October Nasturtiums

Yes, I know it’s Friday, the 17th of October as I write this, but Nasturtiums still frolic on while their ancient – gaunt, pale, and sinewy – protector, Hosta, melts back into the earth. Tonight, possibly, they will join him when a sudden jolt of cold wilts them in the active old age of life. And by that they might teach us a lesson: live till you die. Have fun doing it. Give pleasure to others. And, if its in your nature, taste good.

Nasturtiums don’t seem to mind giving up a few of their pretty round leaves to round out a salad, and their piquant, peppery taste adds dimensions to one. As do their flowers, which in texture are a combination of velvet and crunch, with the same peppery taste. Their unripe seedpods have been compared to capers, and I have pickled and bottled them as such, or just eaten them out of hand. Several times this summer past I’ve lined vine and leaf, flower and seedpod between fried green tomatoes or eggplant on the oval black cast-iron griddle to serve as appetizers with cocktails, and perhaps this evening I’ll do that one last time before their night falls.

Dear little things! I thank you – two or three starts – for completely taking over one new flower bed this summer, tumultuously traveling, leafing and flowering, setting off and encouraging two new hosta divisions and Leo’s grandmother’s repotted hibiscus, all superintended by the wooden giraffe pretending to munch the leaves of the taller plants. Perhaps he encouraged you. I wondered if you wouldn’t reclaim the whole garden. But so long for now – knowing you, you’ve probably reseeded yourselves and I’ll see you next spring!

...no doldrums here...

Appreciating the nasturtiums may not be quite the same as smelling the roses, but it takes a welcome moment to do so, thereby escaping the chaos in this season’s kitchen to revel, briefly, in them.
Okay, so here’s what’s going on: yesterday, the 16th, a Thursday, I start thinking seriously about my next column. But I’m totally engrossed in making clotted cream because I’m reading Milk, the new book by Anne Mendelson which is subtitled The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages with 120 Adventurous Recipes that Explore the Riches of Our First Food. (I used an Amazon link there, but please order it through your local bookseller.)
Now this is a wonderful book, a very timely book, so timely, in fact, that I had done some beginning research with the idea of writing it myself. If I had written it, it would have been well-researched, historical, knowledgeable, insightful, elegant, personal, with a few well-placed recipes and techniques and lots of pictures of farmers and barns and cows in fields.
It would have taken me ten years, and then it wouldn’t be timely anymore.

So I am now breathing a sigh of relief and appreciation, for Anne has done a tremendous job of research, and she has written elegantly and personally and knowledgeably, and insightfully of that marvelous substance. As for the brouhaha over unpasteurized vs pasteurized milk – she side-steps it, instead calling for non-ultra-pasteurized milk and cream, but especially unhomogenized milk, cream, and cheese. I applaud her magnificent effort, while regretting the fact that there are no pictures, which was probably the publisher’s decision, not hers.

But why was I making clotted cream?
Wouldn’t you if you had a recipe and four or five hours that you could let half a gallon of rich milk heat on the stove and end up with a cup or so of the unctuously delicious cream you’ve read about for so many years and hardly tasted?
Yes, of course you would – that is, you would if you hadn’t yet remembered that you needed to make spanakopita-for-thirty for the Friends of the Library dinner Saturday night, and that you were going to be out of town all day Saturday for the first meeting of the Vermont Chapter of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association, and that, by the way, you needed to make something to offer for that day’s lunch. And, oh yes, the column.

Not to mention that fat chicken sitting in the fridge waiting to be poached, or the bread dough rising at that moment because you’d made the most luscious yogurt the day before and had strained it overnight and had sweet and tart whey that needed to be used.
And the column?

You open the refrigerator and there are three grilled-whole eggplants that you need to do something with.
That’s the position I found myself in on Thursday. Looking at those eggplants, though, I thought – I’ve just made yogurt, using as a starter the expensive and delicious Greek strained yogurt which is sold at the Co-op under the name of Fage Total, and I have never made yogurt so creamy it tastes almost like the best crème fraiche. The roasted innards of the eggplant combined with some of my yogurt, along with some hot
pepper and garlic, cilantro – hmmm, that sounded good! It would be awfully synergistic, or perhaps incestuous, slathered on that whole grain bread I needed to bake off soon that was made from the whey of the yogurt that will be mixed with the eggplant.


I hardly knew where to start.

I sat down at my computer, but the desk was littered with Mexican cookbooks – one by Rick and Deann Bayless, another by Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz, and several by the doyenne of Mexican food writing, Dame Diana Kennedy. What were they doing there? Well, I’ll tell you what they were doing there – I’d found a very neat little Tuesday night Mexican bistro and had realized that I didn’t really know much about how the food was made. Seemed everything started with a tortilla... or a poached chicken, so I was doing a little research.

My Tuesday night outings are not really to a bistro, though it seems it. Last Tuesday when I walked into the Co-op’s kitchen, Peter McGann was just frying tacos rolled around chicken and mushrooms and fastened with a toothpick, and Tomas was serving them to about a dozen of us with a side of piquant tomatillo sauce spiked with Serrano peppers, onion, and cilantro.



It was the second installment of Peter’s Mexican cooking class being held on each of this October’s Tuesdays. The tacos would be followed by Arroz Verde – rice with poblano chiles, onion, garlic, all cooked in chicken stock (from that poached chicken that was pulled apart for the tacos). A lovely Sopa De Elote followed that – made from pureed corn and milk, and garnished with roasted and skinned poblano peppers cut into a brunoise, or tiny squares. What a perfect combination! As was the final dish we prepared – Peter doing most of it – that of Tostadas de Tinga Poblano, or shredded savory pork mounded on fried tortillas. Tinga translates as “vulgar” or “disorder” notes the author, but it was a delicious disorder!
By that time, most of the class was involved in pureeing the corn or putting it through the food mill, roasting peppers and rubbing the skins off (works better if you wear those disposable plastic gloves), chopping onions, cleaning up here and there, with lively conversation and questions of Peter and his thoughtful replies. What delicious fun! This series is sold out, but I’m sure he’ll do it again – first come, first served, and this time we didn’t even advertise. Perhaps he’ll start a list of names and telephone numbers of people who want to make sure they get in on the next series of classes. Let him know.

It strikes me, sitting in front of the computer, thinking back on the class, that I will have some really nice cooked milk after I ladle off the clotted cream tomorrow morning, and corn in the freezer. And that’s when I decide the canoers will be tasting Sopa de Elote on Saturday.

But then I realize – this is Thursday, and I’m sitting at my computer looking at the Mexican cookbooks – that I don’t even have the recipe for spanakopita and no doubt I’ll have to shop for it, and that’s the way the rest of that day is spent – shopping for specific ingredients, which is something I seldom do, poaching the chicken, and baking the bread – which turned out fantastic, by the way, with a crisp, crinkly crust and whole-grain goodness, and no kneading!


Today, late afternoon, I’ve made the corn soup – using my cone-shaped chinois instead of a food mill: much easier – and everything’s ready to make the spanakopita. I’ve even written a bit of my column.




Whoops! Forgot about supper. I believe that spanakopita is going to serve only 28 tomorrow after I snitch a couple of squares for Leo and me tonight.



Later I’ll roast the poblanos and dice them, and I have some great Consider Bardwell feta that will make a nice additional garnish for the soup.
Oh, those lucky little nasturtiums frolicking out there with no inkling of the cold ax that is going to fall one of these nights. I, on the other hand, seem to have foreseen (my back hurts) what needed to happen and made it happen. For now.

...it all comes out in the wash...

Sunday afternoon I sit here finishing up the column.
The nasturtiums were frozen in place Saturday morning, caught still bright and beautiful, the frost on them glistening in the rising sun before they melted and turned to mush. The filo dough for the spanakopita was as arduously difficult to handle as I’d suspected, which is why I’d never made it before, but Friday night’s little supper of it was luscious, as was Saturday’s when we attended the dinner.

The canoers seemed to like the corn soup. I have two liters of solid chicken broth in the fridge alongside a quantity of shredded chicken to fold into tortillas tonight. The bread, as I said, was wonderful. And the clotted cream? Well... absolutely disgusting. Waxy. Vile. And when I stirred it to see if I couldn’t disperse some of the wax, it turned to waxy butter. It’s at the bottom of the bowl of chicken skin and sinews I’ve saved for the dog. He’ll love it.
But I shan’t give up. We’ll have delicious clotted cream yet!

...lagniappe...
Try the soup. It’s easy and extremely tasty.
Sopa de Elote (Fresh corn soup)
• 3 tablespoons chile poblano or canned, peeled green chilis, diced
• 4 cups corn (1 ½ pounds frozen corn or kernels from 5 ears)
• 1 cup water
• ¼ cup butter
• 3 ½ cups milk
• ½ teaspoon salt or to taste
• 6 tablespoons crumbled cream cheese or diced feta
• tortilla chips.
If using fresh chiles poblano, impale them on a long-handled fork and roast them over a gas flame until the skin is black and charred, then place them as each is blackened in a paper bag – the steam will help to lift the skin. Then rub all the skin off them, and I think that using those disposable plastic gloves really helps this process. Dice in a tiny dice, or chop them.
Put half the thawed corn into a blender with half the water and process until molten. Pour into a food mill (I like to use a chinois) and process the other half of corn and water. Press through the mill into a bowl. In a soup pan, melt the butter over medium heat then add the corn puree (what’s in the bowl, not in the mill) and let it cook while you stir it for about 5 minutes. Add the milk and the salt and bring it just to a boil, lower the flame and let it simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring from time to time so it doesn’t stick. It will thicken slightly.
To serve, put about ½ tablespoon diced chili and 1 tablespoon of the cheese into each bowl. Pour the hot soup over them and serve with tortilla chips.

This is a twice bitten column published in the Rutland Herald here.

A Pail of Milk

A pail of milk slung inside the kitchen door at dusk, steaming a little if the air is cool, still a little frothy on top from zinging into the bottom of the pail; gotten from the doe-eyed, sweet-faced little Jersey cow eating her green grass all day, ambling along from sun to shade to sun again, and finally munching her way back to the barn, lugging her evening udder swinging heavy against her legs.

That particular pail of milk is a memory and, though it is a sweet, sweet memory, I had no desire, whatsoever, to drink a glass of milk icy from the refrigerator, poured out of a pail or a plastic carton, even if it was labeled organic or local, or unpasteurized and labeled not at all. A little cream in my coffee, a bit of yogurt here and there, some crème fraiche over a dessert – that was the extent of my dairy needs. That and crooning “aaaay bosssss” to any cow I encountered. Oh, and tossing down a few capsules of calcium everyday.

And when friends marveled over the unpasteurized whole milk they got from a neighbor farmer I was wont to say that in a real farmer’s life whole milk was an oxymoron: that pail of milk was poured off into jars and pitchers and put into the fridge and not until it was icy and the cream had risen and could be scraped back would I accept a glass of it. As I remembered. No icky clots of cream in MY glass of milk, thank you very much. Cream itself was much better used over berries or made into butter.

They looked at me pityingly, but didn’t say much after that.

...making butter while the sun shines...

But then I decided I wanted to make some butter. This is the time of year that animals are eating fast growing green grass and when you eat of their flesh or the products of their flesh – butter, cream, milk, eggs – you are getting a nice helping of all the omega-3s they are converting that grass into, as well as helpful amounts of vitamins, such as D and A. You can even buy an 8 ounce jar of especially potent clarified butter online for an especially potent amount of money. Why not, I first wondered, just stock up on butter made at this time of year and freeze it?

Omega-3s. They are the offspring of Alpha Linolenic Acid and gotten from the leaves and green parts of plants. They are the opposite arm from Omega-6s (linoleic acid), and a balance between the two is essential to the health of our bodies, from our brains to our bones to our organs to our very souls. But omega-3s oxidize quickly and so, to reduce spoilage and create a longer shelf life, food processors have worked hard to eliminate them from processed food. In addition, industrial food producers have unwittingly cut out the omega-3s in their products by keeping their animals indoors and feeding them grains and silage. Simplify, simplify. That’s the short of it.

The long of it is taken by Susan Allport, a science writer, in her rigorous little book, The Queen of Fats: Why omega-3s were removed from the western diet and what we can do to replace them. Allport’s thorough study asks the question, “...though cholesterol and saturated fat have been reduced in the American diet, heart disease continues to afflict just as many Americans – and we’re now facing epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Saturated fat and cholesterol were supposed to be the problem, so where did we go wrong?” She follows the studies done on fatty acids from before anyone knew the various and competitive components of fat up until the present, when there have been “...many thousands of studies linking deficiency in omega-3s to a long and growing list of illnesses,” but which have been swept under the rug by various political and industry entities who like things just the way they are; and, of course, a public that has as hard a time reading scientific reports as I do.

Which all means, of course, that we need to go out of our way to get our good omega-3s – by eating dark green leafy vegetables, as well as other bright vegetables and fruits; finding really free range meats and animal products; and finding a good source of non-scoured pharmaceutical grade cod liver oil. Little fishes are full of good omega-3s, fishes such as sardines and anchovies packed in olive oil, NOT cottonseed or soy oils. As a matter of fact, most seed oils are preponderantly omega-6s and therefore to be avoided. To do all of this we need to support our local farms, markets, and co ops so they can continue to support us.

Easier reads are two books I’ve mentioned before – Mary Enig’s and Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions and Eat Fat Lose Fat, both of which sing the praises of unpasteurized milk, cheeses, butters, creams, yogurts and kefirs. Like the egg, whole unpasteurized milk is designed to nourish the young. From a clean and healthy dairy, it is the perfect food.

...KISSing Dr. Strangelove...

Of course, various state and federal agencies wish the whole idea of unpasteurized milk would just disappear. It’s much easier to keep an eye on things if everything is uniform, and pasteurization just makes sure that, clean or dirty, a dairy’s milk is heated until any undesirable – as well as desirable, indeed, necessary – microbe or bacteria is dead. It’s a variation on the rather rude admonishment, KISS, which I’ve always read as “Keep it stupid, Simple.” Nevertheless, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture allows the sale of unpasteurized milk if all sales take place on the premises where the milk is produced and are limited to less than 25 quarts of milk per day. The sales must be to the final end user of the raw milk, and no advertising is permitted.

But I didn’t think it was necessary, or even possible, to find enough unpasteurized milk to make, say, ten pounds of fast-growing-green-grass butter to put away for the year; I thought I’d start with locally produced butter from a commercial source. Surely our cows were eating grass in this green season!

Not especially true, John Thomas of Thomas Dairy told me. What green grass they do get is in this season, until around the 4^th of July, but many farmers don’t have enough pasture to graze their animals, and they need what land they do have to grow corn and hay. “When we still had cows,” he said, “we let them out at night to keep them out of the heat of the day. We had a lot of land that couldn’t be used for anything but grazing.”

In an email, Annamarie Clark, of Cabot Cheese, whose butter Thomas distributes, told me that their cows were pastured from April to December.

Well that’s okay, I thought. Cabot spring and early summer butter should be a pretty good source of vitamins and omega-3s if you knew when it was made. I called Cabot and talked to another person, who told me that unsalted Cabot butter had a four month or 120 day sell-by date. In other words, if you wanted May or June grass-fed butter you would stock up on that which had a mid-August to Mid-October sell-by date. And you could probably begin looking for that butter now.

I asked him, too, why Cabot pasteurizes the milk they turn into cheese even though the law says that cheeses aged more than 60 days can be unpasteurized. He said that by law they needn’t be pasteurized, but to receive US Department of Agriculture certification they must.

I’m thinking Dr. Strangelove, here, but things were about to get stranger.

I had noticed that the Organic Valley milk carried by the Co-Op was ultra-pasteurized. Organic, granted, but heated to within an inch of its life. When I talked to the dairy person at the Co-Op, she told me that Organic Valley gets their milk from eighty Vermont farms (among others), but is sent to Wisconsin for processing. The milk of another producer, Organic Cow, is shipped all the way to Colorado for processing, so of course both companies have to ultra-pasteurize their milk or it would be sour by the time it got back to Vermont! The Co-Op is trying to bring in a smaller organic milk producer, from Vermont, whose milk will be pasteurized but not ultra-pasteurized, and won’t have been flown all over the country. They also carry Thomas’s (pasteurized but not ultra-so) milk which, even though not labeled organic, would seem, by far, the best bet to me.

“Big” seems to be the adjunct of going organic, which is another contradiction in terms. Thomas’ would like to be known as organic, but they are perfectly satisfied being a small company, and so will probably not seek certification. A farmer down the road from me said they’d considered going organic, but would have to be quite a bit bigger, and they’re already running short of pasture.

...in which I visit the farm...

But sitting at my desk and talking about cows had given me an itch to see one and to smooth its soft nose and rub its nubbly horns. I drove up to a farm that had been recommended to me by the “unpasteurized milk underground.” There I was given the tour by three small and well-behaved dogs. I worried over a small Jersey with an immense udder (hours from milking time) who was joyously wound around some long grass, chewing with abandon, her big brown eyes laughing up at me. She was not tethered or secured in any way at all. I hallooooed and yoo-hoooed to no avail and, just before I got back in my car, saw the little Jersey switch her bony rear into the barn.

That night I called and made an appointment with Mr. Farmer to get some milk the next morning. I told him about the unsecured cow. “Oh, that must’ve been Dumber,” he said. “She’s about to be disappeared. She’s driving me nuts, can’t keep her in.”

“Dumber?” I said.

“Ayup,” he said, “Dumbest’s already gone. She’d walk right through a fence, know what I mean?”

I didn’t ask him about Dumb.

Next morning I arrived in the midst of much activity. The vet was there filing down the teeth of a horse. Ms Farmer told me that horses’ teeth grow in slanted and they need to be filed flat so they can get a grip on their food. “Go ahead, look around,” she said. I wandered around a bit with the dogs, had a good look at the horses in their stalls, and petted each and every one of the calves that were in their little plastic houses and tiny pens just outside the milk house, allowing my hands to be suckled in their eager mouths.

Ms Farmer showed me into the milk house with its big stainless steel tank, how to turn on its thrumbulator to mix the cream back into the milk, how to hook the spigot to the tank, how to turn it on. She filled some pails with milk for the calves. I took one of the buckets and, as I was fitting it through the window and into its bracket, she said, “Careful, she’ll head-butt it in her eagerness.” Splash. Once it was settled, the calf plunged her whole sleek golden head into the milk.

Finally, I took my jug of icy-cold milk and started home. On the road I met Mr. Farmer wheeling a large yellow plastic wheelbarrow and leading a cow. In the wheelbarrow was the latest calf, born just as I was filling my milk jug. On the winding, narrow road home I followed, with infinite patience, a farmer on a tractor with a baler on the back.

Granted, it was the best of days on the farm: a beautiful summer day, a new calf, some good milk. I could imagine it in mud-season, or on a frigid February morning, the deaths and accidents and disappointments. I could imagine all the pitfalls of farming, had grown up with them intimately. But when it was beautiful there was nothing that could beat it. Farming is a noble venture and the farmer a noble being – that’s all there is to it.

...a glass of milk...

At home I lugged my slippery jug of unpasteurized, fresh-from-the-cow, creamy milk into the house and slung it up on the counter. I looked at it, at the moisture forming on the glass, and thought, Now what am I going to do with a gallon of milk? Well, first of all, I thought I’d just have to have a glass of it. It might be the first glass of milk I’d drunk in thirty years, but the occasion seemed to demand it. I unscrewed the top, and plunged a dipper to the bottom and brought it back up.

When all is said and done, when all the pros and cons have been considered, telephone calls made, emails exchanged, books read, laws obeyed or disobeyed, memories proven faulty, it takes only one taste to tell you what’s real and what’s fake; what’s healthy and what’s not; how we need to live our lives.

I filled that glass. I took a sip. I paused. Was I really going to cry over a glass of milk? I stood at the counter and drank straight down to the bottom. It was the taste of my childhood. It was indescribably delicious!

This column was originally published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on June 19, 2007