We did a fair bit of dumpster diving in December. A grocery store we know on the west side of the city has a great set-up for it. Since Vancouver has a composting collection, the grocery store has three large trash bins labeled for organics that are used only by the produce department--no plastics in there, and no meat, dairy, or other things that you'd worry about spoilage. The majority of the things in the bin are discarded lettuce leaves, I believe because they strip the outer leaves off the lettuce before displaying it so that it looks nice. More importantly, it cushions everything so that the slightly brown bananas, bruised eggplants and who-knows-why-they-threw-it-away everything else is just hanging out waiting for you to dig down to it.
I don't have a picture of "soup time", but the Farmhouse has a soup clock with the names of each resident taped to it. When it gets to your name, it's your job to fill the crockpot with water and vegetables until it's soup. It's quick, healthy, easy, and a great way to use up vegetables that need using.
I mentioned our wine-making before. Our apple-pear-grape-mango wine is fermenting away in its carboy. These pictures are from the day that Sara and I moved it from the primary fermentation chamber (a foodsafe 5-gallon bucket) to the glass carboy (a giant 5-gallon glass jug).
Here, Sara dresses up science-tastically to pour our first taste of the wine. The wine isn't done, so our tastes were extra-sweet and low in alcohol. The yeast has to eat the rest of the sugar to make the rest of the alcohol.
I'm using a hydrometer here. The hydrometer measures the specific gravity (the thickness or viscosity) of a liquid by showing how high it floats. Think about it; something would float much higher in a bowl of syrup than a bowl of water. So it measures the sugar content. By subtracting the current sugar content from the original sugar content before fermentation, you can figure out how much sugar the yeast has consumed and therefore how much alcohol is in the wine. During our test, I guessed the alcohol content to be about 8%. Our goal is around 15% at the end of another few weeks of fermentation.
So the wine wasn't ready for Christmas, but...
We had Christmas dinner "Quebec-style," according to Sara, which meant that we had dinner and presents on the evening of December 24th, which was also my 25th birthday. Ander was visiting family for Christmas, but Sara's girlfriend Razan spent her holiday break with us, so we still had a full house, but...
At the end of December, Willow, Tomko and I moved out of the Farmhouse. Willow moved back with her family to Winnipeg, and Tomko and I are staying in Olympia, Washington, making plans of where to go next.
Good luck, Farmhouse! I hope you find new and amazing roommates! I hope spring finds your garden better than ever, and the city stays out of your gardening-business. Happy 2011.