...thrice shy

fish lard and other delicacies

2012-01-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

Now that we’ve had time to become hungry again, and curious, and winter is now perceptible, kitchen warmth may be the call of the day, and a few stories might be told around the table.

...A Valuable Fat:
I worried all the time I was melting some of my freshly rendered lard to fry up some calamari that I was wasting it. It’s very rare, you see, if not impossible, to find lard rendered down from hogs that have been raised correctly. And even though it’s fairly easy to render it yourself after you find the right fat, it’s an uncertain process. I’d been out of lard for six or so months until I found good fat at Pine Woods Farm.
So I was being stingy and agonizing over the depth of the lard I was allotting the calamari, and then I reminded myself that I wasn’t wasting it, I was using it for what it was made for! All physical things get used up eventually, and then you start over. Use it or lose it, Honey.

The calamari was very good, but then what did I do but pour that used lard through a sieve into a plastic container which I labeled ‘Fish Lard.’

Have you ever heard of anything more disgusting? I mean hell will have frozen over by the time I dig into the bottom of the freezer to rescue that little capsule of ‘fish lard’ because I need it to... What? Make a potion? What in god’s name would I use it for?

This is the way that old people get a bad name. Packaging up something called Fish Lard for their progeny to discover after they are gone.

**Readers of Twice Bitten wrote with various suggestions. Of course, one said, you could fry some more fish in it -- which I think I will do tonight. Also use it instead of butter in fish chowder. Thanks, Readers!

...Weird Recipes:
Those are the best kind, don’t you think? This one is a cookie filling, said to be delicious, that consists of 1 small jar of grape jelly, 2 cans of chick peas, 1/2 quart of wine, 1 pound of chopped walnuts, 1 grated orange, 1 large Hershey bar, and 3 cups of sugar. You mash the chick peas and boil everything else together. I couldn’t find how they got put back together, and I couldn’t figure out if you were supposed to drink the wine or boil it up, so I didn’t make it. If any reader is weird enough to try it, let me know the result.

**Readers again came to the rescue -- apparently this is an old Italian family favorite, made for holidays.

...Superb Popovers:
I made these for Christmas dinner for the first time and baked them off at a friend’s house. They were light and tall-hatted and crispy on the out, eggy within, but I couldn’t find the recipe this time. Luckily my friends had found it and stuck it on their fridge. It was called Marlene’s Yorkshire Pudding and it was from Michael Ruhlman’s blog. Now, what is interesting – and I think probably effective – is that you mix this batter a couple hours before baking. Now if that’s not convenient on a busy day I don’t know what is. You could certainly whip these up in the morning and bake them off at 4 for appetizers. Excuse me while I do that right now!

Popovers, (or Yorkshire Pudding)
•    1 cup/5 ounces all purpose flour *
•    1 teaspoon mustard powder (I omitted this)
•    4 or 5 large eggs, enough to make 1 cup
•    1 cup/8 ounces whole milk
•    6 teaspoons lard or beef fat drippings (or try coconut oil if you are not roasting a meat)
Whisk the flour and mustard powder together into a mixing bowl. Add the eggs and milk and blend on high speed with a mixer until fully incorporated. Let the batter rest for 2 hours (at least) at room temperature, stirring it up now and then.
When ready to bake, first, pour a bit of fat into each cup of a popover pan or of each muffin cup. Place the pan on a baking sheet and slide it into the oven to heat the oil while the oven comes up to temp 475°. When it’s ready, stir the batter and pour it into the pans until each cup is 3/4 full.
Put the pan in the oven. From this point on, do not open the oven door. It helps if you have a glass door on your oven so you can watch them rise and brown, but I don’t. We’ll see how that works out.
Bake for 10 minutes, reduce the temperature to 450° and continue baking until the popovers are puffed and golden brown, 13 to 20 minutes. Serve immediately.
Yield: 6 popovers of 12 small muffins; you can also bake it in 9×13-inch baking dish with some beef drippings in the bottom and call it Yorkshire Pudding.
*I mistakenly called for 10 ounces of flour in Twice Bitten, the same amount I called for in the scones, below, even though the scones called for 2 cups flour and the popovers only one. A sharp-eyed reader caught that error, so I made the popovers yet once more, with only 4 ounces of flour. They came out pretty much the same as the 10 ounce popovers, except possibly more delicate. Both highly edible.

...Current Favored Salad:
This is fresh like spring. So sprightly with lemon. So flavorful with... Kale.

Massaged Kale Salad

1 bunch of kale from the farmers’ market. Tear it off the stems into a large bowl. I don’t think you want the stems in the salad, although they’re good. Use them as dippers for a nice spread.
Add to the torn up kale: a very thinly sliced clove of garlic; a sprinkling of salt and pepper; the juice of 1 lemon; the zest of 1 lemon; about a tablespoon of Worcestershire; several chopped anchovies (if you like); a few glugs of olive oil; a heaping tablespoon of Roquefort, Stilton, Gorgonzola, or other blue-veined cheese, pinched into chunks.
With your (spic and span) hands toss these ingredients together, squeezing handfuls, rubbing them together, until every leaf is coated and becoming if not limp then at least manageable. Toss some more. Taste for salt and correct seasonings.

**I met a reader on the evening of the day this was published in the Rutland Herald, and he said, "In this weather (it was sleeting and slippery, do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to drive into town to get some kale to make that salad. It sounds so healthy!"

... Much ado about Garnishes:
What you put on top – like a bit of parm and olive oil on most soups – can really make the dish. I like to serve that kale salad with sliced hard boiled eggs on the side, and a few sliced almonds and pumpkin seeds that have been crisped in butter over the top. The latter are a wonderful garnish on almost anything.

As are a few raisins that have been plumped in port, Madeira, or sherry. I keep a small dish of raisins macerating in a flavorful alcoholic liquid on the counter for use in many dishes. A sherried raisin is a nice cook’s snack, too.

Too, I like the cascobel pepper salsa that I’ve mentioned several times as a garnish for many dishes.

And just lately I found a new favorite – Spicy Fenugreek Sauce – It’s from Flatbreads & Flavors by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, a travel/food book, a collection of breads and their accompaniments from exotic and mostly third-world countries.

My jar of the hard little fenugreek seeds dates from the mid-‘70s. I have never known what to do with them. Grind them up, said Naomi – a quarter cup of them (they are beans, not herbs, legumes in other words) and mix them with a cup of boiling water and let them sit for 3 hours. In this beginning mass they are terribly bitter but give off that sweet aroma that personifies Indian cooking. When they have soaked into a mass, add 3 cloves of finely chopped garlic, ¼ cup of finely chopped onion, 2 large tomatoes, chopped, ¼ teaspoon of cayenne, ½ teaspoon of salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

I ground it in a coffee grinder, used some frozen roasted tomatoes from my garden, some of the cascobel pepper salsa instead of cayenne, and served it over the coconut chicken I’d was making that night. It was very good. It makes a great deal of sauce, keeps well for at least a week, and tastes good as a garnish for many things. Although perhaps not scones.

...Scones and thick cream:

These were developed for a child’s history of food storybook I worked on a while back. When I made them the other day my friend Ann brought sweetened whipped cream and we had Breezy Meadows’ elderberry/blackberry jelly. It was perfect.

Unfortunately, late that evening I discovered that bits of the scones broken off and used as dippers for as much whipped cream they could carry were indistinguishable from true joy. Uneasy dreams resulted from that discovery.

Pippin’s Scones
2 cups (10 ounces) unbleached white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 scant teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup (4 ounces) butter
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup raisins
1 large egg
¾ cup of buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 375°.
Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl or a food processor. Cut or pulse in the butter, then the rolled oats, then the egg and buttermilk. Then stir in the raisins and work them through the batter.
Flour a counter top, scrape the dough onto the flour, gather the dough and pat into a flat circle about 12 inches in diameter. Cut it into wedges with a sharp knife – the dough will be soft – like a pizza, and then carefully place onto a baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes.
Alternatively you may spoon half cups full of batter onto a hot griddle, smooth into cakes and bake on each side until done.

Here’s hoping you find true joy on these cold but lengthening days, get to spend some time in the kitchen, with friends around the table, and have another sherried raisin – they’re good for you!

future tense

2012-01-03T14:49:00.000-05:00

ingredients for peasant cuisines found inexpensively at your nearby co-op: spices, fruits and nuts, beans, lentils and rice. plus a little bit of maple sugar

Two thousand eleven was the year that the cat clawed herself out of the bag! Finally everyone seems to know they need to be eating clean-raised local food, and they seem to know where they can find it, too.

Thank god for Roots, say those of us who are disgusted by the idea of a burger made of the ground up flesh of ten, a hundred, maybe even traces of a thousand cows who were fed antibiotics and hormones like gruel in their last days, and then were all ground together into a vast vat. Roots, the Restaurant, on Wales Street opened last winter and has made it their point of pride to serve food sourced from our local farmers – all across the menu. They've bought almost $70,000 worth of local food from our farmers in the first 11 months they've been open! They have succeeded. Wildly!

We also recognize 3 Tomatoes, which has long made a valiant effort to serve a lot of food grown in Vermont, which is to say pretty organically, and they do so beautifully. Dennis at Red Clover in Mendon is a pretty faithful Farmers’ Market customer. Downtown Grocery in Ludlow serves spectacular home-grown food – for spectacular prices, it must be said. Splurge there, though, when you can. And both Cafe' Provence in Brandon and The Victorian Inn at Wallingford source local food, though Chef Stanti at the Victorian Inn balks at local meats.

But other restaurants are slow to catch on. When we all stopped by Sabby’s the other day I was told that local food was way out of their ball park. People didn’t care. We stayed anyway, but I’ll tell you that eating a pile of anonymous animal protein is not a very appetizing thing anymore.

Even the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, whose food politics have been somewhat middle-of-the-road until the last year or so, understands that studies finding that eating meat is an unhealthy habit are not studying locally grown grass-fed beef, pork and fowl. In other words, they’re not studying the effects of meat-eating on human health, they are studying the effects of the antibiotics and hormones the meat is fed on the health of the eater. So Bittman, realizing that most people do not have access to grass-fed meats, suggests abstaining from meat on certain days of the week and simply eating less. And he's not alone in this fall-back stance among food experts who are talking to a large number of people. And it is not an unappetizing idea.

Peasant and ethnic cuisines that rely on a preponderance of vegetables and spices with very little meat to produce great flavor are a fantastic place to start. We can teach ourselves their ways by picking up a book or looking online.

If you are as ignorant as I am you might start by picking up a copy of Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook – It’s chock full of inexpensive and for the most part simple recipes and techniques. After all these years since it was published, this is the first time I’ve really examined it. I made a little ‘garlic dip’ she wrote about and it was not bad. It was not good, either – it involved boiling some potatoes until very tender and then fo-proing them with lots of garlic and some mayonnaise into a slithery mass that tasted like very garlicky potatoes. Of course it did.

If you really want to fix something good to eat, quick, and cheap, try this, one of my favorite meals: It’s basically red lentils and rice, with perhaps a sausage. The lentils are rinsed, put into a pot, covered with cold water, and cooked over medium heat until tender but still (if possible) retain their shape. This takes only about 15 minutes. Add a little salt to the water towards the end of cooking. For the rice, bring two cups of water to a boil, add a teaspoon of salt, pour in 1 cup of white rice, stir, bring back to the boil, cover, and turn the heat very low. Cook for 20 minutes. When these two foods are done, they’re piled into a plate, dolloped with plain yogurt, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds, and drizzled with a little garlicky olive oil. Salt and pepper. Maybe some hot peppers. You could sprinkle with Asian seasonings such as 5-spice powder. Add any crunchy vegetables you might have lying around. It takes about 25 minutes to make and costs about 3¢ per serving. It’s good, plain, proletarian, peasant food that can be gussied up.

This one from last summer included sausages and lots of fresh veggies. Yum.

Of course, for home cooking there are few places more liable to supply good makings for our kitchen than the Farmers’ Markets and Co-ops. Here in the Rutland area we are blessed with the best year-around Farmers’ Market in the state, probably in the northeast, possibly in the country. It’s impossible to walk through without engaging in many conversations with people ecstatically commenting about the good feeling there, the wonderful food, the festive atmosphere, how lucky we are, yadda yadda. Shopping at the Farmers’ Market is just a very uplifting experience. Here are some vendors and foods that are new favorites.

I LOVE having Peter McGann – who used to give away samples of his food free at the Co-op – offering his Mexican fare – all the way from tamales and enchiladas to the lovely cascobel pepper salsa, guacamole, and tomato salsa, as well as his Tortilla Espagnol – a thick potato omelet. His orange scented rice pudding studded with big plump raisins? Well...

Too, I enjoyed Maya Zelkin’s steamed tamales there one Saturday, and she will be back with more the last Saturday in January. I keep nattering at her to supply us with freshly made tortillas, but they are labor intensive and she does not see her way to doing that just now.

Pine Woods Farm is also new this year, with their excellent beef and pork. I bought pig fat there that I rendered down into the best lard I have ever made – creamy white and solid. It’s a once-a -year process I go through, and so worth it! You can also get organic suet – for cooking or for the birds. After all, why would you feed birds suet with antibiotics and excess hormones in it? Love their sausages and roasts, too.

Meadow Squire is there with her Breezy Meadows booth from which she is still selling baby greens, most especially fresh cilantro, as well as the bibelots she puts together, like the tiny jars of maple sugar last Saturday. I wrote about their rice crop here.

Meadow is just one example of the biggest boon the Rutland region has going for it right now – a preponderance of young and very determined farmers.

A few years ago Greg Cox told me, “We’re getting tired. We’re getting old. We need nothing less than an influx of young people going into farming.” Guess what? Suddenly we have them, and they are committed to the land (even when it slides out from under them as Evening Song’s did during Irene). And Greg, who has hosted many beginning farmers on his land at Boardman Hill, is very responsible for this resurgence. He has long worked with RAFFL to offer an incubator space for new farmers and POW, we look back and what do we find? He has, perhaps unwittingly, provided it on his own land!

I hope that 2012 proves to be the year that the Rutland Co-op assumes its diversified and indispensable roles for Rutland, for instance as a teaching venue for people who want to learn to shop the Co-op and the Farmers’ Market and learn to cook the food. There is a very nice kitchen that was built a few years ago expressly for that purpose. Now there’s a “Private” sign on its door most market Saturdays.

I’m not grousing about 2011. I still have not needed to get up from my supper table, pack up a few things, and walk down Rt. 7 to get away from the enemy. Wars always take place upon other people’s soil, isn’t that true? All I really wish for in 2012 is peace and a contentment with what is without losing the edge that makes us do better. A less tense future. And I wish that for you, too. That’s not much to ask, is it?

nice and easy does it

2011-12-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

A 'tween holidays jigsaw puzzle provides the background for a moderately tiny cuppa

This is really not a time when we need to talk very much about food. I mean, this is the question:::: Who is Hungry? Not me, and not you, I’ll bet. Not that we’re aware, and certainly not for food.
Of course everybody is hungry for something. They’re hungry for approval, for peace, for meaning, but sometimes they couldn’t care less for a truffle, whether it be chocolate or dug up by an Italian hog from under an ancient oak.

So, let’s talk about something more important than food. As if there could be such a thing, because perhaps you’ve noticed that where ever you start it always comes back to food. That’s what I realized several years ago when I started to write about it. Several? Well that would be since 1978, which is thirty-some very odd years, I believe, and since then I have often been pretty much able to use food terms to translate life into something understandable.

For instance, I can only remember one time that I was hungry. A friend and I were lost. We had left Michigan in a 1965 Mustang and were wandering all over the east looking for Rosa Parks and Bob Dylan. We’d heard they were out there. What we didn’t know in that pre-instant-information-age is that they’d been here and already left. On a side-trip we got off on some logging roads in French-speaking Quebec. Finally we came upon a gas station out in the middle of nowhere whose attendant did not speak English and apparently had never met anyone who did, just as we, probably, had never met anyone who spoke French. We found things in this alternative universe that looked like milk and Hostess cupcakes, but the milk had cream pushing the cap off and the Hostess cupcakes were... like Hostess, but just a little different. Very primitive, it was. Oh, I was heartsick, and so HUNGRY. Finally we tumbled out of the Canadian forest onto a beautifully paved road into Jackman, Maine and were able to assuage our hunger on familiar homogenized junk food, American – albeit 1960s – style. And that’s what I was starved for – familiarity – that mild Canadian strangeness was terrifically unsettling!

Thanksgiving reminds me of that time. It’s a day when we stuff ourselves with – besides the blameless good local turkey and roasted vegetables – all the starches of potatoes and gravy and dressing, not even to speak of pie. It’s a pure, longed-for carbohydrate binge. It happens every year at this time and we eat the same food that Grandma cooked – starches and sweets!

And then come the recriminations! By now we have got past the talk of what gluttons we were and how we stuffed ourselves, and are looking forward with various strains of trepidation to Christmas cookies and more pies and suet puddings and holiday breads and sweets.

What’s the answer? Let’s try this – just take it

For forty-nine years I have had at least one very large and potent cup of coffee in the morning. A couple of months ago I quit drinking it, just to see what would happen. At first I substituted decaf, but soon realized I didn’t need anything! I had no headaches, no withdrawal symptom of any kind. Well, perhaps there was a kind of emptiness at the centre of my morning ritual; and, as I gradually realized, perhaps a certain lack of energy, a lethargy, in my morning activities. So I relented a bit.

I have beautiful little pottery cups made by Susan Leader from Weston. They’d never been used much because they’re so tiny. Now I often fill one of these miniatures with coffee and cream. I might even have two cups. That serves to ameliorate the tiredness and provide a bit of ceremony, and so, in the end I have not quit drinking coffee so much as I have explored the habit and moderated it, and brought more pleasure to it, too.

So let’s take heed of our feelings that we have overly stuffed ourselves, but let’s not excoriate ourselves for it. We might say, ‘Okay, wayyyy too many carbs, I’ll just cut them out for today.’ And maybe tomorrow we’ll wake up and feel really quite as though we’ll pleasingly exist on salads and cheese and eggs and maybe a hamburger for yet another day, and perhaps find ourselves at the end of a week having lost a few pounds and feeling far less bloated and round-footed. We’ll wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak.

Then of course in come the Christmas cookies and who can blame us if we cannot resist one, or two, unless we have an extreme allergy to gluten, which we may have since the flour we grow now bears very little resemblance to the flour that grew a few years ago. It has been so bioengineered that perhaps our bodies do not recognize it as a food substance anymore. Perhaps our bodies mistake wheat flour as a bacteria, something to be flooded with antibodies. It certainly is true that many people find themselves with a gluten intolerance. One has to wonder why.

In that light it is interesting that the country of Hungary has destroyed one thousand acres of Monsanto genetically modified corn. Other countries are taking these depredations seriously. Peru has likewise passed a ban on genetically modified seeds.

So perhaps you will not abstain from all carbohydrates. But perhaps you will try very seriously not to eat anything made with wheat, barley, or rye. Try that hat on and see how it feels.

I used to think of moderation as the habit of boring people. I don’t think that anymore. I will try to be thoughtful about my hungers and to take it, as Frank Sinatra sang in that era when I was following my hunger along Canadian logging roads, “Nice and easy does it all the time.” I have to tell you, I never did catch up with Dylan, and now I’ve developed this inappropriate curiosity about him. You couldn’t possibly have a gluten intolerance, could you, Mr. Jones?

there’s rice in them thar hills

2011-11-15T18:52:00.001-05:00


A sheaf of rice from Breezy Meadows Orchard showed up at an autumn farmers' market

It is another glorious November day and in the afternoon the phone finally rings. It is Meadow calling me to say she is “at home” if I would care to come up.

Meadow is Meadow Squire who, with her partner, Josh Brill, is farming land up in Tinmouth on plus or minus 70 acres that Meadow’s parents, Marshall and Melody, bought back-in-the-day and on which they built a log cabin to house a burgeoning family.

I’ll be there in twenty minutes, I told Meadow, and drove up 140, then up to their farm on a rough, two-track one-mile driveway, over boulders and through water-filled ruts in the heavy hard-pan or clay – the same stuff that comprises their growing fields. Given lemons they make lemonade; given clay – which does a good job holding water – they’re making paddies. Rice paddies, that is, right here on the side of a Vermont mountain, with a glorious southwestern view, and that steep mountainside acreage to complicate things.

They also grow veggies, and fruit, to feed themselves and sell at the Rutland Farmers’ Market, on what they have named Breezy Meadows Orchards. And what that means is that they have instituted wildly innovative improvements to their soil. And the soil responds, gradually.

But Josh and Meadow, beginning again, are strong and energetic and young – Meadow is 21 and Josh is 27. He thinks.

But, if he can’t quite remember how old he is, he knows a tremendous amount about permaculture and rice paddies. Permaculture is the idea of nestling under Mother Nature’s ample breast and instituting agricultural practices without her knowing, without making her miserable or angry. I think of it as cunning non-interference.

For instance, large piles of wood chips, Josh explains to me, are laced with tubing, the stack is soaked, covered, and left to decompose. When water is run through the pipes it is warmed by the heat put off by the decomposing chips and that water will be used to warm the greenhouses in winter and spring. When I ask what the piles of litre plastic bottles are for, he explains that when filled with water in the winter, allowed to freeze, and then stacked to line the mega-insulated walk-in cooler that they built, they will provide cooling well into the summer for the produce they take to the Rutland Farmers’ Market.

The 50’x20’ plastic coated high-tunnel greenhouse? Josh and his father bent the metal poles and coated them with sheet plastic. Its shape is slightly gothic so that the snow doesn’t pile up on it, and it can be moved to cover, in thirds, 150 linear feet of garden space. Another one is in the works for next year. The garden rows in that 150 feet are rounded raised beds – logs, trimmed trees, are laid down, those are covered with brush, the brush with manure and compost, that with that clayey soil that we spoke off. The rows are planted, then covered with straw, and as the brush and logs begin their decomposition they give off heat to the soil and attract earthworms which continue to lighten the soil. The rows that were constructed first are nicely turning that clay into a wonderful lightened humousy soil.


The traveling high tunnel covers 150' in 50' intervals. Josh and his dad put it together.

Josh Brill: Works well with Mother Nature

It’s rough up there in spite of the solitude and the beautiful day and the view. It’s steep. Every movement seems to be up or down. All the hard work that is called for makes taming the wilderness – combing and whacking and giving it a spit and a polish – seem extraneous. But there’s energy in the air. These two young people are totally at home in their kingdom.

Meadow calls the mother pig to her. She is named Regina, with a hard g. A beautiful spotted white Tamworth/Berkshire cross, she comes running out of the foresty scrub where she’s been rummaging for roots and grubs, and flops herself down to get a stomach scratch. Meadow pets her until she melts down into slothful experience (Regina, I mean), and when another pig comes running he is soon lying as blissfully under Meadow’s hands. Their ears flop down, porcine grins grace their faces. I mean, there’s Meadow with two contented hogs blissfully stretched out as if bacon at her feet. This woman has power! Meadow, I mean.

During her high school career I saw Meadow in many theatrical productions and she was marvelous.
She is just as marvelous as Daisy Mae. And Regina and Bacon are in porcine heaven.

Two beautiful brown Oberhasli goats from Consider Bardwell prance and amuse themselves – as only goats can do – in another paddock. One turned out to be pregnant when they got her. Meadow milks them and looks forward to a small herd of milking goats for yogurt, milk, and cheese. The chickens are “mutts” says Meadow, and they are the most gorgeous assortment of half-wild fowl – they’re roosting in treetops and fencetops – I’ve ever seen. They will be laying “at the end of next week,” the couple agrees. They seem to have everything planned out. Meadow and Josh, I mean.

Including the paddies. This year’s rice paddy is a rich little pocket dug into the clayey soil, about 10 or 12 feet square, the stems of the harvested rice rising in small symmetrical clumps out of a reddish mix of azolla, a water plant similar to duckweed. It’s edible, high protein, and it will not go to waste but will be fed to the animals. It suppresses weeds and forms a physical barrier between the water and mosquitoes so their eggs can’t hatch. Watercress is the third plant, also edible, of course, and can be harvested as a salad green. The waters also attract salamanders and frogs, as well as dragonflys and damselflys, all of whom eat lots of insects, and they are considering adding some fish, such as Tilapia. How about crawfish? “What,” they wonder, “would happen if farmers planted rice paddies as a riparian buffer along rivers?” Hmmm. Lots of food for thought here.

This is the azolla, and it is that that gives the paddies their reddish hue -- their fall colors. It sets nitrogen in the water,
all the better to provide nutrients to the rice.

Rice seed is very difficult to get. They started this year with a handful of Haruka, a Northern Japanese hybrid. With the seed they produced this year, and money from a Kickstarter project, they will plant nearly an acre of paddies next summer, starting the seeds in late winter, early spring, and transplant them in the paddies in mid-May.

Hooray! There should be Vermont rice at the Farmers’ Market by next fall! Please go to their Kickstarter web page (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/840980225/growing-rice-in-vermont) and look at the cute video they made. And wish them good luck, even send them a buck or two if you can afford it. Check out their web page to get more detail on their projects at http://breezymeadowsorchards.com/

Josh and Meadow at one of the first of this summer's Farmers' Markets -- I don't think they missed a Saturday.
And look how handsome it is.

****

For those of you who don’t know, the Co-op’s own Peter McGann has been selling his wares at the Market. In the summer he started out with hand-chopped salsa and guacamole, which was very nice, but in the Winter Market at the Co-op he’s branched out dramatically. I bought a container of his lovely Red Cascabel Chili Salsa, as well as several potato and chorizo taquitos (small tacos). I mean! What a treat! You can’t get this stuff anywhere else. I spooned that salsa over some Hutterite beans from Yoder Farms – they are firm and flavorful – that I’d cooked up with a couple of beef shanks from Spotted Dog Farm. Sprinkled Breezy Meadow Orchard’s Cilantro over the whole thing. Yum.

****

And on a tragic note, our hearts and best thoughts go out to the family of Gary Miller of Castleton and the Miller Farmstand. He was killed in a tractor accident two weeks ago. He had set up his booth at the Farmers’ Market that very day from which he would have sold fresh herbs and my favorite horseradish. It was a sad day for the Market. We will all miss Gary.

the thin season

2011-11-02T13:37:00.000-04:00

Halloween, and the skin between the worlds is stretched as thin as a mosquito’s ... oh, I can’t say that in the paper. Take my word for it, it’s thin. So thin that you wouldn’t, for instance, want to take a paddle in a canoe on a glassine lake for fear of not knowing if the trees towering overhead were reflected in the water or the water in the trees.

Not that you’d want to take a paddle right now. It’s good, I suppose, that the leaves came off those trees before the snow came onto them. Yes, very good. And it’s good that we had the last rather subdued but nonetheless joyful Farmers’ Market out in depot park before we have the first – coming up this Saturday – of the cold season back in the medieval cave of the theater through the Co-op on Wales Street in Rutland.

Greg Cox of Boardman Hill Farm embraces Mother Nature at the last outdoor Farmers' Market of the year in Depot Park.
Mother was designed and constructed by artist, Grace Brigham, who hides under Mother's skirt.

People were complaining last Saturday that they weren’t inside out of the elements; and no doubt this coming Saturday will be so gorgeous that everyone will complain that they aren’t outside at Depot Park. Charlie Brown will be there, though, outside, jolly and plaid and sharp as a tack, selling his apples and cider and doughnuts to the faithful. He won’t come inside until the slice of daylight is so thin that even he capitulates.

There will be a few others out there, too, and I wish they would just relent and come inside the theater when the weather gets too bad. But no, they’ll probably decide to do their “own” farmers’ market instead of uniting with the other farmers in the theater. Which is a drag. It’s as if they never heard of the old saw, United We Stand; Divided We Fall, which is doubly true for farmers – stick together guys and gals::: You’re an endangered species, and we need you! Each and Every One.

It’s good the Winter Market will benefit the Rutland Area Food Co-op again this year – they’re two integral links in a healthy food chain. The Winter Market has brought immense numbers of potential customers into the Co-op each winter. Never mind that while the Farmers’ Market is cool and colorful and copacetic, and just makes you want to dance and eat at the same time, the Co-op is a little more... staid might be the word. Not quite as colorful. Of course there are wonderful people there, and I like to stop by and chat with Peter and Leah and Laura, among others. I’m sooo glad they continue to lend their hard work and personality to it Stop by. The Co-op needs our support – our laughter and even irreverence. One of the best ways of supporting it is to make our presence known as owners. And the way to be an owner is to be a member: That costs, last time I looked, $10 per year for an individual and $20 for a family.

***

Now for pumpkins, which are skeery things this time of year. You know those tiny pumpkins, about 4 inches in diameter? I’ve seeded them and par-baked them, and then poured a savory custard mixture into them, flavored with garlic and a little bit of nutmeg, and baked them until the custard was set. I believe I scattered some big orange grains of salmon roe over them. They were outstanding!

The other night, though, Three Tomatoes stuffed baked ones with a risotto, nestling 3 large shrimp into the risotto, and scattering the whole with roasted pumpkin seeds. It was billed as an appetizer special, but it was my entrée. I didn’t know if I was in heaven or the nice dining room of Three Tomatoes. There’s that thin place again. It grew even thinner when, afterwards, we heard Jennifer Johnson Cano sing mezzo and soprano on the Paramount stage. Marvelous. I staggered out of there quite high on her wonderful voice.

Tiny Pumpkins stuffed with risotto, with shrimp and roasted pumpkin seeds was a highlight at Three Tomatoes on Friday night

I’ve written about Carol Field’s Pumpkin Risotto before. It’s one of my favorite dishes to make in this season. If you were to obtain say four of those aforementioned tiny pumpkins, some pumpkin seeds* which you then roasted in a little oil with garlic, and a pound of medium shrimp that you would simply steam in the shell before cleaning them, you could combine these elements into the cunning and delicious dish of which I spoke.
For the pumpkins: Cut the tops off as though you were making jack o’lanterns and clean out the seeds. If you have a serrated grapefruit spoon, use that to make short shrift of the cleaning. Bake the pumpkins upside down on a cookie sheet in a 375° oven until the inside is tender, about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the risotto. Note that pumpkin is a squash, and I have more often than not used a butternut squash in place of the pumpkin in this recipe:

Riso e Zucca: Pumpkin Risotto

Creamy Pumpkin-flavored Rice
From Carol Field’s Celebrating Italy

6 servings

•    1 pound minus 2 ounces uncooked pumpkin or butternut squash, seeded
•    ¾ cup minus 1 tablespoon (5 ounces) Arborio rice
•    2 cups chicken broth
•    4 tablespoons (2 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
•    ½ cup (1 ¾ ounces) freshly grated Parmesan cheese
•    Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the pumpkin or squash in thick slices and cook in boiling salted water until a knife pierces the flesh easily. Drain, peel, and cut into small dice. Put the rice, diced squash, and cold broth in a pan. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook until the rice has absorbed the broth, about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat, stir in the butter and cheese, and serve immediately.

To serve, stuff the pumpkins artfully with the risotto and allow some to overlap onto the plate. Nestle 3 or 4 shrimp into the risotto and sprinkle with the roasted pumpkin seeds. Serve on fall greens, such as arugula.

***

If you are going to fill the little pumpkins with the custard, which needs to be baked, itself, you want to just par-bake the pumpkins for, say 15 minutes, until just beginning to be tender.
Prepare the 4 small pumpkins (prepped as above and baked 15 minutes), and fill them, while still hot, with:

Garlic Custard

•    1 ¾ cups whole milk
•    ½ cup heavy cream
•    2 or 3 cloves of garlic
•    1 teaspoon salt
•    freshly ground white pepper
•    2 whole eggs
•    2 egg yolks
•    nutmeg
•    caviar (optional)
Very carefully and slowly heat the milk and cream until bubbles begin to form around the edges of the pan. Turn the heat off but leave the pan on the burner. Grate the garlic into the milk and let the mixture cool until warm.
Whisk the eggs and yolks together gently until well combined – the strands are broken down but the mixture is not frothy. Whisk the scalded and cooled milk into the eggs, add the salt and pepper to taste, pour into the hot pumpkins and grind (a microplane works great for this) some nutmeg over the tops.
Bake at 300° until the custard is set, about 30 minutes. Check at 20 minutes by sliding a silver knife into the center. The mixture should be almost set, as it will continue to set when taken from the oven.

This, also could be strewn with caviar or pumpkin seeds.

*About pumpkin seeds: I can never understand how people can rave about frying up the pumpkin seeds they scoop out of the jack o’lantern. They’re tough, no matter how much garlic and oil you fry them in. And stringy. And inedible. Unless you’re one of those people, buy the raw pumpkin seeds at the co-op and have your way with them. They’re an entirely different kind of seed.

***

Here’s wishing you a wonderful thin season, Dear Reader. Be very observant of the edges!

fall 'shrooms

2011-10-26T09:59:00.000-04:00

If anyone can identify these fall mushrooms, please let me know. They are not in my repertoire although I wish they were, because they look delicious.

These are the ones in a fairy ring. They look like single oysters to me, and I believe they are rooted in some almost totally osmosed wood. These are quite large, as big as a coffee saucer, anyway.

Then there were these beauties::: I don't know them so I don't eat them. I barely touch them...

Now these I know. They are unmistakably Shaggymanes. I will eat them until the cows come home, or until they turn to black ink and drip themselves away. You can see some black on the bottoms of some of these:

apples and onions

2011-10-18T13:31:00.000-04:00

and the occasional mouse

the Buddha onion

I just cleaned out my pantry.

It was way past due.

There were those widgety moths that get into live grains, and messes that mice made.

Don’t ever put one of those metal containers (most people call them cans) of olive oil in the pantry with mice. They chaw through the little plastic neck of the stopper and climb in. You can feel the ass-over-kilter of them slosh heavily around in there when you pick it up.

Hopefully you sense it before you’ve chowed down on some truffled mice. Well no, that would be mice confit, left to bubble only slightly in its own or another’s fat. But of course there was no heat involved here, just room-temperature olive oil and a slowly expiring rat. I mean mouse.

Maybe it was only a really tiny one, practically pink yet, and so tender. Barely grazed by the world. But, what would a pink infant mouse be doing climbing up the slippery sides of a can and chewing through the slippery plastic of its mouth? Nope. Had to’ve been a big, fat, athletic male.

Yum. Lent such a tang to that fresh and crisp frissée and that fine balsamic vinegar, thick as molasses with age. Greek sea salt. Coarsely cracked black pepper. Tellicherry, even. Something rare about that flavor, like truffles, or that coffee that is collected after it has passed through a certain rodent’s intestines, or that awful cheese that is infested with maggots that appears on some very rare tables. Or that fruit that smells like death, or that fish that if it is not cleaned especially correctly will kill you. Disgusting foods. We pine for them. Put conserved mouse on that list, would you? Just below escargot, please.

Truth in advertising, no mouse got into my olive oil lately, but it did happen some years ago. I believe I discovered it before using any, and after much thought I buried the whole can somewhere in the yard. Ugh.

Now how did you make me get on that subject? Please remember, this is a food column. Let’s keep it cute and pretty. Put on your patent leather heels and straighten the seams in your stockings and don that sweet little ruffled pink apron. Now. We’re ready to cook. Sweet things, like chicken breasts in cream. Lasagna for the daring. Long cooked tomato sauce – here, take a lick from this wooden spoon. Careful, it’s hot. Good isn’t it? I do so envy those people, able to enthuse about simple things and not worry about the seamier side of food, like mouse confit and which kind of onion caramelizes to the rich sweetness best for French Onion Soup.

Because that’s really what I mean to talk about this week.

some perfectly normal and beautiful yellow onions
before they were made into soup

I stopped by Radical Roots Farm on Creek Road to get enough of their small storage onions to store AND to make a French Onion Soup. I’d googled for a recipe I saw on one of the blogs but couldn’t find it. But I did remember a couple of the main pointers. Namely, to caramelize a good number of onions; #2, that there was no need for a meat broth to be added to it; and #3, in no particular order, that sharp yellow onions were best for it. "Sweet onions don’t caramelize as well," Carol Tashie told me (as she was told by Dennis Vieria, chef at the Red Clover Inn in Mendon). But my thought is that sweet onions are TOO sweet. I love the flavor of Carol and Dennis’s sharp little storage onions. But keep in mind that Carol prefers to caramelize the sweet ones, and she IS the expert.

So, when I got home on the afternoon of the evening that my friend Dana, from Virginia, would arrive, I peeled a good number of those little onions and sliced them thinly and set them to begin lightly browning in a cast iron pan over a fairly low heat. Once I saw they were not going to burn I went upstairs and finished the vacuuming and changing bed linen, coming down to check every fifteen minutes or so to stir the onions and make sure they were becoming golden and limp and giving off their lovely juices. Altogether I think they were over that heat for a couple of hours.

Towards the middle I sprinkled them with some salt, and towards the end I added a couple of glugs of sherry and six cups of water to make the onion broth and let them continue to cook over that medium heat. By that time they were delectable, but when I tasted the broth a little bit later I could not help but add a heaping soup spoon of Better than Bouillon beef broth concentrate.

Now just hold your horses. I’m all for purity and stuff, but the fact that bouillon – blocks or liquid – is used often by French cooks was uppermost in my mind. Except for the bit of MSG in it, I can’t find anything wrong with this habit, and it does make everything taste a little better.

Dana arrived, and after greetings and a bit of a walk around the garden, we drank some wine with some Blue Ledge Farm Camembrie cheese, and when we were ready to eat I made a salad with a wedge of that melty Camembrie over the top, with some toasted pumpkin seeds and a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I cut three apples in half and cored them and set them into an earthenware baking dish with a dab of butter and a sprinkling of sea salt on each one and tucked that into the oven. I sent Leo to the store to get some ice cream.

And then I ladled the onions in broth (after correcting the salt seasoning) into 3 ovenproof soup bowls, placed a slice of French bread that had been griddled in olive oil over the top of the soup, and sprinkled that with a thick layer of Southwind Farm’s raclette-style cheese. A very nice plethora of it. Slid that into a hot oven and let it melt and brown.

When it came time for dessert I alternated layers of apple halves, ice cream, and some Fat Toad Goat Caramel in goblets and topped that with some crunched walnuts sautéed in butter.

What a nice supper!

French Onion Soup

Makes 4 servings

•    3 tablespoons olive oil
•    3 pounds of sharp yellow onions
•    2 teaspoons sea salt or to taste
•    ½ cup (or more) golden or dry sherry
•    6 cups water
•    1 heaped soup spoon of Better than Bouillon beef broth concentrate (available at the Co-op) (optional)
•    ½ lb (or more) Southwind Farm cheese, grated (or other Swiss style cheese)
•    4 slices of good white baguette, cut thick and toasted in olive oil

Heat a deep heavy skillet or dutch oven over low to medium heat, add the olive oil. Peel the onions and slice thinly and spread in the skillet. Cock a cover over the skillet. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions give off some moisture and they seem to be browning nicely on the bottom. Adjust the heat. Let them cook for one to two hours, stirring often. Season with some of the salt. Pour in the sherry and let them cook some more.

Add the water, bring to a simmer and let them cook for ten or so minutes. Stir in the broth concentrate if you are using it, taste for salt and add some if you like. Turn the heat to a very low simmer until you are ready to serve it.

In the meantime grate the cheese and toast the bread slices and, when ready to serve, ladle the onions and broth into four oven-proof bowls placed on a cookie sheet, top with the toastslices and lather liberally with shredded cheese. Slide into a 400° oven for ten minutes until the cheese is melted and browned and the broth is bubbly.

Serve that up. Enjoy your dinner. Tomorrow? Clean out that pantry! It needs it.

Is that a frog in my soup?

going not gentle but sassy

2011-10-05T11:50:00.000-04:00

For lunch a few days ago I went out into the garden and picked a large green tomato that was turning just pink in places. I sliced it and coated it with panko bread crumbs and fried the slices in coconut oil. Golden crispy on the outside and tender and puddeny on the inside. Sided them with a relish of roasted peppers of all decibels and a spoonful of crème fraiche.

Those fried green tomatoes and the peppers and crème fraiche were so wonderful that I wish I could eat them all over again! Which of course I CAN do until the tomatoes freeze off the vine.

Where did this mélange of peppers come from? You’ll remember I wrote about Hedie Francis’s technique of roasting peppers and freezing them? Well, when we had danger of frost a few weeks ago I picked all my Hungarian Wax peppers and added them to an assortment bought at the Farmers’ Market of all varying degrees of heat and sweetness – Lipstick sweet, big red bells, long green pasillos, small bell-shaped fiery habaneros, tiny glossy-green needle-like Thais, and I spent a Sunday afternoon grilling them in my Big Green Egg, and when they had cooled I stuffed them into freezer bags. As is. I did not rub the skins off nor did I seed them or de-membrane them.

I saved out an assortment and did clean them up and then chopped them in the food processor with a little water and some salt. That made a pint of deeply flavored relish with some heat, and I’ve been spooning it alongside everything I put my mouth around. It lasted about a week and a half. You could, of course, add a bit of sugar and vinegar, and they would last longer because they would be pickled and preserved. I’m afraid, though, that the vinegar would mask the natural deep roasty flavor of the plain peppers. You could also omit the roasting/grilling, chop the RAW peppers with the salt and water and leave the mixture on the counter, loosely covered, to develop its own ferment.

It’s not perhaps the intuitive choice, but pepper relish’s natural flavor partner turns out to be crème fraiche – its creaminess and tanginess against the full southern flavor of the peppers with their certain number of scoville units, is perfect with almost everything.

I happened to have some around because I’d noticed a bit of heavy cream that was about to sour, so I whisked some Cabot’s sour cream into it and left it to ferment into the kind of half-sour thickened crème fraiche that we all like. Overnight, in a warm place. That fermentation gives a much longer life to the cream. The ferment keeps the cells busy adapting and not rotting.

You wouldn’t think I would have to call for a certain brand of sour cream, would you? Since I almost always use Cabots I kind of took it for granted and didn’t always recognize what a quality product it is. But Leo brought home some ShurFine sour cream from a stay in the Northeast Kingdom – where he obviously couldn’t get Cabots – and so I’ve been using it up. The first thing I noticed was that its texture was not smooth, like Cabots, but rather curdley. And the next thing I noticed was that it had gone bad! I’d put spoonfuls on the German Cabbage and Pork Soup I made the other night and kept getting a whiff of the rottenness that only really bad milk products give off.

I never usually worry about sour cream going bad – it’s fermented, and it just keeps on fermenting unless it grows mold, at which point you throw it out. So obviously this ShurFine stuff was not naturally fermented, probably had more ingredients than you would think it should have, and was doing something not in the natural way of milk.

As a matter of fact, isn’t the web wonderful, I was able to Google the ingredients in ShurFine sour cream:

Milk Non-Fat Cultured, Food Starch Modified, Whey Sweet, Cream, Propylene Glycol Monoester, Color(s) Artificial, Sodium Phosphate, Agar, Xanthan Gum, Cellulose Gel, Locust Bean Gum, Cellulose Gum, Flavor(s) Natural & Artificial, Sorbic Acid Added as a preservative, Potassium Sorbate Added as a preservative, Vitamin A Palmitate, Rennet

Ingredients in Cabot sour cream?

Cultured Milk, Cream, Skim Milk, Modified Corn Starch, Guar Gum, Carrageenan, Locust Bean Gum.

Hmm, that’s like five too many, too, but just about as good as it can get in the commercial marketplace.
So, after you’ve made this crème fraiche what do you do with it? Oh yes, make a potato salad or butter roasted pears.

Crème Fraiche Potato Salad

Wash russety or Yukon Gold type potatoes, cut them in quarters and boil them in salted water to cover until fork tender.

(The best way to test potato doneness is with a silver fork, a regular dinner table fork. A thin-tined cooking fork or the sharp tip of a paring knife are way too sharp to test for real tenderness.)

Drain the potatoes, put the pan back on the burner to sear off the little bit of water left, then crush them with a fork as you add olive oil that has been infused with garlic. Don’t crush them too much – they should be chunky – and use just enough olive oil to coat them and flavor them with garlic. Finally, fold in a luxurious amount of crème fraiche. Add salt & pepper to taste.

Butter-Roasted Pears
(you could use apples, instead, or even bananas!)

Cut pears in half and core them. You needn’t pare the pears. Melt a few tablespoons of butter in a cast iron skillet over medium heat. When the butter starts to brown lay in the pears cut side down and let them brown and caramelize undisturbed for some minutes.

You can peek, lifting one edge with a spatula, and adjust the heat accordingly, but if you start moving them around before the underside is caramelized they will tear apart.

When they’re quite browned, turn them over. You might slant a cover over the top of the pan now, just to keep some heat in. When the pears are tender and caramelized they are done.

You may serve them dolloped with the crème fraiche as a dessert or as a side for meats, or simply as a mid-afternoon treat. You could sprinkle them with a mixture of spices that have been toasted and then ground (a coffee-grinder is good for this) – a bit of cinnamon, cumin, and, say, cardamom. Sky’s the limit here, Readers. Try different mixtures. They add interest.

Stable whipped cream:

Folded into whipped cream, Crème Fraiche keeps the latter from weeping – about 4 tablespoons crème fraiche to 1 cup of whipping cream. Whip the cream and then gently whisk in the crème fraiche.

But above all, and for now, side everything (how about maple baked acorn [or other] squash) with crème fraiche and peppers, saying adios to summer and going not gentle, but sassy, into autumn!

bleu, blue, and more buttermilk

2011-09-22T15:11:00.000-04:00

After dark last Saturday I took out the corn husks and cobs wrapped in the Monday’s Herald that never got here until Tuesday, whose headline read Mean Irene. When I laid that paper down I read the headlines again and a bit of the text, and I wondered if I should save it along with the JFK Shot and Nixon Resigns headlines, and then I went on using them as a wrapper, and when I got to the compost bin I slid the cobs and husks from them like a sailor’s body at sea and then shredded the papers into the compost. I think I’m angry at Irene. I don’t want to remember her and all that suddenly vicious water.

Ironically, we are just back from satisfying a yen for more water and gazing at the abyss that the ocean is to us, that other world, the twin of our land, about whom we know next to nothing.

We stayed in an oldly brilliant contraption of rooms on a glorious beach, with concrete patios and plastic tables and chairs and blue umbrellas. On the North Cape, so much more connected to the city than wild and primitive Cape Cod, a regular urban kind of shambledown Brooklyn.

Who in their right mind would go in search of yet more water after what we have been through with Irene? But that water is anarchic, matriotic, from whence we and all other waters came. Perhaps we needed to go to the source. Yes, I think that’s it.

But now we’re back and the velocity of fall coming onto us is rapid to say the least::: It leaps and bounds, shedding leaves and leaving piles of tomatoes and peppers on the porch, where the houseplants crept to, too, at forecast of frost.

In the meantime, before, during, and after Irene and Cape Ann I was visiting cheese makers. I was doing that for two reasons – firstly because I like to visit farmers and farms and food people, and it’s part of my job description for living on this earth; and #2, because I was trying to fast talk them into donating cheese to RAFFL for the Twilight in the Meadow Dinner that happened on 9/11. Oh, I had called them, but finding cheese makers and other farmers who use a phone and don’t think you're trying to sell them a bill of goods is a full time affair.

So on beautiful late summer days I’d get into the car. One day I went to a yoga class being held in the living room of the Weston Playhouse, where we did our downward dogs with glimpses of those lovely quaint little falls that would rise up a mere few days later and demolish said living room. Afterward, I saw the sign for Woodcock Farm – it’s a ruffly sheep with a woodcock sitting on its back. So I stopped by and bought some of the last of this season’s ultimately delicious Blue Cheese and asked Mark Fischer if he would donate some cheese to Twilight. He would, he said; yes, he would, but he would not be able to attend in person. And the cheese he would be glad to donate – because RAFFL is so integral an organization to farm and farmer health – would be their Summer Snow – a soft, bloomy-rinded, melty cheese much like Camembert.

Then I drove over to South Londonderry because I had heard that The Pantry was open again, and there is something about that angular country store in that tiny town that I like very much. When it was being run by various French and perhaps Austrian or Swiss men it was eclectic and packed to the gills and offered a lot of haute cuisine deli items.

The new owners haven’t quite worked up to that fullness and variety, but lots of things are happening there that are very nice. I picked up a container of one of those – broccoli in a buttermilk blue cheese dressing, and the blue cheese was Woodcock Farm’s. I told them that Mark had told me his blue cheese is almost gone, and they said yes, they were getting the last wheel of it. After I tasted the dressing I wanted to know how it was made. I guessed sour cream and mayo and buttermilk. And chopped shallot and...garlic? Maybe a white balsamic vinegar?

They wouldn’t at all mind giving me the recipe, said one of the women. But when I waited, she asked me to call in the morning so they could check with Mark for his permission. Whatever. I called back several times but they were being downright finicky about giving out that recipe.

So I Googled Buttermilk Blue Cheese Dressing, and I came up with one from blessed David Lebovitz that calls for sour cream, buttermilk, lemon juice or white wine vinegar and then a few drops of red wine vinegar. He also extols bacon in this piece. What a sweet boy he is. He is going to pour this dressing over iceberg lettuce – a man after my own heart.

I figure I’ll use a few drops of Gordon’s Pond white balsamic vinegar and see if I can stay away from the mayo. Would garlic be overkill? Woodcock’s blue cheese is tender and subtle and sweet and pungent. It marries well with buttermilk, I am imagining. All that delicate fermentation going on in your mouth. Does it need much else?

Okay, come to find out, Blue cheese, buttermilk and sour cream? Say a ¼ cup to ¼ cup to ¾ cup proportion? Fabulous. You need nothing more. Add two teaspoons of the white balsamic and the whole balance shifts. Now you want some garlic, smashed into a paste, maybe – a whole, fresh clove. And you want freshly ground pepper – but you want freshly ground pepper anyway.

Last Sunday I made more of that basic dressing and I roasted a Singing Cedars chicken in a clay pot – a story in itself – and built this salad:

Onto a plate, lay down leaves of romaine lettuce from the farmers’ market that you have found in the fridge. Mine was from Alchemy Garden or Radical Roots. Then, strew with slices of very soft pears, yellow in color. Then strew with crumbled Woodcock Farm Blue Cheese, or, since it’s rather hard to get right now, with whatever blue cheese you have. Then, slices of red onion. Then take a walk outside into a beautiful fall evening and look at the sunflowers spiking the sky yellowly, so captivating this year. Think about that salad. It needs crunch! Nuts or croutons? Back in the kitchen throw a couple handfuls of walnuts into a pan with melted butter and brown them very slowly.
To the salad, add a sprinkling of baby basils, so enticing, from Foggy Meadow, and then dollop the buttermilk/sourcream/blue cheese dressing over top, and then warm, melting slices of chicken breast. Scatter the walnuts on top. Hmm, what else does it need? Fruit? No, remember the pear slices. Another scattering of the baby basil. Grind of black pepper! That’s all! Okay, let’s eat!

***

The cheese board at Twilight in the Meadow turned out to be a glorious thing. As did the whole affair, but I just need to talk about cheese here. First we had a hefty round of Southwind Farm’s buttery Swiss-like cheese. I’ll call it a raclette. This is a new to me cheese and it’s fabulous, made by Jeremy Russo down in the Pawlet/Rupert area. But he makes it at Woodcock Farm’s cheeserie, with Mark’s tutelage. Farmer to farmer generosity, that!

Next to Southwind, Kim Farrar served up some of Crowley’s best and sharpest. I don’t think there’s a better Cheddar/Colby style cheese in Vermont OR the world. Next came a selection of Consider Bardwell’s Rupert and Pawlet aged cow’s milk cheese and a handsome round of Manchester, an aged raw goat milk tomme – all, of course, stunning!

Leicester’s Blue Ledge was represented by a selection of their delectable fresh chevres, some with a pepper or herb coating, and lovely rounds of their signature, ash-veined Lakes Edge cheese. Next came Woodcock’s Summer snow camembert-style cheese; and finally there was Maplebrook Farm’s fresh burrata, which is mozzarella stuffed with sweet heavy cream and mozzarella shreds. And to show that off exquisitely, Fat Toad Farm sent us a selection of their goats’ milk caramel to drizzle over.

Thank you, you lovely cheesemongers. You really came through!

thursday lunch in misty wallingford

2011-09-22T14:36:00.000-04:00

I went out into the garden and picked a large green tomato that was turning just pink in places. I sliced it and coated it with panko bread crumbs and fried the slices in coconut oil. Golden crispy on the outside and tender and puddeny on the inside. Sided them with a melange of different hot and sweet peppers that had been roasted and then chopped with a little cold water and salt, and a spoonful of crème fraiche .

I spent the other afternoon grilling those peppers and packing them in freezer bags. The flavor will be wonderful all winter served with... everything.

I had some heavy cream and a bit of sour cream left over and so I mixed them together and let it sit in a warm place overnight, and that's where the crème fraiche came from.

Those fried green tomatoes and the peppers and crème fraiche were so wonderful I wish I could eat them all over again!

a mighty mighty rain

2011-09-06T12:49:00.000-04:00

The rain that we’ve been getting all summer? It’s not a plop plop plop kind of rain; it’s fine but heavy, like a block of mist, an image that is almost as strange as the idea of a black hole. All summer I thought there was something weird about it... you’d look up from a meeting or work or reading on the porch and you’d say, 'Oh, it’s raining.' It was a silent rain, almost sneaky. And it WAS different.

Irene’s rain was that fine rain, too, and it started at 10pm on Saturday and finally let up around 6pm on Sunday. We got... what? anywhere from 4.5 to I don’t know, I’ve heard people say... 12 inches? 17?

About 3 in the afternoon I put on a yellow slicker and walked down to where Roaring Brook – usually a brisk and charming little stream – was snarling and biting the air under 140 and leaping at and over – all thunderous brown curls – the railroad bridge and then attacking Otter Creek. The Creek then thundered on, fed by a million Roaring Brooks – doesn’t every town have one? – dug out the approach to Elm Street Bridge and rolled up over River Street, taking out the basements and first floors of houses along it.

That’s when it began to sink in. But it was FaceBook and updates from the Herald and VPR that brought home that Vermont today was not Saturday’s Vermont. Oh my goodness, yes. I mean no. And the theme became – How can we get there from here? We used to be so cut off from each other but connected by roads. Now it’s the opposite. If we do now live in a dystopian world, it may be happy to the degree that we do not feel alone in our endeavors, in our efforts to stay alive and nurture ourselves. We're all, you'll excuse me, in the same boat. Perhaps we will have to nuance our meaning of dystopia. Perhaps it’s working together in the face of a violent Mother Universe -- for this was no doing of Mother Nature -- this was the outrage of the universe.

***

A few days after Irene, I took a right turn on 103 towards Cuttingsville from Wallingford and felt a faster thrill of the heart – as though we were heading to the edge of the known world! And we were – to roads just barely passable and a farm that had been completely wiped out by a mighty rain.

Kara Fitzgerald and Ryan Wood-Beauchamp of Evening Song Farm came on the Market scene absolutely
gangbusters at the beginning of the season.

By now you’ve all heard about the seven-acre Evening Song Farm whose lovely little stream-turned-ferocious-monster reduced it to two acres. It leapt from the back of the farm, behind the tree line, to gobble up a 15 foot rise and carry all those acres of soil downstream. It miraculously left the house and barn – in which the summer’s garlic and onions were safely drying – looking out upon an idyllic river beach instead of cabbages and tomatoes. The river has moved. It intends to stay in its new home. I know these words are in vain... you cannot imagine this without seeing it.

Though not quite undaunted, the two twenty-six year old owners – Kara and Ryan – found themselves beached upon a heartening shelf of community concern and activism. Standing with Kara I motioned to men chain sawing log debris and piling a lifetime’s firewood chunks: Friends of yours, I asked? “I have no idea who they are,” said Kara. “People just show up and do what needs to be done.”

Kara and Ryan are so community minded – they often wondered if their vibrantly successful first season working alone was what they really wanted to do – and the Shrewsbury community so helpful and welcoming that I can see another Shrewsbury institution being formed here. Kara and Ryan may be to Shrewsbury Farm what the Sarckas were to Spring Lake Ranch and the Pierces to Pierce’s Store.
Indeed, Ryan wrote on the website, “Our long-term goal when we began the adventure of Evening Song Farm was to create a true community farm over time: to develop deep and meaningful connections with the people who are nourished by our food.” That sounds like it was made in Shrewsbury heaven.

***

If they didn’t lose their very soil, as Evening Song did, many farms lost all or much of their 2011 harvest. Only about 2 weeks ago I attended a NOFA-NY conference held at Kilpatrick Family Farm over in Granville. They had 7 acres under cultivation and Michael Kilpatrick led a caravan of cars into Granville to 4 beautifully planted acres of sweet potatoes and kale and Brussels sprouts. Carrots.

A few days later, when the Mettowee finished its Irene rage, well, here is what Michael Kilpatrick wrote: “During it's watery, violent rampage, it covered our entire Granville production field, tearing through winter squash, cucumbers, and carrots and flooding our beets, Brussels sprouts, leeks, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and a multitude of greens.

“Almost as quickly, by Tuesday noon, the water had receded, but left around (preliminary estimates) $80,000 in destroyed and damaged crops.”

The young Kilpatricks kept the first Rutland Winter Market well supplied with an amazing array of fall and winter veggies back in 2007/8 and again the next year. They have since ceased vending in Rutland, being ultra busy with nearer-by markets.

Closer to home, Yvonne Brunot’s and Ed Safford’s Right Mind Farm in Wallingford was ruined for the time being when Otter Creek, which lies possibly a quarter mile away behind their farm, spread its maw over all their fields and up to the house. Onions and garlic were already harvested, and they’ll be selling those at the Farmers’ Market along with fresh sprouts, soaps, and flowers. Their tomatoes and potatoes and squash – anything that was not harvested yet – is all a loss!

Mort and Mary Brown’s Timberloft farm store in Center Rutland was flooded, almost a total loss, though both were at the Farmers’ Market Saturday and seemed in good spirits. They’ve been through it before, although not perhaps quite this bad, and they know there’s a lot of hard work that they’re intent on doing by themselves at this point. When they need help they’ll ask for it. I bought eggs from them, and some jam and pickles!

***

Jason Martin from Woods Market told me at the Rutland Farmers’ Market Saturday – by the way, very well attended by both vendors and customers – that many people were questioning whether or not the produce offered for sale was safe to eat.

What? I said. Where would they get this idea?

“Well,” he said, “they’re not to blame for asking the question.”

Did some state office or official actually caution people not to eat local produce because it might have been contaminated by floodwater? Or was that the interpretation of a clueless reporter.

“That’s JUST why you buy from your local farmer or market,” said Jason, “and not from a grocery store. Your local farmer knows whether his or her own product could have been contaminated by flood waters – or whatever else is out there – and they would never in a hundred years offer contaminated produce to their customers. You go to your local farmer to get the best and the healthiest. What are they talking about, don’t buy local?

“Sheeshhhh!” he finished.

Well said!

Woods Market Farm is just one of our many farms that were minimally harmed by Irene. We’ve got lots of good fresh produce going on into the fall and winter. So let’s just remember to Buy Local. It’s more important now than ever before.

***

What can you do to help, besides BUY LOCAL.

Check out Evening Song’s website for the best way to help them.
Go to the RAFFL website to find other ways, or give RAFFL a call at (802) 417-1528.
And this, from RAFFL's website: “The Vermont Community Foundation and Agency of Agriculture have built the Vermont Farm Disaster Relief Fund to help farmers through the current crisis. http://www.vermontcf.org/give-now . If you want to make a donation specifically for Rutland County through the Vermont Community Foundation (it's possible!), please call RAFFL first (802) 417-1528.
Fat Toad Farm is donating all of this Wednesday's 9/7) on-line proceeds to Evening Song. Their goats' milk caramel is wonderful! Drizzle it over chèvre or burrata. Or peaches.

***

Yes indeed, Irene was a mighty mighty rain. And instead of being a once in a lifetime happening it may just be an omen of things to come, even if we were able clean up our carbon footprint Ps and Qs immediately if not sooner!

For some of us, our whole ability to reside in this world with any equanimity at all depends upon thinking that we are perfectly capable of feeding ourselves outside the jurisdiction of the federal government’s industrial food system. If events even worse than Irene continue to happen, if our rivers rise up in black mutiny and eat our fertile farmland, then we won’t be able to feed ourselves. And you know for yourself, whoever controls the food chain controls the world. I’d a hell of a lot rather it was our local farmer than Monsanto.

where kick meets mellow

2011-08-23T13:08:00.000-04:00

In which we create aCorn and Chili Salsa with fresh cilantro berries in the garden

Hot, hot, but definitely not haute (see below) did not assuage my yen for chilis -- or peppers or pimentos in other words. For I’ve been scouring the Farmers’ Market for ripe (not green) peppers, from mild and sweet to incendiary, but all flavorful. For I find I have a dawning and realizable fondness for that flavor so difficult to describe and yet addictive. You sense it, I think, way up at the top of your nose, almost between the eyes: It’s thin, almost windy, it’s sweet, it’s spicy to different degrees. I handled a very dangerous little red pepper at Woods’ Market Garden at the Farmers’ Market the other day, having been warned “Careful,” and could sense the hotness of it from it’s very outside unbroken skin. My fingers were slightly spicy when I let go of it, and when I licked them there was that hotness winding up my nostrils.

these little peppers were sweet and good, as was the eggplant next door

On the other hand, I bought some little round red peppers stuffed with a cream cheese filling – or was it fresh goat cheese – which were as sweet as candy. That was at Costello’s Market at the Marble Works in Middlebury.

The Farmers’ Market is as overflowing with Hungarian wax peppers as is my garden, and by diligent searching I have been able to find a long red sweet pepper called a bull’s horn, I believe, and jalapenos – no Thai yet – and mildly spicy poblanos – which I adore – and little fat elongated pale green sweeties.

I had a selection of these the other day, and some day-old uncooked corn on the cob when I decided at the last minute to make a spicy and sweet, mild and gentle mélange of these things to be dipped up by tortilla chips. It would be my offering at Sundays-at-Five at the lake.

Sunday had been a busy one and by the time I was ready to get into the kitchen it was 4 o’clock, and I had one hour to make the dish and take a shower! Could I do it?

I asked Leo if he would shuck the corn while I put pumpkin seeds toasting in a little coconut oil and garlic over a low heat. Meanwhile I blackened two poblano chilis and the long bull-horn one over the gas flame and slipped them into a paper bag to steam. I seeded and sliced two Hungarian wax peppers – I deemed their skins too thin to char and rub off – chopped up some onion that had been charred on the grill the night before, and two cloves of garlic. Cilantro was minced.

I put those aside while I cut the kernels from the six ears of corn, making short and neat shrift of this usually messy and onerous task with my trusty Benriner mandolin, and put them to sauté in coconut oil over low heat. Remember, this mélange of tastes was to be oh-so-fresh-tasting, barely cooked, not fried. In a word, mellow!

Meanwhile I rubbed the charred skins from the peppers, seeded them, cut them into small squares and threw them into the pan with the corn. I cut a long yellow – vastly sweet – tomato into squares and tossed some of those in the pan. Ditto a small juicy red tomato.


Cilantro berries and flowers. They appear after the cilantro fronds, and when they are dried turn into coriander::: Smart little things. They are a treat available only from the homemade garden

Added the onion, garlic, and Hungarian peppers. Sautéed just a bit more, drizzled that with the juice from half a lime, added a sprinkle of cumin/cinnamon/chipotle pepper I’d ground together, and the chopped cilantro. I scraped this mixture into a wide bowl and layered cubes of feta cheese over the top. Then a good scattering of the toasted pumpkin seeds that I’d intermittently shook and stirred until they were golden and began to pop like popcorn. As a lagniappe I tossed in some cilantro berries from my garden. They pop between the teeth juicily, giving a surprising fresh touch of something between cilantro and coriander.

I looked at my watch. It was 4:35. Time for a shower. The beach is 3 minutes from home. We arrived at a stylishly tardy 5:10pm. When people asked me what this dish was called I hummed and hawed::: what was it? Finally, I think it’s a Corn and Chili Salsa – where kick meets mellow!

Caveat: Do not try this at home with the same kind of deadline – you’re bound to spill your wine and take fifteen minutes to mop it up – as I did last night::: Drat!! – or something equally time consuming. This time I didn’t get the pans too hot, Leo didn’t come in and mess about cutting cheese and leaving the crumbs all over my work space. The stars were aligned – although Mercury was indeed retrograde, which seems to be a good thing for me. Anyway, I doubt I could do it again.

Check out my post from August of 2008 for Elizabeth David’s method of preserving red peppers here.

And then I found this pepper story -- one that hasn’t made it into a Twice Bitten column yet -- about my old Mexican food friend, Hedie. It was published in another column, my Small Bites, in 1993, I believe.

Those long green peppers – chilis – that I spoke of a couple of weeks ago, ended up strung in a heavy swag by the fireplace to dry. Slowly, they are turning red. But I wish I'd had Hedie Francis' note before I did that. The way she treats a big batch of them is to roast them on the grill then place them, one by one, on a sheet on the ground by the grill, then cover them with towels until they've cooled. Without picking off the blackened skin, she puts about 12 chilis in a ziplock freezer bag and that into the freezer. "When we're ready to eat... I'll take a bag or two out to thaw. Then I peel the skins off and pull off the stems," which pulls out most of the seeds and membranes, too.

With those peppers she might make... Green Chili Enchiladas with Sour Cream: Chop the chilis with garlic and salt, add water until saucy but thick, lightly fry corn tortillas and drain, then make layers of tortillas, chili, grated cheddar cheese, onion and sour cream. "Delicious," she says.

She also keeps a bowl of chopped green chili in a bowl in the fridge, with a little water and garlic and sometimes stewed tomatoes, to put on any old thing, such as eggs.

Now listen to this! This is the way Hedie chops her green chilis – not in the food processor, and not with a knife, but "I use the lid off a vegetable can," the way she used to watch her grandma do it." She has other suggestions too, because green chili preparations are a staple in Mexican and southwest cooking and eating, and Hedie is the expert on that... (this was published in my former Herald column, Small Bites, on 10/18/93).

I miss Hedie. She was a wonderful and generous Mexican food neighbor – she once brought me a quart jar of menudo when I was feeling off-kilter one winter. It saved my life, I think, thrillingly hot with chilis, with the unforgettable umami taste of tripe. I would LOVE to find some good, grass-fed tripe!

Well that's it for peppers this August, folks.

Interns and Garlic

2011-08-14T10:14:00.000-04:00

photo by Bailey Schreiber

One of the more exciting things we look forward to with the beginning of the summer are the farming interns who will earn their stripes over the season. They bend their backs and minds to learn from some of our most experienced and successful farmers, and we get to know them at the Farmers’ Market. Their enthusiasm and hard work is often so enticing that we become fast friends.

Bailey Schreiber is interning with Paul Horton and Sally Beckwith at their Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson. She, with her cohorts, follows Caroline Kimball and Conor Falcon from last year, and our own Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle from the year before.

Bailey hails from Jackson, Wyoming, and has been writing about her interning experiences on her blog called Turnips and Tators. She is an uncommonly good writer. I took my licks and lessons from MFK Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Elizabeth David, to name a few mentors. When I read Bailey’s post about garlic and the process of coming to love the earth I knew that I had to be the first to introduce her to my readers.

She titles her piece,

Garlic as Legacy

by
Bailey Schreiber

About nine months ago, last year’s interns – who are to me just names, not faces – helped Paul and his son, Jimmy, plant about 2,500 row-feet of garlic. On a cold fall day, they threw a bunch of seed garlic in the back of the truck and headed up to the south meadow. The bed was tilled and marked, and they poked a little clove into the soil at eight inch increments. After this was done, they likely looked over their work briefly, then threw their tools and themselves back into the red truck.

If they were anything like me, as they made their way back to the barn they thought about how this was one of the few crops they will sow but not harvest, how it will be one of the first plants to reach up and greet next year’s interns, and how it will be tended, harvested and planted again by yet other hands.

These other hands are, of course, my hands. And Katelyn’s hands, Nate’s hands, Grace’s hands, Sandy’s hands, and Kayce’s hands. The garlic was there in the spring to greet us and, as we slowly and sometimes painfully learned what it means to farm, it grew for us too. Early in the summer, I’d walk the rows looking for a double shoot – a spot where two cloves had been planted instead of one. To ensure a full head of garlic, one stalk had to be removed. And eaten.

Scapes provide a welcome taste of garlic before the young garlic
is ready to be pulled. They can be eaten raw or sauteed or made
into a vibrant pesto. (photo by spnimtz)

In late June, I watched and waited impatiently for the stalks to send up scapes. When they finally started to appear, we’d walk up and down the rows, baskets in hand, snapping off the early garlic blossoms. These whimsical, green garlic curls, when removed, encourage root growth. They also provide a taste of what is to come, a little sneak preview.

After weeks of scape-snapping and -snacking, I watched as the first few leaves of the garlic stalks began to brown – an indicator that the bulb is shaping up. Paul would pull up a plant now and then to check progress. “Getting there,” he’d say as we watched in anticipation as he pulled back the outer layers of the bulb to reveal the developing cloves. We waited until one day, after he examined a head, he said, “Well, I guess we’ll be bringing some garlic to market this week.”

We were a little train of garlic harvesters: one person loosened the soil and roots with a broadfork, two people pulled the plants from the dirt, and a third cut the roots and stalk from the bulb.

We were a well oiled machine, pulling and cutting over two hundred heads in an hour.
A couple hundred heads the first week and a few hundred more the next, we piled fresh garlic on the bed of the truck and on the table at market. As I told many a curious customer, fresh garlic is milder than the garlic you find in the store. As garlic cures, its flavor intensifies. Fresh garlic, though, can be sliced thinly with a pocket knife and eaten in the barn between tasks. It is important, however, that all workers are fond of and partake in this practice.

Garlic cultivation, as I’ve discovered first hand, is very labor intensive for about two weeks of the season. This is the primary reason farmers don’t grow more of it. It is important not to leave the garlic in the ground for too long as the heads will start to rot rather than cure. As a result, lots of hands are needed for a week-long window. It took four or five of us about twenty hours to get fifteen hundred or so heads out of the ground, trimmed and set up to dry. We did it in two- or three-hour increments stretched over a week and a half, but even so, it felt good to have it all under a roof and out of the field. One day before the garlic was harvested, Paul asked if I was going to market with Sally the following day. I replied, “No, I’m staying here to make sure we get all the goddamn garlic out of the ground.”

Once harvested, we set up the stalks in a small old garage on simple yet effective drying racks. We put fans up to promote air circulation and closed the doors in the evening to keep out the dew. After a few weeks, the outer layers of the bulbs took on a papery feel, flaking off in your hands as they were cut and cleaned for market. Again, we cut a few hundred at a time as was needed for market, until yesterday, when Paul decided they were as cured as they were going to get. I clipped over two hundred pounds of garlic, setting the largest bulbs aside. We’ll sell the regular heads at market for the next few months, but the biggest heads have a different destiny as breeding stock.

Come October, we’ll separate out the cloves, sitting on buckets in the barn. I’ll probably be wearing long underwear beneath my Carhartts and my fingers will be cold. We’ll load the truck up, drive to the prepped bed and we’ll poke one hundred pounds worth of garlic cloves into the ground at eight inch increments. After this task is completed, I’ll look out over the field, hands warming in my pockets. I’ll think about next year’s interns who will watch the garlic poke up through the soil when the snow melts and the ground thaws; who will excitedly snap the scapes; who will pull, trim, dry and eventually replant the thousands of new heads these little cloves will grow to be.

I’ll feel a sense of relief knowing I will not be responsible for these tasks, but I’ll also feel melancholy. This farm now feels a lot like home. As I’ve worked in the fields, I’ve come to know and love this land. I feel a small sense of ownership and liability for its care. But, while it will be sad to leave one day, I am thrilled to know someone will be taking my place in the spring. And I’ll know, on that chilly fall day, that the garlic will be there to meet, excite, challenge and feed them.

***

I think you'll agree that we'll be seeing much more of Bailey's writing in the nation's food future.

For garlic lovers, scape pesto is made by chopping scapes with pine nuts or walnuts very finely, then folding in
grated parmesan cheese and enough olive oil to make the mixture creamy. Season with salt . (photo by spnimta)

Hot and Hot, but definitely not Haute

2011-08-08T12:16:00.000-04:00

One of the things that survived the maple tree falling on my garden were several Hungarian pepper plants. I planted several because I loved them so much last year; and not only did I plant the yellow kind but I planted the black kind, too, which so far seem to be much smaller than the chartreuse ones that look like horns of some kind of bull. The black ones look like the nubs on calves that might some day turn into horns.

If left on the bush they will turn red and incendiary, but they are most often picked when yellow -- when they can still be spicy to very spicy.

My favorite dance with them is to split them lengthwise along one side, leaving the stem end intact, and carefully remove all the seeds and membranes. Do this over a sink and then tap the pepper on the wall of the sink to loosen the seeds so they can be shaken out.

Take out a big block of Cabot Cheddar super sharp Cheese, cut a half inch slice of it and cut the slice into half inch strips. Stuff a chunk of that into each pepper and lay into a gratin dish which can be put into a 425° oven for as long as it takes to melt the cheese and tenderize the peppers, turning them coppery and charred in places.

Oh Yuuuuummmmmmmm!

Let them cool and serve them at room temperature (or beach temp) as appetizers. If you were to have any left you could slice them into mouthfuls and serve them as a side/relishy kind of thing to accompany oh, whatever -- meats, for sure, sandwiches... or just as a non-carb snack.

They are sweet and spicy and creamy and have that nice pepper vegetable taste.

You could definitely use a different cheese -- for instance a blue cheese or Gorgonzola, or Stilton -- I think that's what I used last year. I would try a new melting Swiss raclette type cheese from Southwind Farm down in the Rupert/Dorset/Pawlet Vermont area. And I wonder how a maply, garlicky chèvre would be!

Expecting Lysander

2011-07-26T09:10:00.002-04:00

Oh, the garden.

It was only a few days after I spoke of a dystopian world here that the sudden storm came up, the wind blew like hellions, the temperature dropped 20 degrees in five minutes, and I, picking peas in my garden, looked askance at the flailing trees and told myself to get into the house. Now! I dashed and darted, with an eye on the maple and even the writhing Royalty crab, and got there, and while I was closing windows upstairs – where I paused to watch half-inch hail rattle on the tin roof of the porch – a third of a very large maple blew down onto my tomatoes, the basil, and a decades-old perennial garden.

Dystopian indeed. Picking through the rubble later, I was demoralized, close to tears, rendered suddenly without energy. But when I heard about the losses of a couple of vendors at the Farmers’ Market I felt a little ashamed of myself. That hail sliced up Alchemy Garden’s beautiful lettuce so that the first Saturday after the storm their booth looked pretty bare. By last Saturday, however, their lettuce was again beautiful. Farmers roll with Mother Nature’s punches.

On Sunday I was looking forward to a visit from dear friends who would be escorting the infamous Lysander child, who must be five years old by now, if not in college! Could that be possible?

Because of the spiraling inferno of heat I’d made cold dishes – beets in a vinaigrette (beets first cooked in the cool of a morning), raw zucchini salad, cucumbers in sour cream, and grilled corn cut from the cob. And I grilled fat tomato slices and even some mozzarella in order to make the toasted quinoa salad, the idea for which I’d borrowed from Chef Donald of Roots the Restaurant. And when they got here -- that would be Cary, Dana, and Lysander -- I would grill some chicken for the non-vegetarians among us.
And there were red raspberries from Saturday’s farmers’ market with which I thought Lysander and I might make some ice cream if there was time.

Oh, but it’s summer – of course there would be time.

I have a new tool that I’ve used to slice the beets, julienne the zucchini, make a carefully tiny shred of some garlic cloves, and even to cut the corn off the cob. It makes an attractive job of slicing cucumbers, too, and would do awesomely if you had a finger that needed to go. It’s called a Benriner mandolin, and it’s a little cheap plastic job (well, $19 from Amazon) with a flat blade for simply slicing, and three interchangeable julienne blades for a tiny shred to a fat ¼ inch, julienne. It even shreds cheese, it’s so sharp and thin. And dangerous! But if you’re a careful sort and not accident prone it is a fun plaything.

Lysander, chewing on his drumstick, first asked me what the stick was that was sticking out of his chicken, and then informed me that “most people take the sticks out of their meat before eating it.” He also wondered what kind of animal this could come from: “It must be a very small animal because its bones are teeny,” said Lysander. This child needs some farm visits!

Lysander’s mother is a vegetarian so I hope she was pleased with the selection of vegetable dishes Sunday evening, especially the toasted quinoa salad. Lysander was not very interested in the vegetables. "He likes cucumbers and he likes sour cream, but not all mixed up together," his mother told me.When we tried the beets – and they were a shock – his expression asked “WHAT is this vile stuff?” It made me wonder what this little family ate for dinner every night if not vegetables. "Perhaps some bread," said his father, looking worried. We found some bread and butter and that seemed to fill Lysander up.

But Lysander was very bright at the mention of raspberry ice cream.

“I kind of made it for boys who have eaten all their vegetables,” said downer I, for at the last minute I HAD made one pint in my small Donvier, thinking that we would need to make another.

But the ice cream – and who could actually withhold ice cream from a boy so viscerally disgusted by vegetables – was a great hit. After everyone was served, with extra berries and a drizzle of heavy cream over the top, Lysander was allowed to keep his arm crooked around what was left as he spooned up his own serving. Every once in a while he peeked into the container and a big, blissful smile spread over his pretty little face.

***

There must be a recipe here someplace, don’t you think? Well, not much of one. I striped the cucumber skin off with just the flat blade of the mandolin, and then sliced them rather thinly and tossed them with salt and let them drain in a colander. I dressed them with sour cream into which I folded some lemon juice, chopped dill and garlic, and ground pepper. The residual salt on the cucumbers was enough.

The raw zucchini salad is a real eye opener. I dressed it with vinaigrette made with white balsamic vinegar (from Gordon’s Pond in Shrewsbury), shaken with a very garlicky olive oil, seasoned with just salt and pepper. That very garlicky olive oil? I made it by rubbing a clove of fresh garlic (flooding the Farmers’ Market these days) over a rough surface like a garlic grater, or pounded in a pestle, and left to macerate in a good olive oil. Dressed with this, the raw julienned zucchini turns into silk. Instead of balsamic vinegar you could use plain rice vinegar with a slight drizzle of maple syrup. Then I’d add some thinly sliced onion rings to the mixture.

I’m still refining the toasted quinoa salad, but in a nutshell it involves toasting the raw grain in a cast iron skillet over a medium heat until it’s golden and giving off a toasty smell, and then adding 2 parts boiling water to 1 part quinoa, covering, and simmering until tender, about 15 minutes. Cool, and then dress with the vinaigrette we made for the zucchini salad, and toss with grilled tomatoes and mozzarella.

To grill the tomatoes, cut in inch thick slices and grill over a hot fire, turning once. Then cut them into bites. To grill mozzarella, cut into ½ inch slices and put them on a very hot griddle. As soon as the edges melt – not more than a minute – turn them over briefly and then remove to a cutting board. Use a rigid straight-edged spatula to handle the melting, sticky mozz. Cut into cubes and toss into the salad.

For inspiration you might order the Toasted Quinoa Salad at Roots the Restaurant. Remind Chef Don that mimicry is the sincerest form of compliment.

***

I have just finished reading Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood, in which one character reflects, “Was there in the end nothing but breakage, liberty from obsession and nothing enduring of the spirit?” In the dystopian mood I have been in for awhile that plaintive query slammed into my heart. But now I realize there are absences in that book – an absence of children and, perhaps not coincidentally, of hope!

All this weekend, of course, I was getting my Lysander fix. And in our meandering conversations full of wit and whimsy I didn’t at all mind when he slipped and called me “Grammy!”

an accretion of karma

2011-07-20T08:51:00.000-04:00

Once I foolishly spaced some tubers of the orange daylily along the sidewalk in front of my house. Ten years later it took axes and shovels, brute strength and an entire summer to dig them out. Inevitably I missed a few chips along the way and they are popping up all over the place now. Do tell. The things are hardy opportunists, and plant themselves into the middle of more cherished plants more often than not and, unless you want to ruin clumps of your more esteemed lilies, you are reduced to pulling them out as well as you can.

I put the last of those that I supposedly destroyed in a big, tough, black plastic garbage bag and put that in an out of the way place in the woods. There they apparently ate that plastic and burst from it into a thriving colony.

We can imagine, in a singed, dystopian world, one lonely tiger lily pushing orange through the rubble. First one, then another, until they repopulate the world.

I DID mean dystopia a few columns back when I described a strawberry season from my childhood. Some of you assumed I meant utopian, and one of you sent me an entire encyclopedia page defining utopian, in an email with WRONG WORD? in the subject line. And no signature. Wrong word? Well, No. But that did let me know that I did not succeed in clarity in that column.

Being a young farm-kid in the era of my childhood was every kind of disconnected. For our news of the world we had Gabriel Heatter and Grandpa. Neither one of them inspired a person to feel easy in her soul. You took your joys as they transiently appeared – the first sun-hottened strawberry in your cheek or Grandma coming home from work. Sometimes food is the only thing we CAN rely on – not only can we touch and feel it, but we can taste it, and it nourishes us.

Perhaps the reason so many young people are going into farming is our new connectedness with the land and with food without – these days – the disconnect from outside society. Without “the mental prison of rural subsistence,” is the way Ian McEwan described it in his latest book, Solar.

There is community in farming now that there wasn’t back in that Midwest that I grew up in, where we were reliant on family, which could be a little ingrown, and a very limited community. Now we can be connected by the internet to the larger world, and to an educated local community that helps solve the problems inherent in farming. And that might prevent us from getting too hateful, perhaps, and narrow, or even too lonely.

When Carol Tashie of Radical Roots Farm broke her ankle recently, the event summoned lots of help from the larger community. When she thanked everyone on Facebook, saying “We are overwhelmed with appreciation,” the answering comment from Solarfest struck my eye. “It’s the good side of Karma,” they said.

Carol and her partner Dennis Duhaime have, all by their ownselves, brought an invigorating sense of community to Rutland over the last several years and now they’re reaping the rewards. And it was nice that they chose Rutland to put their cheerful and effective energy into. Rutland has always been a gritty place, a kind of a show-me place, and perhaps it is now attracting the kind of people who see work to be done here that they can do – not to change Rutland into Woodstock, but to help Rutland reach the height of being Rutland.

This is a matter of accretion – for forty years the farmers’ market has met every summer Saturday, then more recently on Tuesdays, and now for the last few years year-around. It is arguably the most exhilarating market in the state. How did it get there? By perseverance. And accretion.

Kara Fitzgerald, of Evening Song Farm in Cuttingsville, told me how she and her partner, Ryan Beauchamp came to be in the Rutland market. They’d meant to move their very professional operation to Hardwick from Pennsylvania but got sidetracked when they talked to Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle of Alchemy Gardens, who had interned with Paul Horton of Foggy Meadow, who had been enticed a few years ago to become a new vendor at the Rutland Farmers’ Market by Steve Chamberlain of Dutchess Farm and Greg Cox of Boardman Hill, two of the oldest vendors. Lindsay and Scott talked of the wonderful energy in the Rutland area – and certainly Carol and Dennis are responsible for some of that wonderfulness – and of the numerous young farmers, of the knowledgeable older ones, and the opportunities for new ones. Kara and Ryan are pretty darned thrilled with their decision to settle here.

Another recent example of perseverance and accretion, if not karma: For years local restaurants kept repeating the mantra of ‘it’s more complicated than you know’ when I asked them why they weren’t serving local foods. Or else they got all paranoid and hysterical when I made a joke of it. But. Guess what? It’s not as complicated as all that now that Roots, the Restaurant has made such a splash by successfully serving, making it a point to serve, local food. Sustainable, at the very least, since not everything can be locally grown and/or produced.

All of a sudden our good tried-and-trues are asking – “where can I source good local meat or vegetables in the amount I need?” The answer is, of course, RAFFL will be sure to help you, and you could always look up on line and talk to some of the farmers. I know for a fact that Greg Cox almost always picks up on his cell phone.

Now, if that’s not accretion, I don’t know what is: It's like sand building on a rock through aeons until suddenly you have topsoil! That's what's made Rutland a big star in Vermont's bright food galaxy.

Rutland resembles nothing so much as those tiger lilies with which we started this ramble: Intent survivors, and beautiful, too. What to do with all those lilies so intent on repopulating the world? Well, you can revert to Rutland’s answer to almost every problem – you can eat them. They are rather delicious as well as pretty in a common sort of way. Eat them all up, but be sure to leave the tiniest chip of them to keep... slowly... propagating.

***

Last year at this time I made a little salad of slices of kohlrabi, mango, Hungarian wax pepper, and tomato sprinkled with sea salt, coarsely ground pepper, and chopped parsley and cilantro, then drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

photo by Janet Kennedy Farmer

This is a properly formulated salad from my friend and localvore Janet Kennedy Farmer. She notes, “Last years empire apples, from local grower, Brown’s Orchard, are available at the Co-op & taste as crisp & delicious as the day they were picked!” She used sweet, crisp, juicy kohlrabi from Radical Roots. Yum.

Mid-summer Salad of Kohlrabi & Apple

serves 4
SALAD:

2 kohlrabi roots, peeled and thinly sliced, the slices cut into quarters
1 apple, cut into bite-sized pieces
4 spring onions, thinly sliced, including some of the green stem
½ cup walnuts
¼ cup fresh parsley

VINAIGRETTE:

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup raw apple cider vinegar
1/8 cup maple syrup
1 tablespoon prepared brown mustard
salt & pepper to taste

METHOD:
Place all the vinaigrette ingredients in a lidded glass jar and shake vigorously, set aside.
Prepare the salad ingredients and place in a bowl.
Pour the vinaigrette over the salad and toss.

“Great served with rustic bread and a local pungent or sharp cheese,” says Janet.

And I say, in honor of this column, you might garnish the salad with sliced unopened blooms of the tiger lily.

Emus: big brown prehistoric birds

2011-06-21T11:28:00.002-04:00

and oh, yes, incidentally, we eat them.
(Photos by Lowell Klock of Klockworks.com)

Ann Breen with Baby Emu

I have this kind of block about different and unusual kinds of food animals. Emus, for instance, were not on my radar. But a couple of weeks ago when I dropped by Roots the Restaurant to sample their new menu of foods and wines, I met Ann Breen, who mentioned that their Emus were “hatching”. Along the way that evening we had some excellent emu sausage.

In the next few days that verb finally sank in and I remembered that emus were fowl of some sort. Some kind of flightless birds? Like big brown chickens, I guessed, having forgotten whatever I ever knew about them. But when I mentioned to my friend Lowell that the emus were hatching – Lowell loves all these esoteric animals like ostrich and emu, and has been trying unsuccessfully for years to get me to eat ostrich – I could barely keep her on her er, ah, leash. Plus, a trip to Brandon would no doubt include lunch at one of Chef Robert’s Provençal establishments there, something she never forgoes.

I notice I’m talking here about living animals and food as the same thing. That strikes me as wrong, doesn’t it you? But that’s the way we are. Unless it’s dogs and cats and sometimes more esoteric things that we keep as ‘pets’, we expect that if we keep an animal it will do things for us – such as give us milk or eggs or... yes, flesh. It’s a deal we make with them, although they have no decision in it. No doubt they would agree with us that in order to survive for a certain amount of time they would have to agree to die on our schedule. It’s kind of the same deal we’ve made with our own gods and goddesses, I imagine. If we could remember. Perhaps it IS the same.

Those living beings that don’t benefit us in some way that we recognize we swat or pull out by their roots, or poison, or trap, or simply make it our habit to kill in any way we can, especially if they’re pests. They buzz too loudly, or they bite, or they slither scarily, or they grunt ferociously, or their juice makes us itch, and we find a way to banish them from our environment.

But I do love my little Jersey cows, and big grunting pigs, and sometimes even chickens, and suddenly I was seized with a desire to see baby emus. So, after I’d suitably bribed Lowell, we drove up to the Breens’ Neshobe Farms in Brandon a few days later. Ann Breen came up from the barns holding a baby emu who had gotten tangled in some fishing line, and we were immediately involved in trying to untangle him.

Ann held him and I tried to untangle the line from his three long toes. Remember, this is my first glimpse of an emu, and the baby is as big as a small turkey, with beautiful striped markings on his fuzzy baby feathers. The adults, who can weigh up to 120 pounds and can look you in the eye, have gorgeous lacy feathers covering their rumps, and sometimes a strikingly curly headdress. Their little faces are triangular with funny round eyes. They get right up to you, but then shy away. The Breens’ emus are dun colored, silvery and black and grays. It really is a prehistoric bird, Australian, very odd and beautiful. Big Bird is the most famous emu, except for his extravagant coloring.

So when this baby emu startled, and his powerful little legs kicked out, I was one startled untangler, I can tell you. But it was good to get up close and personal so quickly, and soon he was untangled and put back into his pen, where he almost got stomped to death by his slightly older siblings when we startled them by stepping into their pen.

There was a lot of startlement going on that day.

Ann showed us their beautiful farm, their emu corrals, the raised garden beds, and the rest of her fowl, among the most beautiful of which was a Muscovy duck and a giant red leghorn rooster rooting and hooting on a pile of compost.

Ann’s husband, Peter, came along and got us some emu steaks and summer sausage from the freezer, and we went back up to the house where Ann fetched us some emu oil. Emus have a nice layer of fat between their skin and their musculature which is touted to be excellent for dry skin and all kinds of eczema, and since it is easily and deeply absorbed it can do some good for arthritis and other aches and pains. It’s even said to lower cholesterol. Huh? It might seem odd to be rubbing chicken grease all over yourself, but come to think of it, Grandma used to rub my chest with goose grease and then wrap it in a flannel cloth when I had a cold. Using fowl grease for healing is nothing new under the sun. More about emus here.

The meat of the emu is red. It is leaner than most other meats. The steaks should be marinated, Ann told us, and then flash grilled so that the outside is nicely marked and the inside a very dusky pink.

Roots’ Chef Don Billings offers several emu dishes. There is, for instance, an appetizer consisting of a white bean dip, emu sausage, and Blue Ledge Farm Chèvre. The combination is lovely, and the emu sausage very tasty. He also offers an “EELT”, a BLT served with Emu sausage and a fried egg as well as lettuce and tomato. But one of his most popular preparations is ground emu in a patty.

I have to leave soon – I’m writing this yesterday – to pick up my daughter from Albany Airport – Yippee! – and I think tonight I’ll fire up the grill and try that emu steak.

Along with it I think I’ll try a grilled salad. I have a head of romaine from Alchemy Gardens at the Rutland Farmers’ Market. I’ll split that in half and lightly grill it and serve it with a Caesar dressing. I believe Chef Don has the best Caesar dressing I’ve ever had outside my own kitchen, that he serves over his new Grilled Caesar.

The salads on Roots’ new summer menu are outstanding. I believe I talked about the ‘massaged’ kale salad that I had there during Restaurant Week. It’s now a regular on the new menu. I loved the Quinoa Salad, too, consisting of toasted quinoa tossed with grilled mozzarella cheese and tomatoes, with a basil vinaigrette. There’s cumin in that there dressing that kinda sneaks up on you. Delicious. Lots of local ingredients here, including the warmed spinach with mushrooms, bacon and blue cheese that seared scallops are served over in yet another great salad.

Another thing that I might put on the grill is a head of that escarole from Radical Roots that just fell apart like feathers when I cut off the end. Delicious, tender, sweet, with just a slightly bitter edge. It will need a stand-up dressing – lots of garlic, maybe some plumped raisins, balsamic and olive oil. Oh, and blue cheese. Another green that I’m in love with is some very cute little arugula from Breezy Meadows (a little play on co-owner Meadow Squire’s name?) that I like to scatter all under and over plates of food these days.

At that tasting I spoke about at Roots, we also tasted wines. What absolute fun. I tasted and swirled with the best of them and, if I didn’t spit, I did at least pour quite a bit of wine into a spare glass just so’s I could keep on tasting.

Among my favorites (and keep in mind that I am no expert) was a very grapefruity, citrusy New Zealand New Harbor Sauvignon Blanc, as well as my more customary red – a Norman Classic Zinfandel. I loved that and wrote various forms of BAM and POW over my menu.

If Roots does any more wine and food tastings I would be sure to sign up for them.
Well, I'm off for Albany now::: Remember::: Eat Local!

What? Who said that? Who is that woman. Smile. She's taking your photograph!

Strawberry dystopia

2011-06-08T10:10:00.000-04:00

The way to eat the first strawberry is to put it into your cheek and then squeeze it slowly with the flat of your fist through your teeth. The berry is preferably hot from the sun; you would be, preferably, as innocent as a child, and it would become one of those memories that turn into the ribs and vertebrae of your future self. Of such memories are lives made.

Grandma had a job at Rudy Manufacturing in Dowagiac, Mom worked at Kaiser Fraser there, too, and Dad drove to Bendix in South Bend. It was just Grandpa and me and my little brother that summer, as well as the migrants who came up from Oklahoma or Texas or Arkansas to pick and pack strawberries in the field.

At noon Grandpa took us into the house and fed us lunch. The big brown plastic radio gave us reports of pork belly futures and Gabriel Heatter gave us news about Joseph McCarthy, the evil scourge who rolled through the country wrecking the lives of people he accused of being communists. “Pinko!”

I prattled away until Grandpa sliced the air with his hand, his ear cocked to the news. “Sunnova...” he’d say.

What did we eat for those womanless lunches? Cole slaw and cold fried chicken? Perhaps we poured cream over cold, solidified, raisin-packed rice pudding? Maybe sandwiches of good white bread and leftover pot roast. Pickled beef tongue. Cold baked beans. I can’t remember a thing about those lunches except the mixture of radio politics and food. And maybe the slightly used look of the leftover pie. Rhubarb, mincemeat, cherry. Perhaps, in a fit of frivolity, Grandma would have made lemon meringue.

But I can feel the chill of those lunches, deprived of the energy and warmth of the feminine. Grandma backed down that deep driveway in the morning looking straight ahead. I waved from the sidelines, feeling small.

But everyone would be home for supper; and supper, when strawberries first came in, would be all about shortcake – big plates of hot baking powder biscuits, split, lavishly buttered, ladled with strawberries that had been sliced, not mashed, gritty with sugar, sweet thick cream ladled over all.

Now, what was the name of that half-moon shaped, wooden-handled slicer? I have it. I use it still! Of course – Mezzaluna! The berries are capped, tossed into a bowl, and then they’re sliced/chopped with that mezzaluna, sugar is added, and they macerate in their sugar/juices but keep some shape and texture.

Whole families of “Okies” or “Arkies” would be present in the fields, the older sisters taking care of the babies in the shade of the tree-line. They’d come up to the pump in the dooryard to get a drink of cold water, one skinny hip stuck out with a baby on it. They’d take the tin ladle from the hook and hold it under the gush and drink from it, then offer it to me. I’d shake my head. No thanks.

“Ain’t got no germs,” they said.

“But I do,” I’d say. At night there’d be music faint in the distance where they were camping.

I found this recipe in a profile of a Scotsman called Jeremy Lee in an article in the magazine Saveur from July of 2006. In spite of it’s persnicketyness it has become a favorite. You need to toast breadcrumbs before you start, and let them cool, and then you have to refrigerate the dough for 8 hours, but these little cracker/cakes are so good – delicate and interesting – that you might want to bite the bullet.

Use them for shortcake, or for scones.

Scots Shortcake

12 tablespoons butter, softened (That’s a stick and a half, OR 6 ounces, OR ¾ cup)
1⁄3 cup superfine sugar (I process regular granulated sugar in the food processor)
Finely grated zest of one small orange (about 1 teaspoon)
1 cup flour
3⁄4 cup whole unblanched almonds, ground
2⁄3 cup toasted white bread crumbs

1. Put butter and 1⁄3 cup of the sugar into a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer until pale and well combined, about 1 1⁄2 minutes. Add orange zest and beat again until just combined, about 15 seconds. Add flour, almonds, and bread crumbs and beat again until a soft dough forms, about 1 minute.

2. Transfer dough to a piece of plastic wrap and roll up, twisting both ends tightly as if it were a piece of candy, to form a 3"-wide log. Refrigerate dough for 8 hours or overnight.

3. Preheat the oven to 300°. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper; set aside. Unroll dough, discarding plastic wrap, and cut log crosswise into sixteen 1⁄4"-thick slices. Arrange slices on baking sheets in a single layer, leaving them spaced at least 1" apart. Bake until just golden and slightly puffed, about 20 minutes. Transfer shortcakes to a wire rack and let cool.

Of course, mound with sweetened berries and whipped cream.

Or, go ahead and make James Beard’s utterly sumptuous (and simple) Cream Biscuits.

We have at least two vendors – Radical Roots and Evening Song – offering broccoli raab at the Rutland Farmers’ Market, for which I’m grateful. It’s one of my favorite vegges. This is the way I wrote about preparing it several times before:

And the way you achieve that flavor and texture is to toss the raab into boiling salted water and bring it just back to boiling, hold it there maybe a second more, then drain it. In the meantime you’ve warmed about a quarter of a cup of olive oil in a sauté pan with a finely chopped clove of garlic. When the raab is drained, and the garlic has had time to flavor the olive oil without turning a bit brown, turn the heat to high under the pan, and when the oil is hot (don’t let that garlic turn) throw in the raab and shake, rattle and roll until the raab is hot, has cooked a couple minutes more and is, my goodness, coated with the oil. Sprinkle with salt to taste, then a teaspoon or so of hot pepper flakes, and there we go! Serve it warm or even cold. Put it in a sandwich. Al Ducci’s makes a raab sandwich on their little flatbreads that are split in half, with Al Sheps’ fresh mozzarella and lots of that garlic olive oil. It is a treat!

I do miss asparagus at the Farmers’ Market. Not ONE farmer offers it. Why? Well, I guess it’s labor intensive (weeding), and difficult to grow organically. But I think that organic asparagus must’ve been the norm before the second world war created a glut of nitrates to make chemical fertilizer. Since I shop mostly at the Co-op and Farmers’ Market I’m in danger of forgetting there IS an asparagus season. Help!

Update: After this column appeared in the Herald yesterday several people emailed to tell me that Williams' Farm just north of Rutland sells asparagus -- not organic, but delicious. Of course I knew that, I just seldom get north of town, and I prefer organic. Nevertheless, I drove out and scored a couple of pounds of beautiful asparagus. I grilled half of it last night and I'm eating the rest for breakfast.

From Blog Strawberry Dystopia 2009-06-14

And finally, a suggestion for cheesemakers and sellers: It seems to be the practice to fold the wrapping around the cheese and gather it in the center, then plop a label over the gathering. Which means that I have to destroy the label when I open the cheese to eat it. I don’t want to destroy that label. You’re proud of it yet you make me destroy it. There should be the top of the cheese – with the label – and the bottom of the cheese with the fastening. Thank you.

It’s that fast-growing-green-grass time of year, when the perky and winter-weary little Jerseys are out there under the sun eating it and turning it into good milk and cream. Chickens are scampering and scratching around in it for grubs and seeds to make good flesh and eggs. So if you’re a milk drinker or egg eater now’s the time those items are going to be the tastiest AND healthiest they get. Get them while you can.

rode hard road food

2011-05-24T14:18:00.001-04:00

Driving U.S. Route 81 to Virginia and then to western North Carolina is, for us Vermonters, a little like wood nymphs slipping out of their forest homes to do battle with dinosaurs or giants in an alienating landscape. We both need a truly imperative destination or else we’d just stay at home nestled comfortably among our tree roots.

But since U.S. 81 divides us from our daughter and other friends, warmer latitudes, and the south – the south as culture and landscape and, inevitably, food – the battle must be waged periodically.

Now look what I just wrote there – that U.S. 81 divides us instead of unites us as is no doubt the proper role of any highway worth its salt. But I’ll stick with my original description, for it is a veritable river of humongous trucks, and not a smooth one at that – up and down it goes – straight up and then straight down again, again and again, over destroyed mountains. Harrisburg. Scranton. Dead deer and concrete fields. Acres of Wal-Mart – distribution centers, headquarters, and trucks. With our wants and trivial pleasures we turn swathes of our earth gray and unproductive.

We come from Vermont, though, where the stresses we put on the earth are comparatively benign, and where WE certainly would not allow acres of our soil to be cemented over for junk storage. Would we? How about Williston? Or, closer to home, Rutland Town?

The first day we drove ten hours so that we would not have to stop until we got to our friend Dana’s kitchen in the serene rolling mountains of Virginia just north of Charlottesville. I’ve been enjoying cooking in that kitchen whenever I get a chance since it was created, maybe 20 years ago. Its centerpiece is an – oh – five foot long well-used butcher block work space, none too level, and its many windows look out over beautiful productive gardens.

As we’d left Vermont that morning it occurred to me that Virginians didn’t, probably, grow rhubarb, so I’d picked enough for a pie. The next morning I wandered into that kitchen in my pajamas and got my first cup of coffee and started making a rhubarb pie, while partaking of conversation with Leo, who’d already been out birding, and Dana, who was making breakfast. I love that kind of cooking, in a kitchen that accommodates more than one cook and function.

A couple of soothing, recouping days in Virginia and it was off to Asheville, a mere seven hours more of playing games of wit – certainly not of force – with the mega- and mono-liths, the eighteen or twenty-eight wheelers: Pass ‘em on the way up, get out of their way on the way down.

But once there, with my magnificent daughter Zoe and her partner Jesse, again we ate from a beautiful garden, under a canopy set up right beside it, accompanied by the chickens clucking in their sing-song soothing way from their chicken tractor, surrounded by the sharp spires of Western North Carolina mountains. We ate eggs sneaked from under those chickens everyday, and those eggs sat right up in the frying pan as though the whites had been molded around that bright plump yolk.

And I got the honor of pulling the first head of garlic out of Jesse’s garden, and it was a thing of beauty.

Zoe was graduating from nursing school, and so there were lots of people and parties and eating. There was the pinning ceremony, a dinner before it at the Tupelo Honey Café, and a couple of gigs that Zoe and Jesse played, and then, all too soon, time to set out on the return trip.

We were making good time until, in the valley between two verticals, the traffic slowed and stopped. There had been a clash of titans on some distant destroyed mountain top, and we peons were creeping through sixteen miles of back-up and incipient pile-up – who knew which of those many smoldering brakes would reach its breaking point and when.

After a couple of hours of this we crept up upon an exit, and Dana – now see, I’m not really a Luddite – was able to guide us over a little road, all hilly and curvy, without a center line or even a name, for about twenty miles, around the pileup. Thank god for cell phones and computers!

We made it to her house only two hours late. She fed us homemade spring rolls, fresh asparagus from her garden, cous cous, and lamb shanks. I’m not sure if I’ll ever have more delicious food. Then I sliced fresh strawberries from her bushes over the ice cream we’d made on our previous visit, and sprinkled it with balsamic vinegar and maple sugar. Not too shabby for road food, eh?

***

Over the course of my travels I missed the first two outdoor Farmers’ Markets in Depot Park in Rutland. I know – this is such an unlikely happening that some of you could not be blamed for thinking I must’ve met my maker. But all is well, and the markets were extensively covered, I found, when I went back over two weeks worth of Heralds. I was especially pleased to note the new Market Watch column written by Kris Smith of RAFFL. Welcome, Kris.


Kara is helped by her mom at this market

So this third market was especially colorful and festive to me. As well as greeting all the tried and true friends, I was pleased to see at least two new produce vendors. Ryan Wood-Beauchamp and Kara Fitzgerald from the poetically named Evening Song Farm in Cuttingsville have a burgeoning CSA business as well as attractive booths at several markets. They got off on the right foot with me because they had beautiful broccoli raab for sale!

Then there was Meadow Squier and Josh Brill manning their Breezy Meadows Orchard and Nursery from Tinmouth. They had something I’d never seen before – a snappy pretty little curly cress that is not a watercress. And it’s Yum. We knew Meadow when she worked at the Co-op and also at RAFFL. Welcome and good luck to all!

It was really nice to see two older businesses with new booths at the Market. I was thrilled to see a Crowley Cheese presence – its extra-sharp is one of my favorite Colbys in the world, and the price was extremely reasonable. And Jia Indian Restaurant from the service station on West Street was there with some delightful potato and pea samosas, amongst other delicacies.

Finally, I just want to remind you that the celery-like herb, Lovage, is such that no-one should be without and it’s available in the pot at Second Nature Herbs at the Market.

Some of my "finds" at the 3rd outdoor Rutland Farmers' Market are fiddleheads from Radical Roots; a tiny can of smoked jalapenos (chipotles) from Alchemy gardens; a pot of lovage from Second Nature Herbs; salad turnips from Evening Song; a new white balsamic from Gordon's Pond; Broccoli raab from Evening Song; Blue Ledge Farm's plain chevre; half a wheel of Crowley's extra sharp colby; and a bitey little cress from Breezy Meadows.

***

And, this just in::: Happy Seventieth Birthday to Bob Dylan, who said, when we were young and pretty and in good voice and thought we knew everything,

“Well you know something is happening/ but you don’t know what it is/ do you, Mr. Jones.”

That's truer, I'm sure Bobby would agree, now than it ever was before.

the merry merry month of

2011-05-04T12:25:00.000-04:00

Spring makes me think of Grandma’s screen door and Grandma’s clothesline.

That screen door – screen blackened and patched; patches sewn with strong cord in places where the dog’s front feet had rested, where children’s forearms slammed into it. Further trussed up – that flimsy frame – with wooden diagonals nailed in, and squares of plywood here and there. It was a sorry sight, yet satisfying. It was the signage of spring. Its sound, as small bodies hurtled through it, the incantation of summer in my memory.
Take this lovely remembered shabbiness off the house and place it atop a green meadowy hill. The thud of small, grimy heels comes to the ears, a small body hurdles, nearly naked, toward that door, smashes into it, through it, and bolts onward: The child flies over the hill and disappears into the valley of... adulthood?

Meanwhile, the door, alone on the green hill with only its frame to make it visible, to give it meaning, and to give the sound of it resonance when hit by the small and grubby left forearm of the child upon the special square of plywood set there to reinforce it against these repeated onslaughts, extends open to the magnitude that the black wire spring across its top will allow – like a bullfighter who, with a twitch of the hips, avoids the bull – and hangs there yawning, suspended, stretching, before reaching its final and furthest extent, pauses, then begins inexorably, to close, slowly at first, then overcoming inertia to shut with a resounding slam if it is sturdy, or a splatty slap if it is not.

But who hears? The child is gone. Only memory remains.

A voice began before the child appeared. It warned, “Don’t slaaammm...” The child appeared over the crest of the hill, left forearm at the ready, hit that door running, and was through it and over the hill before the voice finished, “...the doooor!” which was followed, of course, by the slam of the door.

Also upon this meadow, you notice, is a clothesline, and the spring breeze that tugs at the door in its frame – succeeding at times in opening it a whisk against the black metal spring’s determination – billow the sheets around you, the fresh-smelling, pristine sheets, and the yellow sunlight slants down upon the crown of your head and you are the sheets, you are the sun, you are the billow and you are Spring. You are the voice, “...don’t touch...” warning the muddy hands of the child (also you), returned from the valley beyond the hill, “...the sheets!” But it is too late.

Ah May! The month of my birth, the month that ramps are born – wild leeks – and fiddleheads, and morels. Even dandelion greens! What good company we keep!

I couldn't resist adding this photo of the latest pie. I used basil leaves as an herbal counterpoint

And there is rhubarb, and on May Day I make the first rhubarb pie. And this is the way I did it is here.

The leeks? Eat them raw or put them into a fiddlehead quiche, found here (scroll to the bottom to find a humble pie for gentler chiders).

Morels? I dip them in flour, very lightly, and fry them in butter and olive oil. I don't stuff them into anything and I don't stuff anything into them. I like to taste them, and only them! Because they may be my favorite taste in the world.

The other thing that people don't think of as a spring food, is overwintered parsnips. Spring is when parsnips should be eaten. My friend Kathleen cookes them with a whiskey/mustard glaze, with a hint of maple, that is tremendous!

These are my spring parsnips -- quite small yet

Spring Parsnips in a Whiskey Mustard Sauce
This is the original recipe. See note below.

1 pound parsnips, scrubbed, peeled, if you like, cut into 1/3 inch diagonals
3 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons Dijon or other distinctive, coarse-grained mustard
3 tablespoons half honey and half maple syrup
1/2 cup bourbon, whiskey, or rum
salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup chopped parsley

Heat oven to 450°

Steam or boil the parsnips in well-salted water until just tender. Butter an ovenproof gratin or 8 inch round baking dish and arrange the parsnip slices in it. Roast for 10 minutes. This draws out the natural sugars to caramelize in the high heat. You could also grill them.

Combine the butter, mustard, honey, maple syrup and whiskey in a small pan and cook over medium flame, stirring, for 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and fold in the parsley. Spread over the roasted parsnips. Lover the oven temp to 350° and bake for another ten or fifteen minutes.

Note: I've been making this dish for years, but never looking at the recipe. It seems unnecessarily fussy. I just simmer the parsnips in a little water and butter, and salt, until they have absorbed the water and are just becoming tender, then add the other ingredients and simmer until they are very done. Then I put them into an oven-proof serving dish and run it under the broiler until browned.

Live and learn.

... Notes...

•    First of all, Congratulations to Roots the restaurant for their award from the Preservation Trust of Vermont as Vermont's most important new downtown business. If you haven’t eaten there yet, Vermont Restaurant Week is this week, and Roots is offering 4 courses for $25. Leo and I did that Friday night and were very pleased. Highlights were a fabulous Kale salad (that I ordered on a dare, kale not being my fave veg) and a very nice grilled mozzarella appetizer. The Crème brûlée is the best I’ve ever tasted. 747-7414

•    The Rutland Farmers’ Market will move back outdoors into Depot Park this coming Saturday, the 7th, so let’s say goodbye to the winter vendors who do different farmers’ markets – like Norwich and Londonderry – in the summer, hello and welcome back to those vendors who only do the Rutland Summer Market, and let’s salute those marvelous ones who celebrate the whole wonderful, year-around Market. And let’s hope for a gorgeous day!

•    The following week – the 14th – there will be an official moving day parade meeting at the Co-op on Wales Street at 10 am to escort the farmers to Depot Park. Join us. Mayor Chris Louras will throw out the first radish. I hear there will be a raffle that Saturday, too, with a drawing every hour.

•    On one of those weekends many of the vendors will donate 10% or more of their market proceeds to Carol Tashie’s Farmer-to-Farmer:Vermont-to-Japan campaign that has gone viral, to include most of Vermont’s farmers and perhaps our neighboring ones, too! Support them generously, won’t you?

the Noticers

2011-04-19T16:58:00.001-04:00

I’m reminding myself to keep noticing, to be present, on these chilly damp days, and so I go out and make the rounds of the garden, of the yard, of the lake and the river, and in that way I realize the coltsfoot is blasting out its little leafless yellow flowers and the tiny white blooms of the bloodroot wrapped in their frilly leaves, like bugs in cocoons, are carpeting my yard. The sorrel is tart and lemony, peeking green out of the chopped leaves in my garden – the very earliest edible – and Egyptian onions are freshening.

And, I am reminded, Easter is coming on, isn’t it? The first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring solstice. All writhing goats and death and resurrection. And eggs and bunnies, of course. What a strange symbol of fecundity the silly pastel bunny is.

I notice the tiny vole who lay dead on his side in the coils of hose, how delicate his little claws, how curious his pinpoint of an eye. We notice the wood ducks and kingfishers on the lake, the raucous grumbling thunder of frogs mating in the bog. Nature makes herself known, pastel rabbits or not.

Edith Fisher Hunter, captured above by her son, Graham, at this year’s sugaring, is a powerful noticer. And she brought up four children to be noticers, and teaches the wider world to notice, too, through her books and her talks, Vermont Public Radio commentaries, and even through her preaching.

We began to exchange emails last September when I had the opportunity to tell her how much I enjoyed her VPR commentaries. There had been a recent one in which she had talked about sitting in her October garden among the overgrown asparagus fronds that had shot through them a volunteer tomato vine with tiny sweet tomatoes. Edith draws pictures with her voice, which crows and soars and teases as she brings to our notice the natural world, Aunts Mary and Margaret, Son Graham, Son William, Son Charlie, and Daughter Elizabeth. They’re all pronounced without a comma, so that their proper names seem to include Son and Daughter.

I fancied it was an old fashioned kitchen chair on which she sat in the garden. A green one.

Wonder of wonders, Edith answered me by saying that she didn’t know what had possessed her to read one of my columns awhile ago – she had never, that she knew of, ever read a food column – and didn’t find it unpleasant. I was delighted.

Edith and her husband Armstrong Hunter published the Weathersfield Weekly for 15 years. They both had divinity degrees but Armstrong’s passion was for printing. Weathersfield encompasses Ascutney and Perkinsville over in the eastern south-central edges of our state. The Weathersfield Weekly was very well thought of in Vermont and nationally, too. It made a community out of these disparate areas, and it made a center, too, right there on Center Road (which Edith pronounced “Centah” just as Hunter is “Huntah”).
Printing, and local newspapering, is all about community, isn’t it?

Once Armstrong submitted to a journalism contest an article Edith had written about the dairy industry in Weathersfield. As Edith tells it, “There were several classes to enter – publications with 100,000 circulation, those with 50,000, and those of 10,000 and under. We had 650! The winner in each class got $5 thousand and a night at the Plaza and an awards dinner. Milton Freedman won in one class, and James Fallows in another, and I won in (the under) 10,000. Pretty good company! It built my garden house and back porch.”

Edith has written half a dozen books – one of which has been in print for 47 years. Armstrong joked that it put at least two kids through college! She’s written nature columns. She’s a historian and a genealogist. She’s 91 years old. There’s no sense in hiding one’s light under a basket when one has reached that great age.

In the meantime they reared their family. “I have three lovely sons who I see almost daily and we share such wonderful memories! And they have great senses of humor. And my daughter and I email everyday,” she wrote to me. And it seemed to me that the most amazing thing that Edith and Armstrong Hunter did was to encourage their children in all their varied interests, and act as such passionate advocates for them that each has evolved into an utterly idiosyncratic individual. It seems a rich and yeasty family, all writers, social activists, and I’m not quite sure how many ministers.

The oldest is Elizabeth, a writer, a teacher, a nature columnist, who lives in North Carolina. She’s the only one who lives out of state. Graham is next – an architect, “the only one of the boys to be a Mr. Fix-It,” and the person who nursed Edith through an illness a year or so ago when she “almost flew the coop,” she told me. “For almost a year he came over and made my meals and saw me off to bed and made my breakfast.”
Next is William, whom I knew of through his Peace and Justice advocacy. He is a lawyer, a writer, and a preacher. A community activist. “A saint,” his mother told me recently, but that was because on top of all his other duties he was finding me photos and mailing me things. Thank you, Will. Charlie is the youngest and has combined fine and graphic art with music managing. And musical train tours. He’s in charge of Edith’s extensive gardens, too.

I’d been thinking about those gardens and in one email I asked Edith if I might visit come spring. It was the end of February and Edith was looking forward to beginning sugaring with Graham. “You can come see me anytime,” she answered. “ I'll hope to be spending a lot of time in the sugarhouse starting next week - I hope, hope, hope.”

Days, no, weeks, went by, and I thought of Edith in the steaming sugarhouse with “Son Graham”. And then one morning I sat down with my coffee and opened the Herald and there, with plummeting stomach, I saw Graham’s obituary!

Edith wrote right back to my email. They were in shock. Graham, who was 63, had never been sick, it had been sudden and, to all appearances, peaceful. “He and I were in the middle of a great sugaring year. We had made 8 gallons when he died and since then I have made two more.” Altogether, they would make in excess of 19 gallons of syrup for the year. One keeps on keeping on. One keeps on noticing.

Before he died, Edith wrote, Graham had planted “what looks like 1,000,000 tomato/basil/rosemary seedlings. They are up and waving their little green leaves in the sun of my kitchen. Charlie came by yesterday and planted the cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage, and eggplant and lettuce. But the tomato seedlings are a lovely reminder of Graham, as are the little container after container of maple syrup. What an empty place he leaves against the sky.”

Graham at Thanksgiving with his grand niece. Photo by his sister, Elizabeth Hunter.

And then she added, “Come by sometime next week and you can see Graham’s wonderful pan in action.”
She had told me that two years ago, “when our old pan, which was very primitive, was giving out,” Graham designed a new one and had it custom made, and then “surprised me one day by taking me out to see it already installed in our sugar house.”

I did find my way to Weathersfield that week. I have to say the visit is pretty much a blur in my mind. It was three days after Graham’s memorial service. I walked into the long east-facing enclosed porch and was greeted by a woman with the brightest blue eyes, and a sharp tongue, too. “You must be Sharon,” she said. And then, accusingly, “You don’t look anything like you’re supposed to!”

She was exactly what she was supposed to be! She wore a blue watchcap and an LLBean fleece and she was surrounded by the flats of tomato starts and, outside the windows, the birds at the feeders. Elizabeth was home and showed me the house, which appears not to’ve changed over the last century. Grandson Matthew was there. Will would wander by. Edith and I chatted and bantered. It is indeed a working, yeasty family.
Edith and I went to the sugarhouse, where I attempted to build a fire. I did not do as good a job as Graham would have done, but I felt completely at home, very happy to be so insulted and so gifted.
I will go back in the summer, I hope, to notice more, to be taught by a master-noticer.

on not making a habit of anything

2011-04-05T13:04:00.001-04:00

A 150 year old fern at Pierce's Store?

Mercury is retrograde so I put my writing Haflingers away, slip on my traveling Mucks and take off up Shrewsbury mountain to play with masa.

I keep thinking of everything in terms of Venn diagrams, how circles overlap and create a common center. So if we were to describe that day in those terms we would have the three circles of Maya, Lindsay, and me overlapping into a common center of = Tortillas! That’s oversimplifying, of course. We would have to have a big circle named Chet, and a little circle named Iris to be at all complete, and the Iris circle would have to be sliding into and between the bigger circles in a bubbly little way, occasionally even being osmosed into them with no rupture at all of any perimeter. I have no doubt that Iris is not a perfect three year old, but you couldn’t prove it by me!

Lindsay and I were there to learn about nixtamalization – soaking corn kernels in some kind of ash or lime treated water before grinding them into masa and making, well, tortillas, for instance. Maya had learned the technique in Mexico years ago and is generous with the knowledge.

So. There we were, in the back-of-beyond in a pretty much off-the-grid house, in a small kitchen with a roaring wood range, performing that time-honored dance of women slipping by each other in small spaces in order to achieve gargantuan tasks, comparing notes and solving the problems of community and world at the same time. We took turns lifting the kernels from the limewater, picking off loose hulls, and rinsing them. All three of us took turns grinding them, twice, while Iris, toes curled onto the edge of a kitchen chair, handed us balls of once-ground masa for the second grind.

(Oh, how I wish I had not forgotten my camera that special day!)

Maya added a good amount of coconut oil to a pot of beans and slid them into a scorching oven. We flattened small balls of masa in a tortilla press that Chet had made, and flipped them onto the hot range to cook. I kneaded some of the raw masa with buttermilk and leavening to make cornbread, slid it into the oven, and realized it was the kind of hot that I had not experienced since grandma’s wood range back in the good old days. Whew. We stripped off more layers.

When the tortillas were done and the cornbread had proven to be more of a corn pudding, we took them into the other room where a table was set charmingly with pickles and salsas and kimchi and cheeses to join the beans and tortillas and Chet joined us and we had a lovely repast with lively conversation. I don’t know when I’ve had a meal so delicious.

***

Manolo greets customers at the store recently

Another day, another Venn diagram. Leo and I drive up to Pierce’s store – located at the apex of Cold River and Lincoln Hill Roads, and at the entrance to the seasonal CCC road to Plymouth – to see what’s kicking. Maya’s son, 12 year old Manolo, mans the cash register while Maya knits in the corner of the room. It is bustling and friendly and bright, as it has been whenever I’ve visited, and I sit down to talk with Maya while Leo gets himself one of Rob McKain’s blueberry muffins and some coffee and sits down at one of the tables in the back. Where there’s no shortage of people with whom to chat.

Pierce’s, of course, has come back to life, with only a few years of dormancy between this new life and the old one, which had lasted well over a century.

Some of us know that soon before she died Marjorie Pierce – the last in the family of Pierces who owned and ran the store – made a deal with Preservation Land Trust hoping to give the store continued life. A group of energetic people worked with PLT to decide what form the reincarnation should take.

Selling local products and making the store a community source of goods and gathering place – as it always had been – were in the lead. It would be a cooperative. It would not define itself as ‘organic’, particularly, but would serve the community, saving its members the long trek to Rutland every time they needed a cup of sugar or a loaf of bread. You’ll find Bud Lite as well as Vermont brews, even a few packs of cigarettes, on the shelves, and a package or two of Purdue chicken in the freezer along with locally grown ones.

It’s worth noting, though, that the products from local artisans and farmers contribute a great deal to the well-being of the store, and to the entire community of Shrewsbury. Something like $13K stayed right there in the community last year as a result of farmers and artisans having a market for their product and customers the opportunity to buy it.

Win/Win!

As well, there was a nice over-all profit last year – its first year in this new life – which kind of belies its isolation, its far-from-anywhere location. Oh, I am reminded, it is not far from the center of Shrewsbury! And it has become a destination – a beautiful drive, delicious delicacies, and well stocked with one-of-a-kind gifts and foods.

Rob McKain bakes and cooks

Rob McKain – a chef of wide renown, especially in Shrewsbury – bakes breads and cookies and scones, and makes soups as well as a variety of other delicacies every day. Local cooks provide a take-out meal every Friday. Board members take turns staffing the store and each takes on a longer term project to fulfill. Maya, who is a newcomer to the board, is working on making the barn a presentable place for community gatherings.

Lindsay, whose last name is Arbuckle, and her partner, Scott Courcelle, co-manage the store, and have since a few months after it opened in August of 2009. See that new Venn taking form? Now Lindsay and Maya and I are circles surrounding a new center, which is Pierce’s Store. But oh yes, we are now joined by many other circles – Scott, for instance, and Maya’s Chet, whose last name is Brigham, who was one of the early workers on getting that store reopened. And Manolo. I’m sure Manolo’s not the greatest 12 year old in the world, but you couldn’t prove it by me! Or Leo!

Scott and Lindsay were working for Americorps in Montpelier a couple of years ago. Scott grew up in Rutland and had some farm/garden experience. Lindsay, with Kansas roots, not so much; but she was interested in some of the garden lore other AmeriCorps friends were involved in. “I thought, that isn’t a bad thing to do with your life,” she told me. In the summer of ’08 they planted a community garden in Montpelier and liked the work, then looked into interning for a Rutland area farmer. They ultimately chose Paul Horton at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson, “because we knew we’d learn a lot from him, and we did!”

At the end of that summer of ‘09 they learned of the need for live-in managers at Pierce’s Store from Rob McKain. “We immediately called the number he gave us, and went up to meet some of the members the very next day. On the drive, we brainstormed what we would say, what WE would want from a neighborhood store, a co-op, and that was community, convenience, and local food. We were SO excited, but we didn’t have any retail or managerial experience. Still, they got right back to us and said, ‘you’re the ones.’”

Last summer they planted a market garden at Greg Cox’s Boardman Hill Farm in West Rutland and sold from their booth, Alchemy Gardens, at the Rutland Farmers’ Market all summer. It was a good summer of hard work and juggling the Co-op and the garden, and a successful one, too.

Scott and Lindsay co-manage the store

They live where the Pierces did, in the house attached to the store, with the Pierce’s furniture and even a hundred and fifty year old fern. It really is like living in a museum.

I think that puts Lindsay and Scott into the center of yet another Venn diagram surrounded by overlapping circles of Americorps, local farmers, co-ops, the farmers’ market... food! And perhaps it makes them iconic of a new wave of Rutland area farmers who are going to be feeding us for the foreseeable future. They might not be the greatest young couple in the world, but you couldn’t prove it by me!

Pierce's Store can be reached at 802-492-3326
The hours are: Tuesday - Saturday 7am to 7pm
Sunday 8-5

***

In Maya’s and Chet’s house there is enough electricity from a solar panel for electric lights by which to read in the evenings (a conscious choice not to support Vermont Yankee), but there is no computer, none of the other electronic time-sinks which sap our time and energies. There is no refrigerator in the house, just – in colder weather – a west-facing window-well where they keep milk from cows kept by Manolo and Grace, Chet’s sister.

Bone-broth soups bubble on the back of the range, and cooked food can be kept on the porch in cold weather. Jars of vegetables preserved in a naturally fermented state – kimchi and sauerkraut – stand in cool parts of the house. Thoughts and actions pertaining to food are a constant backdrop to lives like this, and when people ask Maya how she finds the time, she shrugs. Not too many years ago we all had to spend a considerable amount of time each day dealing with food, and look what’s happened to our food supply once we were relieved of the chore or, put another way, deprived of the pleasure.

Maya Zelkin is better known to the public as a thrower of elegant pots, which is the way I got to know her maybe ten years ago, and her potting shed is next door, still closed for the winter. A June firing is in sight.

One of the topics of conversation we had that day was how Maya liked to roast her own coffee beans. She likes her own coffee but she, unlike me, does not drink it every day. “I try not to make a habit of anything,” she said quietly.

Why, the very idea! It widens out the world.

***

This is the 100th Twice Bitten column to be published, and that puts me in the center of the most lovely Venn diagram of all, surrounded by fat circles of farmers and local food and food people, of eaters and doers, of co-ops and gardens, of readers and editors.

It’s a very happy place to be. Thank you.

between now and green

2011-03-17T10:02:00.000-04:00

a little dill'll do ya

Last year at this time we’d had spring for over two weeks – not terribly bright, perhaps, but in the 50s and low 60s sometimes – and green things were becoming apparent. All the green this year is at the Farmers’ Market.

Miller’s Farmstand has been offering dill and cilantro directly from growing flats for our delectation, other herbs already banded together, tiny bunches of romaine, and half a bushel of baby spinach if you get there early. Foggy Meadow has had micro-greens all winter – those baby sprouting greens that make such a difference to a plate all through these snowy days – and now has baby spinach, too, but, as with Millers, you need to get there early for a taste. They are in demand. Jim Horton, Paul’s son, who has been manning the stand this winter, told me he hopes to have (shhhhhhh...) a bit of chard this coming market.

There’s no doubt that we’re missing Kilpatrick’s Farm this winter, they with their well-tended and well-planned plethora of winter vegetables as well as surprises all along the way. In an email, Michael Kilpatrick told me, “...now at the (Saratoga) market we have lettuce mix, mesclun mix, baby spinach, regular spinach, Christmas spinach, boc choi mix, and Swiss chard, for greens, (and) the kale will be back in a few weeks. Couple new roots this year, too – Jerusalem artichokes, parsley root, purple and green kohlrabis, (and) a new yellow carrot.”

So, as I say, we miss them, but some of our larger farmers are seeing that they need to take up the slack – Paul at Foggy Meadow and Greg at Boardman Hill come to mind. How to do that sustainably is really the gnarly heart of the problem. Winter greens grown without petroleum? That would be the next breakthrough!

In my last column I said that you could find local mesclun – that mix of small-leafed greens – at the Co-op in Rutland. Mea culpa, you can not – they’re getting their mesclun from California! I’ve been buying it all winter, assuming it was from Benson’s Vermont Herb & Salad Company, because that IS available, and as we all know our Co-op is mandated to support our local farmers and provide us local produce when possible. So I emailed co-owner Heather McDermott to ask her where VH&S’s mesclun could be found. Not closer, she said, than Burlington! She is trying to get her herbs and salad mixes into Hannaford’s, however, so it wouldn’t hurt to put in a plug if you shop there.

Ironically, when Leo brought home a package of California mesclun from Price Chopper the other day I was like, Umm, I am NOT eating this stuff. What were you thinking?

(Over the holidays my daughter picked up two vacuum-packed packages of romaine lettuces. I popped one open to use in Caesar salad. The other got shoved to the back of the fridge and when I dug it out over a month later it was – guess what? – just as “fresh” and crisp as the first one had been. Now that is scary. “Don’t eat anything that won’t rot, or ferment” is a really good axiom.)

“But it’s organic,” Leo said of this recent incident, “and I was at PC anyway.” Organic schmanic, I said, I’m not eating greens that were picked in California by who knows who, who knows how long ago!

Sheesh. Who knew that’s what I’d been feeding us all winter. Lesson learned – I should never assume.

This demand for local food has just skyrocketed, hasn’t it? And nowhere can it be seen more clearly than in the success of Roots: The Restaurant down on Wales Street. Their business has been going lickity split ever since they opened – is it something like ten weeks ago already? I mean, reservations for lunch, please, as well as dinner (open every day except Monday at 747-7414). And the farmers whose product Chef Don Billings has contracted for are also doing well, able to plan the year ahead; having some idea of how many head of beef, how many rows of squash, and how much bacon to have smoked.

And the customer? The eater is in her glory – finally she can get a locally grass-fed beef hamburger! With hand-cut fries from local potatoes. She can also get a shrimp cocktail with Bomoseen shrimp and Don’s own sweet salsa. Oh, you didn’t know Bomoseen had shrimp? Learn something new every day, don’t you?

Let’s face it – not everything can be local, and what would a menu be without a shrimp dish – these are delectable little Ecuadorian things, supposedly sustainably caught, very nicely presented in a champagne glass so tall that you kind of have to put in your lap to be able to eat out of, with said salsa and guacamole and some tortilla chips. Kudos to Roots for making a few exceptions to Local!

Because at this time of year our tastebuds crave something out of the ordinary. And we’re finding it also in a burrito from Izapa Burrito Bar on Evelyn Street. The little purple structure is home to fiery – or not so – Mexican tastes a la the very gutsy Jillian Burkett, who has been open ALL WINTER (in that flimsy little structure) for lunch Monday through Friday. My burrito’s heat and content was perfect, I told her, and she murmured that she has a knack, the ability to judge, just by looking at them or listening to them on the phone (774-1001) a customer’s scoville unit preference.

And at home? What are we doing to enliven our winter-weary buds on that front?

Dukkah is the answer. I’m sprinkling this little nut and seed preparation on everything, from the yogurt and red lentils I have for brunch to the striped bass (Earth and Sea in Manchester) I wrapped in parchment with drizzles of olive oil, panko, and the dukkah grind I made last fall, and salt and pepper, of course. I put that parcel into a 400° oven with the slices of sweet potatoes that had lived there for 15 minutes already, and set the timer for 20 minutes.
In the meantime I remembered the brocc raab I’d bought a week ago at least. I parboiled it while I warmed some garlic and hot pepper flakes in olive oil in the old black skillet. What the raab would experience when it had drained and turned cool, was a warm spicy bath of olive oil that imperceptibly heated to flavor the raab in a process similar to that in which lobsters are said to be cooked starting in cold water – without alarm.

Dukkah

There are many mixtures of this but this pleasing one I found online
from a woman by the name of Melissa Fernandez.
Feel free to double this to make it worth your time.

2 tablespoons pistachios, toasted
2 tablespoons hazelnuts, toasted
1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted
2 tablespoons coriander seeds, toasted
1 tablespoon fennel seeds, toasted
¼ teaspoon sea salt.

To toast the nuts and seeds put each kind separately into a small skillet over medium heat and watch them carefully, giving them an intermittent swirl, and when you begin to smell their toastiness they are done. Let them cool in a sauce dish and start on the next one. When they’re all toasted and cooled put them into a mortar and pestle and pound to a coarse consistency, or pulse in a food processor (I use a coffee grinder). Sprinkle them on everything.

Make some dukkah for yourself. It’ll pass the time between now and green!

published as Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald 15 MAR, 2011

emptying the larder

2011-03-17T09:42:00.000-04:00

I took out last year’s calendar just to look at the blank spot that ran through the last week of February into the first week of March of two thousand and ten. So clean and unmarked it was except for the straight line I’d drawn through it with the words “to SJU”. That is travel agentese for San Juan. Every last week of a Vermont February should have a similar line drawn through it, indicating that we are off having adventures, exotic or not. A certain energy is released when one goes journeying, certain plugs are exploded, a freshness in one invites new energy back. Lives change when adventures are spun.

My calendar this year does not sport that line through a couple of weeks, though it doesn’t have much else, either. So I have been enjoying my own home and village and walks as though I were a visitor, hoping for new eyes and appreciation. It almost works, and it has some enjoyable side effects.

The weather has cooperated. This is one of the more exciting winters that I can remember, with temperatures into the negative numbers and not single digit ones, either. There is a certain sense of accomplishment when your car thermometer shows -23° and you have made it out for early breakfast with the governor. Or when you get to the Paramount in spite of heavy, wet, crunchy snow all day, to hear The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, whose music is simply magnificent.

We were in our own private world there with those eight people on stage working as hard and perfectly as hummingbirds, with their wands and violas and violins and cellos to give us music that just smacked us in the face like a lovely Olympian ruffle – so powerful and transporting it was. After the Shostakovich came intermission, when nature gave us just as powerful a rendition as the thick snowing sky turned to pouring February rain, pelting like liquid icicles on the street, and lightening and thunder, great rolls of it, blasted us back to the Academy for the mesmerizing Mendelssohn in the second half. The whole night was something like ecstasy.

We are some of the lucky ones: Everything works – though there have been some major complications – and our house is warm and the larder stocked.

That larder is being slowly depleted, which is as it should be: The growing season is coming again – we’ll soon be prying ramps out of the rocky ground and steaming fiddleheads – and it’s time to spend the luxurious currency we put up last summer. The roasted corn we froze last August is so incredibly sweet and tasty now! It’s as though our tongues had been blanded down over these white months to be shocked awake at what we took for granted in August. All those times that I threw twice as much corn as we could eat on the grill, all those times that Leo shaved the rest of it off the cobs and I froze it? Little chunks of time with a great payoff now! I simply mixed it with faro one night, to side some grilled chicken breasts. Now there’s a nice combination – so nutty and so sweet.

I roasted broiler pans full of tomatoes last summer, and ladled them into freezer bags. When I thawed some the other day, took an immersion blender to them in the pan just to break up skins and seeds, and tasted, I was petrified with delight!! So vibrant, so sweet, that I simply ladled them into little bowls, put a spoonful of garlic olive oil on top, and imagined we were sitting on the August porch.

Then – it just keeps getting better – one very snowy Saturday we saw the signs for the Maine shrimp truck and scored 5 pounds of them. After beheading them and shelling them, 5 pounds of Maine shrimp is not an impressive amount. Nevertheless, they are delicious little things, and combined with the roasted corn and the roasted tomatoes, cilantro and chopped avocado, on a few leaves of mesclun, some lime juice squeezed over – they made a totally decadent and delectable salad.

Playful salads are our counterintuitive choice these days for supper – a bed of mesclun, locally grown and available at the co-op, along with the micro-greens from the Farmers’ market, some leftover shredded chicken or pork, sometimes beef (also from the Farmers’ Market), perhaps some homemade fried croutons for crunch, a scattering of walnuts or pecans or pumpkin or sesame seeds that have been roasted or at least warmed in some butter, and some dried cranberries or diced dried apricots, or slices of fresh mango, come to that. A little vinaigrette of sherry or balsamic vinegar and garlic olive oil. Salt and pepper, sometimes some shavings of parmesan or cubes of mozzarella. These just totally hit the spot, full of intriguing tastes and textures.

We’ve started on the second batch of sauerkraut, too, and it’s wonderfully refreshing – tangy and crunchy yet, and full of microbes and live cultures that help our guts populate themselves with healthful things.. I dig out a dish of it in the morning and leave it on the counter to snack on all day.

The pile of New Yorkers (not people, Silly, the magazine!) that I was too busy to read last fall is slowly diminishing, too, as I take some of these white hours to peruse them, finding some gems as I go along. One of them was a fascinating article by Burkhard Bilger in the November 22 issue called Nature’s Spoils, which followed Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation, on his rounds of making fermented foods such as my sauerkraut and along the way had some amazing things to say about the idea that “Americans are killing themselves with cleanliness,” as he quotes Katz saying. Somehow Bilger segues from fermented sauerkraut to raw milk, and his discussion of that timely topic is perhaps the most balanced and unbiased that I’ve ever read. It’s too long and too complicated to summarize here, so I hope you’ll find the article and read it for yourself.

I say ‘timely’ topic because you may or may not have heard that the excellent organization, Rural Vermont, was stopped by our new (and, we hoped, farmer-centric) Agency of Agriculture from conducting workshops teaching people how to make yogurt, butter, and cheese from raw milk. The Agency cited some confused wording in the raw milk law that prohibited farmers from selling raw milk to people who would use that milk in any but its fluid form. The solution would seem to be a simple one – the Agency should clean up the wording so that it makes some modicum of sense and get themselves out of our pantries – where they most obviously do not belong. Because it is none of their business (or my farmer’s business) if I drink my gallon of raw milk whole or skim the cream to make butter or heat it up to make yogurt.

Making yogurt from raw milk is something that I often (and illegally?) do. And there’s nothing simpler, really. This is my technique.

***
Yogurt

2 quarts raw whole milk
½ cup good unflavored, whole milk yogurt (Butterworks Farm is a good one)

Ladle the milk into two quart jars and pour into a pan. Heat the milk slowly and carefully to 160° to 180°and let it cool to 115°. (Some recipes call for just heating the milk to 110° in the first place, but I do not have good results with that technique.)

Meanwhile, take a small hard-sided cooler (that the two quart jars can fit into) and fill it with hot water. Close it and let it warm up while you make the yogurt.

When the milk has heated and cooled to 115°, stir in the yogurt. and pour back into the quart jars. Screw the caps on loosely.

Empty the cooler of water, put the jars of milk/yogurt into it, close it, and place somewhere warm and out of drafts for 8 hours, at which time check the consistency and taste. If it is still too thin, without any sign of setting, you can leave it for a few more hours or overnight. If it seems to be setting, put it in the fridge, and it will continue to thicken. If you leave it for too long in the ‘cooler’ the tanginess will cede to sour.

Voila! That’s it.

***

Mark McAfee, C.E.O. and founder of the country’s largest raw-milk dairy, Organic Pastures, is quoted by Bilger in the aforementioned article as saying that dealing with the live cultures in any food, but in this case, raw milk, forces dairies to do what all of agriculture should be doing anyway: downsize, localize, clean up production.

“We need to go back a hundred and fifty years,” McAfee told Bilger. “Going back is what’s going to help us go forward.”

My question to the new head of the Agency of Agriculture, Chuck Ross, on VPR’s Vermont Edition one day was,

“Sustainable dairy – meaning smaller herds, grass and pasture fed, sustainably milked, minimally and locally processed... How do we make this happen, and how do we quit encouraging farmers to get bigger at all costs, and how do we transition big farms to sustainable farms?
Thanks. I'll take the answer off the air.”

The recent action of the Agency of Ag was not the answer I was looking for.

published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald 01 MAR 2011

not a lot of solid evidence

2011-03-17T09:18:00.000-04:00

It’s Sunday morning, so I’m trying to decide what to do instead of writing Tuesday’s column. I think I’ll wipe the kitchen down, even mop the floor. Make some chicken soup – good for what ails you in February or any other time. And maybe I’ll clean out the fridge.

There is a commonality in opening the fridge and seeing it stuffed full with forgotten leftovers and other mysteries and realizing that it needs a good cleaning. Nora Ephron has to take care of her own leftovers, probably, clean her own fridge. No one escapes that chore unless they have full-time housekeeping, or a wife, or a partner who does it. There is not a job I like less, except, apparently, writing a column.

Ah! I’d forgotten those Brussels sprouts I made on Wednesday. I was looking for recipes for the Co-op and asked around and Lindsay Arbuckle, of Alchemy Gardens and Pierce’s Store, suggested Brussels sprouts steamed with dried cranberries, leeks and pecans. I formulated that into a recipe that I trust approximates the preparation she had in mind.

They’re delicious now, cold, salted and peppered. The sweetness of the pecans and the cranberries with the savory greenness of the sprouts is the perfect brunch snack.

Hmm, wonder how the Vermont Peanut Butter got pushed back behind the seldom-used jars of miso? I take a teaspoon full of it – it’s the chunky variety – and add a scraping of butter before taking it to my computer and staring at this screen. It’s an adult lollypop. Well, it’s a peanut butter lollypop, adult or not. And it reminds me of an article about food allergies in children that I read in the Feb 7 New Yorker.

The practice of anti-intuitively advising pregnant women and babies to avoid all kinds of foods, from peanuts to shellfish for varying amounts of time up to two years old in order to AVOID food allergies in children, seems to have backfired, and the number of food allergies has exploded!

My favorite quote is by a medical doctor/professor who said, “We in medicine are making a lot of decisions and recommendations based on not a lot of solid evidence.”
Read that again. “... on NOT a lot of solid evidence.”

So the NEW thought on allergies is that “a child becomes tolerant to a variety of food proteins through exposure in the first six months of life.” You will notice that’s the exact opposite of what they have been advising the poor allergic dears all this time.

Nowhere in this article – The Peanut Puzzle, by Jerome Groopman – does anyone wonder if allergies might be due to the altered chemistry of the food because of the way it is now grown. Is it not reasonable to think that the reason such an increasing number of people have ‘intolerances’ to so many foods – milk, wheat, soy, nuts – is that their bodies do not recognize the food as food. It’s been genetically altered. It’s been grown or produced with a variety of chemical helpers that our bodies do not recognize as food.

But they do note that in developing countries, where allergies are scarce, children “often consume solids, initially chewed by their parents, at two or three months.” It’s the quickest and most convenient, and even, perhaps, the healthiest way of feeding babies solid food. “Saliva is a rich source of enzymes that can help break down solid foods and of antibodies that might coat food proteins...” to make them less allergenic. Don’t you just love it?

You know all those pronouncements about when to feed your baby rice cereal, and phase in this and that food? It has NO basis in scientific evidence! And that’s according to a specialist in newborn nutrition quoted in the article. NO basis in scientific evidence. Who’da thunk?

This reminds me of a quote by Gary Taubes. In his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, he wrote, “The institutionalized vigilance, ‘this unending exchange of critical judgment,’ is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity...” He adds, “(practitioners) certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public.” In other words, it SOUNDS like science, but it is far from it.

How about that low-fat milk we’re advised to feed our kids? Who says? Well, for one, the new USDA guidelines say to. On what scientific basis are we advised? There is none. And to my mind, when in doubt follow Michael Pollan’s advice – Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Why take apart a perfectly good food and recombine it to some know-nothing’s specifications? Eat the whole food. Drink the whole milk. Our cells need saturated animal fats. They don’t oxidize like vegetable oils do, and go rancid and create the dreaded free radicals. Cholesterol is an antioxidant. It rushes to repair arteries and heal infections. It’s good for our brains, our nerves, and our adrenal glands. Forget the Kool-Aid! Drink the milk!

Oh my goodness, look what I’ve done! It seems I’ve written a column! Whether or not it’s readable remains to be seen. And just to be sure that it’s edible, I’ll include a recipe for Lindsay’s

Glorified Brussels Sprouts

•    1 pound Brussels Sprouts, trimmed and cleaned
•    Salt and pepper to taste
•    1/2 cup dried cranberries (or other dried fruit)
•    1 tablespoon butter
•    1 tablespoon olive oil
•    1 large leek
•    1/2 cup pecans
•    Optional: Sherry or Marsala wine

Steam the Brussels sprouts until they begin to soften, sprinkle with salt and pepper and steam until fork tender. Meanwhile, melt the butter and olive oil in a skillet. Clean the leeks and slice lengthwise into thin strands about 2 inches long. Add the leeks to the butter and sauté over low heat until golden and tender. Add the cranberries or other fruit (shredded dried apricots are very good) and pecans and sauté a few moments more. A splash of sherry is nice here.
When the sprouts are done add them to the pan and combine. Correct the seasonings. Add more butter, to taste, just before serving.

published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald 15 February, 2011

Butz Redux

2011-02-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

The sun is brilliant this morning, the thermometer is hovering at about +6° and it’s so beautiful I might even have to take a frigid walk as soon as I can tear myself away from these seed catalogs. Seeds of Change, I’ve got here, from out west; and Pinetree Garden Seeds out of Maine, and Cook’s Garden from Manchester.

Everyone should have a garden, don’t you think? To keep us grounded, aware of what food is and how it gets here. We need to get those little dirt microbes under our fingernails and let them find a complementary home in our guts. They make us happy and healthy. We need the breath of trees, and their hugs, too. Oh my goodness, I think I might be breaking out into a little sweat of exaltation here. What plethora. What bounty!

Well, it’s a good thing we can take pleasure in the simple things, because there’s enough to worry us on the larger front. There’s a little diffuse, niggling, gnawing ruffle of worry around my rosy satisfaction with the Farm to Plate Initiative, Vermont’s own ability to take care of its own self in the continuing food emergency, our ability to move forward agilely while the ship of state turns clumsily in a new direction, even as I dream of spring and eat up the pictures in the seed catalogs. Red Streaked Mizuna, anyone? A spinach called Indian Summer?

This unease comes from many directions. For example, a man named Atul Gawande, a prolific and intelligent thinker and writer about the nation’s health-care system, has begun to propound the idea that our future health care system should follow the pattern of the so-called “Green Revolution”. That, you will remember, was the child of Earl Butz, whom Nixon appointed in the ‘70s to design a food system. He was the guy who said to farmers, as Michael Pollan puts it so succinctly, “get bigger or get out, plant fence row to fence row, move toward monocultures, just crank out that corn and soy; and then he redesigned the structure of subsidies to encourage that whole program.”

Somehow Atul Gawande thinks that was a success. And it did bring down prices – we have unrealistically cheap (supermarket) food. Unfortunately it’s food that causes a variety of “Western Syndrome” diseases – obesity and diabetes, for instance. Those diseases cost us, oh, maybe around $250 billion a year. Not only that but we’ve put small and diversified farms out of business all over the country. The environmental costs are stymieing.

Are you picking up on the irony here?

Thank goodness for those seed catalogs. Next spring I’ll plant hops to run up the utility poles, and white clover in my garden pathways.

But that reminds me that the federal government has deregulated Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready alfalfa. Not only does there not seem to be any good reason for this – alfalfa grows perfectly well on its own – but this stuff will almost surely cross-pollinate conventional and organic alfalfa. In the meantime, weeds have been adapting to be able to survive Round-Up, creating a whole other set of problems. And do you know how much of earth’s surface is covered with alfalfa? Do we need to make it all Monsanto’s? Remember – every time we humans screw around with Mother Nature we live to regret it.

Well, enough of this. I think I’ll have some breakfast. I like my breakfast about eleven o’clock in the morning, and I like it to be my lunch, too. I like it after I’ve read the paper and drunk 2 mugs of coffee, done all those personal morning things, worked a little bit, maybe taken a walk. I like maybe an egg, maybe some yogurt, perhaps some oatmeal. But, I simply can’t get out of bed and immediately sit down to eat after having done nothing all night.

Tsk, tsk, my friends say. Don’t you know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?

Well, Yeah, but ... can’t it be brunch, too?

Imagine my immense satisfaction at the new headline that said “Studies prove... (Never mind that studies can prove just about anything!)... that a big breakfast just adds calories to your daily total. Now I don’t care about calories but my friends do.

I might even have a banana for my brunch/breakfast. Which reminds me, if you’re a banana person you’d better eat ‘em while they’re still available. Because I’ll bet you’ve heard of the banana pest that’s killing the banana palms and threatening the entire industry. You see, banana palms are genetically modified – they cannot be grown from seed but must be cloned. Civilization’s favorite source of potassium is a vast monoculture, and if it falls ill we’re back to square one, as far as bananas go.

Okay, enough of the headlines. Back to the seed catalogs and the hope – nay, trust – that yet another spring will arrive in its own good time.

Let’s have brunch!

***

Ruth Reichl says this is the best waffle in the world!

Fannie Farmer's Yeast-Raised Waffles

Sprinkle 1 package of dry yeast (or ½ teaspoon bulk yeast) over a half cup of warm water in a large bowl and wait for it to dissolve.
Meanwhile melt a stick of butter, add 2 cups of milk and allow it to just gently warm up. Add it to the yeast mixture.
Mix a teaspoon each of salt and sugar into 2 cups of flour. Add this to the liquid and beat until smooth.
Cover the bowl and let it stand overnight at room temperature. In the morning beat in 2 eggs and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, stirring well. Cook on a very hot waffle iron until crisp on each side.
This makes about 8 waffles, and will keep for a few days in the refrigerator.

***

And now, let’s celebrate bananas while we may:

James Beard’s Black Bananas

Take a hand of bananas (1 for each eater) and put them into a 350° oven for 15 or 20 minutes, until the skins turn black and the insides are soft.
For each person, slit the inside curve of the banana, and scrunch it open. The banana should be soft and fragrant. Top each with at least 1 teaspoon of butter, 2 teaspoons of maple syrup or brown sugar, 2 or 3 teaspoons of freshly squeezed lime juice, and a plentiful drizzle of dark rum. Serve hot.

***

Happy gardening!

Soda Protests

2011-01-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

Years ago, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s I was dumbfounded to realize that our kids’ schools had soda dispensing machines in their cafeterias. I suggested that this was not a good thing, and that they should discontinue the practice and take those machines out because soda was about the worst thing kids could consume. I didn’t keep it in MY fridge! The schools told me that it wasn’t tenable to take them out because the contracts with the soda companies and distributors were very lucrative for the schools. My answer to that was a shrug. So what? The mere fact that the school had those dispensing machines within its walls gave all appearances that they were condoning the use of soda. It would be more expensive in the long run to keep them. At that point we didn’t know HOW expensive.

Skip forward a few years, er, ah, decades, and what do we have? Suggestions that soda should be taxed! I think that nothing any one of us decides to put into our mouths should be taxed. Namely because you never know what someone is going to decide we need to be protected from next. It might be cauliflower. Or radishes. Or good healthy hog fat. But wait, they already subsidized that out of existence. “The other white meat,” indeed – the hogs are so skinny now nobody wants to eat pork!

Judith Levine in an article she wrote in Seven Days, says it well. “So, keep the junk off the market. Pour on the industry regulation. End the corn subsidies that siphon high-fructose corn syrup into virtually every U.S.-made processed food and thence into the bloodstreams of American eaters. Support organic farms. Require schools to serve lentils and whole-grain bread, broccoli and watermelon.”

In other words, teach your children well, by example and not by punishment. Sin Taxes are ... yucky. They have that singy smell of outraged morality – the ‘I’m better than you are’ syndrome.

That is not to say that I agree with a very conservative woman by the name of Kate O'Beirne, who reportedly said, at a Republican Strategy Meeting, “Obesity is a substantial national problem that the federal government should have nothing to do with. It is largely a cultural problem.”

Because the Federal government IS directly responsible for obesity, for paying farmers to grow corn and soy and changing our wheat so that our bodies don’t even recognize it and telling people not to eat animal fat, and then foisting the genetically modified grains, sugars, and fat back into our diets, very often hidden.

Oxymoron of the moment? The fact that since warning people that dairy fat is going to give us heart attacks people have turned to 1% or 2% milk. That’s ancient history, and the people have gotten fat without the dairy fat and had the heart attacks, too! But whatever happened to the cream? The fat? Well, we know now that it’s consolidated into some kind of weird machine-made cheese, and they’re slathering humongous portions of it over commercially made pizzas and who knows what else! But I mean where did it go all these years past? You can bet it was coming back to us in some hidden form. Better to drink your nature-ly balanced whole milk than only parts of it here and there.

Things get very crazy when the government gets involved in our food.

And that’s why it’s a very good thing that Vermont is reclaiming its ability to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” as Michael Pollan put it so simply. When everything comes to your table whole and fresh and unadulterated and you cook it and sauce it and butter it to your own taste, then you’re kicking the government right out the window.

Many people are taking the “mostly plants” part of that exhortation quite seriously, and more people are becoming vegetarian for one day a week or every day until supper – partial vegetarians – because they will not eat CAFO* meat – supermarket meats; and grass-fed and free-range meat is expensive – for some people, too expensive and they can’t afford it at all.

O’Beirne touched on this affordability angle. She said that parents who couldn’t stuff at least a bowl of cereal and a banana down their kids’ throats in the morning are criminally negligent. She was saying that in defense of her position that schools should not be feeding kids breakfast. Is it criminally negligent to be poor, to be sleeping in a car, to not have a bowl, to live in a food wasteland, to not be able to afford a fast-disappearing species of banana? I think it’s tragic, but criminally negligent?

People are very, very upset about her elitist words.

As for Vermonters, if we become the breadbasket for the northeast – Montreal, Boston and New York City – maybe with those economics of scale we will be about to afford our own good food and help feed those who can’t, too. That’s what the Executive Summary of the Farm to Plate Strategic Plan is hinting at, and we’ve got farmers and fooders who will be very happy to spend their lives making it come true.
It’s all coming together, folks, but don’t take your shoulder from that boulder – keep it moving, however slightly, up.

*Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation

***

So, how ‘bout some fat...
I’m here to tell you that cooking for two is lots easier than cooking for four. Coring two apples is not a chore, while coring four begins to be. Making an apple pie? Priceless. I am coring two apples to roast the halves, and serve them with this lovely pasta dish that’s made with potatoes as well as pasta, caramelized onions, and three kinds of cheese. It appeared in Esquire magazine back in the dark ages, I think maybe even 1979. It is scrumptious and once or twice every decade I bring it out and make an utter flurry of appelzangrubincheeser. You can make half a recipe for 2 people, and you can serve it with baked apples instead of sauce, and you can use any kind of cheeses you like – last time I used Parmesan, Cabot, and Gruyere. It’s a Swiss Alpine dish, and it calls itself rugged.

Aelplermaggrone

Use cheeses from mild to strong, such as Emmentaler, Gruyere, Sbrinz (hard). Served with big bowls of applesauce.

2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 large onions, peeled and thinly sliced
8 ounces potatoes, peeled, quartered, sliced thickly (1 very large)
10 ounces tubular macaroni such as penne or elbow
4 ounces shredded Emmentaler
4 ounces shredded Gruyere
3 ounces grated Sbrinz (or Parmesan or Romano)
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
Salt and Pepper to taste

In a large skillet melt butter and oil over low heat. Add onion and sauté slowly, turning frequently to brown evenly. Cook about twenty minutes or until the onions have turned a rich brown. Set aside.
Cook potatoes in boiling water for 5 minutes, then add macaroni and cook 6 to 8 minutes, until nearly done but still firm. Drain under cold running water and set aside.

Mix together three cheeses in a small bowl. Heat cream in small saucepan just until barely simmering. Whisk in 1/3 of the cheese until sauce is melted and smooth. Set aside.

Heat oven to 375°. Butter bottom and sides of a large, rather deep baking dish. In large bowl toss together potato/macaroni with second third of cheese, salt and pepper. Place in baking dish. Pour cheese sauce evenly over the mixture, sprinkle with remaining cheese, arrange onion slices on top.

Cover dish with aluminum foil. Bake fifteen to twenty minutes until the cheese is melted and the mixture thoroughly hot. Serve at once with tart applesauce. Makes four servings.

This post was published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald on 1/18/11.

doin’ that crazy hambone

2011-01-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

recently decanted cherry heering

Yawn. Oh, hi. Yup, I know, welcome to 2011, a whole new bright untarnished year rolling out in front of us, ready to be marred, patterned, designed, pleated, planted, cooked, harvested and, finally, composted..

But wouldn’t it make more sense for New Year’s to be celebrated on Winter Solstice, or on Spring’s, for that matter? The beginning of lengthening light or the beginning of the planting season? A localvore would never have chosen January 1 as the New Year. It’s arbitrary. A simple matter of paper. Just because January is when the Gregorian calendar makes the months begin anew. So it is literally if not intuitively the New Year. Oh well – gave us a chance to fill the still-dark season with yet more mindless and desperate gaiety. To be gay! ‘Tis devoutly to be wisht! And, truth be told, we do feel the beginning of something after the holidays, if only the need to sort out the detritus of the last twelve months and begin organizing for the next dozen.

Bah. It's enough to drive you to drink!

In the meantime, if you are like me, you are feeling a little tender, having been dumped into these new days that are not noticeably lighter longer. We’re in need of some quiet and simple kitchen time, and there IS that hambone. Hambone, hambone, where have you been? I sing as I dig that juicy thing out of the fridge.

Been all around the world and back again, it says to me in a gristly voice.

Well, that was surprising! My eyes flicker from side to side: hope no one heard. From the timbre of that voice looks like it’d rather be swimming with some collard greens and beans, but I intend to turn it into split pea soup. With dumplings.

But first have a cherry. Because this afternoon I decanted the Cherry Heering* that I started steeping last July with those sour cherries from Champlain Orchards. I’d decided to take the cherries to a party tonight as a snack, and I couldn’t resist trying them. Let’s have another one while we get busy on that soup. They’re so small they can’t do much harm, can they?

Okay then. Big pan, hambone in it, cover with water, about 2 1/2 quarts, drop a bay leaf into it, cover atilt, over high heat until it begins to spatter, then turn it to a low medium and let it simmer away for an hour or so.

Once you’ve got the hambone over the heat, chop up a fairly large onion and a clove of garlic. Cut the onion in half and then slice each half thinly, sprinkle the slices with some coarse salt and chop them fine.

We’re singing now: Hambone, Hambone where did you go?/ I hopped up to Miss Lucy's door. Where. Is this coming from? In any case, add the onions to the simmering hambone and have another cherry.

Then , measure out 3 cups of split peas, rinse them a couple of times and leave them to soak in water to cover. Sing: I asked Miss Lucy would she marry me? Make her say back, Well I don't care if Papa don't care! Roll your eyes like you were young Miss Lucy. Hambone. Hambone.

When the hambone has simmered for an hour to an hour and a half, and the meat separates easily from the bone, lift it out of the broth with some tongs and put it on a plate to cool. Drain the split peas and add them to the broth. And GIT your hands out of those cherries. Keep those peas and broth simmering.

Now. Scrape or scrub a large carrot and a medium-sized potato and make very small squares out of them. We will call them a brunoise. Now do the same with a stalk of celery and be sure to include the leaves. Very small squares, like quarter inch squares.

When you’re making squares out of oblong things like potatoes and carrots, take a thin slice off of one long side to give you a level resting edge; cut in quarter inch slices, then stack the slices and cut them into quarter inch logs, then stack the logs and cut them crosswise into quarter inch squares.

Those of you who already know how to cut a brunoise? Please bear with me. Here, make yourself comfortable. Have another cherry. Oh, what’d I do with them. Mm, I put ‘em away. Here, the dangerous part’s done. Have another.

Check the peas and broth. Add water if it’s too thick. Take the meat from the hambone, chop it up and put it back into the soup.

When the peas begin to lose their shape, after about 45 minutes, and when you taste one it’s al dente or just chewy in the center, drain the brunoise and add it to the pot. And while you tasted, did it need more salt? Add it, and some ground pepper, too. Want a little curry in there? Now’s the time. I’ll add a teaspoon of 5-Spice powder. Doin’ that Crazy Hambone.

Now for the dumplings. Break an egg into a small bowl, shmear it up with a fork, and sprinkle in some flour and stir it in with the fork. Add more and stir and more and stir, until you have a thick paste as for pasta. When the dough won’t incorporate any more flour, then take this up in your hands and knead it, dipping your hands in flour to ward off the stickiness, and when you have a smooth, non-sticky ball of dough flatten it out on a board or counter until it’s about, oh, a third of an inch thick reaching towards a half. Cut into small squares. These little pillows will probably still be clinging to each other, so take up a hambone, er, ah, a handful, and pinch them into the bubbling soup. They’ll take 15 to 20 minutes to cook and then you can serve it up.

Pass me those cherries, would you? What? They’re all gone? Well, that’s okay. I don’t give diddley...Bo Diddley, of course... Let me just pour us a little bit of this Cherry Heering now.

Hambone, Hambone, where you been? ’Round the world and goin’ again!

Here’s to a jazzy Year!

*Cherry Heering -- cover 2 quarts of pitted sour cherries (save the pits) with 1 cup of sugar and a couple quarts of rum. Or vodka. Put the pits in some cheesecloth and put them to steep with the cherries. Cover and put aside until winter. Be careful!

This post was published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald on 01/04/2011

Holy Yum!

2010-12-20T09:36:00.001-05:00

This king of salads has a place on the holiday table

It’s hectic, Sunday, got to write a column, looking forward to friends this evening, going to Albany to pick up my daughter tomorrow (looking forward to driving home on Winter Solstice AND full moon), and so I’m making and writing about THE Caesar Salad.

Besides making a great supper salad, especially, perhaps, in this solstice/new years season, it makes a refreshing breakfast – if you manage to squirrel a bit away – for the morning after. In this way I can have friends over, take pix, eat well, finish up the column tomorrow – the whole thing like a jigsaw puzzle, fitting it into the little pockets of time that this season repatterns.

This isn’t the original Caesar salad but I do believe it’s Craig Claiborne’s, from when he was the food guru at the New York Times. I’ve made it many, many times and once had it served to me in an airport hotel restaurant where the waiter made it tableside. I mean THIS Caesar salad. I’ve had lots of others that just don’t measure up.

The recipe, circa 1978, which is also taped (like the corn bread) to my messy cupboard door, reads like this:

Caesar salad
Had this since time began.
- Combine and let steep -
1 clove garlic, smashed, with 1/2 cup olive oil
- Begin to make
2 c. croutons in garlic oil
- Tear
1 or 2 heads romaine lettuce
into a bowl.
- Sprinkle with
1/4 c. grated parmesan
1/4 c. crumbled bleu or Roquefort cheese
- Combine
1/2 c. olive oil
1 T. Worcestershire sauce
3/4 t. salt (?)
3/4 t. freshly grated pepper
drizzle over greens and toss.
-Place
1 raw egg
1/4 c. lemon juice
several anchovies (to taste)
on top and toss until no egg color remains.
- Add and toss
Garlic croutons.
Serve.

This is the perfect Caesar – yes to anchovies, yes to raw egg, yes to getting your hands into it and tossing, tossing, in the prescribed stages, until every last leaf is a bit limp with its unctuous goodness.

If you hate anchovies then don’t make this salad. If it’s only the texture of anchovies – and I dislike the little feathery bones – then chop them finely, or melt them over very low heat in a small frying pan before adding them to the greens. But this salad is nothing without the umphy umami that the anchovies add.

If you (sniff) Do. Not. Eat. Raw Eggs, then don’t make this salad, because ditto – if not umami then that egg contributes something just as important. If you buy your eggs, as fresh as yesterday, from a nice local farmer who lets her chickens roam around outside and helps them perch fluffily and huffily on roosts under shelter at night, and even coos to them sometimes below their own clucks, you have little to fear except fear itself.
If you want to be more local, use local spinach for the greens.

The recipe itself is a bit problematic. The olive oil and garlic, for instance, don’t add up. I do it this way., starting an hour or two, or a day or two, before you will serve the salad.

1) Smash a clove or two of garlic and put it with ½ cup olive oil into a 1 cup measure. Add a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, a sprinkling of salt and several grinds of black – or white – pepper. (I believe the ¾ teaspoon of salt has a question mark after it for good reason – it might be too much. Add a sprinkling, then wait till the end and taste to see if it needs more.) Set this mixture aside.

2) Make croutons. Cut 4 to 6 slices of – I like Baba Louis white sourdough – bread into ¾ inch cubes and let them sit out for a bit, then coat the bottom of a wide-bottomed frying pan with a skim of olive oil. It should have a bit of depth. Slice a clove or two of garlic thinly and add to the warming olive oil over medium-low heat. When it begins, just barely, to brown, toss the bread cubes into the oil until they’re coated. Watch them very carefully, shaking them and tossing them often so they don’t burn. You want them to get crisp and golden and a little dried out, but not burned. When they’re done – and that might take half an hour – sprinkle with salt, toss, and set them aside.

3) Wash 2 large or 3 small heads of romaine (or spinach), shake it damp, wrap it in a thickness of paper towels, put it into a plastic bag and into the fridge until making time.

Ready to make the salad?

4) Tear the greens into a bowl (which could be rubbed with yet another clove of garlic), sprinkle with at least ¼ cup grated Parm and bleu cheese each, and then the olive oil/Worcester mixture and toss with your hands. The reason for this is that you want each leaf to be almost... massaged with the oil and cheeses. Think sensuous.

massage, massage, in this whirl of a holiday season: Photo by Wendy Hybl Fannin

5) Break the raw egg over the greens (maybe break it into a dish first. Just in case...), sprinkle the lemon juice over, then the anchovies, and toss and toss, massage, massage, until not a speck of recognizable egg shows. Taste for salt and sprinkle with more if needed. Ditto pepper.

6) Sprinkle the croutons over the greens and toss once again.

Holy Yum!

And have a seriously sentient solstice. See you next year!

Monday morning breakfast... Mmmm

the many faces of hunger

2010-12-08T09:32:00.002-05:00

thanks for permission from Jeff Danziger to reprint

When my mother saw Injun Joe* and his wife Mary tramping up our long driveway she’d exclaim, “Oh, Lord, here they come again,” in spite of the fact that it had been a month or so since they’d shown up the last time. It was common knowledge that the little old man and the little old woman would periodically (when the Check came in) walk from their shack in the woods about a mile from our house to the tavern in a neighboring village five miles further on, where they would get roaring drunk until the sheriff drove them home. They stopped at our house to pick something up that we saved for them. I think it was newspapers, though I have no idea what earthly good newspapers would have done them.

In return they insisted on giving us some of their government subsidy brown rice or some other brown grain. My mother never used it. It was common knowledge that it was weevily. Mom seemed to resent those visits. I didn’t know why – they really were no trouble – but I got the feeling that it was maybe just that these two poor old Indians had the nerve to think they could give us something that we needed or would deign to use. And maybe also that the sight of them brought up a vestigial fear of impoverishment and hunger.

There were many ways we were impoverished, but hunger for food was never a problem. We were farmers in an extended family of farmers – our entire lives revolved around food. We had fresh milk everyday and butter and eggs and a chicken in the Sunday pot, vegetables from the garden, preserves, bushels of apples and potatoes in the cellar. We had pork from the annual slaughter. We had beef. It was really GOOD food, not the kind of crap that poor people eat today when a bag of chips and a soda pop are cheaper than a bunch of carrots and much more filling.

And it’s not just poor people. A few years ago I sat in a government office talking to an official. Behind the adjoining desk was a woman* whose upper arms fell away in tanned folds of fat above her elbows. One of those elbows rested upon the desk and regularly flexed to allow her forearm and fingers to descend to a carton of little orange cheese thingies and then rise to feed her mouth, which was set amidst several cheeks, jowls, and chins. Note that she was not wolfing down porterhouse steaks with their attendant mouth-watering fats and juices nor glasses of whole milk nor rounds of fully ripened cheeses, in fact, nothing made by nature, but tiny little crisp factory-fashioned morsels made of the most refined flours and sugars and oils, so far away from anything that grows from the earth that they were unrecognizable as food at all. A beautiful woman resided inside those layers of fat, a still-healthy one, it seemed. But if she wasn’t diabetic yet, she surely would be soon, because it’s a simple case of cause and effect: sugar and refined grains cause obesity and diabetes and other deathly diseases as well. And there goes that hand again, into the carton and there it goes fingering the evil little devils into the mouth.

Putting a face on hunger is not the easiest thing. In our world hunger crosses money boundaries, and in our world the hungry are most likely not skin and bones with bloated bellies – they are, not to put too fine a point on it – the fat people, and they may or may not know that they are hungry; and they may or may not be monetarily poor.

I asked friends and acquaintances if they’d ever been hungry, and their thoughts on hunger. After I recounted my Injun Joe story to my friend Susan, she recalled her elderly mother a few years ago asking her to pick up a “tramp-lock” at the hardware store. Susan said, “I don’t know what a tramp-lock is, Mom.” Why, it was a chain lock to go inside the kitchen door so that the door could be opened thus far and no farther, so that a dish of food could be passed out with no danger of the recipient being allowed in. It made me think of tramps and hobos and stews, but I had never heard the term before. So of course I Googled it and found only one reference to the term. It was used in the book, “Afloat and Ashore on the Mediterranean, by Lee Meriwether (1904). A tramp-lock was used for guards to open prisoners’ doors enough, ostensibly, to hear the priest down the corridor saying mass.

Another person told me, “Tramp lock reminds me of monasteries and churches where they still have special windows where foundlings (babies) can be left.” She went on to say, “Handing out food, feeding the poor (the sharing of bread & wine) has a long history in Christianity, and shame is still associated with that type of charity.” She found it interesting that in those terms the giver and receiver did not have to see each other.” Yes, shame is a big part of this, isn’t it? No matter how undeserved by either party.

“Like, REALLY hungry?” asked one friend. “Like, shoplifting a package of cheese to get through the day and not knowing about tomorrow? Like, panhandling enough for a box of crackers or swallowing pride to ask neighbors for something, anything? Even, gag, dumpster diving?” He paused. “Actually, yes, but not for many, many years, and never for more than a few days. But I do remember and I am always mindful of how much I have and how long it would last. Right now, in the house and garden, I could probably stretch it for about three weeks, if I had to.”

That sounded like “food insecurity” to me, and I asked what could be done about it. He said, “We need a community infrastructure to wean ourselves from the big business of food – food prepared for us, food conveniently packaged, food that has traveled too many miles, fast food, junk food, food marketed by brand instead of nutritional value.”

We kind of have that here with the Farmers’ Market and the Co-op, but what about the people who can’t afford that kind of food. Let them eat cheap meat and vegetables from the grocery store that have been adulterated by the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, antibiotics and hormones? Or a bag of chips and a can of soda? You know that that’s going to come back and bite us when we have this enormous diseased wave of people that society has to care for one way or another.

When I asked the question of Carol Tashie of Radical Roots Farm, she said, “Personally, I have never been hungry. Amazingly fortunate – especially when you think of the entire human community. What percentage of people on this planet could say that? What percentage in this country? In this state?”

When I talked to Carol’s partner, Dennis Duhaime, last Saturday at their stand at the Farmers’ Market, he told me they took a load of butternut squash down to the city for Thanksgiving, and gave it to a person who operates – entirely on his own – a little storefront soup-kitchen in Queens, and that he made squash soup from those Vermont butternuts to feed the hungry. I love this – a couple of people making a difference with no diminution from bureaucracy.

In that same spirit, RAFFL operates a Grow-A-Row program for which farmers and gardeners contribute some of their product to the Community Cupboard and BROC; and the farmers regularly contribute leftover produce after the market is over. Still, the Mission and the Community Cupboard and BROC need each and every one of us to contribute food and/or labor to help them feed the hungry.

Another friend wrote: “There is hunger in every community. My wife and I work at the Sunday Breakfast Mission in our town and serve between 150 to 200 meals Sunday evenings to homeless men, women, and CHILDREN! We don't see them during the day, or do we just choose not to see them? Some of both I believe. I encourage you no matter where you live give some of your valuable time to help feed another human being!”

In a Newsweek article, “Divided We Eat”, Lisa Miller has a conversation with a Brooklyn localvore and writes, “Over coffee, I cautiously raise a subject that has concerned me of late: less than five miles away, some children don’t have enough to eat; others exist almost exclusively on junk food. Alexandra concedes that her approach is probably out of reach for those people. Though they are not wealthy by Park Slope standards—Alexandra works part time and Dave is employed by the city—the Fergusons spend approximately 20 percent of their income, or $1,000 a month, on food. The average American spends 13 percent, including restaurants and takeout.” The woman answers, “This (buying local) is our charity. This is my giving to the world... We contribute a lot.”

You know, in this era of declining middle class and the rise of the ultra-rich and corporations with the rights of individuals, we are likely to be seeing more and more hungry people – there is greed abound in this land – and that hunger may be the result of impoverishment and/or ignorance, or simply the brainwashing power of mega-corporations and even the medical establishment. “We have rich farmers feeding lousy food to poor people,” writes Michael Pollan, “and poor farmers producing great food for rich people.” But here in Vermont we have great farmers needing our patronage – those of us who can afford it – so that they, and we, can continue to take care of our hungry, whatever face they wear.

So yes, once again, Support Your Local Farmer, but in addition call one of the following and ask them what you can do to help:

Community Cupboard: 802-747-6119
RAFFL: 802-417-7331
BROC: 802-775-0878
Open Door Mission: 802-775-5661

And when you hear the phrase ‘common knowledge’ dig a little deeper. You might be surprised at what you find.

simple foods like apples and squash are cheap and easy to prepare,
but some people don't know how to prepare them. Heck, some people don't even have a kitchen.

*I've taken the liberty to use what might seem to be stereotypes of the 'drunken Indian' and the fat lady eating crap, but please know that the first is simply an observation of the prevailing attitudes in the 1950s and the latter is my own observation as truthfully if not tactfully as I can describe it.

This post was published under the title "a common knowledge of hunger" in my Twice Bitten column in the Rutland Herald on 12/07/10.

The Cornbread Chronicles

2010-11-23T15:00:00.000-05:00

My messy cupboard door -- very handy!

Taped to the inside of a cupboard door in my kitchen is a recipe for buttermilk cornbread. I like that it’s simple, calling only for cornmeal, no flour, and that it uses buttermilk, which I adore, and just before it’s put into the oven the leavens are added – baking soda and baking powder, along with some salt –to, in effect, react with the buttermilk and create an explosion. Then it’s scraped into the greased, smoking hot cast iron skillet in which bacon has been rendered and put back in the oven for 20 minutes.

I like it in theory, but my family is unimpressed, and so I don’t like it in fact. In spite of the buttermilk/baking soda catalyst, it’s really quite a heavy slab. And, if you heat the pan with bacon in it it’s liable to end up burned to a crisp. Beyond that, there was something... missing, something not quite right with it.

But after a very interesting, if esoteric, conversation on-line with some food academics about the practice of adding lye to water in which to cure ripe olives; and after I confessed that several years ago I used Drano (a new, unopened can) as the lye in question and never had I tasted more buttery olives; and after I began to think about how lye or other such esoteric ingredients are used in other food processes, I had an aha moment about that cornbread.

Note: Lye, the result of filtering water through wood, or other ashes, is also called potash (as a matter of curiosity, Samuel Hopkins, of Pittsford, was granted the first US patent in 1790 for an “improvement in the making of pot ash or pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.”), or sodium hydroxide, and is incredibly alkaline, and very caustic. Indeed, it should not be stored in glass bottles because it eats the glass. Slaked lime can be substituted for lye in some instances.

You see, the reason Mexican cuisine, so heavily based on corn, has proven healthy over the eons is that somehow they learned very early on to soak the corn in, in effect, lye. Mexicans burned sea shells and limestone and added the ashes to the water in which they cooked the corn kernels because they’d found it took off the kernel’s hard-to-digest hulls; and as a revolutionary by-product, as Rick Bayless writes in his book, Authentic Mexican, “... their bodies felt more strength: The corn now gave them more minerals like niacin, more protein at their service, perhaps more calcium. They had made the one nutritionally energizing discovery that could yield a strong race: nixtamalization (from the Nahuatl nextli, ‘ashes’ [and tamal, “dough”]).”

And that brings me to the real underlying unease I had with that cornbread. You like to think that what you put on your family’s table has more going for it than just good taste – you like to think that it is good for them, that it contributes to their well-being. While, to my mind, bleached white wheat flour has very little going for it, cornmeal, except for being gluten-free, has very little more. But if I were to substitute an energized, nixtamalized corn product for that cornmeal, wouldn’t I be happier? And so I tried it – substituting 3 to 1 a mixture of masa harina to grits for the cornmeal – and the results were phenomenal!
While some people nixtamalize their own corn, I wasn’t ready for that.

The Ingredients -- cold pan, frozen cracklings, ready to go in the cold oven

I had some Bob’s Red Mill Masa Harina and Corn Grits or Polenta. The masa is very fine, like a flour, and the kernels from whence it comes have been slaked with lime; while the grits are not nixtamalized but are coarse cut, and so contribute texture to the finished cornbread, and texture is always good. And instead of the bacon, I melted half a cup of cracklings (leftover from rendering lard) in the pan.

And perhaps it should be mentioned, I swapped out my old tins of baking powder and baking soda for new. They do wear out, you know.

Although the plain cornbread was too good for words, next time I added about a cup of frozen corn kernels to it, caramelizing them first in a frying pan in the time it took the oven and skillet to heat up. And the time after that I added some chopped jalapenos along with the corn, and sprinkled Cabot cheese over the top. Now, I imagine that a handful of cubed ham would be very nice. Maybe some cumin seeds.

Because this is light, fluffy, moist, robust, crispy-bottomed, ham-fisted cornbread! It’s very accepting. And it’s very forgiving, as I found out one afternoon when I was making it as my contribution to our Sunday Cocktails at Five. I shoved the hot skillet back into the oven, spanked my hands together – job well done! – when my eye lit on the little bowl of leaveners! Yikes! I had forgotten to mix in the baking soda, powder, and salt at the last minute! I stood frozen for a split second, swore, tore open the oven, scraped out the pan into the bowl – all those lovely cracklings no longer on the bottom, cheese on the top, but stirred altogether in with the leaven -- scraped it back into the pan and back into the oven. It was... still VERY good. You can’t ruin this stuff!

This isn't a great photo, but you can see the texture is light and moist, and there's a nice skin on the bottom of the piece on the right. Yum!

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so I called Maya Zelkin who I knew could tell me something about making masa nixtamalera. I was answered by Maya’s young son, Manolo, who told me his mother was at a pottery show. I was about to say goodbye when I realized that Manolo could probably tell me how it was done. “Oh sure,” he said, “I’ve done it hundreds of times.” It involved, he said, buying big sacks of “I think dried” dent corn, and soaking them “or maybe cooking them” in water with “slaked lime”. Maya told me next day that she boils the corn in the lime water until it’s soft, then let’s it soak overnight.. Next day they rub the skins off the kernels, “but we don’t get anal about it. You can drive yourself crazy that way.” Then she grinds the kernels with a Corona grain grinder into a soft dough from which she makes tortillas. I’d like to try stirring buttermilk and the leavens into it for cornbread. Maya invited me up to participate in this process when the nutziness of the holidays is over and I accepted.

Buttermilk Corn Bread

1/3 cup of bacon grease or lard, or ½ cup of cracklings
1 egg
2 cups buttermilk (you may need more)
1 1/4 cups masa harina (5 ounces)
1/2 cup grits (3 ounces)
1 scant teaspoon baking powder
1 scant teaspoon baking soda
1 heaping teaspoon salt
(optional) 1 cup corn kernels, drained; chopped jalapenos to taste; cubed ham; grated cheese; whatever... I think apples might be good...

Put the grease, lard, or cracklings into a cold 10” cast-iron skillet. Put the skillet into a cold oven and set the oven to 450°. (Just because you think I’m lardcore, do. not. skimp on the fat. There is none in the batter, itself, and you have to get some unctuosity in there somehow.)

Whisk the egg and then whisk in the buttermilk. Whisk in the masa and grits. Set aside.

Into a small bowl measure the baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside in a prominent place so you don’t forget them.

Prepare whichever optional ingredients you might choose to use.

When the oven reaches temperature, take the skillet from it and place it on a burner (careful! I leave a potholder draped over the handle to remind myself not to grab it).

Add whatever optional ingredients you desire to the buttermilk/cornmeal mixture. If it’s too stiff stir in a little more buttermilk – it should be thick but stirrable. Add the baking powder/soda/salt mixture to it, mix it all up and pour and scrape the batter into the hot and smoking pan. Sprinkle the cheese over the top if you’re using it, put that hot skillet back into the hot oven and bake for 20 minutes.

That’s it!

Note: While I am talking to Maya I am also making one last batch of plain cornbread. The pan is heating while we talk, and then the pan is ready and I tuck the phone beneath my chin and scrape the buttermilk mixture into it and put it in the oven, set the timer to 20 minutes, talk some more and as we’re saying goodbye I notice the little red bowl of leavens sitting still on the counter! The timer now reads 10 minutes. Too late. Apparently I’m making a big, fat tortilla!

The leavens and salt -- What you should. NOT. FORGET!

***

Yes, I am aware that talking about turkey today would’ve been relevant, but you could always make a cornbread stuffing. Stuff it, shove it in the oven, and it’ll get done in a couple hours. Make your mashed potatoes, your squash, your Brussels sprouts, your pumpkin pie (all locally grown, of course). It will all be delicious if you’re not afraid of salt, butter and fowl fat, and hugs from your relatives and friends – and please don’t be. Enjoy your family, your company, and/or your waiter. Think what you would like to be able to say on November 25 of 2011, and make it happen in this year in between.

Think hard, now!

Published as my Twice Bitten column in the Rutland Herald 11/22/10

Plenty

2010-11-08T14:05:00.001-05:00

Radical Roots Brussels Sprouts

Boardman Hill Produce

Foggy Meadow's Turnips

Mendon Mountain's Apples

Tweed Valley Farm Shiitakes

I had been thinking about hunger and community and the relationship between the two when I walked through the Co-op on Wales Street into the first session of Rutland’s Winter Farmers’ Market. There, hunger had no place, though it was all about food, and community reigned; and so, predictably and soon, I was grinning like a fool, as Carol Tashie observed.

She and Dennis are new Winter Market vendors this season with their Radical Roots Farm booth. They, along with Jim Sabataso at Sustainable Rutland, and RAFFL, are sponsoring a Localvore Thanksgiving again this year. Radical Roots is also raffling off a Bounty of Thanksgiving Vegetables, and they have some beautiful ones.

Of course, to some of us the combination of local with Thanksgiving is no oxymoron, only the natural thing to do. To get some ideas on HOW to do it go to one of their websites for recipes and recommendations.

The big medievally-atmosphered space has new lighting this year, and a new roof to prevent those deluges we used to have to avoid, which, actually, should keep in a little more body heat, too.

Hilary Adams-Paul’s The Domestic Diva is continuing its reign from the summer, with sumptuous offerings to eat out of hand or take home for dinner. And Young La continues to ladle up her enormously popular Asian noodles (gluten-free) and eggrolls, too; while Sheila at Burnham Farm offers quiche and soups and pot-pies. There are samosas and Ana’s Empanadas, and, in the future, Daniel Pol will be making crepes from his Ooh La! La! booth.

Caroline Kimball and Conor Falcon, interns at Foggy Meadow Farm, are new faces that we got to know from the summer market. They’ll be leaving soon for unimaginable western adventures – living in a tepee in the Montana winter! – but swear they will be back here to settle down and farm!

Foggy Meadow and Greg Cox’s Boardman Hill Farm are proving to be fantastic new farmer incubators. This summer’s Alchemy Gardens farmers, Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle, are graduates of the two, and Sally Beckwith of Foggy Meadow told me that many of their interns have gone on to farm full-time.

The Yoder Farm was new last year, with their beautiful selection of dried beans and popcorn and it is really good to see them back;

as it is Joe Bossen with his Vermont BeanCrafters’bean burgers. He came in the middle of last winter and looks like he’ll be around all this season.

Kevin Evans, from Groundworks Farm in Florence just moved here from New Hampshire. He and his partner, Margaret, are offering produce and sprouts (I liked the lentil sprouts), pastured chickens, and a chocolate croissant that will now be my weekly Saturday morning carb and sweet splurge.

Almost as wonderful as the food, and the things to eat with,

Ray Powers, inimitable baker of Bear Mountain Sourdough Breads

Yvonne Daley, shopping and schmoozing

The Co-op's lovely Bess Lewis

Michael Manfredi of Boardman Farm

Greg Cox of Boardman Hill

are the faces:

Michael was the hero of the summer when he took over running Boardman Farm in the absence of the legendary Greg Cox who was recuperating from knee surgery.

Steve Kyhill strummed and sang for the first Winter Farmers' Market

These are only a few of the vendors and foods and visitors, but I hope they give you some idea of the festive varieties in store for you.
I will continue to think about hunger – and would love to hear your thoughts about it – but for now it’s all about community, local and beautiful food, and the people who make it and eat it.

The State vs Tristan and Max

2010-11-03T09:20:00.001-04:00

Sue Thayer in her garden

Tristan Thayer, the eldest of Sue and Alan Thayer’s three children, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002. Nevertheless, given the circumstances, he continued to live a full and giving life until he died on May 29, 2005, at the age of 25, from the effects of that leukemia.

Blessedly, he died literally in the bosom of his family.

One of the reasons Tristan was able to live so fully while the foul disease continued to sap his strength and energy was the marijuana he learned to grow so beautifully and, it must be said, illegally. Planting seeds in spring and harvesting in fall, according to nature’s dictates, he was able to smoke the ‘weed’ to counteract the debilitating nausea caused by the disease, the five rounds of experimental chemotherapy, and the two stem cell transplants, one from himself and one from his younger brother, Max, with which it was treated.

His mother told me, “Cannabis not only made it possible for Tristan to eat enough to recover every time they killed his immune system, (but) it helped him assimilate his life in his time of dying.” Tristan told her, she said, “that each round of chemotherapy was like 'jumping through a ring of fire', and the pills they had to offer just made him 'sick and unable to function'.” And then she said, “Tristan had no time to waste.”

Brother Max thinks that the reason that Tristan was able to meet his death so beautifully and generously was due to "...the gentle relief that marijuana provided him. He could accept his life, find joy in it and see it for what it had taught him; cannabis was a conduit for that insight.” The plant is historically the choice of seekers, after all.

Tristan, Lucy, and Max - 2004-2005

Ironically, Tristan and their sister, Lucy, were the Thayer children who enjoyed perfect and vibrant health from the times of their births. It was the youngest, Max, who suffered a medical emergency when he was an infant that left his kidneys scarred, and around whom the family gathered protectively and over whom they worried since he was 28 days old. For most of his life Max suffered a lack of appetite and chronic nausea which made him almost unable to eat, certainly unable to flourish, and that caused him to be unable to participate in many of life’s routines – his schoolmates never knew if he could be expected to attend classes on any given day. Max needed a new kidney and keeping as healthy as possible was essential.

Before he died, Tristan realized that Max’s symptoms could be alleviated by smoking marijuana, but Max was reluctant. “I was surprised,” he says now. “It seemed so strange, and so I didn’t really give it a chance.”

In 2005, Max almost failed out of school. He considered quitting. “I just didn’t feel up to it!” Tristan was gone, but Max decided to give the marijuana a chance. The difference was dramatic. He smoked as much as he needed – before the nausea could get to him in the morning and before meals – and he started having success.

In the fall he went back to school for his senior year. It was a splendid year. “I aced a lot of classes. I got involved in activities. I had a really good time. I just felt... better.”

In 2004, “An Act Relating to Marijuana Use by Persons With Severe Illness” was passed in Vermont that allowed one flowering plant to be grown by patients with cancer, AIDS, HIV, or multiple sclerosis. But kidney disease and Max’s symptoms were not included in it. In spring, Max’s mother Sue planted marijuana for him. Illegal? Well, yes, but what mother would quail before illegality when her child’s well-being was at stake; when she knew – had seen them up close and personal – that the effects of it could play a crucial role in maintaining her child’s life.

Sue is a Master Gardener. Her gardens up in the mountains east of Wallingford are legendary and regular attractions on garden tours – Tristan’s grave is the center of one of them – and she grows naturally and organically.

In July of 2007, when the gardens were thriving, an amendment was passed to the Medical Marijuana Bill that included patients with debilitating illnesses that produce persistent and intractable wasting syndrome, severe pain, nausea, or seizures – exactly Max’s symptoms.

There was only one hitch: Medical marijuana must be grown inside.

No matter how much land you have, no matter how discreet you might be, no matter what healthy gardens you are capable of growing, Medical Marijuana must be grown inside where room(s) must be dedicated to that growing, where electric lights and climate control must be utilized (using electricity and heating/cooling power that might double your household energy cost) to simulate the natural seasons (which are available free outside), and where chemical fertilizers and pesticides must be used to simulate nature’s own healthy growing conditions. Not exactly the kinds of things that severely ill people should be ingesting, and a whole lot more work than they can probably do and possibly afford.

Planting the gardens had been a kind of grief therapy for Sue. She had planted them at just about the anniversary of Tristan’s death. The marijuana plant is a beautiful plant – more beautiful, one might judge, than its cousins Foxglove, Poppy and Datura which produce, respectively, digitalis, opium, and atropine, all potentially useful drugs but also potentially deadly, and all of which you can see growing in most of our gardens. There is nothing deadly about marijuana or the useful chemical it produces, Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is used for recreational, medicinal and spiritual purposes.

On August 2 of that year state police showed up at the Thayer gardens, hacked the plants down, destroyed them, and charged Sue with growing an illegal substance.

“It was heartbreaking,” says Sue, “to see those beautiful plants destroyed and know what benefit they would have been to Max, remembering what comfort they had brought to Tristan.”

A recent photo of Max

Although that legal cloud has hung over the Thayer family these three years, it was absolutely glorious when Easter Sunday of this year found Max traveling to Burlington to get a new kidney! The operation was successful, and Max is gradually getting used to feeling better, learning to eat, going to college, and building up his strength, though he is and will be all his life on a regimen of drugs that must be impeccably managed. He has started a blog about his mother’s court case. He is an amazingly intelligent, clear-thinking and passionate but gently speaking 22-year-old.

In August the Vermont Supreme Court denied Sue the chance to tell her story in a juried trial.
Her defense is one of “Necessity”, which admits the criminal act but claims justification. In other words the harm avoided (Max’s debilitating symptoms and possible death) must outweigh the harm caused (by planting marijuana), and the situation must present no reasonable legal alternative.

And indeed there was none when Sue planted the marijuana, because it was not legal to use marijuana for alleviation of Max’s symptoms. Once the law was amended to include Max’s symptoms, mid-summer, she lost that justification because she would then be allowed to grow marijuana, but only inside. So what is her crime? Not that of growing marijuana, but of growing it outside.

Indeed, as Chief Justice Paul Reiber put it in the findings, “The irony is that a statute that aimed to decriminalize certain uses of medical marijuana has effectively criminalized defendant’s actions in this case.”
This story, I think you’ll agree, is an amazing story – a tragic one, heartrending, but with glimpses of an almost otherworldly joy, and it must be heard!

A conversation about marijuana is difficult to have – though volumes have been written – because there is something about it that makes people uncomfortable. But talking about a mother who has lost one child and sees the possible loss of another, and the concomitant misery the disease produces that can be alleviated by the planting of a simple... seed into the ground, is a different matter. I cannot think of any mother who would not do everything in her power to keep her children safe and pain-free in the face of disease and death, no matter its legality.

I would. Wouldn’t you?

Sue Thayer with daughter, Lucy

This post was published in the Rutland Herald/Times Argus on 11/14

gentle cream

2010-10-26T13:44:00.002-04:00

Every morning there they are – the players of my a.m. – the coffeepot, the coffee, and Thomas’s Half-and-Half.

Yes, I love my coffee. My coffeepot? Not so much! A great, black, overpriced monster, so officious you’d think it would do more than make coffee; but if that IS all it can do you’d think it could do it without being so intrusive. Always flashing its little red eye at me! “Girl! Clean me!” Or, “Girl! Change my filter!” Insisting on beeping every morning – just what everyone needs in the morning, five shrill electronic beeps – to tell me the coffee’s ready.

Which is insane, of course – am I not standing here staring at you as you begin to gurgle, making sure you haven’t decided to spurt great puddles of black greck all over everything? Did you think I would forget my first coffee injection of the morning? Are you not gurgling into a vacuum bottle that will keep it hot? And please, do let me remind you that it is MY coffee, so get busy!

As for the coffee itself, my favorite lately is Pierce Brothers’ Holy Smokes – organic, Free Trade – from the Co-op. I grind it all at once when I buy it because I don’t like the noise of the grinder first thing in the morning (hint hint, Mr. Coffeemaker!). And I mean! Really! How freshly-ground does this old palate need it to be?

My VPR mug sits on the counter next to the monster. I pour my Thomas’s half-and-half into it before the coffee. It’s my cream of choice except when I have whole, unpasteurized raw milk from one of my neighboring farms.

Why Thomas’s? Well, 1) it’s bright and cheery and good tasting; 2) it’s local – Thomas Dairy has been around since Orin Thomas started delivering his own cows’ milk back in 1921, and now the milk comes from six local farms – as one of their wryly clever ads says, “Trucked in all the way from up the street” – and it’s owned by the grandchildren, Richard, John, Perry, and Christa (John’s daughter, Abbey, is now showing an interest); and 3) it is gently pasteurized.

Which is to say, it is NOT ultrapasteurized – that is, cooked until you could keep a pail of it in your pantry for months and not a creature would take the slightest interest, unless it accidentally tripped on a box of Jell-o and fell in and drowned. Almost all the organic milk you can buy is ultrapasteurized. And what that means, of course, is that our organic dairy farmers produce a wonderful product that is then picked up and shipped out of state to be processed, subjected to ultrapasteurization and homogenization, then shipped back here deader’n a doornail.

I’m standing here watching the dastardly coffee-pot when it occurs to me – I’ll bet Thomas’s is about the only milk we can get that ISN’T ultrapasteurized. And yup, next time I look in the Co-op’s dairy case I find that’s absolutely true.

People who haven’t been paying attention buy this organic, ultrapasteurized milk and exhort their kids to drink it – Because it’s GOOD for you! But it’s probably NOT good for little Noah and Emma, first of all because it’s cooked, and second because if Mom and Dad have been paying attention to the official line for the last half century they have certainly come down with the prevailing idea that animal fats are not good for them and so they are feeding little Carter and Madison skim milk or 1% ultrapasteurized water that has probably had dried (skim) milk solids added back into it so that it doesn’t have the mouth feel of water. Dried milk is often made by spraying milk onto a hot screen and then peeling the evaporated solids off the screen.
Eew. It’s not a good thing. And drinking milk without its natural fat just further upsets the balance between its good Omega-3’s and everything else’s Omega-6’s.

And maybe, since little Liam and Charlotte would rather drink soda, Mom and Dad have brought them sweetly flavored chocolate or strawberry milk. We are getting very far from whole, natural, or healthy here, or even the meaning of... Milk!

Anne Mendelson in her book, Milk: The surprising story of milk through the ages,
writes, “As shown by USDA and census statistics, consumption of both whole milk and butter was steadily declining during the 1950s and ‘60s while the number of fatal heart attacks rose – along with decreasing use of animal fats overall and increasing use of vegetable oils. Yet to this day the American Heart Association – which readily accepts money from manufacturers in return for putting AHA approval stickers on products like Cocoa Puffs breakfast cereal and Smart Balance De Luxe Microwave Popcorn – still inveighs against milk with the milkfat that is simply part of the nature of milk.”

Those people who feel that pasteurization is needed in order to kill off any dastardly microbes should demand with their milk dollars milk that has been heated to the agreed upon high heat (of 160° - 170°) for a short time (20 seconds) rather than the higher heat of 280° for a shorter time (at least 2 seconds), which is what produces ultra-pasteurized milk.

Still gazing at my black plastic coffeemaker, I realize that I have never seen the inside of a dairy processing plant nor do I know the exact process Thomases uses, so I drive up to Thomas Dairy just north of Rutland and talk to John and Richard Thomas, who are cousins, and it works this way: Milk from each of the 6 dairy farms they buy from is picked up every other day – their one milk tanker is on the road every day of the year – then fed into one of several bulk tanks built into the walls of the rather small processing plant. A portion of that milk is kept whole and the rest goes through the process of separating the milk from the cream. At that point whole milk is added back to a portion of the separated skim milk to make the 1% and 2% milk. Cream is added to the whole milk to make the half-and-half, which is 11-12% butterfat (trivia fact: half-and-half originally meant half skim and half lite cream which is 20% butterfat. Just to give you more of an idea, heavy cream is 43% butterfat and butter contains about 80% butterfat).

The next step is to pasteurize every mixture, and then all but the heavy cream is homogenized.
Homogenization consists of passing the liquid under high pressure through a tiny orifice, making the fat globules smaller, increasing their number and surface area, which keeps them suspended throughout the more watery substance and prevents the cream from rising to the surface.

It is this last process that Anne Mendelson finds most objectionable. “...virtually all the pasteurized milk that reaches us has been centrifugally separated, recombined to standardized milkfat percentages and homogenized. These steps do more to denature milk than anything else that happens to it in manufacturing. The creamier ‘mouthfeel” and fresher flavor of whole raw milk at a well-run... dairy farm ... reflect not just actual freshness but the fact that the basic milk structure is intact. You can get nearly all the same effect from unhomogenized pasteurized milk – at least, if it comes to you very fresh and was pasteurized by the right method.” There is an added benefit to unhomogenized milk and cream – there is some evidence that the smaller globules of fat are able to get caught on the walls of the arteries and can clog them.

When I asked John and Richard, separately, whether they would consider offering unhomogenized whole milk (called cream-line milk) if they found there was a demand for it, both looked thoughtful, perhaps even intrigued, and agreed that it was a possibility. Whole milk which is never separated, only gently pasteurized, and bypasses homogenization would simplify their process immensely, and be much less expensive to produce.

In the meantime, there’s another solution if you want your coffee cream unhomogenized. Since Thomas’s doesn’t homogenize their heavy cream, you could mix a small container of it with a quart of skim milk. That is, if you don’t mind shaking your coffee cream!

Those of you in the central/eastern part of the state can buy Strafford organic cream-line milk. It is unhomogenized and simply pasteurized. Monument Farms Dairy (that link under construction), a little north of here, also does no ultra-pasteurization, but their milk is homogenized. None of them allow their milk to contain any added hormones or antibiotics.

I asked John Thomas why it was that my half-and-half and cream lasted so incredibly long – I can leave a freshly opened carton in the fridge while I leave for a long weekend, and when I come back it’s still fresh. He said he didn’t know, but that a lot of chefs won’t use anything but Thomas’s heavy cream because it stays fresh and sweet and always whips up nicely. I told him that when I make crème fraiche with any other cream (and when and why would I do that?) it sometimes won’t sour and thicken at all. He’s not a cook, but he filed away that fact. I think it’s because Thomas’s is so fresh. And local! Its shelf life starts moments before you reach into the cooler to buy it.

Ah, finally – the monster emits its five beeps and I pour my first cup of coffee. I wish someone made coffeemakers locally.

Crème Fraiche

Gently whisk a tablespoon or two of good (Cabot’s) sour cream into a pint of Thomas’s heavy cream in a bowl, loosely cover and leave in a warm place until piquantly soured and quite thick – this usually takes about 3 hours. Serve a dollop of this over pies, pot roast, or breakfast toast. For a special dessert, serve it over good preserves or jams or jellies served in very small bowls, with tiny spoons. How precious!

Originally Published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald 10/25/10

the gourmet connection

2010-10-12T17:33:00.003-04:00

I met with a rep from Zabars recently.

It was an old e-mail from last winter that I answered out of belated curiosity, in which Sam – that’s the rep’s name – had written, and I quote, “I should like to partner with you with recipes, (and/or) submitted samples of whatever food/houseware items you choose.”

Though through journalistic integrity I could not, of course, accept anything that might color my opinion – of Zabars?? – still I couldn’t help thinking that maybe a new Cuisinart food processor to replace my 1986 model (nesting bowls, maybe easier to clean, but no doubt more shoddily made) from the fairly new housewares department on the 2nd floor down on 80th street and Broadway in New York City, would come in handy.

The first floor of the Zabar's emporium – as I’ve just found out that you probably don’t know – is full of smoked salmon, lox, cream cheese, bagels and herring salad. Olives. Cheese. They do an IMMENSE business. Zabars is probably the first New York City food name I ever learned.

But that was a different time, back in the ‘70s, when I still didn’t know how to make my own lox, or couldn’t buy it in any number of grocery and/or specialty stores. That was before I found that the best bagels in the world (as I know it) are made by a little Burlington company by the name of Myers'es. And that the recently reopened Café Terra (where Sam and I met one drizzly afternoon) serves them just the way I like them – toasted, with lots of butter and a thin layer of cream cheese.

Still, Zabars is, to me, an iconic name, retaining a certain mystical food romanticism from years back. And if Café Terra would spread a little of that Zabar’s lox on that Myers bagel over that cream cheese, and sprinkle that with thin crescents of onion, that would be all the better.

It was founded by Louis Zabar who emigrated to Brooklyn from the Soviet Union in the early 1900s in order to escape the pogroms. In Brooklyn he rented a farmers’ market stall. By 1950, when he died, he and his wife Lillian owned 10 stores. The 1995 obituary of Lillian Zabar in the New York Times quoted sons Saul and Stanley as saying “The business was started in 1934 and now has about 35,000 customers a week and $40 million in sales a year.” A move and expansion in the 1970s made Zabar's one of the largest supermarkets in Manhattan and one of the best known specialty stores.

In our meeting, Sam told me that when he retired to his Vermont house in Pawlet (for years he’d flown himself back and forth from New York City to Pawlet), he’d asked Saul – an old school friend – what he could do for Zabar’s in Vermont. And the reason for our meeting boiled down to the fact that Saul Zabar set Sam to gain more recognition of their on-line site, Zabars.com, and more name recognition, Period.

Oh, I said, everyone knows Zabars.

“Vermonters don’t,” said Sam. He had a bit of a thing about Vermonters and their perceived unworldliness. I was patient. I didn’t correct him.

“Maybe food writers do, but not most Vermonters,” he said.

I gazed at him. Maybe some salmon caviar, or even some nova lox.

“So Saul’s idea was for me to get in touch with food editors and writers and provide whatever they needed – recipes, whatever.” The list had dwindled, to... recipes. To... whatever! He paused and looked at me and shook his head slightly, “but you don’t need recipes, do you?”

I shook my head. Nor Cuisinarts, either, I supposed. Nor lox. Nor caviar.

“And you write about local food. Do you ever write about gourmet food?” I thought that oxymoron over for awhile and decided not to even try to go there.

Come to find out, he had sent the Herald newsroom piles of bagels and cream cheese and herring salad, and they didn’t seem grateful. “They even seemed kind of angry about it,” said Sam. And they didn’t even call me, I thought! But, Yes, I said, there’s something about disciplined journalists not accepting...

“They acted like it was a bribe or something,” said Sam.

I shook that off and really did try to help him. But, I said, we don’t raise our own salmon or smoke it. So when someone has a yen for it it would make some sense to go on-line, at least to some people, and order it from Zabars dot com.

“But,” he shook his head dismally, “how to get the name out there?”

As we parted he said, “Remember, Zabars will provide you with whatever you need.”

I said, But we don’t need anything from Zabar’s. Zabar’s needs something from us.
He nodded sorrowfully.

For the next hour I walked around the Co-op, up Center Street, to Depot Park and the Tuesday Farmers’ market, and asked everyone I met if they knew what Zabar’s was. None of them did.

So, maybe a paper cup with Zabar’s printed on it. I’ll settle for that.

That meeting must have been still in my mind because when I read this recipe by Francis Lam on the Salon.com site it jumped right out at me:

Silky Marinated Salmon

•    About 2-3 ounces of salmon per person as an appetizer
•    Lime juice, as needed
•    Extra virgin olive oil, as needed
•    Salt, to taste
•    Green chiles, minced, to taste (optional)
•    Horseradish, grated, to taste (optional)
•    Dill, chopped, to taste (optional)
•    Pink peppercorns, ground, to taste (optional)
•    Shallots, minced, to taste(optional)
Directions
1.    Cut salmon into 1/4" – 1/8" strips. Set them in a bowl just a little bigger than you need to hold them. Season with salt and toss lightly.
2.    Combine olive oil and lime juice in a ratio of 2 parts of oil to 1 part lime, enough to cover the fish in the bowl. Heat the mixture with any of the optional flavorings to 110 degrees. Whisk together as much as possible, and toss with the salmon.
3.    Let salmon marinate in the warm liquid for 15 to 20 minutes. The heat won't cook it, but will speed up the marinade's penetration into the fish. Remove fish from marinade and serve immediately with salad greens, toasts, or however you'd like. Or leave the fish in the marinade for a few hours or overnight for a more traditional ceviche effect.

So I picked up some frozen Alaskan sockeye salmon, wildcaught, from the Co-op (good choice on the Monterey Aquarium’s website), and ceviched it. And it lived up to its name, all silky and pink and full of savory sweet salmonness. And I bought some frozen Myer’s Bagels from Café Terra and some Philadelphia cream cheese, and had myself a nice cream cheese and ceviche treat!

I want to say congratulations and thanks to Café Terra’s original owner, Jen Hogan, and new owner, Jake Pluta, for keepin’ on keepin’ on. It has free web connection, so it becomes the place to have some good coffee or tea and a bagel or soup or sandwich while you’re checking Facebook or chatting with a friend. It’s a light and airy place, chock full of original art, and it’s open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 9 p.m. Friday, when they offer entertainment. Just up Center Street east of Wales.

And don’t forget – check out Zabars.com. We wouldn’t want them to think we’re just a bunch of ungourmeticized Vermonters!

Published in the Rutland Herald 10/12/10 in my Twice Bitten column

seasons’ crux

2010-09-28T10:42:00.001-04:00

A week ago I was leaning over the counter eating a yellow watermelon and finishing up Diana Gabaldon’s last book. The yellow watermelon tasted so sweet and so refreshing and it had a clean, fermenty smell, as well, and I imagined this elegant enclosed thing lying in a field on the end of a vine for so long – all this long hot summer, really – in someone’s field – I think this one came from Woods’ in Brandon – growing larger and rounder, the delicious seed pod from that small yellow blossom, under the sun and the rain, to end up here in MY kitchen, satisfying MY hunger.

We take the mysteries of the growing season so much more for granted than we do the mysteries of fall. We eat directly off the vine, with very little preparation, because everything is so glorious it’s best just fresh. Plants are a great leveler, feeding rich and poor alike, in great houses and humble – in both you find people gnawing corn off the cob.

The mystery of this crux is that some of us are still picking basil off the bush, tomatoes off the vine, and cutting okra from its plant, too, even while mountainsides are turning crimson and gold and colored leaves rain off the trees over the deck and you have to pluck them out of the tarragon before you pick it. Our frost comes later and later.

...fried veggies...

That’s what we’ve been eating most of all this highly prolific summer – vegetables – and one of my favorite ways of preparing them is to fry them. Eggplant, green tomatoes, just-ripe tomatoes, zucchini, okra. I slice them (except I leave the okra whole), dip them into a tempura batter and fry them in lard that I rendered from pork fat I sourced at the WAWWEE (We Are What We Eat Eats) store in Gassetts, just this side of Chester, or in some butter and olive oil. Yum! I’m not tired of it yet.

Nor this: one fine afternoon a friend dropped off some bass that he’d filleted from fish he’d caught that morning. He and a friend leave Wallingford at 3AM for Lake Champlain and are back by 8, he said. With a plethora of fish. What a treasure. Thank you, Robert!

I dipped those beautifully cleaned filets in egg and then panko crumbs and fried them in olive oil and butter, but I could have dipped them into the tempura batter instead.

Here’s a technique for that batter from Elizabeth David. It’s an excellent coating, and I think it’s the oil in the batter that keeps the coating on the food rather than in the grease:

Take 4 ounces of flour, about a cup, and put it into a bowl. Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil and a pinch of salt, then gently and slowly whisk in “3/4 teacup of tepid water” until the mixture is about the consistency of somewhere between thick cream and half and half. Let it sit for awhile to let the gluten relax, and, when you’re ready to use it, whip one egg white and fold it in. Dip your food into it and fry it up.

Take advantage of that simplicity while you can, before the first frost, and then, while you wait for all those leaves to come off the trees, you might like to take to the road to see the autumn sights and refresh your palate with some un-New-England tastes before you settle into those long-simmered winter things.

...on the road...

I met friends at Mariam’s Restaurant, which serves African and American Cuisine, located on the main street in downtown Windsor. Not only is it a beautiful ride from here to there – we took the most picturesque route from Echo Lake Inn on Rte 100 and wended our way through South Reading, Brownsville and Ascutney to the other side of the state – but it’s totally worthwhile: Where else can you get African – in this case Tanzanian – food in Vermont? We chose to order totally African, and chatted while the young couple – Ibrahim and Jennifer Mahem (he, originally from Tanzania, she from New Hampshire) – prepared curried goat with rice, coconut cauliflower with chicken, a spicy mango stir fry, and a platter of chapatti, a creamy African flatbread. We tore off pieces of the chapatti in which to pincer and wrap bites of each entrée. The flavors were fabulous – spicy but not too hot – sharing many with Asian food – those of coriander, cinnamon, and cardamom.

We had a dessert orderer among us and we all noodled over what she should order. Deep Fried Ice Cream, she’d had before. Cheese cake... no. We paused at the Fried Plantains with ice cream, but ultimately settled on a Squash Bread Pudding. Wow! It was wonderful, a big plate of bright orange slathered with whipped cream. Three spoons went right to it, smothered gasps of goodness emitted. YUM. Chef Ibrahim and Jennifer had the leisure – we were the only patrons that noon – to sit down and chat with us. It turned out that he had made up the dish a few days before, simply roasting a butternut squash with clove and cinnamon (“and mebbe some cardamom,” he guessed), a drizzle of olive oil and sprinkle of salt, then mashed it with heavy cream and poured it over cubes of challah, that lightly sweet and eggy, very light bread, with perhaps a trace of cardamom in itself. Then he baked it. “I was just experimenting,” he said, having the ingredients and combining them in a playful kind of way. It was sensational. I haven’t tried making it myself from these hints, but when I do I’ll let you know how it comes out. And if you try it, let me know what you did.

Mariam’s is open Monday through Saturday from 11AM to 9PM. Put it on your calendar, for you’re in for a treat. They also do catering. Call them at 674-2662.

I was lucky enough a week or so ago to have my second lunch at Anjali Farm in South Londonderry. Now that’s a gorgeous ride from here, up 140 to 155 and then 100 through Londonderry and then 3 or 4 miles further to South Londonderry.

Lini Mazumdar cooked for maybe twenty of us who were attending a MetaYoga retreat at the restored train depot in that beautiful village. She made a lovely Raita, seemingly more silky and certainly more tasty than the ones I’ve made. She doesn’t make her own yogurt, but buys the excellent Butterwork’s Farm one that I do (available at the Co-op), whipping it up with cucumber, spearmint, cumin and cayenne, as well as salt and pepper and a touch of maple syrup.

Too, I was totally captivated by the daal she served (admittedly, we had worked up quite an appetite in the morning yoga and aerobics session), which she described to me over the phone afterward: Cook the lentils, any kind (wash them 3 times) in water or chicken broth flavored with turmeric and minced ginger. Then sauté cumin seeds in oil, add onions and garlic and sauté until soft. Meanwhile, parboil vegetables which could include, as hers did, potatoes, cauliflower, chard, kale, carrots, and red cabbage, and when they are partially cooked add them to the lentils and cook until tender. If you make this thick it’s a stew; thin, a soup. She served hers with basmati rice.

She described how she made her dal but there was no accounting for how delicious it was. She also served a chicken curry, also exceptional, and a holy basil tea. I could not have made that, either. Something there is that goes from her hand to the food that does not translate into a recipe. Perhaps if I stood in her kitchen and watched over her shoulder I could translate it.

Anjali Farm is owned by Lini and her husband, Emmett Dunbar. Lini grows herbs and makes elixirs and tinctures she sells under the name Lotus Moon Medicinals. She is available, also, for Indian cooking lessons and catering for events. She will come to your house and cook for you and your friends or she will cook in her own kitchen and you can pick it up from there. Call for more info and/or directions at 824-4658. MetaYoga? 802-824-5064.

Finally, just a few days ago, I was headed west and stopped at Cinco Gringos just west of Castleton on Rte 4A in Hydeville. This is a small storefront in a small mall, brightly painted with Mexican scenes, owned by a young man named Michael Jakab, originally from Fair Haven, who is also the cook along with his girlfriend Alex Lamy who recently graduated from culinary school. Michael, on the other hand, majored in communications. No matter. The restaurant – mostly takeout, has been open since last December, and it’s time we heard about it and gave it a good try.

I asked Michael what he would recommend and he said “sweet potatoes”. Okay, I said, in what form would he recommend that those sweet potatoes come in that I could eat in my car. Well, the least messy, he told me, would be quesadillas, and so I ordered sweet potato quesadillas. I waited ten minutes and there they were, eight large triangles of flour tortillas stuffed with cheddar and jack cheese and sweet potatoes, served with freshly made salsa and sour cream. They make their own salsa and guacamole – tons of it, Michael says – every morning.

There were nice tastes in these, but they were very filling and I could eat no more than four of them and that was stretching it a bit. Others, however, were glad to finish up my leavings. I’ll be back soon to try a burrito, or maybe even chicken mole’ tacos!

Cinco Gringos is open Tuesday through Saturday starting at 11AM through the evening hours. Sundays they open at 4. Closed Mondays. They also do some catering. 278-4090.

So, eat your veggies, Folks, while these fresh summer ones last, and then take a ride to enjoy this season and the international tastes offered by young cooks along the way.

this post was published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald on 09/28/10

little cows & spotted dogs

2010-09-14T09:28:00.003-04:00

There’s nothing like taking a ride in this season when the color is coming on and the days are high and blue and breezy, and so, a few days ago, I drove up northwest of Brandon to Spotted Dog Farm. Once there, I surveyed the vistas and spied not one cow. In fact, I’d been talking to Susan and Chic Whiting for a good half hour and the only animal I’d encountered was the enthusiastic and eponymous spotted dog, himself named Hawk, and a spotted pony that we were leading down to a corral. Oh, the registered Irish Dexter Cattle were off in a field (a breezy wave of the hand), said Susan, but I was beginning to doubt it. This wasn’t Montana, for instance, where a beeve could wander miles in its quest for grass.

But darned near it! There were 35 or so head of those diminutive cattle on 185 acres, and they were clear and way back on the back forty. Finally some black- and cinnamon-colored dots began to detach themselves from the rising treeline of one field and, like a wave, rushed the length of the field, stopping in a clump five feet away from us, heads down, necks stretched, their round nostrils whiffing and blowing bubbles, half-masticated clumps of grass sticking out the sides of their faces. These were the yearlings, half a dozen of them or so, sequestered from the mammas and babies so they might begin to learn to wear a halter and come when called.

Susan and Chic see their operation ultimately with three aims – cattle for beef, milk, and burden. At this point the meat operation is in full swing – they are able to sell the beef from six of the animals a year at the Rutland Farmers’ Market, and soon will sell from their farm store, too.

As for milking them – that’s in the future for now, and Chic and Susan doubt they’ll milk for themselves, but will raise the cows to sell for milk. And for burden. For these little cows are gentle, smart, and trainable, and can be used in pairs as farm-teams to do farm work. They will eventually – beginning with these six – be halter-trained, and sold for this purpose, too.

A person or two could own one or two of these little cows and have their own – very creamy – milk, a team, if two, to help pull up stumps or do other farm work, and, eventually, with careful breeding, beef to eat. Gee whiz, and Gee Haw.

The little cattle – boxy like angus or Hereford, but slightly smaller than the Jersey, to my eye – are fully grass-fed, grazing rotationally all the time grass grows green, and eating that grass in the form of hay in the winter, during which they retain the freedom to roam about and snuffle out what winter fodder they might, yet with the option of the open-sided barn for protection against the elements. They have their treats, too, which consist of beet pulp, the stuff that is left after beets are crushed and wrung for their sugar, then dried and compressed. They also love alfalfa squares, and apples from the many apple trees on the property.
We walked back up to the house and I sat on the porch to make some notes.

The Whitings have been here since 2001, with the first of the Irish Dexters, living in a small trailer until their house was hauled up the road in three parts. It’s a pretty house – cape on one side and ranch – with that long porch – on the other, perched on a high gentle rise. There’s a view of the Adirondacks and the acres are hilly, and were overgrown until they began the process of pulling out the Buckthorne that had taken over. What had been 300 acres belonging to the Vermont Land Trust, had been divided into two pieces. It hadn’t been farmed in maybe fifty years and, when it had been, it was a dairy farm.

Working with the Vermont Land Trust has been invaluable to them, a liaison visiting once or twice a year to help keep them in compliance with Land Trust rules and regulations and to offer other kinds of help. It was he who connected them with Diane Heleba at the USDA office in Rutland. Sally Eugair, from the same office, helped them with a Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program (WHIP), to bolster up some areas and protect the wetland. EQUIP helped them deal with water quality. Cindy Watrous, from USDA, helped with a cattle nutritional program through a class that Susan took in Middlebury. And Willie Gibson and the Vermont Farm Viability Enhancement Program helped them produce a business plan.

“Networking is what it’s all about,” Susan says.

These names come as easily from their lips as from those of many other farmers I’ve talked to, because these people and agencies have been generous and helpful with their knowledge. And with that help, Chic and Susan have done an incredible job with infrastructure – water lines, barns, and berming of the land into paddocks – and growing a healthy herd.

“Wanna take the (John Deere) Gator and go find the main herd?” Chic asks, and I say an emphatic YES, having feared I’d taken up too much of their time already.

Well, shades of being 12 again. It’s been many many years since I’ve been on a tractor, and this little vehicle is much like one, though it has two seats and a small truck bed. Chic drives, I ride shotgun, and Susan is in the back. She slides off to open the many gates and close them behind us.

We wind up tippy, crooked little paths, around hills, down the farm path, all the way to the back of the farm, and there we find the main herd as we stop at one end of the field. After eyeing us quizzically from afar, the herd thunders bellowing to us down the length of the field. Some of them have wide and wickedly pointed horns. Those I do not approach, though I mix with some of the hornless mommas and babies.

Then Chic turns the Gator around and leads them out of that grazed paddock up to a nearer ungrazed one. It’s a slow start – they stand watching us at first but then notice that the gate is open and Susan and Chic are calling them and they suddenly thunder after us. It’s a wild race, the little truck with a slight lead as wild-eyed, wickedly horned beasts pursue us through the brush. Susan points out the hilly patches that they’ve cleared of buckthorn and other invasives. That’s a nice job, I say, imagining the challenge of it and long days spent outside doing this work. “It’s a good winter job,” says Susan. It’s the kind of job, I know, that beaches you in the evening in front of a fire and crock-potted stew, feeling immense gratitude at having done real, hard, grown-up work!

The cattle are now contentedly grazing on the new grass, Susan fastens the gate behind us and we return to the house.

My friend, Ann Tiplady, from Red Houses Farm in Wallingford, constantly raises the issue, “Can one make a living raising beef cattle? And if one can’t, should one be occupying oneself in this manner?”
And so I ask the Whitings if they can make a living off this way of life.

“No,” is the answer to that. A rueful “no.” Susan works as a Physical Therapist at the Rutland Hospital, and Chic, a retired policeman from the Hyannis Port area, drove a school bus for several years after moving here but now works fulltime on the farm. He tells me that it is the prevailing wisdom that you’d need 300 head to make a living from it, and that would require a farm several times the size, and then, of course, it becomes a chore. But that number would be for a regular commercial herd. The Whitings rely on ‘value added’ to make a profit, and that value added for them is that their cattle are grass-fed and tri-purposed.

My next, and last question: Do you love this life? Would you do it again?

The answer is instantaneous: “Absolutely!”

I take my leave, thanking them for the time they’ve taken out of their busy day to show me their impressive operation. Susan says, thoughtfully, “It’s good to take a little time, good to answer questions, because it makes us think about them. Usually we’re so busy we just keep on keepin’ on. Good to stop and think about why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

***

The Whitings welcome visitors but ask that you call ahead (247-6076). Spotted Dog Farm is a regular stop for the Audubon Society and popular with individual groups of birdwatchers. I can only imagine what a gold and glorious spot it will be in a few weeks.

Post Script: After this column was published in the Herald, a letter was appended to the column with some thoughts on cows and horns. This is it:

Not to worry about the horns on those little cows. Dexters are very friendly. But... if the animal wanted to hurt you.... horns would be the least of your worries! They can all kill you with very little trouble, if they wanted to. I watch my cattle & they don't use their horns to fight w/ each other. They head butt.
Dexters have an extreme amount of vasiclature in their horns. Like an elephants ears, they dissipate heat, to keep the cattle cool. I have a few cows that came to my farm w/ their horns removed. Poor things suffer terribly during heat spells.

Addenda: 10/12/10
Sue checked out this information and got this reply from Animal Welfare Approved:

Horns for thermo-regulation

There is potential for sheep, goats, cattle and bison to use their horns as part of their thermoregulatory (temperature regulating) processes. In cattle the extreme is the Ankole Watusi , a cattle breed native to Africa which has horns that can grow up to six feet long, honeycombed with blood vessels. This makes perfect sense as the Ankole Watsui evolved to live in areas where the temperature stays very high all year round.
The way the heat exchange process works is for blood to be pumped round the ‘core’ of the horn – the bit that actually has blood vessels in it – and as this blood passes close to the outside of the horn heat can be lost to the atmosphere and cooler blood returns to the body of the animal.
However, other cattle breeds evolved to live in colder environments and there is a difference in horn morphology for cattle breeds from tropical and temperate zones. Research has shown that in temperate species the surface area of the vascularised inner core is reduced while the thickness of the outer keratin sheath is increased. This limits heat loss from the horns, as in colder climates loss of heat would be a welfare negative.
Animals have evolved to adapt to their environment but this adaptation takes many thousands of years. An animal from a hot climate cannot suddenly switch from using their horns to cool themselves to stopping that heat loss. It is worth noting that antelope originating from Africa have actually been found to have frostbite at the tips of their horns when they are kept in zoos in cold countries – the cooling effect of having horns cannot be controlled by the animal.
The Dexter is obviously a temperate cattle breed; originating from south west Ireland. Its horns will therefore not be a major part of its cooling process.
Further to the points above, thermoregulation in cattle is not solely a function of having horns. There are a number of breeds and strains of cattle that are polled – that is they naturally do not have horns. A number of popular cattle breeds such as the Angus are polled cattle and other widespread breeds such as the Hereford have polled strains. If the only way cattle could heat regulate was through their horns these animals would not look very healthy.

When temperatures exceed the thermo neutral zone for cattle – at around 85F or more – the animals regulate their temperature by evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling is mainly effected through sweating and respiration. Heat stress is a function of time, temperature and humidity, because cattle rely on water evaporation via sweating and panting to dissipate an excess of heat they have generated metabolically or absorbed from the environment. High humidity makes evaporative cooling less efficient. Cattle will seek shade when it is available to minimize the effects of high temperatures.

There are negative points to having horns for the animals and for the stock people managing their health and welfare. Animals can damage one another with horns – a boss animal whether male or female will keep less dominant animals away from feed and water with its horns. Breeding males can fight and injure one another with their horns. In the wild this is about survival of the fittest and allowing younger animals with different genetics to take charge of the herd and breed. In a farming situation this could be the incapacity or loss of your best bull. Lastly there is a human health and safety issue with handling horned cattle. A horned steer that throws its head around when it is being handled can be a considerable danger to those trying to work with it.
There are some farmers who choose to keep horned cattle and who have the particular skills and equipment to manage them – for example feeders and squeeze chutes must be specially adapted for horned animals to prevent them being trapped or injured. AWA would never require that such farmers moved to breeding polled cattle or that they disbud their calves to stop horns growing. However AWA does recognize that for other farmers and other breeds disbudding calves may offer the best welfare for life. AWA does of course specify the age and methods of disbudding that are acceptable to minimize the stress of the operation. AWA does not allow the mutilation of dehorning – the removal of the horn once it is fully formed and attached to the skull.
References:
Picard K, Festa-Bianchet M, Thomas D (1996) The cost of horniness: heat loss may counter sexual selection for large horns in temperate bovids. In: Ecoscience 3(3): 280-284
http://countrystudies.us/united-states/weather/vermont/brandon.htm

I call my egg Mariah

2010-08-31T08:39:00.000-04:00

I’ve been traveling a long food road for most of my life, and that road was at first a circling, curving, hilly one, filled with daily routines like eating watermelon slices on Grandma’s kitchen stoop after supper at the end of a long hot farm day, with all the tired men and women and kids there in the dusk, sitting on the well platform; talking and slurping. I am bent over the glistening black-speckled, salt sprinkled crimson crescent I hold in both hands between my rolled-up overall-covered knees, my bare-feet plunked in the sand below, toes slightly curved inward, spitting seeds that will sprout between the stones, those sprouts surely trampled on our everyday tromping. And things like the milk pail slung inside the kitchen door after each evening’s milking, and long hot strawberry days.

Then that road straightens out into a highway, and alongside it are big barns filled with dairy cattle day and night. You see those barns in Vermont, too, and they look almost idyllic set in those green fields. But where are the cows? Not a sign of one. They’re never outside – their entire lives are spent in that barn, being fed hay and grain and antibiotics and hormones. That’s the reality of BIG for you – these farms milking from 225 to a whopping 1400 cows, with not a ray of sunshine or blade of green grass to satisfy their four stomachs.
Is BIG a bad word when it comes to food? Umm, well, half a billion eggs from TWO Iowa farms were recently recalled in the salmonella incident.

Yep... Half a billion eggs from just two farms!

Those eggs came from chickens raised in chicken ghettos – slave chickens raised in tiny cages, their beaks cut off, their bodies managed impersonally like lifeless little cogs in a machine. Those were 99¢ a dozen supermarket eggs or even $2.50 – who knows what they cost. In the long run they cost way too much.
But I don’t worry about salmonella or anything else when I break an egg into a frying pan, because my eggs come from chickens that peck here and there, into cow pies even, under the sun and trees, in the fresh air. They live like chickens should, according to the wisdom of old Mother Nature. And you know what? There’s really no reason to be eating supermarket eggs if you live in Vermont. I can’t drive a mile in any direction from Wallingford without seeing an Eggs for Sale sign plunked in someone’s yard, and I pay anywhere from $2.50 to $4.00 a dozen for them. The thought of 99¢ eggs makes me gag.

I could grow my own layers and meat birds, but I have a shameful secret, and that is I don’t particularly like chickens. I grew up with them, you see – Grandma raised them for eggs and flesh, and I found them dirty excitable things who invariably pecked me when I slipped a small hand under them to steal their eggs. They didn’t peck Grandma – Oh no! – they bent over backwards for her to steal their eggs. Maybe it had something to do with her calm, musing air as she scattered grain and seeds for them in the chickenyard, clucking along with them; or the way she would bend over and capture one and stand up smoothing its rindy feathers against her bosom.

About as far as you can get from my attitude toward chickens (and much closer to Grandma’s) is that of Farmer Bill, who stopped by last Saturday to drop off a dozen eggs from his own chickens, and while he was at it also brought me a pint of hard-won raspberries from the earlybird vendor at the Farmers’ Market, and a copy of his Chicken Things newsletter that he puts out a couple of times a year. I opened the egg carton and the eggs within left me in no doubt that they were fresh as the dawn, still stippled with grass and who knows what. He apologized: “I almost forgot them, and didn’t have time to clean them.” They were heavenly, the palest of pale yellow, pink, and green – or was that blue? – and giving off that ineffable scent of grass and chicken.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not one of the lucky people who regularly eat Farmer Bill’s eggs (though I am one of the lucky people who regularly eat eggs from Sunset Farm and other vendors at the Rutland Farmers’ Market), and the reason I was receiving these was an email I received from Ms. Bill a few days ago in which she told me about the flock of chickens that resides on their almost-off-the-grid farm in Danby, with which I was immediately fascinated.

She wrote, “We've been keeping the same chicken flock going since 1987. Our original chickens came from a farmer friend who had been interbreeding for years on his farm in Little Compton, Rhode Island, so we started with a mix of Araucana, Rhode Island Reds and who knows what else. Early in the 1990s we brought in some Buff Orpingtons and Silver Spangled Hamburgs to add to the gene pool, and along with them came a free chick which turned out to be an Araucana rooster, so that strain got boosted. A few years later I got some fertile Rhode Island Red hens from a friend. Ever since, the flock has proliferated by hens going broody and hatching out their own chicks. Half of the chicks are roosters, and we butcher them on the farm and eat the meat.”

Of the chickens’ present life, Farmer Bill writes, “This farm is an ultimate fantasy destination – if chickens elsewhere knew about this place they’d want to vacation here. Green grass... begins right outside their doors; they have barnyard, meadow, forest, and front yard and orchard, and each has what I now view as ‘that special place’ that makes all the difference, a contentment spot, a ‘mini jungle’, a spot of close trees, bushes with open shade underneath. They spend hours a day as a flock just sitting in their jungle rest retreat...”
He goes on, “I see the farm as a place where the chickens have the opportunity to express their ‘chicken-ness’ to the maximum. They can make choices (they like that) and go from one mini-environment to another and they like the trip, I can tell.” Bill particularly likes being able to afford his chickens the cow-shelter, “an open-sided shed of sunshine and shade mix, usually containing a couple dozen chickens, a cow, and a goose – the perfect pastoral scene.”

I’ve seen these chickens and the farm and I can attest that these are happy chickens. And now I’ve eaten the eggs, too. I ate a pale green one and my Breakfast Partner got a pale pink one. I called my egg Mariah. BP’s egg went unnamed and right down the gullet. The yolks were bright yellowy-orange, the whites stood right up, not spreading around, so the finished fried egg looked like a golden patty, not an insipid pancake. Yes, they were delicious.

Mariah is the one on top

Ms. Bill told me, “About 10 years ago, scientists recognized that eggs that come from chicks hatched out by mother hens contain a bacteria that is a natural protection against salmonella.” Factory chicken farms do not leave the chicks with their mother/breeders long enough to acquire that bacteria.

And then she said this, stating my own thought:

“It strikes me as perverse that our society has ruined something so beautiful as the production of an egg. Chickens are amazingly smart creatures, with far more personality than most people give them credit for. Locking them up in cages where they barely have room to turn around, keeping them indoors all the time, feeding them who knows what (well actually I do know and it involves taking the hens that die at the factory and shipping them to a production facility where they're processed into chicken feed...), is so inhumane, and most people don't seem to know or care.”

Farmer Bill teaches a select few some tricks, such as climbing upon his shoulder and eating treats out of his hand. He thinks that, “what makes a chicken a pet is getting a name.” For instance, the rooster pictured on Bill’s shoulder is named Speckles, for his speckled breast.

Farmer Bill and Speckles, photo by John Geery

You will probably not be eating Farmer Bill’s eggs – they are very difficult to get ahold of, being in very high demand – but you certainly have many other sources for excellent eggs. Hie thyself to the Farmers’ Market, for instance...

You might want to get off the food highway, if you’re on it, and get on a small macadam road that curves and climbs into more interesting, and delicious, food terrain.