emptying the larder

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

Waiter, There’s a Hare on My Plate

...a waskally wabbit...

I am not a stranger to rabbit. I’ve hunted them, actually, long ago when my distaste for guns was not what it is now. And I was a pretty good shot, too. Nevermind. It was my dad who brought them home from the field and hung them from their hind legs against the wall of the barn and pulled their furry coats off in one mostly whole piece. What a picture that brings to my mind – my dad in his red and black checked hunting pants, his square-cut, exceedingly capable hands wielding the knife. My mother must have cooked them, but I don’t remember eating them. She must have told me it was chicken and, the way my mother cooked, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. We ate squirrel, too, with the same lack of differentiation. Gravy – red, brown, or, in my mother’s case, possibly white – covers a multitude of sins.

Jeff and Cathy McMurry sell rabbit, chicken, and sometimes eggs at their Sunset Farm booth at the Winter Farmers’ Market. Gazing down at the McMurry’s beautifully dressed, wrapped, and displayed rabbits brought memories to mind – the most recent, a walk up to the Victorian Inn at Wallingford a few years ago, and Soo whispering to Leo that Stanti had a limited amount of rabbit stew in the kitchen, which he had made for the family but was willing to serve Leo. Leo loved it – he savored the stew but he was no less pleased to be offered something ‘special’! And I was grateful, too, that the McMurry’s are offering us something different to go on our plates. A carnivore can get weary of the same ole, same ole – pork, beef, chicken, and sometimes lamb, although the fresh, free-ranged, grass-fed products of the Winter Farmers’ Market vendors offer revelations of full-bodied taste to anyone who is used to industrial, feed-lot meats.

So I bought a rabbit to experiment with. I knew I would be approaching Stanti for a rabbit lesson sometime in the future, but first, I wanted to try out my own rabbit intuition. I mistrusted my own ability to try out Jeff McMurry’s suggestion to grill it, and as I gazed down at the little pink body laid out on my kitchen counter I remembered the Red Brick Grill’s dish of rabbit ragu with porcini and their own house-cured pancetta. On the other hand, a strand of words in a NY restaurant review popped into my mind, suggesting that “cinnamon sweetens the delicate strands of pulled, braised rabbit,” and that was my inclination, too – a dark sauce, deep with the sweeter spices, perhaps sherry, possibly raisins. While I thought about the best way to proceed I discovered the liver and heart in the cavity, glossy and reddish brown.

The McMurrys are highly responsive to their customers’ ideas, desires and needs. When I expressed dismay that a glorious little chicken I bought from them did not have the giblets in the cavity, they immediately changed that practice. The livers are large, dark mahogany and evenly colored, healthy and extremely tasty. When I asked for some chicken feet the McMurrys came up with a ton of them, nicely cleaned. I spent an hour clipping toenails and paring off calluses afterward, and scrubbing them a little more, but now I have several packages – six yellow legs and feet per package – to add to my chicken bones when I make stock. And what a wondrous stock it is: from one 4 pound chicken, roasted, I simmered the bones and 6 legs and feet for possibly 4 hours, and ended up with a quart of very flavorful chicken jelly.

I was surprised to find the liver included with the rabbit, but I was glad to eat the whole of that little fella. Taking a life in order to eat, I feel, calls for wasting as little as possible. I put it, along with the heart, in a small frying pan with butter over very low heat for a short time, turning it once, salt and pepper, the same way I cook a chicken’s liver, and found it was delicious.

... in a chef’s kitchen...

Sure enough, there was Stanti, at the WFM one Saturday, bent over the case of frozen rabbits and chickens on ice, while Cathy and Jeff looked on. I’d known I’d see him at the Market, and I’d suspected he wouldn’t be able to resist the rabbits.

Since he first came to town – could it be almost 20 years ago??? – he’s searched out local foods, from cheeses to turnips. He attends markets, visits farms, and receives deliveries from local farmers. It’s the way he was raised and learned his trade in Switzerland, with the family inn and restaurant, the farm and the store. At first, when I saw the aerial photograph of that distant village, I’d thought it was Wallingford.

He selected two rabbits and said, “Yes. Certainly,” when I asked if I could watch him prepare them.

When I walked in the kitchen door at the Inn, the two rabbits were laid out on a cutting board. Several small pans were lined up with the other ingredients. In a row, mise en place, were flour, butter, salt and pepper, chopped flat leaf parsley, garlic, chopped onion, diced carrots, diced celeriac, tomato sauce, and glace de veau (reduced veal stock). A container of white wine stood on the shelf above.

He speaks American with a Swiss or at least European accent, and so we haggled over the name for the pan he took down. It turned out to be a braissier – “how would you say it in English,” he mused – for braising, natch, and he put it over the fire and melted some butter in it. Placing the rabbit pieces on a flat pan and strewing them with salt and pepper and then flour – “You don’t have to drench them in it,” – turning them and treating that side to the same, he then placed them into the butter, pointing out that the side that would show on the plate – the smoother, outer side – should be lightly browned first and, turning them when they were, he began to add the prepared vegetables in turn, “about a cup of the onions, carrots and celery (celeriac) for one rabbit. Half a cup of parsley for a nice taste. It doesn’t have to be tomato sauce, but maybe concassee,” he said as he emptied the sauce over the vegetables. Just chopped tomatoes, or cubed, if you’re meticulous. He reached up and pressed the button for white wine and poured it over the vegetables, then tipped the glace de veau over – about a cup of each for one rabbit. “The nice thing is,” he said, glancing at me, “everything you can get at the Winter Market.” I considered this and realized he was right. “Right down to the wine,” I said. He nodded, pleased.

While we chatted, the mixture simmered and, after we tasted and found the sauce very pleasant and vibrant – marinara-like, with the almost metallic taste of white wine and tomatoes – I left, promising to return for a photo when it was plated for that evening’s diners. As I took the photograph that evening, three orders for rabbit came into the kitchen. Looks like the menu at the Victorian Inn at Wallingford may have a new and possibly frequent ‘special’.

...or please, take my duck...

It’s Sunday afternoon now. I have a duck sitting in the fridge. I got it at the Winter Market, of course, entered through the Rutland Area Food Co-op on Wales Street in Rutland on Saturdays from 10 to 2. I’ve prepared duck perhaps once in my life. I’m already thinking about its preparation, the tastes, the accompaniments, how to get as much duck fat as possible to save for frying other things... And then I wonder – perhaps I can interest Stanti in doing duck!

...Tell Tale Heart...

An article by Gordon Dritschilo in the Herald on January 12 was brought to my attention by one of our farmers. Entitled Census counting on Vt. farmers, it quoted the spokesperson for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, who said, regarding the penalty for not completing the census form, “I’ve heard different terms... I saw at one point you can be arrested...” Not only is this incorrect, but it is significant that the first thing this spokesman for the Agency comes up with, off the top of her head, is punitive in an authoritarian kind of way. OUR Vermont Agency of Agriculture should consider themselves the farmers’ facilitator, should be helping our farmers to be more successful and creative in growing and raising food for their customers. Instead, this statement, while being more than a little wishy-washy, also contains an aura of threat, of authoritarianism and of paternalism.

In fact, what the article or law or whatever it is DOES say is: “(2) Refusal or neglect to answer questions: A person over 18 years of age who refuses or willfully neglects to answer a question, which is authorized by the Secretary to be submitted to the person in connection with a census under this section, shall be fined not more than $100.”

An often-forgotten fact about the government, its employees, and the political establishment, is that they are all public employees, that is, OUR employees – we pay their salaries and, in the case of elected officials, elect them – and their main job is not to be threatening and authoritarian but to work with the us – in this case with the farmers – in a partnership for everyone’s well-being.

Although farm census is not a new thing, and while it can be effective, it has always been a controversial action among farmers who do not wish to make themselves vulnerable to the long arm of a government that they might view as punitive. This is particularly true among present-day small farmers who rightly fear the partnership of the government with industrial-strength mega-farmers who wish, some think, to put small farms out of business. Control the food chain and you control the people.

That said, it’s encouraging that the Agency is working with farmers to get a mobile fowl slaughtering facility up and running, and a stationery slaughterhouse in southern Vermont. Rutland needs one, too, to replace the one that burned a couple of years ago. And hopefully they’re working closely with Rural Vermont on promoting a hemp industry and making farm fresh unpasteurized milk more available to people who want it. As a matter of fact the agency seems to be extremely active promoting local foods from our small farmers lately, which only makes a throw-away patronizing remark the more regrettable.

...on the subject of real food...

“But if real food – the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food – stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help.” From www.MichaelPollan.com

this column originally published in the rutland (vt) herald 01/22/08