Despite the fact that we run Inn Serendipity B&B and “breakfast” is part of our business, we find the average American breakfast is, well, boring. With the same old, same old about everywhere you go, we wanted to give breakfast a makeover with a dash of serendipity: spinach and egg stuffed burritos; fried green tomatoes; a side of beets and root crops roasted with thyme. The delighted look on B&B guests’ faces when served a plate of the unexpected inspires us to keep experimenting creatively with the most important meal of the day using a smorgasbord of seasonal produce.

Breaking the rules a bit and leaving room for the unexpected proves to be Inn Serendipity’s appeal. Most of our guests are experienced foodies, flavor and health-conscious sleuths who appreciate the difference between heirloom tomatoes and those found on supermarket shelves wrapped in plastic. We’re eager to savor cuisine prepared in unique ways, or combinations. Foodie travelers don’t want a cookie-cutter motel room, cable TV and continental-style doughnuts for breakfast. They seek out places like our B&B, where a homemade cordial and chocolate greets them for a bedtime nightcap and our young son leads enthusiastic s’more making sessions around the campfire. They smile when roasted turnips and rutabagas appear at the breakfast table from the fall harvest. Authenticity drives culinary travelers off the Interstate and a few of them through our doors. Our tastebuds and our souls crave the real thing.

Wisconsin leads the nation in recognizing this growing market of travelers seeking authentic experiences that don’t ruin the planet in their process of enjoying them. Spearheaded by the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, Travel Green Wisconsin (travelgreenwisconsin.com) invites tourism-related businesses to undergo a certification process based on a range of environmental and social criteria, from sourcing food locally to adopting energy conservation measures. Restaurants showcase local cheeses and lodging establishments like ours are powered by renewable energy. Travel Green Wisconsin leads travelers to places that offer unique experiences that may help sustain, restore or enhance the very features that attract visitors, be it natural or cultural.

The movement is also afoot in Minnesota, spearheaded by the non-profit organization Renewing the Countryside under the moniker Green Routes (greenroutes.org). Their website provides an easy-to-use tool to help you find one-of-a-kind places to eat, play, shop, sleep and learn in Minnesota (and soon, to a place near you).

This green travel movement, echoing that of the organic foods movement, revitalizes small family farms and fuels interest in real food and flavors. Local farms are the ones saving seeds and sowing the Cherokee Purple Tomato and Royal Burgundy Bush Green Beans. Taste some, and you will be a believer in God’s true intentions. The real thing doesn’t come in the form of a dark-colored soft drink.

By stripping away packaging, processing and predictability, authenticity shines through. Jump-start your day with a dose of something different and smile when a turnip turns up on your breakfast plate. This flavorful, unusual recipe from our cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity, prompts folks to rethink their assumptions about rutabagas. Be sure to boil turnips and rutabagas first till they are tender yet firm since they don’t cook as fast as the other root vegetables.

Roasted Root Vegetables (Vegan)
Ingredients:
8 c. beets, turnips, rutabagas and potatoes, cleaned, peeled and chopped into bite-size pieces
2 ¼ t. garlic salt
2 ¼ t. dried oregano
1 ½ t. sugar
1 ½ t. dried thyme

Directions:
* Mix spices and oil in a glass jar and let set for about an hour or more.
* Place veggies in a 9-in. x 13-in. baking pan. Drizzle spice and oil mixture over veggies and toss to coat.
* Bake at 425 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.

Serves 8.

According to The Low Income Project Team, food deserts are "areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food." This does not mean that people in food deserts do not have access to any food… just the stuff that is relatively good for them.

In fact, a food desert often has an abundance of "fringe locations," or businesses that do not serve the sole purpose of selling foodstuffs, yet where food is available think dollar stores, gas stations, liquor stores, etc.). The type of food sold at these stores is usually the worst type of food, and when the only food available is pre-packaged, and full of preservatives, there are bound to be health risks.

In June, LaSalle bank sponsored a study that explored the nature of food deserts in Detroit, Michigan. Not surprisingly, what they found was a high concentration of food deserts. The report noted that "more than a half million Detroit residents live in areas defined as food deserts — areas that require residents to travel twice as far or more to reach the closest mainstream grocer than to reach the closest fringe food location."

Further, the study found that the people of Detroit were physically suffering because of their lack of access to healthy, fresh food. The study concluded that "as a group, residents in food deserts are statistically more likely to suffer or die prematurely from diet-related disease than residents who live in areas with healthy food options."

I don’t know about you, but these revelations make me profoundly sad. I have never known a life without farmers’ markets, Whole Foods and even the occasional roadside produce stand, so the prospect of living in a place where fresh food is so far away slightly boggles my mind. Moreover, the places that food deserts are the most prevalent are places where people have the lowest incomes, and are therefore more likely to not be able to afford transportation. Talk about adding insult to injury.

While the prevalence of food deserts in Detroit is disheartening, there is a silver lining to this awful reality. Local groups have been responding to the lack of fresh food by producing their own! The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) operates a two-acre site in downtown Detroit where they operate a very small, city farm.

According to Malik Yakini, a community activist, owner of the Black Star Community Book Store and member of the DBCFSN,

"Our primary work is urban agriculture, urban growing in the city of Detroit…It’s a small-scale farm. We mainly sell the food, although we give some away to people in the immediate neighborhood. We’re trying to create jobs as a result of urban agriculture".

What?! Good for the economy and good for urban sustainability? Now this is an example of people finding environmental solutions to economic problems.

"Where exactly do you find a farm in the middle of Detroit?" one might ask. Well, you make one! The DBCFSN practices soil remediation, or "the removal of pollution or contaminants from environmental media such as soil, groundwater, sediment, or surface water for the general protection of human health and the environment." In their remediation efforts, DBCFSN’s main project is removing house foundations from abandoned and grown-over sites, in order to prepare the land for tilling. As Yakini notes,

"Given the vast number of vacant lots in Detroit, we’re creating a model of how we can utilize that space…We’re trying to create greater access to fresh produce, generate income and create jobs and to change the community’s vision of what a city is and how space is used in a city. I don’t think we’re going to feed Detroit on vacant lots but we can grow 10 to 25 percent of the food and that’s a significant impact." 10-25% is nothing to shake a stick at! Given the devastatingly low access to fresh food Detroiters are witnessing now, 10-25% is a major improvement that will help to increase the health of Detroit residents.

Like I said before, the DBCFSN is an environmental solution to an economic problem, which is why I believe it should stand as the model for other hurdles faced when trying to improve the quality of life in urban centers. Because conventional ways of approaching problems in inner cities have not led us to many successful conclusions, looking at alternative approaches — like the Local Food Movement — seems to be a proactive way to go about making the necessary changes.

In addition to utilizing the wisdom of the local food movement, DBCSFN is also drawing on staples of the Urban Environmental Movement through the creation of urban green spaces and the redevelopment of "dead sites." Needless to say, the DBCFSN’s efforts should be applauded. Not only are they making large strides for the people of Detroit, but they are also teaching the rest of us how to make sustainability tangible in even the most unlikely of places.

Quotes from Malik Yakini taken from an interview with Larry Gabriel, in his article "Life in the Desert" (Metrotimes, 2007)

Photo Credit: The New Farm

Editor’s note: We’re very happy to welcome Lisa Kivirist to the Green Options writing team! Lisa, along with husband John Ivanko, is the author of Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life (which we reviewed), and Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity. Lisa and John own and run Inn Serendipity, a central Wisconsin bed and breakfast.

Like clockwork, three opportunities come our way every day to make the world a better place: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Add in snacks, and our daily eating choices can collectively add up to significant impact on our planetary tides.

But with the buffet of eating options – from mega supermarket aisles to lengthy restaurant menus that resemble encyclopedias — making educated food choices can border on overwhelming. Simple strategies help.

Being from Wisconsin, we feel compelled to sprinkle in some cheese references, and frankly, we first encountered the "Eat High, Use Less" strategy in our local cheese store. Bruno, a Swiss cheesemaker who runs Alp and Dell, the cheese store adjacent to the Roth Kase cheese factory here in Monroe, shared this insight with us: In Europe, where folks arguably know their fine cheeses, they eat about eighty percent of their cheese. By "eat," he means savoring a nice slice of cheese, perhaps accompanied with some bread or fruit. The focus is on the flavor. The remaining twenty percent gets used in cooking. In the United States, the opposite rough statistic holds true: we cook with about eighty percent of our cheese and eat only twenty percent; with gobs of it on pizza, the focus is on our enjoyment of the fat.

Bruno helped shift our thinking that day, prompting us to focus on eating less, but eating better. Quality versus quantity. A fine-quality hard parmesan cheese may cost more, but just a few grates of such a flavorful cheese can dress up a whole bowl of pasta or Caesar salad. Rather than guzzling whatever java was on sale, savor one flavorful cup of Equal Exchange Sumatra, a fair trade, organic coffee.

Some tips on eating better by using less:

• Cut back on quantity. Flavor tends to increase with higher quality foods, so you may find you can get away with less quantity, which adds up to cost savings. We found this to be the case with coffee. We just needed to just fill our coffee maker two thirds full with Equal Exchange Sumatra, yet the coffee brewed was nicely full flavored.
• Upgrade slowly. Every year we pick a handful of food items we regularly use and see if the “eat high, use less” theory can apply. Chocolate readily fell into this category, but we were discouraged by the pricey fair trade, organic offerings. Undaunted to cut back on chocolate, we found that dry, unsweetene baking cocoa powder (not hot cocoa mix) – still fair trade and organic – delivered a cost savings when mixed with sugar or other ingredients as needed in recipes. When a recipe calls for a one-ounce unsweetened baking chocolate square, simply and economically substitute three tablespoons unsweetened cocoa mixed with one tablespoon of vegetable oil.

Confession: This moist, richly flavored chocolate muffin is really a cupcake in disguise. These vegan muffins use cocoa powder and is from our cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity:

Cocoa Muffins

Ingredients:

1 ½ c. all-purpose flour
1 c. sugar
1 t. baking soda
½ t. salt
3 T. cocoa powder
1 t. vinegar
1/3 c. vegetable oil
1 t. vanilla
1 c. water

Directions:

• Grease 12 standard size muffin cups.
• Mix together all ingredients.
• Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Yield: 12 muffins.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The family raised an astonishing array of vegetables, fruit, meat, and eggs. They did buy supplies like flour, coffee, and olive oil from the grocery store, but they were able to grow the vast majority of their food at home or buy from locals. Besides Kingsolver’s accounts of the ups and downs of pulling weeds or dodging testosterone-crazy roosters, husband Steven L. Hopp provides fascinating food facts sprinkled throughout the book. He explains that if we all ate just one meal each week made of locally raised organic meat and produce, we could reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil per week. Kingsolver’s nineteen-year-old daughter Camille offers sidebars of meal plans and recipes (my looming zucchinis thank her for the zucchini chocolate chip cookie recipe).

Steven and Camille’s practical commentary provide a good balance to the author’s more subjective arguments for eating seasonally. For example, Kingsolver implies that the reader will have a greater appreciation for food if they can’t eat apples in January, or that hours spent in the kitchen canning vegetables with the family is a happy time that brings you closer. It sounds great to me, but other readers may be swayed less by a touch-feely argument, and more convinced by the scientific health arguments for organic foods and the greater energy independence local foods bring (a typical meal travels 1500 miles to a dinner table). At times, I did get a bit tired of seeing Kingsolver’s world though the rosiest of glasses. Everything appears to be perfect, lush, beautiful, the most delicious, faster, stronger, healthier. I don’t doubt the superior taste and nutrition of locally grown, organic products, but I was waiting for another side to the story – some sort of significant downside or obstacle they had to overcome. The author admits this herself when she recounts telling a friend about a tranquil summer evening spent with Amish friends on a farm. The friend remarks, “What, not even a mosquito to bother heaven?” But perhaps Kingsolver’s point is that it is easier than we think to eat locally. In spite of the endless positive spin, her humor and thorough research were inspiring enough to get me to contemplate making my own mozzarella.

A thought-provoking surprise was Kingsolver’s adamant argument for eating meat – specifically locally bred, organic meat. She aligns herself with a vegetarian position, she says, except that she eats meat. She points out that “every sack of flour and every soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest…To believe that we can live without taking life is delusional.” She goes on to explain that the oft-repeated argument that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil. Cultures that live on less productive land like the Navajo, Mongols, Lapps, and Masai would starve without their animals. The argument for eating locally produced organic meat is perhaps a more realistic option for individuals who care about where their food comes from and its environmental and energy consequences, but who aren’t going to stop eating chicken or burgers tomorrow.

In the end, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has a little bit for everyone. For those ready to set the loftiest goals, take the Kingsolver challenge of canning all fall and making meals from home seven days a week. For someone like me who has a love of food, gardening, and cooking, but who isn’t prepared to give up Cheerios (are they local if General Mills is located 20 miles from my house?), I walked away with a renewed dedication to my farmers’ market, an intensive search for local foods at my grocery store, and the knowledge that buying food that grew up continents away is as much of an energy decision as leaving the lights on.

The Palouse is known as the most important lentil growing region in the United States, producing about a third of all lentils grown nationally. So obviously, local lentils are easy to come by around here, and thankfully they don't have to travel far, which makes them a very sustainable option. There is a large lentil farm just a few miles east of me, and many varieties of local and organic lentils abound in the Co-op's bulk bins. Lentils are a great vegan source of protein, fiber, and other nutrients, so they are one of my favorite kitchen staples.

There are many varieties of lentils, with a range of beautiful colors and textures. Green lentils and red lentils are quite common, but there are also yellow, brown and black varieties. I prefer red lentils because they cook very quickly. For the following recipe I also used quinoa, which is a small, versatile grain that is high in iron and protein, making it another great vegan staple. You can add any veggies that are in season, I just used whatever I could find in the fridge! Be sure to use local and organic ingredients whenever possible, and buy in bulk to cut down on packaging waste.

Curried Lentils & Quinoa With Veggies
Serves: 2 - 4. Preparation time: 30 - 45 minutes.

1 small head of cauliflower, broken into pieces
1 Tablespoon canola or olive oil
1/2 a yellow or red onion, diced
1 - 2 cloves garlic, minced
1 - 2 teaspoons fresh ginger, minced
1/2 a zucchini
1/2 cup fresh snap peas
3/4 cup red lentils
1/2 cup quinoa
2 1/2 cups vegetable broth (or water)
2 Tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
dashes of: salt, pepper, cumin, and cinnamon to taste
fresh chopped cilantro

Chop the cauliflower and steam. (I use a pot with a steamer basket over about 1 inch of water).

Dice onions and mince ginger and garlic. Heat oil in a large saucepan or soup pot and when it's hot, sauté onions, garlic, and ginger in it. Meanwhile, snap the ends off of the snap peas and dice zucchini. Once the onions are softened, add the peas and zucchini to the saucepan.

After about 5 minutes, add the lentils, quinoa, and vegetable broth. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. Add all spices and simmer for 20 - 30 minutes or until quinoa and lentils are tender. Add the cauliflower once it is crisp-tender. Cover the pot and simmer, stirring often, and add more liquid if the mixture looks dry.

Once the lentils and quinoa are soft, taste and adjust seasonings. Remove from heat, add chopped cilantro, and serve. I like to top mine with a dusting of nutritional yeast for extra vitamin B12.

Cooked chickpeas (garbanzo beans) would also make a great addition to this recipe, as they go very well with curry.

If you'd like to experiment with raw and living foods, summer is a great time to do so! And you don't have to give up lentils to eat raw either. Lentils can be soaked and sprouted for optimum nutrition and digestibility. Just soak lentils in water overnight (about 8 hours), then strain them into a colander and set it on a bowl. Leave the lentils in the colander for about 3 days, rinsing each day in clean water, until small "tails" sprout from the lentils. Once the "tails" are about 1/4 inch long, the lentils are ready to use or store in a jar in the fridge. I like using sprouted lentils on salads, in soups, and in raw burritos.

For more vegan recipes using lentils, see VegCooking.com. For more information on raw and living foods and lots of delicious raw recipes, I suggest the wonderful book RAW: The UNcook Book by Juliano Brotman and Erika Lenkert. Enjoy those lentils!

You can easily, however, remove these toxins from your life, as well as support your local farmer's market or organic farmer, by making your own salsa and hot sauce. And furthermore, just an hour’s work one day can give you enough condiments to last you months—and they can be to your taste and up to your standards health-wise and sustainability-wise.

Ingredients

(all to be purchased organic and locally produced if at all possible):

Salsa

• 20 mid-size tomatoes
• 5 tomatillos
• 4 green bell peppers
• 2 white onions
• 1 head garlic
• 1 bunch cilantro
• 3 limes
• ½ cup apple cider vinegar
• Salt + Pepper
• Optional, for heat:
  (medium) 2 jalepenos
  (hot) 2 serrano peppers
  (very hot) 1 habanero pepper
• Optional, for fun:
  mango
  pineapple
  black beans
  basil

Hot Sauce

• 25 serrano peppers (or 1 habanero for extreme heat)
• 5 jalepeno peppers
• 1 large white onion
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 3 limes
• Salt + Pepper

Preparation:

Salsa

1. Chop ½ tomatoes on a cutting board into ¼-1/2 inch squares.
2. Blend or puree remaining tomatoes in a food processor.
3. Dice onion, bell peppers, garlic, cilantro, hot peppers.
4. Combine all above ingredients into large mixing bowl, with vinegar and salt + pepper.
5. Juice limes into mixture.
6. Spice to taste, adding brown sugar for mildness or tumeric for a twist.
7. Mix vigorously until a uniform texture is achieved. Taste with a chip!

Hot Sauce

1. Stem all hot peppers, peel and section onions, and put into food processor.
2. Blend on high speed, adding vinegar slowly to facilitate blending.
3. Juice limes into mixture.
4. Add salt + pepper to taste.

Storage + Serving:

Salsa

1. Put into glass jars or Pyrex containers, and leave about 1” of room from the top.
2. Freeze with lids loosely on the top (to allow for the salsa to expand as it freezes
3. After twenty four hours, tighten lids and store.
4. When you want some salsa, simply transfer the jar from the freezer to the fridge 24 hours in advance.

Hot Sauce

1. Allow to sit for 48 hours, to let flavors to thoroughly mix with vinegar.
2. Should keep in refrigerator for about a month.

Making your own Southwestern Condiments can accomplish a number of green goals. It can help you eliminate various preservatives and other chemicals from your diet; it can provide a new avenue to utilizing locally grown and organic produce into your life; and it can provide the satisfaction of a tasty food item that you can customize and make your own.

How Much Booze in the Beer?

Actual fermentation time was about 16 days. During that time, the yeast population expanded, fed upon all the sugars in the malt, and slowly converted those sugars to alcohol. At this point in the game, we were probably looking at an alcohol content of around 5.0%

The way to tell the alcohol content of your beer for sure is to measure the Final Specific Gravity (FG) of the brew (think back to chemistry class) using a gravityometer. You then enter it into an equation 76.08*(OG-FG)/(1.775-OG), with OG being the Original Specific Gravity, and you should come out with your alcohol content! In this case, our OG was 1.06, and our FG was 1.01, which gave us a Alcohol by Weight percentage of 5.32%. Just right.

Getting Started

The whole bottling process, which is quite exciting, is predicated by a rather dull period of sanitization. This is when you must sanitize all of the bottles you’ve collected over the proceeding two weeks—any remaining bacteria will contaminate the beer and lead to spoilage, or worse, illness. This takes quite a long time (about 2 hours for 48 bottles) and is certainly the most time consuming part of the process.

With sanitization completed, the real bottling began. I started by uncorking the glass container the beer has been brewing in (known as a “carboy”), and pouring in a packet of Corn Sugar. This will stimulate the yeast into production again (now that they have more food), which will in turn give the beer carbonation in the bottle.

The First Taste

After mixing in the sugar, I put in a siphon hose, and I readied my first bottle. In order to get a good flow of beer coming out of the main container, and into the bottles, I had to get a siphon going. So I sucked on the hose… hard. A big mouthful of tasty (if flat) beer later, the hose was spurting into the first bottle. The siphon is controlled by a pressure-release valve on the bottom of the hose, which you can engage by pressing it onto the bottom of the inside of the bottle.

After the bottle was full, I placed an uncompressed (somewhat flattened) cap onto the top, and used a capper clamp to seal it into place. The first bottle was completed! Success! However in my joy of capping, I had placed the siphon hose carelessly, and lost my siphon. So I had to take another big suck on the hose to get the siphon going. Mmm… sweet, flat beer filled my mouth, and then it filled another bottle.

Several More Tastes

This process repeated itself over the next hour. While I became more adept at keeping the siphon going between bottles, I had to do the hose suck routine many more times. Spillage was inevitable (when I overfilled a bottle or sucked too much beer into my mouth), and by the time my partner got home, she found my sitting on the floor, sticky with beer and surrounded by bottles, glassy eyed and satisfied. She helped me bottle the last few, and to clean up before I went promptly to bed.

The final test will be in two more weeks, when the first bottle will be opened, and we can relish in our success (or commiserate in our failure). Either way, homebrewing has been quite a process, and I’m already looking forward to my next batch (particularly to bottling my next batch!).