Houston TX: Phil G and Brisket

We made it to Texas! We're currently at Curt's hometown friend Phil's apartment crashing on a couple awesome leather couches. After leaving New Orleans, we got an oil change (that's right-we've hit our 6,000 mile mark) and followed interstate 10 for 6 hours. Phil welcomed us to Houston by bringing us out to some awesome Texas BBQ at his favorite spot Rudy's BBQ! We got to meet his amazing girlfriend Polett and we all had a fun night laughing. We'll be leaving around 8 this morning to head over to Austin! We'll check back in with another update soon,until then : Stay Classy TVFTV followers!

New Orleans, LA - Mardi Gras!

After a quick breakdown van repair incident we made it to New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras! Apparently it's hard to miss as the entire city seems to party ALL day... for a month straight. After only 2 days we're not sure how they do it but we can honestly say that this is the biggest party we've ever seen and it's a ton of fun! Endless floats throw out unlimited amounts of beads and party favors, everyone is in a good mood and delicious smells of gumbo and jambalaya are all around you. Obviously it's not all fun and games, there's a lot of walking to do and having a map or charged phone is helpful (we found this out the hard way) and amidst all the partying its definitely a challenge to moderate your drinking and money spending. So far we've done good and it has been extra fun having Nick along with us. So glad we're making friends on our journey!

Milton FL: CWG- Sad to Say Goodbye

After 4 weeks of staying at Coldwater Gardens, we're really sad to be leaving. We've met AMAZING people, learned a TON, ate awesomely, and are leaving inspired by it all!

Sitting on Ashley's living roof.

Since the last non-food post, we've done a lot (because when are we not doing lots of stuff right?)

We helped with a long leaf pine forest restoration project that involved going around the soon-to-be guest camping area and planting over 100 tiny, grass-looking trees that will shoot up 6ft in the next year!  The long leaf pines are a native tree that have been heavily harvested for timber.  The project we took part in was only the tip of the iceberg as Coldwater Gardens will be receiving a grant to plant several THOUSAND more pines on their property this year.  Good luck volunteers!

Cob oven rebuilt!

We rebuilt the infamous cob oven that so many of you talked about on FB last post.  Due to our excessive partying and formal attire the first time around we neglected to realize we were pushing the oven past its structural limits and the back wall ended up becoming too heavy and eventually split from the foundation.  Ooops!  We had to tear it down and rebuild it wearing normal clothes but it ended up being a good learning lesson and we reshaped the exterior to resemble a tree stump.  It's too bad we won't be able to enjoy any pizza out of this oven (still isn't dry due to weather)but if it holds up we can try it out when we come back!

Juan Posing for the photo shoot of "Fort Juan" for dwell magazine

Wading Pool

Our projects this past week (aside from normal garden harvesting, seed planting, and chores) have included creating a wading pool in the garden, taking some photos for Dwell magazine, and constructing a new worm composting area.  We also got an informative maintenance demo from Preston which detailed all the working and serviceable parts of a chainsaw.  Kim took such good notes that they are being turned into a print-out for future volunteers/workers! 

New Worm Bin Frame

 Juan taught everyone how to weave dreamcatchers (aka dreamweaving) and we ended up with a pretty awesome collaborative effort that we can now hang in our van (we'll get a picture soon).  Curt completed his dehydrator training by successfully making a batch of beef jerky.  He is now a dehydrator master.  We capped our week off by taking an adventure out to Ashley's house for Sushi Saturday!  Kim made another awesome no-bake chocolate cake and everyone tried their hand at rolling sushi.  We also got to check out Ashley and Greg's AWESOME cob house.  It was very inspiring and a great evening all around.

Preston's Chiansaw Workshop

We're all packed up and about to head out.  We've got our travel plans for the next week locked down and it's going to be a trip.  We're taking Nick with us to New Orleans where we'll be celebrating Fat Tuesday (aka Mardi Gras) and staying with our first of 4 couchsurfing hosts.  Wednesday we'll be outside of Houston, Thursday in Austin, and Friday in Lubbock before finally reaching our next landing spot in Santa Fe, NM.  We'll try to make a post everyday as we whiz across the country.  Talk to you soon!

Hanging out at Fort Juan

Kim standing on the green roof at Ashley's handmade cob house!!! check out all the drums and the awesome glass bottle windows!

Sushi Saturday!

GOOD-BYE FLORIDA!!! THANKS FOR KEEPING US WARM THIS WINTER

Milton FL: CWG- The Food Edition

The volunteer basket after a day of harvest: eggs, shiitake,
kholrabi, and romanesca broccoli 

We've been eating really great food since we've been here at Coldwater Gardens and it has come to my attention (Kim here now speaking solo for the duration of this post) some people might want to hear about our culinary adventures. If you don't want to know about the adventures of food, just wait a couple days and we'll be back to our regular broadcasts!

As volunteers, we're able to pick veggies from the garden, eat a limited amount of eggs, and are supplemented by a weekly stipend and regularly stocked ingredients like oats, pasta, rice, flour, sugar, peanut butter, oil, herbs, coffee, etc. The stipend allows us to buy any other ingredients we might need to make our diet here as whole as possible.

I won't go into much detail with EVERYTHING we eat but there are a few "shining stars" and notable methods for some interesting things!

Granola: Oats (majority), shredded coconut, sesame seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds, walnuts, pecans, sliced almonds, vegetable oil, VT maple syrup, raisins or craisins (add after baking) - Bake all for between 5-15 minutes in an oven set to 400F.  It might take a few tries to get the proportions right according to your taste but you can make batches as big or as small as you'd like! While we were at Grandpa Chuck's house in Fort Pierce last month, I must have made 6 or more batches of this stuff so that we were stocked on the road.

**We've had back to back pancake Sundays. Last Sunday we had cornmeal pancakes and this past Sunday, Curt's favorite he insists (but he says everything is his favorite) Buttermilk Pancakes.**

Cornmeal Pancakes
Recipe slightly adapted from Ree Drummond's Pioneer Woman website
1 1/2 cup King Arthur all natural white whole wheat flour (it's a whole wheat flour that acts a lot like all purpose white flour! They've been getting it here at CWG and it's been working great for all of our recipes)
1 1/2 cup Yellow cornmeal
1/2 t salt
3 T baking powder
4 T sugar
2 1/4 cups whole milk (we got some awesome raw milk at the Pensacola Co-op!)
2 Large eggs (from the chickens here at CWG)
4 T butter, melted
Add any type of seed to the pan before cooking like poppy seeds or flax seeds or sunflower seeds. It will add a nice texture and more nutrients through the seeds!
VERMONT maple Syrup for serving (way bette than Wisconsin syrup, we learned this the hard way)

Buttermilk Pancakes
Recipe from my all time favorite cookbook, The New Laurel's Kitchen
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup wheat germ (or just more flour if you don't have any or mix in some cornmeal)
1 t baking soda
1 T brown sugar
1 t salt
2 eggs (from the chickens at CWG)
2 1/2 - 3 cups buttermilk (if you don't have buttermilk, use milk and put a T of lemon juice in it an let it sit for a little)
2 T oil

Buttermilk Pancakes

Vegetable and Chicken Stocks
Veggies: When you are around a lot of vegetables, you'll see that you come into the issue of not using the ENTIRE vegetable. In this case, most people will put things into a compost or even the trash bin.  Instead just grab a large freezer bag and fill it with the veggie scraps- carrot peelings, kale stocks, garlic paper and ends, onion paper and ends, broccoli stems, and so on and so forth. Once the bag gets full, empty it into a crock pot and fill the crock pot to the top with water. Cook on low for about 8-12 hours and then strain the leftover veggie scraps and bottle up your veggie stock. You can then use this stock and the nutrients and flavor you SAVED and add it to your rice or soups.
Chicken: If you decide to cook an entire chicken, save the bones and anything else you would throw away from the chicken (and make sure to try and use chickens that are humanely raised and fed organic grains and/or pasture raised like those of our friends back in vermont at Freshies Farm. They taste sooo much better and have less fat than the birds you'll get at a normal grocery store). Add the bones to the bag of veggies and cook them in the slow cooker for up to 48 hours or until the bones can mush between your fingers. You want to get to the bone marrow and all the nutrients that are in there! Drink a half a cup of that and you'll be powered up...or add it to your simmer dishes and rice again!!

Sprouts
There's an awesome section in The New Laurel's Kitchen about sprouting but it's pretty simple even if you don't read about it.

Just starting to sprout (day 3)

Preston put lentil sprouts in
his egg rolls!

We've been sprouting some Mung Bean Sprouts (which I could not find at the regular grocery store, but I could find them at the Co-op) but you can sprout alfalfa, lentils, etc in the same fashion. Let the beans soak overnight in a large ball jar with a fine mesh top. For the next 2-4 days, rinse the beans (that's where the fine mesh comes in handy) twice a day until you get your sprouts to the size that you want them. Note that 1/3 cup of mung bean sprouts will fill up to the brim and almost pop out of LARGE ball jar. Then use the sprouts on salads, in sandwiches, in stir fry's, or wherever.



Pesto
We've been making pesto with some fun ingredients. Generally, you can follow a standard guideline and interchange the ingredients. For the greens, instead of just Basil, we've been using Cilantro, Nettles (cooked of course so they won't sting you), Nasturtium Seeds (you can use the stems, leaves, and flowers of Nasturtiums), and even chickweed. For the nuts, we've been cracking a pile of pecans that were left behind by another WWOOFER, but you can use pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, etc.  Here's a recipe I came up with that you can use as a base, leave ingredients in or take them out depending on what you have lying around!

1 bunch Cilantro
1/4 cup Nasturtium Seeds
1/2 cup Pecans
4 cloves Garlic
1/4 cup Parmesan Cheese
3 T Siracha Hot Sauce (you know, the one with the rooster on it)
1/2 cup or more Olive Oil


Pesto is amazing in pasta, on pizza, as a rub when you make a pan seared fish or tofu on the stove (Curt actually used some of the pesto and pan seared some tilapia we had and it was AMAZING!)

Wraps
Instead of using flour tortillas or those big, gluten heavy wraps for tacos or sandwich wraps, we've been using collard leaves, brocolli leaves, cabbage leaves, kale leaves, or chard leaves. Collards work the best especially if you get perfectly round leaves on beautiful plants. At Coldwater Gardens they've got SO many Collard plants because they are using them to feed the chickens, so we've been able to have MANY healthy wraps. Curt says Collard leaves are his favorite haha.

If we had an oven, another thing I like to do is fill leaves with a cottage cheese, egg, rice, and sauteed veggie mixture (and sometimes ground meat) and wrap them up and bake them for about 20 minutes. You can pour regular spaghetti sauce over them or gravy or whatever! They look really fancy and it's a good way to sneak veggies in the meal.

Fry Night
We had a Friday Fry-Night and everyone really pulled together to give each other stomach aches! We filled two pots with oil and fried potatoes, onions, romanesca broccoli, the huge mushroom Ashley found during the week, okra, tofu, dough, oreos, snickers, tilapia, eggplant, and I'm sure I'm leaving something out. The cool thing was that we had 5 different batters: beer batter, root beer batter, potato flour gluten free batter, and 2 different tempura batters.

My favorite was the romanesca broccoli with one of the tempura batters. Curt's favorite was everything!
Tempura Batter
Dip the fry item in soy sauce and then batter with the following mixture:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup Nutritional Yeast
salt and pepper
Any fresh herbs you want to cut up and add like oregano, winter savory, etc.




EASY NO BAKE CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER MOUSSE PIE
When we arrived at Coldwater Gardens, it was Ryan's birthday and Ashley made an awesome carrot cake. Then a couple weeks later it was Aaron's birthday and Ashley made an awesome vegan chocolate cake. Then a week after that, it was Ashley's birthday so we HAD to make her a cake! Well, what do you do when you don't have an oven? Make a No Bake Pie (we had tried to make a chocolate cake in the crock pot but it was more like moist cakey brownie's that were just a little off, haha).

Graham Cracker Crumb Crust

1 pack of graham crackers crumbed with a food processor or just a plastic bag and rolling pin (should make about a cup and a half)

3 T butter

1 T sugar (optional) or 2 T honey (optional)

-Press into a 9 inch baking dish and put in the freezer to set up

Peanut Butter Mousse Filling

STEP 1:

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup heavy cream

-Melt together on the stove and then cool in the fridge while stirring occasionally

STEP 2:

2 Cups heavy cream whipped to stiff peaks

-Fold the whipped cream into the peanut butter in 3 segments

Note: make sure the melted peanut butter and cream cools enough so it doesn’t melt the whipped cream when they get folded together

Chocolate Filling

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup Dark Chocolate Chips

-Melt together on the stove

WHEN THE CHOCOLATE FILLING IS DONE ON THE STOVE, POUR HALF OF IT ONTO THE CRUST AND PUT IT IN THE FREEZER TO FIRM UP

ONCE FIRM, PUT HALF THE PEANUT BUTTER MOUSE FILLING ON TOP OF THE CHOCOLATE AND THEN PUT IN THE FREEZER TO FIRM UP

ONCE FIRM, REPEAT WITH ANOTHER CHOCOLATE LAYER, AND THEN AGAIN WITH THE PEANUT BUTTER MOUSE. THE SECOND PEANUT BUTTER MOUSE LAYER CAN BE PIPED ONTO IT TO MAKE IT LOOK FANCY.

ADD A FEW CHOCOLATE CHIPS AND DRIZZLE HONEY ON TOP!

That's it for our View From The Van food update post.  Let us know if you make any f these dishes and how they turn out and we'll talk to you soon!