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

Frozen Sauce Bases: Zucchini Peel Sauce

Sauce bases have turned out to be a really great way to freeze and later make use of some of the random veggie parts I cross paths with when I take home a bag-o-veggie scraps from work. I recently made a spinach and daikon stew from some slightly wilted spinach I took home and pureed and froze as a future soup base. I added the mandolined daikon leftovers from work to this base and tweeked it a bit with the addition of feta and millet and minced ginger and garlic. Not bad. I actually really loved the mandolined daikon addition, which we use at Licious Dishes as the noodle part of our rawvioli's. In the soup it still reminded me of noodles, especially once it was cooked and softened up. Try it. I recommend.

Then tonight I made a cheese sauce out of the zucchini peels I blended up and froze last week. I added to this the pureed basil stalks and some leftover thyme, plus about three dollops of sour cream and a handful of feta cheese (yes, again with the feta). I also put some garlic, oregano, and salt and balsamic vinegar into the sauce. Turned out really yummy. Put the sauce on top of whole grain pasta and garnished with pine nuts. mmm. Healthy aaand delicious. I'm saving the leftovers to use as a cheesy garden dip.

So, challenged by how to put up food fast before it spoils, just based on whatever I 'harvest', I think next time I will have to explore culturing or pickling some veggies. Kimchee, miso, kraut, pickled fruit, here I come!

Zucchini Peels and Papaya Skins...

So I've brought home and 'processed' two bags from work since my last writing.
The contents of the two bags that I sorted out as being potentially useful were:
lettuce leftovers
papaya skins and seeds
apple seeds
onion roots
avocado peels
onion skins
lime rinds
lettuce heads
daikon slices
thyme
basil stalks
thyme stalks
carrot peels
banana peels

And here are the categories I sorted them into:
for use as a fabric dye
for medicinal/tea use
for use as a beauty concoction
future stew or sauce base
garbage garden participants
spice/seasoning rack

So I'm gradually amassing a large plastic bag full of onion skins and banana peels for a future dye project...and I'm collecting avocado peels for their use as a parasite cleansing medicinal tea...and I'm keeping the lime rinds until I get a grater and can grate them into a tiny jar and keep that for seasoning purposes (mm coconut milk curry)...the papaya skins are facial material, though I may grind them up soon and use them for a shampoo base...the carrot skins I blended up and use as a facial...the garbage garden will be made up of green onions, papayas, apple trees, and a lettuce head experiment (I'm gonna see if the lettuce heads will grow at all..kinda overly optimistic, I know)...I've already had great success with potting and growing the last batch of green onions, though the papayas from last time never sprouted....so this time I'm drying the seeds out on the porch before i plant them...this also makes them useful as peppercorn like seasoning, as in papaya seed dressing...mm.

Mexican and Michoacan ideas for Avocado Peels

Tonight I made a carrot face mask, baked zucchini chips, spinach soup base, avocado seeds to plant, avocado peels for parasite tea and facials...froze thyme, basil stalks, lime rinds

According to a site I found on Michoacan medicine, you can boil the peel of an avocado in 1⁄2 quart of water, and drink a cup daily before breakfast, for two weeks to get rid of intestinal parasites. I've heard that a lot of us have these wormies in our guts, even here in the 'first world' and walk around not knowing it. Vegetarians and meat eaters both. There are different opinions on the presence of these parasites and it's ok-ness for your health. There was a girl in my massage class that had gone to energy healing school. In one of her healing treatments she discovered that she had some parasites and was of the philosophy that getting rid of them would be really great. A friend of mine that practices the primal diet tells me that many practicers of the diet (which eschews the eating of daily portions of raw meat and milk) believe that parasites are indeed good for your body, up to a point of saturation. They believe this to be true because parasites should only eat dead tissue, and by doing so they help you to maintain better health. I dunno. I think I lean towards trying a parasite cleanse though. Worms in my gut are not a pretty idea, healthy or no. An added benefit of avocado peel tea is that it supposedly gets rid of menstral cramps. Also it is said that the peel of the avocado can help to alleviate headaches. Apply it like a headache plaster on both temples, holding in place with a handkerchief
tied around the head.

Another thing I discovered on this site is a medicinal use for avocado seeds, which you can soak in alcohol as a cure for rheumatism. To prepare the infusion, soak three seeds in 1⁄2 quart of alcohol; then add 1⁄2 quart more and let the mixture sit for one week. Then rub the affected part with the concoction and cover the area completely with a piece of flannel.

Here are some brainstorms I had about other things I could do with the avocado peels:
use as fertilizer
make candle boats
make regular miniature sailboats
use as a plant pot
make avocado wax (by boiling the peel?)
use as a face /elbow/knee scrub
sew together once dried, to make a textured bath mat
make it into a soup bowl by covering the inside with self-dry clay, or just by using while still fresh
chia island or organic kitchen sprout bowl
a turtle island for a pet turtle (that i don't have)
pumice soap
use the peel to texturize a box or a faux leather purse (could make the 'purse' out of cardboard)

and for the avocado seeds?
a bottle cork
a table cloth weight (when tied to a table cloth like a large heavy bead or sinker)
squeeze for oil