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

Papaya Skins

So what to do with those papaya skins?? I saw a site that mentioned a papaya vinegar recipe for skin and hair care, where you cover the papaya fruit over with apple cider vinegar and use it as a skin or hair rinse after it's soaked in the vinegar for a few days. I've also found several sites extolling the benefits of papaya for skin care. One recommendation that sounded simple was to use the skin the same way another site advised that we use the mango skin--apply the fruit to your face using the peel as applicator, and then wait until the fruit dries to remove it, making a nice facial peel mask. I think I will rub my face with the papaya peels, just as recommended by some with the mango skins. Then I will chuck it in the tub for a relaxing, skin nourishing bath. For future reference, I found that the juice from pineapple skins are also sometimes used for a nourishing skin mask. Turns out Papaya is antibacterial and acne-fighting. It is also wound healing and is used a lot in serious wound care to remove dead skin cells, as well as in the healing of smaller bruises. Papaya can also get rid of age spots and freckles, as it has whitening agents. It is often used in baby food and food enzyme pills because it helps with digestion and proper production of digestive.

My other thought is, natural dyes. This is something I have a burgeoning interest in. I think I will begin to experiment with things like papaya as natural dyes. I've researched some of this, and what natural dyes need in order to stick to clothing is a fixative of some sort. The household varieties of this are table salt, vinegar, or alum (which you can find in the pickling spice section of the grocery store spice rack), though one site I found also recommended aluminum salt as a good fixative, and as I was brainstorming on how to obtain an aluminum salt other than alum, it occured to me that deodorant might be a prime example of this. I switched my run-of-the-mill deodorant/anti-perspirant out for Tom's deodorant recently because I heard how the aluminum salt in it is bad for your glands and skin. Fortunately, instead of chucking the old deodorant sticks I saved them in the back of a drawer somewhere. I think a natural dye experiment would be a great use for them.

The procedure for making a fixative is to dissolve the fixative in water, then dunk the fabric you are going to dye in the mixture using a stick or wooden spoon, then raise the water to boiling, and let the fabric simmer for 20 minutes. Then remove the fabric, wring it out, and place it immediately in the dye bath. Dye baths can be made from natural sources by wrapping the organic substances in cheesecloth, covering it with water, boiling until the color really comes out into the water enough to seem useful, then remove the cheesecloth wrapped items and dunk the fabric in the dye for as long as it takes to really soak into your cloth. Line dry.

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.

Garbage Crafting

I'm creating this blog as a place to be creative and rethink refuse in a myriad of ways. I've always had a fascination with trash and it's reuse, and I especially notice this urge in the workplace. I've worked a lot of jobs in my lifetime..the short list is:
Lemonade Stand Juicer
Aquaculture Researcher
Office Manager
Computer Programmer
Stage Hand
Sound Engineer
TV Station Master Controller
Photo Archives Scanner
Barista
Nursing Home Nurse's Assistant
Student
1-hour photo developer
Student photographer
Post-Katrina Volunteer
Substitute Teacher
Teacher
Data Entry Specialist
Personal Assistant
Raw Vegan Chef
Puppeteer
Pizza Deliverer
Artist
Writer
Editor
Maid
Labor-Ready employee

During a few of these jobs I have found myself at times, bored, with time on my hands, staring at the trash bin, and creatively musing. I don't know that most people could relate to this, but my fascination has yielded all kinds of work-junk related craft projects, and dreams of future craft projects. I was thinking about this one day while mentally breaking down the visual contents of our compost bin at my current workplace (a raw vegan kitchen), and decided it would be a really cool and absolutely important subject in which to generate collective interest. So in this blog I will be taking a look at my work junk, and also I will be talking to other workers about their junk. One project I am going to try is the challenge of using all the trash we generate in a week at my work, and making sellable crafts/foods/folk remedies/dyes/etc out of it's contents and see how much I generate. I would love to create a work-junk crafts co-op of some sort, where we meet once a week and workshop and trade around all the junk we create at work. And this is where we begin today.