About twice a year, we make the trek to Honeyville grain's retail store in Brigham City. It's a tiny little store in the front part of a warehouse-style strip mall. And it's a little...unusual. Although it seems nearly normal to us now.
When you walk into the store, the first thing you notice is that the carts are not normal shopping carts. They are more like something you would find at your local home improvement warehouse. The second thing you notice is that everything comes in big---really big--- packages! 50 pounds is the standard bag size for most things. Some things, like pasta, can be bought 15 or 25 pounds at a time, but all the grains and flours come in somewhat overwhelming quantities. They also have freeze-dried foodstuffs, like asparagus (wonderful!) or mushrooms (eh.) or berries (how did I ever get along without these!). And all in vast quantities designed for... You guessed it... Mormon food storage.
So this is interesting to me, because there are two ways of thinking about food storage. One is to think that you are going to buy a year's worth of food, packaged to remain shelf stable for 25 years, and then go ahead and buy food like the rest of the population. The second way of thinking about it is that you have a year's worth of inventory, and you are going to store the things you use all the time, and then use them until they are gone. All the time, you are rotating stock, keeping the shelves full. While we are neither Mormon, nor in possession of a year's supply of food, what we have figured out is that we can take advantage of the whole infrastructure, to lower our food costs, improve our diets, and help support the local economy.
So typical purchases at Honeyville include:
50 pounds of all purpose white flour.
50 pounds of hard red wheat
50 pounds of soft white wheat
25 pounds of sugar
10-15 pounds of dried pasta
2-3 very large cans of dried berries
2-3 very large cans of dried vegetables
10 pounds of popping corn
5-10 pounds of dried beans
5 pounds of sea salt
And 50 pound of oats...
Which brings me to oats. I keep John in granola, at a fraction of the cost of box cereal, keep myself in baked or boiled oatmeal, keep us both in oatmeal cookies, and generally work my way through 50 pounds of oats, 6 cups at a time. This year, because I was so busy, I didn't keep up, and find myself with about half a bag left, and it's just about time for our periodic visit. So of course, I started looking around for things to do with oats. And as I was thinking about it, I realized there's an added bonus to thinking about this. Not only are oats a whole grain, and not only are they packed with vitamins like niacin, which we should probably all eat more of, but they also have several other wonderful advantages, if you are pondering resilience.
First, they grow practically anywhere, dry, wet, hot, cold, whatever. They are the most indestructible of common grains. Second, they contain a natural preservative, so they can just be rolled and stored, unlike wheat, which goes rancid if you try that. THAT means they are the easiest grain to harvest and store in small quantities. Third, they have collateral benefits (unlike corn), in that oat straw makes great bedding for animals, such as...let me think...chickens and horses! Fourth, people, horses, chickens, and dogs can all eat oats straight off the stalk, making them good for all the creatures on a small farm.
Taking the obvious next step, I went looking for other things to make from oats (because if there was any grain that we had any hope of figuring out how to grow, it would be oats!). And I find very little. Which is interesting. Because oats might not have much gluten, (so won't make good bread), but neither does rice! And it's easy to find great rice recipes. I did find a recipe for an oat pilaf, that turned out to be delicious. So now I am both on the hunt for oat recipes, and also shifting into major experimentation mode. It's time to start treating cooking like it's research. What to do with a low-gluten starchy whole grains? well, we'll find out! But I've got some ideas I'm working on... If it makes pilaf, it will make ris-oat-o. Get it? Risotto, ris-oat-o? Ha! I should do stand-up!
No comments:
Post a Comment