"hippies" news and stories

Awhile back I acquired a cookbook from my mom. It's one leftover from her hippie days and was appropriately titled, "Country Commune Cooking." It was written by a woman named Lucy Horton, who spent five months in 1971 hitchhiking around the country, visiting communes and collecting recipes. It's interesting as much for the stories she tells about the places she visited and the people she met as it is for the recipes she prints.

One of the things I find interesting about this book is it's emphasis on organic foods. I tend to think of the organic movement as something fairly recent, but according to Lucy, there were quite a few people back in the early seventies who were committed to eating whole, organic foods.

The majority of the recipes in this book are a bit dated, but a few still jump out at me as worth trying. After the jump you'll find a recipe for Curried Squash and Chickpeas that seems, at least to me, to be the perfect dish for this time of year. I imagine that it would be particularly good over a scoop of warm brown rice.

Back in the early 1970's, my mom had a friend named Melinda who had a small business making homemade granola. One day, on her way home from shopping for several weeks worth of ingredients in her VW Beetle, she was rear ended. She was not hurt, but the force of the impact sent oats, nuts, raisins, oil and honey flying all over the interior of the car. Even after the body work was completed, the car was never the same. She stopped making granola sometime soon after that. Customers all over the Bay Area mourned her choice, as it was very, very good granola. Thankfully, before she closed up shop, she shared the recipe with a few fortunate people. I thank my lucky stars that my mom happened to be among that number.

This much-coveted recipe is after the jump. It is delicious eaten with yogurt, given away as gifts and eaten as a before-bed snack, right out of the jar or bag in which you are storing it.

photo by Marisa McClellan