Urban Foraging

The other day we were coming home from a movie night at the kids' school when I noticed a branch almost broken right off one of the service berry trees at the end of our street. We've been on the street for 9 years now and it was just last year when I finally decided to identify those trees. I was too late to harvest the berries - the birds got to them in just a few days once they were ripe - but I'll be ready for them this year! And since I now know the berries are edible, I also know that the wood can therefore be used for smoking.

My wife found this wonderful item at the annual spring yard sale at one of the churches up the road. It says "Edelstahl Rost Frei" on the blade so is probably a German unit that I would say is 30 to 50 years old, and looks like it could have just as much use left in it. The body is extremely well engineered cast aluminum, with a stainless steel blade, and a few plastic parts that given how long they've clearly already held up, my money is on them lasting a good time longer still.

We'd actually been looking at meat slicers but the only good ones seem to be hundreds of dollars. The lower end models have a lot of plastic on them and look fairly shoddy. I will give this a good cleaning and try it out soon on one of the ham roasts I'd brined up recently. I bet it would also work fantastically on my home made bacon! My wife says this is what she immediately thought of.

Another day, another free grill for the Urban Hippy! A reader here in Ottawa saw my call for free grills and answered it with this Centro unit with lots of stainless steel ... oooooo ... shiny! Thanks very much BTW! He said he bought it in 2006 but recently picked up a Big Green Egg and is not looking back - doesn't want to have anything to do with gas or propane any more! Not that I can blame him that's for sure. If anyone out there has a Big Green Egg to give away, just let me know :-)

I'm not exactly sure how I got this way because it was not ingrained into me as a kid, but I really have a difficult time wasting food. If the kids do not finish what is on their plates, 9 times out of 10 I will either finish it right away, or put it into the fridge for leftovers. The 10th time would be when they are sick, and I don't want to catch what they have. But even then sometimes it pains me so much to throw away good food that I'll cook it again to kill any germs in it, and eat it.

Here is a can of olives that I found this past winter while walking my son home from judo. It was neatly placed on the window sill of a local Vietnamese restaurant. The ends were bulging a bit at the time, but I figured that was just from the stuff inside expanding from being frozen. I know, I know, you should not eat canned goods that are bulged. But that is only a general rule of thumb for people who do not actually know why you should not eat them when they are bulged. I do know why, and I knew that if I took the can home and left it a few months, it would tell me whether or not it was still good to eat. It still looked fine today, so I put it on the pizza I made for supper.

I like to talk a lot about wants versus needs, and how for the sake of the planet we all have to be a little (OK, a lot) more careful about not wantonly giving into our consumer wants. Today on Earth Day I put my money where my mouth is - my gift to the planet was to "upgrade" my backyard grill to one that someone else was tossing in the garbage. While there is very little in this world that I find myself really wanting, you would not believe how badly the former consumer inside me burns with wanton desire when I see a shiny new stainless steel grill. Ooooo, soooo shiny. My precious! Sure, I could afford one. A nice one, too. But do I need it? Not in the least.

What I do actually need is more surface area on my grill. The one I have was the lowest-end, cheapest model I could find 8 years ago. And now that we have big Brew 'n' Q parties all summer long the last few years, I've found that I really need more real estate on that sucker. So I scoured kijiji and got a free one. It ain't pretty by a long shot, but it is actually a bit better looking than the one I have, and has almost twice as much real estate.