Karen Hutchinson, Food Box Challenge Participant

Wednesday May 9 and Thursday May 10th:

Wednesday and Thursday meals both started off the same with oatmeal and the berry mixture.  From there again there was a combination of apples, cucumber, pita, eggs and mixed vegetables. 

On Wednesday I cooked the beans I bought.  That brings up an interesting discussion point on value, nutrition and cooking.  I happen to like chick peas or garbanzo beans as they are also known.   I like then plain, in mixed salads with cucumber, in soups and stews.  They also form the base of one of my favourite foods – hummus.

Beans are a great way to add protein to things if you like them, but they can be a hard sell to kids and also sometimes to adults.  We really need to do some recipe work to figure out how to make them more appealing.  Best of all, most beans or lentils can be grown in Ontario.

The next logical question is – dry beans versus canned beans.  The canned beans are dead simple and quick.  I know I ate my first round of the chick peas with just some canola oil and cider vinegar on them because I was hungry.  If I had limited food, I would probably look to the canned first.  But the dried are better value, higher yield and they don’t have all the preservation additives and/or salt.

To prepare the dried beans, you need to follow a two-step process of soaking and then cooking.  For soaking, you can soak overnight or boil for 2 minutes and let them stand in cooking water for an hour.  For cooking, you need to simmer them for 1 ½ to 2 hours.  It is not a quick meal if you are hungry and need to eat in a hurry.  But, you will yield 2 ½ to 3 times as many cooked beans as dried beans.  So for $1.29, I got 900 grams of dried beans or approximately 2250 grams of cooked beans – enough for my two can ration equivalent, two batches of humus and 2 sandwich bags full of beans for the freezer.  That is great value and a nutritious protein.

On Thursday, I made two types of hummus – regular and local.  I made regular humus for my family with chick peas, oil, tahini (sesame seed paste) and garlic.  For my local humus, I was missing two key ingredients – tahini and garlic.  I made a trip out to grocery stores to see if I could find some local nuts or nut butter with no luck.  I did learn from Soup Girl (Inglewood Farmers’ Market), who is also an expert in hummus and I work with, and that you can use any kind of nut butter in hummus.  The best I could do was some wild foraged walnuts that I had bought at a farmers’ market.  I figured I could trade those for something on my rations I wasn’t eating.  Then for garlic, soup girl suggested garlic mustard.  It is an invasive species that grows locally.  The hummus wasn’t bad, but I needed to find a better solution for the local butter.

As for garlic mustard, it performed really well and added garlic and mustard flavours to the humus by adding the leaves of the plants.  To learn more about garlic mustard, you can attend the first ever Garlic Mustard Festival in Belfountain on Sunday May 27, 2012.  Go to www.eatlocalcaledon.org for more details.

Finally Thursday night, my kids and I had pasta and the canned tomato sauce.  I had my regular pasta ration and the kids had spaghetti.  The sauce was not bad – it was thick and filling, although I don’t usually like food thickened with corn starch.  I was quicker than how I usually make my own sauce from scratch starting with tomatoes.  The on-going dilemma presents itself again – quick, cheap and easy versus fresh, tasty and healthier.  When you are hungry, it is harder to cook and think about food choices and creative recipes.  We need to deal with hungry and healthy issues first, but right behind are local food and food literacy.