at work when you make food you label it with who made it so that later, if it's especially good, or if it's all fucked up, everyone will know who made it, and they can be appropriately lauded or shamed. since i work with a bunch of hippies, instead of writing our names or initials, we each have a symbol. having just started last week, i have been symbol-less until today, because i take things like this very seriously and have put some thought into mine. so, confronted with this need, i did the only thing i could think of:



ps: alex, stop reading frilly keats' coughing up tubercular arterial blood on his lace-fringed pillow and read watchmen before the movie ruins it.

last night after not having eaten all day, i made an incapacitatiinlg large and delicious veggie sandwich:

1 loaf essential pugliese bread for bread, 1 bulb fennel sauteed with 1 head fresh garlic for filling, quarter cup of sundried tomatoes in oil for spreading, romano cheese for sprinkling, lettuce and red russian kale from garden for crunching, mustard and mayo, salt and pepper.

result: awesome sandwich twice the size of my face that it took me half an hour to eat and made me moan in pain for a few hours afterwards. bonus points for making it all out of dumpstered or home grown ingredients, i think. maybe minus points for making ridiculous dumpster sandwiches without alex present.

last year's modest garden has since ballooned to double it's previous size, due to the massive influx of free awesome compost from some of our housies' work. lots of work from me and annie (and some help from the rest of the house) was also required.

new layout, scale is about 30 feet x 20 feet:


some of the actual garden (unfortunately cropped, as i couldn't get gimp to merge photos correctly):


chard, somewhat recuperated from their transplanting last week:


my weird cubic lattice tomato growth structure that houses 12 of our 33 tomato plants:


king corn's ethanol preserve, or: advances in that art of ironic gardening:


upside-down tomato plants:


fire escape pea and raspberry trellis:

non food related but cool: friend jeffery steuben made this sweet toilet bowl hack to wash your hands and reuse the water to fill up the bowl again. nice design avoids gross greywwater in holding tank issue and routes the water straight to the bowl.

a day in the life of the sherwood food team...

7:30 - alex wakes up. goes to store for soap. store closed. no soap. starts monday crossword. fuck, monday crossword is hard this week. coffee, more coffee.

10:30 - i wake up.

11:00 - cheerios and tea; check with alex to see if he wants to go shop for the house. yes. plan to leave at 12:45.

11:00-2:00 - fuck, the monday crossword is hard this week. i usually rock this shit. clean room, clean new bike (#4). where the fuck is alex?

12:00 - alex eats pho? & drinks delicious coffee & condensed milk.

2:00 - alex shows up. debate destinations and bike routes. central/international district holds the promise of cheap asian markets and oh so delicious banh mi sandwiches... ballard/fremont is closer and has no hills. decide on burke gilman trail to ballard/fremont and to dumpster produce instead of hitting the asian markets. alex screws pedal on to bike.

2:30 - warm and sunny outside, depart on bikes to cash & carry (restaurant supply store). old miyata 710 i found abandoned by the docks at work hauls trailer. alex on three speed trails hauler. trailer hauls all our haul on trail.

3:00 - spend much time wandering around cash & carry gawking at all the industrial cooking gear (want 18" pizza paddle so badly) and giant sacks of things. find $400 microwave. get 10 lbs of tillamook cheddar for house, and some jam and tortillas. identify other shoppers by what restaurants they run. man with taco del mar shirt buys fatty stack of flour tortillas. italian dude buys flat of romaine lettuce. alex contemplates buying vanilla shake base. get bottle of tamarind soda and some jalepeno chips for lunch. some confusion over which line is which. "it's all one line. we're all in this together. except that guy." that guy (the italian) leaves store. someone "cuts" us, i thought we were all in this together. pack absurd "groceries" into plastic bucket instead of bag.

4:00 - out of store, barely avoiding mass purchase of Dubble Bubble and/or other candy. stuff faces with chips and soda on the sidewalk. hi five. depart to pcc in fremont.

4:15 - stop at theo's chocolates right next to pcc. sitting right on top in the dumpster is 30 lbs of little flavored chocolates (the kind that are boxed up with sour quince logs and given to your boss) all bagged up and ready to go. on seeing chocolates rd goes into freak-out mode, eyes bulge, pulls chocolates, and we make an unnecessarily hasty break for it. rd later reports thinking "don't fuck this up don't fuck this up." best 30 second dumpster run ever. high five again.

4:17 - arrive at pcc. eat chocolates. i pull two normal ones alex freaks out 'cause he got a peanut better and jelly flavored one. [alex note: like a sandwhich dipped in chocolate, fuck.]

4:20 - inside pcc. get eggs and milk and yogurt and butter. pantry bulk order is coming tomorrow, so no need for grains/beans/vegan milks. cave to pacifying the faction of our house that demands we always buy some produce; get some apples and oranges. also get parsley and tahini for making hummus. consider "pulling a safeway" and repackaging two or three bunches of kale in one twist tie. discuss possibility of passing off pine nuts as peanuts.

4:30 - get in line beside world's saddest guide dog. [dog is later observed being strapped into a bike trailer. ah.]

5:00 - depart for home. trailer looks like it might collapse under load.

5:30 - arrive home (trailer held, only minor bottoming out), put food away. eat more chocolate.

6:00-8:00 - rearrange and clean the living room and kitchen.

8:00 - drink beers and barbecue some hamburger we dumpstered a few weeks ago. grand central bolo rolls for buns (grand central dumpster is nice); burgers are yummy. haven't eaten a hamburger in a year.

9:00-11:00 - drink beers, hang out with housies and play music. try to talk each other into dumpstering before we get too tired. feeling warm and fat and happy, don't really want to go out into the cold.

11:00 - alex makes us going happen. depart for qfc. alex pulls trailer on three speed, i follow on fixie to make sure he doesn't pawn trailer duty off on me. alex rocks trailer duty.

11:10 - so much produce in the qfc dumpster. alex jumps in and fills two large boxes (~35 lbs each) full of tomatoes, pears, apples, shallots, limes, and assorted other stuff. supply truck pulls in, we leave for produce stand.

11:45 - produce stand dumpster is gross as usual, and really full, but too many flattened boxes for good digging. dig a little and find ~100 tangelos, some rotten but most juiceable. also get lots of cilantro. both need to pee really badly (beer), decide to skip whole foods and go home.

12:00 - arrive home; pee. unload dumpstered produce. tiredness mounts, decide to wash it tomorrow. hi five and head off to bed.

route:

Dumpstered lately: 100 lbs of flour (semolina, wheat, and white), a 50 lb hunk (relatively oblong) of really nice Theo's chocolate (now in the fridge with a hammer and chisel), and many flats of cherry tomatoes. Rory's cooking up some brownies right now. Food life has been rad lately, since Tara cooked up some anise & chocolate, and ginger, biscotti-- and sourdough starter has made tangy pancakes (butter and honey'd) & an ultra dense loaf of bread. (It was the kind of bread that the plate tectonics would bake, if they could.)

silly, silly amounts of food arrived in the pantry last night:

Hundreds of one-meal sized pre-packaged salads (some vege, lots with chicken)
Sushi
Wraps (some vege, some with meat)
Pre-made lunch bags with sandwich, cookies, bottle of water, and string cheese
four pounds of butter
three fully cooked and seasoned whole chickens
lots of lasagne
The subject of this email, really fresh looking
Enough hot dogs (Hebrew National) and pork sausages to build a large
airplane out of (well, almost)
pizza dough
squash
prime rib
much, much more ...

A brief guide to where stuff is: Look closely how the fridge is
organized - there's more there than you might think at first. The top
and bottom shelves are completely salads - the top right corner is all
vege and the top left corner is vege in front, meaty in back. There
are lots of varieties. The bottom shelf all has meat. Veges and fruits
and juice are on the middle shelf along with tortillias stacked up
behind the juice. There's also some tortillias in the freezer.