Have you ever looked at the ingredients on a bottle of imitation vanilla? Propylene Glycol, Caramel coloring, plus other words I cannot pronounce… Who wants that? Did you know you can make your own vanilla extract? It’s easy to make, tastes great, you know exactly what the ingredients are in it and it makes a great gift.

To make your own vanilla extract:

1. Get nine vanilla beans (you can use more if wanted). You can order these online (I like Penzeys Spices) or try your local health food store or grocery store.

2. With a sharp knife, simply cut the vanilla beans into 1-2 inch pieces

3. Add the chopped vanilla beans to a bottle of .750 liter bottle of Brandy. 

Easy! I let the brandy and vanilla beans sit for a few weeks in my cupboard. Several times a week, I turn the bottle upside down to stir the beans and brandy. You may see the vanilla seeds floating in the brandy. Do not discard the seeds or beans, they only add to the flavor. After a few weeks, your vanilla extract should be ready to use!

And, for a few lucky friends, I bottle up the vanilla extract in a decorative bottle for a nice homemade gift!

Your homemade vanilla extract will have a golden brown color due to the brandy and vanilla beans. So, if you’re making something like white frosting for a cake, you will want to use a clear vanilla extract so you do not alter the color of the frosting.

I’m also told you can use any grain alcohol like vodka or rum, but I’ve personally only used brandy.

Enjoy! Stay tuned for more ‘How-To’ blog posts! Any requests?

When I look back at Summer 2009, this is what I will remember:

Community Garden Plot Harvest

The supposedly organic mega-dairy just won’t play by the rules.  It’s hard for small dairies to compete when they’re not even competing on the same level playing ground.

Aurora is not playing nice. That’s why its a good idea to steer clear of Horizon milk.

The Whole Foods food fight continues this week, with Michael Pollan defending the grocery giant as an integral part of developing an alternative food system:

Because if health insurers can no longer pick and choose their clients, and throw sick people out, they will develop a much stronger interest in prevention, which is to say, in changing the way America feeds itself. When health insurers realize they will make thousands more in profits for every case of type II diabetes they can prevent, they will develop a strong interest in things like corn subsidies, local food systems, farmer’s markets, school lunch, public health campaigns about soda, etc. So Mackey is wrong on health care, but Whole Foods is often right about food, and their support for the farmers matters more to me than the political views of their founder.

Amanda from Pandagon on why Pollan is wrong:

I appreciated the Whole Foods boycott, because I think it was a symbolic reminder that eating food labeled “organic” isn’t some kind of health tonic that will negate your need for health care.  John Mackey’s opinion on the whole health care debate was only deemed important because Whole Foods is associated with healthiness, and therefore the whole thing was a way to strengthen the belief that the only reason we need universal health care is that “some people” are lazy and inattentive to their health.

…

Of course, Pollan supports health care reform—and actually makes good points about how health care reform could lead to food reform—but the problem with these sorts of things is that most people just remember that Pollan defended Whole Foods, and thus feel reassured that their beliefs that the non-organic-eating don’t deserve health care are sound.  Pollan’s more subtle message is going to get lost in the chest-puffing healthiness contests.

Meanwhile, Amy Muldoon points out the class warfare undertones of this dust up:

As obesity has become more of an issue in American life and politics, a growing awareness of the connection between race, class and health has emerged. However, the prevailing perspective from the media, politicians and corporate boneheads like Mackey is that the poor simply lack the discipline to improve their lives.

Over at Civil Eats, Whole Foods anti-worker practices are in the spot light.  The growing focus on Whole Foods hypocritical nature and black mark on their image is a bigger liability in the long run than the growing boycotts.

However, unlike out-and-out opponents of the legislation, Starbucks and Whole Foods have built labor friendly images by supporting fair-trade and offering better wages than some other chains, despite being aggressively anti-union. Now it appears the retailers are cashing in on that image to modify the EFCA and remain, as Mackey says, “100% union-free.”

The hypocrisy is not lost on Whole Foods’ employees – one states, people need “to know just how false their [Whole Foods’] ’socially responsible’ image is, especially with regards to their own workers.”

The future is coming.  No one know what it will look like, but if biochar is part of it, the world could be in for a delightful surprise - a closed loop that uses farm waste to replace chemical fertilizers and producing a input that takes carbon out of the air and keeps methane and nitrous oxide in the ground.

In the natural carbon cycle, plants absorb CO₂ as they grow. When they die and decompose, this returns to the atmosphere. If, however, they are subjected instead to pyrolysis—a process of controlled burning in a low-oxygen atmosphere—the result is charcoal, a substance that is mostly elemental carbon. Although life is, in essence, a complicated form of carbon chemistry, living creatures cannot process carbon in its elemental form. Charcoal, therefore, does not decay very fast. Bury it in the soil, and it will stay there. Some of the terra preta is thousands of years old.

Moreover, soil containing biochar releases less methane and less nitrous oxide than its untreated counterparts, probably because the charcoal acts as a catalyst for the destruction of these gases. Since both of these chemicals are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, this effect, too, should help combat global warming. And the process of making biochar also creates beneficial by-products. These include heat from the partial combustion, a gaseous mixture called syngas that can be burned as fuel, and a heavy oil.

Taking all these things together—the burial of the charcoal and the substitution for fossil fuels of the heat, gas and oil produced by its manufacture—Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University and Jim Amonette of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state suggest that a reduction of between one and two gigatonnes of carbon-emission a year might be achievable. That compares with current annual emissions of some 9.7 gigatonnes.

It is unclear which gives off more greenhouse gases - the creation and use of petroleum based fertilizers or biochar.  That will be the game changer.

This weekend, Oakland hosted the Eat Real Festival, and the organizers took the event in a much more accessible direction this year:

Several festival organizers were involved in last year’s Slow Food Nation in San Francisco, which included a victory garden, farmers’ market and a food hall that cost $65 to enter. They decided they wanted to make healthy, environmentally conscious food available to a large audience that could not or did not want to spend that kind of money.

Most items on sale at Eat Real were in the $1 to $5 range, and admission was free.

Kudos to them.  This is real (food) change we can believe in.

For your bacon listening pleasure, we bring you Vanilla Bacon. A spoof worthy of Weird Al.

The Agriculture Department has a $92 Billion budget.  This is how they spend our money.

I’m not normally one to blog about my lunch, but when it’s less than 10 minutes off the vine, you have to make an exception.

Tomato Salad

Two fresh tomatoes, sliced
drizzle of olive oil
dash of sea salt, black pepper, and dried oregano
thin slices fresh mozzarella
3-4 shakes balsamic vinegar

Enjoy!

Thanks to global warming, the San Joaquin Valley of California, one of the most prolific farm producers of our country, has been mired in 3 years of drought:

A three-year drought, combined with environmental restrictions on delta water deliveries to protect a native fish, have forced farmers on the valley’s west side to fallow more than a quarter-million acres and left thousands jobless.

Don’t kid yurself if you think they’re actually serious about fixing this problem.  They can’t even play nice enough to bring all the parties to the table at an emergency water summit next month:

Fishermen and environmentalists, who have sued state and federal water managers arguing the ecosystem needs more water to survive, were not invited to Wednesday’s private summit.

Very cool trial being done in Utah. Instead of building a $180 million facility to “treat” the sewage lagoons of Logan, UT, the state has awarded the town a half million dollar grant to attempt to turn the lagoons into algae farms.  The resulting algae can be used for bio-fuels, and the phosophorus can be sold to fertilizer producers.

Algae treatments of CAFO manure lagoons(pdf) have shown to be effective at significantly diminishing the paralizing noxious odors that are given off at an initial start up cost of $40-$60 per cow and runs at $6-$9 per cow per year.  If these systems could be turned around to not just amerloriate the putrid smell of manure lagoons, but also show to make money via the sale of bio-feuls and phosophorus, we could be looking at a serious win-win situation.

Yes, dairy farmers are still in crisis.  Yes, the USDA keeps buying up surplus milk to no avail.  No, a floor price for dairy has not been set.  That’s why this is such a big opportunity to get something done on the dairy crisis:

USDA established the Dairy Industry Advisory Committee in August 2009. The purpose of the Committee is to review the issues of farm milk price volatility and dairy farmer profitability and provide suggestions and ideas to the Secretary on how USDA can best address these issues to meet the dairy industry’s needs. USDA also seeks nominations of individuals to be considered for selection as Committee members.

Here is a hige chance to get small family dairy farmers and cooperatives inside the door to actually have a say.  Now we just need some folks to nominate.  Who would you recommend?

Nominations should be sent to Judith Lindsay , secretary to Brandon Willis, Deputy Administrator, Farm Programs, Farm Service Agency, USDA, 1400 Independence Avenue SW, Room 3612-S, Stop 0510, Washington, D.C. 20250-0510; Facsimile: (202) 720-4726; E-mail: judith.lindsay@wdc.usda.gov.

Big Dairy already announced the openings to their friends.  The question is whether we can get advocates for consumers and farmers on the board as well.

Advisory committee members will elect the chair and vice-chair, who will each serve a two-year term. As Deputy Administrator of the FSA Farm Programs, Brandon Willis will serve as the committee’s executive secretary.

I’ve always wanted a food dehydrator. Maybe it was those RonCo late night infomercials with the lady making fruit roll ups. Or maybe it was the bags of jerky my grandmother would occasionally send me in college. All I know is, it’s been a little dream of mine. So, when I went out to buy my first canner, and saw a $30 food dehydrator right next to it, I had to buy one. And, when my husband found one with two more trays for 5 bucks more, I knew he was on board, too.

Today is my first attempt at using it, and I’m starting with peppers, since my CSA sent about 10 of them last week and my tomatoes aren’t ripe enough for salsa yet. The first two trays are green peppers, the second two are annaheim, and the top is banana peppers from my garden (since I’ve already pickled 4 jars of them, why not try dried?).

How’s it going? I’ve just completed the banana peppers. They are ridiculously hot. I’m thinking dehydrating concentrates that sort of thing?

A huge debate has bubbled up in Boulder County, CO over whether farmers can plant GMO sugar beet seeds.  This will set an interesting precedent that could potentially be copied elsewhere in the country.  The good folks in Boulder seem to realize the importance, so they are putting off a decision until the issue can be studied in full and they can come up with a comprehensive ruling on GMO seeds.

While few people believed that the a Whole Foods boycott would hold, or that complete economic collapse of the company would follow.  While Mackey’s ill-received Wall Street Journal op-ed may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, it may well be the first crack in a damn that is doomed to fail.  Today that crack got a little bit wider.

CtW Investment Group — the investor arm for unions including the United Food and Commercial Workers — said Mackey damaged the upscale supermarket’s reputation when he published an Aug. 12 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal saying, among other things, that people “have no intrinsic right to health care.”

And then threw down the gauntlet:

“The board must act immediately to address the burgeoning crisis caused by Mr. Mackey’s undisciplined behavior,” the investor group told Whole Foods director John Elstrott in a letter this week. The group hinted it might wage a proxy battle next spring if the board is “unable or unwilling to hold management accountable.”

Can Whole Foods slow the coming flood?

Senator Edward Kennedy passed away early this morning.  It is hard to cover the breadth of issues that he was a leader on.  Obviously health care and universal coverage were incredibly important to him, as were immigration and civil rights. As was feeding the hungry:

He several times spearheaded legislation to raise the minimum wage and, in the early 1970s, wrote the law creating Meals on Wheels, which delivers meals to seniors. He was influential in reforming immigration laws and in expanding Head Start programs.