Today I glanced at the old Duralex glasses I’d brought home from the Canary Islands (Spain) some ten years ago, unable to purchase them here. Manufactured in France of tempered glass, they have been used in Europe for decades in cafes and restaurants because of their durability and elegant design.

My earliest memories of these glasses, dating back to 1976, is of the Canarian cortado, so pretty in its tiny glass cup and such a knock-out to drink, once its layers of black espresso and creamy white sweetened condensed milk were mixed with the tiny spoon that came with it.

I did a search on Duralex glasses a couple years ago but none were to be found at any price. Today, lo and behold! I find them- at least the larger tumblers – being sold in the US under the name “Kidishes” – durable glass tumblers and bowls that your kids can use if you’re trying to get away from endocrine-disrupting chemicals BPA, PVC and phthalates. Kidishes can be found at The Soft Landing and ZoeBOrganic.com. You’ll enjoy seeing their other products as well.

Sean said in 2005:

Sitting in the car Thursday, watching as men and women flowed in and out of the Dinosaur, it struck me that people go there because it offers something unique – and because it embraces, rather than fears, authentic city ambiance. The funny thing is, if the Dinosaur went by the Walgreens rules (referring to Walgreens “need” for suburban, big-box style development – ed.) , a true Syracuse phenomenon would probably dry up and close its doors.

Sean reminds us that many of our pre-conceived notions of what makes a business work just fall apart in the face of this reality: a restaurant putting out top-notch food that caters to a serious diversity of people can be a destination. It doesn’t need to demolish a building to be successful. It doesn’t need acres of blacktop in front of it. It doesn’t need to alter the streetscape. It fits right in with the city and people come from all over to be there. And they aren’t afraid, and they don’t complain about having to walk a few blocks from their parking spot to get there. (They gotta do something to burn off the calories they’re about to eat!) This is what a real city is about.

But, sadly, Mayor Driscoll is singing the old last-century tune that has ruined much of Syracuse (and the fabric of countless cities across the country): demolish, demolish, demolish. Pave paradise, put up another drug store, and…  you won’t know what city you’re in any more. And you certainly won’t have economic development, because your money will be siphoned off to the coffers of a big corporation in another state.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again:

• Mayor Driscoll has been talking out of both sides of his mouth.
• There IS a developer who can take the existing Wittigs Ice Cream / Steak & Sundae building and turn it into something great.
• And the Dinosaur Barbecue is just the type of destination we can have in Eastwood if we’ll just stick to our standards.

How difficult is that?

Keep up the good work Sean! We need you!

There are lots of people in Syracuse thinking the same thing about their neighborhoods, too.  Look at the websites that have sprouted just this winter (disclaimer – I’m the webmaster of the last two):

• Syracuse Grows “…is a grassroots network cultivating a just foodscape in the City of Syracuse. Syracuse Grows provides coordination, programming, education, and resources to support equitable local food production, distribution and consumption through community gardening and urban agriculture.”
• Community Supported Agriculture of Central New York “Since 1998, CSA-CNY has been bringing people together to safeguard, promote, make available, and enjoy locally grown organic foods.”
• Slow Food CNY is a new chapter in the Slow Food USA network. Slow Food is “a global, grassroots movement with thousands of members around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.”

With this flowering of organizations interested in very local food, it doesn’t seem quite so daunting a task to imagine the kinds of food we can grow in Eastwood. It’s the last day of February, high time I got some seeds and started them in the sunny southern window. My first shopping stop will be the Seed Savers Exchange. Why not just shop the Burpee catalogue or Lowes for seeds? Well, we’re losing biodiversity at a tremendous rate and I feel I can just as easily do my part to help maintain it, for the sake of my kids and grandson.

If you’re growing a garden this year, let us know what you’ll be planting and how you’ll cook it.  I could use a little inspiration. For instance, I just learned that I don’t have to go to the trouble of breading and frying eggplant – it can easily be cut up and roasted with some olive oil and the fresh rosemary from the garden. So let us know what your favorite preparations are for the veggies you’ll be growing!

Here’s what my compost pile looked like today. The sun shone through the slats and melted only some of the snow:

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Newsweek has an article this week about urban chickens. Take a look! From the article:

There are a host of reasons for the growing trend. “Locavores” hope to avoid the carbon emissions and energy consumption that come with transporting food. Chicken owners and poultry experts say eggs from backyard chickens are tastier and can be more nutritious, with higher levels of supplements like omega-3 fatty acids. Their production cost is cheap: you can buy chickens for as little as a couple of dollars, and three hens will likely average about two eggs a day. You can also use their waste to help revitalize a garden. “There’ve been recalls on everything from beef to spinach, and I think people want to have peace of mind knowing their food is coming from a very trusted source,” says LaBadie. “As gas prices go up, and people realize how food is connected to oil and transportation, they are bound to realize they can get a higher quality product cheaper if they get it locally.”

So here are my questions:

- Do you know anyone who remembers urban chickens during WWII?
- Do you know of anyone who is keeping chickens somewhere in Syracuse?
- Do you think it’s an idea whose time has come?

But the book that continues to inspire me is A Cook’s Tour, and specifically the chapter, “Where Food Comes From“. Read it, and you’ll understand why he says that where our food comes from is not always pretty. But it’s the larger concept behind that chapter that makes me think a lot and sometimes do strange things.

Strange thing #1: I make coffee in a 70-year-old vacuum coffee pot.

This little honey requires that I take 12 minutes every morning to heat the water, grind the beans bought from Cafe Kubal, pour the grinds into the top part of the pot, stir the grinds into the hot water once it’s risen to the top, time it for two minutes and thirty seconds, and remove it from the heat when that time is up. I pour some of the coffee for us and put the rest in an old glass thermos (metal containers make the coffee taste bad). What we get is some of the best-tasting coffee you can make at home. What it gives me is a reassuring ritual with which to start my day and some quiet, meditative time watching the magic of physics as the coffee magically gets sucked back down into the lower chamber.

I like buying from Matt Godard at the cafe because he has a close connection to where coffee beans come from. His latest offering is an Indian Narali bean, roasted dark, that is truly stunning. But it’s the fact that he can email the grower and get that bean behaving the way the grower wants it to behave in the cup that has me feeling somehow connected to the earth on the other side of the world. (More on this bean in a later posting.) Here’s a cup at the cafe:

Strange thing #2: I dry my clothes on the line.

Where do dry clothes come from? Some of us in Eastwood still dry most of our clothes on the line. There’s no shame in that here! In fact, many today might consider it a badge of coolness, an awareness of the grave danger our planet is in, and an attempt to do our part. Call it what you may, hanging clothes on the line is one of my favorite activities. It satisfies my Protestant work ethic while I’m thoroughly enjoying the outdoors. It’s not even hard work, like gardening. It’s just pleasant. Your neighbors say hello to you as they walk by. You might even have a conversation with someone and pick up on some of the latest gossip. Networking at its finest. I save a few bucks in energy costs, I get that righteous feeling that allows me to blog my attempts at minimizing my carbon footprint, and my clothes smell great! What’s not to like?

How about you, my neighbors near and far?

What strange things do you do?

Do you pick your own strawberries? Do you fill jugs from a local spring? Do you buy eggs directly from a local farm that you’ve visited? Maybe you make your own clothes? What do you do that reminds you and/or your kids where things come from?

1. Don’t plant more than four tomato plants for two people.
2. Put lime around the perimeter of the garden to keep the woodchuck from eating up all the lettuce three times.
3. Forget cabbage for such a small garden. It’s cheap and plentiful in the Regional Market. Instead, plant things you want super-fresh, like lettuce, specialty carrots, all those herbs, maybe some heirloom tomatoes this time, poblano peppers and sugar snap peas.

I figure the more we eat out of the garden, the less distance our food has to travel (fewer food miles) and the less it contributes to our carbon footprint. Now if I could only learn to love winter squashes, I’d build a second garden, grow them and then store them for winter enjoyment.

A fun video: The History of Gastronomy (turn on your speakers!)

The Real Cost of Globe-Trotting Food, from National Geographic’s The GreenGuide (added on Oct. 31).

Plastics are everywhere, and they’re getting into our bodies. And they’re forever. I’ve been reading some sobering science, much of which is neatly summed up in this article: Our oceans are turning into plastic…are we? It’s worth a thorough read. While we frantically scramble to get passports so we can go see our Canadian neighbors in an effort (justified) to keep terrorists out, it turns out that we have been committing a silent form of environmental terrorism on ourselves and our children. As the comic-strip character, Pogo, said many years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

One of many highlights in the above article refers to a compound called bisphenol A (BPA),

… which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.

Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

Dr. Joseph Mercola, in his article entitled Store Your Food In Glass Not Plastic, states that “… Even extremely low levels of the compound, called Bisphenol A (BPA), produced genetic abnormalities, according to researchers. BPA exhibits hormone-like properties and imitates the effects of naturally occurring estrogens.” It is thought that BPA may be contributing to the obesity epidemic in developed countries.

I’m convinced, given these and other articles (Glass baby bottles making comeback, Leftovers Again? Said the Refrigerator, Plastic Compounds and Birth Control Estrogen Cause Prostate Abnormalities in Mice, etc.). National Geographic’s The Green Guide puts it neatly: “Glass, ceramic and stoneware are the safest options when it comes to food packaging and storage because they do not leach any questionable chemicals when in contact with food. Unlike plastic recycling, which produces toxic chemicals, glass recycling is more environmentally friendly.”

Okay. So how to keep plastic from touching our food? Well, it’s a journey, not an overnight change. What I’m about to outline has taken me over a year to accomplish. Maybe it will give you some ideas, and if you have more ideas to share, please add a comment to the end of this blog!

First: a picture of the glass in our kitchen:

An explanation, left to right (more or less):

- Burr coffee grinder, not made of glass. But we know our coffee roaster personally, we can see the bags of green coffee beans in his cafe and we can watch him roast them if we want. We grind them every morning in the home grinder. They do fall into a plastic container but I dump them immediately into the coffee maker.

- Storage for bulk items, fancy jar and a recycled spaghetti sauce jar (left over from years ago – we make all our own now, and soon will be eating our very own tomatoes). It’s become almost impossible to find glass mayonnaise jars any more. So look for mayonnaise in your health food store where you’ll find organic mayonnaise in glass. Very few oils come in glass bottles any more, either. We buy them in big tins but I’m not so sure that’s good, either. Have to investigate further. It’s expensive in glass.

- Home-made cole slaw in an antique glass refrigerator container. This one happens to be Hazel Atlas “Crisscross”. You can find these containers in antique stores for $10-15. They chip easily but they look so cool. Anchor Hocking makes pretty good ones that don’t chip easily at all.

- Glass vacuum coffee pot. This is THE best way to make great-tasting coffee at home if you’re not into buying a $500 espresso machine. It takes a little effort and babysitting, but it’s so much fun to watch and the results are delicious. The pot is just about all glass, including the filter (that appendage sticking up inside the top section). No plastic or paper touches the coffee ever.

- Hot coffee that we don’t drink right away goes into the small glass 50′s-era Thermos. It works better than anything keeping hot things hot and cold things cold.

- I buy organic heavy cream that does come in a carton. I wish I could find it in glass. But at least I remove it from the carton as soon as I get it home and put it in a … cream bottle! I forgot to put glass milk and orange juice bottles in the picture. We get them from the Eastwood Byrne Dairy. (While we’re not happy with the way Byrne is allowing their Eastwood property to degrade, we’re very happy to buy their rBST-free milk in glass.)

- We have a filter at the tap and fill the glass pitcher at the beginning of the day, which we stick in the refrigerator. We often put sprigs of mint from our garden into the water. Once it’s cold, we pour it into the tall Thermos and refill the pitcher. The water stays ice cold for hours and hours in the Thermos, touching nothing but glass.

- I buy our spices in bulk in various local ethnic stores and put them in little glass jars I’ve saved from such things as capers and jelly jars. You can also just ask for glass containers on Freecycle.org . People have them and are happy to get rid of them! Natural peanut butter still comes in glass jars (be careful – check to see they haven’t gone over to the Dark Side!) and they’re great because the mouth is so wide. I keep every one of those.

- My mixing bowls are glass, so when I have large quantities to store I’ll use one of those with plastic wrap stretched across the top, not touching the food.

- We’re buying more and more food locally, so it’s never wrapped in plastic. I wish we had a meat market close by. I suppose the grocery stores are okay, as long as you buy from the butcher and not from the case. You could probably ask them to wrap the meat in paper. (Of course there’s nothing like shopping at Liehs and Steigerwald, the German butcher shop!) You have to buy a little more often because nothing keeps things fresh like plastic. So it’s good to live near where you shop.

- I like home-made mozarella and other cheeses and I like to buy them directly off the wheel or out of the tub. I go to Samir’s, a local Middle Eastern shop, to buy Greek cheeses and the best deal on Pecorino Romano anywhere. I should try more of their cheeses. The idea, of course, is to end up buying as much food as possible that’s produced within, say, Onondaga County. A local CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm, Grindstone Farm, has a great program. Going that route is probably the best way to get used to eating vegetables in their most appropriate seasons. I think I’d be forced to be a more creative cook if I had limitations on what was available. Summer and fall is easy. But just what do you do with a mess of potatoes, winter squashes, cabbages and turnips in the dead of winter? If you have a favorite recipe, please post it here!

Nobody says you have to suddenly stop eating everything you’re used to and start eating what’s left over from last fall (ugh! a turnip? an old cabbage?). Rather, begin to make choices based on the following:

If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.

It’s not that hard to find locally-produced eggs, cheese, meats and wines all year round. A great way to start. The Real Food Store has great big, colorful labels throughout the store indicating which products are locally made. We need to let our nearby supermarkets know that we support any effort on their part to help us find local products quickly and easily.

Another way to eat local, really local, is to grow your own vegetables. Last fall, I put together a small raised bed for this year’s veggies. I haven’t had a vegetable garden for over twenty years! We’ll see how it goes. It will at least pay for itself, and it’s bound to taste better than anything that has to travel in a vehicle to get to my kitchen. One day I’ll get really serious about eating all local food. For now, I’m just going to keep nosing around and trying to change out one item at a time as I learn just what the region produces.