The rush of big heirlooms and romas were processed in August, most dried in the solar unit out on the front (southside) deck. Weather’s back up into the ’70s during the day after a couple of nights of high-30s and frost warnings, looks like the peppers and grape tomatoes survived to finish up before Halloween – more sun-dried tomaisins! I keep making them, they keep disappearing faster than they’re coming in. I’ve found they’re not just great on crackers (with fresh basil, red bell peppers and feta cheese) and pizza, but add lots of zing to pasta and rice dishes as well. Mostly, though, the kids eat them as late-night snacks by the handful, right out of the jar.

As soon as it’s too cold to garden any longer, I’ll be using some of the dry-dried tomato that I’ve turned into powder to make tomato, basil and rosemary fettucini. Fresh pasta is fun to make and freezes very well, great to pull out and cook up quick when unexpected guests drop by. For the leathery half-dried tomatoes I had to go looking for recipes beyond “the usual” diced and tossed into/onto stuff. Discovered Valley Sun, a California company that specializes in sun-dried tomatoes. The linked page offers some general ideas about adding dried tomatoes to just about any recipe for meat, poultry, seafood and vegetables.

Dried Tomato Pesto Fettucini

• 2 cups half-dried tomato quarters
• 1/2 cup slivered or sliced almonds
• 3/4 cup chopped fresh basil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• 1/2 cup Parmesan, Reggiano or Gruyere cheese
• 1 pound fresh rosemary-basil fettucini

Dice tomato quarters, toss in oil with basil and garlic. Saute slowly in a cast iron pan over medium heat until garlic is soft and basil is well wilted. Toast almonds over medium heat stirring constantly to keep them from burning. Remove from pan when slightly brown and set aside. Boil the pasta according to directions and drain. Return to pot over low heat, add tomato pesto mixture and the grated cheese, toss well. When this is all well heated, add the almonds and toss. Serve immediately, garnished with fresh basil and extra cheese.

Clams with Tihuana Pepper and Dried Tomato Broth

• 2 tins oil-packed clams (or oysters)
• 1 cup Chardonnay
• 1 cup clear vegetable broth
• 1/4 cup salted butter
• 1/2 cup diced half-dried tomatoes
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt
• 1 tbsp. crushed red pepper
• Lemon wedges

Bring wine and broth to a boil in a covered sauce pan, add butter, tomatoes, salt and red pepper. Reduce heat and add clams, cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Serve in bowls over a slab of toasted home made whole wheat tarragon bread with lemon wedges on the side, to be squeezed into the soup as desired.

Sun-Dried Tomato Appetizers

• 1 cup half-dried tomato quarters
• 1/4 cup basil herbed wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 2 tbsp. finely chopped fresh basil
• 2 tbsp. chopped fresh oregano
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt
• Dash of freshly milled black pepper

In a small sauce pan heat vinegar and water together over medium low heat until barely simmering. Remove from heat, add tomatoes and cover. Allow to stand for 1 hour. Mix fresh basil and oregano together with the pepper and minced garlic. When tomatoes have soaked for an hour, remove from marinade and place cut side up on a cookie sheet and brush with olive oil. Sprinkle the garlic, pepper and herbs onto the tomatoes and bake in a 200º oven for 4-6 hours until somewhat ‘dry’ to the touch. Cut in bite-size pieces (3 per quarter of an average roma), insert toothpicks and serve on a plate with crackers and Chevre goat cheese.

Sun-Dried Tomato Dip

• 1/2 cup half-dried tomatoes
• 4 ounces softened cream cheese
• 4 ounces soft Chevre goat cheese
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 3 cloves chopped garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil, or 2 tsp. dried basil
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh chives

Put all ingredients except fresh basil and chives into a blender and process until smooth. Mix in fresh basil and refrigerate until ready to serve. Sprinkle dried tomato powder on top, serve with dried crackers and fresh vegetables or French bread baguettes.

Hope these recipes for sun-dried tomatoes sound as delicious to you as they do to me, and I absolutely MUST remember to plant more basil next spring. Dried tomatoes are great additions to vegetable soups, chili and bean dishes, added to the cooking water for rice and just about anything else you might feed your family over the coming long winter. Dried tomatoes retain more of the original nutrients than canned tomatoes do, something to consider as cold and flu season hits. Dried tomatoes also make excellent straight from the bag or jar snacks when the family is gathered around the kitchen table to play cards or board games, though for this those little bitty grape tomato tomaisins are neater.

Now… out to the porch to see how the latest batch is coming along.

I am probably not the only American homesteader who has been watching with fascinated horror the events in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake on March 11, its subsequent tsunami on the nation’s northeastern coast, and the amazing nuclear disaster underway at the Fukushima-1 power station. We have heard reports of three reactors in various stages of meltdown, we watched horrified as reactor buildings exploded one by one, and we keep on hearing about unshielded (open to the atmosphere) spent fuel pools that are also in various stages of melting.

Radiation levels have been so high that plant workers attempting to prevent worst-case scenarios by spraying seawater onto the melting fuel had to be withdrawn for extended periods of time. We have been humbled by the selfless courage of workers willing to lose their lives to protect the nation from this awful mess. And this past weekend we have begun hearing about radioactive contamination of food crops and water at ever farther distances from the reactor reservation, even as we concurrently hear about the plume of nasty isotopes having made it across the Pacific to come ashore in California, the most important milk, fruit and vegetable producing region for the entire United States.

Thus it seems timely to offer some real information about radioactive isotopes that will continue to contaminate milk, meat, vegetables and fruit in northern Japan, and which may end up in our food supply too (but in much lower concentration). First, let me direct my readers to an excellent blog effort by a friend of mine who spent a long career in government [USDA] assessing various dangers to the food supply, including emergency planning for radiological accidents and how they can contaminate food.

Radioactive contamination of food: A primer for consumers by my friend, who goes by the internet pseudonym of “Deep Harm,” is the best place to start in gaining understanding of how to minimize your family’s exposure to radioisotopes in food, along with very good information about how all this works, what it means, and how to protect yourself.

To Deep Harm’s work I would add just a few details that should also be kept in mind whenever you hear that the plume is in your area, or has been in your area during the most important weeks of the growing cycle (like spring). First, it is NOT the external gamma dose given off by radioactive particles in the cloud/plume that are of primary concern. That will be so minimal on this side of the planet that it won’t add up to a single chest X-ray all told. The real danger comes from the isotopes themselves – atoms of matter in the air that you can’t even see. If these get into your body by breathing or being ingested with your food and water, they can do many times the biological damage right up close to your internal organs.

And for those of us who grow some of our own food, it is important to know that it’s not just these isotopes “falling out” of the cloud onto the ground and plants that needs to be considered. You could wash that off of many foods without too much trouble. A bigger problem is that when isotopes such as cesium, strontium and many others will, if they are in the soil, be uptaken by growing plants and incorporated into their very cells. Cesium is uptaken just like potassium, neither plants nor animal bodies (including yours) can tell the difference. Strontium is uptaken just like calcium, which will, if you ingest it, be greedily allocated to your bones. And this is known to cause leukemias and other cancers over time. The iodine that is such a threat to thyroid glands isn’t uptaken in high amounts due to its short half-life (8 days), but easily gets on the grass that is eaten by cows and from there into the milk.

Officials will of course be keeping careful track of the situation both in Japan and here in the U.S., but self-reliant homesteaders should also bear in mind that potential problems will tend to be downplayed drastically. Supposedly to prevent “panic,” though no nuclear power plant accident has ever actually caused people to run screaming down the streets as if they were being chased by Godzilla. In situations where radioactive fallout is present, what you don’t know CAN hurt you. Those who are in charge of knowing are too often unwilling to let you know everything you need to know. So bear that in mind as the weeks and months proceed, Fukushima’s nukes will be releasing steadily for the foreseeable future because they are not and cannot be contained.

As a perfect example of the kind of insufficient and occasionally downright misleading information that can come out of supposedly responsible ‘officials’, let me just deconstruct an article from the March 21 edition of the Mainichi (Japan) News:
No need to fear radioactive contamination of food, rain if proper steps taken: experts. This article is a short series of questions and answers, the most misleading of which I deal with below…

1. What happens if you eat food products that have been contaminated by radiation?

Expert Answer: Radioactive iodine has a tendency to collect in the thyroid, and ingesting massive amounts raises the risk of thyroid cancer. However, it has a half-life of eight days, which is relatively short.

Me – It doesn’t take “massive” amounts of iodine to cause thyroid problems or thyroid cancers, which tend to show up years down the road. The greater the dose, the sooner the problems appear, 3-5 years if you get a lot, 10-20 years for far lesser doses. The 8-day half-life means nothing in this equation except to assure you that what you have ingested is emitting its radiation quickly and steadily to your thyroid. Sure, it may be essentially gone in a two or three months because it has decayed, but the damage it did to sensitive internal tissues while it was decaying is already done.

2. What are the “provisional regulation levels” of radiation that spinach and raw milk were found to exceed?

Expert Answer: These levels refer to standards from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare based on [Japan's] Food Sanitation Act.

Me – Spinach, milk, canola and other leafy greens in a 150-mile distance from the stricken reactors have tested for iodine and cesium at above these standards and the Japanese government has acted to prevent those food products from getting into the marketplace. It is reasonable to presume that agricultural products from this entire region will be a total loss this year, and due to large amounts of longer-lived isotopes in the soil, may have to be abandoned as a ‘dead zone’ like that around Chernobyl for many years into the future.

3. Is it okay to keep eating such food products?

Expert Answer: According to former University of Tokushima professor Jun Sekizawa, much of the radioactive material found on spinach can be eliminated by washing and boiling it. As for milk, Sekizawa says, “drinking even the most contaminated [1,500 becquerels] several times is still less than one tenth of the radiation people are exposed to in the natural world. He adds that people will be fine if they do nit keep drinking the milk.

Me – This is nothing less than insidious. You cannot scrub green leafs enough to cleanse them of radioisotopes (root crops should be okay if they are harvested now). Nor does boiling affect radioisotopes in the least. Pasteurization of milk won’t get rid of iodine or strontium either. So it’s a complete lie that it can be boiled out of vegetables. Assuming that ‘officials’ are reporting truthfully about contamination levels – which has never been known to happen in the entire history of nuclear technology – telling people to boil is doing WORSE than nothing. The fair assumption should be that the ‘official’ story on radiation is short by at least a factor of ten. Proceed accordingly.

4. Is it safe to drink tap water?

Expert Answer: The maximum consumption limit per one liter of water is 300 becquerels for iodine and 200 becquerels for cesium. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says that while people should refrain from drinking water whose iodine and cesium levels exceed the regulation limit, it can safely be used for bathing and washing. The ministry also says that it is safe to drink the water if there are no other alternatives.

Me – I’d avoid drinking the water entirely when radiation levels are present. If I had no other choice (and many people still stuck in the prefecture don’t have a choice), I’d drink it to stay alive. Here in the U.S. levels are unlikely to reach anything close to federal limits, but I’d sure replace the charcoal and particulate filters on my water filtration system just to make sure. Iodine is captured very well by activated charcoal. Then I’d change them again when the all clear comes. I would seriously avoid showering or bathing in hot water, as the steam will bring contaminates right into your nasal passages and lungs. Only lukewarm or cool for washing, and definitely use an abrasive type soap such as Lava. Or use a loufa sponge. Throw it away after a few uses.

Whenever there is radioactive contamination present in the air, soil and water, people who spend time outdoors should definitely wash off thoroughly once indoors. Dry quickly and well, especially the face, and don’t re-use towels. Keep soiled laundry in enclosed containers. Don’t wear your outdoor shoes inside the house. Luckily, the Japanese are noted for fastidiousness in these areas, it will serve them well in this crisis.

5. What should we do when it rains?

Expert Answer: Stay out of the rain as much as possible, and whatever you do, don’t drink the rainwater.

Me – Always wear a brimmed rain hat to keep the rain out of your hair, and a rain coat to keep it off your skin. Keep this outer clothing away from the living areas of the house (like in a mud room) along with shoes and boots. And do that scrubbing wash thing whenever you’ve been exposed – the rain will contain far more contaminates than will be present on a nice day in the air.

Bottom line for those of us who don’t live in Japan, we are not going to be exposed to seriously dangerous levels of isotopes or gamma dose from the plume. Most of the very serious heavy metal fission products will fall out of the cloud over the ocean (or very close to Fukushima) well before they get here. But if we remember that it’s not the exterior gamma dose that will most harm us – but the isotopes falling out of the plume that might get inside us – we should be mostly okay.

Back in the days of atmospheric bomb testing the levels were very, very high. I can remember when word came down that we couldn’t make snow ice cream anymore, and always wondered how much of a nasty dose I got from eating it every year up until then. Yet another reminder that ‘officials’ aren’t going to tell the truth about the dangers if they can help it. Besides strontium and iodine, which were specifically cited back in 1963 as the reason for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, cesium that got into the food and water supplies was a big consideration.

Think about this, then – there is more cesium-137 in just one of the spent fuel pools at Fukushima than was released by all the nuclear weapons ever exploded since the beginning of the nuclear age. Sobering thought, but one that it might be valuable to hold when the real debate on shutting these nasty things down for good comes to a forum near you!

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

One of my favorite sources is the Organic Consumers Association [OCA], which is tireless in its efforts to follow and disseminate necessary news and useful resources for homesteaders like us. If you haven’t signed up yet for their newsletters, go on over to OCA and do so. You sure won’t be sorry!

In my newsletter this week I was again informed that OCA’s website has been under sustained hacker attack, operatives for the ‘usual suspect’ [Monsanto] notwithstanding. Somebody out there doesn’t want us to have the good information OCA delivers to us for free, and is actively attempting to thwart the effort. Show ‘em some love if you’ve got some love (or money) to spare!

One of the issues OCA is on top of that should be of serious concern to all of us who grow organic fruits and veggies or raise free-range chickens, grass-fed beef or offer organic dairy products is the Obama administration’s alliance with Monsanto in matters of developing policy. The new proposals for “food safety” have proven positively draconian for small value-added producers, many of whom are having their farms raided by gestapo-type goon squads and their equipment, animals and food products seized, and are facing astronomical legal bills all in the name of corporate agribiz profits and total control of the food supply. I mean, it’s not like these people care about toxic substances, unsustainable practices, mad cows or melamine in baby formula or anything. What they want to eliminate are your choices, access to markets, and ability to make a living by sustainably tending and preserving the land instead of raping it wholesale.

Knowledge can be our most effective weapon beside our commitments to the land, our families, our way of life and our hard work to make it work. If readers have more sources for keeping up, please offer them in the comments and I’ll check them out and report back.

As we prepare to replace the fence posts and fencing around the garden, I’ve been considering a fenced area on the other side of the garden, or perhaps on the upper terraces, for a chicken coop, a little barn-shed and a couple of milk goats. It would be a big step for us to go into livestock (that’s not dogs, cats or doves), but with the food shortages expanding and the prices rising fast, it might be something that makes good sense.

The folks we bought this place from some 15 years ago raised goats and horses, also kept bees. I’d love to get some bee boxes, know right where to station them at the edge of the woods facing the garden. But we’ve plenty of wild bees and other insect pollinators for the fruit and vegetables and wildflowers. I’d be doing it for the honey! Chickens will have to be well protected from foxes (we have a couple of fox families on the property, and we don’t plan to kill them). We used to keep chickens in the fenced back yard of a house in town when I was a kid, they aren’t difficult if they’re protected.

My experience with goats hasn’t been so encouraging. Got our first goat in Virginia from a friend. She was half alpine, half Nubian, the cutest critter God ever made! All legs and full of energy. By the time she’d grown up enough to breed (yes, they have to be bred regularly in order to give milk), she was convinced she was a dog. Who ever heard of milking a dog? She made an great pet, but we never had her bred.

Toggenburg goats give the most milk per capita. Had a friend in New Mexico who got one in payment for a debt, gave 2 gallons a day! Since he didn’t like goat milk that much, we told him we’d take all the excess. He’d deliver a gallon daily, and my kids went through it fast. It’s naturally homogenized (you have to mechanically separate the cream), more easily digestible than cow’s milk, tastes sweet and creamy, and makes some of the best cheese on the planet. My family loves cheese, and that is way more expensive than milk at the store. Worse, they don’t label cheese as to whether it comes from rBST treated cows, and unless you can afford organic, it probably is.

If we do get goats, I’ll be making cheese. And goat cheese isn’t difficult to make if you know what you’re doing. You don’t have to separate the cream for cheese, but a separator does allow you to make butter. Heat the milk in a double boiler to 80º. Be precise, get a good long digital thermometer. Because we are vegetarian I’ll be using a mushroom-based rennet alternative. Rennet is produced from cow stomach lining. Testing for pH is also recommended for making hard cheeses.

Cheese flavoring is introduced with the lactobacillus, which you can get from buttermilk or purchase online along with the rennet or rennet substitute. At home a gardener can flavor fresh cheese with fresh herbs, too. A good herbed chevre (goat cheese) can go for $50-$60 a pound, if you can find it. Here’s a simple recipe for chevre:

5 quarts goat milk
1/2 cup cultured buttermilk
2 tablespoons diluted rennet (or vegetable rennet)

Warm milk to 80 degrees. Stir in buttermilk and mix well. Let sit a few hours. Add rennet. Stir at least one minute. Let sit at room temperature for 8-12 hours. Curd is ready to drain when it looks like thick yogurt. There may be a thin layer of whey floating on the top.

Ladle curd into muslin bag and allow to drain for 6-8 hours, or until it’s the consistency you like. Freeze, unseasoned, in Ziplock bags, or add salt and herbs to taste and put in a wooden cheese mold. When set, remove from mold, bag and freeze.

Check out some of the recipes at GourmetSleuth or surf around for others. Find out if anyone in your area offers cheese making classes (extension service sometimes has lists). You don’t have to have your own goats to make cheese. Just hook up with a dairy!

Links:

Cheese Making, Milk, Dairy Home
GourmetSleuth: How To Make Cheese
CheeseSupply: Cheese Making Supplies
Cheese Making Ingredients