Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (6 page)

UPSET STOMACH

If the symptoms come from simple overindulgence, peppermint is your best bet, because it relaxes the stomach and promotes digestion. Make a cup of strong peppermint tea or eat several strong peppermint candies, such as our Curiously Homemade Peppermints (Project 40). If the queasiness is not from an overfull belly but from motion, nerves, illness, or morning sickness, then turn to ginger to warm and soothe a sick stomach. Grate an inch or so of fresh gingerroot and simmer it for 5 minutes in 1 cup water. Flavor with lemon or honey, if you like. Or, if you’re on the move, nibble on candied ginger. Half a teaspoon of baking soda mixed in a small glass of water effectively neutralizes acid indigestion, but it should never be used if your belly is already uncomfortably full, because baking soda releases carbon dioxide in the stomach, making the discomfort worse and potentially leading to dangerous straining of the stomach muscles.

SLEEPLESSNESS, ANXIETY

Try sipping chamomile
(Matricaria recutita),
vervain
(Verbena officinalis),
valerian
(Valeriana officinalis),
catnip
(Nepeta cataria),
or linden flower
(Tilia
spp.) tea. The first four plants are easy to grow in the garden, or their teas can be found in health stores. Linden flowers must be harvested from the linden tree, also called a lime tree, but not to be confused with the citrus tree. If none grow in your area, you can find linden tea in health food stores and stores that sell European foods, because it’s popular in Europe. Chamomile and linden taste best of all these remedies and are both traditionally considered safe sedatives for children.

Wild lettuce
(Lactuca virosa, L. serriola)
and the flowers of hops
(Humulus lupulus)
are both excellent sedatives but very bitter, so they are best taken in the form of a tincture: 1 teaspoon in liquid before bed. Wild lettuce is a common weed that is practically guaranteed to be found in your nearest vacant lot—it’s also the ancestor of salad lettuce. The milky sap in its stems and leaves is such a powerful sedative that it was long used as an opium substitute or to adulterate opium. Hops vines are fragrant, beautiful plants and a must for your garden if you make your own beer. Hops works well in combination with other sedative plants—hops and valerian are a classic combination, for instance.

YEAST INFECTIONS

Garlic kills yeast. For women, insert one peeled clove of garlic just as you would a tampon before going to bed at the first signs of a yeast infection. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to fish it out in the morning. It sounds strange, but it works. Repeat every night for 3 to 5 nights. Use plain, live-cultured yogurt for external itching. Acidophilus capsules, which are sold in the refrigerator section of health food stores, can also be used as suppositories to restore healthy bacteria levels in the wake of a yeast infection. Insert one or two capsules a day for a few days.

14>

Herb and Fruit Infusions

PREPARATION:
5 min

WAITING:
4-10 hours

Day to day around this homestead, our liquid intake consists of coffee, tea, beer, wine, and water, water, and more water. This is all well and good, but when we’re looking for a change, we drink one of these.

Green Elixir

Herbal tea—a teaspoon of herb steeped in a cup of water for a few minutes—is pleasant, but it doesn’t capture much of the nutritional potential of herbs. To take full advantage of the rich vitamin and mineral content of plants, you need to soak a good quantity of herb in water for hours. This process is called infusion, and infusions are nature’s power drinks.

We first learned of strong herbal infusions through the writings of an herbalist named Susun Weed, and ever since we’ve been quaffing infusions around the house as part of our regular routine. The flavors are strong, but they grow on you, and the infusions have powerful positive effects. Homemade herbal infusions are like energy drinks and vitamin pills rolled into one. They’re also inexpensive, and the ingredients might even be growing in your backyard. Once you get used to the process, it’s no more difficult than keeping a supply of iced tea in the fridge.

Our favorite infusion, good for men and women and people of all ages, with no medicinal cautions that we know of, is made of stinging nettle
(Urtica dioica).
Nettles can be foraged in most parts of the country and are in no danger of being overharvested. They are nutrient powerhouses: loaded with vitamins A, C, and D; iron; potassium; manganese; and calcium. This beautiful emerald green infusion is both energizing and deeply nourishing—a tonic, in other words. When you drink it, you know you are doing your body good. The flavor is best described as a cross between green tea and vegetable broth. See Project 34, Foraging Feral Greens, to learn how to identify and harvest stinging nettle.

YOU’LL NEED

• 1 ounce dried or fresh nettles or herbs (One ounce of dried, chopped nettles measures about 1 cup; 1 ounce of fresh leaves stripped from their stalks would fill half a quart jar.)
  
• Quart jar
  
• 4 cups boiling water
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Add the fresh or dried leaves to the quart jar. Pour the boiling water over the nettles or herbs to fill the jar. Cap it and walk away for at least 4 hours. After a maximum of 10 hours, strain out the herbs, squeezing the plant matter to get all the good juice out. Drink the resulting concoction over the next 36 hours or so—either chilled, at room temperature, or gently reheated. It will start to lose nutrients after that and eventually spoil.

Aguas Frescas

PREPARATION:
10 min

If nettle infusions seem a little stern to you, but you want something special to drink, try
aguas frescas. Vitroleros,
huge beehive-shaped jars filled with colorful
aguas frescas
(fresh waters), are a fixture of our landscape here in Los Angeles. They sit at market stands and on restaurant counters and show up at backyard parties and picnics. Fresh and fruity and lightly sweet, a big glass of
agua fresca
is the ideal antidote for sultry summer weather and the natural complement to a plate full of savory little tacos or a
pupusa
swimming in cheese and hot sauce.

Aguas frescas
are made of many things, but we’re going to focus on those made of ripe fruit blended with water. Sometimes they are flavored with herbs or spices, sometimes they are sweetened with sugar. There are endless flavor possibilities for a budding mixologist to explore—cucumber and lime with salt and chile, anyone? Or what about a watermelon and basil combo? You can get as fancy as you like, yet a single-ingredient
agua fresca
can be mind-blowingly delicious if the fruit is ripe and in season. Here’s a basic
fresca
formula.

YOU’LL NEED

• 3 cups peeled and chopped fruit. Classic choices are watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries, pineapple, guava, cactus fruit, cucumber, and citrus. But more “northerly” fruits would work well, too—peaches and blueberries and raspberries come to mind. The riper and sweeter the fruit, the better. This is an ideal use for slightly overripe fruit. Remember, if your fruit is flavorless, your drink will be, too. Sugar and lime juice will help not-so-great fruit, but they can only do so much.
  
• Juice of 1 lime (optional) (Lime makes everything better.)
  
• Sugar, if necessary, to taste. Simple syrup works best, because dry sugar will not want to dissolve in cold water. Agave nectar works well, too, but add it sparingly because it’s quite sweet.
  
• Extras: Handful of chopped mint, pinch of sea salt (really brings out melon flavors), pinch of powdered chile
  
• 6-8 cups water
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Put your fruit and any sugar, herbs, and spices in a blender along with 2 cups of the water. (Don’t use all 6 to 8 cups of water at once or the result will be a foamy mess. Use just enough water to puree the fruit.) Blend the fruit until smooth. If you don’t have a blender, use a fork or potato masher or similar tool to pulp the fruit as best as you can.

For a clear beverage, strain the pulp through a fine-mesh colander or cheesecloth, pressing to release all the juice. Otherwise, just toss the pulp into your serving pitcher and add the rest of the water. (The slightly chewy quality of an
agua fresca
is part of the experience.) Chill well and serve with or without ice.

Makes 4 servings

Section Two

Week to Week

The following projects are about ongoing cycles of maintenance and renewal. Weekly cooking, housekeeping, and laundry are the indispensable (some would say inescapable) rituals that make a house a home. Adopt a
DIY
stance toward these necessities, and you’ll not only eat better, but you’ll make your home a welcoming, comfortable, and nontoxic oasis.

Weekly Cooking

We cook the majority of our meals at home and buy very little prepared food. We do this for a bunch of reasons. It saves money (lots and lots of money), it minimizes the amount of packaging waste that moves through our kitchen, and it keeps our diet simple and healthy.

Like any other aspect of a
DIY
lifestyle, the transition from prepared foods to home cooking is best done gradually, through passion rather than duty. That is to say, the last reason you want to cook at home is because “It’s good for you.” Or, even worse, “Because it’s good for the environment.” These are abstractions, and abstractions don’t motivate you when you come home from work hungry. An improved diet and a reduced carbon footprint are side benefits of cooking from scratch. The driving force behind all real change is pleasure.

We splurge on certain indispensable foods, like cheese, chocolate, and wine. Meanwhile, most of our meals are constructed out of fresh produce from our garden and inexpensive staples: flour, sugar, dried beans and whole grains, dried fruit, seeds, and nuts. Staples are cheap, even in the grocery store, but especially when bought from bulk bins or through a food co-op. Staples keep well and pack a lot of calories into a relatively small space. A well-stocked pantry is not only the basis of home cooking but also the backbone of emergency preparedness. At any given time, we probably have about 2 weeks’ worth of food in our pantry, enough to weather a garden-variety disaster, but perhaps not enough for the whole Mayan calendar thing.

We weren’t born eating this way, and we still buy prepared foods once in a while. This has been a long transition. What set us on the Way of the Bulk Bin was a love of bread. The drive to make interesting bread sent us searching for all sorts of flours and whole grains, many of which we could only find in bulk bins. Soon, the breads we were making were better than those we could buy. For the same reason, we grow our own vegetables because they taste so much better than store-bought. Once you realize that what you make tastes better than what you buy in the store, it’s hard to go back to eating out of boxes.

As we began to learn our way around exotic flours, we also began to expand into other bulk items and found that basic, elemental foods satisfy like nothing else. Canned beans are salty and slimy. Dried beans cooked with love are a whole different order of experience. Whole grains brought new flavors and textures into our lives. Bit by bit, our diet started to change.

STOCKING UP

Of course, cooking from scratch takes time, and all of us are pressed for time. The secret is advance preparation: doing the bulk of your cooking on one weekend afternoon and stocking your refrigerator with basics that can be transformed into quick meals during the week. The building blocks of quick meals are stock, precooked grains, and beans and bread. All of these can be made ahead of time and transformed into different meals throughout the week. We’ve also included some recipes for condiments and some old-fashioned drink concentrates. Spend one afternoon a week stocking up on these basics and reap the benefits all week long.

STORING BULK FOODS

Insect contamination is the biggest danger with bulk foods. When you come home with bulk items, transfer them to jars or plastic containers with tight lids. Leaving food in plastic bags is the surest way to invite infestation, and if something comes home already infested (this is a possibility), keeping the food in jars contains the damage. We use a lot of quart and half-gallon canning jars in our pantry. The glass doesn’t absorb odors, is easy to clean, and lets us see what we have, and the lids are sturdy enough to keep insects out. If you suspect that a package of grain or flour might have been exposed to infestation, popping it into the freezer for 4 days will kill any hidden creepy crawlies.

Where Do I Put All This Stuff?

Storing bulk foods can be a challenge if you have a small kitchen. When we started down this road, our few cabinets soon began to overflow with jars. We fantasized about a new house with a walk-in pantry, but we came up with a solution that works for us and might work for you.

Make a pantry by lining any open section of wall with narrow shelves. Our pantry is in a hallway off the kitchen and is made up of eight long shelves cut from 1 x 5-inch lumber. Five inches of depth is all you need to stow away jars, cans, and boxes. Narrow shelves don’t take up much floor space, and they’re easy to inventory and manage. Everything is right in front of you, nothing is hidden. Mount the boards on simple shelf brackets, and space them at varying heights, like bookshelves, so the bottom shelves are taller and the upper ones have just enough headroom to store pint jars and cans. In one afternoon spent with a saw and a drill, you can add mountains of storage space to your kitchen.