Further reports from the outdoors

[luzula]

It's good to be home after a total of almost three weeks of outdoors living, although I'm actually not that tired of it. Possibly this is because of good weather; we only had rain showers on a couple of days and dried out quickly. Although I did have to get up in the rain at half past six and start a fire and cook breakfast one day (we took turns cooking). In all, there was good company, lovely views, interesting old-growth forests, and lots of skinnydipping. A friend of mine who works with refugee children brought along a 16-year-old boy from Eritrea, and he was usually far away during the skinnydipping. I guess people in his culture do not do this? OTOH, he might now know more about the boreal forest than most Swedes.

We have sent out a press release and sent the inventory results to the authorities and the company, so we'll see how it goes. A journalist called to interview me and then sent me what she'd written and I had to correct basically every line. *sigh* Probably she was a summer substitute and not very experienced.

Before this, I was at a feminist camp where we learned various practical work: there was one workshop where we built a (very small) house, one where we renovated old-style windows, one where we did bike repairs, and one where we harvested grass with scythes. I enjoyed it a lot, both trying new things and meeting interesting people.

I planned the food for both of these activities, and one person called me a "genius at food planning." \o/

Photos to follow at some later time...

Comments

[isis]

This all sounds very cool! Though, why harvest grass? What do you do with it?

[luzula]

You dry it and then give it to animals to eat in the winter as hay. Does this not happen in the US? : ) My friends have both rabbits and a horse.

Harvesting the grass is also useful for biodiversity since there's a community of organisms adapted to the European hay meadows that people kept for many hundreds of years before artificial fertilizers came along--removing the grass year after year gave a nutrient-poor environment that was actually very rich in species. Nutrient-rich meadows tend to have fewer species since a few strongly competitive ones can outgrow the rest.

[isis]

Hah, got it, we usually call it hay even before it's dried, though it is actually just grass, yes!

[seascribble]

Welcome back to the internet, we missed you! it sounds like you were having a very fun time though.

[luzula]

Thanks! Yeah, I did. Soon I will go camping again. : )

[jesse_the_k]

The "Feminist Camp" sounds delightful. Is that a regular program, or a pleasantly anarchist event where each share their knowledge?

Please boast of your clever food planning details -- I'm sure to learn something.

[luzula]

It's the first time they organized it, but they hope that it will be a yearly event that rotates between different farms in the area. One person expressed interest in organizing it next year. There was one person in charge of each workshop who had experience or education in the subject, but within the workshops the participants were pretty free to do what they were interested in.

I'd send you the food planning document if it wasn't in Swedish. : ) But the constraints on the forest trip were: 1) the food should be vegan with vegetarian stuff on the side (cheese for sandwiches etc), 2) the food should keep without refrigeration, 3) the food would be cooked in a pot over a fire, 4) lunch should be made in the evening/morning and brought along in lunch boxes (so no soups for lunch). Weight was no obstacle though, since we had a minibus.

Overall there were a lot of salads for lunch (variously with pasta, potatoes, bulgur, beets, noodles). For dinner there were lots of soups (good because you only need one pot for them) and also stews with rice/bulgur/pasta on the side. We used up fresh tomatoes and stuff like that early, because they don't keep well, and towards the end there were lots of potatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, apples, etc. Stuff that kept well but that was still fresh vegetables.

And you can do a lot with condiments and spices. Like, one day you can make an Indian-style dish with garam masala and with chutney on the side, and then another day you make a Thai-style stew with red curry paste and peanuts on the side, and those will feel like two quite different dishes even if they both contain similar vegetables and have rice on the side. Different consistency is good too: if you have a salad with beans in it one day, then you can make hummus from beans the next day and it feels like a different dish. And if you make borscht for dinner one day, you can make red beet salad another day and it will also feel different.

Okay, I guess I'm done boasting now. : )

[jesse_the_k]

That's worth boasting about! Group cooking is challenging enough; doing it over a campfire was superlative.

I met MyGuy in a 40-person residential coop. We bonded cooking "leftovers" on Friday night. The goal was to empty the refrigerator as much as possible so there'd be room for Saturday's shopping.

Difficulty level: bean sprout farm on premises ∴ at least 10 pounds of sprouts to include in meal.

[luzula]

Oh, that's also an interesting constraint: cooking with whatever happens to be available.

Bean sprouts, huh. That's not something I usually cook with--can you do anything with it except put it in a salad?

[jesse_the_k]

Empiricism was our guide. We usually had 10 gallons of sprouts to play with, and we learned a few things:

The tiny ones don't survive cooking: alfalfa, mustard, radish sprouts belong in salads.

The bigger beans (pulses) do well: lentils, soy & mung beans are large enough to withstand cooking. They're very common in Asian cookery, added in the last 90 seconds to give crunch to any stir-fry.
We'd submerge them in boiling water to get the refrigerator chill off, then stir them into anything that could do with some extra protein/green. In moderation, most casseroles can welcome sprouts.

The spouts' stems form a scaffold when surrounded with something sticky. We generally had eggs left over as well. Sprouts & eggs and whatever else we could find would meld to become something more durable than an omelette and more fragile than a loaf. (The egg-sprout combo is sometimes called "egg foo yung," tailored to an American palate by Chinese cooks working on the transcontinental railroads.)

[luzula]

Interesting, thank you! : )