Posts in category: 100 mile diet

Gray has Full Tilt tattooed on his knuckles. It is appropriate for some of the activities we partake in including a recent round of apple cider pressing.

Gray, Noel, and the current WWOOFers Liz and Tanya gathered apples from our tree, loading up a couple of giant coolers. From there the apples went to a neighbor’s shop and into a janky old cider press. Our neighbor Kathryn started everything off with a quick wash down of the press.

The press is another neighbor’s (Ned) machine. He told that he bought it for $300 thirty years ago. According to a handy inflation calculator, that would be about $800 today. Oh, and it was used when he bought it, so who knows what it originally cost.

Ned oversaw the first few rounds of pressing, staying just long enough to collect a quart of raw cider.

Gray did most of the first pressings, and I took over after that. In the humidity and falling sun, the work was sweatier than it would be in the Fall when folks are pressing their storage apples. Along with all the grass clippings, twigs, bugs and leaves that ended up in the press, I’m sure we added a few drops of sweat during the work.

The way the press works is pretty basic. You load the hopper, a motor drives some metal plates together and crushes the apples into an open wooden bucket. The bucket is made up of spaced slats of wood. The full bucket is moved down to the press, which is cranked down onto the apples. The juice runs down into a small container at the end of the press.

From there the cider is filtered, the smashed up apples removed from the press and the process started over again.

I think we did about 25 gallons that night, finishing up after the light of the day had been and gone.

By then it was time to drink up some samples and head back home.

When I left Wilmington, I generated a new version of the 100 mile diet circle.  Gone is the vast expanse of salt water; in is a nice chunk of rural Virginia and a bit of country in South Carolina.  Many of the farms included in the old map are still in the new map.  After all, I did stay in the same state.

All that said, I have to admit that my local food habits hit a rut when I first moved.  I was eating peanut butter and canned crap for a good four week period before I realized that I was missing out on what the new circle held.  I started eating five mile salads and thirty mile meats.  Locally grown and milled flours, grits and rice made their way back onto the table.  I also found my way back into a box of Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

Through Eastern Carolina Organics, I also have access to produce from the entire state of North Carolina, from Valle Crucis to Ivanhoe, Edenton to Hurdle Mills and back to Bakersville.  Occasionally things get culled due to poor quality and I of course get my hands in the boxes just like back in Wilmington.  My scavenging eyes are returning and – without my staff discount from the coop – I am looking for ways to slim down the food budget.

Basically what I am getting at is that I am back in the food bubble.  I am also looking forward to producing more of my own food in the coming year.

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.

It has been almost twenty years since I intentionally killed anything besides a plant in order to eat it. Yesterday, as a matter of addressing the one-half of my 100 mile food radius that encompasses only ocean, I ventured to the beach to catch some fish. I have practically no ocean fishing experience to speak of having only fished in the lakes and streams of my native Western New York, eight hours drive from the nearest salt water.

I asked Noel to provide me with his knowledge, and we set out with borrowed fishing poles and a cast net. After a brief stop so that I could get a fishing license ($15, cash only which Noel had to spot me) we were off to the beach. We were lucky enough that a nice person gave us their already paid for parking pass as they were leaving. The pass was good for eight more hours, and Noel passed it along to someone else as we left a few hours later.

We had good luck with fishing as well. After getting the poles set up for live bait, we threw the cast net into the masses of mullet fish, bringing in dozens without really trying. After about thirty minutes of casting around, bluefish started biting and we caught six in a short amount of time. One ended up shaking itself off my hook, so we ended up bringing five home with us. Five was plenty for the day.

When we got home Noel showed me how to clean and scale the bluefish and gave me pointers on where the bones were and what to cut out. It was a quick and easy process, the fish being long dead and fairly stiff. The fish were frying in the pan mere hours after they were hauled out of the water.

Remove the head –

Clean out of the organs –

Remove the scales –

Wash the fish –

Ready to go –

The preparation was simple – flour, salt, pepper and a few eggs for the batter then simply frying the fish for several minutes on both sides. I never really liked fish when I was growing up, but I was basically forced to eat it since it was what was available. I did like this fish though more so since I had caught and cleaned it myself. It won’t be long before I go through the process again now that I know how it is done.

Breading –

Fry –

Enjoy –

After the meal was finished and everyone had gone home, I had some time to reflect on what had happened. To me there was no “well, it’s just a fish” moment. These creatures were just swimming around out there, living, when by chance they ate another fish that happened to have a hook in it. All that swimming around and living ended as they suffocated in a five gallon bucket, so that I and others could eat them. Those fishes sacrifice is important to me. If it breathes oxygen, then pause and thanks must be given when that life ends. I will feel the same with whatever it is that I kill, and I cannot diminish the fact that something gave up their existence so that I could continue mine.

I have made it of primary importance to know where my food comes from, but there is a great difference between buying a frozen and already processed chicken from Grassy Ridge and actually doing the killing and cleaning myself. But it is imperative that I get further into that process in order to understand it and also to proceed humanely and without waste, just as it should be. Thanks bluefish…