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!!!