an accretion of karma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

photo by Janet Kennedy Farmer

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

Mid-summer Salad of Kohlrabi & Apple  

serves 4
SALAD:

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

VINAIGRETTE:

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

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

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

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

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!

textures... cast iron & perfect pork chops

Sad but true – that you can love something so passionately for so long, and then one day you imagine how they could be better, and it’s hardly a breath before they’re moldering in the cellar and a bright new thing, better than the old, becomes the apple of your eye.

Oh, don’t worry – Leo’s fine – I haven’t found anything better than he yet, but your thoughts and commiseration might light on my flat little cast iron grill pan. Poor thing.

I always really loved that small pan that I got down in Boston’s North End a couple of years ago. Now that I think of it, what’s wrong with that statement? Now that I think about it that pan has resided in my kitchen for 20 years or more, that’s all. That’s what a ‘coup’la’ refers to as you get older. It was a time when several women friends would do weekends in Boston, go to the Faneuil Hall Market on Saturday and slide freshly opened oysters down our gullets, pick up fresh garlic (gasp) shoots in February, and other at-that-time esoteric things, and lug gallons of Italian olive oil back to the hotel. I found the pan in the front of a great little combination Italian ingredient/utensil/eating place where we’d stopped for dessert after a winey dinner elsewhere. We went to Jasper White’s restaurant then, and the food was top-notch and so was the service, and Jasper would always come over to say hi. We went to Lydia Shire’s Biba, wonderful food, extraordinarily expensive. As well, we went to Legal Seafood and other Boston tourist attractions. I lugged that heavy little pan back to the hotel and back to Vermont.

The secret is to get that pan really hot (turn on the exhaust fan), until heat waves are distorting reality and then slap on your perfectly formed hamburger patties (2) or pork chops (2), either rubbed with garlic and sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper, and let’er rip. For the hamburgers I do 4 minutes on one side, flip ‘em, cover them with a deep pan cover and turn the heat off. When the sound of sizzling fat quiets you will take off the cover and find perfectly caramelized and marked meats, the hamburger will be perfectly (medium) done. The pork chops, if thick, the way I like them, are grilled sizzling 4 minutes per side and then will be ready to do 20 minutes in a 375° oven to be juicy and done just right – to me that means the juices run brown, not pink. Sorry, can’t get around pink pork, which some cooks are calling for now that the danger of trichinosis is deemed to be over.

What you’ll also have is spattered grease in a three foot aura around that great little grill pan to clean up.
So after all these years, I had an idea – why not replace the flat grill pan with a larger grill pan with frying-pan sides? Lodge made one that I’d seen, and wouldn’t that do a lot toward containing the mess, especially with a spatter screen. Which wouldn’t work with the flat pan.

Well. Good idea. But I did not act on it, would only think of it when I was cleaning up the mess. Then yesterday I went down to the basement to get a package of hamburger out of the freezer, and what should my eye rest upon? Why, upon a high-sided cast-iron grill pan, part of my daughter’s storage while she’s off conquering the world. It’s been sitting there for three years. My eye must have ignored it several thousand times.

I cleaned it up – it was a little rusty and dusty from the damp and dusty cellar – anointed it with olive oil and let it sit on the pilot light for most of the day, then grilled up some pork chops that very night. It was the BEST pork chop I’ve ever had. I voiced those sentiments, and Leo said, “I believe it might be.” It was tender. Juicy. FULL of healthy pork flavor. I began to think about it. I’d gotten them at the Farmers’ market on Saturday, from Greg Cox at Boardman Hill Farm. “Why do you suppose they’re so good,” asked Leo. Well, Greg is the only pork producer I know of who lets his pigs forage in a forested hillside, which is how pigs like to live, and which means that they don’t have to eat as much grain or slops (sorry about that, but those are the facts), and maybe their bodies make healthier, better-tasting meat when they live and eat as they are made to live and eat. In addition, Greg tells me that his pigs are free-feeders, which means that there’s always organic grain for them to eat when they like, AND his pigs are not pushed to slaughter weight. They grow naturally and are killed later.

I trust that is enough of a recipe for making great pork chops. I like to grill some fruit with them, some halved and cored apples, maybe, a slice or two of pineapple. That’s it.

We and the pigs thank you, Greg!

Just... Summer

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



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

That’s just the beginning, of course.

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

Simple Food for Pacing Tigers

The White Tiger paces its bamboo cage – “He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this—that was the only way he could tolerate this cage.” Those words are by Aravind Adiga, in his novel about India, The White Tiger. Ah, I look up from the page – has there ever been a better description of cabin fever? Just when I am dangerously bored, my imagination forsakes me and all I can see are walls. Thank god for people like Adiga whose words act as a pry-lever to flip me into another reality, make me laugh, demand my commiseration for those worse off than I.

Not a White Tiger – charcoal by Isobel Gabel Nimtz (with permission)

So I get up and go make myself a smoothie. I have never made myself one of those things – don’t really approve of them – but I have blueberries that Greg Cox picked last summer and froze in his prototype processing barn up at Boardman Hill. Prototype for the processing plant he and RAFFL want to build as part of the food HUB in Rutland whenever they find the property.

That Food Hub will one day consist of a Commercial Kitchen to serve as an incubator for small businesses and also for RAFFL to process foods under their own label so that Rutland area consumers can find local canned and frozen foods all year round. There’ll be a Flash-Freeze Operation, a USDA certified Meat Processing center, Storage for ingredients and final products, Distribution Facilities, and a four-season Farmers’ Market. That’s Greg’s dream, and RAFFL’s, too, and, come to think of it, mine as well.

Now wouldn’t it be nice to see that dream take on flesh right in downtown Rutland, on Wales and Center, surrounding Center Street Alley. That way the Co-op (Rutland Area Food Co-op; Rutland Natural Food Market: The Co-op – whichever name you know them by, they’re all the same entity) and the Farmer’s Market could stay together in what has been an incredibly fulfilling partnership so far, stretching out into the alley in the summer, and withdrawing cozily inside in the winter. And all those empty spaces on Center Street could be filled with the other components of the HUB.

The important thing to know right now is that Greg has done more than talk about the Food Hub, and installed display freezers at his booth at the Winter Farmers Market and is selling berries, melon balls, vegetables and meats there. You know, of course, that the Farmers’ Market sets up Saturdays from 10 to 2, and is reached through the Co-op’s Wales Street entrance.

About that Smoothie, er, ah, let’s just call it a shake. I spooned out probably about half a cup of Fage Total – that thick, creamy, Greek strained yogurt – into a glass, added Greg’s frozen blueberries, a spoonful of blueberry jam that my friend Ruth Ann made last summer, and some creamy whole unpasteurized milk that John Pollard gets from his little Jerseys up in Shrewsbury. Jumbled that up with an immersion blender, and didn’t so much drink it as spoon it out of the glass. MMMmm, delicious. I scraped it up.

Mark Bittman calls this a Sorbet in his blog BITTEN (think he stole the name from me??), combining 2 cups frozen fruit in a food processor, with 1/3 cup sugar, ½ cup yogurt and about 2 tablespoons of water. Process for just the right amount of time or, he says, “you’ll have a smoothie, instead.” Spoon into desert goblets and serve right away. Those are the proportions for, probably, 4 or 5 people – make as little or as much as you like. It should be eaten immediately, perhaps with a crispy shortbread if it’s a company dinner.

***

Well, that was simple enough, but so is this following – one of those slow-cooked winter dishes that permeates the house with tantalizing odors.

I talked about a book called France, A Culinary Journey, a few weeks ago. This recipe for Caqhuse (I do not know where the term came from, but isn’t it an interesting word) is one I didn’t mention then, but it makes an absolutely lovely dish and it’s as simple as they come – all it takes is oven time. And though I haven’t tried it, it could probably be made in a slow cooker. It’s simply a pork roast slowly cooked with a LOT of sliced onions, which melt down into a savory compote whose deliciosity is impossible to describe. It’s supposed to be served cold, and it IS good cold, but for that first supper I serve it hot, and in days following it’s eaten cold, usually with a good amount of that onion compote spread on good bread and covered with slices of cold pork.

The recipe itself calls for “fresh ham”, which, of course, means unsmoked, a slice cut from the thick end of a leg of pork, but I’m going to make it with country – meaty – spare ribs tonight.

Caqhuse

• 5 tablespoons butter
• 2 ½ pounds pork (or more), preferably bone-in
• 2 pounds onions, thickly sliced (or more)
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• ¼ cup red wine or cider vinegar (I used the vinegar, here)
• ¾ cup water
• 2/3 cup white wine (I’ll use red wine, sorry)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Melt a lump of the butter in a large baking dish, place the pork in the center and surround it with onions. Dot with the remaining butter, season generously with salt and pepper and bake for about 1 hour, or until the pork and onions have begun to brown. Baste from time to time (I don’t).

Turn the pork over, add vinegar, water, and wine, and continue baking for another hour. Test to see if the pork is done by piercing the meat – if the juices run clear, it is done.

Remove from the oven and serve warm.

I think you will be astounded at the synergy of these two ingredients!

***

All right, so those are a couple of satisfying things to do in the kitchen that will interrupt your pacing for a bit, and sooth your cabin fever.
Here’s another – get out of the house and have a little lunch at the Co-op.
Yes, finally, after finishing the new kitchen oh, about a year ago now, the Co-op is utilizing it for more than a prep area for the store.

First of all, there’s a little series of cooking classes/demonstrations happening one Saturday a month during Farmers’ Market. There was a steamed vegetable soup there in November, a vegetarian chili in December, January’s offering was roasted root vegetables – all very good, and all given out at the end in small portions to vendors and customers. Coming up on February 14 is Vermont Breakfast Specials (French Toast & others), March 14 will be 3 Sisters and a Brother, corn, squash, beans and rice. And April 18 finishes this series off with Feeling your Oats (and Grains). You’re welcome to join the cooks say around 10 or 11 a.m., watch the whole process, and learn what you can!

As well, the Co-op has been making and selling lunch soups now on several days of the week. Highlights have been last week’s Yellow Split Pea soup. Clam chowder was a hit, as was the Salmon Miso Soup, and a Curried Coconut and Roasted Squash. Mike Muller, the Co-op’s General Manager, raved about the “Great Cabbage Soup,” from last week.

For now the soup – very affordable, by the way – is accompanied only by Westminster oyster crackers, but Mike told me that as he gets a handle on the operation there will be some good bread and/or rolls with it, and some experimenting with non-soup offerings such as oh, casseroles, chili, and Beans and Rice kinds of things, and then, perhaps, eventually, salads and sandwiches.

“We’re taking it slow, seeing what works,” Mike says.

It’s quite enjoyable to ladle out a cup of soup for yourself and head up to the tables by the windows. Maybe pour yourself a cup of tea or coffee. There’s always an interesting character sitting there already, or standing behind the cash register, to relieve your tigerish pacing!

Plethora Again

“This is the time of year we’ve been waiting for... the first field tomatoes are coming in, there are beans, and the beginnings of peppers, eggplant soon, all sorts of zucchini and summer squash. And corn – both Grabowskys and Browns will have trucks full of corn Saturday! The old standbys, such as beets, are better than ever... This is summer as we think of it in February.” Greg Cox of Boardman Hill Farm.

...that first ripe tomato...

A million times I’ve written this, in various permutations, over the years: That first ripe tomato? Eat it in the garden, while it’s plumply sun-hot and the green scent of tomato vine curls to your nose. Perhaps you’ve carried along a shaker of salt. Use it. But first you must heed the advice of our artist friend – feel it first, heft it in the curve of your palm, notice its full-to-bursting skin and the way it glints its different shades of red in the light.

...the question of pasta...

But the morning after that first garden-fresh, ripe and juicy tomato, make the tomato sauce. Go out into your dew-wet but already simmering garden and pick several tomatoes – half a dozen small ones – and a good handful of basil leaves. Pull a bulb of garlic and knock the dirt off it. In the kitchen cut up the tomatoes into a pretty bowl. Tear the basil leaves over them, smash two or three cloves of garlic – or more, to taste – and add them to the mix. Then, as Elizabeth Romer suggests, for this is her recipe called Spaghetti al Salsa di Pomodoro Crudo, from her book The Tuscan Year – take “one teacup of the best green olive oil, no other sort of oil can be used” and pour it over and toss the whole mixture together. Let that bowl sit, covered, in a cool place if you can find one, but not in the refrigerator, to let the peppery flavor of the good oil and basil, the sweet/tart ones of the tomatoes and the sharp and unmistakable garlic flavors marry all day, to transcend each individual taste into an amalgam of them all. And when you’re ready to eat later on that evening, cook some spaghetti al dente and drain it well and pour the hot pasta into the sauce, which has been salted, and toss together. Top each serving with coarsely ground pepper. Parmesan? Only if you must.

This is, of course, a wonderfully leisurely kind of recipe, technique, celebration, meant for a simple hot mid-summer’s day when the tomatoes are ripe and the basil is yipping in the dooryard, and perhaps a couple of friends will stop by for a glass of wine and a bite to eat. Leave it to me to make it difficult by planning it too early, then racing all over hell and gone trying to gather really fresh ingredients – for that is the beauty of it, too, the simply peak and simmering gift of food from your garden or your farmer’s. It’s paradisiacal, actually, in its essence.

I might make it once a summer, just as I might make a thought from my old compatriot, John Thorne, whose Simple Cooking is one of the best foodletters, and longest running, in existence, once a winter. That thought would be a midnight snack of pasta topped with a fried egg. I’m speaking from memory, here, and there might be more to it – like crumbled cooked side-pork or pork belly on top of it (yummmmm!), or a chopped parsley sprinkle – but there needn’t be anything more to it than a fried egg slid onto a bowl of hot pasta, mixed up, salted and peppered, and you’re good to go. Of course I would serve it for Sunday supper, never at midnight or I might’s well forget sleep for that night, at least.

Why only once a year for either of these two intriguing and delicious dishes? Well, I don’t see the point of pasta. It’s not that I don’t like it, although it’s not my favorite thing in the world, but you could spread cream and anchovies and tomatoes and garlic and olive oil on a clean kitchen sponge and it would probably have about as much taste as pasta. That’s what it is, a cheap way of spreading a few hard-won ingredients over many plates. A filler.

Well, at least that’s what I think. What does Larousse Gastronomique say about it? “A dough made from durum-wheat semolina, water, and often eggs. Pasta is shaped in various ways and sometimes flavoured... Marco Polo introduced pasta into Italy from China...” Or at least it had always been thought to be true, but it can also be traced to Sicily in the middle ages “when the island was under Arab domination.” Monsieur Gastronomique also points out that different shapes of pasta, made with different grades of flours, make a difference not only to texture but to taste, as well. How much does the tender but crisp bite of Wendy Jackson’s Tagliatelle at the Red Brick Grill contribute to our perception of its deliciosity? What about my favorite (besides Wendy’s tagliatelle), which is the tiny little hand-twisted Trofie that I find at the Co-op? No doubt the thickness of those little bits, and the fact that it’s air-dried in the sweet air of the mountainous Abruzzo region of Italy, after it’s shaped by the delicious little hands of Italian ladies all sitting together in a flowery meadow (my imagination runs away with me), has something to do with making it so sumptuous.

Okay, so it can be delicious, but the fact remains that it’s flour. It’s all flour, and it’s mostly over-refined white flour that not even mice want to get into because it’s got no nutrients; and which is blamed in large part for the diseases of the western diet. Why, again? Well because when we snuff it up it’s like a drug, that super-refined carbohydrate, and shoves our blood sugar sky high, and our insulin has to get up from the table and shoot up and drag it back down again, and pretty soon our insulin gets tired of doing that, and then all hell breaks loose. At least that’s the way I understand it. A little here and a little there ain’t gonna kill you, but some people eat this stuff every day of their lives.

But then another deeply beloved staple of our diet is all flour, too, mostly white flour, and that would be... bread! And what could be more delicious to eat than good bread, or more satisfying to make, or to buy from our beloved favorite bakers? Taking pot-shots at bread is akin to kicking a puppy.

And that reminds me that another wonderful thing to do with that third tomato is to make a sloppy tomato sandwich, with good white bread slathered with mayo and enclosing slices of a tomato that still holds the heat from the garden. Maybe a few arugula leaves before clapping the top slice of bread upon the whole.

And, as my heroine, of food the doyenne, the great Julia Child – who ate her share of pasta and especially bread, and a great deal of fat, both olive and animal, and died at the age of 91 – might say, and most assuredly did say, “Bon Appetit!”

...odds and gifts...

My young friends Cyrus and Kristin traveled home to Burlington for their wedding from Fort Collins, Colorado, where they live, and though we had gotten an invitation we did not get a list of stores and websites where we might buy their selected gifts. I was grateful for that – is there anything more distasteful about modern weddings? – and so had to wrack my brain for a suitable gift. For my last wedding gift I carefully chose a beautiful casserole hand-thrown by my friend and neighbor, Carl Buffum, wrapped it well, but not, as you might surmise, well enough, and sent it down south where it arrived in shards. So fragile was out. Also, it seemed almost a thoughtless act to give them something they’d have to pack and send home, or carry home on the plane. So I googled “Co-op Fort Collins Colorado” and gave them a membership to their co-op and a gift certificate. I might – or not – have given a more thrilling gift, but they seemed to be genuinely tickled with it. Turns out they can walk to the Co-op from their house, and do, but had not yet become members.

For my friend Kathi’s November birthday last year I wrapped up a gigantic turnip in sheets of paper that, when smoothed, were typed over with turnip recipes – because Kathi had never cooked a turnip. And she should, you know? Okay. All right. It was a joke. But she loved it! You have to know your friends.

For a gift for a foodie closer by, I noticed all kinds of suitable things at the Farmers’ Market Saturday.

Start with a Garlic Grater and Dipping Sauce Bowl from Pizzazz Pottery. This is a shallow 4 inch flat bowl with ridges on the bottom over which you rub a clove or two of garlic. It renders them juicy and squashed. Then you pour in some good olive oil, perhaps some coarse-ground pepper, maybe some grated parm, all for dipping some of that good bread you just bought, or made. I cherish mine, and use it, literally, constantly.

You can build on that – along with the garlic bowl, add a couple of plump heads of garlic, and then maybe a nice bottle of olive oil – which is not, so far, available at the Farmers’ Market, though there are rumors and expectations.

A bottle of balsamic vinegar, aged by the people at Gordon’s Pond in Shrewsbury, who also make a great sesame dressing and a marinara to die for, would go nicely in this package, as would a loaf of Bear Mountain Bread if the event was to happen in the next few days. If it were that very day, then throw in some rich and delicious hard-boiled quail eggs the package – you can get them from Nancy at the Tweed Valley Farm Mushroom stand. She hard boils the little things herself, and peels them for you!! No easy chore. This Saturday, she tells me, she will be selling quail, already dressed. We’ve been waiting for that!

A bottle of Montcalm Lacrescent wine, a nicely balanced white “with delightful citrus-lime character with hints of pineapple and peach” bottled by Champlain Valley Vineyards in Benson would be very much appreciated. You serve this icy cold and it is glorious!

Maya Zelkin occasionally shows up with her pottery at the FM, and I happen to know, having traveled up to her
studio in Shrewsbury to get mine, that she has several Kimchi pots just thrown and kilned. They’re gorgeous, and so utilitarian, my favorite combination. A nice gift for someone very special. And if you’re very lucky you might get to say hello to Manolo.

That’s all the gifts I’ve got time for now but, as you can see, the Farmers’ Market is a good place to start gift shopping.

...fyi...

On August 6, Rural Vermont will host one of their famous Ice Cream Socials – Rutland finally made it!! – in the grassy space beside the Co-op on Wales Street, starting at 6:30PM. Rain space will be in the Winter Farmers’ Market in the back of the Co-op. So come and lick a cone made of Farm Fresh Cream, meet some of the fine people from Rural Vermont and the Co-op, and your friends and neighbors. It’s Leo’s birthday, so be sure to say HB2U!

...slow food...

“For dinner I had a pork chop from the pigs I raised, sautéed with a little mustard, and some crushed fresh sour cherries added when the chop was turned over. Oh man. Got to go pick more cherries for sure.”... My friend and pork supplier, Joyce Sabo.