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

showers of flowers

Well, not flowers, exactly, but the leaves of flowers, because if you let them go long enough they will make flowers, as most beings in the wild will do, on their own, or in couples at least. But wait, I’m really talking about herbs – grasses and plants that are still in their baby stages just now, beginning their push toward flowering and procreation.

But really?  I’m talking about flavor, and the insanely simple but intense pleasure of walking out into the garden in the late afternoon to gather an assortment of whatever is coming up right now to shower over your supper. In this yard that would be spiky chives (some with fat purple buds already) and flat-leaved garlic chives, the rough leaves of lemon balm, purple budlets of mint, spears of Egyptian (Walking) onion thickened in the middle with their incipient babies, that when cut into unfurl into new onion shoots (how amazing).

And then you need to put your little collection down somewhere and get your garden knife in order to dig out a spear of green (immature) garlic, and gather everything up again and go on to pluck a sprig of lovage, pinch off some tarragon, then don’t forget some soft oregano leaves. Oops, back to the other side of the garden where you forgot the sour sorrel (pick off those seed-heads while you’re there), the cilantro just coming up, a feathery dill... (We would not be having those babies so early, nor be forming those seed-heads if not for that week of heavenly hot weather we had a few back.)

Whoa, that is quite the little salad you have there and you haven’t even got to the lettuce. Or the spinach. Or the baby chard or kale; nor need you get to these larger, more traditional leaves – keep just the explosively flavorful ones, put them into cold water to crisp and stay fresh for supper in half an hour or so, and then just separate them into separate leaves.

I have been saying for a while now that I’m really tired of cooking. Shhhh, I would say – don’t tell my readers. But it was true. Everything was old – I think I even mentioned here how tired I was of root vegetables and hunks of meat.

But now it’s spring nigh unto summer and we don’t have to like cooking, we could subsist on each successive seasonal food with no or just the tiniest bit of preparation AND a shower of garden herbs. The little bunch of broccoli raab I bought  from... who... at the Farmers’ Market on Saturday? I simply steamed it and then tossed it in a bit of good olive oil I’d heated with half a stalk of my green garlic and some hot pepper flakes. We ate that with a small slab of Alaskan salmon I’d gotten from the Co-op and grilled and showered with the herbs. Oh, and there were small grilled/baked potatoes from Heleba’s, too.

Lunch had been a slice of grained and seeded sourdough from the French baker next to Radical Roots at the Farmers’ Market, slathered with the pricey butter from the new Jersey Girls vendor, made at their farm in Chester, and some of their Quark, a simple farm cheese, drizzled with local raw honey from my friend, Julie, and coarsely ground pepper.  That last from Penzeys. Even that benefitted from the shower of power herbs and provided a phenomenal gustatory satisfaction.

That bread. That butter. Those tiny green things. So simple, so good!

Now I’m contemplating doing justice to the bunch of sturdy, red-veined beet greens with the tiny beets still attached. Steaming, of course. Quark does seem to enter here as well, and coarse pepper, too. Oh my yum. But I can’t forget the first sugar snap peas I got from Radical Roots, either. Perhaps they will be eaten raw along with another slice of that bread and butter. And a strew of herbs.

See? Not really cooking, just fiddling, working with the cleanest and most local of foods using the simplest of techniques.

This is the perfect time of year.

Oh, a recipe? Only if you insist – a suggestion recipe

Hot Rice to Awaken the Flavors
in Chicken Salad

Make some rice. For plain white rice bring 2 cups of water to the boil, salt it – 1 teaspoon, stir in 1 cup of rice, turn the heat to low, cover, barely simmer for 20 minutes without lifting the lid. At the end of the 20 minutes either serve, or take off the cover, cover the pan with a towel, put the cover back on. That will absorb the extra moisture and keep the rice hot.

For the chicken salad: To 2 cups of diced chicken, add half a dozen coarsely chopped black Moroccan oil-cured olives. Then add the following in small dice: 1 tablespoon preserved lemon (you may use fresh lemon zest and a bit of juice), 3 French Breakfast radishes (or any radish), a couple of cornichon, and, say, 3 tablespoons onion. Add chopped tarragon and lovage, with maybe some dill; then mix it all up with, say, ½ cup olive oil and 2 or 3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. After the flavors have time to mingle, serve it over the hot rice.

But wait! That’s not all: Over all, sprinkle chopped cilantro and lemon balm and rings of Egyptian onion. The heat of the rice wakes up the many tastes in this little dinner so that every bite is a study in contrasts and comfort. Drizzle with a little more olive oil over the top; course grinds of salt and pepper, too.

You will, of course, not go out and buy herbs but use the ones that grow in your own garden. Perhaps you’ll even have some basil starts. I haven’t mentioned basil because I don’t have any yet.

Grow some herbs and make some green showers of your own. Lovage, cilantro, arugula, dill, tarragon, lemon balm, sorrel, basil, parsley, mint, thyme... the list never ends. Mix and match. And when the flowers come on? Eat them, too. And then plant some more. It’s all good! 

may you eat interesting food

Maybe it’s only the time of year and the fact that this ridiculous winter simply will not give up and spring on out of here that I’m having a hard time coming up with my usual at least adequate enthusiasm for cooking supper each night. My appetite is gone for root vegetables, for instance, and a chunk of meat just seems extravagant. Gone, too, I think, are the days when we could and would settle into a big pork chop and mashed potatoes with veg. I’m simply not interested.

But one of the best places I’ve found for interesting food is the Rutland (year-around) Farmers’ Market (it’ll be moving outside to Depot Park on Mother’s Day weekend), from Peter McGann’s excellent Mexican to Young-La’s smartly named Flavors of Asia: Vermont Seoul Food, and everything in-between.

One delicious food I’ve been noodling about all winter is  Storytime Foods’ muhammara, a walnut, red pepper, and pomegranate molasses dip that is as spicy and full of flavor as you might deduce from the ingredient list. It is delectable, no getting around it. You can find a recipe on-line, but that involves several different steps, such as toasting walnuts and roasting and skinning red peppers, and even then you have no guarantee that you’ll get the same end result. They even make their own pomegranate molasses! I have an ancient bottle of that in my fridge, so perhaps next pepper season I’ll make a batch, but for now my Muhammara will come from Storytime Foods.

Get Cracking Kitchen is another intriguing purveyor. After I spotted several packets of its Chickpea Almond Crackers in a friend’s shopping bag and she told me she’d bought them out because they were so good, and gluten free, and vegan, and acceptable for diabetics, I made sure to buy a packet of them the next week, and Man, they are good! Intriguing. Just on the off chance I googled them on the web. And there they were, called Besan crackers on a lovely website, the Mindful Foodie. They’re very straight forward, containing flaxseeds and cumin as well as the two main ingredients. (The chickpea is also known as gram, garbanzo, and cece as well as besan.) However, I was certain that Grace Davy, who is the baker and cook behind Get Cracking, adds her own touches. Over the last couple of years I’ve bought several items from her, including a totally outrageously rich chocolate beet brownie that you can only eat in tiny slices. She uses 3 kinds of chocolate, she whispered to me.

So I emailed her, wondering what her aim is – besides deliciousness – in the products she creates. “You use such iconoclastic ingredients and I suspect your techniques are dissident. Are you just curious?”

Well, she got an awfully big kick out of that. And then she said, “My objective in all this is to keep my creative juices flowing and spread the creativity to my customers. I like whole grain flavors in my desserts, I like homegrown ingredients and I like details and ideas.”

And then I really like her take on competition with the other established foodsters at the Market, namely that she prefers “innovation to competition.” Continuing, “Everything at the market is good, and I came in after so much deliciousness had (already) been established, so why offer ... close choices?... I work really hard to offer things no one else does.”

I, for one, appreciate that hard work, and until I get a little more creative myself I’ll continue to let Grace put the cece in my crackers and the beets in my brownies.

***

Last couple of weeks there’s been fresh ricotta at the Farmers’ Market, and this last week I grabbed a package. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who I bought it from and there’s no label. Fresh ricotta, though! What a treat. And since I also bought two bags of fresh spinach from Radical Roots, my mind wandered to a treat I learned to make from Dancing Ewe Farm when they came to that first year of the winter farmers’ market back of the co-op several years ago. That treat being, it came to me slowly, Gnudi Spinach and Ricotta Ravioli!  Meaning, in answer to Leo’s query, Nude ravioli – the filling without the pasta purse. “Oh,” he said, “how disappointing.” Well, no, not really. Really quite grand, he would find out.

So, the recipe had disappeared from Dancing Ewe’s website but I cobbled one together in spite of the fact that the search for “gnudi ravioli” all came up in Italian so I was forced to go with gnocchi. Nevertheless, I’m here to tell you, a plate of these swimming in basil butter is not a bad thing.

Gnudi Spinach and Ricotta Ravioli

(adapted from Epicurious) Serves 2 as a main course

• 12 ounces (2 bags from Radical Roots) fresh spinach leaves
• 8 ounces, 1 cup, fresh ricotta cheese
• ¼ cup freshly grated parmesan cheese (plus more to be slivered over)
• ¼ cup all-purpose flour (plus more to roll out)
• 1 large egg yolk
• ½ teaspoon salt (plus more for cooking water)
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Fresh ground nutmeg
• ½ to 1 stick of good butter, melted, not browned
• 2 small bunches of baby basil (Radical Roots has these) or sage leaves

Cook the spinach in a large pot of boiling well-salted water just until wilted, stirring occasionally, about 4 minutes. Scoop the spinach out of the water, squeeze out the liquid when it’s cooled enough to handle, and chop finely. Reserve the cooking water.

Mix the spinach, ricotta, parmesan, flour, egg yolk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg in a bowl until a sticky dough forms and everything is well combined.

Dust a flat surface with flour, and working with about ¼ cup of the mixture at a time, pat it into a well-floured, fat roll, then pinch off perhaps two teaspoons at a time and roll them between your palms to form into lozenge shapes. Handle these as little as possible while assuring that they are well put together. Line them up on a cool surface.

Add enough water to the spinach water to fill the pan ¾ full and bring it to a boil.

In a sauté pan melt the butter over very low heat – even using a diffusing pad over the burner if needed, the butter should not color – and add the whole sprigs of basil or sage to add their flavor to it.

When the water is boiling, work in batches to add the nude ravioli to it. Cook until the ravioli rises to the surface then cook 4 to 6 minutes longer. Using a slotted spoon, remove the ravioli from the water, letting all the water drain off, and put them into the warm butter.

When all the raviolis are boiled and warming in the butter, place on serving plates, grind pepper over them, sliver parmesan over that, place a couple leaves of basil or sage on the top – another grating of nutmeg? – and eat up.

So that’s this week’s installment of interesting food. Catch you in a coupla!

a mighty mighty rain

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.

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!”

little cows & spotted dogs

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

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!