After discussing my bread problems on a previous post, I received quite a few helpful tips from readers and friends. El at Fast Grow the Weeds sent me a link to a no-knead bread recipe from the New York Times. The beauty of this recipe is that you let water and time do the work that your hands and back would usually do. Instead of using physical energy to create and expand the strands of gluten in the dough, the water (given eighteen or so hours) does the job for you.

I was skeptical, and, since I do not have packaged yeast, not convinced that I could make a sourdough no-knead loaf. I figured I would need a pretty strong and pretty watery starter to make everything work. After searching for no-knead sourdough recipes, I decanted a couple to try. This recipe is what worked for me.

Wait. First, a short discussion on my collection of sourdough starters…

This stuff is great if you take care of it. I use it a lot, and try many different flours in their creation and maintenance. I had three starters going, each with its own type of flour, but now I am down to two. If you don’t have a jar of starter and you make bread or pie or pancakes on a weekly basis then you are really missing out.

So I am down to two starters now. I was using graham flour in the one that died. It was getting pretty funky towards the end, losing its sweet aroma and leaning towards some kind of rotten smell. I don’t have a theory as to why the graham flour starter didn’t last. Maybe someone else has the answer. Here is the graham flour starter before I composted it:

It was pretty lifeless even after I fed it.

I also have a questionable starter that I feed whatever free flour I bring home from the store. It has recently eaten garbanzo bean flour, soy flour and a variety of other strange varieties.

It is still alive and smells fine. It does not bubble as much as my most active starter, the one I feed Southern Biscuit Flour, the only local flour I have available at the moment.

This one loves being what it is and performs no matter how long I neglect it or knock it around. It is my wild yeast workhorse, and I can’t praise it enough. I used this starter in the following recipe.

1 - Mix a sticky dough with three cups of flour, one cup of sourdough starter, one cup of water and one teaspoon of salt. You can also add just a dribble to honey to get everything real activated.

2 - Mix everything well, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for twelve to eighteen hours on your counter or other warm place. Sixty-eight degrees works well for mine, but seventy would be better.

3 - When the dough is ready it will have doubled its size (at least). Scoop the dough out onto a floured board.

4 - Form the dough into a ball, adding about a quarter cup more flour in the process. Don’t do too much work with the dough, just get it into a ball shape.

5 - Put the ball into a baking dish that has a cover. I am using a casserole dish at the moment, but have a cast iron Dutch Oven waiting to be put into service.

6 - Let the dough rise in the baking container. The recipes I found say everything from one to six hours. Use your best judgment.

7 - Place the baking dish (with cover) in a cold oven, set the temperature to 450 degrees and bake for one hour and ten minutes.

8 - Scrape the bread out of the container and set on a plate to cool.

Kristin says this is the best bread ever. It is really damn good.

Next up is Duncan’s beer bread…

During the summer I signed up for a fall/winter Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription run by Robb Prichard. The CSA is small with four members this season. Robb is just getting started with the project and wants to keep things manageable.

I have been getting the boxes for the past five or six weeks. During this time I have received a lot of heads of lettuce, bok choy, green and red cabbage, sweet and bell peppers, carrots, shelled pecans, okra, beets, turnips, green and red kale, lacinato (dino) kale, leeks, dill, parsley and basil. I’m sure I have left something out, but everything has been great. It is great to be able to have a fresh salad every night of the week. The bok choy coleslaw that I made was from cabbage from Robb’s CSA. Last night a bunch of turnips and carrots went into some chicken soup that I pulled out of the freezer.

Yesterday I had a chance to go and visit the farm. Located in Castle Hayne, the farm is a quick ten minute drive from my house. That isn’t far compared to the other places that I buy produce from. Still, Robb had to come pick me up since I don’t trust riding a bicycle on no-shoulder roads.

Robb has tentatively named the farm Oakley Laurel. The farm’s main focus is on pasture management for raising and keeping horses. There are currently five horses on the farm. The pictures are of Eddie, a four year old horse. He was pretty friendly, constantly trying to eat my camera bag. I haven’t really been around horses that much, and I wasn’t sure if one was going to step on my foot or knock me over. I think horses are just a bit too big for my animal tastes. I much prefer goats and their scale. Goats are still friendly, and I think I could block a goat’s kick much better than a horses.

The pastures take up most of the eight acre farm, with about a quarter acre dedicated to the CSA garden. Robb rotates the grazing pasture every so often and removes most of the manure for composting. She also reseeds with various grasses in order to increase the density of forage and reduce the amount of hay she needs to buy.

The garden area is good sized for a small CSA. Robb wasn’t using every part of the plot and planned to expand the beds as the ground is worked. She is dealing with a shallow clay hardpan that has to be broken up before the roots have a place to go.

Robb uses multiple successive plantings to ensure variety in the CSA box. In one area there were mature lettuce heads and in another the seedlings had just been transplanted.

Plenty of cold weather brassicas - kales, cabbage, broccoli - as well as roots like turnips, carrots and beets.

With the drought that is plaguing North Carolina, Robb has taken to setting up a number of rain barrels to collect water from the barn roof. The barrels feed into drip tape and soaker hose run throughout the beds.

Besides the horses, there were also a couple of cats residing on the farm working to rid the place of moles and mice.

If you are interested in finding out more about Robb’s CSA, contact me and I will get you in touch with her.

Originally named “End of the Line”, Local Revolt (the linked interview and its out-of-context editing and framing used to make me really angry, now it is just funny and reads like bad satire) was a short lived anarchist house. After three years, its vision of becoming a collective never really materialized although we often called ourselves a collective. Plenty of folks came and went…bands played, art shows were held, films were screened, books were loaned, protests were planned, shit was talked. I was the only person to stay there from start to finish, living in each of the three bedrooms at some point along the way. I may have been the only person that actually loved that house, but even I knew when it was time for it to come to an end.

We had a Free Store that was abused by anyone who wanted to come and dump their junk on us. We had an open door policy that allowed a homeless prophet to move in for a month and eat all our food and watch free cable all day in the basement. We had a lax housemate policy that brought in some sketchy folks who had to be kicked out after very short stays.

We had loud housemates, housemates who wanted to run us into the ground with their window AC units, housemates that would never come out of their room. In total there were fourteen people who revolved through the bedrooms. In addition there were dozens of travelers. I am still in contact with a few of those traveler folks, and most were great to hang out with. Whether they had hitchhiked or hopped a train into town for something to do or were biking the East Coast or walking from the West Coast and back, everyone had a story that stuck with me.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a post about a garden…

I started a garden even before I officially moved into the house. I slept on couch cushions on the floor in my room, but didn’t care as long as I got some beans and tomatoes and squash and flowers in the ground as soon as possible. The area of the garden was pretty shady, so I had to get creative with its placement.

One of the first things to go in were the compost bins. The next was a driveway garden.

The bins are in the back right of the picture. The driveway garden usually had the greens, lettuce and a smattering of sunflowers. I grew edible nasturtiums and cosmos as well.

After the first year the gardens got a little bigger. I was able to clear some vines and small trees from a fence area in order to get more light and focus on the backyard garden. Cherry tomatoes, beans, greens and summer squash all did pretty well there. Basil and rosemary also did well, but other herbs didn’t really take.

The garden was often a happy mess of a place. The garden gate was the aluminum decoration from an old screen door. Office filing shelves served as compost sifters. Metal shelving supports from the Office Depot dumpster made up the bean trellis. Notice the assorted chairs rescued from the garbage as well as the gaggle of duck decoys on the porch railing. The porch itself was a disaster. One of the old housemates briefly tied his dog to one of the columns. The dog ripped the column out, breaking part of the flashing that attached to the house thereby setting up the roof to leak for the next two years.

We moved out during the summer when tomatoes and squash were coming off. I was pretty depressed about leaving, so I left a lot of the stuff unharvested. The garden was tilled under soon after I left and is probably a nice, green, chemically altered lawn at this point…

I’ll break the suspense on this thread of past gardens; none of the three in this series are still around.

I have been moving to a new home over the last few days and am pretty run down with all the carrying and dragging and boxing and unboxing. I hate moving; there are few highlights. My high points of the day - Noel and Danielle brought me some expired goat cheese and goat butter. Tonight was dinner with Sarah and Anthony.

Given that I am surrounded by boxes and unfamiliar with which light switch works which light, I am in the mood to be a bit self congratulatory. Please bear with me.

A few months ago I was nominated for the Cooperate for Community Contest. From the Tidal Creek website:

“National Cooperative Grocers Association (NCGA) and Frontier Natural Products Co-op sponsored the first-ever ‘Cooperate for Community!’ contest to educate the public about the benefits of sustainable food and the cooperative model.

Open to anyone aged 18 or older, this contest encouraged co-op members, shoppers and community members to identify and honor the people and organizations that work toward more sustainable food in their community while exemplifying an outstanding spirit of cooperation along the way.”

I won the local competition, but was disqualified from the national stuff because I am a co-op employee. I guess “open to anyone aged 18 or older” doesn’t really mean anyone. Dumb. But I won locally and was able to donate some money to Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and receive a Tidal Creek gift card. Here is what my nominator wrote. (I read it for the first time when it was printed in the co-op newsletter. My nominator is pretty damn cool her ownself…)

“Local Winner – Trace Ramsey

Trace’s everyday life demonstrates his commitment to a just and sustainable world. He is currently the Produce Manager and a board member of our local co-op, Tidal Creek. Trace motivates Tidal Creek to adopt policies and programs that support and follow principles of sustainability.

Since Trace became Produce Manager, he went through the tedious process of organic certification for his department. It is the first and only certified produce department in Wilmington.

Through choosing to try to eat within a 100 mile foodshed and blogging about it at cricketbread.com, Trace has inspired the store. He is helping the co-op identify and connect with local producers and compile this information by creating a local foods guide for Southeastern North Carolina. This guide will be a huge resource to consumers, restaurants and small farmers in our area.

As a part of Trace’s healthy living, he bikes to work everyday, five miles each way. He is an advocate for alternative transportation and has instituted a bike incentive program for employees and customers. Outside of Tidal Creek, Trace has initiated a community garden, organized a community bulk veggie purchasing program helping make organic produce affordable and accessible to low to middle income families, rescued food from dumpsters, helped launch the Cape Fear Biofuels Co-op, and participated in many other projects.

Trace is worthy of the Cooperate for Community award because of his dedication to sustainability and community building through his work and advocacy for organic and local foods. He is truly a leader in our community by facilitating our co-op’s mission of providing fresh food and educating and empowering the public.”

There is my self promotion for the day…