Okara, and GE-free shopping guides

Feb 3

It’s a byproduct, it’s a food, it’s a fertilizer..? Okara is all of these things. It’s made up of the solids left over from tofu and soy milk making, and resembles cottage cheese. It starts to sour and then rot fairly quickly so is perishable if you’re planning to eat it, as many Japanese do. It is rich in iron, low in fat, high in fiber, and also contains protein (not nearly as much as whole soybeans of course) as well as calcium and riboflavin.

Raw okara needs some preparation before using, both because it’s relatively flavourless on its own and because the proteins need cooking to become digestible. It should be steamed or baked or toasted for 25 to 45 minutes, or fried in oil for about 20 minutes until thoroughly cooked, and then cooled before using. It’s very light and crumbly once cooked, and still pretty flavourless.

You can add it to baking, use it as a substitute for nuts or ground beef; there are recipes around for okara falafel. I added it to some potato-vegetable pancakes last night, and it was good. There’s a useful-sounding blog out there, Okara Mountain, which has many more ideas.

Here’s a video on home tofu making, (and another one on making your own soya milk at home). The astute will notice that both tofu and soy milk begin the same way, and it is in these early steps that the okara is produced.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kARjk3k3EY]

Okara is also a great soil enhancer if added to your garden or compost in the spring. If you leave it too long and it starts rotting in the bag, it will, as one of Haliburton‘s farmers put it to me, stink like a dead deer, though when spread over a garden and loosely raked under the leaf mulch, I haven’t noticed a smell. But that decompositional tang, certainly discernable to the canine nose, might explain why old Anton has developed quite a fondness for it, so I have to watch him closely until it rots down. I hope I am not attracting other four-legged browsers in the meantime.

And further to an earlier post which featured a Genetically-Engineered Foods Shoppers’ Guide from The Center for Food Safety, here’s one for Canadians, thanks to our friends at Greenpeace.

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Sweet stuff

Jan 29

A recent article asks if maple syrup is the new sugar? A timely question with the Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival seeping up on our horizon. The instigators of this festival go by the charming name of the Sapsuckers, and for a couple of years now, they’ve been promoting what is news to most of us: that even out here in the west, our local bigleaf maple trees (Acer macrophyllum, aka Oregon maple) can be tapped and the sap boiled down to make maple syrup.

The reason this isn’t more well known, or more frequently done, is that the more commonly known and aptly named sugar maple (Acer saccharum) – growing in Eastern Canada – has a higher sugar content. So although both need to be boiled down to acceptable levels of sweetness, the Eastern variety will take less sap and therefore less cooking time to reduce to a syrup.

Before you rush out to tap all your trees to see if there’s more sweet gold in them thar trees, the research has already been done: the only other tree you can tap for syrup is the birch, and its syrup has a distinctive flavour that not all will enjoy. Like the bigleaf maple, birch sap is lower in sugar than sugar maple sap, so will take much longer to boil down. But if you want to go for it, here’s how it’s done:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGChFvK8huk]

And if you’re looking for syrup recipes, here’s a good puddle of them. When I was in Nova Scotia a year or two ago I picked up a couple of interesting alternatives to syrup: maple sugar (sinzibukwud) and maple butter, both of which are produced by boiling past the syrup point.

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Happy farmers and googly-mad writers

Jan 27

The blessed 60 day extension to the Madrona Farm fundraising campaign has yielded some truly gratifying results. Written up in Guy Dauncey‘s EcoNews, it caught the attention of a right thinking reader, Mel McDonald, who came up with the $200,000 that was needed for a matching donation by Ed Johnston, which reduced the amount needed to an entirely manageable sounding $287,000 – by March 31st. Still a lot of money to come up with, but “a lot” is certainly less than “a staggering amount”. And it’s a pittance compared with the amount that’s been raised – $1,413,000 so far.

A group of BC writers are carrying on their declamation of the Google Book Settlement as the final opt-out date looms hugely (January 28) before us. This is the date to opt out or opt back in if you went out but changed your mind. If you’re just plain mad, there’s a letter of protest (Canadian Writers Against Google Settlement petition) being sent to the US courts: to add your name, send it quickly to dvbolt@aol.com . Writers who are spending this last day on the fence are advised to devote some small part of it reading this FAQ on the settlement by the (US) National Writers Union.

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David O’Meara reading, A Chemical Reaction, and Slow Food Pasta

Jan 26

Food and poetry reared their twin heads last week, with a sprinkling of pesticide in the middle.

On Tuesday, Ottawa poet David O’Meara came into town to read from Noble Gas, Penny Black as well as older and newer work, at Open Space Gallery. The reading was probably the highest he’d done; we were up near the ceiling becoming part of an installation (Bamberton: Contested Landscapes). Here, he sizes up the pulpit with Tim Lilburn.

Introduced by Garth Martens…

O’Meara took the.. er.. floor, and after the reading was interviewed by poet Steven Price.

Thursday I attended a screening of A Chemical Reaction, sponsored by the Canadian Cancer Society, which is lobbying for a cosmetic pesticide ban in BC (you can send the government an email: they are seeking input on this matter till February 15). The man behind the film, Paul Tukey, is a former landscaper who through his own and his son’s experiences learned the personal and health costs of cosmetic chemicals.

He wanted to tell the exemplary story of the town of Hudson, Quebec, which imposed the first cosmetic pesticide ban in North America – due to the fearless work of local dermatologist Dr. June Irwin, who continues – at her own expense – testing skin and blood samples from all her patients, to monitor the presence of toxic chemicals in their bodies.

The film was an instructive lesson in the hard work of pushing municipal legislation through, particularly when it puts a multinational’s revenue stream at risk. Because of the town’s wish to stay chemical free, chemical companies sued it all the way up to the Supreme Court (it won!).

But those guys don’t give up without a long, expensive fight. Now Canada is being sued by Dow Chemical for violating the terms of NAFTA, which it feels, give it carte blanche to make its money unimpeded by pesky legislation or trivialities like long term health costs caused by recommended application of its products (hmm, why does that sound so familiar..?)

Dr Irwin’s advice to those who wish to follow her example and don’t know where to begin? “Letters to the editor are free” she says, and makes full use of that avenue. Her other strategy was to attend – live and in person as we all have the right and privilege to do – municipal council meetings, and speak up about her concerns, supported by her findings. Even so, with her more or less constant presence and insistence that they read her findings, it took her six years to convince them to act. The film asserts that had it not been for a receptive mayor, the bylaw would never have gone through. Despite the medical evidence.

The film also explains the systematic way the pesticide companies have exerted influence on state legislators in the US to make sure no municipality can follow Hudson’s lead. But as Tukey observed: we all have the right to vote with our wallets. Just stop buying the stuff.

To round out my week, on Sunday, Slow Food Vancouver Island held a pasta workshop and tasting at Ristorante La Piola in Victoria. About 40 of us milled about the place listening to various people talk pasta and sauce. Here’s Mauro Schelini, of The Tuscan Kitchen, advising us only to buy pasta machines that are made in Italy (the Chinese ones, he says, are too frail and have a tendency to spit metal filings into your pasta when they are new).

Don Genova shows us how to roll…

La Piola’s executive chef Cory Pelan catches and cuts the pasta as it comes out of the extruder.

The best part of any demo… seeing the tasting plates fill.

Eric Whitehead, mushroom forager, of Untamed Feast, shares a few morels and his special way with pasta sauce.

…Resulting in more tasting plates…

And very happy endings:

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Milky justice

Jan 25

Last week’s Ontario court case decision on the Michael Schmidt/raw milk issue – which has been dragging on since Schmidt had his farm raided in 2006 – has lactivores bubbling over with questions. Schmidt had been charged with illegally selling unpasteurized milk to people who chose to drink it, and exercised their choice by the only means legally open to them, by subscribing to a ‘cow share‘ enterprise. This means buying a share of a cow and contributing to its upkeep, in return for which receiving a quantity of raw milk. There is a similar system – Home on the Range Dairy – in BC which has been subjected to a sustained attack by our own public health buttinskis in recent weeks.

One part of the public health attack has been to publish a misleading press release that mentions the presence of fecal matter in the dairy’s milk. What the release fails to mention is that fecal matter is present in just about everything we eat, drink and touch, including soft drinks, spinach, government-inspected beef, and public health-approved pasteurized milk and milk products. It can certainly cause serious health problems, but the important distinction where testing is concerned is the fecal count, not the mere presence of fecal matter, and the press release is curiously shy of mentioning this. Nor do the public health officials claim to have tested for or found E. coli, which is, according to the Food Safety Network, the best way of testing for fecal contamination. In fact the whole manner of testing in this instance is considered highly biased.

Raw milk is a murky subject, much debated. It is hard to separate the views of the pro-pasteurization side from their vested interests in industrial scale production – which can by their very nature cause so many health problems that some kind of public protection is certainly called for. Most of the pro-raw milk defense comes from the Weston A. Price Foundation, which is not universally revered, but does have many sane and healthy supporters. There are genuine causes for concern about raw milk, as there are for production of any animal food likely to be consumed by people with delicate immune systems.

My personal experience with raw milk was in Italy, where the law allowed me to purchase raw milk from a machine in a shopping mall – the provision being I had to fill the bottle myself. There was a large sign posted on the machine warning pregnant women that raw milk could be dangerous, but I saw at least one near-term consumer ignore this. The milk was fabulous, rich and flavourful and made impressive custards and puddings. When we visited Epoisse producers in France, we were given a tasting and demonstration at which it was explained that the runniness of a ripe Epoisse is due to EU and North American market requirements that they use pasteurized milk. When the cheese is properly and traditionally made with raw milk, the paste shouldn’t collapse, but be soft and firm. Pasteurization also kills off many of the microflora that give any artisanal cheese depth, texture and flavour.

So. Canadian raw milk consumers are rejoicing in what seems like a great victory in the Schmidt case, but is in fact only a local affirmation by the Ontario Court of Justice that he operated within the law in Ontario. It’s unlikely the ruling will give strength to either side of the pasteurization argument, as the presiding judge made clear in his closing remarks:

I wish to make it perfectly clear that my decision to acquit the defendant on all charges-
* In no way stands for the proposition that henceforth it is legal to market unpasteurized milk and milk products in the Province of Ontario;
* In no way purports to undermine or invalidate the milk marketing legislation in this Province, which has been held to be valid legislation byt he Ontario Divisional Court in Allan v. Ontario (Attorney General) (supra);
* In no way supports either side of the debate on whether the consumption of unpasteurized milk or milk products is healthy or constitutes a health hazard 

CBC has a poll you can take to share your opinion on whether or not people should be allowed to drink raw milk. Take it here.

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