How to clean a birdbath

The simple delight that they generate is unprecedented.

I have my front-yard birdbath up against my home office window.  The birds can see in, but they are so acclimated to the situation that unless our dog rushes at the window, they don't mind the human and canine proximity.  They come and enjoy, every day at dawn and dusk like clockwork.  

I explained how to attract birds to a birdbath in this post.  If you live in modern suburbia, it's really a no-brainer.  We now engineer subdivisions to drain rainwater so efficiently that a residentially-installed birdbath will often be the only source of standing water for quite some distance.  Birds have little choice but to use them.

WOO-HOO!!   POOL PARTY!! 

These shots were taken from inside my home, through my front window.  Camera info here.  

Other critters will visit the bath as well.  Here a brown anole does his best to look ferocious.  This particular species is invasive on the upper Texas coast, but anoles are generally indispensable in a southern suburban garden because of the number of harmful insects that they eat.  Brown anoles tend to remain close to the ground whereas the green Carolina anole will climb.     

However, if you keep birdbaths on your property, eventually you're going to have to deal with a build-up of algae and lime scale.

My back yard birdbath, looking rather yucky.  I keep an additional bath in our back yard because I find that, on hot days, birds will peck open my tomatoes to get at the water within.  In other words, they aren't so much interested in eating the tomato itself as they are in getting hydration.  Therefore, I offer them this option.  Those are volunteer tomatoes growing to the left of this bath.  

Even if you flush out your birdbath(s) daily with clean hose water, every couple of weeks you're going to have to scrub them to get rid of this gunk.  It's easily done, as this photo sequence shows.

Detach the bowl and set it on the grass.  Use a plastic bristle brush to remove the loose stuff.  

I use ordinary vinegar to remove lime deposits (it's cheap - about two bucks a gallon or less at the grocery store, and you'll only need about a cup for any given birdbath cleaning).  I add a bit of vinegar to the bottom of the bath, swish it around with the brush, let it sit for five or ten minutes, then scrub with the brush again. 

Repeat as many times as needed with new applications of vinegar until all the scale is loosened and/or dissolved.  You can't always see scale when the bowl is wet, but you can feel it with your fingers as you are scrubbing (it feels rough to the touch whereas the cleaned ceramic of the bath will be very smooth).  

Then simply replace the bowl and re-fill until next time.  

And there will be a next time.  

What's wrong with the USDA Myplate?

Answer:  The federal government's ChooseMyPlate campaign compartmentalizes food choices in a way that is no longer realistically attainable or reflective of prevailing American culture.

People really did eat like this a hundred years ago when 39% of American people worked on farms (virtually all of them family farms) and this kind of food assemblage was readily available to them, with most of it being in fresh, palatable forms.  That number of workers has since fallen to 2% and the farms that they do manage are mostly factory farms and monoculture installations where you wouldn't find much taste in the end product even if you were to harvest a bit of it for immediate personal consumption.  

Screengrabbed from this USDA site.  

OMG, that looks like PRISON FOOD!!  This is an example of what I mean by "no longer realistically attainable".  Yes, you can "attain" a situation in which you've procured all of the elements of the USDA plate.  However, each and every one of them shown in this picture is highly processed - the bread looks mass-produced, the fruit looks canned, the meat looks pressed, and the green beans have been cooked half out of existence.  You can tell just by looking at the photo that none of those components have much taste.

Screengrabbed from a "post my plate" contest announced by Oregon State University.  

One glance at that pic above and it's easy to understand why so many folks choose junk food over USDA's suggested "plate".  It's simply not realistic to expect people to eat the likes of that for as long as there are other more satisfying (if profoundly less healthy) choices available.

Fortunately there is a workaround.  All you need to do is "think outside the wedge" and capitalize on the best information that is available to us here in the 21st century.

Sambar combines the nutritional intent of three plate wedges into a single dish.  Recipe here.    

Where that sambar is concerned, some folks may wonder why I'd choose to post such an exotic and somewhat challenging recipe instead of something more "American".  The answer is, because Americans have historically done a crappy job of leveraging the value of vegetables and legumes in their style of cuisine.  Most Americans envision vegetables as being something boiled or steamed and simply topped with a bit of butter and salt.  That worked, taste-wise, a hundred years ago when vegetables were maximally fresh and non-factory-farmed.  But because of the situation in which we now find ourselves, that approach is no longer workable, and therefore we need to develop a better strategy.  Asians have historically been virtuosos where the preparation of vegetables is concerned - it's a far more prominent part of their culture than ours.  They have already invented that particular wheel, and therefore it simply makes efficient sense to adapt some of their techniques in our own lives, to compensate for what we have lost through mechanized food production.

Garden porn, the stuff of the sambar pictured above.  I refer to it as "the best food that money can't buy".

My husband and I had one of those classic "You didn't disclose this part of yourself before we were married" conversations the other day.  I didn't disclose to him the fact that I was going to devote a fair amount of mental energy and time to gardening and developing recipes that make use of what gets produced in our tiny back yard.  I didn't disclose that because I myself didn't realize that it was going to happen.  I started doing a little gardening as a hobby, and all of a sudden, the positive feedback loop initiated.  Now there are plenty of days when I simply don't feel like devoting a few minutes or an hour to the gardening tasks at hand.  But if I don't garden, we don't eat the same quality of food.  My husband is 6'1" and 170 lbs.  I (at the age of 50) am 5'6" and 130 lbs.  Our teenage daughter is 5'6" and 115 lbs.  If I stop gardening and cooking, some of that benefit is going to be forfeited, not to mention the loss of the enjoyment we derive from superior food taste.  Thus far, I haven't found the trade-off to be worth it, and so I keep digging in the dirt.  

Successful composting in the suburbs, Part 2

I am so sick of seeing the likes of this:

A League City grocery store, pic taken within the past few weeks.  Apples, oranges, squash, tomatoes - you name it, straight into the trash.  It's a twofold atrocity - first the fact that the stuff is wasted by lack of human or animal consumption, and second the fact that the stuff is totally wasted by not composting it.

That is money being thrown into the trash above.  Pure money.  It is organic matter that represents a sequestration of energy, and every form of energy has a price attached to it.  And at long last, people are starting to wake up to the magnitude of that squandered energy and the profit that could instead be made from it.

Economist featured a high-tech solution in this article (may be paywalled depending on who and where you are).  Screengrabbed from Facebook.    

Screengrabbed from a New York Times article published yesterday.  Once again, the aim is to turn the food into compost to be sold, i.e., for money.  

The potential for profit is not just limited to the institutional realm - it can also be realized on a much smaller scale.  In 2012, I published "Successful composting in the suburbs", which showed how I used a crappy five-foot building setback to house my Earth Machine which generates high-quality compost that I'd otherwise be forced to purchase at ten to fifteen bucks a bag.

Here's the picture that tells the thousand words.  There is very little trick to composting, supposing you follow a few simple rules as I described in that post.  You throw pretty much everything non-protein-based and non-fat-based (except St. Augustine clippings) in the top, wait a few months, and then you shovel really good compost out of the trap door in the bottom.  Greater Houston's subtropical climate, with its heat and humidity, is superbly suited to the biological process of composting.

Good compost is extremely expensive to buy, and every homeowner needs it.  Even if you don't grow fruits and vegetables as I do, you will have raised landscape beds somewhere around your suburban dream home.  You won't realize good plant health unless you augment the soil with compost.  Synthetic fertilizers are not capable of adding necessary organic bulk to your poor quality Houston clay gumbo soil.  And mulch alone tends to suck too much nitrogen from the soil as it decomposes.    

As thoroughly disgusted as I am with every useless leaky rain barrel I ever bought, I can't tell you how pleased I've been with the Earth Machine.  The design is really optimal and it has withstood a lot of my abuse (such as me repeatedly hacking away at the inside with a shovel, trying to carve compacted compost out of the interior).

My only problem at this point is that my gardening and landscaping endeavors have expanded to the point where I need at least one more Earth Machine for the volume of organic waste I am generating, and Earth Machines aren't easy to buy.  They are available through Amazon (what isn't?) but as of this writing, the price was four times what municipalities typically charge when they host mass distribution events.

Unfortunately I accidentally missed the last City of Houston distribution event, which reportedly was held in late 2013.  Wildly popular fellow Houstonian Blogspotters Two Men and a Little Farm were wise in purchasing two at one time.  Screengrabbed from one of their posts.  

Of course there are other devices on the market and other ways to compost, but I'm hesitant to mess with success (especially after my rain barrel debacle).  I lined the underside of my Earth machine with metal hardware cloth, which has proven effective in keeping rodents and opossums out of it.  Very often when municipalities do distribution campaigns, they offer both rain barrels and composters...

Old City of Houston announcement, screengrabbed from this site. 

  ...however when the City of League City did its recent campaign, for some reason they chose to distribute rain barrels only.  Maybe next time they'll do both, which would bode well for conservation PR especially given the failure rate of rain barrels versus the near-automatic success of composting.  LC guys, make a note for future reference - the Earth Machine is a good product.  Please choose it for your next campaign.

For those of you who are not familiar with the logistics of composting, typically what happens is that you combine both non-lawn-grass yard waste with kitchen waste.  You can accumulate your kitchen waste in any kind of bug-proof container, but the best option I've ever used is this attractive "cookie jar" type offering from Delafield Pottery, shown here in the center of this countertop grouping.  Every few days, you just walk your kitchen scrap bin out to your composter and dump your fruit and vegetable waste, rinse and repeat.

I designed my kitchen (especially the backsplash) around my existing stoneware collection which was hand made by a very skilled potter named Marilyn Farrell of New Brunswick, Canada - I used to import the stuff and she'd personally pack and ship it to me in big wooden crates.  Unfortunately Ms. Farrell passed away in 2007, and there my collecting ended.   However, Delafield uses a number of glazes which coordinate quite well with my existing collection, as this photo indicates.

Delafield sells out of the Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market and other locations.  Mr. D. has mentioned to me that, when he Googles his own products, my blog posts show up prominently in his search results.
:-) 

Sambar from suburban gardens

Sambar is a lentil-based vegetable stew that furnishes yet another example of how back yard gardeners can put their copious crops to optimal use.

The top pic shows the vegetables that I harvested on one particular day, but the beauty of sambar is that it can be made with whatever you happen to be harvesting at the time.  

Here's Wikipedia's vegetable line-up.  Very different from mine.    

If you've ever eaten in a south (not north) Indian restaurant, you most likely had sambar and maybe didn't even know it.  It was that surprisingly-flavorful orange thing that you probably wished you knew how to make.  It's vegan, it's gluten-free (double check the ingredient list on the sambar powder listed below), it's kosher, it's consistent with many popular diet programs (for example, it appears to be consistent with Ornish Spectrum Group 1), and it's no accident that it's a dietary staple for millions of people.  I'm going to present my own somewhat Americanized sambar recipe in this post because this dish has all these things going for it:

1. Despite its Asian origins, it tends to be liked even by folks whose tastes are more toward Western traditions (my Houston-born meat-and-potatoes husband gobbles it up).  
2. It is extremely healthy and furnishes nutrition from the legume category, which is underrepresented in the typical American diet.  
3. It is easy to make, although it does require certain specific cooking implements and non-mainstream ingredients (shown below).
4. It freezes beautifully with no detectable loss of taste. 
5. It pairs well with other foods (vegan or non-vegan).
6. It can be fashioned out of almost any vegetables, as long as the base ingredient list (especially the herbs and spices) is adhered to.

COOKWARE:

• You'll need a pressure cooker, which is a device that most Americans don't use any longer.  If you've got Grandma's old cooker stored in your garage, go dust it off. Mine is an old Fagor Multi-Rapid; the Rapid Express is probably the closest modern-day analog.  If you plan to cook in big batches and freeze your food, get the biggest pressure cooker that you can afford.  Mine is 7 quart, which is too small, but I had not yet developed my food management strategy 15 years ago when I bought it, so I didn't know I'd need a larger one.  
• You'll also need three of the typical stainless steel inserts that go into a pressure cooker - one with steam holes, two solid.   

Regardless of where you get your pressure cooker, you can buy inserts at any Indian store.
Photo screengrabbed from this blog site.  

Here are two of the better-known Asian grocers in Clear Lake Texas.  I use them both.
Screengrabbed from Yelp. 

INGREDIENTS:

• A selection of vegetables similar to the following in quantity:

Everything here is from our back yard, but grocery store stuff will work just fine.

Regardless of what vegetables you pick, I do recommend that you include plenty of onions and squash.  The squash that is traditionally used in sambar is upo or opo which is also called sorakaya or just "bottle gourd".  But here I used plain old ordinary yellow squash (summer squash), the kind that grows so well in our part of Texas.  You could also use calabaza (Mexican squash) or zucchini - squash doesn't have much flavor and its main function in this dish is to give body and convey the taste of spices, so substitutions don't make a big difference.  

Those nubby orange things are carrots, by the way.  I haven't figured out why my carrots grow stunted like this (their taste is excellent despite the bizarre appearance).

The only tricky ingredient in this photo is the curry leaves shown at lower right.  They are often grown hydroponically and sold in little plastic bags in the Asian grocery stores (produce section, refrigerated case).  I grow my own curry tree and that's an option if you really like Asian food and need a reliable supply.

Curry leaves are an indispensable ingredient responsible for much of the sambar's taste, so if you can't find them, ask one of your Indian American neighbors where to get them.  And if you live in greater Houston, don't tell me that you don't have any Indian American neighbors, because you do, by definition.  They will be glad to help you even if they've never spoken to you before.  I've yet to meet an Indian American who didn't love to discuss their native foods.  

• Black mustard seeds.  They are sold in small packs at Asian stores.  
• The following four additional ingredients from an Asian grocery store (if you buy your fresh curry leaves and mustard seeds at the Asian store, count six ingredients total from there):

Toor dal and sambar powder, which is a spice blend - get this exact brand if you can.  

Urad dal and tamarind concentrate.

If you have an Indian neighbor, you might ask for a few tablespoons of urad dal, because it would save you from buying a whole bag.  The recipe does not call for much.  It's the Asian variant of, "Can I borrow a cup of sugar?"

• Coriander seeds or ground coriander if you don't have a grinder. 

I prefer to grind my own coriander seed. I don't drink coffee any longer, so I use my old coffee grinder as a spice grinder. 

• Light olive oil.
• Cumin seeds.
• Turmeric powder.
• Chili powder (ground chili peppers).
• Salt
• Drumstick vegetable (moringa) if it is available as a frozen food in the Asian grocery store (it is seasonal and often not available, and is not shown in this photo series).  If you add drumstick, note that only the inside of the sticks are eaten.  The outside is tough and woody and is discarded after scraping out the highly-nutritious interior, analogous to removing a clam from its shell in a seafood linguine, for instance.  

PROCEDURE:

Put about 1.5 inches of water in the bottom of the pressure cooker.

Put the steam tray upside down over the water in the bottom of the pot.  

Put 1 to 1.5 cups of toor dal in one of the stainless steel inserts and lower that into the pressure cooker on top of the inverted steam tray.  Fill the insert to the top with water.  Forget about the onion pieces and few curry leaves here - they fell in by accident.  

I depart from Indian tradition at this point by pre-cooking my toor dal halfways prior to pressure cooking the whole lot together.  I put the cover on the cooker but I don't bring it to pressure.  While I'm chopping the other vegetables, I simply bring the cooker to a boil to get a head start on the dal.

Coarsely chop all the other vegetables and put them into another of the inserts with a few of the curry leaves.  Lower that one on top of the toor dal insert.  Add about 2 tablespoons sambar powder, 1 teaspoon turmeric powder, and about a quarter cup of tamarind paste loosened and dispersed in about cup of water.   

Cover the cooker and bring to pressure.  If your cooker has multiple settings, use the lowest one and cook for about 15 minutes at that pressure.

While the pressure cooker is doing its job, add about 2 tablespoons of mustard seeds, 2 tablespoons of urad dal, and 1 tablespoon of cumin seeds to a large stove-top pot. I use a 14-inch flat-bottomed wok but any large stock pot will do.    

Add about a half cup of light olive oil, maybe a bit more.  The oil is key to transmitting the flavors of the dish, especially the spice flavors, so don't skimp on it.  

Fry the spices in the oil (this is called 'tempering').  The mustard seeds will pop, so using a screen can help contain the mess.  Be careful not to burn this stuff, as olive oil scorches at a low temperature.  

Throw a few of the fresh curry leaves in near the end of frying.  

Once your pressure cooking is done, run cold water over it to condense the steam and release pressure.

The obligatory art shot, close up of tap water spilling onto the lid of the pressure cooker (camera info here).    

Now you can open up the pressure cooker and see the cooked vegetables.  

Carefully spoon the cooked vegetables into the oil.  Be careful - the oil will be hotter and you'll have some splatter from flash boiling.  

Next, dump the pressure-cooked toor dal into the mix.  Tongs help with this task.  

Don't discard the water in the bottom of the pressure cooker.  During the cooking, it turned itself into tamarind-rich vegetable stock.  Pour all of that into the pot as well.  

Add water to bring the level up to being a soupy stew.  

From that point, you'll adjust the stew according to your own taste.  I usually add the following:

• About 2 tablespoons of freshly-ground coriander seed.
• About 2 more tablespoons of sambar powder.
• About 2 tablespoons of medium-hot ground chili powder.
• More fresh curry leaves.
• Salt to taste.

Even though you've pressure cooked the heck out of this stuff, I recommend at least one additional hour of simmering so that all spices and tastes blend well.  

Serve with rice cakes or mix in some cooked rice when ready to eat (in this pic, I have poured it over brown rice).  Or eat with sliced bread.  Or tortillas.  Or pita bread.  Or quinoa.  Or bulghur.  Or cooked pasta, for a south Indian interpretation of vegetable noodle soup.  The fusion possibilities are endless.
:-)

Doesn't have to be that way.  All it takes is learning some new recipes that make good use of what gets harvested.  

Gardening meme screengrabbed from Cheezburger.  

So you think you can't garden, Part 2

My title is not perfectly a propos of my content, but I have to pay homage to the fact that "So you think you can't garden..." ended up on a Swamplot linkpost the other day (insert smilie here).

OK, so maybe you've figured out by now that you can garden.  But harvesting is only half the backyard battle - what do you actually do at that magical moment when you end up with more fruits and vegetables than you ever thought possible?!

You could arrange them in an artistic still life, as I've done here with Japanese eggplant, green peppers, Anaheim peppers, and about a gazillion Sweet Million and Yellow Jellybean tomatoes.  But ultimately, it would be a good idea to actually eat the stuff that you took the trouble to grow.  

Eat it how??  If you are a suburban family of three or four people, how do you deal with the fact that even a micro-garden such as mine is expected to yield five to fifteen pounds per week of fresh fruits and vegetables during harvest time?!  How does anybody eat all that?!

That artistic still life above represents one day's worth of harvest from about 40 square feet of active growing area.  What I'll do below is show you how I route all of that stuff to productive use, and on a short time frame to boot.  It's important to remember that you don't get a long window of opportunity to process home-grown food.  It spoils more quickly than store-bought food because it's not chemically treated, it's not irradiated, it's not waxed, it's not adulterated in any way.  That's good from a health standpoint but it can be a bit of a challenge from a logistical standpoint.

I cook the fresh tomatoes into prepared dishes to the extent possible, many of which I then freeze in mass quantities.  However, there are still too many tomatoes to be used all at once, and therefore I have to freeze some of them.  I do this by sealing them in gallon zipper bags with the air sucked out, freezing them one layer at a time so that they'll freeze as quickly as possible. 

After each layer has frozen solid, they can be stacked up like this for efficient storage.

I had really good luck doing this last year when our entire crop consisted of volunteer tomatoes (because I didn't get to the nursery in time to buy new hybrids).  Cherry tomatoes don't need to be blanched before freezing as many other vegetables do - you can just pop them in the freezer and then take them out to cook later in a wide variety of sauces and stews, using them the same way you'd typically use canned tomatoes.

However, cross-bred cherry and grape volunteers tend to be smaller, less sweet, and have tougher skins than their pure hybrid progenitors.  All of those volunteer characteristics make them ideal candidates for freezing.  I'm a bit worried about my efforts to freeze and use these pure hybrids the same way.  They are larger, which means that they took longer to freeze (which is always bad), resulting in some splitting which you can see in the photo above.  Hopefully they will still work acceptably months down the road in prepared dishes.  There's only one way to find out, and that's to go ahead and try, as I have done here.  

OK, so that's the day's tomatoes taken care of.  Onward...

I roast almost all of our Anaheims on the BBQ in preparation for freezing.  

If you roast until the skin is a golden brown and then let cool, it will be easy to peel off the skin and remove the seeds, leaving the flesh.  

This is very labor-intensive work for a relatively small amount of New Mexico-style green chile, but this stuff adds so much taste to prepared dishes that it's well worth the time.  Italian sauces, Mexican dishes, omelettes, you name it - it does wonders for everything it touches.

To my knowledge, New Mexico-style green chile cannot be bought anywhere in greater Houston (someone please email me if I'm mistaken).  If you want it, you have to make it yourself.  

I freeze this stuff in these little leftover containers that are available at any mainstream g-store.  One container works well in a vegetable omelette.  Two or three containers will do wonders for a batch of chili or spaghetti sauce.  

Next, the eggplant.

I combined those two shown in the initial still life picture with two more I'd harvested the day before.  Japanese eggplant needs to be eaten quickly - it is very perishable.  

Incorporating two of our front-yard onions, one Anaheim, and other ingredients specified in this well-rated recipe, I cooked up a batch of spicy eggplant, most of which we ate on the spot and some of which I froze. 

Last but not least, the green peppers I harvested that day.

I actually combined the green peppers, three of the Anaheims, two of our front yard onions, about a pound of our fresh tomatoes, and two pounds of okra that I'd harvested, blanched, and frozen last September into a shrimp and sausage jambalaya which I then proceeded to also freeze.

I do not recommend that okra be frozen for as long as nine months (three or four months would be preferable), particularly if you plan to re-freeze the resulting dish.  However, it's a hardy vegetable and the age of it did not detract significantly from the resulting jambalaya in this case.  

I actually get exhausted at this time of year because I have to be processing a significant number of fruits and vegetables daily, on top of every other life responsibility.  But the upside to this is that, once the toils of June are completed, I really don't have to do much more cooking until September rolls around.

This is what my freezer looks like right now - crammed to the brim.  As long as we don't get a hurricane-related power outage, we are set for months.  

Incidentally, if you keep up with the daily commercial news, you are probably aware of the intensifying dialog on fat vs. carbohydrates within the context of health, obesity, and heart disease.

This iconic juxtaposition of TIME magazine covers shows how beliefs have about-faced in the past 30 years.  This month's TIME article is paywalled, but their tag line reads "For decades, it has been the most vilified nutrient in the American diet.  But new science reveals fat isn't what's hurting our health."

Magazine covers screengrabbed from Facebook, originator unknown.  

This other nonpaywalled recent article presents some of the strongest arguments to date for eating in a style consistent with what I'm showing in all of my garden-, freezer-, and food-related posts.

Screengrabs above and below from that article.  It's worth reading.  

The obvious question then becomes - how the hell is a person supposed to eat like Grandma's generation did?!  We are not living in 1955 - this is 2014!!

I'm showing one answer here.  Look at that freezer photo above.  There is not one teaspoon of refined sugar anywhere in that freezer.  Not one teaspoon of refined white flour.  Not one teaspoon of corn or soybean oil (I use only animal fats and olive oils, and I use both liberally).  In a perfect world, we'd be able to prepare all of our meals fresh from scratch each day, rather than batching and freezing them for future use like this.  I don't know about you, but I don't live in any such perfect world.  I am the mother in a two-working-parent family.  We simply don't have the kind of kitchen time that both of my non-employed Grandmas had at their disposal.  This is our viable alternative, and it works.

Let's close with a bit of a meme-fest, shall we??  Particularly if I'm going to get linkposted, I'd like as many people as possible to enjoy these gems.  

I embedded Finley's TED talk at the end of this post.  

Garden work-out guide.  

My all-time favorite Libertarian. 

Meme attributed to this site.