Basket Jan. 21, 2010 – Fresh rice, finally!

Ai Seud threshing the rice for your basket.

This week has been all about rice. So, appropriately, and finally (!!), we bring you fresh-milled rice from Fair Earth Farm. We can thank a gang of friends for the harvest, and Rainbow Farm for the milling. As for the rest of the basket, we can again thank our Dara-ang friends in Chiang Dao for the peanuts, roasted by Ah Choo. The greens and eggs came off the farm, in great part due to the following: Ai Seud’s diligence and attention, Sarah and Ah Chu’s industry, Les’ inspiration and Mother Earth’s forbearance and grace.

This week:

• Brown rice
• Duck eggs
• Roasted peanuts
• Rat-tail radish
• Mustard greens
• Malabar spinash

The rice was harvested and threshed by Les, Rick, Lora, Phil, Dawn and the farm crew in late November. Present and helpful from planting through reaping and threshing were Dan – camera in one hand and sickle in the other – and Justin, trusty purveyor of the Afro-Brasiliero funkadelic sounds. Also treading gently through the mud on that fine planting day in long-ago August were Sachiko, Ay, Sabrina, Tip (with child) and Tim, as well as the Potter family, including 4-year-old Callie, and … oh, I’m bound to forget someone, with apologies.

I say this week has been all about rice because it’s been a key topic of conversation and activity. Ai Seud’s been busy rebuilding the paddy dykes so we can get planting again. The neighbors are flooding and plowing and broadcasting poisons and getting ready to grow the dry season crop. We visited a wonderful farmer-innovator Kru Pratum and interviewed her about her integrated rice system. And Les was over with Dan to brainstorm ways to diversify the paddy, including the potential to use the lower and wetter area as a fish-rearing zone during and between rice planting seasons. And I just picked up two heavy sacks of freshly milled rice from the mill.

Work, travel and holidays got in the way of milling this fine stuff so lovingly produced by the good people mentioned above. It’s not like I can drop by the mill down the road and give them my business. Most mills in these mad modern times insist upon scraping the nutrients off the rice – the bran and germ – and degrading the fine grain into white rice, the Thai equivalent of Wonderbread. We’re lucky to know Ajarn Tawan from Rainbow Farm, who can mill nutritious brown rice for a trifling fee. More about that master organic riceman in a future blog.

The rice this week is a blend of two kinds of rice: white mountain and red jasmine. The first is our second harvest from a sack of seed obtained by the Karen people of the Mae Jaem valley. The seed for the red stuff we got from Rainbow Farm, a kind of trendy boutique rice that’s supposed to be quite good for you. The cutting edge of organic rice production blends a variety of strains in one pot, sometimes including beans and herbs. This is our first (intentional) attempt at it.

It’s funny that red rice has become trendy, because it was reportedly the staple rice in the old days. Only the elite ate polished white rice, before trade and fashion caused white rice to spread across the globe. Now socially conscious organic farmers are reviving it for both its nutritional value and its symbolic value as an indigenous food of the people. (A note on the colors of rice: “brown” rice is any kind of rice that undergoes a limited milling process that retains the nutritious bran and germ of the rice. “White” rice is any kind of rice that is further milled and “polished” so as to become shiny and white – and nutritionally depleted. Beautiful but empty, white rice is a fitting symbol of the modern consumer society.)

An article on the tourism authority’s website has this to say about rice and nutrition. Organic rice advocates make similar claims. We’re still learning, but it’d be nice to think some of it was true.  Comments are welcome on the veracity of these claims.

“Khao Hom Mali (jasmine rice) is rich in vitamins essential to mental and physical well-being, including vitamins A, B, D, E and K, plus minerals, trace elements and fatty acids to assist in oxidation of body tissue and cell repair. It’s a particularly reliable source of vitamin B, which has a calming and recuperative influence. Stressed-out westerners increasingly take B supplements, many branded specifically for hyper-busy people like executives. So could it be that the famously unhurried Thai sabai sensibility is partly down to the staple diet?”

We could go on about rice, but let’s talk about peanuts. The good people of Pang Daeng village an hour or so away in Chiang Dao District grew the tasty ground nuts you’ll find in your basket. As discussed in earlier blogs about the ethnic Dara-ang of the area and their peanuts, this stuff isn’t really organic. The land was sprayed with herbicides before the peanuts were planted. But the really bad stuff – toxic insecticides and such – weren’t used, so you’re better off eating these goobers than spinning the wheel and buying peanuts from “the market.” (Ignorance is bliss only as long as you stay ignorant.)

I became interested in this village about eight years ago after becoming a friend of Rick Burnett and the good people of the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP). The Dara-ang (or Palaunge) are fairly recent arrivals from Burma, having settled in Thailand in the early 1980s. Being the last large ethnic group to cross the mountains from the strife and human-rights crimes of the Burma Army, they couldn’t be choosy about where they settled. In the contested terrain of northern Thailand, shifting cultivation was not an option, but neither was investing money in strawberries or passion fruit or something. UHDP has worked with the Dara-ang for more than a decade to understand their predicament and help them develop sustainable alternatives. One of these is agroforestry, and another is sustainable upland farming.

In March in northern Thailand, the sky is a thick brown soup from all the burning: the burning forests, fields, vacant lots, backyards, roadsides, exhaust pipes, everything. The city dweller burning a pile of leaves in his yard shakes his head and mutters about the “hilltribes burning the forests,” but just about everyone is guilty of contributing to the lung trauma of Chiang Mai in March.

The deciduous forests in Chiang Dao are yellow smoky ghosts of their rainy-season verdant selves. You can stand at the base of the Great Mountain – Thailand’s third highest peak – and have no idea that you’re standing next to a massive green monolith, the smoke is so thick. The once-green cornfields cloaking the foothills of the district are gray-black hellscapes; the yellow and degraded bamboo groves are only so much easier on the sore and burning eyes.

This nightmare scene (sorry tourism authority for the bad pub!) makes the Pang Daeng initiatives all the more spectacular. You walk through their cool green agroforests, ducking under fan palm fronds and dodging the thorny tendrils of the evergreen rattan clumps. Banana groves, giant bamboo thickets and fruiting mango trees provide shade, food and relief from the furnace of the Hot Dry season. The upland fields aren’t exactly verdant, not having seen rain in at least five months, but they haven’t been burnt, and the pineapple-studded contour strips are starting to flower. The contrast with the denuded adjacent cornfields couldn’t be more stark. We’re not completely sure what’s going on there (learning about it is part of the rational of this project) but one thing is for sure, the place is a nice break from the fire demons of March.

Eating these peanuts isn’t going to save the world or the Dara-ang, but if enough of us ate them, and paid a fair price for them, and gave the people a strong message that their forbearance is appreciated, and that their denial of the pesticide peddler’s dream-weaving is not in vain, then maybe our “food votes” would make a difference. Anyway, they taste pretty good, don’t they?

The ducks continue to produce eggs. Before the neighbors prepared their paddies to broadcast rice seeds – and broadcast snail killer – and we had to lock up the ducks in a small pond corner of the farm, they had been going absolutely bananas in the paddy for the last month or so. I’ve never seen animals work so hard. Work, you ask? They’re just paddling about, nosing around for small snails and weeds and stuff to eat, muddying the water and pooping in the process. Where’s the work? Ahh, then you haven’t read Power of Duck, and you should. These ducks produce tasty eggs, but they’re also trusty farm workers. Learn more about ducks and rice here and here and here.

The three types of greens are from the canal-side beds on the other side of the paddy from the house. These beds are becoming really productive, thanks to the ideas and work of many people. I’ll write about those another time, but it’s time for bed. Oh, don’t forget to put the roots of the greens in a bowl of water right away to keep them fresh until you can eat them.

Before sleep, however, I should convey Sarah’s suggested ways to prepare the greens. She said that the rat-tailed radish can be prepared Western style just as you would fry up beans, with a bit of butter and salt. Or they can be stir fried Thai-style with salt, oil, garlic and some white soy sauce (see-eeou khao). This is true also for the mustard and Malabar spinach. The mustard also can be boiled as a soup with salt, oil and pork ribs or tofu.

Please give it a try and then comment on this blog whether it worked or not, or recommend an alternative recipe. I tend to just eat the stuff raw with balls of sticky rice and red-eye chili paste, and shots of sorghum moonshine, but that’s just me. Not recommended for the faint of heart or tongue.