Biodome rice pudding

Here's my attempt at artfully photographing food on my kitchen table

In my overflowing shelf of cookbooks, I have one written by one of the inhabitants of the Biosphere 2 experiment while it was going on--Eating In: From the Field to the Kitchen in Biosphere 2 by Sally Silverstone. Planning what I would grow in a closed off ecosystem to feed myself is one of my favourite thought experiments (hey, I’ve got to be ready if the opportunity to run off and live in a dome on another world ever comes up).

The book was a lucky find in a used bookstore a few years ago (I no longer allow myself to look at used cookbooks because I don’t have the space to store the stack that would come home with me). The food they were growing in Biosphere 2 at the time had a tropical bent--except for beets, but I tested out their beet soup a few years back with my own beets (and it was magenta!).

With full access to a supermarket and even specialty supermarkets in my urban area, I find it easy to forget that somethings, beyond exotic spices, are really difficult to produce. For example, I can grow a lot of calories in my urban garden, but those calories won’t include much fat. Sunflower and pumpkin seeds are the primary sources of fat that I can easily grow (I have a number of hazelnut trees, but they aren’t producing yet). None of these options creates a reasonable cooking oil. I could grow canola or mustard for oil, but it probably wouldn’t be worth my effort considering the amount of space I could devote to them.

The other tough one to grow is a sweetener. I can and have successfully grown a stevia, but it imparts a flavour that doesn’t go with everything. I do grow a lot of different berries, but most of those get eaten right off the plant. Bees would be an option if I had a bit more space. 

Since I’m going to try to grow rice in my greenhouse this year, I decided to try out the banana sweetened rice pudding (someday, when I have a greenhouse more sealed off from the elements, I’ll attempt to grow banana). I made a raspberry sauce for the top which was the only part actually produced from my garden. All and all it was tasty--not overly sweet, but it still felt like a desert.