Homemade tomato sauce

For the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with homemade tomato sauce. I'm talking about the tomato sauce in a can from, say, Hunt's or X Grocery Store brand. I've been trying to buy as little as possible from the grocery store since we have such an abundance of food at the farmers markets here, and it's still tomato season out in California! So far I've made 3 dinners with tomato sauce as the base: my own spaghetti sauce recipe (which I'll share sometime in the future!), stuffed zucchini, and last night I made homemade chili. They have all come out amazing! Using the fresh tomatoes as opposed to the canned tomato sauce really adds that extra flavor. Here's the method I've found that best makes a substitute for canned tomato sauce.

Peeling and De-Seeding the Tomatoes

For every 15 oz can of tomato sauce + 15 ounce can of diced tomatoes, use 6 large fresh tomatoes. Boil a large pot of water and have a bowl of ice water standing by. Once the water is boiling, place the tomatoes in for a minute or two until you see the skin starting to peel off. Using a slotted spoon, remove the tomatoes and dump them in the ice water. Let them cool for about a minute, then peel the skins off with your fingers. Cut off the tops of the tomatoes so you can see the seed chambers inside. Over a garbage can, squeeze the tomato so the seeds drip out. You can also use your fingers to scoop out the seeds as best you can.

Crushing and flavoring the tomatoes

Cut each tomato in half and place in a large bowl. Using a potato masher, crush the tomatoes. I also use my fingers (they are all covered in tomato goop at this point anyway) to crush them and then go to the masher. Mash until you have a good ratio of sauce to tomato chunks. Add salt, I'd say about two tsp.

Side note: One really cool thing about homemade tomato sauce is that you get to control the salt content. It will still taste great no matter how much salt you put in!

Keep mashing the tomatoes so that the salt dissolves and the consistency is thick but not too chunky. And there you go! Homemade tomato sauce.

It is a little labor intensive. Set aside about 20 minutes to make the sauce. Or, you can make a whole bunch at once and can it or freeze it. I'm going to experiment with canning soon, so I can make sure to have plenty of sauce to last us through the winter!

Forgive me, Mother Earth, for I have sinned...

...it has been almost 2 months since my last entry.

BUT I'M BACK! Most (if not all) of you who read this are my Fb friends, so you know that I've been busy moving to Oceanside, touring Italy, visiting family, and settling into our new home! It has been a crazy two months and I'm so happy to finally be living in one spot for a long time.

So, where to start? Ah, yes.

Italy was AMAZING! I'll spare you the play-by-play and talk about the most important (and relevant) details - the FOOD. The food was to die for. Unlike in the US, all of the reputable restaurants use local and seasonal ingredients (very often from their own garden), making the simplest things taste so fresh. One night, in Rome, I ordered a pasta with sauce that was literally just crushed stewed tomatoes with a little salt and pepper. INCREDIBLE. We also visited Cinque Terre (pronounced chinkway terray, meaning five lands), which are five little beach towns painted on the side of a cliff, connected by hiking trails. This place has the best seafood I have ever had in my life. Think, resort town with the touch of grandma's cooking. So much care goes into every dish; fishing boats are going in and out of the harbor all day, and hiking around the towns you can see gardens growing fresh tomatoes, basil, squash, grapes, and many more. In fact, Cinque Terre is where pesto was invented, so of course I ordered pesto over homemade gnocchi, and I almost died it was so good. It made me wonder why people even bother with the crap that they serve in restaurants here.

Another cool, steffstainble thing about Italy was their toilets. Ok seriously, hear me out. On many of the toilets there are two flush buttons; one releases a small amount of water and the other releases more (comparable to a normal toilet in America). So, um, if you need a smaller flush, you push the little button. And, let's say, it might take a bigger flush, you push the big button. How cool is that?

Anyway, Italy was incredible, but I'm so happy to be back in America, which truly is the greatest country on earth. We are loving the San Diego area. In fact, there is a farmers market somewhere in the county EVERY DAY here! I'm loving it! We've been able to buy grass-fed beef from a local farm, locally-made snacks, and even homemade vegan cheesecake on top of the normal fruits and veggies you normally find at a farmers market. It's been amazing.

I have lots of new recipes to share with you, along with many other thoughts about sustainability and fitness. Welcome back to Steffstainability!

Drugs are Bad, Mmmkay?

Today my little brother turned 21 years old.

For over six months now, I've played today over and over in my mind. Around midnight, I give him a call and of course he is already drunk. I wish him a happy birthday but I know I'll have to call him in the morning/afternoon because he won't remember. My parents might drive out to visit him and take him to a nice dinner and buy him his first legal drink. He and his beautiful girlfriend, and all of his friends, share a great day together, probably ending in something so typically him, like watching the sun set over the beach or staring at the stars twinkling in the night sky. But we will never know.

My little brother passed away on January 28, 2010 from a heroin overdose.

This is not supposed to be my personal blog. This blog is supposed to be about sustainability, about keeping healthy. But this lifestyle is so intertwined with my life nowadays it is impossible to separate this blog from my life. So, as my life goes, so does my blog.

Illegal drugs are not sustainable. Most of our illegal drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, meth, and heroin come from Mexico. This means quite a few things. First, like many of our "fresh" produce, these drugs have traveled thousands of miles, placing carbon footprints in the air, just so people can "escape" for a while. But more devastatingly (depending on who you ask), these drugs fund the drug war going on in Mexico. The money that you pay for your illegal drugs indirectly goes into the hands of the drug gangs fighting against each other in Mexico, killing innocent (and sometimes not-so-innocent, but no more deserving) people. Buying illegal drugs is environmentally and socially bad.

Not only that, most of the drugs I have listed literally alter your state of being. It actually changes the chemical balance in your body, so you are no longer who you once were. Trust me, I have seen it firsthand. Doing these drugs are bad for you body and your mind. For someone who cares so much about what I put into my body (and what others I care about put into theirs), I truly don't understand the reasoning behind consuming these products.

It's just not worth it. These illegal drugs can, more than likely, literally destroy who you are and take your family down with you. Your body is not what it was, your mind is not what it was, and the risk of putting your family through the pain can pull it apart. Even before my brother overdosed, my family had been through so much pain and strife trying to help him break away from this lifestyle. And we truly thought he had done it. Until one day, he left home just to buy some schoolbooks and he never came back.

Trying to make sense out of all of this, I've concluded that the only thing that can come of this is if it convinces other people to stay away from these horrid substances. My brother was a loving, caring person and I know that if he had realized the pain he was putting us all through, he would have never touched the stuff again. Please, learn from him. Don't wait until it's too late. Because he really died of an accident; it was just "one more time" of something he had done numerous times. But he either took too much, or got a bad batch, or some combination of the two, and because of this screw up, I'm sitting here with my family trying to push on, trying to fill this hole in our lives.

It's trivial and low-brow, but South Park really says it best when they say "Drugs are bad, mmkay?" There is literally nothing good that can come from it, whether environmentally, socially, or emotionally. It's just not worth it.

Rest in Peace, Mike, and happy birthday.

Sausageless Shrimp Gumbo

I love love LOVE Cajun food. The flavors are so rich and complex, but the dishes are generally very easy to make. One staple ingredient in many Cajun dishes is Andouille sausage, which can be very greasy, hard on the stomach, and not so great on the waistline. Which is why I love this next recipe. I got it from my dad, who absolutely loves to cook and from whom I probably got my dedication to cooking and flair for coming up with my own recipes. He loves spicy Cajun dishes, and he used to always make this one when I was growing up.

It's farmers market friendly and it's good for you, which makes a perfect recipe for Steffstainability! Enjoy!

Note: For more or less spiciness, play around with the amounts of red and white pepper. My dad had a half teaspoon of each in his recipes, but that's a little too spicy for me, so I decreased it to a quarter teaspoon.

Another note: This recipe requires a spice called "file", which is pronounced fee-lay (makes me think of my favorite TV show in my adolescent days, Boy Meets World... "Feenay! Fee-hee-hee-heenay!" Anyone??). It's sometimes hard to find, but it's almost absolutely necessary for gumbo. It compliments the taste of the seafood and acts as a thickener. If you can't find it, you can add okra to the gumbo instead; the juice from the okra will thicken the sauce. Hell, add okra anyway; it's not in this recipe but is often used in Cajun foods. It's super yummy and currently in season!

Ingredients:

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1/2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp white pepper

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp dried thyme

1 tsp dried oregano

1 crumbled bay leaf

1 onion, diced

2 or 3 celery stalks, chopped

1 green bell pepper, diced

3 Tbl file

1 Tbl tabasco sauce

1 clove minced garlic

1 cup tomato sauce

5 cups vegetable stock

1/2 lb imitation crab

1 lb shrimp

1 cup rice

You can use any flavor stock/broth you want, really. I like the extra kick of flavor that beef stock adds to it; I've tried vegetable and chicken as well, and they all taste great.

You have a couple options with the shrimp. Get fresh if you can, but frozen raw peeled shrimp also works.

Instructions

1. Combine cayenne pepper, paprika, salt, white pepper, black pepper, thyme, oregano, and bay leaf in a small bowl or container.

2. If your shrimp has the shells on them, deshell them, but save the shells in a saucepan. Add the vegetable/chicken/beef stock to the shells and bring to a boil, and simmer for about 10 minutes. If your shrimp do not have shells, skip this step.

3. In a medium or large soup pot over med-high heat, heat some vegetable oil. Cook onions, celery, bell pepper, file (or okra), tabasco sauce, and minced garlic for 6-8 minutes, stirring constantly. If you did use the file, you will have to start scraping the mixture off the bottom of the pot, especially if your pot is not nonstick. Don't worry though, just keep scraping.

4. Reduce heat to med-low and add tomato sauce and spice mixture. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring every now and then.

5. Strain the broth and shells over the soup pot, adding the broth to your mixture. If you skipped step 2, just add the broth to the soup pot.

6. Bring the gumbo to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 45 minutes.

7. Prepare white rice as per the instructions on the package.

8. After the 45 minutes, add the crab and shrimp to the gumbo and cook for about 10 minutes.

Spoon rice into soup bowls and cover with gumbo. Enjoy!!

Because one bad choice leads to another

You know that Nutrigrain commercial? The one where the girl on one side of the screen has a Nutrigrain bar with breakfast and then during the day makes smart, healthy choices, and the girl on the other side of the screen has a donut (I think) and ends up making unhealthy choices all day long? That has basically been my life for the past 2 weeks.

I'm not perfect. I make mistakes, and I get lazy. I do things, like, say I don't update my blog for two weeks. Sorry. I also skip days at the gym, stop cleaning the house, don't go grocery shopping, and consequently eat out for dinner. Ugh. I'm upset with myself for letting it get this far. I don't mean to get too personal on here, but I'm just letting little things in my life get me down. I want to be settled, for goodness sake, and make a run to the grocery store without having to go to Walmart. This place is sucking the life out of me, and I'm letting the one thing I truly believe in, a healthy lifestyle, be taken away from me just because I'm frustrated.

It all started last Monday. It was August 2, and I just didn't want to go to the commissary (the grocery store on a military base, for you non-military folk). It's a madhouse at the beginning of the month, and although I do my grocery shopping on Mondays, I decided to skip and go on Tuesday instead, when it would be calmer. And that turned into Wednesday, and then Thursday, which then turned into this Wednesday and I STILL haven't been grocery shopping, except a few quick Walmart trips.

As a result, we started eating out more. I ate out more in the past week than I'd like to tell you. Because of that, my energy level is dropping and I haven't been to the gym in 3 days. I stopped caring enough to write on here, because I had nothing to say.

It's SO easy to slip out of a healthy lifestyle, especially when the town around you supplies you with unhealthy choices everywhere you turn. It's so easy to order a pizza instead of cook a good, healthy meal. Next thing you know, you're pounding down sodas and sitting on your butt all day.

You have to fight back! Losing your focus happens to the best of us, but it's up to you to realize it and pull yourself back into it. You owe it to yourself to take care of your body. Once you do that, your well-being improves; these past two weeks, I've literally felt it slipping away along with my dwindling energy level. You realize that the time you spent on your butt waiting on that pizza could have been spent making yourself a healthy meal that probably tastes better (especially if you live in Lawton, home of the crappiest pizza on the planet, I'm sure).

So remember, it's not just a sales pitch. One bad choice really DOES lead to another. So put that donut down and grab a banana instead. Now, I must head to sleep, because I'm going to the gym in the morning.

Big News and a Swim Workout

I have been in limbo for almost a year now. No place I've lived in since I've been married has been permanent, nowhere seems like home. And I haven't even thought about applying for jobs anywhere because no job I would enjoy would only employ me for 6 months.

Limbo is drawing to a close. I have exactly 49 days until we leave Lawton and head to the land of milk and honey (as they called California in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath). I've been looking at houses online and suddenly I have the need to find a place that feels homey. But the daunting task that lies ahead of me of finding a job is looming. I can't be a housewife forever. I would go crazy, and if we live in the type of house I want, I would have to work to make ends meet. It's a little scary thinking about it. I mean, sure, I could be an "administrative assistant" with no problem, I did that all the way through college. But it's so BORING. I need to feel like I'm making a difference.

Teaching is out of the question for the next year. Even if there were social science teaching jobs in southern California, I would be getting there too late in the school year to teach. So what can I possibly do? An idea popped in my head when, ironically enough, I was on my way to the gym.

I should be a personal trainer! I love to exercise, I love to teach people, and I need to feel like I'm making a difference. It would be a great source for my blog and give me the chance to share more workouts with you! So I am currently on the hunt for a personal training certification course, and I think I've found one. I just need to buckle down and do it! I wanted to share it with all of you because I'm excited!

Now, I'm pretty sure I have shared with you my hatred of running. Let me reiterate. I. Hate. Running. Even after 20 minutes, I want more than anything to quit and even throw away my running shoes so I have an excuse to never do it again. But I push through it, because running is a great source of cardio.

I usually run about once or twice a week, because I find other ways to get cardio in without the dreaded run. After all, this blog is about getting fit WITHOUT torturing yourself. I want people to realize that working out can be fun, not torture. So I'm constantly seeking new ways to get people interested in working out. One of my favorites, particularly in the hot summer, is swimming. Swimming is great cardio work and it's great for toning too. It's low impact, so if you have shin splints or arthritis, you can still get a great workout in. I researched a few swim workouts so I'm not just running laps, and I came across a sprint workout I really fell in love with on active.com.

Warm-up: 500 Freestyle at your own pace

Get out of the pool and stretch your legs, arms, and shoulders

8 sets of 50 yards/meters at a slow/medium pace at 1 minute intervals. (Time yourself, when you finish your 50 yds, you have the remainder of the minute to rest)

8 sets of 50 yd/m at a medium/fast pace at 1 minute intervals

8 sets of 100 yd/m at a descending pace (Each set should be faster than the last, so start slow and speed up each set)

8 sets of 100 yd/m - 75 yd/m fast, 10 second rest, then 25 sprint

8 sets of 50 yd/m - 25 fast, 10 second rest, 25 sprint

Cool down: 300 yards

Now, I realize this is a lot. In fact, you have to work up to this workout. If you're not a really strong swimmer, it's nearly impossible to complete this workout full out the first time. I greatly modified this workout and added a bit more each time. My first time looked like this:

Warm-up: 300 yards

Stretch

4 sets of 50 yards at a slow/med pace at 1:15 intervals

4 sets of 50 yards at a med/fast pace at 1:15 intervals

4 sets of 50 yards at a descending pace

4 sets of 100 yards - 75 fast, 10 second rest, 25 sprint

4 sets of 50 yards - 25 fast, 10 second rest, 25 sprint

Cool down - 150 yards

Each week I did the workout, I added one set to each drill. So in 4 weeks you can do the full workout!

If you haven't been formally trained to swim, seek a lifeguard or swim instructor to learn the correct method of freestyle. It makes a HUGE difference. Doing freestyle correctly will help you swim more efficiently and get more out of your workout.

A Capitalist's Plea for Sustainable Food

I hate 24-hour network news. In fact, I hate most media outlets in general. I find them all so disgustingly dripping with partisanship it literally makes me sick to read/watch it. If this country comes crashing down, which I doubt but so many seem sure that we need to "take our country back" (from whom, I wonder?), I'm blaming it on the Glenn Becks and Keith Olbermanns.

I thought this was a blog about sustainability? I apologize for the digression, but I swear it ties into what I'm about to say. The one media outlet source I absolutely enjoy reading (but don't fully trust) is Fox News.

Just kidding. (that was for my father-in-law)

... is the Daily Beast. It's a conglomeration of bloggers and many of them are as fed up with partisanship in the media as I am. That is not to say that they aren't biased; one of the most important things I learned from my history education is that nothing is ever objective. But they are only moderately biased and I don't think they are pushing any political agenda on their readers. So today I was browsing the website and came across these two articles:

The 25 Worst Meals for Kids

40 Deadly Salads

Think your kids are safe if you order from the kids menu? Feeling like being healthy so you'll "just have a salad" when you are out for dinner? Think again. One problem about the expansion of sustainability is that businesses try to exploit the idea without actually following through. Think: BP's "Gas Friendly to Gas Free" slogan... yeah right. Be on the lookout for calorie-filled meals that are disguised as healthy!

Now, on to what I planned on writing about today before I had to share those articles.

I, like most Americans, am a capitalist. Now, in case you aren't like me and don't get excited when someone starts a theoretical discussion about economics, let me refresh your memory. People have been throwing around terms like "capitalist" "communist" and "socialist" in order to scare people about our economic climate. Since most people nowadays haven't taken an American civics course since 12th grade when they were probably daydreaming in the back of the classroom, the vast majority of the public doesn't really know what these mean anymore.

Capitalism - The form of economy (NOT government) in which ownership of companies is in the hands of the people. Like, Joe's Movie Theater is actually owned by Joe, and he makes the decisions for his company. Supply is determined by the demand of the consumer; if there is no demand for a product, the company will go out of business.

Socialism - The form of economy in which ownership of companies is in the hands of the government. Joe's Movie Theater is actually owned by the government, who pays Joe to manage the facility. But everything, from what is being shown at the theater, to how much popcorn is being sold, (supply and demand) is determined by the government.

Communism - is actually not an economic theory but a social theory, in which no one owns property, but is controlled by the community. Therefore, there are no social classes and everyone is equal. In fact, in true communism, there is no government at all.

Now that we have that boring stuff out of the way (which actually really excites me), let me get to my point. I am a capitalist. Private corporations and businesses have the right to determine their means of production and their products, and if the public doesn't like it, then their products aren't purchased and they go out of business. In a perfect world, that's how capitalism works.

But this isn't a perfect world, because corporations with less-than-ethical business practices and less-than-acceptable products make millions of dollars by "duping" their fellow Americans, or simply selling faulty products without realizing it. That's why we have things like the Food and Drug Administration; they prevent us from buying tainted meat or cereal with bugs in it.

However, there are many business practices, especially ones that go into our food, that are simply beyond the reach of the FDA. Like I said, I'm a capitalist. I don't want the government controlling every single aspect of how our food is made. First of all, there are always loopholes, no matter how hard the government tries. Second, my husband works for the government. I know exactly how screwed up bureaucracy is and how government regulation can just add pages and pages of paperwork (and we all know that isn't good for the environment!!).

But the problem remains. The big food corporations are trying to produce as much food as cheaply as possible. This means using pesticides that are harmful to the environment. This means packing chickens into an undersized, crowded room where disease spreads like wildfire. This means injecting chickens with hormones to make their breasts bigger while the rest of their body doesn't grow, making it impossible for them to have the strength to support themselves to take more than a few steps at a time. This means feeding animals cheap, massed-produced food, making them actually unhealthy. Animals standing ankle-deep in their own feces. Packing chickens and pigs into cages where they don't even have enough room to stand up and turn around. Having cows, who instinctually are supposed to be eating and living in grass, living in dirt-covered, barren dairies eating mass-produced corn. (All of this information comes from the film Food, Inc.) Going off on a quick tangent, mass-produced corn itself goes against the laws of capitalism. Corn is subsidized by the government; farmers are paid by the government to cheaply produce corn. Therefore, the price of corn is not determined by the market, as it should in a capitalist economy. The price of corn is determined by how much the government is willing to pay for it. By buying meat that comes from an animal who was fed mass-produced corn, you are supporting government subsidies and going against the laws of capitalism.

And it's not just the animals who are getting screwed here. The slaughterhouses are dirty and unsafe. Employees are underpaid to work in unsatisfactory conditions. The farmers who care for the animals we eat are underpaid from the corporations. In fact, according to Food, Inc., the average chicken farmer gets paid $17,000 a year to raise the chickens, but the upkeep and equipment to do so costs much more than that, which the farmers must pay out of pocket. Of course, the corporations don't tell them this before they sign their contract with them. And they make millions of dollars off of this.

This trickles all the way down to us, the consumer. Because of the dirty conditions in the slaughterhouses, it's very easy for tainted meat to reach the general public. Even if the meat isn't tainted, it's packed with hormones and steroids that get into our bodies, and according to some studies, can give us cancer. (See here) The antibiotics given to the animals (because they live in such close quarters) are still present when we buy the meat. Over time, the animals become resistant to the antibiotics, and since only traces of it are left in the food we eat, we become resistant as well. So when we get sick, the antibiotics prescribed to us won't work anymore (See PBS).

And to go against the basis of capitalism, we are paying for a product that isn't good! It doesn't even taste good. Try eating fresh, and I mean FRESH, meat instead of what you buy at the store. It's not just meat, either. A freshly-picked strawberry tastes eons better than the ones you buy at the store. And tomatoes? Go to your local farmers market and buy a fresh tomato. They are in season. Then go to the grocery store and buy a tomato. Eat them side by side. NO COMPARISON. You know why? Because tomatoes you buy in the store are picked when they are green and then injected with chemicals to ripen (See here). Even fresh onions taste better than store-bought. And the chemical-free, organic produce? It tastes even better.

My point is that our food production system goes agains the laws of capitalism. We are buying a substandard product that is based off of unethical business practices. Any true believer in capitalism should be against this. Does this mean the government should get involved? Honestly, I don't fully know the answer to that. The government is already involved, conservatives won't agree to more government regulation, and recently any kind of government "reform" has been ineffective, only creating hoops and red tape without actually getting to the root of the problem. But I also think that these businesses shouldn't be allowed to do what they are doing.

So what do we do? Spread the word! One of the reasons capitalism fails here is because people aren't educated on how their food is produced, so how could they know not to buy bad food? The capitalist way to solve this is to not buy the food yourself, and tell others not to buy the food as well. Encourage your friends and family to go to the farmers market and buy products that are in season. Spread the word about my blog (Did I just shamelessly advertise? Maybe.). Don't buy meat from mass-produced meat corporations such as Tyson or Perdue. I'm in the process of compiling a list of unethical meat producers, and a list of ethical ones.

I know for a fact that Harvestland products are organic. You can buy them at Walmart. *gasp* I know. Walmart doesn't seem to fit into the picture of sustainability. But it actually really does. They sell quite a few sustainable, organic products that frequent my shelves and fridge. Harvestland chicken are cage-free, steroid-free, and humanely raised. They also sell Stonyfield organic yogurt. Be on the lookout for more organic, safe, sustainable food producers. I'll be posting a list soon.

We can change this without, as I say, being a complete and total hippie. Use word of mouth, instead of the hand of the government, to fix this problem. It's problems like this one that make people search for alternatives to capitalism, which, in my opinion, are dangerous to our freedoms. Don't give people that chance. Change in a capitalist society has to come from the consumer. That's you and me. It's up to us to change this.