Vegan Campfire Cooking

I was invited to give a presentation at BikeShare #4 in Oakland.  The idea behind BikeShare is for bicyclists to share experiences, knowledge, skills and stories about exploring the world, nature, and nearby countryside using easy, hands-on, do-it-yourself skills on a bicycle.

The theme of this fourth installment of BikeShare is “Eat,” held at the Jack London Square Farmer’s Market. In addition to a bunch of rad workshops on other food-related topics, I decided to present a talk on vegan campfire cooking.

WHY GO VEGAN ON CAMPING TRIPS?

Whether or not you are an everyday vegan, it makes a lot of sense to stick to a plant-based diet on camping trips. Animal products spoil fast; milk and meat quickly go bad within a day or two without a heavy chest of ice. If packing lightly is your goal, take dry goods you can slip in a backpack or bike panniers. Besides, eating plant food goes well with the idea of doing no harm while traveling. Think like a forager, not a hunter.

SIMPLE STRATEGIES FOR VEGAN CAMPING

There are a lot of ways you can adapt your eating to go camping, but here are a few key tips for eating well while bike camping or backpacking. If they remind you of hippie food, that’s fine. The goal here is to use what’s simple and what works.

• GO RAW.
  

  raw kale salad

  If it  can be eaten raw, you will save time, fuel, and firewood. Salads are a great way to eat fresh produce on the first couple days of your trip. Keep produce out of direct sunlight; wrap in cool moist handkerchiefs to retain moisture. You can make salads from sturdier vegetables like kale, cucumber, avocado, peppers, tomato, onion, and raw corn off the cob. Dress with sea salt, lemon juice and olive oil. For extra calories add dried nuts and seeds, dried fruit, or tahini.

• 

  sprouting beans and grains

  SOAK BEANS, SPROUT GRAINS. Forget canned and dehydrated food. You can bring dried beans and whole grains with you. By soaking or sprouting them ahead, you will save time and   fuel cooking them, or bypass cooking altogether by eating them sprouted and raw. There are a lot of “raw food” resources available on the web for learning how to soak and sprout beans and grains. Good candidates for soaking/sprouting  include red lentils, wild rice, quinoa, chickpeas, fava beans, spelt, and heirloom beans (like Rancho Gordo beans). Rinse them clean after sprouting is completed, dry them in a clean towel. Dress them and eat them with sliced vegetables in a salad. Some things, like red lentils or wild rice, can be eaten raw. Others, like beans and spelt, cook in less time after a 24 hour soak, making it more fuel and time efficient. I like to simmer beans in a pot over fire, rather than bring along a camping stove.

• 

  muslin tea bags for carrying spices

  BRING SEA SALT AND SPICES. Camping food can be just as complex and  delicious as cooking at home. I like to bring small amounts of a variety of spices with me, packed in muslin tea bags. Some favorites include cayenne, whole black peppercorns, whole coriander seeds, whole white peppercorns, whole cinnamon sticks, whole fennel seed, and whole cardamom.  Fresh  chilis and a knob of ginger are nice to have. Nutritional yeast is tasty on campfire popcorn.

• BRING OIL. Oils can be used for cooking, adding calories to soup, beans, and stews, or used to make popcorn over an open fire. Olive oil and  sunflower oil work for vegetables and beans, coconut oil is great for popcorn.
• BRING ACID. Fresh lemon or lime turns up the flavors of homemade soups, stews, and beans. Freshly squeezed citrus makes a great salad dressings as well, and can help your digestion when fresh produce is scarce.
• 

  straining cold-brewed coffee

  COLD CAFFEINE. If you’re addicted to caffeine, you can get your caffeine fix sans fire by cold-brewing coffee or yerba mate leaves. To cold brew coffee, stir 1/3 cup coffee grounds to 1 cup cold water in the evening; leave to cold-brew 12 hours overnight, then strain through paper or cloth and dilute with more water to taste. For yerba mate, steep 1 tablespoon mate leaves to 1 cup cool water for 10 minutes, then strain. Sweeten to taste.

• BRING NO-COOK EMERGENCY FOOD. There are going to be times you reach low blood sugar while biking or hiking and need food ASAP. Some people like trail-mix. I recommend bringing peanut butter and coconut oil. A spoonful of peanut butter and coconut oil mixed up with some currants or dried fruit, salt, and spices or sunflower seeds, will  soothe your brain until you have time to make a proper meal. Even if they seem like heavy items to carry, you will be grateful you have them and can reuse the glass jar when it’s empty.

• 

  foraging for nettles

  FORAGE. Learning to identify edible plants can help supplement the ingredients you bring. Common wild greens include nettles, watercress and celery; common herbs include mint,  sage, fennel, and bay leaves.

• LEAVE ZERO WASTE.  I believe really strongly in putting zero-waste principles into practice while camping. This means you bring food in refillable containers (cloth bags are super light, a couple glass bottles for liquids) and produce only compostable food scraps, which are buried away from water resources.

• CLEAN WATER. I recommend the First Need Water Purifier for purifying drinking water longer trips where you expect to draw water from a natural source. It means you can gather water along the trail. In order to keep wild waters clean, avoid using detergents which harm wildlife. Here are three tips to reduce your environmental impact while camping: scrub your dishes with sand instead of soap. Wash your hair with baking soda in place of shampoo. Condition your hair with apple cider vinegar in place of commercial conditioner. These alternatives are more compact, require less packaging, and break down more quickly into the elements.

Happy summer. Connect with the wilderness, travel lightly, and make no trash.

“THE U.S. COMPOSTAL SERVICE”

For a “dirty, earthy” Nightlife at The California Academy of Sciences April 26, 2012, I teamed up with Ami Puri of Homespun Bikes under the name  SWEET TEETH to create something we called The U.S. Compostal Service, a mobile compost and food vending system that illustrates the cycle of life on a bicycle, trailing a kitchen garden.

For the project, we served up bites of fresh wild nettle and kale frittata inside empty eggshells (a byproduct of frittata-making) from the front basket of the bike. After finishing their snacks, we invited museum participants to add their empty eggshells to the bike-mounted worm compost system built on the back of the bike, in cute wooden panniers we built ourselves.

In one wooden pannier, people added fresh food scraps to living Red Wrigglers (our worms),  and in the other pannier was dark, rich, earth-smelling finished worm compost, ready for the garden.

Behind the bike, nestled inside a hand-made bike trailer made from modified bike parts and reclaimed wood, was a living garden that included kale –  the very vegetable needed to make more fritattas.

We hoped to show how food scraps – used creatively, with worms and time –  build good soil, and grow more food.

Part of the reason we chose to build a mobile food vending and compost bike was to  illustrate how transportation, waste, and consumption can be re-envisioned to become more sustainable in ways that fit together and complement eachother.

We also wanted to show how something educational and useful could be made beautiful, delightful, and entertaining, requiring the active participation of  a community.

The U.S. Compostal Service was on display at The California Academy of Science  April 26, 6-10 PM at, 55 Music Concourse Drive, in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Special thanks to BIG THINGS for helping organize the event.

Jewish Food from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, France, & Austria

SLOW FOOD FROM THE PAST

For the last year I have been organizing very special, one-of-a-kind dinners based on aligning people’s origins with the seasons. I take people on a slow, thoughtful journey back in time, to the cuisine of their grandparents and great-grandparents, as a way of telescoping time between several generations of people and bringing food history to the fore, informing someone’s personal history with time and place, ancestry, geography, religious tradition, and culture.

A personal history of food is both unique to us as individuals and not unique to us in that it is often shared by others who lived in those times, places, and shared circumstances. My idea is to create dinners that braid together several culinary traditions of an individual’s personal history into a single meal that somehow shares the story of who we are and how we came to be here with others we care about. The story unfolds in food and in conversation between people at the table.

A NEW KIND OF THANKSGIVING

Perhaps it is the American in me that wants to make dinner a place to tell stories of how we came to be in North America. But because Thanksgiving isn’t a story most people I know can or want to relate to,  I want to create tables where we can celebrate cuisine and culture as it pertains to diverse family histories, while acknowledging the complicated role persecution, genocide, colonialism, and slavery play in moving families from place to place. Sometimes people assimilate their food practices; sometimes they don’t, and manage to hold onto their traditions. I think both are interesting. Because of the pressures of assimilation, eating a meal  one’s grandparents or great-grandparents might have eaten is a curious and new experience for some Americans. It is this tension – between tastes that are in turns familiar and somewhat foreign – from foods we are separated from by only a few generations – that makes tasting the food of our ancestors so interesting.

My Yeasted Russian Blini with Salt-Brined Cranberries & Home-cultured Creme Fraiche

JEWISH FOOD FROM RUSSIA, POLAND, LITHUANIA, AUSTRIA, FRANCE

Last night I created a special biographical dinner that braided together the strands of a friend’s ethnic heritage to represent the corner’s of her life – her Jewish parents, one of whom fled Poland during the Holocaust to live secretly under assumed identities in Austria and France, and another side that left the pogroms of Lithuania and Russia for South Africa and England before coming to America.

I was interested in the Jewish diaspora of her parents and grandparents from Eastern Europe, living in country after country; sometimes with hope, sometimes in fear, absorbing languages and influences of each. Because my friend is vegetarian, I also chose to focus on foods that would be both respectful of animals and appropriate for the season.

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

It took a lot of research to make a dinner that was both authentic to the world of her grandparents and contemporary enough for modern tastes, translating this Old World Jewish food into a dinner experience people in San Francisco would find palatable and interesting.

ODE TO THE CABBAGE

As it evolved, the dinner became – in my words- a veritable journey of the cabbage, the beet, and the potato –  as they traveled between cuisines of Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Austria, and France, picking up different influences along the way.

As my friend’s family emigrated, so did the cabbage.

For this reason, cabbage showed up in four ways on the dinner table that night – stuffed, fermented, made into cutlets and fried, and even baked into a pie – reflecting cabbage recipes from Poland, Russia, Austria, and France, respectively. In this way I was able to show how a humble Eastern European staple made it’s way from the earth to the oven, from the root cellar to the pickling jar, and from the garden to the frying pan, in cities, in orchards, and on farms, in many, many ways, though many countries, over several centuries, to end up in our modern kitchen.

On Food and War with Maxine Hong Kingston

I was the invited culinary artist for another Feast of Words at SomArts with the legendary writer Maxine Hong Kingston, to complement their current exhibit, “At War,” dealing with the topic of war and conflict.  Having just completed an installation using food and video to talk about war for Emergency USA  (see post below), I decided to reprise the piece for another audience.

Maxine Hong Kingston read from her book, “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,” quoting Rumi, and I served a sumptuous feast of 13th century delights and video installation of Rumi’s poems, mixing words with food from Rumi’s poems, including lavash, murri, baklava and wine.

The Rumi connection between us was unplanned and interesting.

Kingston shared writing exercises she has been doing for almost two decades with war veterans –  using poetry, memoir and fiction as coping strategies for post-traumatic stress disorder, using writing as a tool to transform inner consciousness away from violence towards humanity, humility, vulnerability, and compassion.

It was a pleasure and an honor to present work alongside Maxine Hong Kingston and hear her share her process as an artist and an activist.

A Wartime Revival of the Senses

On January 27, 2012, I will be presenting new work at Rock, Paper, Scissors Gallery in Oakland, for the art exhibit, A Wartime Revival of the Senses, co-curated by Emergency USA, a non-profit that partners with the local population in war torn communities to provide high quality, sustainable regional medical centers.

The goal of the show is to “use visual material and sensory engagement to ‘bring alive’ the U.S.’s wars with Iraq and Afghanistan” and renew a conversation between Americans about the wars.

I will be serving up some wine, Persian food from the Middle Ages, and 13th century poems by Muslim poet and Sufi mystic RUMI at the closing of the show to engage people in a conversation about war, Occupation, seduction, pleasure, and culture.

Rumi

Rumi’s ecstatic poems about wine, love, and thinking beyond dualism have been translated and recited across cultures and languages for 8 centuries.

I will be presenting my food and video installation Friday Jan 27 from 5:30-6:30 pm at 2278 Telegraph Ave, Oakland 94612, followed by a panel discussion with the show’s curator, art historian Katie Anania, and Emergency USA.

VEGAN PIG ROAST * Watermelon Slaughter * Sept 24, 2011 * San Francisco

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 24

VEGAN PIG ROAST

WATERMELON SLAUGHTER

at Hayes Valley Farm, S.F.

• FLOWER ESSENCE AGUA FRESCA 
• PICKLED WATERMELON RINDS
• COB-OVEN ROASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS, ETC. 

This is a DIY class where you will learn to make stuff + take it home. This second class in the series on using whole fruits and vegetables from our local Bay Area foodshed stem-to-root, and nose-to-tail, focuses on WATERMELONS and you will make cool stuff with the whole watermelon, including meat, rinds, and seeds, to take home and share with your friends

Class is open to everyone and cost is $35 OR free with a barter of your choice. 

Proceeds go to  the watermelon growers, the chef, and HAYES VALLEY FARM.

What does this mean? It means you can pay $35 to support the farmers and the chef ~OR~ barter skills and goods of your choice. What you barter is up to you.

Suggestions include: food from your garden, professional skills and services, bodywork, handmade crafts, etc. No one turned away for lack of funds. 

Please register here via Eventbrite so we know you are coming. REGISTRATION HERE : 

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2169541156

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Vegan Pig Roast Kills WATERMELONS!
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 24

1-4 PM

HAYES VALLEY FARM

450 Laguna Street

San Francisco, CA 94102
Location phone: (415) 763-7645

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Look for Vegan Pig Roast updates on Facebook.

Questions? Contact the chef - yasmin@calicopie.us  / (415) 205-0037

Introducing VEGAN PIG ROAST: An Edible Garden Butchery Workshop

INTRODUCING A NEW SERIES OF COOKING CLASSES:

VEGAN PIG ROAST: An Edible Garden Butchery Workshop

WHAT IS A VEGAN PIG ROAST? 

A pig roast is traditionally a community gathering in which an entire animal is slaughtered, butchered, processed, cooked, and eaten from head to tail, in a celebratory manner.Whether you find this type of sacrifice horrific or not, we will not be killing any animals at Vegan Pig Roast.

Instead, we will learn to butcher, process, prepare, and enjoy beautiful, peak-of-season fruits and vegetables from our local Bay Area foodshed, using every part of the whole plant: stems, roots, leaves, seeds, skin, and meat.           

 Drawing inspiration from nose-to-tail eating, we apply this common sense and interesting approach to cooking, using all of what we kill, from stem-to-root, in order to respect the plants that nourish us, and not take ourselves too seriously.

 THE BUTCHER:

Vegan Pig Roast will be taught by Yasmin Golan, chef of San Francisco’s beloved pop-up restaurant, Queer Food For Love. An eight year veteran of artisanal kitchens, Vegan Pig Roast is a class series designed to help build community between feminist and queer people while helping to inspire aspiring cooks of all genders and orientations incorporate more plant-based food into their diet, in fun and interesting ways.

 CLASSES: 

This class series is a safe and welcoming space for queer-identified people. Bring your freaky self and friends. Reservations are required, so we can plan for the correct number of people and tell you what to bring to class. Please register with your name, email, and phone number so we can count on you. Thank you!

These classes are tied to the season in our area, so please sign up for summer classes while they last. Fall classes to be announced later with totally different ingredients.

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 SCHEDULE: 

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SATURDAY AUGUST 6: 

Vegan Pig Roast

Kills PEACHES! 

at HOMESPUN BIKES, OAKLAND

494 Wesley Avenue, Oakland, CA 94606 - (510) 893-3740

>>>CLICK HERE TO REGISTER @ BrownPaper Tickets>>>>

 

• SOUTHERN PICKLED PEACHES
• NOYAU LIQUOR
• PEACH LEAF TEA, ETC.

This is a DIY class where you will learn to make stuff + take it home + share it with your friends. The first class focuses on PEACHES and you will make cool stuff with peach meat, kernals, and leaves. Class cost is $35 and goes to the farm, chef, and queer-owned bicycle shop. 

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SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 24

Vegan Pig Roast Kills WATERMELONS!

at HAYES VALLEY FARM, SAN FRANCISCO  

REGISTER BY CLICKING HERE : 

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2169541156

• FLOWER ESSENCE AGUA FRESCA 
• PICKLED WATERMELON RINDS
• COB-OVEN ROASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS, ETC. 

———————————————————–

Look for Vegan Pig Roast updates on Facebook.

Questions? Email yasmin@calicopie.us