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.

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!

Garbage Soup!

Yesterday was a good day! I took home my first batch of work 'compost' today and began cooking. I missed the first 2 gallon bin dump (we have a little plastic 2 gallon bin that we put all our veggie cuttings in at work...it sits in the middle of our prep table and we empty it into the compost bags as it fills up), but I caught the second, so I went home with about 2 gallons of castoff veggies in my little sack. Worksite trash journal for today read something like: jicama peels, papaya peels and cut aways, papaya seeds, thyme stalks, green onions, basil stalks, mint reject sprigs, red cabbage reject leafs, zucchini spirooli leftovers...except that my take home batch was missing the jicama peels and some of the papaya, and the thyme stalks. So from this I made: a garbage goulash--kinda like a fish-head stew for vegans; green onion, red cabbage, onion, and zucchini omelet; mint tea; and a ziplock bag of precut stirfry. I also planted the papaya seeds and about six of the green onion roots. What I did first when I got home was I brought out several bowls and sorted the cut veggies into separate containers. So the green onions got their own bowl, the basil got it's own bowl, the mint as well, and the red cabbage and zucchini shared a bowl. I chopped the six green onion heads I wanted to replant and went out on the porch and potted them. Then I took the mint sprigs and poured water over them because Juaquin suggested we keep the mint enzymes alive by making sort of a sun tea out of them, only, 24 hours later, I think we decided it would be much better boiled, because the water didn't take up as much of the minty flavor as we would have liked. Then I made a ziplock bag of about half of the green onions, red cabbage, and zucchinis and put that in the fridge, and froze about half of the basil stems. I picked out the papaya sees I wanted and planted them outside as well, and put the papaya peels in the fridge for future brainstorming. Then I began the goulash. The goulash, or fishless fish head soup, I put together by tossing the remaining zucchini, basil stalks, green onion half-stalks (roots and all), red cabbage, and a collection of other leftovers from the cupboards and fridge that included: 4 tiny hawaiian style hot peppers, about a half cup of buckwheat groats, about a half cup of flax seed meal, some sesame oil (1 Tbsp), coriander, curry powder, red pepper seeds, and two kumquats. I poured water over it enough to submerge all the contents, and then set it on medium hi to boil. Once it boiled, I stirred it a little and reduced the heat to medium, and then, once most of the veggies had softened, to low. I let it simmer for about an hour and a half. Viola! Delicious garbage goulash! What really made it great was that yummy buckwheat flavor, and the presence of those lovely green onion roots, which looked just like baby squids with their little roots poking out of the goulash in sprays of white. I loved this so much I decided to see if anybody else out there makes a garbage goulash. I found this one, this one and these two. Here's a pic of someone's garbage soup on flickr:
I also found a link that called the plastic morass of oceanic human trash debree that floats near my stomping grounds here in the Hawaiian islands. Coincidentally, they label it a "garbage soup". Maybe if we reuse more of our refuse disgusting environmental tragedies like this one can be averted...or maybe we should go and souper-scoop the flotsam and recycle it in some interesting ways.
Here's a link to an article on the real, non-vegan, but fully thrifty and garbage concious fish head soup.

Mangos- The useful fruit.

So I've decided to start a daily trash journal at work. A list of the contents of our daily compost bin. I will then take the contents of this list and research and brainstorm about it's various uses. So I haven't started this yet, but in the meantime I want to blog about one of the frequent members of our compost pile: the mango. I always eye this sexy little fruit first of all, because we use excellent Tommy Atkins mangos here in Honolulu, Hawaii, and they smell--amazing--and they taste--amazing. As soon as they enter the bin, the smell intoxicates me. Beautiful aroma, beautiful orange colored fruits, syrupy sweet, perfectly tart, succulent fruit. It seems an absolute pity to waste even a tiny bit of this fruit. I think I could definitely scrape the mango stones and peels more finely, to produce at least a two person mango dessert of some kind-perhaps a mango lassi, vegan mango lassi , mango chutney
or raw mango soup of some kind. I've also been kicking around the web for ideas on what I could do with the rest of it, as I mourn the disposal of the mango peel and stone as well. Here are the suggestions I've discovered:
Mango peel, with a bit of the mango fruit still attached, makes an excellent face peel. Resplendent in Alpha Hydroxy Acid (AHA) , that many beauty companies tout as a quality ingredient in their goods, the mango fruit left on the peel can be smeared all over the face and left to dry, then peeled or washed off. Just make sure you aren't allergic to mango, by tasting a small amount. If it tickles your tongue, you may be allergic. Mangos contain some of the same compounds found in Poison Ivy, and some people will rash up in reaction to eating it, or coming in close contact with the peel. I feel the tickle on my tongue, but have tried it on small patches of my skin without rashing up. This week I will try the face peel and see how it does on me.
Mango peel is also used in Indian cuisine, to create interesting extra sweetness or tartness in a dish. This recipe from Scrumptious Street is for Thai Eggplant with Lime Chili Chutney and Mango Peels.
Here's another recipe using mango peel from Kate's Global Kitchen, for Corn-Husk Grilled Mango-Skinned Salmon.
Here's an article that mentions the use of mango peel to make a popular Indian soft-drink.
This is a more traditional style indian recipe for Mango Pickle (Karmbi Nonche) from Aayi's recipe's, which by the way, is a site that has lots of interesting indian mango recipes to explore.
I've also heard of a recipe for sauteed prawns and peppers which used the mango skin like one would use a stuffed pepper--as an attractive bowl for the dish.
Finally, a delicious sounding "Chocolate New Wave Mango Cake" from the star online.
From past tastings of my own, I'd have to say that mango peel is very bitter and much more astringent than the delicious mango fruit, yet taste aside, people in india and medical scientists all over the world say that the peel is in fact very nutritious
The Hindu, an online newspaper, says that mangoes might have positive benefits for diabetes heart conditions, and cancer. This may be because the compounds found in mangos (and most abundantly in mango skins) modulate receptor molecules called PPAR's, found in human tissue. PPAR's aid the control of cholesterol and glucose levels in the bloodstream, and are also related to some instances of cancer. Mango skin also contains quercitin, mangiferin, and norathyrion--all three are powerful anti-oxidants. Mango skin more than likely contains resveratrol, also found in the grapes which make red wine, resveratrol helps to lower cholesterol.
Mmm hmm.
So.. what else?
Well, this is an interesting link about some of the medicinal properties of various mango parts.
And, on this other site, I found it especially interesting to hear that ground up dried mango seed works to help stem bleeding and also, when ground into a powder and mixed with buttermilk, it helps with hemorrhoids.
There were four uses I found for the mango seeds we usually discard.


The first was as a medicine for bleeding and piles. The second was to grind the dried seed up into a flour that is commonly sold in India. The third was to expeller press the nut and to harvest the oil to make mango butter, which is healing to the skin, reduces wrinkles, protects from UV light, and has many other, mostly cosmetic uses. Finally, I found these awesome recipes from the Honolulu Star Bulletin on how to make Hawaiian-style mango seeds, and this recipe for mango rasam at ifood.tv
Some interesting things to try, ranging from easy to difficult. My other brainstorms include: carving the seed like some people carve peach pits, wood burning the dried seed and making a clamshell container out of it, drying and salting the peels and using them as containers, growing mangos from the seeds, using the seed as a bird feeder core by pasting birdseed and dough mix on the outside and hanging by a thread, or as a model boat (because it floats naturally), as a fishing bobber, xmas ornament, fish scaler, bolo style noise maker, wind chime, noise maker, an arch support, cementing several together using resin to make them into bedside table configurations or tv trays, using rope and bored holes, wood burnt reversible doll face, 2 candy bowls, door knocker, flute, organic raft (using some kind of organic binder to bind many together on water), acupressure foot path texturizer, bird beak sharpener, or perhaps a mango-scented firestarter.