Beet Beatitude

How to Treat a Beet

Last year, on the day before Mother’s Day, I was Saturday-morning busy when I remembered it was the first Farmers’ Market and, without much thinking about it, walked into Depot Park in Rutland... and felt a surprising jolt of what could only be called joy! There they all were once again as they have been year after year since the early seventies – those farmers and their wives and husbands and children, and their students and interns, with the beautiful, glorious, hopeful, delicious products got by the sweat of their brows: The Rutland County Farmers’ Market.

Though it’s always too early mid-May to buy much more fresh-from-the-earth than some new baby spinach and possibly a bunch of radishes and maybe beets – which in any case can be pulled soon – there are the starts of plants for our own gardens, as well as those foods that know no season – the cheeses and breads and pastries and pickles and salsa and log-grown mushrooms and fresh eggs and organic meats. And, just as importantly, all the friends and families and acquaintances and strangers and even tourists are there, who love this seasonal and weekly festival and support it with their presence and their dollars.

Taken all together, these are the people who know the value of keeping our food supply healthy and local and, as much as possible, organic; and who will pit their formidable energy and presence against the forces that compromise it.

One of those forces is plain old garden-variety ignorance. This is not a blameworthy ignorance, but only a reflection that society has changed so much that food knowledge has been left behind, at first because women wanted not to have to be dealing with food all the time (which may be an unreasonable goal, after all, for men and woman), and now because, even if people want to be dealing with food in more depth, many don’t know how.

case in point, a bunch of beets...

Perhaps it was a good year for beets last spring, or perhaps I just noticed the phenomenon, but bunches of beets were piled high on the farmers’ stands from the time their leaves were a tender, red-veined green and their rough-skinned tubers, wine-red and sprinkled with earth, were the size of an apricot, to the time when the leaves were dark green and leathery and the fruit was the size of a tennis ball. All spring, in other words, and all fall.

Now I know – and of course you do, too – that you do not peel a beet before it’s cooked. You leave an inch of stem on, leave the root alone, scrub off the worst of the dirt without breaking the skin, and then you roast them in a hot oven or on a grill, or simply boil them in enough water to cover them – possibly half an hour, but more likely 45 minutes. And you don’t poke and prod at them, to see if they’re done, until the last minutes, because you don’t want them to bleed to death of both color and flavor. When they’re tender to a fork’s tines, to the center, you drain them and let them cool a little bit and then wring them between your hands in such a way as to rub the skin and the stem and the root off.

But who, looking at the piles of bulbous and grimy things piled on the farmer’s counter, would know that.

not a young woman...

Take the young woman I watched at the Farmers’ Market one Tuesday last summer. The Tuesday Market is not quite the fiesta that it is on Saturday. The element of celebration is muted – though not entirely missing – unless you get your kicks from fresh vegetables straight from the field, which, of course, many of us do. The most unlikely people will come to the Farmers’ Market on Tuesday and you’ll notice them, which you might not do on a Saturday, and they’ll have time to ask questions and maybe the confidence to take up the farmers’ time and appear a bit ignorant. Like the young woman who handled the beets and finally said, in a slightly disgusted tone, “What are these?”

“Beets,” the farmer said. The young woman said, “Oh,” and went on to the next bin of whatever – summer squash, say, three different kinds of them or half a dozen, all a little different shape and color or, in that early part of the season, radishes, which she probably did recognize, or spinach, which she might think was lettuce, but whatever it was she would say to hell with it.

But why had she gone on from beets? Especially in the beginning of the season when beets are almost all that are coming out of the ground? Had she tasted them and found them wanting? Or had she never tasted them and had no wish to? Did they seem too much work?

Patiently, the farmer brought the young woman’s attention back to the beets. “You don’t peel these, you see,” she pointed out. And she told her how to prepare them. The young woman’s eyes widened in relief – the skins just slipped off? And they’re sweet? What a difference that made in deciding whether or not to deal with these gnarly things. She bought a bunch of beets, and paid for them with Farm to Family Coupons.

Which, by the way, is one of those things we’ve done right. I suspect this young woman would not have been at the Market if she had not had to go there to cash in those Farmers’ Market food stamps. It may have changed her life.

I asked my daughter, who is a young woman, if she knew how to cook a beet. She thought, looking off into space, that she must know, but then shook her head.

nor the older ...

It’s not only young people who do not know how to treat a beet. “How do you feel about beets?” I asked my friend, Kathi, the other night as we chatted on the phone. (My friends are used to non-sequiturs from me.)

There was a long silence. I waited. And then she burst forth. “How do I feel about beets? Sharon! I don’t like them!”

“You don’t like them?” I feigned incredulity. “But why not? They’re as sweet, almost, as candy, the most beautiful dark red in color with darker rings like the ages of a tree; and crisp and tender at the same time. And the leaves! Fantastic things, all crinkly green with red and white veins. Why don’t you like them?”

“Well,” she wailed, “I don’t know what to do with them.”

but the old ladies know...

My grandmother served them in what she called a Harvard sauce, a kind of sweetened and vinegary white sauce made by stirring flour or cornstarch into butter over a medium heat and then thinning it, probably with water in this case. Into that white sauce or blancmange or roux, when it had thickened and the flour taste cooked out, would be stirred sugar and vinegar, probably a cider vinegar. The beets were sliced into this sweet and sour and buttery sauce and turned to coat them. Salt and pepper added their emphasis at some point, and I would suggest the latter should be ground over the beets just before serving. Liberally.

Some people cut the beets into half-inch chunks instead of slices, and no doubt some of the grand ladies of Grandma’s day shredded them with the new gadget they’d acquired. Some restaurants now top a salad with deep-fried, crispy shreds of beets. I’m more likely to cut them into quarter inch sticks – a fat julienne.

After you’ve cut them up, put them into a bowl and simply sprinkle them with sea salt, douse them with olive oil – 2 to 3 tablespoons, and then add enough balsamic vinegar – or a combination of raw cider vinegar and balsamic – to make them sprightly. I slice a small onion or part of a larger one very thinly, to add. Sometimes I sliver a clove of garlic. These are essentially pickled vegetables and keep for quite a long time in the refrigerator. If you can keep them. We eat them right up.

As for the leaves, they are delicious when sautéed in some olive oil and garlic, or they could make the basis of a quiche; or simmer the older leaves with a ham hock or salt pork for flavor. I like to make a nest of them in the bottom of a Dutch oven for a pot roast. Lovely broth results.

For young beets, cook them first, and then the leaves, combine and serve with just butter and salt and pepper. Or cook some bacon until crisp, remove from the pan, sauté the beet greens in some of the bacon grease, and serve as a warm salad with the beets sliced over the greens, topped with the crumbled bacon and crumbled bleu cheese, gorgonzola or stilton, perhaps some walnuts, and a sprinkling of cider vinegar.

The other night I made a salad of arugula, julienned beets, soft, creamy goat cheese, slices of mango – those little yellow, organic ones that are available at the Rutland Co-Op now – chopped cilantro, a sprinkling of walnuts, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. (If I’d had an orange I would have zested it so that the oils from the skin, as well as the zest, sprinkled over the salad; which gets me thinking – strawberries would also be a good beet complement.) It was followed by pork tenderloins that I butterflied and folded around chopped dried apricots (because that’s what I had) and walnuts mixed with a little yogurt. Roasted for half an hour or so on a bed of half-cooked orzo, they were succulent.

I haven’t mentioned beet soup or borscht, but if I had I would’ve said: Sauté some onion and, if you like, garlic, add the cooked, skinned beets and mash them up with a potato masher. Stir in beef or vegetable stock. If you want a smooth soup put it in a blender or use a hand-held one. This can be finished off by stirring in some heavy cream that has been heated just until bubbles begin to form around the edges; or you can top it off with a dollop of crème fraiche, sour cream or yogurt.

Another friend mentioned a beet soup he’d had in Maine several years ago that contained blueberries. “It was not only the best borscht I’ve ever had, it was the best bowl of soup I’ve had in my life,” he said. I’d love to know how that was put together. I’ve made one with a topping of walnuts and anchovies chopped together into a paste and then stirred into the soup, but that’s a different animal.

tell me again......

Why go to all this trouble to treat a beet? Well, start with the fact that they’re delicious and go on from there to the fact that you can easily find ones that are locally and organically grown. Plus, they’re full of essential vitamins and minerals, says an article in Mother Earth News: “They are rich in calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, vitamin C, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin A and vitamin K. Beets store most of these nutrients in their leaves — which beet-eaters sometimes neglect — but recent investigations into their nutritional make-up bode well for the roots as well. Irwin Goldman, a beet geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has shown that beet greens and beet roots are one of the best dietary sources of folate, which is one of the B vitamins.”

If you want to capitalize on that healthiness, make this Beet Kvass drink that I found in Nourishing Traditions: Into a 2 quart glass container place 3 medium or 2 large organic beets, scrubbed clean and chopped coarsely; ¼ cup of whey (the watery liquid you can pour off a container of plain yogurt); and 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Add filtered water to fill the container. Stir well and cover securely. Keep at room temperature for 2 days before transferring to the refrigerator. You drink 4 ounces of this morning and evening. It adds flora to your digestive system, “is an excellent blood tonic, promotes regularity, aids digestion, alkalizes the blood, cleanses the liver...” You get the idea.

There’s no end to what can be done with three dollars worth of beets bought from a farmer at the Farmers’ Market. Sitting there all pink and pretty on the plate, they give no inkling of the work that has gone into getting them there from a genetically unaltered seed, without pesticides or other petroleum products, from earth that hasn’t experienced those depredations either.

Here’s to the beet. What a treat!

This column was first published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald May 22, 2007

satiate the soul

Every year that day before Mother's Day in early May is SUCH a treat – walking into Depot Park in Rutland on that first Summer Market Saturday, greeting old friends and discovering new – friends, farmers, and, at this time of year, foliage. This year, however, there had never been more miserable weather than we had that day – rain and wind and mud and cold! Nevertheless my eternal axiom had to hold true – the Farmers are going to be there and, thus, so am I!

We had radishes this year! It's always been a joke that the mayor will throw out the first radish at the first Farmers' Market, and someone has to go over to the supermarket to buy one! This year we had a splendiferous display of radishes – most notably at Foggy Meadow's stand – and the Herald got a great photo of young Ben Horton and those radishes to display on the front page.

As difficult as it is to be transported when you are hunching against the rain, racing through mud, icy rivulets streaming down your neck and up your sleeves, we shoppers managed it, and were able to greet some great new vendors as well as all the old beloved ones.

Here are a few of the former and one of the latter.

***

Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle are new vendors this year, and their Alchemy Garden stand is a work of art, so beautiful that you might not gather how much sweat of the brow it demanded and got. From their smiles and easy-going manner it seems that it effortlessly, as its name suggests, sprang into being.

Not so, though, as the Arbuckle/Courcelle duo are busy people who are also the managers of the new co-op at Pierce's Store in Shrewsbury. No doubt they were able to polish their farming talents when they acted as Paul Horton's interns last summer at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson, and they're putting those skills into practice now that they farm/garden on a piece of land at Greg Cox's Boardman Hill Farm in West Rutland. Lindsay also coordinated this year's Locally Grown Guide (just out – look for it) for RAFFL.

Note the lovingly-created seed packets and signs by Lindsay. Whew, that lady is a busy bee!

***

Another new vendor is Larson Farm from Wells, selling, most notably, pasture-raised veal. Some of you readers have asked about humanely raised veal, and here it is. It is rosy colored, very tasty. I made cutlets out of it last week, pounded thin, lightly breaded, sauteed in butter and olive oil.

Erin Seward woman's the enterprise, and brings along, so far, her own wildcrafted ramps, fiddleheads and, these few weeks green garlic.

Probably many people don't realize that garlic can be eaten at any stage of the game. Right now it is simply bulbous, like a scallion, so tender it can be eaten all the way up the stem. Soon you will find cloves being formed, the outer skin toughens, and the skin surrounding the individual cloves easily splits to uncover the tender cloves inside.

Erin also offers a pesto, made out of green garlic, and homemade hummus. Soon she will add her own garden-grown produce.

One of the things that is most heartening about these new vendors is the pure joy they take in what they're doing.

***

This splendid new vendor is Radical Roots Farm. We have watched Dennis Duhaime and Carol Tashie all this long spring sweating it out on their land out on Creek Road. That sweat has paid off with, among other things, broccoli raab at the very first market on May 8.

Now there's a story behind that raab that dates back to when Dennis was the Co-op's produce manager and I urged him to get some in, offering to do a tasting of it if he would. It's one of my favorite vegetables but most people had never heard of it. Dennis fell in love with it and now, finally, we have it available at Market.

Here's the way I wrote about its preparation last year:

….. 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, or put it in a sandwich of crusty whole-grained bread.

Don't you love that sign? It's the work of Carol's brother.

Carol and Dennis also had the earliest regular broccoli ever on May 22. Here's Carol with it in her hands.

***

Not a new vendor but one of my favorite old ones is Rebecca Worthing of Poultney who offers her incredible made-from-scratch-and-lots-of-butter pastries almost every week, winter AND summer at her Rebecca's Kitchen stand at the Market. They're fresh each day! You know what this means? She's up most of the night before Market.
The reason I haven't written about her before or even, I think, mentioned her, is that I was saving her for a feature article. Well, I just don't seem to get around to features anymore, so it's high time to tell you how wonderful she is while I'm writing about other wonderful people.

My favorite is that bearclaw. I've never eaten better – flaky and rich and perfectly balanced between shaley savory crust and nutty, sweet filling. Perhaps an interesting sidelight here: a year or so ago I asked Rebecca how she made her pie crusts. She uses sweet butter in everything else, but she said that was too expensive for pie crusts so she used a no-trans-fat shortening. I was probably visibly disappointed, because, as you all know, I advocate for natural fats – preferably half butter and half lard in my crusts – and she was also visibly distressed, as any artist is at even a hint of criticism.
Recently, though, she confessed to me that she had taken my advice, and now all her pastries, including pies, are butter rich. Right on, Rebecca.
She picks all of her berries and apples fresh and in season. She has a young family, too. I don't think she sleeps, ever.

***

What else is new at the Farmers' Market?

These lovely little salad turnips (from Foggy Meadow) are exquisite out of hand – halfway between a radish and an apple; sweet and juicy – or simmered slowly in butter, with a bit of tarragon, along with their greens. What an unctuous, sweet, meltingly fresh, lovely vegetable this is, either alone or curled around a perfectly grilled porkchop.

And these beauteous young beets:

Really, there's nothing better in spring than young beets and greens. Last night I cut the stems about 2 inches long and simmered the beets until they were almost tender – for as little as 10 minutes, really – then added the greens to the pot and simmered for perhaps 10 minutes more. I drained them, slipped the skins from the beets (but saved the stems), and added the quartered beets, stems, and greens to a saute pan in which I had steeped over a low flame some fresh green garlic in a plethora of olive oil, turned the heat up a bit and tossed just until the beets had absorbed that lovely, garlicky oil.

At that point I may have sprinkled them with a few drops of vinegar, showered them with grated hard-boiled egg, salted and peppered them, or strewn them with hot pepper flakes, but whatever I did (and I've done all for different suppers this month), they all satiate the soul!

***

Okay. What's missing here? Oh, of course, Greg Cox, the Grand old Man of the Farmers' Market, the Philosopher-Farmer. Where's Greg?
Well, Greg's recuperating from long-delayed and well-deserved knee surgery!
About time you took care of those knees, Old Man! You're going to need them for many years to come, and maybe now that you're pain-free and agile as a gazelle you'll quit grumbling like an old bear and accomplish even more for Rutland and its food and farmers!

***

Satiate the soul. Hie yourself to the Farmers' Market wherever you be!

Just... Summer

At the Farmers’ Market the other day, somebody asked, “What do you do with beets. Nobody seems to know what to do with them. They seem to be the forgotten vegetable, and they’re so GOOD if you know how.”
I didn’t say that there was no excuse for not knowing what to do with them! Didn’t I write a whole column about them a couple of years back? I bit my tongue instead. So here’s a recap, about them and some other things too.



Just... buy a bunch of gorgeous beets from a farmer, take them home, cut off the stems an inch or two from the beet, swish them through some cold water – they don't need to be immaculate – put them in a pan, cover with cold water, salt the water with a teaspoon of salt, bring to a medium boil and low-boil them least a half an hour with a cover aslant over them before testing them with a table fork. If they are tender, not mushy, drain them and let them cool a bit before sliding the skins and stems off with your hands. If you can’t push that fork firmly into them, cook a bit more. At 45 minutes they’re probably done whether you think so or not. You can serve them warm with just butter or you can slice them and add... yes, the proverbial three – olive oil, vinegar – in this case balsamic, I would think – and sliced garlic, as much as you want. If you don’t have balsamic don’t go out and buy some just for this – the beets are sweet enough as it is. They make sugar out of them, don’t they? Salt and pepper. You can go on from there with sliced onion or chives. You could add dill? or basil. You could even add some broken toasted walnuts, if you like, and sprinkle each serving with feta or chèvre. Umm.

That’s just the beginning, of course.

Just... toss a red pepper on the grill and singe that skin until it’s black, then rub it off. Slice the pepper in strips (save those thick juices, but flick out the seeds with the point of a knife) and anoint with oil, garlic, and vinegar.

Or if you find those small heart-shaped sweet red peppers – I think they're called lipstick – you can stuff them (after they’ve been skinned) with fresh goat cheese, chèvre, that’s been mixed with something sweet like raisins and something crisp like toasted pine nuts, put them back on the (warm) grill for just a few minutes, carefully – want to keep that sweet cheese inside. Serve with forks. A drop of balsamic vinegar as a finish would not be out of place. (Idea from Tapas by Joyce Goldstein)

Just... cucumbers, fresh off the vine, as good as anything: slice them thin, cover them with cold water with a few ice cubes, add some dill heads to this cold stew and put them in the fridge for awhile. The edges pucker up a bit to make a scoop. They’re crisp, and dill-scented.

Or make Asian-flavored Cucumbers. Slice one or two cukes into irregular slabs, cover with cold salted water for an hour or two in the fridge, drain them, dry well in a clean towel, put them into a bowl with a knob of ginger that’s been julienned (cut into thin strips), and add a tablespoon of sugar, 2 of rice wine vinegar, a teaspoon of dark sesame oil and 2 roughly chopped garlic cloves. Yummy. (Smashed Cucumbers with Ginger from Saveur, Issue #113)

Just... cook dried fava beans (cover with water, bring to a boil, turn to a simmer, about 45 minutes, adding more hot water as needed not to burn, salt to taste during the last ten minutes), spread them out on a plate, top with lots of olive oil and garlic, a strew of chopped jalapenos, and dip up with robust young celery, dark green and positively sweet. I am enamored of the Farmers’ Market celery – who knew it could even be grown here, much less so er, ah, tastefully. I would almost treat it like the cucumber chips – cut into leafy sticks and refresh in icy water for awhile. Then crunch away.



Just... tiny new tomatoes eaten plain, of course, at first, then halved and fried with garlic in olive oil while you blanch those first new green beans in boiling, salted water for 2 minutes. Drain them (the beans), plunge them into cold water, and chop a clove or two of garlic and add to the tomatoes, which should be browning on the cut side. Stir and fry until you can smell the garlic, drain the beans again and add them to the tomatoes. Turn the heat to high and stir-fry everything until tender enough. Not too long. Tear some basil leaves over them for the last minute, turn off the heat, season with salt and pepper and maybe another drizzle of olive oil. You could serve these with soft scrambled eggs for a simplified version of a dish called piperade. Now I'm thinking – serve them with bits of chèvre sprinkled over the top. I've just finished a plain omelet sided with cut cherry tomatoes and chèvre and it was delicious, so sweet and so good.



Just... silken, buttery cabbage, technique from Simon Hopkinson. For 2 people use 1 of those football-shaped cabbages, quarter it lengthwise leaving the core in. Plunge it into boiling salted water and cook until very tender. Drain it well, remove the core, melt a sufficient amount of butter in the empty pan (please, not too little, you’ll spoil the dish), don’t let it brown, add the cabbage to it, grind salt and white pepper over it, turn and turn until it is a buttery mass and then turn it out onto plates or into bowls. If you like, a sprinkle of vinegar – I’d say cider or sherry – to finish it off.

I heard someone ask Paul Horton at Foggy Meadow Farm what he had been eating that had, up to now, called themselves carrots – certainly not these fresh, bright, sweet, crunchy things. Yvonne Brunot from her Wallingford Right Mind Farm (don’t you love the name), a new vendor, made a Moroccan Carrot Salad to sample hers, serving them with The Foreign Kitchen’s lovely crackers to dip it up with, and a little bowl of sheep’s milk yogurt to drizzle over each bite. She gave me the recipe to pass on to you, so here you go.



Just... cook 1 pound of scrubbed new carrots – mix and match yellow, orange, purple, pink, for visual fun – until just crisp/tender – you don’t want mush – in boiling, salted water, drain and chop them rather finely and toss with 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, ¼ cup olive oil, ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper, and salt to taste. Let sit around to marry the tastes. Serve as a salad or as a dip with crackers. Don’t forget the yogurt. Delish! (Exigencies: I used Sherry vinegar, added a scattering of green cilantro seeds, and used ancho pepper because that’s what I had).

Just... make a whole meal of fresh corn on the cob with just butter and salt and pepper. Or mix a quarter pound of butter with lime juice, lime zest, garlic, salt and pepper, hot pepper flakes or powder or chopped fresh hot pepper... chopped cilantro... anything that strikes your fancy.
Leftover butter can be used when you next bake some of those lovely russet potatoes to be found at Heleba’s market stall.

Just... make thin-leaved, spiky Frissée (a curly endive) from Boardman Hill into a classic poached egg salad in the style of Simon Hopkinson in his Roast Chicken and Other Stories, my newest acquisition in the way of Cookbooks. For Salade Frissée aux Lardons everything has to be done at once – the bacon fried, the egg poached, the vinegar heated. The fewer people, the easier it is.

It basically involves cleaning the frissée, maybe half a head for two people, and putting it into a heatproof bowl. Season it lightly with salt and pepper. Make some croutons by rubbing a couple of slices of bread with a cut clove of garlic, cutting them into cubes, and frying them in olive oil. Set aside. Put two eggs into simmering vinegared water to set them poaching. Fry 3 thick bacon strips, cut into pieces, in 3 tablespoons of olive oil until crisp and golden. Toss bacon and fats onto the frissée and toss. Put the pan back on the heat, add 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar to it, swirl around, add to the frissée, which should be wilted, and toss. Add the croutons and toss. Arrange the frissée mixture on plates, top with a poached egg, sprinkle with sea salt and a grinding of pepper, and............. EAT!

I used to think this seemed to be a winter salad, but it always gets chilled around the edges. So now I think it’s a summer salad – perfect for a cool night. Oh, right, you could sprinkle all this with chopped parsley if you like.



Just... substitute garlic scapes for basil in your favorite pesto. Into the food processor go, say, 10 garlic scapes, ½ cup each of toasted walnuts, parmesan, and olive oil... chop it up good, amalgamate, add more olive oil if it needs to be loosened, salt, spoon it over pasta, or tomatoes, or spread it on bread.


These are just a few of the fresh new vegetables we’re gloriously JUST keeping up with these days, and along with a handful of berries – the latest is blackcaps mixed with fresh, unpasteurized Jersey cream and frozen – provide most of our meals these days.

...from marble to merlot...
is an event to benefit Dimensions of Marble and Rutland Area Farm and Food Link (RAFFL) where you can, for $10, sample all these foods – wines from Neshobe River Winery, produce and cheeses from Rutland area farms and producers. It’ll be held at the Vermont Marble Museum on Wednesday, August 5, from 5 to 7. 802-459-2300 or theforeignkitchen@yahoo.com .

Expecting Lysander

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!”

Before the Night Hits...

Since I begin to dread the Winter Night as soon as the summer days begin to shorten at the end of June, and my dread builds as the evenings grow cool and then downright cold, it’s always with a burst of relief and appreciation that I realize we have these two months of energetic brilliance to enjoy before the Night really hits us. Brisk and loaded with color, with baskets and pans and boxes and bowls full of glorious foods, rescued from the garden on frost-fearful nights or just because this is peak season, these days bring contradiction and imperative, both to get out and enjoy the last of this vitamin D sunshine and to stay inside chopping and simmering chutneys, jams, butters and sauces as the piles of fruits and vegetables first grow then dwindle down into preserves.

I know you all feel the same – in late July my friend Lowell emailed me “We've had the most wonderful spinach and broccoli from Foggy Meadow of Benson, and good corn and blueberries from Woods. How shall I exist when all this good stuff is over? I say this every year and survive – but...”

Yes, we shall survive, and we shall eat lots of local foods this winter – especially with the Winter Market and the Co-op keeping them available to us – and then May will, presumably, appear again.

...in a foggy meadow...

I remember walking into Depot Park on the first Market day – the Saturday before Mother’s Day last May – my heart swelling up the way it always does at the sight of these people I’ve known for so many years, and their wonderful early-season produce, working my way down the truck line, saying joyful hellos and catching up, when I was stopped in my tracks.

Speaking of hellos, HELLO, what was this? A new vendor, Foggy Meadow Farm, had set up across from the truck line; a large set-up, of bounteous greens and purples and reds, leafy mostly – from the micro-greens that I would use all summer in salads, and scattered here and there to complement, say, a cheese or salsa, both in beauty and taste, to the mature, most perfectly frilled green and red lettuces, laid out and mounded in beautiful pattern.

“My Goodness!” I said, rather abruptly. “Who are You?” I had not seen Foggy Meadow in their growing stages, not heard of them before, and here they were full-blown as though puffed from a hookah. I rubbed my eyes like Alice.

Paul Horton, it seems, is not a man who goes through growing stages. He and Sally Beckwith have owned their Benson hill farm for four years, lived there three, and farmed organic vegetables for two, selling at several farmers’ markets, including Middlebury, Dorset and Rutland.

I say hill farm advisedly, as I learned when I visited them later in the summer – the old farm house set on the north side of the road, behind and above it the scratching chickens and grunting pigs, and across the road below, and slanting down, an old barn and a patchwork of fields and, um, patches, outlined with irrigation ditch and pipe and scattered, it seemed artfully, with farm implements and machines, some ancient. It’s quite a sight anytime, particularly when created by a man who until a few years ago managed production systems for a publisher and a woman who designed databases. But perhaps that’s the source of their joy and success in what they do now, bringing those organizational and pattern-making talents into an area in which it is possible to love and feel at home – the farm-garden.

An avid organic gardener by avocation before he decided to make it a vocation, Paul appears to see farming as a cheerful challenge, a puzzle to be solved with a little creative diligence: when the town of Benson didn’t seem too keen on digging a trench across the road in which to lay his irrigation pipe, he contacted utilities companies and had them pound a conduit under the road like a horizontal well – that’s the way they lay their own lines, he reasoned – and then snaked the irrigation line through it.

In another instance, as we were walking through a field of leeks he reached down and measured the size of one. “Almost ready,” he said. “I want a buck fifty for these, so they have to be big.” Later I realized that two of his leeks were as big as the three that other farmers were banding together for $3 a bunch, and he pointed out that by growing them large he had decreased his handling costs, time, and aggravation.

Problem solving! It’s a real kick for some people. I’ll bet even now he’s noodling over how to get in the truck line next year.

It’s good to have people like Paul and Sally as part of our food community. Welcome them, won’t you?

...they pasteurize almonds, don’t they... The ubiquitous “They” – The US Department of Agriculture – has determined that all California almonds must be pasteurized (100% of our almonds come from California). However, in this case it seems that it was not the USDA that decided to kill the mosquito with a piledriver, but the Almond Board of California, who worked quickly after a 2004 outbreak of salmonella attributed to almonds to protect their industry from even the faintest mainstream taint, and made it a law that almonds must be pasteurized. Almonds are pasteurized either by steam or by propylene oxide (PPO), a chemical that has been banned by hot rod and motorcycle racing associations where it had been used as fuel. It’s also used for weed control. PPO is a known carcinogen. Pasteurized almonds apparently don’t taste or look differently from their raw counterparts, and are not required to be labeled “pasteurized”; are, as a matter of fact, continued to be labeled “raw”.

According to the Center for Disease Control, food borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. In the almond outbreak, a total of 33 people were hospitalized, lots of people had tummyaches, no one died. Wouldn’t it be an intelligent reaction to check out how almonds are being warehoused and packaged, marketed and delivered, rather than to stomp the entire industry with pasteurization? Our food system should be helped by the USDA and a knowledgeable public to recognize that it should celebrate the diversity and originality of our products and knowledge and totally abhor the idea of uniformity and lack of choice.

...which brings us to milk...

It made sense to react to the inane news of mandatory pasteurization of our almonds by revisiting the issue of raw milk by speaking to Amy Shollenberger at Rural Vermont, the organization that was instrumental in making it legal for small chicken growers to sell their chickens to restaurants and neighbors earlier this year. I had heard rumors that Rural Vermont was working to make unpasteurized milk more easily available to consumers. She said that Rural Vermont is still “in the homework stage, working with legislators” to allow farmers to sell unlimited quantities of raw milk from their farms (they’re limited to six gallons per day now), and to advertise (which they’re not allowed to do) and to deliver milk to the consumer after it is paid for in an arrangement something like the produce farmers’ CSA – Consumer Supported Agriculture – wherein customers subscribe to a farmer’s harvest at the beginning of the season and receive a box of vegetables and fruit, sometimes other foods too, once a week, of whatever is in season. “It’s important to have a relationship with the farmer,” Amy told me, “and pre-purchasing the milk makes it so you would have to at least seek out the farmer.”

...pasteurized livestock?...

Amy was also very hyped about the appearance of Mary Zanoni, legal expert, farmer, and anti-NAIS activist, today, at The Abbey, way up north, in Sheldon at 1:00 pm and at Ilsley Library, Middlebury at 6:30 pm. She’ll keep to the subject of animal registration tomorrow, Wednesday, at the United Church of South Royalton at 7 pm.

NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, which the USDA is pushing, and which small farmers are resisting, saying that the costs of knuckling under to the system are prohibitive, and that the aim of the whole thing is to aid industrial animal farmers and to, indeed, put small farmers out of business. See and hear Zanoni to learn more.

It’s amazing that you can still buy a raw egg.

... what we’re eating now...

Fresh, yet fall, beets. I forego the balsamic vinegar and also the teaspoon of sugar, and use, along with a little olive oil and salt and pepper, raw cider vinegar, with misgivings, yet when I taste them later they are perfect, the beets sweetening their coating, yet sharp, yet sweet.

Katherine Clark of Montpelier is cooking crookneck squash or, rather, her husband is. She writes: “I am convinced that crookneck is by far the best variety of yellow squash. It has a nutty complex flavor that is much better than the standard yellow squash... You never find them because they are ugly and bumpy and people think they are gourds. Bill cooks the squash in our house. He cuts up crookneck in non-uniform small chunks (so that the faces won't stick to each other while cooking), and cooks them in a non-stick skillet with a small amount of butter for a long slow time so that the liquid evaporates and the flavor intensifies.”

I ran with Bill’s technique, sautéing crooknecks or any other summer squash for as long as two hours. The good ones keep their shape, lose their water, and get all caramelly and absolutely wonderful.

Katherine’s on a quest to get people to like ugly vegetables, or vegetables they don’t think they like – like rapini, turnips, fava beans – so that farmers don’t quit growing them. “I adore rutabagas and don't understand why they aren't hugely popular. I like to roast them in the oven with olive oil...and rosemary.”

I’ve never cooked rutabaga much, but I will this year. That sounds like a wonderful way to expand our winter local foods repertoire.

Something else I just discovered is the very small – Little Ben – pumpkin. “We’ve been having good luck with these,” Paul Horton told me last week. “Just bake them, whole, at 325 degrees for about 45 minutes. They’re really good.” I took two of them and grilled them for about half an hour. When I sliced them open the seeds were easily scooped out, and the pumpkins contained a sweet nutty meat. Great taste and texture!

I make Elizabeth David’s tomato soup. I can remember it almost word for word, yet when I make it without getting out the book and re-reading it there’s something missing. As she said, “For all its simplicity and cheapness, this is a lovely soup, in which you taste butter, cream, and each vegetable, and personally I think it would be a mistake to add anything to it in the way of individual fantasies.” Don’t you love that word, “fantasies,” as though you or I could not and should not entertain them?

So I get out my French Provincial Cooking and the book falls open to Potage Crème de Tomates et de Pommes de Terre. It calls for the white part of 2 leeks (only one of Foggy Meadow’s though), ½ pound of tomatoes, ¾ pound potatoes, 1 ½ ounce butter, a little cream, chervil or parsley. You melt the butter, soften the leeks in the butter, add the roughly chopped tomatoes, cook a little until they begin to give off their juice, add the diced potato, a seasoning of salt and a little sugar, cover with 2 ½ cups water, bring it to a boil and let it simmer “steadily but not too fast” for 25 minutes. Put it through a food mill, she says, but I put it all in a blender and pour it back in the pan, in which I’ve heated about ½ to 1 cup of heavy cream. Just before serving sprinkle with chopped chervil or parsley.

But when I open the book and read the recipe, even then I don’t make it exactly as she says – I do indulge in some of my “fantasies” and it tastes better than if I hadn’t read it but made it closer to her instructions. What do you make of that? I make of it that life is more mysterious than we can comprehend.

This column was first published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on September 25, 2007

Plenty: more than enough

Leo gave me a book for Christmas that I had limited interest in reading – it was the autobiography of Gloria Steinem –  so I exchanged it for a cookbook. I do consider myself a feminist but am more interested in cooking than how Gloria stays cute in spite of her feminism and her age.

I seldom buy cookbooks – has anything new been written since Elizabeth David? I’d wanted this one for a while, though, Ottolenghi’s Plenty. Why? Vegetables! I’m tired of my usual treatments of them. I bought my son, Jerusalem, also by Ottolenghi, for the same reason. If you buy locally you need to work to put some excitement into beets and parsnips in the wintertime. Different spices, treatments, combinations. Presentations. Ethnicities. “And,” I explained to his quizzical look, “it’s not as though you need to spend a mint on spices. The Co-op has a fresh and inexpensive quality selection in their bulk department. Best buy in town.”

Plenty was a couple bucks more than the $29 Steinem book and deciding not to belabor the fact that you could feed a person for almost a week for that price, the prevalence of hunger on the streets, the... well I DID say not to belabor, right... I think I would concentrate on the vibrancy of its photos and the usefulness of its suggestions. This is not a baking book, where you need to follow a recipe perfectly, it is a vegetable book, and suggestions do quite well, putting even direct orders to task. For instance, in Roasted parsnips and sweet potatoes with caper vinaigrette, I really liked the combination of those two vegetables with cherry tomatoes and a vinaigrette of  lemon, capers, maple syrup and dijon mustard with a garnish of sesame seeds. My note to myself, though, is to “cut parsnips and sweet potatoes the same size, put all in the roasting pan at the same time and don’t forget the sesame seeds.” I did follow directions to a T the first time but now would spread out to make this dish my own. Little Moroccan oil-cured olives would be good in it. Whole heads of garlic cut in half and roasted along with everything else are just so. darned. good! And gorgeous.

Another idea, this of adding almonds and Medjool dates to arugula with a crumble of Turkish sheep’s cheese (I would use feta) with some dill and basil and red chard leaves? And adding pomegranate molasses to olive oil for the dressing? I really need that little February push of pomegranate. And dates. I think you can get most of the ingredients at the Co-op.

The photos are luscious: Small, thin watermelon wedges drizzled with some olive oil, basil leaves, Turkish cheese and thinly sliced onions with some coarsely ground pepper look wonderfully messy aside a scooped-out wedge of rind but I scarcely need a recipe for it. Oh, but doesn’t it sound good on this February morning?

I’m working from the back of the book forward as I write here, just as I worked from the front when I first got the book, cooking as I went. Supposedly I would meet myself in the middle if I continued in this manner, but the front of the book is more seasonal, so I may just have to go back there. But first, here’s a Quinoa salad with dried Persian lime, and I remember that someone told Leo to tell me that she wanted to know what to do with quinoa. Ottolinghi has lots of ideas. Dried lime skin, though, may not be available to most people. I happen to have slivers of it that I’ve had for a hundred years and now I’ve put some into a clean coffee grinder and made the powder the recipe calls for. Way to spend a half hour or so, Sharon. But Ottolenghi tells us that it is addictive, this dust, and so I will try it out.

As for quinoa, wouldn’t you agree with me that it should be used in the same way rice is, as a little starch, lighter than most? To cook it, Ottolenghi tells us, “Place (1 cup) quinoa in a saucepan with plenty of water, bring to the boil and simmer for 9 minutes. Drain in a fine sieve, rinse under cold water and leave to dry.” Here’s another quinoa recipe on page 228, “a simple salad for a spring brunch,” involving avocado and fava beans. Oh yum, especially when adding in lemons, garlic, and radishes, with cumin, olive oil and chile flakes. Another reason to anticipate spring.

In a recipe for Fried lima beans with feta, sorrel, and sumac, he tells us to use spinach and double the amount of lemon juice if you can’t find sorrel. That’s handy advice but I say get some seeds and grow it in any crevice you can find. The spear shaped leaves are wonderfully sour in omelets and stews and even salads and they are the first green in spring and the last in fall. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could still find a good leaf or two in my garden this weird winter.

Lentils and chickpeas, rices and quinoa are his starches, along with several kinds of beans, as in Mixed beans with many spices and lovage, another of the herbs I’m constantly urging you to grow for its celery/tarragon taste. Here’s another treasure – Caramelized fennel with goat cheese. I hope I remember this in fennel season. Yes, I am aware that the supermarket is liable to have it now. I may have to indulge.

Let’s face it, I’m not going to get back to the beginning of this book where I especially love a Spicy Moroccan carrot salad, which I may make tonight because I do have some of those big sweet Farmers’ Market carrots from either Greg or Paul, I can’t remember which. I loved the Beet, orange and black olive salad except for the olives. I think I’d substitute those little Moroccan ones next time. It’s served on bitter radicchio. But right now I am going to give you a recipe I haven’t tried yet but will as soon as I can get some endive.

Nutty endive with Roquefort

from Plenty, by Ottolinghi

• 1 ¾ oz Roquefort cheese
• ¾ cup Crème fraîche
• white pepper
• 1/3 cup roughly chopped pine nuts
• 1/3 cup roughly chopped walnuts
• 1 tsp butter
• salt
• 2 endives
• a few leaves of radicchio, Treviso or baby chard

Grate the Roquefort on a coarse grater and place in a bowl with the crème fraîche and some white pepper. Use a whisk to mix thoroughly to a thick mixture. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

In a hot frying pan lightly toast the nuts with the butter and a pinch of salt. Keep shaking the pan to get an even golden color on all the nuts. Leave to cool.

Trim the base of the endives and pick off the outer leaves. Trim a bit more to remove more leaves until you get to the core. Using your hands, smear each leaf with plenty of the Roquefort mix. Form bundles of six to eight leaves pressed together each leaf partly encased in a larger one.

Line a serving dish with some red leaves. Place a few bundles of endive on top, stacking them or leaving them standing against each other. Sprinkle generously with the toasted nuts and serve.

Ottolenghi suggests this as a ‘starter’. I think I would arrange single crème fraîched leaves on a platter and scatter the nuts over all the leaves for an hors d’oeuvre.

Ottolenghi’s Plenty! I think this kind of book is worthwhile when you need to put some vegetable energy into February. Is it worth all the coggs being jogged, the immense environmental and energetic expense that it takes to make a book like this? That’s up to you to decide. But remember that you can pass it on and around to family and friends. You might even get to taste the results.

snimtz@gmail.com

crooked little trail

Even in this fall, so generous with its glory, the time change has been painful. It’s bad enough that the days are getting shorter so quickly, without a whole hour suddenly yanked out from under you. So I’ve decided just to ignore it. Oh yeah, I changed the clocks, but instead of going to bed at 11 o’clock by the clock I’ll go at 10, or even 9, or maybe 8. I’ll get up when the clock says 6, or whenever I damned well please. Somewhere that feels like it would have been 7 a week or so ago. My natural wake-up time. We’ll eat dinner at ... well, maybe 7, still. The only problem is wine – I’d feel too guilty if I drank when the clock said 4, so I’ll just wait until it tells me 5.

This morning, the tiniest crescent moon in the dark eastern sky below the most radiant Venus I’d ever seen, then a beautiful pink sunrise, but only for about 10 minutes, that I would’ve missed if I’d gone by the new time. Like a sheep. The weather has been so clement that I find myself still outside digging Jerusalem artichokes or cutting down perennials until it’s pitch dark, and skunk-o’clock, I tell my little dog, Dakity.  In we go.

Perhaps that’s why I have not experienced that moment, that happens each fall where I’m cooking pork chops and apples – something too substantial – and it’s dark, and we’re sitting reading at the table, and the storm windows have replaced the screens in the door, the fire is licking up the chimney, and instead of feeling bucolic I feel claustrophobic, depressed about the whole thing. But this year there’s been a variety or openness about the hours and the days, and a different headset about getting dinner on the table. What do I want to eat? What needs to be cooked? 

The other night it was Late Fall mushrooms from the maple stump in the yard, baked butternut squash, some Brussels Sprouts’ tops (the new IN thing this year) in the sauté pan, and beets boiling forever, like nigh onto 2 hours.  Maybe I stored them a little long in the fridge.

Not a bit o’meat here, you’ll notice, or at least Leo did. But the next day I started a three day stint of making bone broth. Got some beef knuckles and marrow bones from Bald Mountain Farm Store on Cold River Road at the Hubbard place, put them in a lobster pot, covered them with water and boiled them slowly all day. In the evening I mashed some of the marrow fat on bread and salted it. What a treat! The second day I went through the freezer and found some meaty shank bones, and some pot au feu juice, added them and boiled again,  slowly, all that day, too, as well as the next. We had an Asian beef salad in homemade pita that second night, noodle bowls the third – soba noodles with scallions and shredded carrots, doused in boiling broth, and eaten. Because that pure bone broth is incredibly tasty, and some say very healthy. The only addition I made to it was half a carrot that was left over from shredding for the noodle bowls. And some salt.

After I strained all the bones out – they were falling apart by then – I simmered the broth down some more until it cooled and solidified into 5 pint jars.  More bouillon than consommé, even.

The reason the idea of bone broth took hold of  me is that nonsense – I’m sure you read about it – about red meat causing cancer. Really? Are we making any differentiation between grass-fed, organic beef and the gawdawful industrialized crap most people are used to eating? It made me mad, and so I made an essence of good beef –  its very essence.

And, because I’d gone to Bald Mountain, I had those bones. And a lot of stories. I had emailed them in the morning asking if they’d be open that afternoon. Oh yes, they were always open, was the answer. When I got there, sure ‘nuff, they were all locked up, but with a note on the door saying someone was around to open up for me if I would just call this number. I called the number and ... left a message. And I was irritated. But then I began to look around.

The first thing I noticed were some big humped birds resting on the old red trucks in what must be the Hubbard truck graveyard. Turkeys? No. Peacocks. Or peahens. And then a big brown bunny hopped by (Theo told me later that there were white ones as well, and, well, of course spotted ones, too.) Big brown and black and white chickens were stalking about their fenced-in yard. A Big Old Dog (named Tank, I found out later), ambled by emitting a ferociously lazy grumble. Turkeys in the distance. Angus across the road. All the animals are BIG! And then Brigid came back – blond and chic and kind of shy and full of stories – and let me in. She is Theo’s mother, married to the original Ted R Hubbard’s son. Theo is the one who dreamed up this organic meats store. She told me that the original Ted R Hubbard, back in the 20’s (I may have these generations mixed up or I may’ve missed one) was raising hogs and he’d go to various houses and businesses around town to pick up their table scraps to bring home to feed his pigs. Soon a lightbulb went off and he realized there was money to be made in this going to people’s houses and taking away stuff they didn’t want anymore. Getting paid for it as well as feeding his pigs with it. So was born “Ted R. HubbARD, Trash Hauling”. All these years later there are pigs on the farm again, and chickens and beef and... well, peacocks, looking like nothing so much as big ole guinea hens. Or Aryan war helmets.

Next day or so I stopped by for a strip steak – it’s all grass fed beef, not an ounce of grain, and they’re proud of its marbling – and Brigid asked me if I would like one that wasn’t frozen. Apparently she thaws some and keeps them in a separate fridge for those who want to cook a steak for dinner and don’t have time to thaw it. When I asked about the birds – peahens or peacocks? – she told me the story of an old peahen whose mate had gotten squashed somewhere, she just pining away for chicks, and so Brigid took one of her hens’ eggs and gave it to the peahen and she hatched it and nursed it and is now followed around by a large brown chicken.

That number I’d called? Theo called me back just as I was getting in the car after talking with Brigid. It’s a little hit or miss but it works.

Those shorter days got me cooking more than beef broth, though. In interstices of time, I made three jam jars full of the simplest – and best – chocolate mousse in the world – recipe below. On a different note, I made a sauce with all the vegetables on the counter that needed to be cooked – mostly tomatoes that hadn’t ripened on the vine and a few peppers, and gnarly little apples.

I’d started that pita dough in the morning with a couple cups of flour, a teensy bit of yeast – ¼ teaspoon at the most – salt, some yogurt and enough whole, raw milk to make a rather stiff dough. I figured it would get a little more liquidy as the day went on and it fermented and rose, but it didn’t, and the pitas were not that great. I just took golfball-sized pieces of dough and flattened them out in a tortilla press before I griddled them. They worked with the shredded beef salad.  

Then I added more flour and a little water to the leftover dough and let it sit out all night to rise. It didn’t rise much, but the next morning I tossed it anyway – I was tired of dealing with it – into a sizzling hot cast iron pan that I’d heated along with the oven to 450°, covered it and baked it for half an hour, then took it out of the pan, turned it on its top in the oven turned down to 350° for another 20 minutes until it sounded hollow when thumped. It turned out to be a pretty good loaf of bread, tender and tightly grained because of the milk and yogurt, but tasty and pleasant!

Turns out that bread – slathered with the butter I talked about last time, which is cultured by Ploughgate Creamery from Fayston, and available at the Co-op – when topped with the aforementioned chocolate mousse – makes a pretty good stand-in for Pain au Chocolat or even a chocolate croissant. And the mousse could not be easier to make (nor the bread, for that matter).

Chocolate Coconut Mousse

• 7 ounces very dark and good chocolate, chopped coarsely
• 1 can (13.5 oz) whole coconut milk
• 2 tablespoons chia seeds

Melt the chocolate over hot water – that is, heat some water in a pan, place a bowl over, not in, the simmering water, add the chocolate pieces, stir with a rubber spatula until the chocolate is just melted. Take from the heat. Pour and scrape the coconut milk into a blender, turn on low, scrape the chocolate into the coconut milk and then add the chia seeds. Process until smooth. Pour into 4 ramekins or 3 jelly jars. Decorate with dried, unsweetened coconut if you like.  Refrigerate until set, about 2 hours.

The jelly jars make nice little gifts for your favorite people, and you still have enough for your ownself.

Food leaves its own crooked little trail, doesn’t it? Hungry or not, you gotta love it.

snimtz@gmail.com