now they write about their chickens, local food, and cooking as well.  (Think “info.”  Lots of good info.  Info is good, right?)

Anywho, they have posted the Dark Days challenge for this winter.  The task?  Read more after the jump.

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Marion Nestle at What to Eat posted an interesting blurb on Sunday about a report from the Mercatus Center of George Mason University entitled, “Yes, We Have No Bananas: A Critique of the ‘Food Miles’ Perspective.”  Basically, the thrust of the Mercatus publication is that concern about food miles is a distraction from real issues about food policy–trivial at best, dangerous at worst.  I read the complete paper yesterday, and I have several things to say about it.  However, I want to write a full analysis, which is going to require a significant amount of background digging on the institute and the sources they cite.  So, in the meantime, I thought I’d see what your gut reactions were to it.  Give it a read; you can find the whole “policy primer” here.  What do you think?

Okay, so it’s been around for a while, but it’s amusing.  What can I say?  I’m on the road again, busy lady, reading like crazy on the airplane so I have loads of exciting new stuff to post for you.  Anyway, this animation is from Sustainable Table.  Check it out.  (Yes, they do have sequels.)

And in the lineup for the near future, you can expect a review of Food Security for the Faint of Heart by Robin Wheeler, the nitty gritty about the modern turkey, holiday recipes, and so much more! I’m in Wisconsin…cheese for everyone!  Huzzah!

(Except for the vegans, of course.  I’ll get you folks some baby rice popcorn from the farm down the way.  So good!)

Note from Laurel:  On Saturday, my momoo called me up, somewhat flabbergasted by her experience doing her Thanksgiving shopping.  She was surprised and upset by what she found when she actually read the labels on what she was buying.  As I listened to her, I thought, “This would make a really good post.”  And so my first guest column was born.  The following post was written by my mom, also known as Kirby’s mom.  (That being her adorable four-legged daughter with dog breath.)  Mom, thanks for being a good sport.

Pretty, no?  Also cold.  This is why I live in Arizona now.

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I’m going to be honest here.  Because I really do like things simple, trying to figure out which processed foods I could buy if I cared about fats was pretty much the deal-breaker for all processed foods.  It turned out that it was easier to make my own food than to decipher a lot of the information on fats.  Seriously.

Basically, when you get into fats, things get slippery.

Ha.

Puns aside, I will do my durndest to boil this information down to the bare essentials.

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Check those eyeballs, folks: Can you spot the bees in this brilliant stand of Wisconsin roadside goldenrod?

There’s more than one.  And more than two.  I came across this stand (bigger than what you can see here) while biking out in the boonies of Wisconsin late this summer.  Despite their tiny size, the bees were hard to miss; their drone was loud and unmistakable.  Apparently, bees love goldenrod.

And I love bees.  Welcome to the topic of today’s post.

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The folks over at the Organic Consumers’ Association have gotten organized, and they’re inviting you to join in.  Specifically, they have drafted a petition (click through to see) to the Obama Transition Team which asks the incoming administration to consider implementing several of Michael Pollan’s recommendations from “Farmer in Chief.”

Take a look.  If you like it, slap on your Joanie Mitchell.  (John Hancock, whatever.)

If you don’t like it, write your own letter to the team that articulates what is important to you about food policy and food security.  For more info about what Obama said on the campaign trail, check out this page from the Obama website.

How’s that for simple?  A ready-made petition for those of you who agree with the one OCA drafted.  For those of you who don’t, you have a model to draft your own petition or letter about food policy.

Go change the world, folks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have apple cider cupcakes to frost.

The holiday season is here.  Cue the food!

Let’s face facts.  The colder months can be great inspiration for some delicious dishes, but they can also be a shortcut to a pie-and-gravy-strewn path of personal destruction.  Specifically, the chill and the short days somehow inspire carbohydrate hoarding, at least for some of us.  (I speak from a purely observational perspective, of course.  You’d be surprised how much you can see from behind the delicious fort of bread I’ve built.) While carbs–especially those slathered in butter–taste great, I always find that a heavy rotation of too many bready or sweet items makes me tired and kind of cranky.  Nobody likes that.

Still, it is a good time to enjoy delicious food, particularly when you can share it with friends and family.  Over the next few weeks, I will be posting some holiday-themed recipes you can use for the myriad shindigs and goings-on that inevitably pop up this time of year.  Some of these recipes will be meant to balance the richer fare found at holiday dinners, while others will be more self-indulgent.  I hope you enjoy them all.

First up is a salad inspired by one my friend Rachel mentioned when I was in Philadelphia.  Apparently, her aunt used to toss melon and pomegranate seeds together into a lovely and delicious treat, one Rachel describes with considerable enthusiasm years later. I decided to see if I could dress up this recipe into something gala-worthy, seeing as how I had gotten a canary melon from our farm CSA last week and some pomegranates from the nearby farmers’ market.  Pomegranates are everywhere here this time of year, growing fat and red and nigh-to-bursting on the neighbors’ trees.  (Pomegranates are, in fact, classified as an exploding fruit, one that bursts to release its seeds.) It’s a good time of year to make friends and beg for fruit.

Anyhow, the cooking gods smiled on me; my experiment turned out to be both tasty and beautiful to look at.  I am confident your guests will be über-impressed by the splash of color on the dinner table.

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Because Miz Valerie has been asking about some rough-and-ready guidelines for granola for the faint of heart, in the interest of research, I riffed on my generic granola recipe and made some extra-nutty honey nut granola yesterday with twice as many nuts as usual, no millet or flax, buckwheat honey thrown in with the sweeteners, and a generous splash of almond extract.  Hello, deliciousness!

What prompted the out-of-season granola fest?  Well, a few things have been weighing on Miz Valerie’s mind about the granola-making process.  Specifically, she wanted some wet-to-dry ratios and the details on how long it would keep.  Miz V, this post is for you.

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