HOT SAUCE JUSTICE

Hey there, Food Justiceers!

So, this is somewhat late, but I thought I'd hit the blogscape and tell you guys about an awesome little experience we had making... HOT SAUCE!!!

You may not know, but we have a habanero bush growing in our garden. As Ben related in an earlier post, habanero peppers are HOT! Like, really hot! And, having a bush, we have a ton of habaneros! All the time! Like, fifty habaneros! Like, seventy-five habaneros! Like, a hundred habaneros!

But actually, though, we had a whole lot of habaneros, and it seemed that the best way to use a bunch of 'em up in one fell swoop would be to make hot sauce. Lots of hot sauce! In fact, when Ben and I sat down to plan out our hot saucing itinerary, we decided we'd need a full twenty (20) fresh, home-grown habanero peppers. And that was hardly half of what was on the plant! (Disclaimer: Jordan actually pioneered the hot sauce movement when he made his famed "Holy S**t Hot Sauce," with lovely peaches mixed in with the peppers. I wasn't there for that event, though, so he'll have to tell you about it sometime!)

We found two recipes on the interwebs (what a lovely place) that were almost identical, except for the ingredients that made them each unique: both had habaneros, onions, garlic, and shallots, olive oil and sugar. But one was flavored with white wine vinegar (we used red) and cocoa powder (mole style!) while the other used lime juice and zest for a nice tangy flavor.

Once we'd gotten all our other ingredients prepared, we threw our habaneros (with the seeds still in for extra spice) into a food processor and let 'er rip. When we opened that puppy up, I've gotta say, the fumes started to get to me. BE CAREFUL WITH HABANEROS, FOLKS. Not only can you seriously hurt yourself if you, say, touch your eye after playing around with these peppers, but they really fume up a room when chopped and/or cooked. Just ask our housemates! Anyway, here's what came out of the food processor:


So then, following the directions of course, we split the peppers into two separate pans, and threw those ingredients together. The fumes only got more intense as we cooked the peppers down. We got several complaints—Clarissa even barricaded her door with pillows to stop the evil hotness from getting in! I, for one, was coughing and tearing up quite a bit. Again, be CAREFUL!

Here are the sauces being cooked:


When we'd finished, we cleaned everything very thoroughly (but apparently, not thoroughly enough: a couple days later, Noah used one of those pans to make some eggs, and residual pepper oils started fuming up the kitchen again! Remember folks, CLEAN THIS STUFF WELL!) and put those sauces in jars. We had to water them down a bit, as they were sort of thick, but it wasn't an issue. We tried them, of course— they are SPICY. Like, seriously, really hot hot sauce. But flavorful as well! The verdict seemed to be that, while both are very good, the chocolate was more interesting, and the lime more versatile. Have fun with both varieties! Or find your own recipe, and tell us about it! At the rate that bush is growing, we'll be having to make a lot more hot sauce as the months wear on.





Until next time,

Gabriel


Oh, and here's where we got the recipes. Credit where credit is due!

Happy Holidays

Hello FOOD JUSTICE advocates!

If you've been reading this blog for the past few months, you may have noticed that it isn't very good.  It's taken some time to get everything put together here at FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE, and we haven't had much time to sit down and put together any actually half-decent posts.  This is no good, because we've been doing some pretty cool stuff this fall, and we're enthusiastic about the future of this project.

As you surely can see, we've just reformatted the blog to a new, hip, layout.  In the upcoming months, we will also include new, hip news about FOOD JUSTICE and general good living in LA.  We might even define what FOOD JUSTICE means, something which I'm sure everyone is dying to know.  The future is bright, Los Angeles, and you are about to experience it.  I know I can't wait.

In sad news, five out of seven current FOOD JUSTICES are going out of the country next semester, leaving only Ben and Noah to defend the food of LA county.  Lucky for everyone, though, they're being replaced by several trained and qualified experts who you'll hopefully get to know over the next few days.  Who are you?  Who reads this?  These are questions which we'll explore together as we travel onward...

Happy Holidays!

TOP TEN BEST ALBUMS OF 2011!

When I think FOOD JUSTICE, I think rock music.  Some of FOOD JUSTICE'S greatest purveyors are musicians: Tom Morello, Paul McCartney, Flea, Brian Wilson, even Trent Reznor I think is a vegetarian.  Rock stars are usually good people.  So let's hear it for the Top Ten Most FOOD JUSTICE (aka BEST) albums of the year:

10. Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West: Jay-Z and Kanye may be the 1%, but they also care about there unborn sons and other social issues.

9. There Could Have Been A Warmth, ibid.: Who is this guy?  Who knows, but his album is sick.

8. Smile Sessions, Beach Boys: Best all time reissue, hands down. 

7. Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective: Grooving to this everyday this summer.

6. Suck It And See, Arctic Monkeys: So good!

5. David Comes To Life, F____ed Up: Punk Rock!

4. Go Tell Fire To the Mountain, WU LYF: Punk Rock?

3. 4, Beyonce: Yeah!

2. Mylo Xyloto, Coldplay: Best band of our generation.

1. Bon Iver, Bon Iver: I've never listened to this but I'm pretty sure it's the best album of the year.

SALSA JUSTICE

Have you heard of this stuff? It's called salsa and it's CRAZY good! It's refreshing but fiery hot at the same time. I'd never tried it before, but we at FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE thought we should make some...

FUN FACT: Salsa means SAUCE in Spanish.

In the FOOD JUSTICE GARDEN we grow peppers. Most of our crops died this summer, but the peppers survived the summer. This is a pepper:

Peppers are SPICY! We grow two types of peppers, jalapenos and habeneros. Jalapenos are spicy, but habeneros are SUPER SPICY.

FUN FACT: The habenero pepper is 10 to 30 times hotter than the jalapeno pepper.

Not that kind of Pepper!

We've been harvesting jalapenos for awhile, and we've just started to pick habeneros.  We thought it would be fun to make some of this super spicy salsa stuff.  We made our own recipe because we're smart and cool!  It's pretty spicy, be warned!  But it's super refreshing and has a delightful lime aftertaste.  Here it is:

SALSA FRESCA (this means FRESH SAUCE: this means no cooking, all the ingredients are just FRESH)

3 tomatoes, quartered

1/2 habenero

1/2 onion, cut in half

a handfull of cilantro

1 lime, juiced

1 clove garlic

salt to taste

Blend everything but salt in the food processor of your choice.  Be very careful when cutting the habenero...wash your hands after...don't touch anything after touching it...if you touch your eyes you could go blind or die...yikes!  Blend it to the consistency you prefer.  Salt to taste.  Serve chilled.  Yummmmmmm...

It should look like this:

Haha, jk, that would be strange!

It looks more like this:

Did not take this picture!

SALSA is cool and a great way to do justice to peppers.  MAKE BANKS PAY...for SALSA!

Experiments in Food Justice, Vol. 2: Sun-dried Tomatoes

Hello, friends of the movement!

Today's story begins with a really great thing turning horribly wrong.

Fay has a pretty nifty internship at WORKS (Women Organizing Resources, Knowledge & Services). Sometimes, they send her home with big bushels of vegetables, which is really great, because then we get to eat them without ever paying a cent.

One week, Fay came home with a gigantic flat of cherry tomatoes. And at first, it was good. We were very excited to have all these tomatoes, and we were thinking of all the amazing things we could do with them. But then we realized how many tomatoes we really had on our hands, and, well, we were a bit overwhelmed. There were, like, five pounds of tomatoes. Ten pounds of tomatoes. Maybe even fifteen pounds of tomatoes, but probably not.

We tried to use them in a lot of delicious dishes, such as salads, and a pretty fantastic fresh tomato sauce made by yours truly. But there were just too many. Due to lack of space in our little kitchen, we had the flat on top of the fridge, and every time we pulled it out, a swarm of fruit flies went zooming around. Tomatoes were going bad, turning to mush. Things were getting really ugly.

Then, a miracle. Noah "Got-Arrested-In-A-Bank-Protest-Maybe-You-Recognize-Him-From-The-Cover-Of-The-Oxy-Weekly-Or-CNN" Donnell-Kilmer came up with the clearly genius plan of SUN-DRYING the tomatoes.

While he never actually explained the mechanics of it to me, my impression is that the process was pretty simple. He halved the tomatoes, laying them out on baking trays, open side up. He threw some oregano and salt on those things, to make them extra tangy and tasty. The recipe apparently called for cheese-cloth to keep the bugs off, but Noah, the inventive madman that he is, made do with coffee filters. Then he set them outside in the sun, to dry. You know, sun-drying.



After a few days of diligently moving those trays to follow the sun over the course of the day, Noah had himself a batch of certified, grade A sun-dried tomatoes! We still haven't quite wrapped our minds around the possibilities of what we can make with them, but needless to say, we're excited.

OCTOBER UPDATE

Hi those who are interested in FOOD JUSTICE!

We've been working hard here at FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE.  We have done some things.  What have we done?

1. We've made these foods:

2. We saw a [Update: DOUBLE] rainbow:

3. We got arrested:

 

More updates soon...we're doing lots of cool stuff and it will be neat!

Experiments in Food Justice, Vol. 1: Bread crumbing

Hello, all! I'm Gabriel Mathews, the member of the Food Justice House who is reportedly "good at some things". Well, one of those things is now writing a recurring column on our House's trials and tribulations when it comes to being just, food-wise. If you like this column, be sure to check back for more!

In today's installment, Making Breadcrumbs!

Sometime last week, someone in the House (who shall remain unnamed simply because I don't know who it was, not because I wouldn't love to out them) purchased a fairly high quality baguette. Now, anyone who's ever consumed a baguette probably knows that you've gotta eat that sucker within about a day or two, or it's going to go so stale you could use it as a croquet mallet.


And guess what?

We didn't eat it.

But, as they say, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Except, replace "lemons" with "stale baguette" and "lemonade" with "breadcrumbs". For those of you who might be unaware, breadcrumbs are one of the handiest things to have in a kitchen. They can be used in many a baked good, as well as for the purpose of breading chicken, turkey, fish, or just about anything you'd ever think of breading. Pretty great stuff.

So, Jordan "Chicken Judge" Faires and I decided to take that useless excuse for a loaf of bread and turn it into a source of deliciousness to be consumed for eternity.

How did we do this, you ask? Well, the question puzzled us for a while, too. Our initial thought was that it would probably be best to break the baguette up into little pieces. So we took the thing outside, still wrapped in it's paper/plastic sheath, and started whacking it brutally against our picnic table.

This method did not prove to do very much. So Jordan, noting that we should probably acquire a mallet for situations like these, went and grabbed the hammer.

We brutalized that loaf for a while, using the butt end of the hammer for fear of doing serious damage to our table or each other with the head. Once we'd broken it down into a bunch of reasonable small pieces, it was time to bust out the blender.

Clarissa "Kerouac" Boyajian generously donated a pretty snazzy blender to the House, bringing it all the way down from her remote island home in Washington State. This thing looked big and mean, and the Chicken Judge and I figured it'd be well suited to the task of turning our baguette chunks into dust.

We were wrong. After only a few seconds at work, the blender started emitting smoke of a plastic-smelling variety, and we decided to reconsider our options. Luckily for us, this House has around five blenders in it, left here by previous inhabitants who apparently fled in a hurry, judging by the amount of stuff they left around. Jordan and I grabbed the one that looked most like a Cuisinart (following my vague memories of my dad using this method of bread crumbing), and found that it worked like gangbusters! Slowly feeding more chunks into the slicer-dicer, we soon had that baguette down to nothing but powder and tasty breadcrumbs. [UPDATE: This radtastic blender was also donated by the Island Queen Clarissa.]

Fay "Evita" Walker used them that very night to make some delicious breaded chicken, and we have the rest in a pretty little jar on our kitchen counter, to supplement more deliciousity in future meals.

End of Summer...:(...

Today is Labor Day.  This is a sad time for FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE...because we had a pretty amazing time this Summer 2011.  Let's do a recap of all our summers!

LEAH: Leah worked at her parents' funeral home this summer in the great city of Las Vegas.  She is a pretty cool girl!
   

FAY: Fay went to Argentina to research the woman's rights group Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, which does good things.  She had an incredible cross-cultural experience there.

CLARISSA: Clarissa drove up the West Coast and slept in the bed of her Dodge pick-up truck every night.  Most people would be called contrived for doing something like that, but not Clarissa!

 
GABRIEL: Gabriel worked as an intern at a PR firm.  That sounds pretty boring, Gabe!  But don't worry, he also went on a hiking trip in the Cascade Mountains.

 

JORDAN: Jordan worked for a non-profit doing research on poultry.  How's that for FOOD JUSTICE?

NOAH: I don't really know what Noah did this summer!  Sorry Noah!!  UPDATE: Noah worked maintenance at MIT this summer!  What's next?  Robbing casinos?  Saving the world?  Leading the South African rugby team to victory?  Go Noah!

BEN: Ben did lots of cool things this summer, but that's enough about me haha!

Now that our incredible summers are over, we are ready to kick into full FOOD JUSTICE gear.  What does that mean?  What is FOOD JUSTICE?  What does FOOD JUSTICE mean to me?

  

Stay tooned!!!

Moving In.

We are moving back into FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE.  So far we are failing our mission in every way.  The garden is dead and I am eating Ramen for lunch.

Who Is Excited?

I sure am!  That's right, Los Angeles, summer is over and the Occidental Class of 2013 is moving back to the sunshine city.  Some of us are abroad, but most of us are back for the fall semester...and that includes every member of FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE.  Let's get started, team...there's a lot of judicial work that needs to be done.  The garden may have gone to seed...the house may be in disrepair...the bathrooms may or may not have working plumbing fixtures...but we are ready to rock...

...and roll!

FUN IN THE SUN!

Today was a gorgeous day in sunny L.A.!  To celebrate the wonderful weather, FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE did some gardening!  It was something!  Despite some injuries on the trail (those darn folding knifes, what can I say) we got lots of work done.  We expanded our irrigation system by double (more on that later!), replanted peppers and tomatoes (those little guys sure are growing!) and sowed an entire raised bed of carrots, pole beans, sugar peas, lettuce, and scallions.  We even did some passionate landscaping work that was a nice time which brought us all together.  I think I speak for all of my FOOD JUSTICE compatriots when I say that I CAN'T WAIT to move in!

WHAT IS FOOD JUSTICE?

We have made a house in which we will practice the art of Food Justice.  We have a garden in which we grow plants.  This is an example of a plant:

WHO IS FOOD JUSTICE?

NOAH DONNELL-KILMER – THE STRONGEST.
FAY WALKER – THE SMARTEST.
LEAH SUSSMAN – THE QUICKEST.
CLARISSA BOYAJIAN – THE STURDIEST.
GABE MATHEWS – GOOD AT SOME THINGS.
JORDAN FAIRES – GOOD AT OTHERS.

BEN TUTHILL – THE BEST.

WE ARE FOOD JUSTICE.

Food Justice is a concept I don't feel like explaining.  It is a way of life.  This is its story.