Kale Stalks and Collard Stalks...

...are the new carrot stick. I brought a ton of these home from work and have been snacking on them a lot this week. Excellent. Simple. Very healthy. Very overpriced at the grocery store (the whole leaf that is). Also planning on making some stir fry out of it. Other finds include: mushroom water (yes, i finally safely made it home with intact gourmet mushroom water), papaya peels and seeds, won bok outer leaves, and mint stalks. Planning on making a nice mushroom rice dish with the water, grinding up the peels and concocting a face mask out of them which I will try and freeze so that it will keep longer, drying out the seeds for later planting and use(dried papaya seeds grow just great btw), and stuffed wonbok? I've also been thinking that the next thing I want to do is to begin making vegetable prints using interesting transecting cuts of the veggies I bring home. Such great geometrical patterns in so many veggies. Onions, lettuce, Won Bok, pineapple peel, green onion roots, avocado peels, and coconut husks all come to mind. Also, I looked up the uses of strawberry leaves as a tea and medicinal, here are some of it's uses.

The Kohala Center and Thoughts About Hawaiian Ingenuity

In this week's Honolulu Weekly, there's an article about The Kohala Center on Big Island. It talks about how the community on Big Island began to meet and have a community conversation about what they wanted to improve and change in their community. From these discussions the idea came that by focusing on the island as an educational resource (wait, stop--the entire island--as an educational resource), the island could improve youth education, skilled employment at better pay for locals, and economic diversity. All this without becoming a tourist mecca or industrial wasteland. In it's geological rarity, locational uniqueness, geographic isolation, and in it's path towards sustainability and self sufficiency, Big Island is made for research modeling. The amazing part of this intuitive leap of thought is that, in order to continue to be an intellectual commodity, the island must continue to bushwack an interesting and promising path through all of its inherent challenges. Its value as a model is enhanced by the community's ability to create and manifest its own ideals in an ecologically wise way. I absolutely love this.

Furthermore, here's a gem of a quote for Garbage Craft from Matthews Hamabata, the director of The Kohala Center, as quoted from a Honolulu Weekly article entitled, "Kohala Nui--Education, environment, and empowerment on the Big Island": "Wouldn't it be great if we didn't see waste as waste but rather as an input for the agricultural system or our build environment? Outputs of one industry could be the inputs of another. We would maximize efficiency for greater energy and food self-reliance, capture dollars, and keep them on the island and create jobs."

I have thought a lot about this subject, especially lately, as I do this blog. One thing that I envision is to make regular calls to yellow pages buisnesses and investigate what their garbage is like, whether it's something they are willing to part with (or if there are legal barriers, protocol barriers, or govt regulations preventing this sort of thing for specific buisnesses), and what could be creatively done with such products. A next step i see would be to have several standard garbage craft projects figured out. A third step would be to begin interacting with the community on a volunteer basis.

Two ways I picture doing this are 1) in schools, as a recycling education program/craft class and 2) working with poor populations--for instance, temporary housing communities, poverty safety-net programs. In the latter I could do something like startup a workers co-opt in the same way a program like Food Not Bombs is organized. The workers would form a company, they would figure out the interests they had and the kind of crafts they wanted to make, and then they would investigate a cast-offs based supply chain for getting these items. If it needed more structure than this, it might be possible to mentor for a series of craft classes/brainstorming sessions where we worked with certain goods and tried to think of useful creative applications.

Just going to the yellow pages from A-the very beginning of D, I see, and can get creatively excited about the potential refuse of: abrasives companies, acousticals, airbrush, air conditioners, aircraft equipt/ground support/rebuilding, welding and metal works, tailoring, dry cleaners, animal hospitals, appliance repair, aquarium supply stores, artificial limbs/eyes, bishop museum, auto repair, auto detail, bakeries, baloons, bamboo products, barbers, barrels and drums, bars, bathroom remodelijng, beauty salon, bicycle repair, billiard equiptment, binderies, blinds, boat repair, boilers, bowling, breweries, bridal shop, building supply, butcher, buttons, cakes, caligraphers, car wash, carnival equiptment, carpet llayer, ceiling cleaning, cement, ceramics, chairs and tables, chemist, child care, china and glassware, cigar dealer, clock repair, cctv,clowns,painters, coffee, compost, computer parts, concrete blocks, contact lenses, roofing, tree service, propane, copiers, cosmetics, costumes, countertops, country clubs, cruiseships, curtains, cushions, crystals, cutlery, dairy...and so on. I mean, what could I do with: castoff sandpaper or wire bristle brushes, leftover paint, metal ducts, spent airfilters, dog hair, broken stoves, aquarium glass and so on? A lot I imagine.

Kids could think of tons of things I'm sure. It would be like their favorite art class ever. Adults might take hints from the kids, or they might be given categories to think about and elaborate on...like garbage gardening, scrap welding, tinker tin work, glass art/craft, weaving, box making, rug making, shed building, garden ornament building, furniture repair/overhaul/crafting, mosaic making, composting, sign painting, dying, computer tech work, carving, etc. This is what I'm interested in. Kudos to Matthews Hamabata and his Center, for being of a like mindset. I am inspired by what Hawaii has the potential to become.

The weekly sort...

So in order to make amends for not having posted for a little while, I brought home two bags of kitchen compost from my work, and sorted them all out last night. The kitchen was covered for a while from counter to counter. The draw amounted to: lime rinds, butternut squash peeling and seeds, thyme sticks, mint stalks, basil stalks, papaya peels, olive pits, date pits, six blueberries, a bunch of only slightly bruised cherry tomatoes, six or seven collard greens, tons of collard green stalks, tons of bok choy bases, yellow and red onion peels, banana peels, papaya seeds, onion chives, cilantro sticks, strawberry leafs, a couple of pieces of mushroom, shitake/mixed gourmet mushroom water, and some green onion roots. So I took the butternut squash peel and innards, separated them from the seeds, and boiled them in water for a while to soften things up. Then I put it all in the blender and made what I'm hoping will be a nice soup base. It has little chunks of peel still visible, because i chose not to fully puree it, and has a beautiful look to it. I also experimented with pureeing the mint and the papaya. I poured the mint puree over the papaya puree, and i am thinking that mixing these two with the squash will make a really excellent soup. The collard stalks are like, better than carrot sticks for munching on, they've become a favorite of a few people at work. I also was looking at some Ethiopian Gomen recipes earlier and thinking I might make some with the stalks. I took the Won Bok bases, which I had tons of, chopped them up into bite sized pieces and boiled them for a while last night too. I dunno, they would make a nice quiche base, or a great wonbok and parmesan patty. I was also thinking about using them as part of a casserole. I am going to try and plant some of the butternut squash seeds and papaya seeds. The papaya seeds I planted last time are growing like gangbusters! No such luck with the date seeds, alas. I saved the olive pits, so I may try growing with olive pits too. Some of these seeds take a very long time to germinate. I also love the papaya seeds as pepper spice, though i haven't tried them dry for this yet, only wet. The onion skins and banana peels went into the natural dye freezer bag. I saved the bases of the lettuce heads because I admired the pretty star pattern they made, and thought it would make a nice natural elements stamp project.

One thing to watch out for, I found out, is staying up too too late while making my garbage lab experiments. I ended up freezing two glass jars filled with squash soup mix. DOH! Thereby busting both the glasses. I rinsed off the brick hard contents though, so hopefully they are safe again now. The other giant calamity that arose, happened after I bagged up the mushroom water that we'd used at work to soak mushrooms to plump and hydrate them up for a gravy we do. There was a pinprick hole in the gallon bag I used, and drip drip drip, thirty minutes later everything in my bag was soaked--my camera, my cell phone, the title to my car, my journal, you name it and it was soaked. Terrible.

Next time I'll blog on strawberry leaves and their uses...

Thoughts on the Garbage Garden

My new plan is to harvest the plastic gallon jugs from work, cut them in half, cut holes in the bottom, and use them as sorely needed new planters for my garbage garden. I haven't thought of a way to recycle something to make plant labels, but I think I'll prowl around work and think of something for that too. I also told one of my co-workers, Tiff, to bring in her pots and I would give them plants for their garden from my seeds. One of the things I love about work, is everything has that Ohana feel. In Hawaii, there is a tradition of including many many people in your ohana, or family. The last roomate I had, a %100 Hawaiian woman, talked a lot about growing up with Calabash cousins--kids from the neighborhood that their family 'adopted' and fed and and entertained as one of their own. At work, from the very beginning, things have had a family 'kine' of feeling. My boss used to pick me up on her way to work every day when I lived down the road from her. When my feet used to hurt me a lot, she brought in an old pair of arch supports for me. When my co-workers got married and I mentioned wanting to find a box to paint for their wedding gift, she brought me an old wine box to use. She always feeds us at lunch, and we always tend to be willing to stay late in the evenings. We joke that she is our 'work mom'. It is with work that we celebrated the wedding of two of our co-workers, and with work that we celebrate thanksgiving. With work we celebrate the holiday season as well, and if we stay extrordinarily late, you can count on the boss taking you out for dinner, family style. I think a part of functioning in a frugal and environmentally concious world, has to do very much with our willingness to cooperate and see each other as family.
I found this Purdue University link on garbage gardening, with some helpful tips about how to sprout things a bit better. Up till now I've just been plunking things down in soil and watering, and hoping for the best. It's good to know some timeframes on the seeds, and to hear some advice on getting these seeds to sprout. Here's a book I found on the subject as well, and another website, that mentions the viability of planting mango and kiwi seeds, and one site that talks about how a landfill in the city of Austin, gives away free recycled glass to the people of Austin, who want to use it for landscaping. It works really well for planting desert plants like aloe and century plants. It also works well when used as a drainage bed beneath a garden plot, and as a liner for a so-called french drain. I think it's really cool that the landfill gives away recycleds to people, making an easier inroad to appropriate reuse. I wonder if Oahu landfill does any similar programs, and if not, how we could get one started.
On the subject of landfills, I also found this site that discusses how a landfill in Australia is run. Very intense sorting facility compared what Oahu has. I would love to see something like this here. I also found a link on a landfill in Israel, which they recently turned into a public park. It's nice to see innovative solutions like these.

A garbage stew by any other name...

So this week's stew was not as big of a hit as the other week. This week I used carrot heads, cabbage heads, a small amount of green onion roots, zucchini slices, zucchini stems and zucchini peels, and some cilantro roots, then added buckwheat and oregano and red pepper for seasoning. I stewed it overnight as before. The results? Sort of watery and much less savory. I think that the last batch was such a success because it used sesame oil and curry powder, and more onions, and flax meal. These additions really brought out the flavor of the buckwheat. The kumquats from last week were also a nice addition. I think that the next soup I make will have more of the original ingredients, and will also use some kind of citrus flavoring (probably lemon or lime juice).


It's interesting to think back on garbage craft through the ages. This is not a new concept at all. My Norwiegen immigrant grandmother had a 'scraps' drawer beneath her cutting board kitchen island, where she swept all kinds of scraps and later made them into stews. My mother grew up wearing dresses that her mother sewed for her out of flour sacks. It's also cool to look at the words other places and cultures put on things. Opala in Hawaii. Rubbish in England, etc. I found an interesting British blog today called "The Rubbish Diet" this woman's project is cutting down her waste to zero, by 'thinning' the weight of her bin little by little. What was really great to see at this site was an excellent new name for garbage goulash aka kitchen sink soup. The best yet. She calls it, Wizard Soup. That's absolutely savage!

So what else did I make this week? I had many many thick slices of zucchini left over from the spirooli noodles we make out of zucchini at work (did I mention I work at a raw vegan place?)...we use these spiroolied noodles to make an excellent raw pad thai. FYI- The spirooli gadget works by way of a sort of cleat or flower-frog like panel--a panel covered in spikes, which can be rotated and pushed on with a hand crank. On the other side of this cleat you lodge the vegetable you desire to be spiroolied. The other end of the vegetable gets cut into noodles as you crank on the handle and the vegetable is spun, cheese slicer style. through a narrow blade. So anyhoo, I saved the bases of the zucchini and am going to use them in a zucchini cheese casserole.

I also took most of the zucchini peels and blended them with some water, then froze it as soup base. Here is the before and after of that..

As for the garbage garden, it's coming along. I thought I'd post a few pics this week to show it off a bit. This week's new contributions were several cilantro roots, a couple of parsley roots, a slew of avocado seeds, and more green onion stubbies. The papaya seeds I set out to dry should also be just about ready this week for planting. Two things I need to make happen: I need more pots, and I need to make some labels for the plants, because some of the seeds I plant fail to grow anything, and then I forget what was what. Another thing I learned this week was: next time I should really freeze the papaya skins. I ended up throwing the whole gallon bag of them out because I'd planned on using them as a facial care product, but a week in a gallon bag, I figured it must have grown a few bacteria that would not be very healthy to put on my face. Freezing should fix this problem. I lost the lime rinds to the same cause. I didn't grate them in time, and didn't want to risk injesting their bacteria a week later, when I realized I still hadn't purchased a spice grater.

In the column towards the good this week though, I began a compost pile out on Juaquin's porch, where I was able to put the leftovers from this week's bag. I am going to try and get some worms for it very soon. I also was able to add some red onion skins to the dye ingredients bag I've got going in the freezer.

Central Kitchen DC

Anthony Bourdain's Travel Channel show, "No Reservations", took on DC Central Kitchen in an episode I saw yesterday on the Travel Channel's Bourdain marathon. Pretty interesting stuff. DC Central Kitchen is like an organized, instutional version of Food Not Bombs that started back in 1989 right after that year's Presidential Innauguration. Lots of leftover food. Lots of hungry mouths to feed. All it needs is some organization of the flow. So they formed Central Kitchen, harvested the leftovers from innaugurations, and then later from restaurants and kitchens around the city, took them back to the kitchen, and got homeless and poverty stricken members of society who were looking for some new career training, to cook dinner for the homeless and needy of DC. Their philosophy is that nothing should go to waste- no people, no food, and no resources should go to waste. Sounds good to me. I visited the Food Not Bombs website as well, with memories of a Berkeley kitchen at Fort Awesome--a neighborhood co-op house right next to Ashby BART. Fort Awesome hosted FNB about once a month, and the local chapter would collect leavings and giftings from the local farmers markets and local buisnesses, bike it over to our kitchen with a bike trailer, and cook up a fabulous vegetarian, peace loving meal in Ft. Awesome's giant pots and pans. They'dd then deliver it and serve it up over at People's Park--a park that people took back from corporations back in the '60's, that now serves a lot of the homeless population and activist groups in the area. Mmm good stuff. I was interested to see some of FNB's other slogan-based sentiments on their site. "Bake Goods not Bank Bailouts" and "Food not Lawns". Excellent.

Le Tour De Trash

So I wanted to hi-light this little tour. The Department of Environmental Services here in Hawaii is running a total of six tours over the course of this next year, and has designed the *FREE* tours to demonstrate how certain (for the most part large scale) buisnesses creatively manage their recycling. It also gives participants a tour of the waste water management plant(which sounds actually really cool, as opposed to boring--as in my memories of a 5th grade field trip boring--mostly because fyi, WWM here in Hawaii recycles sewage sludge into fertilizer pellets, aand uses some high tech video monitoring to keep close track of its sewage system status... wayy cool...and wayy important for the survival of this little island)

Island Shell (a local company that pulverizes used tire rubber and reuses it as compost and even--gasp--burns it for electricity),

Island Demo(which actually reuses a lot of building components, I assume for public projects, by onsite breakdown and later warehousing of useful materials),

Schnitzer Steel Hawaii (which smashes things haha! smash smash! it smashes fridges, it smashes cars, it smashes whateva you got, that's metal, and then sells? it back into the market for use...I'm a little bit blurry on what this means, but i gotta love that they smash stuff! :),

Automotive Equiptment Services (for the city of Honolulu, they recycle batteries and all kinds of car related stuff, but the cool thing I noted was that they also recycle the *water* used to wash the fleet of city vehicles...which probably amounts to quite a bit of liquid actually),

Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill (a controversy always surrounds the location and management of a landfill...here on Oahu that controversy has ended in the decision to move the landfill around every few years, so that no community is 'stuck' with it for too too long...right now it resides in Waimanalo...the cool things--to me--about this landfill is that they do methane recovery, and protect the ground from leaching garbage juice)

Pacific Biodiesel (which utilizes spent cooking oil, and makes it into biodiesel...we all have heard by now of biodiesel...what's cool about this here in Honolulu is that, unbeknownst to me, city AES vehicles use a B20 blend, which means 20% biodiesel--nice!)

and Hawaiian Earth Products (which recycles green waste into compost and mulch).

All of this is just awesome. Hawaii has a long way to go towards environmental sustainability, and we should be by now the forerunner of all US states in the category of eco-conscious practices--this includes recycling and careful management of our opala (the hawaiian word for refuse), this also includes the use of alternative energies, and finally the conscientious and careful diminishment of pollutants to our fragile environment.

This trash tour shows an enthusiasm at the state level for green friendly trash management. Excellent. What I wish I could see in this tour is a bit more of a user-friendly dimension. I wish DES was going to smaller buisnesses, running micro tours or recycling mixers, where small buisnesses could catch the creative recycling bug. I wish DES had incentive and grants programs that hilighted such buisnesses. I also wish that this tour had practical components like how to recycle your own company wide waste water, or how to grow a roof top garden...although, I think the visit to Hard Rock Cafe, for instance, which will show how they created a customer-friendly recycling sort..that's pretty good...and the visit to the drycleaners that recycles hangers, and the visit to Gyotaku Japanese Restaurant (which has a recycling program at work), these may prove to be excellent components of the tour. I dunno. I guess I'd like to check and see what Gyotaku is doing. As for the tour, I'm definitely checking it out. You should too. There's even a virtual tour online.

http://www.opala.org/solid_waste/Tour_de_Trash.htm