Philip McGarvey

Christopher Weeks wrote:We bought a disposable can of spray oil four years ago when we got our first air fryer but we haven't used it up yet. Thirty years ago we had a refillable stainless steel and plastic can that you could pressurize by hand-pumping but it kept getting clogged with sticky olive oil so we got rid of it. Mostly we use brushes for the kind of thing you're talking about though we don't really use the waffle iron very often.

FWIW, I would bet that four year old oil is rancid.  It might not smell terrible if it's refined oil because the stuff that would start smelling off was removed in the refining, but the oil itself will be rancid aka oxidized, and not good to eat.

If you do use some kind of spray bottle make sure you're using it up and replacing the oil frequently.  Olive oil typically goes rancid 3-6 months after opening.  

But again, there aren't really any natural liquid oils that are good for cooking with.

I suppose if it's a really small amount and just for lubricating the surface, maybe a little rancid refined oil isn't so terrible.  I wouldn't want to eat it, but quantitatively in terms of how much rancid oil you're consuming, spraying the surface of the waffle iron with rancid refined oil might be equivalent to eating a couple of conventional tortilla chips.

Anne Miller wrote:My question is how do you get those lard or tallow to replace cooking spray?

Fair.  I guess my answer is I haven't run into any situation where I needed cooking spray - I haven't thought of making waffles.

If you have a cast iron waffle iron that's seasoned well initially you might not need to grease it at all.  

Any other kind of waffle iron I've seen had a toxic coating I wouldn't want to use anyway.

I mostly use lard or tallow or butter for cooking.  I put some on the pan as it's heating up and tilt the pan back and forth so it flows around and covers it all.  If I'm baking I'll put the fat in the pan in the oven, and when it melts take the pan out and tilt it the same way.

Olive oil is good but real unrefined olive oil is expensive and burns/smokes easily so I don't cook with it.  The less expensive olive oils and avocado oils are usually refined and/or cut with other refined oils like soybean oil.

My soap box:
I bet that refined oils are not healthy.  They aren't natural, require weird industrial/chemical processes, and only existed in the last ~100 years or so.  Animal fat, butter, or unrefined coconut oil if you are vegan, seem to me to be the best cooking oils.  These are mostly saturated fat, which you'll hear is bad for you.  I've done extensive research on this and believe that this was largely a scam to get people to eat refined oils and grains instead of real natural fat which is mostly saturated fat.  I haven't found any good evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy.  And, I've been eating lots of it my entire life and seem to be in excellent health.

I have a large 32sqft solar dehydrator, so a few times I've made a giant batch of beans with seasoning like chili powder and some salt, simmer a long time like overnight in a huge pot, and then pour them on the dehydrator trays.  After drying I store them in big airtight glass jars particularly because the salt would bring moisture in otherwise.

 I keep a jar of them in the car for a crunchy on the go snack.  I can also throw them in soup at any time - they're already cooked after all.  Or just add them to a jar of tomato sauce for an instant chili that can be eaten cold with no cooking.

I do a similar thing with mushrooms sometimes - cook one big batch of dried mushrooms and then dry them after cooking so they're ready to eat immediately without needing to cook again.  

M.K. Dorje Sr. wrote:But I'm curious, how do you make manzanita sugar? And would Hairy Manzanita (the main species in my food forest) be a good species to make it from?

Manzanita deserves it's own thread so I just made one:  https://permies.com/t/357565/berry/Making-manzanita-berries

A quick google shows hairy manzanita having similar looking berries to the ones around here so I'd assume it's similarly good.

Manzanita berries are another often ignored food in parts of the west USA.

They will be dry on the plant when they're fully ripe, which is convenient since you can just store them as is for a long time after picking.  The berries are sweet, tart, slightly tannic.  I pick them into a belt-bucket (a bucket hanging in front of me from a belt) so I have both hands free.  The berries come of the plant extremely easily when ripe.  Some twigs and leaves will get in the bucket.

They have very tough seeds.  It's probably safe to swallow seeds whole, I do it and the bear does it.  But for eating lots of them, it would be a lot of big seeds.  

I make manzanita "sugar" by grinding the whole berries in a cheap blender with dull blades (so as not to break the seeds, and not to damage a sharp quality blender).  Then sift the powder from the seeds and pieces of berry that remain.  I don't worry about the twigs and leaves and bits of dried flower, there will be that debris mixed in and it doesn't ruin it.  It would be a lot of work to separate everything from just the pure berries by hand.

You'll get maybe 3-4x as much of the seeds and chunks of berry as the powder - this stuff is good too, I just make tea or "cider" with it.  Say 1/4 or 1/2 cup ground manzanita berries with ~2 cups hot water, and then pour the liquid through a strainer into mug.  (Any ratio is fine just depends how strong flavor you want.)  

The powder is good for so many things.  I'll put it in anything that I bake, in oatmeal, pancakes, etc.  You can make nice little cakes out of it with just 1/2 cup manzanita sugar and 1 egg and a pinch of salt, mix it up and fry in a pan.  

This year I've made good use of the himalayan blackberries.  I feel like they're a very abundant underutilized resource in some regions.  

I've picked 65lb this season not counting the ones that don't get in the bucket, from probably ~9 cumulative hours picking.  I keep my belt-bucket in the car so on my way home from wherever if I see a good patch I can stop and get some.  There are also patches around here I can walk to.  I might not pick right by a highway but along the back roads I feel like they're still less polluted than conventional food - and also a lot of food we eat is grown near roads already.  There's also the back side of the roadside patches.  I mostly pick at night by headlamp when it's cool and the mosquitoes are mostly asleep.

Flavor can vary dramatically - I find the best are those with moderate water and a lot of sun.  Too much water and they are less flavorful, too little water and they're too small to be worth picking.  That said, even the shaded berries by the river here are still worth picking even if they have less flavor.  

The easiest way for me to preserve them is drying.  I dry whole berries and also mash them into a "leather" though I let it get dry enough to be crunchy.  Freezing would be nice too.  I would recommend mashing the berries and then freezing as one homogenous blob rather than freezing individual berries.  Canning jam is a bit more involved.  And since I'm picking some every few days, and they go bad really fast, I'm not going to can every few days, so it's easy to just throw each batch into the dehydrator.

Tips for picking:

- make a belt-bucket setup so you have two hands free and the bucket hanging in front of you at your waist
- you can press into the blackberry thicket with the bucket in front of you without getting too tangled, to reach deeper in
- bring a hooked stick or tool, for moving canes around and pulling toward you the ones that are just a bit too far.
- if there's a big patch and the best berries are in the middle, try trampling in there to get them, move carefully and you can do it without getting too tangled.  It's important to lift the foot up and then put it down on top of the canes to flatten them, rather than just walking straight in.
- send your tallest person to pick
- wear old clothes that are ok to get a bit more tattered
- ditto for shoes - old shoes that don't matter, or sandals
- skin heals itself while clothes don't
- it's easier to avoid getting tangled in bare skin because I feel the thorns before they get too stuck in - so I actually like to go in shorts and t-shirt or even no shirt if there's no mosquitoes
- the hands will get a bit torn up, embrace it, they heal quickly
- promptly extract any bits of thorn that get embedded - I only got one this season
- wear full plate armor if you have it (or maybe a smooth hard hat for the really tall patches)
- have water handy to rinse the hands when it's time to go

Just a thought - those peels and cores look good to eat.  I've made vinegar before when I had apple and pear bits that were wormy or otherwise not good to eat.  But if I had bits like yours in good looking condition, I'd rather dry and eat them than make vinegar.

That said of course make what you want!  

Charolett Knapic wrote:I'm wondering if it would help to add native tree chip mulch to the soil to help get a mycelium network throughout the soil layer to help keep that soil from sliding/washing down over time. You might need to add some form of nitrogen at first since the mulch breaking down uses nitrogen, but that's easy to accomplish. I've never done it though.

My hunch is this would not help long term. In my experience, fungus that eat wood chips are not permanent - they eat the wood chips and the chips break down and the fungus eventually is gone (eaten by something else).

Mycelium used to make structure is usually grown on the substrate and then dried so it stays in that one form.

Wood chip eating mycelium is different from soil mycelium that are connected with living plants and could add living structure for a very long time. I think these are typically different species of fungus.

I am intrigued by the idea of using a lot of charcoal/biochar in the soil layer as that could give you the most lightweight and drought-tolerant form of living roof as opposed to a soil that is mostly sand/clay (i.e. rock).