Holiday Shopping and Thanksgiving Dinner with Compost

So after Wednesday's trip to Michaels, where I bought three "Pounds of Love" (blanket yarn) with the giftcard because the cotton I wanted was priced higher than it is at the other stores, I did some other things and then cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Having written a short story in which a character serves something similar to my Rice a la Garbage to visitors, I did that. It doesn't seem to have made anyone sicker than we were already. Here is the recipe.

That's not the color I bought. Amazon is not showing a picture of the color I bought. The company call the color chestnut; it's not the color of chestnuts or of chestnut wood. Yarn shoppers now know which color I mean.

Equipment

1. A Dutch Oven type of cooking pot with a nice tight lid. Both sealing in the steam and sealing out the compost are crucial for this recipe. Don’t use the pretty, enameled kind of Dutch Oven for cooking directly in a frugal fire. Plain, heavy metal is good.

2. A secure container for a small cooking fire—either a barrel, or a pit in the ground, or a grill, that allows 6-8 inches (about 20cm) around and below the pot.

3. An average day’s supply of junk paper—junkmail, newspapers, manuscripts, wrappers, etc. About 50 pieces of paper will do. If you use canned vegetables or packaged rice, add the wrappers. One or two pieces of thin flimsy plastic (wrappers, photos, supermarket shopping bags) can help get the paper going in damp weather. Plastic that won't lie flat in a stack of papers burns poorly and releases toxic fumes, so it should be sent in for professional recycling.

4. Dry wood or charcoal: Rice can be cooked over a big fire, of course, but what I’m describing is a frugal little fire designed to get rid of trash and economize on fuel. By cleaning up what your hedge, shade trees, and fruit trees drop on the ground you should have a nice collection of dead wood in your shed. Trees shed lots of twigs and sticks, relatively few logs. For this recipe you don’t need to use up any logs. Take a scant handful of twigs and sticks, about a foot long and not more than an inch thick.

5. Contents of your Sun-Mar toilet, the drier the better. (Remember, you’re meant to put as much dry organic matter as possible—vegetable scraps, garden prunings and clippings, paper, peat—in the Sun-Mar to help soak up and dry out liquids. Even the sand or commercial litter that sticks to cat excrement won’t hurt anything in a Sun-Mar toilet, although it certainly would in an oldfashioned water-flush toilet..) Recognizable food scraps or excrement will dry out and burn slowly, making lots of foul smoke. Burn only well carbonized, peaty looking stuff that will char further and retain heat.

Ingredients

1. Meat, fish, beans, or those soy-wheat “vegetarian meat analogs” if you can eat them, are optional. For this recipe the important thing about any protein you add is that it needs to be fully precooked so that it warms up as the rice does. Grilling over a trash fire? Urgh. So use leftovers from the refrigerator if you have them, or use a can of your protein of choice.

2. Packet of quick-cooking rice. For cooking over a trash fire, Success Rice, Minute Rice, and Zatarain’s rice mixes are ideal. The company has been relatively proactive about glyphosate, so the rice is relatively safe, and the packets take just about as long to cook as an average day’s supply of burnable garbage takes to burn.

3. Water to cook the rice.

4. Vegetables, spices, and nuts are optional. If you like, or don’t hate, garlic and turmeric, they’re rich in trace minerals and good for blood pressure and immunity.

Mix & Match Variations

* Some Zatarain’s flavors are quite spicy (several with turmeric). You can extend meals, add fibre and protein, and also mellow the flavor by combining a packet of flavored rice with a packet of plain brown rice.

* All Zatarain’s flavors go well with canned chicken. If using fish, other canned meat, or “meat analogs,” test to find your favorites.

* All rice, with or without meat, goes well with any member of the Allium family. I like wild garlic in season. I live close enough to Georgia to have access to Vidalia onions in summer; they’re worth paying for.

* All rice, with or without meat, goes well with any kind of beans.

* Zatarain’s Jambalaya Rice goes well with a little extra water and okra, when you have a safe source of okra.

* Zatarain’s Yellow Rice goes well with green peas—fresh, canned, or frozen--when you have a safe source of peas.

* Zatarain’s Spanish Rice positively begs for tomatoes, when you can trust your source of tomatoes.

* Zatarain’s Long Grain & Wild Rice goes well with fish.

* Zatarain’s Mexican Rice with Pinto Beans is better with additional pinto beans, when you have a safe source of beans.

* Wild greens picked out of your garden or pesticide-free not-a-lawn are best, to my taste, when they’re nibbled raw, leaf by leaf until your body tells you you’ve had enough. Non-wild greens go very well with rice and any form of chicken or turkey, but they soak up glyphosate and other nasty residues; I've gone off them.

* Venison is special. Deer are one of those species that nature really seems to have intended us to eat; they will overpopulate, and the consequences of deer overpopulation are nasty. As deer populations are increasing, I'd rather see male deer on a grill than on someone's grille--or beside the road. However, some alarming diseases have been found in local deer. Others ate my share of the venison that was consumed at this Thanksgiving Dinner. After age 80 I plan to eat venison.

Method

1. Clear fully carbonized residues away from fireplace. Make sure the Dutch Oven has a solid support. If not using a grill rack, put a flat stone, brick, or log in the center of the fireplace and surround it with compost. Compost should not touch the Dutch Oven.

(Important: In Virginia a barrel fire is almost idiot-proof—scraps of paper will occasionally blow out of the barrel on the updraft, but 99% of the time they’ll burn out harmlessly even if they land in the woodpile, because nothing ever gets dry enough to blaze up the way wildfires do in California. Barrel fires are legal even during drought-related bans on outdoor fires, but even on the East Coast we need to have a few jugs of water around a fireplace. Someone should watch a fire as long as flames are visible. I once talked to an old lady who once saw a scrap of paper blow out of a barrel and ignite dry vegetation in the yard.)

2. Wash hands thoroughly, combine ingredients in the Dutch Oven, and set it in its place.

3. If cooking in a barrel, you almost have to use a modified tepee-type fire-lay. Arrange paper, twigs, and sticks in a circle (more or less) around the Dutch Oven, letting them stand up vertically to maximize draft. Ignite. Continue adding pieces of tinder as the first few blaze away. By the time the paper's used up the twigs should be, too, and the sticks should have burned down to ashy coals.

4. If the weather is right you may be able to hear the rice boiling in the Dutch Oven. If not, rice will cook anyway. Know your pot. When mine feels too hot to hold, the rice is hot enough to cook. Once the rice is hot, the tinder is burned up, and the wood is smoldering nicely, leave them alone for 20 to 25 minutes.

5. Carefully remove the pot from the fire. It may or may not still be too hot to hold. It will be dirty. Dust off ashes and wipe off soot before lifting the lid to check the rice. If weather conditions are right it will be perfectly cooked and ready to eat. In cold weather you may need to burn another handful of sticks and let the rice simmer for another 10 or 15 minutes.

Thanksgiving Day was sunny and warm, over 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon. A good time was had by all, apparently including Burr and Samantha, though they didn't contribute anything to the dinner.