waste not, want not: dates on food, food on plates 1

Food waste is a huge problem nowadays, all the way through the chain, from animals eating prime proteins to make weaker proteins and ruining rainforest/ prairie/ pampas etc  while they do it, to the overflowing bins emptied into smelly bin lorries going off to landfills that belch as much methane as the animals at the other end…(stern reminder: POSITIVE, OPTIMISTIC outlook please! adjusts headset and continues 😉 )

If you eat meat, you probably like it and don’t want to change that aspect of your diet, but do be aware there are plenty of reasons and recipes to be meatfree at least once a week! And you’re not a CARNIVORE, you’re an OMNIVORE (eat everything!) unless you’re a vampire (eek! run away!) so the rest of this post might still give you useful tips 😉

General waste: there is so much an average person can do to streamline their buying/ eating/ waste management, from loose to detailed planning of meals for the week, pantry inventory (sharpen a pencil or fire up your psion spread sheets, all welcome here!) home production of herbs, the wonderfoods known as sprouts, fruit and veg grown in containers or mixed in your borders, cottage style, and your own compost (which if you follow my instructions will NOT smell 😉

I grew up in a family where pantry inventory was taken for granted, it was a 20 minute round trip to the corner shop and an hour to the town centre and back, so keeping an eye on levels was automatic for my mother. The women on both sides of my family were good cooks and on my father’s side were in catering, so I took in a lot of information I now realise I am very lucky to have – which I am really pleased to share with you too 😉

WHICH BEST BEFORE DATES MATTER:

MEAT, FISH, AND ALL PRODUCTS CONTAINING THEM unless it has been smoked or salted or dehydrated. Basically if it has been preserved using a method an in-tune indigenous/First Nationer would use, it’ll be fine. Freezing is fine, if you are sure the meat has never gone above -7, you can go past the date, the flavour will just be a bit less, but make sure you are cooking it in a stew and boil it thoroughly. Last dead flesh advice! Apart from, avoid it, it’s the biggest risk for bringing food poisoning into your home, there’s a reason for kosher rules/halal etc, they’re about staying alive in a hot climate when eating high risk items…meat attracts flies and flies spread germs, I put my cat’s dish in the fridge between feeds in the summer and still get flies, a problem I’ve never had before, grrr, something about the evergreen forest out the kitchen window…

DAIRY AND EGGS

EGGS If you’re not sure, salt and water test: mix 2 tablespoons of salt in a pint of COLD water and gently place the egg in, the further it sinks, the better, if it FLOATS, discard it, it’s old and potentially growing salmonella, yuck…

CHEESE/YOGHURT/MILK smell test first: if milk smells sickly, it will make you sick, pour it down the outside drain/toilet and you’ll likely see curds (gag). If cheese or yoghurt have pink or green on them, eek! PINK will make you ill, chuck it now, preferably in a sealed nappy bag! BLUE/GREEN this should be a flow chart! is it stilton or gorgonzola? enjoy! (but far away from me, heave…) is it cheap cheddar? cut the white and blue off and use the rest in something TODAY where it is baked or boiled – eg macaroni cheese. Is it dark green/blue? Out now…

When food dates came in, people were expected to still know how to use their own senses to check for signs of danger. With compensation culture, the dates are being made shorter and shorter until some common sense is beginning to rebel at the mountain of waste made by people who don’t know any better and sling the lot.

Try not to use perfume or smoke before you cook or gather ingredients, smell is your best friend for fresh or chilled food – of it smells wrong, it probably is, eg if it smells of fish (but isn’t!) it has a particular bacteria whose name I forget, but you don’t want inside you, take my word for it, please!

Wash fresh fruit and veg slowly (it’s enjoyable, honest!) and you will spot bruised or infested areas – eg butterfly eggs on cabbage leaves, those grubs that like berries will float out upside down and you can put them all in the compost bin where they are your friends!

CANNED/ JARRED FOODS:

these are the ones where the dates are normally a nonsense….

Anything preserved in a pint of vinegar is going to keep 5 years, maybe 10. It may lose some texture or be less tasty, but it isn’t going to hurt you. Make stew/ broth/ casserole and enjoy the tang! It will make your stew keep on top of the stove without refrigeration for five days unless you live in a sauna.

Anything stored in vegetable oil is going to keep a long time, eg garlic, olives, ginger etc. Again, it may lose a little flavour or texture, so check it and adjust amounts, but it is unlikely to hurt you, but if it smells the least bit fishy, out, otherwise, in that stewpot 😉

Anything stored in brine (salty water) is going to be ok for ages past the date most companies give it, though it may go a bit soft. Sluice the beans/sweetcorn /whatever and then stand in cold water over night, drain and use in a boiled soup/stew.

Anything preserved in enough sugar is going to keep for 3 to 20 years.What is enough? Anything marked low sugar is NOT enough, unless it has vinegar or salt in it too, eg fruit compote might have raspberry vinegar in. Jam can keep for several years, if it has no mould, it’s fine. If homemade jam has mould on the top wafer, the waxed circle was put in upside down, the jars were not sterilised, or air got in. Mostly, you can scrape it out, pour the good jam into a bowl and test it by taste. You can now make wine from it 😉 or make an old fashioned steam pudding or make a fruit cake by the boiling method, or add the jam instead of sugar to a cake and bake it, make jammy tarts, porridge, dodgers…or a glaze for nut roast…lots of things as long as it involves heating the jam till it bubbles.

DRIED FOODS

Um, this may seem obvious, but I’ll say it, as a young friend genuinely didn’t know: sugar and salt cannot ‘go off’. Honey maybe just might after several years if there was a lot of comb left in, but dried sugar, kept dry, will last to feed the post apocalypse roaches. Salt can get wet and dry again and be ok, er particularly if is is sea salt 😉 Sugar and salt are the mainstays of food preservation without big equipment, eg de-hydrators, freezers, and the move to low sugar and low salt foods instead of portion control has made for some odd dilemmas and waste problems.

First Nations people around the world (including europeans!) found out very fast that coating things in honey kept them really well, and that sweet enough fruit pounded into bison or deer/elk etc with lard, made pemmican, a dried meat that kept for  a few months, saving the chore of daily hunting in hardscrabble springs.

Fruit/ herbal teas – if it looks and smells ok, it is!

Dried fruit will keep years beyond the bb4date, if it looks ok, it is ok. If it looks a bit dry (currants do this a lot)  soak the fruit in an appropriate fruit tea for 10minutes before cooking, eg apple rings, soak in raspberry tea and bake in a victoria sponge, oh, nom, currants/sultanas  in darjeeling/any brown/black tea or bilberry/elderberry, ever since I learnt to make Irish brack cake I do this anyway, fruit cakes and breads should be juicy not chewy…

Dried vegetables and de-hydrated vegetables (different processes) will keep a long way past the bb4 dates. Again, if it looks ok, it is ok. Beans and pulses are great proteins and therefore attract critturs, even more if they are organic, so keep them in plastic-ware or better yet jars or old biscuit tins. Plastic can be a problem in humid spaces or Edinburgh tenement flats (hiya Em! waves!!) If in any doubt, pour the rice/ wheat/ beans/ broth mix into a mixing bowl and stir. If anything looks nibbled, examine it and if necessary, sling it – mice droppings will give you nasty illnesses, so anything chewed needs to go out, and scrub your pantry and create better storage, set traps, get a cat etc 😉  Cats were revered in Egypt because they kept the granaries – the wealth of the Pharaohs – safe 🙂

Anything with enough ascorbic acid will keep a way past the date. Basically it’s vitamin C, but I just found out the name translates from Latin as no-scurvy…cool! Scurvy is vitamin deficiency that long distance sailors used to get if they didn’t take barrels of pickled limes with them – preserving saves lives, not just jams! 😉 Sorry, I used to be a professional jam maker and still get very annoyed when people dismiss jam as a luxury confection, not a lifesaving food that gave people the strength to farm in the hungry gap of maximum tilling and sowing, and minimum fresh and stored food available. But I digress 😉

Ascorbic acid is used loads in flours and food mixes, vacuum packed tortillas etc and it keeps them fresh and tends to see off the flour weevils – people still throw flour out a day over the date because it USED to get weevils…it can still, if it is organic/ super rustic, but it’s always worth checking. Open  the packet, and pour it through a sieve into a mixing bowl. It may have clumped with age, but if nothing’s wriggling, it’s ok! It may have lost its mojo, so add a bit of baking powder, half what the recipe calls for, and all will be well 😉

However if anything with flour in MAY have got wet or worse, been kept in a damp place, chuck it. It will have the wrong moulds in and you can get nasty fatigue conditions etc from it, so if the paper looks stained, out with it. Another digression – use anti-bax on your showerhead every couple of months for the same reason  http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/09September/Pages/Showerheadsandlungdisease.aspx

In the next installment I’ll explain good storage, good cleaning/ hygiene and give some handy use it up recipes 😉

Meanwhile a link back to the perfect anti-waste foods: sprouted alfalfa seeds are amazing, I place my excellent vitamin and mineral levels (the doctor was politely surprised 😉 ) on their shoulders, and anyone with fatigue issues who got this far, they are so EASY!!! better than salad and no chopping/messing, oh joy!

waste not, want not 1: sprouting seeds, growing potatoes

open and shut case

The last week has been a lot about this:

– which took a lot of stubborn persistence 😉  I don’t often completely miss it with my art, but after an hour’s filming (thanks Keith!) and more in Picasa editing, I watched my first rough cut and thought…oh dear! That’s so DUUUUULLLL 😦  and promptly edited out the first 4 minutes of 15…then another 3… and then muttered a lot, cos if you’ve edited out HALF the original content, it might (just a thought! duck!!) be worth re-thinking your concept…

I had a day off from it and instead explored quotes about diversity online – there are some really nice ones! Then I decided on my new handle and took another limp at it…and after a lot of swapping and turning things inside out, I feel much happier. It’s now a snappy 4 minutes, and gathers from some people I hadn’t even heard of before, always a joy!  Art making is as much about learning as telling, and that was the problem with the first version I think  😉

If you like it and think it would be useful in diversity awareness, feel free to share it from vimeo or this blog to Facebook etc. It has my watermark in it and credits, so I’m happy about it being used to broaden minds/open boxes.

A lovely quote that didn’t quite fit the brief is from Chief Seattle:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

Chief Seattle (1780-1866);
Leader Of The Suquamish And Duwamish Native American Tribes

and this by Goethe rocked my socks 😉

“Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832);
Philosopher, Scientist, Author

And if anyone is keeping track and wants to know where the waste not, want not post is, this is UPCYCLED! k?

I’m looking forward to sleeping more, then playing with brusho and resting the RSI from editing – think more, edit less!

Big Issue Knitathon: Knit Nottingham has fun ;)

So, much laughter, cake and coffee, all in a good cause 😉

Luckily it was a sunny day, if a tad chilly, but hardy Maria (she’s from Russia!) arrived early and stayed late (what a gem! Eleanor and I so enjoyed meeting her 😉 ) and kept me company outside the shop, to raise awareness of what we were doing. Lots of people noticed us and approved, some to the point of donating and one knitter asked for details to quickly knock off more squares to send in – by the sound of it her local group would be up for it too, so I think it was worth it! Of course the KN shop is not large, and as an agoraphobic I would never have made it through to 6pm inside, but Eleanor brought us coffees and the glow of virtue kept us warm 😉

Inside, there were shifts of knitters and sewers – 168 squares were made into strips of 12, another 100 or so squares are yet to come in, we raised £15 on the day, have sponsors of £250 plus to collect and one huge contribution has been sent direct by someone who hit her whole office up for three figures!

There was a lot of fun in this, at some point people started swapping stories of what tall tales they were told as children, Jemma was very amusing…her grandad was a right card by the sound of it, did you know haggises are only born to Scottish sheep? and they have two legs longer than the other to make it easier to climb hills?

I’d brought cake, mmm, sticky crystallized ginger and Eleanor had jaffa cakes to fuel us, and when I left about 6ish, they were still going strong 🙂

Thanks to everyone who helped in any way, I’ll keep you posted on final figures for squares and sponsor money! Anyone who wants to donate direct, here’s a link: http://www.bigissue.org.uk/donate or text  70070  with the message  DOUBO 1 £10

on making space

So there is the space we make in our heads, the time we clear in our schedules, and then…there is the space we need physically to be able to make the art…

They can all be demanding to organise, but as I have my flat to myself (hmmm, not sure Nonie agrees with that…) and have to pace to my fibromyalgia, but not to the phases of the moon and Andy’s bi-polar mood swings and the needs of the allotment garden any more…I have a lot more leeway than most people.

And STILL I struggle to keep a space for making, beyond the area kept for the sewing machine! And I almost always have to clear a space to take photographs or make brusho/ wet paint/ print papers… I suppose the flat is pretty small, but I do have a bad clutter habit since Andy died…apparently it’s a quite common symptom of bereavement, and developing fibro has NOT helped, as I dusted today, I found my 3 missing dusters, abandoned at various points as I either got tired or distracted 😉

I have lots of exciting possibilities in the pipeline at the moment, and one, which I’ve now turned down, gave me an idea for an animation, stop start and simple dissolves, before you get too excited 😉 It’s all great, but this would be a VERY GOOD TIME to get and STAY organised. So… for your delectation,

A TALE OF BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE!

DERRING DO AND PERILOUS ACTS OF COURAGE!!

VICTORY SNATCHED FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT!!!

I went into the studio…

  yesss….it was very bad… but not as bad as this photo, phew, as the red dressmakers dummy found a new home in June, the spare mattress has gone to the cellar and some of the rubble had been moved around so the storage heater could be lit. What storage heater?

also, can we have a round of applause for that wall space!!!

My homehelp really earned her money this week, this was the first time of her coming weekly, so she spent an hour moving, lifting and following increasingly rubbish instructions and then a quick hoover of the bedsit and kitchen, a lovely fluffed up bed for me to topple into and much basking in the glow of visible and inspiring changes!

There is an immense amount of clutter, sorry ART MATERIALS, in the boxes on the table to the left. What table? The table holding all the boxes up? Obviously?

That’s my big mid-arm quilter sewing machine under a dust cover at the back, and this space is now filled with the mystery object I need to make the animation, but the EMPTY TABLE did exist…for maybe 30 minutes 😉

These paintings were unwrapped and hung in the bedsit and hallways a while ago and various items had gone on the rack – the cat carrier, bin bags of quilt wadding… So having cleared the cat carrier to the big overhead shelf in the toilet which was being wasted, this could happen:

seven SEVEN seven boxes/bags of ‘tricky things’ I don’t know how to deal with (omg). What I DO know is that I don’t need anything in them for the next two months when my critical path is finishing two installations, making an animation and probably a commission. Staggers off to dark room, muttering incoherently 😉

So, any more? Well yes, a little something I prepared earlier: TA DAH!

The altar has been moved up onto the shelf, because when I moved the CDs and player across that shelf fitted to the millimetre! The purse you can see standing up was made by Peta Keigtley, of Common Threads, a treat to myself I keep on show for inspiration. I also made space for the velvet chair and put the cloth over where the clawed one has been frolicking, sigh…

Lest you now imagine all is perfection, here is my To Do pile:

There’s a sofa under the pile and someone will be sitting there tomorrow (mah jong night 😉 ) so I have to

move the button that got dragged out of place on the macquette/sample for ‘Torrent’

sew the knitted squares for the Knitathon into strips

sort the yarn into project boxes

find a place to stack the boxes

I have till 3… ;0

and then to the chiropractor… to put me back together again after my exertions!

A treat to remind me what all this is for: a close up of the Torrent macquette – fibre art is sooo pleasing 😉

whole or healing?

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”

– Robert Bly (found via the amazing CALM THINGS blog)

and when you’re lucky, it feels like this:

but on a bad day, this can help:

until things feel better...

choosing myself

SETH GODIN:

It’s a cultural instinct to wait to get picked. To seek out the permission and authority that comes from a publisher or talk show host or even a blogger saying, “I pick you.” Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you–that Prince Charming has chosen another house–then you can actually get to work.

If you’re hoping that the HR people you sent your resume to are about to pick you, it’s going to be a long wait. Once you understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound.

No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.

– I am currently talking to a project about exhibiting with/through them, and it has all come about because I was cheeky on Facebook, and put myself forward as a performance poet for an event and followed it up by asking for a chance to exhibit….

NO!!!

Actually it has come about because I have been in personal growth work for, um, yep, 25 years and counting and yes, I am still a work in progress (is that encouraging or not?  😉  ) and I can choose myself as a poet who is good enough to perform at a public event, who will offend very few (devout Grauniad fans beware!) and inspire many. I know my art work makes lots of people happy or intrigued or quizzical, not everyone, and it’s really not very attractive to people who like very safe, contained, conceptual work, clean hands, and abstruse, cerebral, conceptual theories. ( those are the kind of words they like too, just to show I can use them 🙂 ) The Making Art, Making Work course at Nottingham Contemporary has really helped me let go of trying to reach them. I think I had an awakening, that really I should just be me, then, everyone is happy, but particularly…ME!

Again, choosing myself, to be good enough – I can write one of those turgid, murky, ultimately meaningless exhibition proposals, OR I can write as me, an interesting mixture of intellectual and tactile, practical and approachable, using the odd colloquialism, but still being rigorously professional about the standard of the work. It’s an amazing feeling to realize I have become capable of affirming myself as an artist, without a vicious backlash of insecurity… let’s celebrate!!  And then I’ll move on to the next issue 😉