xxxfoodxxx

mad kitchen science

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:37:00 +0000

at work i make soups a lot. last week i was making two at one time, in identical pots. one soup gets finished by pouring a bunch of lemon juice into it at the end, the other does not. spaced out, i poured a pint of lemon juice into the wrong pot and ruined a soup-pot full of expensive ingredients.

what to do?

i thought about it for a while and, ignoring other people's advice to just turn it into a lemon soup of some kind, thought harder: soup tastes bad now -- why? to much lemon juice. what is lemon juice? mostly water and citric acid. so soup is too acidic. how do you get rid of acids? aha!

every american school student who's made it through the fourth grade knows that baking soda reacts with vinegar and makes a volcano. lemon juice will work just as well.

solution: add baking soda to soup!

it totally worked, and blew the minds of my fellow cooks, who looked on in horror as i poured baking soda into the soup pot. all that remained of the overbearing lemon juice taste was a very faint lemony taste, which i presume was the non-citric acid component of the lemon juice.

the reaction goes something like this:

C6H8O7 + 3NaHCO3 => 3CO2 + 3H2O + Na3C6H5O7

the large product on the right side is trisodium citrate, which has a salty, mildly tart flavor that was not very pronounced.

the only tricky part to this procedure was not adding too much baking soda -- add too much and all the acid is gone but then there's unreacted baking soda floating around in the soup tasting gross. a pH meter and a titration setup would have been ideal but just slowly adding it worked pretty well.

this was extra fun to do at the hippy-ish vegan place i work 'cause all the people who eat there are into the ancestral earth spirits of their food and what local farm it came from but really they just got served molecules.

fruit tree map

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:35:00 +0000

have been gleaning apple, pear, plum, and asian pears trees in my neighborhood. random walks are fun (in 2-d you usually find your way home), but i've been wanting to get a map happening for a while -- here's my first effort. it is editable (and edible) by anyone, so add trees if you know of them.

View Larger Map

tactical nw bike pants?

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:09:00 +0000

problem: commuting to work/riding around city for moderate amounts of time in the pac nw winter. getting wet is a given, so waterproofing and insulation of some kind is needed. sweater/water resistant jacket works well for top, but pants are less straightforward. "rain pants" are a big hassle of changing, and are expensive. jeans/bens get wet and cold, and stay cold. i don't actually mind this too much while i'm riding, but being soaked for hours afterwards at work is kind of annoying.

tentative solution: wool pants, (cost $6 and half hour of sewing). went to thrift store, bought heaviest weight wool pants that fit me. cut off bottom ten inches of legs and hemmed them because a) makes riding easier and b) the kitchen where i work is hot. also, can use newly extra fabric to reinforce seams.

data: works well so far. have ridden in pretty much the full spectrum of seattle winter weather, from cold and not raining to cold and raining a lot. pants stayed reasonably warm in all situations (even heavy rain), with occasional drafts up legs due to "shortening" of pants. contemplating wearing light weight silk-type long underwear if it gets much colder. dry exceptionally fast, esp compared to jeans. problems/things to work on -- could be heavier weight wool. didn't shop around for pants; recommend looking for really heavy ones. questionable durability -- don't know how long slightly dressy wool pants will last as bike pants. single stitching makes me nervous, may have to reinforce seams.

verdict: four stars out of five. for six bucks and less that an hour of work this was the best solution i could come up with, and it works really well so far.

other ideas? pdx crew, how do you ride in the winter?

tactical ice cream unit

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:25:00 +0000

old? news to me. in any event, xxxfoodxxx wholeheartedly supports anarchist ice cream trucks everywhere.

cookies!

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:17:00 +0000

only semi-scrounge, but free ("free") food nonetheless. yesterday alex sent me a link to his friend julia's site illsendyoucookies.com, which, apparently, launched yesterday. go visit it, it's nice.

premise is basically what the url says: girl likes making cookies (choco. chip) and sending them to people; sign up and she'll send you cookies. you can donate if you want, but you don't have to, and she'll stop sending cookies out to anyone if she goes over $100 in the hole on the endeavor.

this project is such a beautiful example of a commons (wiki: tragedy of the commons) that it makes me wonder if this is an econ thesis project or something. but she seems really sweet and genuine about it, so maybe not. she seems to be doing not so great on the money front after two days (net -$39), hopefully the linear projection of two and a half more days of cookies isn't accurate.

curious: do projects like these fare better with more or fewer participants? i would think fewer, as that would usually mean they were people with social ties to the baker, thus discouraging abuse of the commons. but maybe bigger numbers have some advantage? lower variance maybe? i think that wouldn't matter as much as the possible damping mechanism that social pressure might provide. makes me wonder what would happen if someone like kottke linked to it...

my symbol

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:41:00 +0000

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.

sandwich zone

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:22:00 +0000

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.

sherwood garden 2008

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:59:00 +0000

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:

wash-r-flush

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:03:00 +0000

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.

food team log

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:53:00 +0000

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:

freakin out on chocolate

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:03:00 +0000

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.)

pantry thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:49:00 +0000

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.

Oh yeah also

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:56:00 +0000

We got 112 boxes of free granola from The Brothers of Delta Tau Delta. Dudes got sponsored (not sure in what-- beer pong?) by Bear Naked Granola and didn't end up wanting 112 * 50 = 5600 tiny tiny packages of granola. Luckily we did.
Calculations

Total calories: 1,008,000
Feeding capacity(@ 2000 cal. per person per day): 540 person-days
or 38.77 sherwood-days

At the per-lbs price of the normal granola Sherwood buys (bulk @ posh grocery) the granola is worth $1,800 or so.

Cheese

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Picked up 4 pounds of basil, 9 tubs of ricotta, 16 of buffalo mozarella. Hell of pesto made with some of the 40lbs of Brazil nuts Jack dropped off. We're eating pizza & pasta for a while now.

food life update

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:56:00 +0000

since mid-summer i have been:

- mostly too tired to dumpster because i've been
- working as a cook five days a week (fun job though... making soups is the best)
- trying to not let the community pantry in our basement collapse
- brewing lots of ginger ale w/housemates
- brewing small batches of exxxtreme soda (first sucess: garlic soda)
- listening to not a lot of music (laptop/ipod = dead, no money for recs)
- reading a lot (anne carson, greek plays, general realtivity, comics)
- making lots of pies (pumpkin)
- eating lots of pies (pumpkin)
- dumpsreting (recently), and making delicious dinners with garbage food
- liking seattle (rain is back, finally)
- wanting to get away from seattle for a bit
- other stuff

beautiful breakfast

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 05:00:00 +0000

this morning i got up early (for me, 8:30) with the desire to make a nice big breakfast for whomever else was up. i went to the farmer's market to get some supplies and fortune smiled upon me: sweet, sweet duck eggs and raw milk from sea breeze farm.

thus equiped i returned home and made fried duck eggs with sauteed veggies (mushrooms, kale, chard, tomatoes, bell peppers) and ebc toast, served with fresh orange juice and raw milk lattes.

it was really, really good. this was the first time i've ever had duck eggs; the whites were a liitle on the rubbery side, but the yolks more than made up for it: golden-orange and incredibly rich. very delicious.

bought: milk, eggs
grew: kale, chard
dumpstered: mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, oj, coffee (inc. espresso machine)

success increases

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:19:00 +0000

dumpstered Gelato in the Italian hill-town beach-town of Sperlonga. cioccolata. mm.

also, necatrines and else in Rome; in a way its easy here because trash is just set out on the street for collectors. starts to offset the less-waste effect.

food and bike parts

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:50:00 +0000

having a 12 hr a day job has cut into energy for late night excursions, but i am starting to get adjusted and last night with vince and natalie went dumpstering for produce. we've sort of been slacking on this front; a few months ago for some reason the tj's dumpster got really good and that slowly began distracting us from the more workaday prospects of the produce dumpsters. also, the bike dumpster next to tj's has started yeilding sweet things (tonight we got many good tires, chainrings and cranks, and allen wrenches, and a bell). but fruit and vegs are essential, and until i can organize my house to shop for produce at the farmers markets the dumpsters are where we'll be shopping. standard run that served us so well during winter (tj's -> qfc -> prod. stand -> wf) yielded some good stuff, but not in the quantities i've become accustomed to. i think the summer sun might be pretty brutal on the produce.

no time to cook fancy things, but housemate annie turned all the random vegs (cauliflower, bean sprouts, tomatoes, peppers, etc) into a delicious pseudocurry, a sherwood standard. g's r d. that and the fancy ginger ale we got was a nice dinner, made pleasenter by the company of my housemates in high summer spirits. heirloom toms on ebc bread with garlic basil cheese spread made a nice late night snack. yum. gonna pack some of that for lunch tomorrow i think.

have yet to explain to the kids i work with that most of the food i eat comes out of the trash. wonder how that'll go over. they eat such shit though... i have to restrain myself from railing on six year olds for all the wasteful packaging their gross food necessitates. arg.

we are now mainstream

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 07:33:00 +0000

nyt freeganism article.

arrived yesterday

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 11:21:00 +0000

i have yet to find a dumpster in Rome.

the mush leftover from the market appears to actually be disgusting; this may be a source of free food but it is also food that should probably go to poorer people than me. (there are a lot.)

grocery shopping feels foreign. at least most of my food can from this rad fruit/meat market, and feels fresh unpolished and real. the cheapness of it is somewhat offset by the exchange rate. but nontheless buying oranges to cold bite into with some pocket change from a human being is actually really great; i don't regret it. tonight's cooking (if we can somehow get the gas turned on in the apartment) is fresh prosciutto with penne and onions; plum tomato, fennel, lettuce, bell pepper put a foot firmly towards salad.

we grow things too

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 02:55:00 +0000

our humble garden:

i may have run afoul of something

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:05:00 +0000

either a day-old hangover is fucking me out of my mind or I have trashed my body something serious on some dumpster food. woke up at 4 with a "satan's long malformed toenail boring through your cranium" headache, and haven't improved much in the last 13 hours. dehydrated, veins feel like they are about ready to ditch my body entirely, and my stomach is a dang old grumbly acid place. culprits: old mango naked juice and the d. bacon i ate for brunch.

pineapples, mmm

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:28:00 +0000

earlier in the week alex and i dumpstered about a dozen pineapples. been eating a few day since then, but when i cooked dinner for the house last night i decided to use more up and make a pineapple curry, which turned out really well.

ings: two pineapples, five tomatoes, 1 head spinach, 1 head kale, 1 hag chard, two onions, 1/2 head garlic, 1/4 cup ginger, 3 tbs green curry paste, zest from two lemons, and basil, cilantro, green onions, and tamari to taste.

also cooked a bunch of quinoa and mixed everything together to get proper "sherwood slop" consitency. feeds approx 14 people.

bought the can of coconut milk but everything else other than the quinoa was dumpstered.

goldilocks

zazazen@gmail.com (Alex Walton) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 03:33:00 +0000

general grocery store rule: light bags are full of emptiness, bags that are too heavy and take a full round shape are full of things you don't want to touch (wet coffee grounds, pork blood), and medium weight bags (heavy but liftable) are the most likely candidates for the Good Stuff. what to feel for is packaging, but heft. this is theoretically obvious but not at first evident when i started dumpstering. knowing what to feel for is important at big places, like whole foods or trader joes.

and different places have quirks. at the chocolate dumpster, we came home disappointed night after night having smelled the chocolate but being unable to find it, all jack-and-the-giant-beanstalk and such. what jesse showed us was that the bags we'd been throwing away (which were, incidentally, suspiciously heavy) were filled with chocolate, consistently, at the bottom. below all the waxpaper and pepsi cups.

where are good places to dumpster? the posh and the yuppie, from grocery stores to specialty stores. bakeries, all bakeries. rory mentioned distribution centers, which seem to me like the real gold mines for expensive food. and the places where they make the food, where you can find ends, scraps, leftovers, & c. Pasta & Co, in seattle, throws away all kinds of expensive fresh pasta in bags and sacks (ravioli, linguine, everything) presumably because its not worth the money to collect the dregs of any operation. the places where they make the food obviously also occasionally throw out ingredients. pasta and co gave us a ton of eggs, currants, cherries, and party nuts (for, you know, party nut pasta) as well as an option on a few pounds of celery powder.

how we dive

noreply@blogger.com (rmd) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:16:00 +0000

re owen's query...

alex and i were lucky enough that through our social pseudo-network/pseudo-social network we knew lots of people that already knew where and how to dumpster-dive in our city. so my first advice would be to ask around and see if anyone else has already scoped things out; that's how we found a fair amount of the dumpsters we regularly go to.

the other places we found have been purely trial and error. once we had the confidence that there are good dumpsters out there, we were more than willing to go on bike rides to odd places on the off chance that we might find some new food.

if you want specifics, i'd say a good place to start would be all the local grocery stores. look for a store that is small enough that they can't afford a trash compactor, and more than likely their dumpster will have lots of good produce in it (if there's some place like a trader joe's near you, give it a shot, they seem particularly apt to throw nice non produce stuff out).

also very rewarding but much more difficult to track down on your own are distribution centers for stuff like naked/odwalla juice, fake meat products, and the like. the dumpsters outside of those places are full of massive amounts of things that the trucks didn't deliver for whatever reason.

in general i guess just think of businesses that generate waste in such a manner that it's more economical for them to throw it out that do something useful with it. and then find it and eat it.

oh, and this may be a bit nit-picky, but i really dislike the idea of people being worried about "giving away their hot spots" and jealously guarding knowledge about "their" dumpters or whatever, and like to discourage that sentiment whenever possible. for better or worse, there's really not a whole lot of people willing to pick through garbage and then eat the food they found in it, so there's not a whole lot of reason to be worried about being out-competed for dumpsters. but practicalities aside, the dumpsters are a community resource (cf oldschool gleaning), and the idea of people hoarding food from them is entirely antithetical to the reasons that i go dumpster-diving in the first place.