Contrary to what may have never crossed your mind, La Casa has not closed down for the holidays.  Sure, half of us are away in sunnier lands, with (for better or for worse) family obligations, but that leaves half of us here in town, a skeleton crew, suff’rin’ thru the holidays together with joy, good cheer, and sarcasm!

[[Insert picture of We La Casans Four, sitting around a kitchen table teeming with open bottles and gravied foodbits.]]

Erin, Ronna, Don, and your humbuggish narrator Andrew, had a fine few days of gray grump and psychedelic carnage, cheering on the snow and eating plate after plate of lentil-free leftovers.  Our special holiday companions?  Alcohol; recreational greenage; movies with subtitles; and, oh yes, gobs of greasy Holimalaise!

Wikepedia says, “Malaise (pronounced /məˈleɪz/, mal-aze) is a feeling of general discomfort or uneasiness, an ‘out of sorts’ feeling, often the first indication of an infection or other disease. Malaise is often defined in medicinal research as a ‘general feeling of being unwell’.”

Now, I speak for at least myself when I say this Xmas stuff is a crock!  We buy our children a hollow plastic miracle every year until they’re too jaded to buy it, then we sort of give up and let it linger, linger, linger.  But we don’t give up, damn it!  Somebody had a kid?  Great, let’s keep the lie alive!  ”Yes, we love Xmastime in this family, don’t we?”

Combine that disgusted disillusionment with the shortest days of the year, ridiculous wastes of energy and resources (just for show), insulting pressure to buy just the right thing to show so-and-so how much you love them, and some narrow-minded Jesus-talk, and you’ve got yourself the bare essentials for a hefty serving of Holimalaise.

We’re even starting to get straight-up sick around here.  ”I feel like my head is detached from my body,” said Erin a few minutes ago, before going back to bed.

[[Insert picture of We La Casans Four huddled together for warmth on the couch, floating in a sea of vomit and Holimalaise.]]

Ok, it hasn’t been as bleak as all that.  The food has been amazing.  On xmas itself, we had mashed potatoes, two kinds of mac ‘n’ cheese, breaded tofu, and pecan pie with bourbon sauce, all with some mighty fine vegan gravy.  Then, in celebration of Boxing Day (the day after xmas) we had five amazing artichokes with jungle juice!  The leftovers keep on piling up (and thank goodness, because the kitchen sink is offline for four days while the fresh caulk dries!).

[[Insert picture of Sophie eating a full plate of full-gravied Human Food (not to be confused with Human) at the kitchen table.]]

Other good things have come out of this gray week, such as winterized windows, a newly-caulked sink and this blog post.  (Except for the latter, I’ve had nothing to do with anything “good” around here, by the way.)  I look forward to the inevitable repopulating of the house after the new year, but in the meantime, I’m enjoying being on this particular strange island with my three winter-torn comrades.

Greetings from my familial home in the early morning of Xmas in Virginia Beach, VA, to wherever and whenever you, dear reader, read this.

Among the Xmas traditions I have observed since being home is the Xmas Eve dinner, wherein the “kids” (ages 19, 21, 24 now, not including the firstborn who is at the in-laws’ this year) cook for the “grown-ups” (the two ‘rents, plus Dad’s sis Chris, a.k.a. Auntie Santie).  We did some vaguely Mexican things, including this recipe for sweet-and-spicy black beans. A big hit, it was, even if the beans weren’t cooked “a la casa” (from scratch).

Also some flan for dessert—my first flan!  Sorry for the lack of pictures; I’m still not in the habit of snapping much.  Perhaps I’ll find a picture of the fam’, some of whom visited back in March 2008 on the occasion of a House Concert…

There are plenty of tidings to go around, don’t worry…

(((An upcoming event involving La Casa residents & friends.  Note that it is taking place at a house that is not La Casa.  Consider yourself invited!)))

House Theater Dec. 10, 11, 12: “The Truth about Injustice Always Sounds OutRageous”

Sounds outrageous and outrageous sounds, brought to you by House Theater and UC-ODD MUSIC project. We invite you to an hour and a half “Letter to the Editor” on the system-designed killing of 15 year old Kiwane Carrington Oct. 9 2009 entwining experimental compositions in sound, dance, and poetry performed in a living, bedroom, bathroom of an Urbana house.

You’re invited! You don’t need to know us to come!

There will be three identical performances. Pick one or several:

Thursday, December 10 @ 7:30pm
Friday, December 11 @ 7:30pm
Saturday, December 12 @ 7:30pm

Where: 2106 S. Race St., Urbana (home of Ben Grosser, Kate McDowell, and Jasper)

How much: suggested donation of $5-$10, or pay what you can

Who: compositions by Grosser, Schuessler, Rzewski, Enslin, Simpson, Gaiuranos, Barton, Heathwaite, Parenti, Nix, Michaelis, Lieder,Chynoweth, Cage, Glick, and more…

RSVPs are appreciated but not required.  Drop an email to grosser@bengrosser.com.

Carly’s birthday & party happened here on October 27th.  These pictures bespeak a fraction of the unfolding mirth.  Add pictures; comment!

(the Jackalope)

a pictoral timeline of Carly’s birth mythology.

Surfing the certainty gradient…
or
being cute

cute like a red-head bear/cat mop thing: Putting the “costume” in costume party.

What was I thinking?… or maybe what weren’t you thinking?

No party’s complete without it.

Traditional La Casa hand slap game.

The other day I stopped by the house on Washington St that has pawpaw trees growing in the yard.  A nice lady named Ruth greeted us in her driveway and we spoke for awhile about her trees.  They were planted 45 years ago by her husband who saved a few seedlings from a grove that was about to be bulldozed on campus.

Happy to share her bounty of fruit, she graciously served us slices of freshly ripe pawpaw and sent us each home with a few fruits.  When I told her I was interested in growing my own, she gave me a container with hundreds of seeds. I also saved all the seeds from the fruits she gave me.

Eating Ruth’s pawpaws was the first time I’d ever eaten a fully ripe one. I thought they were incredibly delicious.

Normally people plant the seeds in deep containers and transplant the seedlings after they’ve grown a bit. First, however, the seeds need to experience a period of cold lasting 90-120 days, called stratification. This is achieved by refrigerating the seeds during the winter. Of course this is a lot of work and it requires patience, a quality that I can’t always depend on myself having.

My plan is to plant all of the seeds in our shady front yard. The grass grows terribly under an old Maple tree, and pawpaws can tolerate a lot of shade. I chose to plant the seeds directly into the soil, allowing them to stratify naturally during the winter. This reduces the overall amount of work. Instead of planting a few seeds and carefully watching them, I planted a lot of seeds and allowed nature to do the rest of the work.

Using a rebar spike I stabbed the ground and dropped a seed, over and over, until over 100 were planted. The idea to plant this way came from this movie. If none of them come up, no biggie, the whole process took less than an hour. However, if some come up, then a lot will, and the chances of a few surviving are better than slim.

After I planted them I received this email back from a paw paw expert: “Maples are difficult trees to plant pawpaws under because the maple roots are so aggressive and out compete the pawpaw roots for water and nutrients. At least that is true in general if not very every situation. Pawpaws grow very often in association with tulip poplar and ash. If your soil is deep and rich, then maple is probably okay.”  So I guess I have to hope our soil is “deep and rich.”

The seeds will first grow a 10 inch taproot before emerging above ground next Fall. Sometime in August 2010, I’ll be looking for tiny seedlings and hoping that somehow they’ll survive the following Winter and grow into trees.

I zipped up all my pawpaw research and you can download it here. Also, this page is loaded with info.

An apple-picking friend of mine from Way Back When grows some awesomely fine garlic. Her name’s Rebecca and she lives back East in Burlington, Vermont, which is where I spent the coldest winter of my life. One day the temperature with the wind chill factor was, I swear to you, 90 below zero. That’s 90. Below zero. The wind whips across the huge and frozen Lake Champlain and if you are there, you know bitter cold. Anyway…it was my great fortune this year to be a recipient of a sampling of Rebecca’s superb product. That cold but beautiful place makes for some fine, hot garlic, some of which I’m turning around and putting into our Illinois soil to, hopefully, carry on her good stuff and have lots more to devour in future times.

So, we’ve cleared out some of the tomato bed, which is petering out in this cold weather anyway. I put the green tomatoes in paper bags ala my father’s instructions. He sez they’ll ripen. We shall see. Erin and I began forking the bed, but Andrew did a lot more, then JP finished it off and worked in some compost. Today I planted the seed cloves from the 4 varieties Becky sent. JP helped with the first variety, Nootka Rose. The other 3 are Georgian Fire, N.Y. White and German Porcelain, the latter of which is HUGE, but NOT elephant garlic, which Rebecca said is the Red Delicious of the garlic world. You don’t have to be an old apple picker to know that that is tantamount to saying that elephant garlic is hardly worth eating, though, actually, La Casan Jacob would argue this point as he somehow is convinced that Red Delicious apples have some redeeming value. My heart aches for the dear boy. The German Porcelain garlic, indeed, is nice and strong, tons of flavor.

Now here’s a little story which is true:

I farmed garlic in Washington State for about a year and a half. I knew an elderly couple, the Webbers, who had formerly grown garlic organically. I thought the organic aspect was impressive as they had farmed many years before, far ahead of the current organic heyday and even far ahead of the beginning surge in the early 80’s. They were in their 90’s when I knew them back in the 90’s. Anyway, they let me and some friends of mine plant their field which was a nice field with an excellent view of Mt. Stuart.  We did garlic and a lot of potatoes, too. One thing, though, their field had gophers. Not only did their field have gophers, but that field had more gophers than I knew could live in one field and what’s more is that these particular gophers had to taste every single garlic bulb to be absolutely sure that they didn’t like garlic. Also, the field had bindweed. It had extra strength bindweed that could bring down a rototiller in an astonishingly short amount of time, but which did not, apparently get in the way of gophers. Ever since, I can hardly believe it when I see packets of morning glory seeds for sale. I want to tell people not to ever plant it, that it comes from the devil. The DEVIL! And irrigation was, as I recall, quite tricky in that field. Al (Mr. Webber) made constant improvements to his “system”, though it never seemed become less tricky to me, and I think, quite possibly, more so. I do recall one great leap in the irrigation technology where the involvement of PVC pipes boosted our watering capabilities, but only for a day or so. Really, all those gopher holes led to one mother tunnel which emptied out not into the field at all, but, oh, down there, off the side of the hill. I thought perhaps it would at least have the benefit of washing the gophers away (or drowning the motherf*ckers), but it seemed to not impinge on them at all and what does not kill them makes them stronger. Pretty sure about that. If anything it seemed to have softened the soil up for them quite nicely. (It may have been about this time in my life that the murder of certain animals [being various rodentia] began to seem maybe not quite so abhorrent as I once thought. My dogs proved to be superior diggers, but insufficient gopher catchers. That’s a big help, as you can imagine.) Oh, and there was the wind. I wouldn’t want to neglect giving due mention to the wind which allowed for no hats, would throw dirt in your eyes, which once knocked me clean over and whose relentless blast caused me to cry and curse the wind god. (I only did that last thing once because the wind picked up noticeably when I did it.) Nonetheless, regardless and despite all we had a lot of fun and we all had garlic and spuds to last and it sure made the Webbers happy. I do not believe I would want to do it for a living, though. Not in that particular field, anyway.

Garlic chomping gopher. Say that 3 times fast.

Bindweed (Morning Glory)

The species in the la casa permaculture garden were chosen for their niche in the whole system. Helianthus tuberosus, aka jerusalem artichokes or sunchokes, produce tasty tubers underground and beautiful clusters of yellow sunflowers above ground. The plants grow to almost 10 feet and the tubers can grow as thick as your wrist. Although most of the ones I harvested today were about as thick as your thumb.

You may be confused.  They’re not artichokes, and they’re definitely not from Jerusalem, so what are they?  Well, they are more like potatoes that shoot off the roots of a native sunflower.  They grow vigorously and can compete with most weeds, however they don’t store as easily as potatoes and so are less commercially viable.  They are a popular permaculture plant.

I had a craving for something fried so I found a recipe for Pan-Fried Jerusalem Artichokes in Sage Butter on epicurious.  I went out just before dark and dug up a bunch of tubers.

They were very aromatic as I was digging them out and washing them.  It took awhile to scrub and clean all the dirt off. From then I followed the recipe, doubling it and subbing vegan butter for regular butter.

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons butter, divided
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 pound Jerusalem artichokes,* scrubbed, cut crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick rounds
• 3 tablespoons coarsely torn fresh sage leaves, divided
• 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley

Preparation

Melt 1 tablespoon butter with olive oil in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add Jerusalem artichokes and half of sage. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sauté until brown and just beginning to soften, turning frequently, about 10 minutes. Using slotted spoon, transfer Jerusalem artichokes to shallow serving bowl. Add remaining 2 tablespoons butter and sage to skillet; fry until sage darkens and begins to crisp, about 30 seconds. Add lemon juice; simmer 1 minute. Pour lemon-sage butter over Jerusalem artichokes in bowl, tossing to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with parsley.

The result: well it was my first time cooking with them and I used the wrong type of pan. Some slices were cooked thoroughly til mush, others were still crunchy and undercooked. The flavor I thought was quite good and a few housemates agreed.

WIN!

Here’s some research about jerusalem artichokes I found online, zipped up.

small version of yard sale flyer

Our yard sell happened this past Saturday.  Aside from  a few complications and miscommunications, the sale went smoothly.  It was a nice day and lots of friends stopped by.  As planned, G & Ts were drunk in honor of Maria’s day of birth!

In total we pulled in between 250-300 bucks, woohoo!  There’s still a lot of items left however, so we’re now having a FREE SALE.  Meaning: come take whatever you want.
I had to work during the morning part of the yard sale and an anonymous photographer (named Andrew) took some nice snaps from the sale:

After finding their egg sacks in the Spring, I hadn’t seen a single mantis around the yard until today.

As many of you know, Jacob and Andrew have a project going at the IMC called Oddmusic Urbana-Champaign:

Oddmusic U-C is building a library of unusual and usual musical instruments at the UC-IMC and facilitates events to connect experimental composition, microtonality, & instrument-building with non-sectarian radical social change.  We insist upon “music” as a type of “odd,” desirable when it avoids the same old society telling itself what it already knows.

Andrew in Oddmusic II, the day after the big move.

Last month, we had a grand(e) opening, and this month an opportunity has come up to relocate our collection to a brand new space that’s cheaper, more commodious, brighter, and by at least one guest’s account, friendlier!  Last Sunday, with help from our friends Mary Ann(e), Don, Snow Leopard, and Mary Margaret, we successfully moved into our great new space.  We’re continuing to host office hours every Sunday evening from 7pm to 9:30, so feel free to come by this weekend and see what we’re about.  We’re now in the basement of the Independent Media Center (at Elm and Broadway in Urbana), room 21A, just down the hall from the Bike Project.

For more, see our blog and (or) sign up to be on the Oddmusic listserv.

Last night Andrew and I went to a Unit One lecture by Sociologist James W. Loewen on Sundown Towns and racism in small town America.  ”Sundown Town” is a name for a town or city where whites collectively drove out and kept out black people (and also sometimes Jews, Native Americans, Latinos).

These communities are sometimes called “sundown towns” because some of them posted signs at their city limits reading, typically, “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In ___.”

The practice began in the late 19th Century, became illegal after the 1960’s and the civil rights movement, but still persisted through the 70’s, and in some cases, still persists today or until very recently.

(These archival images are taken from Professor Loewen’s slideshow on Sundown Towns.)

He’s confirmed over 400 sundown towns in Illinois alone. I used his database to check out some towns I grew up around where I’ve never once seen a black person. The question about some of these rural towns is, do they just happen to be all white, or are they all white on purpose?

Maroa, Illinois, is on his list of confirmed sundown towns (which you can search by state). He writes that the main method of exclusion in Maroa is realtors refusing to sell to blacks, and a realtor told him in 2001 that there was still an ordinance on the books making this official town policy.

The method of exclusion varies by location. Some excluded by violence, threat of violence, police or other official action, and reputation.

You can check out Loewen’s website for more information, for papers on how he conducts his research, how to confirm sundown towns, and how to help him with this project in general. He is looking for volunteers to help him conduct oral histories and research in small towns across the country.

I’m looking forward to reading up on this disturbing side of American history that deserves more attention and understanding.

Oh, those deep purple beauties ripening, ripening.

A little campfire, a lot of fire-roasted eggplant.

Delectable end product.

Andrew eating the hell out of a baba ganouj sandwich.

When you’re really lucky you plant some plants in just the right spot at just the right time and they say, “Man, I feel so good, I’m going to grow like mad and make lots of whatever it is I make.” We were sooo lucky here at La Casa. The eggplant plants went in the ground considerably past the prime time AND as you all know, summer was unusually cool. Eggplants like time to grow and some heat, you know, so what the hell? Not that I’m complaining. No. I am not. I’m rejoicing and not just about the mysteriously extraordinarily huge and productive plants that are our eggplant plants, but about wonderful new La Casan, Erin, who knew that you can put your eggplants by a fire to give them that extra flavor edge for better baba ganouj. But that’s not all! There’s extra flavor and then there’s someone who really knows how to work it. We at La Casa are fortunate enough to have in Erin, not just someone who can fire-roast an eggplant, but who can push that extra flavor to it’s most excellent extreme. It was so much fun today watching one after another of my fellows take their first bite and say, almost invariably, “Oh, my god!” You know, pure astonished delight.

If you want to fire-roast your eggplants just put them near your fire, almost in it. They will slowly start to shrivel and sag a bit. Keep turning them until the whole things is more or less rather shriveled. They should maintain their skin’s integrity for the most part. If they go up in flames you have gone well beyond fire-roasted.

Thanks to JP for photos and to Erin for the damned good grub. And La Casans in general for just being so great!

I went this morning to help on the new student farm located south of campus. The farm’s manager, Zack, showed me and a group of volunteers around as we helped out harvesting.

The produce from the farm is sold to University Dining Services and goes to feed kids living in the dorms. The student farm is part sponsored by the dining halls and part by the College of ACES.  This is the FIRST year planting crops and they’re supplying a lot of food to the dorms.

We picked mostly squashes but some basil and parsley too.

That’s Zack on the back of the van that Dining Services gave to the project.

The best part is that after a few hours of work, they let you take home as many veggies as you can carry! My roommates will be happy when they get home.

The paw paw genus (asimina) contain the largest edible fruit indigenous to this continent (says wikipedia).  They apparently taste like a cross between a banana, a mango, and a pineapple. I’ve just begun learning about paw paws and recently was at a paw paw forest about an hour away.

The big leaves give the plant away, but the fruit are even more distinguishable.

Paw paws a very fascinating, I would recommend the wikipedia entry as a good introduction. Kentucky State University is building a great website for paw paw information and research of which there is surprisingly little. Compared to standard orchard fruits, not a lot of people are working with paw paws because they have a very short shelf life. For the backyard orchardist who doesn’t have to worry about shipping and storage, the paw paw could be an easy delicacy. Due to the fact that they’re indigenous, they are extremely pest resistant.

There’s one paw paw on the Urbana Fruit Map in someone’s yard and they’re not overhanging the sidewalk (yet), so don’t take any!

View Larger Map

Paw paws grow densely in the understory layer. Next time you take a ride down Washington St stop and take a look at the beautiful trees with the big leaves.

Robbie and I opened up the hives a few weekends ago to take an inventory of the healthy hive and see how much brood the new queen has produced in the weaker hive.  Sadly, we didn’t see a lot of honey in the honey supers (the shallower frames on top).  We figured this was some what to be expected since our hive was just getting built up when most of the plants were producing nectar.  It was a timing issue, and we were late getting our hives started.

You can see that there is some capped honey in the middle, but the bees have barely drawn out the wax comb towards the edges of the frame.

In the hive that recently had been re-queened, there was a clear sign that the new queen had been successfully introduced. You can see in the photo below that some of the cells have a dark yellow cap on them. That’s called ‘capped brood’, and in a few weeks fully developed bees will eat their way out and begin working right away.

The brighter orange cells are pollen stores.

When we first opened up the second hive we immediately noticed something strange. Right in the corner of the hive that we pried open with the hive tool, there was an unmarked queen hiding out.

There she is about as far away from the nucleus of the hive as possible.

You can see her elongated abdomen and short wings. We were hoping to find signs of the introduced queen and maybe spot her, and oddly the first bee we see after opening the hive is another queen. I suspect that before the first queen swarmed, the bees had already started feeding royal jelly to create a new queen. By the time she hatched we had stuck a new queen in, who has now taken over the colony.

If you spend a moment to think about it, a very interesting tale of courtly coups could be extracted from this. Is the native born queen entitled to the crown? Who is this imposter queen who has stolen the throne and banished the rightful heir to the far reaches of the queendom? Did we screw up the natural order of things by adding a new queen when the bees were busy rearing a new one?

We scratched our heads (through the veils), set the mystery queen aside, and continued looking for signs of the introduced queen. When we were finished and putting the frames back in we found the unmarked queen very close to where she was before.

It seems as though she still had a few workers attending to her.

The point at which the party devolves a tad is the best time for pictures.  After everyone has had a few drinks and perhaps becomes both sillier & more shining/relaxed.

Strange crossroads, which came first?, and yes that is a bathroom picture.

Good food, great drinks with home-made tomato juice, wonderful folks sharing, laughter, gettin’ down wit some rap, general all ’round fantabulous night.

(Rob wrote this song in the direction of the health care debate. It is the product of less than 24 hours of work.)

Jacob, “MC Utterbot” and udderbot
Andrew, “Professor Heathwaite” and 23-tone electric
Rob, “Hello” and drums

Lyrics:

I need a lever, cause yo, I’ve got a fever
Need some accessibility to the health care facility
What’s the public option when the option ain’t publicized
I’m still waiting in line you better recognize
your health is mine, to deny it’s a crime
50 million in urgency so check the emergency… **CRASH**

All the other wealthy industrialized countries have universal health care systems — that means, every citizen has access to health care. Except in the United States. Yo! MC Utterbot, I think they need some contents to make some sense out of this nonsense…

The clock ticks… I’m talkin’ ’bout one-in-six
Only hard to understand with insurance in hand
When y’read they propaganda, s’hard to understand-a
They take our activism and they call it socialism
Or portray the U.K. as a place with no x-rays
where you wait in line for days but it’s worse here I dare say…

Excuse me sir, we only assist robots in this emergency room — WILL SOMEONE TURN OFF THAT CAR ALARM. What’s that? You are a robot. Oh. I’m sorry but your insurance doesn’t cover that procedure. Please see the secretary down the hall and fill out more paperwork…

My pre-existing condition was no health care access
I had to treat myself based on my best guess
While corporations are playing me like a game of chess
Still I’ve got to say, nevertheless
I want health care parity and solidarity
A social contract yo this ain’t no frickin charity
The blue dogs know they’re gonna have to go
and when I get to the do’ I wanna hear something just like

Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…
Hello…

We canned a lot of things this past wednesday.

Maybe Carly can update this post with some more info!

This past Friday we went mushroom hunting in a super-secret local spot.  The key to finding mushrooms is going out a day or two after it rains.  The soaked ground underneath decaying trees creates the perfect conditions for fungal growth.

In addition to a dozen or so species of fungi, we’re %90 certain we found some chanterelles, a choice edible.  We cooked and tasted ‘em (I didn’t try too much) and they were indeed delicious.  I made a spore print, but the white spores were difficult to see on the white piece of paper that I used.

Mushrooms are so beautiful and interesting.

Link to the rest of my mushroom photos on flickr.