LocaVocaDo

Sometimes if local doesn’t come to you, you just might have to go looking for local! At least that’s my wishful thinking here in this Pit O’ Winter: Ice and snow, freezing rain, high winds, freaky lightning and claps of thunder, icy sidewalks, flu germs, cabin fever... the most optimistic thing that might be said is... well, I forget!

Oh, right! The light’s coming back. The other evening it was almost six o’clock when we walked into a friend’s house for a dinner visit and she exclaimed, “Oh my, it’s still light!” And the days are just going to get longer and longer until June. Excuse my exuberance.

We sat down, that evening, to glasses of wine and a little bowl of guacamole. As I scooped some up on a chip, my friend said, “It’s all local, too – the tomato is hydroponic, from West Rutland, Steve Chamberlain’s wonderful garlic, onions from the farmers’ market...” and then she added that, of course, the avocado was not local, though she had got them at the Co-op. “At least they’re organic.” Well sure, avocados don’t grow on trees here, most definitely not in February, but I remembered they are at the height of their season in warmer climates, a fact I’d found out the hard way, or at least first hand, actually in a very pleasant way.

...sleuthing for local food...

Because, it so happened, a couple of years ago on one dark-of-the moon, just-before-dawn morning at the end of February, with the thermometer shuddering at 1 degree Fahrenheit, I flew out of the Rutland Airport on my way to a little island seventeen miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, in search of local food. Friends who have been visiting Culebra for twenty years or more, and who have even built a house there with other congenial couples, had told me that Culebra did not grow any food at all, that all of it was imported from the big island, the water piped undersea, and that the fish they ate were not caught in the warm turquoise waters surrounding the island but were shipped from Boston. Of course, I was aghast! If rocky and cold little Vermont could produce a great deal of its own food, certainly rocky and WARM little Culebra could do the same.

...avocado frenzy...

The first morning I was there, the women drove into Dewey, the main little town, to do some grocery shopping. At the first store there were four or five aisles of canned and boxed goods that were not so very different from the cans and boxes in our own stores in Vermont except much more limited in variety, as were the vegetables, mostly carrots and broccoli wrapped tightly in plastic.

And then, off to the side, I found a couple of flats piled high with oblong and ovoid green things which I realized were large avocados. Huge, in fact. The kind of bland tasting avocados that I never buy in Vermont. I pressed one and it was very firm but I thought that even though it might be crispy it could be flavorful.

It took me a while to realize that I had stumbled upon the only fresh and wonderful produce from anywhere near. My excitement rising, I added another avocado to my basket and, noticing that some of the green ovoid things were a bit smaller and smoother skinned – that they were, in fact, mangos – I picked up a couple of them, too. In the next grocery, the realization still seeping in that these avocados and mangos were straight off the trees, if not from Culebra then at least from the big island, I went a little crazy, filling up my basket with both items. A man came in the back door with a new shipment of fresh stuff and said, quite proudly, “We have green onions,” so I grabbed a couple of bunches of scallions. If my excitement at these humble examples of fresh produce seems a little disproportionate now, imagine what it seemed to my shopping partners then.

We made one more stop, at a liquor store and deli named El Eden, owned by Luz, a beautiful large-eyed Puerto Rican woman, and her partner Richard, who had been a dairy farmer in Plainfield for most of his known life, where we bought a couple of pounds of tuna. From Boston.

...precious food...

For supper that night, I made a dressing of lots of chopped ginger, garlic, and scallion, along with olive oil and soy sauce and the juice of a lime or two, salt and pepper and hot pepper flakes. I picked up one of the avocados with some trepidation, because they should be softer, and sliced it in half around the pit.

It. Was. Perfectly. Ripe. Perfectly! I had never handled an avocado so shortly after it had reached its peak of ripeness. A shoot was already curling out of its pit and immediately went into a glass of water on the windowsill.

I alternated great thin slices of avocado and mango on top of greens, split the scallions lengthwise in four parts and crisped them in a glass of ice water, then piled them upon the slices of fruit and drizzled the whole with the dressing.

We grilled the tuna on as hot a fire as we could make – which wasn’t, of course, hot enough – only minutes upon each side so that it was caramelized outside while leaving the middle red and warm, or at least that was the aim. We grilled thick-sliced red onion until it was still crispy but warm and caramelized; and then we sliced the tuna as thinly as we could and piled the red onion on top and drizzled the dressing over that, and we ate. Everything was good, but the mango and the avocado were outstanding. And that dressing... I’m going to make that tonight!

We ate those local avocados for several following lunches, halves of them, drizzled with garlic and olive oil and a bit of balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper, and with tiny shoots of cilantro that my friend was growing in flats on the porch. We ate them with spoons from the shell.

Of course, those were the most delicious avocados I have ever eaten or probably ever will, and that is because the search for them, their serendipitous appearance, my relief at having recognized them, the fact that they turned out to be ripe in spite of my initial doubts, made them food hard-gotten, almost missed, therefore precious.

...roosters, wild cats, and bombs...

I continued my sleuthing for local Culebran food, but to little avail. I picked up some island literature and read that the island had been predominately agricultural in the 1800s and that wood, turtle oil, turtle shells, salted fish, tobacco, cattle, pigs, goats, country cheese, sweet potatoes, plantains, pumpkins, beans, yams, garlic, corn, tomatoes, oranges, coconut, cotton, melons, mangrove bark, charcoal, and turkey had been produced and exported in 1800.

I talked to Luz, who murmured how convenient the big island was for food supplies. Culebra is not semi-arid, but ARID. It has NO water – no rivers, no lakes or ponds (but that had not stopped the folks in 1800). She talked about the awful, invasive, thorny acacia plants that were imported to feed the wild goats that used to roam the island, and how it glommed onto the gracious growing conditions and grew such large thorns that the goats couldn’t eat it, after all, and it took over the island. Fronds of acacia that are broken off into the roads are capable of puncturing the tires of those unknowing folk who drive over it.

“No one eats the goats,” said Luz, “and there aren’t that many left now.” And, “No one eats the chickens” that flocked everywhere, and “No, you can’t get fresh eggs – they all hatch into new chickens,” (which you could surmise by the cock-crows that filled the air before dawn each morning), and “no one grows vegetables because of the lack of soil covering the volcanic rock.” And then she said something puzzling – that “there was a United States military base here until recent years and they did practice bombing here, and that activity wasn’t conducive to farming or tourism.”

I had heard mention of the military base, and I had seen old rusting tanks decorated with graffiti, and I had seen artists’ renderings of the tanks that looked like protests, and they puzzled me. They were jarring next to the beaches of white sand soft as cream, and I didn’t know what to think of them.

And what could that have to do with two to three thousand people sitting in their little houses upon that rocky soil, upon the creamy sanded beaches that surrounded the fish-filled turquoise waters, not going outside and scratching little gardens into their earth and pulling fish from their waters, and preparing them in their kitchens and sitting down to eat them with their families? What was it that made an entire island of people give up one of the basic rights they were born with, that of feeding themselves with their own good food? The truth was dawning upon me, but I still had not connected the dots. I could not see the truth hidden there, just as I had not been able to see the avocados loaded onto the flats underneath the shelves of the grocery stores. I was looking too straight ahead, my peripheral, truth-seeking vision blinded.

But a pamphlet I read on the plane coming back to Vermont finally provided something to flesh out my poor, parched imagination; something to explain the inertia of the Culebraneses in the matter of food, and most things else. Its words were stark: “In 1901-1975 US military used the island for military exercises and a firing range. The destruction to the reefs and the psyches of the inhabitants will take decades to heal.”

Imagine! An invasive government (ours) had used that beautiful little atoll as target practice for 74 years, had moved the people out or resettled them between its ammo stash and bombing target, and inflicted the noise and the stench, and the fear of unexploded missiles upon them. It reminds me of the warning Ike – a Republican, let me remind you, and a military man – gave us when he stepped down from office, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Back home again I googled the matter and found that different forms of cancer are rampant on Vieques, Culebra’s larger, neighboring sibling island, where the military only recently pulled out, and also on Culebra. The cancers are linked to depleted uranium poisoning, which is linked in turn to the bombing and artillery exercises which took place on the islands. The cases to have both Vieques and Culebra declared super fund sites are still pending.

Nice that we live in Vermont, where such things don’t happen, eh? But Culebra and Vermont do share some of the same problems. Don’t fewer and fewer people concern themselves with preparing, not to speak of growing, their own food? Isn’t more and more land being bought by wealthy people whose aim could not be further from that of using their fields to grow food? Don’t more and more large companies – whether military or industrial – want the land for their own nefarious purposes, and try to own our food supplies, and often poison our soil? Culebra stands as a stark reminder – Control the food supply and you control the people!

...circles...

On top of one of Culebra’s steep mini-mountains there is a restaurant known as Juanita Bananas. Upon grinding to a stop at the restaurant, the visitor is met with astonishing sight – ripe tomatoes hang from vines under a greenhouse overhang, grow from white pvc piping all sheltered and overhung with big leaves of oregano, and wide-leaved trees hang with the green fruit of mangoes and papayas, plantains and bananas, lemons, limes, guavas. There are small red fruits with tiny question marks attached to the hanging end of them that prove to be cashews, one to each fruit. In the ground and in planters and growing from the pvc piping are sage and basil, small and fresh growing lettuces and cilantro, green peppers and chilis and long, blue eggplant. Parked nearby is, incongruously, a motorcycle. Chef and owner, Jennifer Daubon, with her husband, Javier Cabrera, have created this little paradise, growing real, indigenous, fresh food, straight from the soil (and water), preparing it in Jennifer’s kitchen and serving it onto our plates.

...local avocados...

Culebra is a beautiful little island with stretches of the most exquisite beaches you’ve ever sunk up to your ankles in. The people are friendly and outgoing, with a culture that is almost expatriate, and an inimitable loyalty to their damaged island. With people like Jennifer and Javier to repair it and bring it back, I think it will survive. And on days like this – is that sleet pinging against my windows – I think they might need my help! Add to that I’m developing a real itch for local avocados. Can’t get local avocados around here. LocaVocaDo!

this column was first published in the Rutland (Vt) Herald on 02/19-08

anger and a sandwich... or two

Last Saturday was the Vernal Equinox – the first day of spring – in Culebra as well as in Vermont, and on Equinox Eve my Culebran/Wallingford friends called me from there: “We’re just sitting out on the deck, having just come back from Susie’s, and while we were there another couple came in and sat down near us. We chatted. They told us they had found Susie’s through a column in the Rutland Herald, and just had to try it.”

I love those little synchronistic happenings in life, don’t you? Those little ‘6 degrees’ events? Here are these people – from Brattleboro, I think – who just happened to read my last column and end up 3,000 miles away, meeting the very friends I wrote of, while checking out my suggestions for good eats. Happy plantain mash to them, and a tip of my pina colada!

I laughed and chortled at this news, and perhaps even more heartily because I’d received an angry email about that column from someone who resented my being ‘snarky’ about their precious little Culebra. I guess they didn’t get that Culebra is precious to me, too. People must think in order to show admiration for some place, person, or restaurant, etcetera, that one must ooze adulation all over it and find nothing to improve.

Well. Not me!

Take the Farmers’ Market, for instance. Everyone knows I totally adore/admire the Market and I loves my Farmers! But don’t I admit that they can be cantankerous prigs sometimes? Oh yes, I do. Insensitive to other peoples’ accomplishments? Yes! Full of themselves? Oh my goodness! But better friends and quality food you cannot find!
I do not brag when I tell you that I receive my share of appreciative messages from you, my readers, about my columns. I so appreciate those messages and want to thank you for them, but once in awhile a really angry one knocks me from my comfortable little roost.

I received one from a ‘nutritionist’ (you’ve probably noticed that I usually bracket that word) a while back when I wrote about canola oil vs the lovely Lard. Meh, I blew that one off. I also got a lot of flak from my editor, my dear Randal, which followed down to the fact that the beautiful yellow drifts of rapeseed (Canola) blossoms in his grandparents’ fields made a big impression on him as a little buzzer. Ah, I appreciate that. Much of my food sense stems from the same kind of thing – rosy memories of familial pig-killings, for instance. But the memory of long tight rows of corn with the DeKalb 791 sign in the corners of them, or of my dad kvetching that the blankety blank government was paying him to keep fields fallow did not inculcate me with any respect for the so-called ‘green’ revolution, government subsidies, or GMO crops.

But really – do people need to be so blasted angry at me for something I wrote? I mean, I’m angry, too, but my anger is at big banks, big insurance, big pharm. Etcetera.

On the other hand, if you remain open, something good almost always comes out of such encounters. For the Culebra column it was a link to this blog http://islandwomanculebra.blogspot.com/ . If you go to Culebra, you will meet this woman. She runs a little stand on the corner of the bridge, and when it’s closed the words Open Some Days, Closed Others appear on the doors, in true island time!

The most vicious attack happened a couple of years ago by a friend of a friend for a column about a grass-fed burger and a plug for a restaurant, as I remember. Oh well, who cares! Because you’d best try not to let that kind of misplaced anger cramp your style – it’s the penalty for being a public object for people to see and take umbrage at if they happen to be in a bad mood and don’t have a dog to kick. Honestly? That’s what makes people mean – down deep thinking that everyone else is bigger and more powerful than they are, which gives them the right to blast ‘em!

Still, it DOES put a crimp in your style. I seldom write about restaurants anymore because there are few I can recommend with unremitting adoration – I’m sure I could nitpick with Thomas Keller’s French Laundry for heavens’ sake. My farmers, now, they just grin and bear both my praise and my plaints. There’s hardly anything bad I can say about them anyway, even the Republicans, and the single one I do not favor with my currency or words is so popular he doesn’t need them.

Another crimp is that I don’t have the heart to do those long, fully researched stories that I used to offer you. They’re lots of work and time, and then Whap! Back o’the knees with a 2X4. Still, that’s a doubtful loss, at best – just means you spend less time reading!

But you know what? Three years of writing these Twice Bittens, countless wonderful letters, comments, and even several friendships, and only 3 nastinesses. I guess I can take it.

***

That said, I have discovered two new comparatively hidden places that might or might not be new to you. I’ve been out and about – frenetically so, for me – these last couple of weeks, and I spent many hours driving to and from Vergennes on the bucolic 22A.

On the Vergennes main street there is a little rustic place called 3 Squares Café, and on their blackboard they do have a Boyden Farms grass-fed beef burger! They also have good coffee and bagels and scones and muffins for starting out your day. Lunch is handwritten on said boards, with lots of Mexican shadings and very nice all-American sandwiches with good breads and fillings. The owner, Matt Birong, cooks in a tiny kitchen in almost plain view, with some added help on busy days. It’s a bustling place, with wood floors and tables, even some community ones, and, the first day I walked in, there was Patrick Leahy scarfing down a sandwich with some cohorts.

So, my final word is – excuse me if I don’t gush – If you find yourself in Vergennes (perhaps you’ve driven up to Dead Creek to check out the spring bird migration) around breakfast, lunch, or dinner (although I haven’t had dinner there) give it a try. I like it. A lot.

Another day I was driving through Chester, on my way to Andover (don’t ask) and went by an almost hidden fairyland with a sign out front announcing The Phoenix Café. I screeched to a halt and backed up. The lettering on a large building half-hidden behind some trees gave me to know that I had found the latest home of Baba a Louis bakery, the original one, I mean, which shares a common birth but is now under separate ownership from our own excellent Baba down on the notorious south end of Wales Street.

Entering the shrubby wooden arch and following the curving shallow steps and path to the entrance was indeed like entering a fairyland. Inside, big wooden, high-ceilinged rooms with lots of bakery equipment at one end, and chairs and tables at the other. Again, good sandwiches, soups, and salads, as well as the bakery’s famous rolls and pastries. And of course your choice of breads and crackers. I chose a ham and Swiss on rye for my sandwich, and a loaf of seriously whole-grain bread and some latticework crackers to take home. All were delicious. Note: the café and the bakery are separate businesses, so you will also pay separately. See if you can find it right at the end of Main Street in Chester before the wilds begin.

... Catching up ...

Peter McGann will do another, long-awaited workshop on authentic Mexican Cooking, with all new recipes from diverse regions of Mexico. They will take place on three Wednesdays, April 14, 28, and Cinco de Mayo, from 5 to 7PM in the Rutland Area Food Co-op kitchen at 77 Wales Street. $30 per class or $90 for the whole series. Sign up at the Co-op, or call 773-0737.

Peter will also be providing the food for the Co-op’s annual meeting on Sunday, April 25th at 5PM at the Unitarian Church on West Street. You should attend, why? Well, to become a member ($10 a month); because you ARE a member; to voice your vote on new Co-op Board members; see the new RAFC video; mingle with friends, and, of course, to enjoy Peter’s food. Catch up on the Co-op, come and enjoy!

Rutland is the host of the statewide Farm to Plate local food summit on Saturday, April 10 from 9:30am to 4pm at the Rutland Middle School Complex on Library Avenue. This is a big deal, because the purpose is to bring together people from the whole state to review the goals and provide feedback to guide final drafting of the Farm to Plate strategic plan – what is our farming and food future? How does the Rutland area fit in? Registration is required. Contact Heather Pipino, heather@vsjf.org if you would like to attend. $10 registration fee to cover lunch cost - scholarships available. Send check to: Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, ATTN: Farm to Plate Summit, 3 Pitkin Court, Suite 301E, Montpelier, VT 05602.

And lastly but not leastly, Maya Zelkin has been holding food workshops at Pierce’s store in Shrewsbury. I’ve been out of town for most of them, but am determined to attend the last one on March 28 to celebrate spring foods – making butter, yogurt, and soft cheese from local jersey cow milk, and then an assortment of maple confections and candies. Call (802) 492-3326.

when in Culebra, eat as Culebrians do

Typical lunch -- chicharrones my addition

“When in Rome...,” quoth I the other day when my companion complained that his pre-plane Bloody Mary was rather watery. We weren’t in Rome, but believe me when I tell you that the choice of a Piña Colada couldn’t have been more apt in this instance.

We'd fled Vermont just on the leading edge of that nasty spell a week or so ago, when it was still deep winter, and came back to balmy, sunny skies filled with the steam of maple sap and signs of spring. Since when have I been so lucky? Well, “Lucky is as lucky does,” as Grandma used to say, and we did skedaddle ahead of plan, nevertheless finding ourselves in the Dartmouth Coach (what a great deal) grinding sideways up (or down) 89 in a foot of snow on the way to Boston; but better that than standing in grounded Rutland APO missing our Boston/San Juan flight.

Because, yes, we were on our way to the little island I wrote about last year, where the flock of wild chickens that roams it wakes you at 4:30AM crowing raucously PUERto RIco, PUERto RIco! They scratch and scavenge up and down the island, making a mess of your gardens and planters, meanwhile providing a certain amount of protein for hardened islanders. “Makes wonderful soup,” one of them told Leo, and indeed they are all handsome, feathers glowing, living the good life under that hot hot sun.

Culebra, with the creamy white sands, the long white rollers on the edge of the turquoise sea, the thorny acacia, the rutted roads, and the house of friends high above the bay.

View from the deck. Bougainvillea is rooting. Book? Fortress of Solitude

The drill? Wake and wander through the breezy, bright kitchen to get coffee then out to the deck to observe the sun’s progress up over the end of the bay. Walk. Breakfast. Read. Lunch. Desultory conversation. Read. Beach. Showers. Cocktails. Conversation. Dinner. Discussion. Bed. To be repeated next day. Lovely way of alleviating the sense of existential loneliness caused by residing in one separate body and mind.

Zoni Beach, inaccessible, with a shrouded St. Thomas in the distance

The only decisions needing to be made were which beach, the secluded and lovely Zoni or the more accessible and world-class Flamenco; and what and where is dinner. Oh, and whether or not it’s worth it to break the unspoken agreement to agree to disagree. Diverse opinions there!

Breakfast consisted of eggs (each marked “U.S.” in blocky red-inked letters), bacon, English muffins, and fruit – grapefruit, bananas, mango, pineapple, and papaya, most from local trees. Lunch was usually sandwiches made of the only bread that could be had, which was tan and square with the consistency of Wonder, along with coldcuts – mostly ham and swiss cheese, and whatever salad was left over from dinner the night before. Chips and bottles of pickles and green olives usually accompanied the sandwiches. Some of us eschewed sandwiches and resorted to the gigantic local avocados, drizzled with olive oil and chopped garlic, salt and pepper, or else tucking slices of them into sandwiches.

But dinner was a different story; that was where we shone. At home, grilled tuna, red snapper, pork loin. Potato salad, lentil salad, pineapple and yellow peppers brushed with garlic and olive oil and then grilled. Man, that was good. The pork was marinated in the spicy fish sauce Nuac Cham we’d made the night before as an accompaniment to the tuna.

It was a whole different way of eating, of course – I hadn’t had sandwiches like those since I was there the last time. The fruit and the avocados were local, but nothing else – even the fish had been imported from Boston, I imagine. There you are, surrounded by fishy seas but the fish are... unavailable, though we did see one sign on top of an insulated picnic cooler advertising fresh fish but didn’t have the opportunity to investigate. The pork was very good, so it may have come from the main island. Puerto Rican cuisine is known for its pork, as well as its use of dried cod (bacala).

“But not for its beans,” chided a restaurant owner in Old San Juan, where we spent a few days before taking the small plane to Culebra. “You have us confused with Mexicans,” she spat. In Old San Juan we explored and ate tapas, which were invariably small regularly shaped items, like bacala, coated in that tan granulated cornmeal that makes everything look industrial and pre-formed whether it is or not. Much to my chagrin, time after time these tasted like they were. Our last morning, after the early morning flight from Culebra, we took a cab to El Convento, a fabulous 400 year old Carmelite convent-cum-hotel, for breakfast. I spent the morning within its thick walls and shaded courtyards just wandering around inspecting the original art and tapestries or sitting in a cool corner reading. I heartily recommend it.

In Culebra, we did go back to visit the fabulous Jennifer at Juanita Bananas, the hilltop restaurant I wrote about last year that is owned by the young couple who grew much of their produce hydroponically just outside the restaurant, and set up a system to obtain much of their fish from local fishermen. But no more. Our visit to their full-moon tapas celebration was disappointing, no fresh produce in sight, the little dishes too few and uninspired. Apparently a new baby is taking up their time these days.

Another night we had a superb dinner at the new Susie’s, right by the bay in an old fish house in the small – and only – town of Dewey. In the open air, accompanied by the cats that also roam the island (I’ve seen them lazing about surrounded by baby chicks), we ate our plantain mash, fresh fish, and nice sauces with gusto.

We were back in Vermont by last Saturday’s Winter Farmers’ Market, and I burst in there, too, with lots of gusto! Local food! My friends, the farmers! You’d think I’d been gone a month!

I’m not complaining about the food in Culebra – not a bit! We make our own good times and good food. But how much better to be able to rave about it.

I wonder. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to help make the wonderful little island sustainable again? People growing their own pork, catching their own fish, planting their own gardens and small farms? Hmmm. Six months here, six months there. Doesn’t sound too shabby!

In the meantime I bought those Boardman Hill pork chops and a small pineapple from the Co-op, and that’s what we’ll be having for dinner! And maybe a Piña Colada.
You know, made out of pure Vermont rum, coconut, and pineapple! How local can you get?

Published as Twice Bitten column, Rutland Herald, 09 March, 2010