PUBLICATION OF THE BETTER TIMES ALMANAC OF USEFUL INFORMATION, 5th EDITION

[Guest guest]

PUBLICATION OF THE BETTER TIMES ALMANAC OF USEFUL INFORMATION, 5th EDITION

forwarded, thanks to Robert Waldrop, president

Oklahoma Food Cooperative

Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House

 

We are happy to announce the publication of the 5th edition of the Better Times

Almanac of Useful Information, in both a print and an internet edition. The

internet edition can be accessed at http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm

.. This 32 page tabloid newspaper format publication is designed to help people

make better decisions in their kitchens, cooking healthy, tasty, and nutritious

meals from basic ingredients. It incorporates information about the importance

of growing at least some of your own food and buying from local producers. It

is a practical information tool kit. Reading it should be like having a long

visit with your grandmother and grandfather, or perhaps your great grandparents.

Yes, it has recipes. Redneck Eggs Benedict (and Redneck Eggs Florentine too),

chicken fried steak, cooked greens, how to make your own bread and biscuits, the

secrets of meatloaf and the theory of casseroles, and Dorothy's Never Fail Pie

Crust, among many which could be cited. I don't know who Dorothy was, I found

the recipe in a cookbook of Depression era recipes, but I always considered

myself a failure at pie crust until I tried this one, and it really works for

me.

 

To receive a free printed copy of the 5th Edition of the Better Times Almanac,

please send a stamped, self-addressed 9 " x 12 " envelope with $1.06 postage on it

to: Better Times, 1524 NW 21st, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73106. There is no

charge for the publication, we are happy to send them out for free. If you would

like multiple copies, contact me at rmwj . Donations are accepted,

however, to help keep the publication in print -- we printed 4000 copies but

they will go fast, checks should be made payable to " Catholic Worker House " .

Donations of $15 or more will also receive a copy of my CD, Venite Adoremus,

which has improvisational piano meditations on Christmas melodies, which I

recorded live at Epiphany Church.

 

Robert Waldrop

Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House

Oklahoma Food Cooperative

 

 

THANKSGIVING " SLOW AND OKLAHOMA FOOD " REFLECTIONS

http://www.oklahomafood.org/bobsblog/

 

We've had a day of cooking, eating, visiting with folks, and writing. The

morning was a bit brisk, it was cold and the wind was blowing, but as the day

went on the temperature warmed up considerably and the wind went down. Lots of

leaves still on the trees, my cayenne, jalapeno, and habanero peppers are

putting on new fruit. Not bad for November 25th. The local joke is that one of

the consequences of global climate change will be that Oklahoma will get a

decent climate. We're grateful for many things on this feast day, but high on

the list is the publication of the 5th print edition of the Better Times

(Occasional) Almanac of Useful Information, 32 tabloid pages in its print

incarnation. It is also available on the internet at

http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm .

This fifth edition comes into a world that is troubled and in trouble. Global

climate changes, environmental devastation, and waves of violence and

destruction are sweeping across the earth. The captains and the kings are

marching and shouting, people are dying and there doesn't seem to be much

prospect of this changing any time soon. Indeed, the velocity and magnitude of

the problems seems to be increasing. Into this world situation comes the specter

of sharply increasing energy prices, and the certainty of even more extreme

price increases on the horizon. Energy prices are being driven by an

" irresistible object " (insatiable demand for ever more fossil fuel energy) "

running smack dab up against an " immovable object " (the limits - dictated by the

geological facts under the ground and our technology - of fossil fuel

production). Everyone in China wants a car now, in fact, they want two cars and

a garage to put them in.

 

Meanwhile, world oil production appears to be nearing its all-time production

peak, after which it is all downhill, with things going from bad to worse for

energy production, and then they will get even worse. North American natural gas

is already in decline, and that decline rate appears to be accelerating. All

this is the beginning of sorrows, so nobody should be thinking about bidness as

usual, but unfortunately that is pretty much where most people are at.

 

Every calorie of food in a supermarket incorporates many calories of fossil fuel

in its manufacture and distribution. Food production in the " developed world " is

entirely dependent upon high inputs of fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and

toxic herbicides and pesticides. Soil fertility is declining, agriculture

diversity is being eradicated, thousands of heirloom varieties of food crops and

heritage breeds of poultry and livestock have gone extinct. The food industry is

increasingly consolidated. A supermarket may look like a competitive

marketplace, but in reality most of those brands are owned by five corporations.

 

If people are ready to do something practical about this situation, the Better

Times Almanac is for them. It is a tool kit that people can use to learn how to

live better with less - less stuff, less energy, less money, less aggravation,

less trouble, less hassle. It has ideas on how to do more with less - more

wisdom, more beauty, more fun, more satisfaction, more resilience, more

security, and more sustainability, with less energy use, less money, less

pollution, less impact. It is for people who are ready to accept personal

responsibility for their lives, and who understand that they must literally be

the change they want to see in the world. We got into this situation one bad

decision at a time, and we will get out of it the same way - one good decision

at a time. If we can't make the best decisions, we can at least begin making

better decisions, and failing that, we must make good decisions. We should stop,

or limit, the damage we do to the earth's biosphere and our human communities

when we make stupid, imprudent, intemperate, gluttonous, and greedy decisions.

 

One of the tragedies of this time is that there has been an almost complete

breakdown in the cultural transmission of important knowledge, sciences, and

arts between generations. My grandparents, William Glen and Dovie Irene Waldrop,

and John and Opal Marie Cassidy, lived on self-sufficient homesteads on the

southwestern Oklahoma prairie along the Red River and lived much of their lives

as farmers who grew and preserved a substantial amount of the food their

families ate. They worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, and my grandmothers

were among the best cooks that Tillman County ever produced. My grandfather

Waldrop was an artisan of curing hams and making sausage. We still have the

wagon bows from the wagon that brought my great grandfather Waldrop and his wife

Mollie and family from Sherman, Texas to Tillman County, Oklahoma territory, but

we have lost much of the knowledge they and their daughters and sons possessed.

He lived in a mostly solar economy, and so did my grandparents up until rural

electrification. My grandmother used to say that one of the regrets of her life

was that her mother had died before they got electricity, and thus " she never

lived to see how easy it was to keep house with electricity. "

 

Thus it is important for people to work together to preserve this kind of " solar

economy " information and learn how to incorporate it into our lives again. As we

walk this journey, we must learn the value of the slow, the traditional, the

small, the particular, the locality, the sense of place that used to be a fact

of daily life. We must understand that there are limits and boundaries, and we

should respect them. These ideas are so alien now they seem almost exotic.

 

It is of course all well and good to climb up on a watchtower and shout, " Lo the

dust of the war chariots of the enemy riseth above the foothills " , or to put on

your John the Baptist hat and cry repentance, but it is another thing to

actually put these high sounding ideals into practice. Thus the regular editions

of this Better Times Almanac of Useful Information, each one building upon the

previous work, growing organically in response to the signs of these times.

 

If things are going to change for the better, it will only happen because people

decide to literally be the change they want to see in the world. And conversely,

if things don't change for the better, if things continue to go from bad to

worse, it will be because too many people did NOT decide to be the change they

want to see in the world. The place for me to start is with the man I see each

morning in the mirror. It is said that the world would be a better place if we

would all try to be what we want the other fellow to be.

 

It is as simple as that. Each person is responsible for his or her individual

response to the world situation, we are all part of the problem, and we are thus

all part of the solution. There is nobody that anyone can blame for not doing

their part in the way they lives their lives.. There are many things that many

people can do to make a positive difference in the world, and procrastination is

the deadly enemy of the loving care and responsible stewardship of Creation. We

can do, as the masthead of Better Times proclaims, what we can, with what we

have, where we are. And so we should do it.

 

>From the beginning, if we are talking about ways and manners of living, I have

felt that the place to start is in the kitchen. Food First! It is one area where

we have a lot of control, and it is a place where changes can be made without

spending big piles of extra money. In fact, we can spend less money and have

more quality and do less damage to the planet by learning how to be Better Times

cooks from the pages of the 5th edition of this Almanac. Food provides instant

rewards. Eating is an agricultural act, eating is a moral act, eating is a

cultural act. Decisions we make in our kitchens have enormous consequences, for

good or for evil. One of the things we need to work for is a world where it is

easier to be good. We hope the Better Times Almanac of Useful Information makes

it easier for people to make good, better, and best decisions.

 

If we want a local food system, where farmers use sustainable, organic

production methods, where herds and flocks are free-ranging and naturally

managed, where land and resources are conserved and constantly renewed by

natural processes, then there must be a market for the products of such a

system.

 

If there is going to be a market for such products, then those of us who are

customers must generally change the way we do our food.

 

We must stop looking for frozen, prepared, manufactured foods and instead

purchase basic ingredients (or grow our own) from which we prepare our meals,

always looking for products grown here in this region.. It is not as hard to

make this transition as it seems at first, and it really is true that there are

instant rewards in terms of both the authentic tastes and nutritional value of

true food. The Better Times Almanac of Useful Information is designed to help

you to stop being a passive consumer of manufactured junk foods and to start

becoming a " co-producer " in a local food system where your grocery dollars

support local farmers and local economies instead of feeding the appetites of

transnational agribidness corporations and driving the destruction of our soils,

biological diversity, and rural economies. In this situation, there is no rich

or poor, or middle class in between. Everyone has a place at this table, there

certainly is plenty good room.

 

A holiday, by definition, is a break with the ordinary routine of life and in

most cultures is connected with feasting and celebration, so I would like to

write a bit about the preparation of our Thanksgiving feast. As with much in our

lives, there is good and bad co-mingled. The world is such that making the best

decisions can be difficult, in some situations impossible. But we shouldn't let

the difficulty of some decisions stop us from making other best decisions which

are so easy they are practically no-brainers. That's why I talk about these

kinds of food preparation happenings, first so that I can reflect on how I can

do better next time, and second so that others can learn from our experiences,

both the mistakes and the successes.

 

We like to cook and eat all day on Thanksgiving, ending up in late afternoon

with the main feast. We started our day with strong coffee, free trade and

organic certified, from PrimaCafé bought through the cooperative. That's one of

those small decisions we all make every morning. Should I support greedy

international coffee corporations that are destroying long established local

traditions of coffee cultivation in favor of plantation cropping featuring high

inputs of fossil fuels, and toxic herbicides and pesticides or should I buy

coffee that pays the grower a just return for his product and is grown using

traditional, organic production methods? The cheapness of the supermarket coffee

reflects my willingness to take advantage of that corporation's ability to cheat

small growers by not paying a just price for the coffee. We decided we simply

weren't going to do that anymore, and if that means we pay a higher price for

our coffee, well, we pay a higher price for the coffee. We pay less for other

things and some things we don't buy any more and we don't drink coffee every

day. It doesn't hurt of course that the fair trade certified organic coffee

tastes better than anything we have ever bought at a supermarket or at a coffee

shop. It is as good as the Italian coffee I drank in Rome.

 

After coffee, we had whole wheat fry breads, made with whole wheat flour ground

from Oklahoma grown certified organic wheat (Springhill Farms, Kiowa County),

sweetened with Honeyhill Farm honey (Oklahoma County), and Sean made his " Should

Be Famous " onion rings (recipe in this edition of Better Times), he also made

his cream cheese and green olive and habanero pepper salsa tortilla rollups,

which we only make on big feast days. The tortillas were supposed to be from our

favorite local tortilleria, but alas they were closed yesterday, so we got store

bought tortillas, at least they were from Texas. The basic recipe for the fry

bread was my whole wheat biscuit recipe, only I doubled the amount of honey and

reduced the milk by an amount equivalent to the extra honey.

 

Meanwhile the turkey went into the oven, alas again, here we fell back a bit as

we were not able to get a locally grown turkey for Thanksgiving. There is a

serious unmet demand in the Oklahoma marketplace for locally grown, pastured

turkeys. The cooperative has 3 growers who had turkeys but they all sold out

before the cooperative monthly order came up. I stuffed the bird with carrots,

celery, onions, and from our garden a bundle of sage, oregano, thyme, and

rosemary. I cooked the turkey at 325 degrees, covered, and I don't fuss with it.

Before putting it into the oven I rubbed the skin with olive oil.

 

As the afternoon passed, I worked a bit on the web edition of Better Times 5th

edition, and Sean made his " Also Should Be Famous " deviled eggs with more of

that habanero salsa, which we make from habaneros we grow in our garden. All of

the eggs in this feast were from local producers, PDH Farms in Okemah and Horne

Organic Farm in Cordell. Besides making great deviled eggs, farm eggs help make

perfect baked goods.

 

I make my dressing in a cast iron skillet. We combined chopped onions and

celery, shredded carrots, garlic (from our garden), and sauteed them in olive

oil, added crumbled sage, thyme, and rosemary, and when the turkey was done, we

dowsed this bread and vegetable mixture with broth from the turkey, and into the

oven it went at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. I made the stuffing from

biscuits I had made earlier in the week, half white flour biscuits, half whole

wheat biscuits (more of our local flour), and this time, contrary to my usual

practice, I didn't use any cornbread. It may have been my best dressing to date.

The biscuits weren't quite stale enough yesterday so I crumbled them onto a

cookie sheet and put them in the oven for about 90 minutes at 200 degrees and

they were perfect for dressing. I didn't use all of them, so I put the rest in a

jar and they will be fine for " stove top stuffing " two weeks from now.

 

We feasted on the traditional green bean casserole as a side dish, only we used

our own onion rings, and it was very good. Homemade onion rings add a nice touch

to this festive dish. There's no point in buying those canned " french fried "

onion rings. God only knows how many weeks old they are. We had frozen some

green beans earlier in the summer, but they didn't last until Thanksgiving -

memo for 2005 garden plan: grow more green beans!

 

I didn't make any rolls this year, as last night at church after the

Thanksgiving vigil mass somebody gave me a nice loaf of homemade sourdough

bread, very chewy. I made gravy from the turkey broth, cooking the roux until it

was light brown. Making gravy from scratch is easier than making gravy from a

mix and homemade gravy tastes much better than gravy from a mix. Gravy making is

so important I put a whole page in this edition of the Better Times Almanac on

that subject..

 

For dessert we had cushaw squash pie, and it looked just like any pumpkin pie I

have ever seen. I am not sure that people could tell in a blind cushaw/pumpkin

pie taste test which was the cushaw squash pie and which was the pumpkin pie. I

cooked the cushaw squash 2 weeks ago (baked) and put it in the freezer. We took

it out early this morning and let it thaw. I used the " Dorothy's Never Fail Pie

Crust " recipe (bless you Dorothy, whoever you are) from Better Times, and for

the recipe for the pie filling I used the recipe from a can of pumpkin. It's

been on my shelf for so long it is out of date, but I keep it around so I have

the pumpkin pie recipe ready when I need it. It has been I think 3 years since I

made a pie on Thanksgiving from canned pumpkin. I am glad I bought several

cushaw squash from the McLemore family while they were in season. They seem to

be keeping very well. I noticed one of them had a soft spot yesterday so

tomorrow I will go ahead and bake that squash, first cutting out the soft spot,

and freeze it in portions for eating later, either as baked squash or as more

pies.) It's been said that most commercial pumpkin in a can is actually cushaw

squash, and having now made 2 cushaw squash pies, I believe it. The pumpkins we

have stored are also doing fine. They aren't stored in a fancy way, they are

sitting on a shelf.

 

The leftovers are safely tucked in the refrigerator (within the 2 hour limit),

and the dogs and cats all got treats too. The compost bucket has a feast for the

worms and rolly pollies. The mache (corn salad), carrots, and chard in the cold

frame are coming up strong, and the chard in the yard is still going strong.

Even the basil is still green, so we really are blessed with kind weather this

fall thus far. It has rained so much this past week the ground is

super-saturated. I heard from a friend whose dad is farming that it has been so

wet in his area his dad hasn't been able to plant his wheat.

 

So it goes this Thanksgiving here at Northwest 21st Street and McKinley Avenue

in Oklahoma City. As this season of holiday feasting unfolds around us, I pray

that everyone will be conscious of the impact for good or for evil of the

decisions you make as you observe this season. Discover for yourself the wisdom,

beauty, and satisfaction that making better choices about food and lifestyle can

bring to your life.

 

Robert Waldrop, president

Oklahoma Food Cooperative

www.oklahomafood.org/bobsblog/

 

This " Slow and Oklahoma Food " reflection is abstracted from a much longer essay

at

 

http://www.justpeace.org/onpilgrimage.htm#Thanksgiving%20Day,%20November%2025,%2\

02004

 

which incorporates information about the history of the Better Times publication

project and its previous 4 editions, and also has considerable religious

content, including a new " Letter from Paul the Apostle to the Agrarians " which I

redactd from his writings in the New Testament. If that url breaks up go to

http://www.justpeace.org/onpilgrimage.htm and click on the page link for

November 25th.