Enjoy!

Track performers:
1. Anna Zeide
2. Steel Wagstaff
3. Ben Slatky (Hypatian)
4. Justin Horn
5. Noah Balgooyen (Hypatian)
6. Kevin Gibbons (Hypatian)

Big thanks to Sarah for cleaning up the recordings and posting them on SoundCloud!

1. Accept the constraints of the genre. You are making inexpensive vegetarian food in quantity, within the context of a co-op community and economy. The job is a large cog in the machineries of our food buying (and eating) system, and our organized socializing. Your choices and practices affect the work of other members who buy the food, cook on other nights, clean up after dinner, clean the pantry and fridge, deep clean the kitchen, and put away the dishes. You can have a significant impact on the food budget. You certainly have a large effect on house morale, and perhaps even our health and productivity. The points below basically spell out what the co-op cooking genre is all about.
2. Make enough food. Assume the entire house will attend dinner, plus food coop-ers and guests. Often that won’t actually happen, but sometimes it will. After everyone eats (including stragglers) and the post person is putting away the food, are there leftovers from every part of the meal? If not, then you didn’t make enough.
3. Be punctual. Others plan their schedules around dinner. Make sure that dinner is served on time. Make sure that dinner time is advertised correctly, and stick to the same time every week.
4. Make edibles from inedibles. Some items in the fridge and pantry are ready-to-eat (e.g., fruit, bread), and others can be whipped up into a meal in just a couple minutes (e.g., eggs). Using such ingredients, you really don’t increase the quantity of edible food in the house, since those things were edible to begin with—or almost. (Regarding fruit in particular, almost anything you could make from it would be less accessible and convenient than the raw ingredient, since fruit is already pre-packaged and ready to go.) On the other hand, making edible food from dried grains and legumes or from vegetables that require significant processing increases the supply of edibles, which should be your main concern.
5. Include protein. Beans, lentils, garbanzos, peas, dhal (purées, salads, patties, balls, loaves, soup, stew), tofu (curry, baked), tvp (chili, sloppy-Joe), nuts (salads, dressings), seitan (curry, kebabs, stew).
6. Prevent spoilage. Prioritize the use of ingredients (especially produce) that are old or going bad. Cut off the bad parts, use the good parts. In a whiny voice: “But I wanted to make such and such.” Too bad. What you will cook is often largely determined by what needs using.
7. Keep costs down. Familiarize yourself with the cost of ingredients and weigh those costs against other factors such as health, variety, tastiness, and convenience, as well as the other considerations outlined in this document.
8. Avoid making extra work for others. Rinse and re-use bowls and pots as you work. Soak anything that may prove hard to clean. Don’t burn anything. There is rarely reason to use more than one knife and cutting board.

Produced by Amanda Werhane and Jill Hopke, former Hypatians.

We collected the stuff in our dining room, but it overflowed, spilling out into the corridor.

…masonry and rubble (?); mouse-infested and tattered luggage; couches from the street side; used Band-Aids and balls of tape; timeworn lamp fixtures — no shades; relics of people’s lives circa the early/mid ’90s — pink hair dryers, Aqua Net aerosol hair spray, baseball cards, a stepping machine, Thigh Master set.  Punk-O-Rama I and II CDs.  Et cetera.  And though it was interesting to rummage through this, we had to let it go.  The clutter rendered the space nearly unusable.

All the attic stuff piled into our living room and out into the hallway

Floor plan layout - please write your name legibly

Initially we started with a plan of how we were going to organize the attic space.  We decided on a floor plan where each of our 12 rooms would be allotted a single space, all of equal size, with the addition of two “spillover” spaces for extra storage — perhaps for a guest or a sub-leaser.  Those plans were drawn to scale after much measuring, but were lost in a tragic and horrible Thigh Master accident.

Attic maestro, Casey Helgeson, displays his art via sick rhymes (click here)

Welcome to the attic! How inviting!

Once the drawings were finalized, a small group of co-opers were assigned to mark the individual spaces with masking tape.  Afterwards, residents were given two weeks to move all of their belongings to their own individual spaces.  They also had to remove things from their spaces that did not belong to them (see the first paragraph).  If contact info could be found on boxes or items, those people were contacted.  If not, it was brought to our living room to be picked through.  Bringing these things downstairs may have been the biggest effort of the entire project.  I estimate that 90% of what was initially up there was not property of current residents and current residents are really not fans of OPP.

Once everything was in place, two people swept and mopped the attic floor and then proceeded to permanently mark the spaces with white paint using a 4″ paint roller.

Each spot gets a letter

St. Vinny’s came by four times to pick up all of the clothes, furniture, and books.  A lot of the broken furniture was put on the curbside, most of which was picked through by scrappers within hours.  Were they lurking in the bushes waiting for this moment to arrive?

The project is now complete!  We worked hard, using 35-40 total man hours, spread out over a month.  It’s very satisfying knowing that a system was created that will only (hopefully) encourage future organization and clutter control.

Space begging to be used to store things. Notice the wide walkway.

Anything yes people can store!

Plz store your stuff here

Varieties of plum tomatoes are recommended for the oven-dried tomatoes because they are meatier and not too soft for the drying. The drying takes 6 hours in the oven at 200°F, so if you are preparing dried tomatoes and sauce, start with the drying recipe first.

Oven-dried Tomatoes

Ingredients: Tomatoes, lots of salt, pure olive oil
Equipment: Large baking sheet(s), glass jars

1. Start by cutting off the tops and cutting the tomatoes lengthwise. Use as many tomatoes as you can manage. A large crate looks pretty imposing, but they will shrink A LOT.
2. Use your hands to take out the seeds and the juices from the halves. You can put the juice and seeds into a bowl to be used later in the sauce, or you can strain it and have a delicious tomato water drink.
3. Pre-heat the oven to 200°F and line a large baking sheet (or two or three) with a full layer of salt (don’t be stingy). This salt will absorb the moisture and accelerate the drying process.
4. Place the tomato halves on the salted baking sheets, skin side down and place them in the oven.
5. Let them sit in the oven for about 6 hours. They will look and feel dry and leathery when they are ready to be canned. While they are drying, clean and dry your jars and lids thoroughly.
6. After 6 hours, take out the tomatoes and place them in the jars. Don’t push them in too tight because you do not want to trap air or moisture inside. You can tap the jars on a countertop to get them to settle in place.
7. Fill the jars with olive oil. Make sure that the oil completely covers the tomatoes. You may want check on your jars after you have let them sit for a bit to see if the level of oil has gone down as air bubbles have escaped. [Note: Don't splurge on the olive oil; just use pure olive oil or a reasonably priced extra virgin.]
8. Keep the jars in the fridge and ration them over the next 6 months. Our house is looking forward to using them in fresh pastas, on homemade bread, or with a nice omlette.

Tomato Butter Sauce and Simple Spicy Tomato Sauce

Ingredients: Tomatoes, salt, butter or olive oil, whole peeled onion(s), favorite spices (bay leaves, whole hot peppers)
Equipment: Large pots, colander, potato masher or food processor, freezer-safe storage containers

I can’t describe the tomato butter sauce better than Smitten Kitchen or Salt & Fat, but then again…it is not very complicated. All you need are tomatoes, whole peeled onions, butter or olive oil, salt (I used some of the salt left over from the drying), and whatever you would like to spice the sauce with. I just used bay leaves and a selection of fresh hot peppers. Here are the simple steps:

1. Skin the tomatoes. Get a large pot of water to a rolling boil, add the tomatoes carefully (I always splash myself with the water, so I recommend covering your hands and arms), heat for 1-2 minutes, scoop them out into a bowl, transfer to a colander, and let air dry or spray with cool water in the sink. When they are cool enough to touch, remove the skins (and stems, if necessary) and place the skinless tomatoes into a large pot or bowl.
2. Mash them up. You can use your bare hands, a potato masher, a food processor, or whatever large implement does the trick. You can leave the consistency a bit chunky or puree them thoroughly, depending on your tastes.
3. Cook 45 minutes to 1 hour. Add all the ingredients together, bring to a boil on medium heat,simmer on low, and stir occasionally until you get the taste and consistency that you want. You can leave the onions whole or cut them in half. For the tomato butter sauce I added the bay leaves to turn down the sweetness of the tomatoes just a notch or two. For the spicy variety, I added a variety of whole hot peppers and a generous amount of olive oil.
4. Remove onions and other large ingredients. Leaving the onions whole or in halves allows you to get the sweetness and sharpness of the onions, while maintaining the simple texture of the tomato sauce. Removing the peppers allows you to keep the complementary hint of hotness that they have infused without overpowering the tomatoes. The leftover onions and peppers taste great. I chopped up these ingredients and threw them over a fresh bowl of pasta, herbs, and olive oil.
5. Let cool and pour into freezer-safe containers. The stronger the seal the better.
6. Ration. It may be difficult to make the sauce last throughout the winter, so you may want to set rules to prevent your housemates (and yourself) from eating it all too soon. Unless you have a deep freezer, make sure to finish your sauce within 6 months.

And there you have it! 50lbs. of tomatoes prepared for the long winter ahead.