Friendsgiving Potluck

I was invited to a post-Thanksgiving potluck on Saturday. I had to bring a dish I could make beforehand and transport on my bike. It also had to somehow do something with fall or thanksgiving or something of the sort. Luckily the night before I had come across three lovely heads of purple cauliflower.

Deep Purple

I went online and found this nice simple recipe for baking cauliflower. Although this recipe didn't called for it, another one I saw said to sprinkle parsley on top after baking. We didn't have any parsley, but we had found some chervil in the same haul which according to google is just fancy parsley. 

We also didn't have any parmesan, but had found a good amount of bleu cheese and feta in a previous outing

I have no idea how to rotate this

The garlic was actually a gift from a friend who knows someone that runs a farm in Vermont. She had more garlic than she knew what to do with so she gave us a few bulbs. This wasn't your grocery store garlic. The cloves were three times larger than cloves I am used to

The garlic had elephantiasis 

To give it a little extra Thanksgiving flare, I replaced the olive oil in the recipe with pumpkin oil. We had found the pumpkin oil at Commodities a week earlier, but I hadn't found an application for it yet. I really ended up enjoying the pumpkin oil as it gave it a pumpkin-y, nutty taste and it has an interesting dark green color that aesthetically added to the dish. Sadly, I had rescued two of these bottles, but I dropped one and broke it on the way. 

Free range pumpkin oil

Finally, I cut up the cauliflower, doused them with the poil, put some salt and pepper on them and sprinkled the chopped garlic all over. I did an initial baking before taking it over for the potluck. I cooked it at 400 for 25 minutes to come out with this:

Like an acid trip in a pyrex dish

Afterwards I bundled it up in some old take out containers. I stuft it all in a bike basket along with the cheese to add later, some baguettes, and a bottle of wine. I realized with the contents of my basket there was only one thing to do... I had to wear a barret.

 

spring break woooo show us your seins

Once getting to the potluck I put the cauliflower back in a baking dish and sprinkled the cheese on. I cooked it for another 5 minutes at 400 then took it out and sprinkled the chervil on and came out with this:

I need a better camera 

XOXOXO

Randall

Rainy Daze

So I haven't really figured out a schedule of when I'll update. I really doubt it will be a regular schedule, more like I got some free time or made something interesting. On that note, it's raining today so I ain't going nowhere none.

Anyway, one of the fun things about urban foraging is that you have a lot of food that you can't possibly finish yourself. Solution? Dinner parties!! At this point most people know where the food is coming from and either have made peace with it or, as is more often the case, were totally cool with it in the first place. However, with the first blog post, a friend that I have cooked for more than a few times, found out where the ingredients were coming. Although her faced contorted to a look of disgust as she read the first post, she still enjoyed the meal, but did offer to cook the entrée next time.

I learned to "cook" when I was in college where I would generally cook a batch of food large enough to sustain me for an entire week. I never had an issue with eating the same thing for an entire week nor did I have any qualms with leftovers. I've never really been able to adjust to cooking for just a person or two so till this day I end up cooking 8-10 servings at a time which ends up being perfect for having mini dinner parties. On a recent haul we had come across several boxes of cheese, flour, veggies, and eggs. Actually eggs are one of the most common items founds. Typically the market will toss the entire dozen if one egg in the carton breaks.

So I made a pizza. We got the flour, eggs and some of the veggies from TJ and the rest of the veggies from a small health food store called Commodities. The cheese and pesto came from a market called Gristdedes. I got a crust recipe from epicurious and it is quite easy to make. A trick I've learned to making your crust crispier is to place it on a hot item when you put it in the oven. Usually a pizza stone but an upside down tray works just as well. Prepare your pizza on a cookie sheet while the oven is preheating at 500F, then when you're done take out the upside down tray and slide the pizza on to it. Works really well.

Anyway we chopped up the veggies

The colors Duke, the colors

The cheese, two types of gouda and a swiss, came in cubes so we cut them down to size. Now lately we've come across a lot of potatoes and I remembered that in SF I had a potato pizza so i decided to try it out. First I sliced the potatoes thinly then fried them up in a pan

Almost like a potato chip pizza

Started assembling everything 

Full disclosure: the sauce was purchased

And 15 mins at 500 and out it came. The parchment paper will burn around the edges but it won't bother the pizza

Couldn't get the picture before the vultures attacked

Finally like i said, we have a lot of eggs.  A friend recently showed me how to poach an egg. The vinegar really does the trick. I'm always looking for new things to do with eggs and this one is so much fun and delicious so I decided to add a poached egg on top of the pizza.

It had two yokes!

That saucy slutty double yoke running all over the luscious pizza 

It's finally up

So this blog has been a long time coming. I had the idea for this website when I was still working and would sneak into meetings just to hit the sandwich tray to taste the forbidden nectar of found food. It's now been around 7 months since I've stopped working and discovered the wonders of urban foraging. Urban foraging can take several forms. You can have a garden in your yard or you can chop down the ornamental cabbage plants outside the Peninsula Hotel. The best part about the latter is that you don't have to wait for them to slowly grow back in season. They'll be replanted, whole, almost immediately.

Look at all the heirloom tomatoes
 harvested from our yard garden.

Mmmm delicious ornamental kale is delicious

However, the easiest and most plentiful way of urban foraging is dumpster diving. Also often referred to as food liberation. There are a lot of great online resources on the net to help people get started with their quest to liberate unloved and unwanted groceries. One of the best is on the NYC freegan website. They have a lot of great all around tips for dumpstering and an amazing dumpster directory if you live in any of the five boroughs of NYC. If you don't, check MeetUp to see if anyone has dumpster tours in your area. You could also just ask around to see if you have any friends who go diving. It is a great social activity and a whole lot more fun to do with a friend.

Bike scum in his natural habitat 

Trader Joes is a really great spot if you can find ones that don't lock their dumpsters. All their stuff is prepackaged so it remains relatively clean and they carry great stuff in general. Whoever knew what an inside out carrot cake was and how fucking amazing it is before TJ started selling it. On good nights the hauls can also be quite staggering. To the point where you might want to consider a chest freezer.

Bell peppers and tomatoes for days

Dumpster meat is the most sustainable meat

Premade food is great for those days when you don't feel like cooking

You'll soon notice that a regular divers fridge looks quite peculiar. It's kind of like feast or famine. You'll have 10lbs of bell peppers, but not a single onion. That, however, is one of the fun things about urban foraging, especially if you're unemployed and have a lot of free time on your hands. It really causes you to get creative and make dishes you'd never thought of. Ever tried ground turkey stuft bell peppers marinated in pumpkin oil. Yeah I hadn't either, but let me tell you what, shit was dank. Just the other day I came across over 30lbs of apples. I hauled the bag over my shoulder like a Chinese laundry worker through the East Village on a Saturday night. I got it to a juicer where after 4 hours and 3 over heatings, I was able to extract 3 gallons of juice to make hard cider.

Gonna party like it's 1799

Not to say that everything has to be experimental. For breakfast I made the quintessentially American meal of meat and potatoes with a cup of coffee. It just happened that the meat was a black angus filet mignon and the potatoes were russet, sweet and taro potato all mixed in with onions, peppers and snow pea sprouts.  The coffee was a single origin, organic, shade grown, fair trade Ethiopian coffee that promised me a floral aroma.  It may have been cage free too.

I like my coffee like I like my women, lukewarm and bitter

So in the end, I don't really know what the point of this blog is. There are a million food blogs out there written by people who are much better writers than I am. I'll try to document some more interesting aspects of urban foraging and share some recipe ideas so next time you have 15lbs of smoked gouda you'll have an idea what to do with it.

-Randall