“You have to live a life without fear; and to be fearless, you have to have a very clear conscience that guides you on a daily basis. If you are fully aware of doing the right thing everyday, there is no power on earth that can make you afraid.” ~ Vandana Shiva, Mt. Allison University, New Brunswick Feb. 26, 2012
“We live today where creating fear is the political governing style today. Cultivating fearlessness I think is one of the most important trainings of democracy and citizen freedom.”
We share this short video of Vandana Shiva telling her story of the struggle to preserve heirloom seeds in her native India from the wonderful folks at The Perennial Plate.
Engineering Salt, Sugar and Fat to Create Food Addiction
“Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.” -Michael Moss in The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
How did we reach this stage of poor health as a nation? The answer may surprise and anger you. As with most complex issues, the answer is not as simple as many talking heads in the media and nightly news would have us believe. It isn’t just a matter of willpower, or knowledge, or education, or alternatives to the junk food that is, quite literally, killing us. The answer is far deeper, wider reaching and more sinister.
Most processed foods these days are “optimized”, or engineered for better sensory perceptions that drive us to eat more. These sensory perceptions include but are not limited to the physical appearance, packaging, shape, mouth feel, taste and array of flavors, aftertaste, smell and satisfaction of a food. One of the most important factors that are considered is the strength of the urge for a second bite, sip or swallow, or a third.
Everyday people spend hours in tasting rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is being optimized. Their opinions are fed through a very sophisticated program that not only produces an optimized formulation for the food in question, but also addresses marketing concerns such as colors and packaging. All of this is done to gain more “stomach share”- the amount of processed food that a consumer will eat from a certain company. These are not small concerns in an industry that measures stomach share in the billions of dollars annually.
The Holy Grail for food companies is what is termed the “bliss point”, that spot where consumers like a product the most, but are not satisfied enough with the flavor combination to stop eating it. Foods and drinks cannot be too flavorful, as consumers quickly get bored with them. The brain is quickly overwhelmed with big, intense and distinct flavors and shuts down the “want more” portion, thus stopping eating.
This has become one of the major guiding principles of the processed food industry. The biggest players owe their success to very complex and secret formulas that pique the taste buds but don’t have a distinct, intense flavor that shuts down the desire for more. This is the science of engineering addictive junk food at its most focused and intense.
For example, Frito-Lay employs about 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians to conduct research that cost up to $30 million a year that focuses on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of their product lines. One of their tools simulates a chewing mouth to test and perfect their chips, like the perfect “break point”; people crave chips that crunch at about four pounds of pressure per square inch. You just can’t make stuff like this up!
With market shares reaching multiple billions of dollars, highly aggressive marketing tactics such as Coca-Cola make twisted sense. Their goal was simple; outsell every other beverage that people drink, including milk and water! From this goal they developed one question for the marketing division – “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?” This explains the door-to-door sales of Coke to Brazilians living in slums and frontier shanty-towns.
With all of this high technology, psychological and physiological research running into hundreds of millions of dollars, strategic placements and extremely focused marketing campaigns all supporting highly addictive processed foods, what chance do we as everyday people have?
Somewhat surprisingly, we actually have a pretty good chance. Alternative research has shown that people can “recover” from their junk food addictions simply by abstaining from them for a period of time. Eating normal meals, eliminating or restricting snacking on junk food, or replacing that food with real, healthy food recalibrates our taste buds. Skipping meals is one of the leading causes of increased junk food intake, not by desire but simply because of convenience. Snacking on fresh vegetables such as carrots, apple slices, celery or such that provides the crunch that we have come to desire helps ease us out of the salt/sugar/fat cravings and into appreciation of new tastes and flavors that have been lost as we overload our taste buds with junk processed foods. The brain has a chance to realize that the food being eaten has nutritional content and can once again establish a reasonable signal of when the stomach is “full”. It is no longer tricked into over-eating multiple times a day.
Once a recovery period of a couple of weeks to a month had been established, most people found the tastes of the same junk food they previously had highly enjoyed were too salty, fatty or sweet and lacked the real flavors that they had re-discovered and come to appreciate. They also had pleasant side effects of increased concentration, higher energy that lasted throughout the day, decreased weight, blood pressure and headaches, among many others.
https://w9j002.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Potato-Chips.jpg?time=1730917219225300Stephen Scotthttps://w9j002.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Survey-Header.jpgStephen Scott2013-03-04 18:01:552024-04-30 17:34:02Junk Food Designed to be Unhealthy And Addictive
There is a groundswell among home gardeners looking to grow their gardens in a less chemically intensive and more biologically responsible way. They spend hours reading and researching the best ways to build the health and fertility of their soils, improve the microbial communities in the soil and attract earthworms and beneficial insects and pollinators. The appearance of more earthworms, a new species of butterfly or pollinating moth is cause for celebration.
Seeds are a high priority for these gardeners. The purity, quality and provenance are paramount. After all the work and care that goes into the soil and preparation, they rightly want the best and highest quality seeds possible.
Surprisingly, this is exactly where the home gardener and small scale grower may be getting shorted on quality. Growing for seed as opposed to growing for food has its own unique challenges. For a plant to set seed it must reach full maturity, set flowers and produce seed. This takes much longer than a plant grown for food which is usually harvested at a much younger stage, succulent and tender. Producing seed exposes the plant to a whole host of insects and diseases that younger plants may not experience, due to the phytochemical changes that take place as the plant matures sexually in order to reproduce.
“In my own vegetable beds I use no chemical heroics, and yet I had been using some conventionally produced seed that is often coddled and adapted to a life of “high inputs” that it won’t get from me or from an increasing number of other chemical-averse home gardeners.
That packet of seed may not grow as well in my garden as one that wasn’t grown with chemicals, and it also probably contributed to upstream pollution.”
Agricultural regulatory agencies allow an expanded use of petro-chemical pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers if a grower specifically grows for seed production and not food production. Many large-scale seed growers take advantage of this loophole, with the unintended consequence of creating a population of seeds that have become dependent on high-input, chemically intensive agriculture that many home gardeners are moving away from.
This has been ongoing for several decades now and is just being discovered as more and more gardeners and small scale agriculturalists are growing with less chemically intensive methods and are looking for sources of seed that are in line with their vision.
The end result of using seed grown under these conditions is that they usually don’t perform as well. They don’t germinate as strongly, are slower to put on growth, develop fewer flowers and are much more pest, disease and weather susceptible. In short, they simply aren’t as strong and resilient as those seeds grown in more biologically active soil with little to no chemical inputs.
While modern chemical agriculture initially looks very promising with better growth and increased yields, it is always discovered that plants grown with amply available macro-nutrients afforded by the chemical fertilizers become lazy and lose the ability to work for their nutrition, growing ever more dependent on the applied fertilizers for food and pesticides to control the insect populations.
The solution to these issues is to find seed sources that concentrate on growing their seed in a natural and low-input manner. These are often smaller, family-owned companies that are happy to answer questions on how their seeds are grown. They know the story of the seed they offer and willingly share it. Patronizing these companies only helps to strengthen the entire system by rewarding those that are congruent with the natural order of agriculture.
https://w9j002.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Handful-of-seedWeb1.jpg?time=1730917219234250Stephen Scotthttps://w9j002.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Survey-Header.jpgStephen Scott2013-03-03 09:43:442024-04-30 17:34:02All Seeds Are Not Equal
Are they called peppers or chiles, and why? I prefer to call them chiles and here’s my reasoning: In the Aztec’s Nahuatl native language, the word is “chilli”, which was changed to “chile” by the Spanish who were looking for a new source of black pepper and discovered these fiery little treasures. For me, chile is closer to the original name and meaning.
One of the mainstays of the garden, they are often started from seed or bought and planted right along with their travelling companions from the central Americas, the tomatoes. Humans have been eating chiles for at least 7,200 years, from archaeological evidence in Mexico and have grown them for around 6,100 years. For those that aren’t chile-heads, these sweet or hot little packets of history can be either boring or scary. Some gardeners will plant the same variety of green bell pepper year after year and not think too much of what else is on offer, while others are very concerned with the amount of “fire” some hot chiles pack. There is a lot of room to explore the world of chiles without being either bored or burned.
Chiles can be grown with great success in many varied garden climates across America. They are very adaptable to different conditions and have travelled widely, establishing themselves in many different locations and cuisines around the world. With a background understanding that they are a tropical plant originating in Central America and the following growing tips as a guide, you can have the tastiest, most colorful and most productive chiles or peppers from your garden this year. Here are some tips to help you along the way!
Start seeds indoors at least 8 weeks before the last frost date. This can change year to year; they can be started a bit later in a hard winter and earlier during a mild one. A soil temperature of 75 – 85F will give the best germination. They are not nearly as fast to germinate as tomatoes, and will take from 14 – 21 days to germinate at the optimum temperature. Use heat mats under the seedling tray if needed. For a more in-depth look at what seeds need for germination, read Starting Seeds at Home – a Deeper Look.
Peppers dislike transplanting or disturbance of their roots. Paper pots, yogurt cups or similar are a good start, having a large enough soil volume to give the root system enough time and space to develop well before going into a larger pot or into the garden. They can be started in seedling trays, but plant extra to account for those lost to transplant shock.
Peppers really need warm soil to transplant into and warm weather for best growth and ripening. Full sun is preferred, but a light shade for part of the day should be all right.
Make sure the weather is warm and all danger of frost has passed before transplanting into the garden. Daytime temps of 65F and night-time of 55F are minimums. If you find that you have to transplant under less than ideal situations, use what’s called “hot caps” or “cloches” at night to keep the termperature a few degrees warmer. These range from plastic milk jugs with the bottoms cut out to glass bells made for the purpose. Another alternative is to create a temporary row cover over the new transplants, taking it off in the morning and covering them at night. Use this until the night-time temperatures are warm enough for the young plants.
Don’t worry about waiting an extra week or even two before setting the plants out, it will be worth it if you don’t lose half your peppers to a late-season frost!
Peppers aren’t particularly picky about the type of soil, preferring a sandy loam of moderately high fertility. They will grow well in other types of soil, however.
Critical factors are temperature and water, both factors need to be fairly steady. Don’t transplant starts from a warm growing condition into a cold soil, or let them dry out. They can tolerate high temperatures, but need a moist soil for best flavors and production.
Days to maturity usually refers to the time from transplanting to harvest, similar to tomatoes.
Magnesium is an important mineral, so add a dusting of Epsom salts to the hole when transplanting, working it into the soil around the plant.
Transplant the peppers about 15 – 18 inches apart for best growth and to avoid crowding. This also makes it easier to see the ripe fruit.
Separate sweet and hot varieties as far apart as practical, with neither upwind of the other if possible to avoid cross-pollination. If this is unavoidable, put the sweets upwind of the hots, unless you want really hot sweets!
A 2 inch thick dressing of well-rotted compost around the base of the plant acts as both a mulch to keep the moisture levels more constant and act as a slow release fertilizer. For more on how to create great compost, read Compost- Nourishing Your Garden Soil.
During the growing season, your peppers will benefit from feedings of a natural fertilizer, especially during the height of pepper production. You can make some of the best fertilizer yourself with our recipe for the Best Homemade Fish Emulsion.
Green peppers will keep a bit longer than fully ripe yellow or red ones.
Riper ones have more flavor and nutrients, are usually sweeter and have a more complex flavor. They also have much more Vitamin C. Hot varieties will have much more flavor with usually less apparent heat.
Harvest when you think the fruit is ripe – either green, yellow or red. Try some of each color to see what you like the best. When picking fruit, don’t pull them off the plant, use a sharp knife or scissors to prevent damage to the plant, slowing growth and inviting pests and diseases.
Companion plants are Basil, Carrot, Mint, Nasturtium, Spinach, Sweet corn and Tansy.
Use these tips for a great season of chiles or peppers, however you want to call them! Let us know how yours do this year, and if you have experiences or tips listed that would help others, please share them!
This is an incredibly versatile chile sauce with loads of flavor and just a touch of heat. It is my adaptation of the incomparable Mole Coloradito Oaxaqueno from Susanna Trilling in her “Seasons of My Heart” cookbook that we’ve featured before. (Mole is pronounced “Mole-lay”!)
This makes a sauce that is 95% of her Mole, but I prefer to make a very large batch as it is a project to do and doubling of the recipe doesn’t take much more time to make. Then you have this cache of amazing flavor that spices up any dish with no extra time but lets all of the flavor and work shine through. It is a wonderful basis for enchiladas, nachos, stews, soups, sloppy Joe’s, burritos or even spooned over eggs in the morning. I like to add about half tomato sauce by volume to make a great sauce that is smooth and mellow with the taste of the chiles but none of the bite.
Colorado means “red” in Spanish, usually referring to a deep brick type of red, so coloradito is “little red”. We’ll give you the recipe first, then walk you though the preparation in photos so you can see the stages and progression. These chiles can easily be grown in your garden for most of North America, or at a well-stocked Mexican grocer. For the Mexican chocolate, Ibarra is a well-known brand that is available almost everywhere. If you really want to take the flavor to the next level, look at Taza Chocolate. It is stone ground in the traditional Mexican village tradition and has a flavor that is absolutely to die for, not to mention being fair trade and traceable to the source. You can see all about how your batch was made by entering the batch number into their website!
1/2 Tsp Mexican oregano, dried (Can substitute Marjoram if needed)
1 Plantain, ripe
1 Tbs raisins
5 Almonds, whole and unpeeled
1/2 Cup sesame seeds
2 Bars Mexican chocolate – 6 oz total
3 Tbs Coconut oil or sunflower oil
1 1/2 Qt homemade chicken stock
Salt to taste
There are 3 steps to this recipe: processing the chiles, processing the spices and processing the tomatoes, onions, plantains and seasonings.
Some cooks will stem and seed the chiles while still dry, toasting the pieces. Others will toast the chiles whole, then soak them to soften the skins and remove the stems and seeds.
Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. Meanwhile, heat a dry comal, griddle or a cast-iron frying pan over low heat and toast the chiles on both sides for about 5 minutes. Toast the Anchos a bit slower and on a lower heat because of their thicker skins. Toasting them blisters and loosens the skins and gives off a rich chile aroma. It may be best to toast them in smaller batches so the pan or comal is not crowded. You need room to move and turn the chiles in the pan.
Remove the chiles, place them in a large bowl with the hot water. Cover or weight the bowl with a plate to keep the chiles submerged. Soak for about 20 minutes to fully soften the dried skins. If chiles have been stemmed and seeded, puree in a blender using as little of the chile water as possible to make a thick paste, usually about a cup. If chiles have not been stemmed and seeded, do this first, then puree in blender. It is best to do this in small batches to not overload and overheat the blender, as the chile puree is quite thick. Depending on your blender, you may have a smooth paste at this point, or you may have some small pieces of skin. If skin pieces are present, pass the puree through a food mill or sieve to remove the skin pieces. Set aside.
After processing the chiles, heat the dry comal, griddle or cast-iron frying pan over medium heat and toast the peppercorns, cloves, allspice, cinnamon stick, cumin and coriander until they release their aroma. Stir the spices constantly to prevent burning and to monitor the toasting process. Set the spices aside.
Grill the garlic and onion on the dry frying pan, turning often until they become translucent. They may stick a bit, but keep turning. Puree the spices, onion and garlic with 1/2 cup of the chicken stock. Set aside.
Heat the cast-iron frying pan to medium and cook the tomatoes and oregano with no oil until the condense, usually about 10 – 15 minutes. They will give off their juices, then start to condense as the juices evaporate. Once condensed, set aside.
Heat 2 Tbs of the oil over a medium heat in a cast-iron frypan and fry the plantain until brown, about 10 – 12 minutes. Remove from the pan, add raisins and fry until plump, about 3 minutes. Remove and set aside with plantain. Fry the almonds until light brown, about 4 minutes. If needed add a little additional oil, but the amount should decrease with each ingredient until the almonds are almost being dry-fried.
Puree the plantain, raisins and almonds in a blender with 1 1/2 cups chicken stock until smooth.
Heat frying pan over low heat, add 1 Tsp of oil and gently fry the sesame seeds until just turning brown, about 6 – 8 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove, cool and grind in a spice grinder or food processor.
In a heavy stockpot, at least 6 quart capacity, heat 1 Tsp of oil until almost smoking on medium-high heat. Add chile puree and cook, stirring constantly. It will splatter, but keep stirring until heated through. Once heated, lower heat to medium-low and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring frequently. When chile puree starts to thicken add tomato mixture, lower heat to low and cook another 15 minutes, stirring to keep from sticking or burning. Then add onion and spice mixture and stir well. Add pureed plantain and sesame mixture and stir well. Cook a further 10 minutes, stirring constantly to keep from sticking.
If you are making a larger batch and freezing some, add 2 cups of chicken stock, stir in well then add the chocolate and stir constantly. Once the chocolate has dissolved, add the salt, stir in well. Reduce heat to a slow simmer and let cook for 10 – 15 minutes, stirring frequently to avoid sticking. It will be a thick sauce, ready for freezing in jars. Let cool, then ladle into mason jars leaving an inch gap at the top. Will keep in the freezer for up to a year.
If you are making the batch to use fresh, add 5 cups of chicken stock to thin the sauce, then add the chocolate, stirring constantly. Once the chocolate has dissolved, add the salt. Lower the heat to a slow simmer and let it cook down for at least 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. It should coat the back of a spoon, but not be much thicker when done.
Makes about 8 servings.
Recipe Tip! It doesn’t take much longer to make double the recipe and freeze for an easy, delicious dish later!
This may sound complicated or a lot of work, so we will walk you through the process and show you what each step looks like. It is a good day’s worth of work, but it can be broken up into a couple of days if you don’t have the time to make it all in one day. Once you taste the results, you will immediately see why it is worth the effort to make a large batch!
In the first photo, we are toasting two of the different chiles and dry frying the onion and garlic in another pan. We have learned to save a lot of time by combining a couple of steps at once. The Ancho chiles are in the back with the Pasilla Bajio or Chilacas in front.
Roasting Chiles and Frying Onions
These are the chiles after toasting, soaking and being stemmed and seeded. Most of the work happens right here, to get to this stage. After this everything is roasting and toasting, then using a blender to puree everything into a sauce. To give a sense of scale, this bowl is over 18 inches across!
Into the blender with the chiles! We have a Vita-Mix blender that is a real blessing with big projects like this. It stands up to the thick sauce without overheating, but we still need to process all of the chiles in batches. We usually fill the blender about 1/3 full with chiles and add just enough soaking water to make a thick paste. Please notice the gloves, I use them when working with chiles for extended periods of time to keep me from itching my eyes with a chile-infused finger!
It is easy to see why the name of “colorado” is applied to this sauce – look at that beautiful rich brick red color! My mouth was watering for most of the time after we pureed the chiles as the kitchen was filled with their aroma.
There is not too much volume lost from the soaking stage to the pureed stage. This is the same bowl after we’ve finished pureeing all of the chiles.
Next up is toasting and grinding the spices and seasonings. We used a smaller cast-iron pan to toast the spices and release their aromas.
A molcajete is what we use simply because we have one. It is great for grinding spices and really working them to release their flavors and aromas. A food processor or blender can do much the same with less effort.
A few minutes later, here is what the ground spices look like, ready to be mixed into the chile mixture. At this point we’ve also pureed the onion and garlic and mixed it into the chile sauce.
Now it’s time to mix it all together! This photo helps to show the scale of everything, as the whisk is almost a foot long and I’ve got my hand completely wrapped around it to work all of the purees and spices together.
After everything is mixed together and cooked at a slow simmer, we put it up in jars to freeze for later. We use pints, as this gives a generous amount of sauce without being too much after a couple of days. We leave about an inch or little more of space at the top to allow for expansion in the freezer.
All done except the clean-up! This particular batch made 17 pints of scrumptious chile sauce, with just a bit left over for the next morning’s eggs. This will give us almost a year’s worth of chile sauce.
A close-up of the color and texture of the finished product. Well worth the work!
https://w9j002.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Seedlings1.jpg?time=1730917219567850Stephen Scotthttps://w9j002.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Survey-Header.jpgStephen Scott2013-01-30 09:38:512024-04-30 17:34:02Starting Seeds at Home – a Deeper Look
Two Options with Vandana Shiva
We share this short video of Vandana Shiva telling her story of the struggle to preserve heirloom seeds in her native India from the wonderful folks at The Perennial Plate.
Junk Food Designed to be Unhealthy And Addictive
Engineering Salt, Sugar and Fat to Create Food Addiction
How did we reach this stage of poor health as a nation? The answer may surprise and anger you. As with most complex issues, the answer is not as simple as many talking heads in the media and nightly news would have us believe. It isn’t just a matter of willpower, or knowledge, or education, or alternatives to the junk food that is, quite literally, killing us. The answer is far deeper, wider reaching and more sinister.
Most processed foods these days are “optimized”, or engineered for better sensory perceptions that drive us to eat more. These sensory perceptions include but are not limited to the physical appearance, packaging, shape, mouth feel, taste and array of flavors, aftertaste, smell and satisfaction of a food. One of the most important factors that are considered is the strength of the urge for a second bite, sip or swallow, or a third.
Everyday people spend hours in tasting rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is being optimized. Their opinions are fed through a very sophisticated program that not only produces an optimized formulation for the food in question, but also addresses marketing concerns such as colors and packaging. All of this is done to gain more “stomach share”- the amount of processed food that a consumer will eat from a certain company. These are not small concerns in an industry that measures stomach share in the billions of dollars annually.
The Holy Grail for food companies is what is termed the “bliss point”, that spot where consumers like a product the most, but are not satisfied enough with the flavor combination to stop eating it. Foods and drinks cannot be too flavorful, as consumers quickly get bored with them. The brain is quickly overwhelmed with big, intense and distinct flavors and shuts down the “want more” portion, thus stopping eating.
This has become one of the major guiding principles of the processed food industry. The biggest players owe their success to very complex and secret formulas that pique the taste buds but don’t have a distinct, intense flavor that shuts down the desire for more. This is the science of engineering addictive junk food at its most focused and intense.
For example, Frito-Lay employs about 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians to conduct research that cost up to $30 million a year that focuses on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of their product lines. One of their tools simulates a chewing mouth to test and perfect their chips, like the perfect “break point”; people crave chips that crunch at about four pounds of pressure per square inch. You just can’t make stuff like this up!
With market shares reaching multiple billions of dollars, highly aggressive marketing tactics such as Coca-Cola make twisted sense. Their goal was simple; outsell every other beverage that people drink, including milk and water! From this goal they developed one question for the marketing division – “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?” This explains the door-to-door sales of Coke to Brazilians living in slums and frontier shanty-towns.
With all of this high technology, psychological and physiological research running into hundreds of millions of dollars, strategic placements and extremely focused marketing campaigns all supporting highly addictive processed foods, what chance do we as everyday people have?
Somewhat surprisingly, we actually have a pretty good chance. Alternative research has shown that people can “recover” from their junk food addictions simply by abstaining from them for a period of time. Eating normal meals, eliminating or restricting snacking on junk food, or replacing that food with real, healthy food recalibrates our taste buds. Skipping meals is one of the leading causes of increased junk food intake, not by desire but simply because of convenience. Snacking on fresh vegetables such as carrots, apple slices, celery or such that provides the crunch that we have come to desire helps ease us out of the salt/sugar/fat cravings and into appreciation of new tastes and flavors that have been lost as we overload our taste buds with junk processed foods. The brain has a chance to realize that the food being eaten has nutritional content and can once again establish a reasonable signal of when the stomach is “full”. It is no longer tricked into over-eating multiple times a day.
Once a recovery period of a couple of weeks to a month had been established, most people found the tastes of the same junk food they previously had highly enjoyed were too salty, fatty or sweet and lacked the real flavors that they had re-discovered and come to appreciate. They also had pleasant side effects of increased concentration, higher energy that lasted throughout the day, decreased weight, blood pressure and headaches, among many others.
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food – NYTimes.com
All Seeds Are Not Equal
Your Garden is Chemical-Free, Are Your Seeds?
There is a groundswell among home gardeners looking to grow their gardens in a less chemically intensive and more biologically responsible way. They spend hours reading and researching the best ways to build the health and fertility of their soils, improve the microbial communities in the soil and attract earthworms and beneficial insects and pollinators. The appearance of more earthworms, a new species of butterfly or pollinating moth is cause for celebration.
Seeds are a high priority for these gardeners. The purity, quality and provenance are paramount. After all the work and care that goes into the soil and preparation, they rightly want the best and highest quality seeds possible.
Surprisingly, this is exactly where the home gardener and small scale grower may be getting shorted on quality. Growing for seed as opposed to growing for food has its own unique challenges. For a plant to set seed it must reach full maturity, set flowers and produce seed. This takes much longer than a plant grown for food which is usually harvested at a much younger stage, succulent and tender. Producing seed exposes the plant to a whole host of insects and diseases that younger plants may not experience, due to the phytochemical changes that take place as the plant matures sexually in order to reproduce.
Margaret Roach wrote a great opinion piece in a recent New York Times Sunday Review:
Agricultural regulatory agencies allow an expanded use of petro-chemical pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers if a grower specifically grows for seed production and not food production. Many large-scale seed growers take advantage of this loophole, with the unintended consequence of creating a population of seeds that have become dependent on high-input, chemically intensive agriculture that many home gardeners are moving away from.
This has been ongoing for several decades now and is just being discovered as more and more gardeners and small scale agriculturalists are growing with less chemically intensive methods and are looking for sources of seed that are in line with their vision.
The end result of using seed grown under these conditions is that they usually don’t perform as well. They don’t germinate as strongly, are slower to put on growth, develop fewer flowers and are much more pest, disease and weather susceptible. In short, they simply aren’t as strong and resilient as those seeds grown in more biologically active soil with little to no chemical inputs.
While modern chemical agriculture initially looks very promising with better growth and increased yields, it is always discovered that plants grown with amply available macro-nutrients afforded by the chemical fertilizers become lazy and lose the ability to work for their nutrition, growing ever more dependent on the applied fertilizers for food and pesticides to control the insect populations.
The solution to these issues is to find seed sources that concentrate on growing their seed in a natural and low-input manner. These are often smaller, family-owned companies that are happy to answer questions on how their seeds are grown. They know the story of the seed they offer and willingly share it. Patronizing these companies only helps to strengthen the entire system by rewarding those that are congruent with the natural order of agriculture.
Look Carefully At Those Seeds – NYTimes.com
Chile and Pepper Growing Tips
Are they called peppers or chiles, and why? I prefer to call them chiles and here’s my reasoning: In the Aztec’s Nahuatl native language, the word is “chilli”, which was changed to “chile” by the Spanish who were looking for a new source of black pepper and discovered these fiery little treasures. For me, chile is closer to the original name and meaning.
One of the mainstays of the garden, they are often started from seed or bought and planted right along with their travelling companions from the central Americas, the tomatoes. Humans have been eating chiles for at least 7,200 years, from archaeological evidence in Mexico and have grown them for around 6,100 years. For those that aren’t chile-heads, these sweet or hot little packets of history can be either boring or scary. Some gardeners will plant the same variety of green bell pepper year after year and not think too much of what else is on offer, while others are very concerned with the amount of “fire” some hot chiles pack. There is a lot of room to explore the world of chiles without being either bored or burned.
Chiles can be grown with great success in many varied garden climates across America. They are very adaptable to different conditions and have travelled widely, establishing themselves in many different locations and cuisines around the world. With a background understanding that they are a tropical plant originating in Central America and the following growing tips as a guide, you can have the tastiest, most colorful and most productive chiles or peppers from your garden this year. Here are some tips to help you along the way!
Use these tips for a great season of chiles or peppers, however you want to call them! Let us know how yours do this year, and if you have experiences or tips listed that would help others, please share them!
Homemade Chile Coloradito Sauce
This is an incredibly versatile chile sauce with loads of flavor and just a touch of heat. It is my adaptation of the incomparable Mole Coloradito Oaxaqueno from Susanna Trilling in her “Seasons of My Heart” cookbook that we’ve featured before. (Mole is pronounced “Mole-lay”!)
This makes a sauce that is 95% of her Mole, but I prefer to make a very large batch as it is a project to do and doubling of the recipe doesn’t take much more time to make. Then you have this cache of amazing flavor that spices up any dish with no extra time but lets all of the flavor and work shine through. It is a wonderful basis for enchiladas, nachos, stews, soups, sloppy Joe’s, burritos or even spooned over eggs in the morning. I like to add about half tomato sauce by volume to make a great sauce that is smooth and mellow with the taste of the chiles but none of the bite.
Colorado means “red” in Spanish, usually referring to a deep brick type of red, so coloradito is “little red”. We’ll give you the recipe first, then walk you though the preparation in photos so you can see the stages and progression. These chiles can easily be grown in your garden for most of North America, or at a well-stocked Mexican grocer. For the Mexican chocolate, Ibarra is a well-known brand that is available almost everywhere. If you really want to take the flavor to the next level, look at Taza Chocolate. It is stone ground in the traditional Mexican village tradition and has a flavor that is absolutely to die for, not to mention being fair trade and traceable to the source. You can see all about how your batch was made by entering the batch number into their website!
Homemade Chile Coloradito Sauce
There are 3 steps to this recipe: processing the chiles, processing the spices and processing the tomatoes, onions, plantains and seasonings.
Some cooks will stem and seed the chiles while still dry, toasting the pieces. Others will toast the chiles whole, then soak them to soften the skins and remove the stems and seeds.
Makes about 8 servings.
Recipe Tip! It doesn’t take much longer to make double the recipe and freeze for an easy, delicious dish later!
This may sound complicated or a lot of work, so we will walk you through the process and show you what each step looks like. It is a good day’s worth of work, but it can be broken up into a couple of days if you don’t have the time to make it all in one day. Once you taste the results, you will immediately see why it is worth the effort to make a large batch!
In the first photo, we are toasting two of the different chiles and dry frying the onion and garlic in another pan. We have learned to save a lot of time by combining a couple of steps at once. The Ancho chiles are in the back with the Pasilla Bajio or Chilacas in front.
Roasting Chiles and Frying Onions
These are the chiles after toasting, soaking and being stemmed and seeded. Most of the work happens right here, to get to this stage. After this everything is roasting and toasting, then using a blender to puree everything into a sauce. To give a sense of scale, this bowl is over 18 inches across!
Into the blender with the chiles! We have a Vita-Mix blender that is a real blessing with big projects like this. It stands up to the thick sauce without overheating, but we still need to process all of the chiles in batches. We usually fill the blender about 1/3 full with chiles and add just enough soaking water to make a thick paste. Please notice the gloves, I use them when working with chiles for extended periods of time to keep me from itching my eyes with a chile-infused finger!
It is easy to see why the name of “colorado” is applied to this sauce – look at that beautiful rich brick red color! My mouth was watering for most of the time after we pureed the chiles as the kitchen was filled with their aroma.
There is not too much volume lost from the soaking stage to the pureed stage. This is the same bowl after we’ve finished pureeing all of the chiles.
Next up is toasting and grinding the spices and seasonings. We used a smaller cast-iron pan to toast the spices and release their aromas.
A molcajete is what we use simply because we have one. It is great for grinding spices and really working them to release their flavors and aromas. A food processor or blender can do much the same with less effort.
A few minutes later, here is what the ground spices look like, ready to be mixed into the chile mixture. At this point we’ve also pureed the onion and garlic and mixed it into the chile sauce.
Now it’s time to mix it all together! This photo helps to show the scale of everything, as the whisk is almost a foot long and I’ve got my hand completely wrapped around it to work all of the purees and spices together.
After everything is mixed together and cooked at a slow simmer, we put it up in jars to freeze for later. We use pints, as this gives a generous amount of sauce without being too much after a couple of days. We leave about an inch or little more of space at the top to allow for expansion in the freezer.
All done except the clean-up! This particular batch made 17 pints of scrumptious chile sauce, with just a bit left over for the next morning’s eggs. This will give us almost a year’s worth of chile sauce.
A close-up of the color and texture of the finished product. Well worth the work!
Starting Seeds at Home – a Deeper Look
Starting seeds at home is easy and gives more choice than the local garden center. We take a deeper look at germination and the needs of the seeds.