The last few weeks I’ve been collecting all my veggie scraps and stowing them away in a bin in the freezer.
Once my scrap bin is full, I plan to boil them in water to make vegetable stock. I got the idea from an old roommate of mine, who regularly made batches of homemade veggie stock. She was always finding meaningful ways to bring sustainability to the kitchen. It was a few years ago that we lived together, along with eight other college students in Decorah, Iowa. The ten of us shared a small house in town.
We were a small community living together under a commitment made to more sustainable living.
As I reflect back on our time living together, I find it interesting and special that so many of our sustainability practices centered around our kitchen, tethered by broader sustainable food systems and communities in Northeast Iowa.
Egg Week
It was Egg Week. One of our professors, who lived in an acreage off the grid outside of Decorah and kept chickens, was selling eggs that spring. Local farm fresh eggs? We went crazy for them, and soon our kitchen island was anointed with a holy tower of brown cartons. The week was orange – we had never seen yolks quite this color. Scrambled eggs, fried eggs, egg salad, omelets, egg sandwiches, eggs on rice, eggs on noodles, eggs on eggs. It was a celebration of those sunrise yolks, and every conversation that week started with something like: “I can’t believe how incredible these eggs are…”
Breakfast from the Farmer’s Market
Summertime was the best for walks to the Decorah Farmers Market, one of the best hubs of accessible local food in Winneshiek County. On lazy Sundays we would wake up and find our cupboards empty, and walk on down to the market to piece together a Sunday breakfast. Popular purchases would include homemade bread loaves and cherry tomatoes (best for scrambled egg and tomato on toast), jars of farm-made jam (best for warmly baked strawberry rhubarb rock cakes), and apples and honey (best for apple crisp with honey green tea). My favorite part of our Sunday ritual was not the walk downtown, or the wonderful exchanges with vendors, but perhaps the conversations I shared with my roommates afterwards, as we busied our kitchen with flurries of Sunday breakfast preparations.
Harvest Festival
One September, we dreamt up a Harvest Festival – a large meal to enjoy together, and made from produce growing in the gardens near us. Our campus was filled with “Edible Landscapes” – small gardens where students could take what they needed. A few of my roommates took large tote bags and went to forage, bringing back kale, carrots, green beans, and green onions. From our own garden, we plucked more kale, cherry tomatoes, and all sorts of yummy herbs. One roommate brought back apples from the orchard in southeast Minnesota where she had worked over the summer, and together we threw together our Harvest Festival: Roasted kale with chickpeas and apples, roasted rosemary potatoes, sauteed carrot coins with green beans, apple crisp, and apple turnovers. Nearly all from the gardens at our fingertips.
Thanksgiving
We decided, as a house, to celebrate Thanksgiving together before many of us went home for the actual day. We began prepping a week prior, submitting an order to the Iowa Food Hub, a nonprofit that provides deliveries of local food from small to mid-sized farms. We picked up our order the following Saturday from one of their curb-side pickup locations. Back at home, we cheered and sang as we unpacked the goods – yams, brussels sprouts, zucchini, and our most treasured beet-purple potatoes (my first Thanksgiving with plum-tinted mashed potatoes!). Cooking and baking began promptly at noon, and seven hours later we sat down to eat, table set with scavenged dried leaves and pinecones and lit beeswax candles from our town’s local beekeeper. We marveled over the spell of our special kitchen. That night was all cranberry sauce, cornbread, marshmallow yam casserole, cranberry brussel sprout salad, rolls, zucchini brownies, purple potatoes, and pumpkin pie. And as we ate, we linked hands and felt connected to one another and to the food and to the farmer’s hands from which our meal was born.
Pickling Day
On the first Sunday of that December, it was finally Pickling Day!
For months I had been telling my roommates that I wanted to learn to pickle. Specifically, I wanted to make pickled asparagus, my dad’s favorite snack, to wrap up and give to him as a Christmas gift. So when my birthday came around that fall, I woke up to my very own pickling set, a gift from my very thoughtful roommate. She had assembled it from the bulk section at the Oneota Community Food Co-Op in town, including all the essential spices: peppercorn, mustard seed, allspice, coriander, dill seed, garlic heads, and bay leaves. The note tucked inside said, “Happy Birthday! Let’s pickle together someday.”
And finally that day was here. We woke up early on a Saturday for the occasion, and prepped the kitchen accordingly – laying out rows of sanitized mason jars, lining up the sieve, measuring out the vinegar and pickling salts. We began with slicing our vegetables of choice – asparagus, onions, and radishes. We packed them into the jars along with the spice mix of our choosing (I opted for a spicy, dill-heavy flavor range). And soon the jars were filled with the boiling vinegar mixes, and tucked away in the fridge to complete the quick-pickle process.
My dad told me that the pickled asparagus was his favorite gift that year.
I still have my pickling kit with me in Colorado. It sits in my kitchen, begging me to crack open the mason jars once more, to get the vinegar boiling again. One day I will – and perhaps I’ll teach my new roommates, in my new community, the key to a mean quick pickle. But for now, one project at a time – I’m determined to get this vegetable stock just right. As I tuck away each scrap of carrot shred, each flake of onion skin, I’ll think back to my old roommates in my old house in my old Driftless town, and the community we shared through orange yolk chatter and purple potato love. I’ll think back to the local food systems that tethered us all down together in that kitchen.
By Carson Schulte